Nate Simpson

Tomorrow marks one whole year since the Early Access launch of KSP2. How is it that a year can fly past in a heartbeat while also containing so much stuff? In that time, our team has released a total of 11 updates and knocked out more than 2441 bugs. We’ve brought new physics systems online (re-entry heating, more rigid rockets) and we’ve added new features (Exploration Mode, Science collection, and Missions). As good as it’s felt to work through our feature list, the most satisfying part of the release process has always been the "day-after basking," where we take in all the unexpected ways the community is taking advantage of new gameplay possibilities. This has only gotten more exciting since the arrival of the Science and Mission features - not only are your vehicles getting more ambitious, but the missions themselves are starting to get pretty elaborate. The ways you’re getting the U-Dunkit module into alien seas are emblematic - it’s quite an awkward part, and the vehicles that it’s attached to tend to be delightfully weird! Shadowzone does a Laythe dunk (full disclosure, he discovered a bug on this journey, but I think he still had fun) Shadowzone is dunk-drunk, and now seeks out puddles across the Kerbolar System! Audaylon with a rare double-dunker with fore and aft Dunk-its! @GalaxDragon aka Yuri has managed to get their U-Dunkit nowhere near any liquid at all @SciVirus has used the part in an unexpected but delightful way We’re looking forward to the new possibilities that will be opening up to players in the coming year, especially with the arrival of colonies! We’re making good progress in that area right now - why, here’s a stately little orbital test colony over Duna (it looks extremely cool with all the modules rotating): Thanks for continuing to share your creations with us, and thanks for helping us to make KSP2 even better in 2024! Nate

To clarify for our QA - this post relates to our fairings not becoming translucent on mouseover. 연평균기온, we are tracking this issue and it's on our list of desired UX improvements for vehicle creation! Thank you for submitting this feedback.

I just wanted to check in on this thread to tell you all that we're following this conversation and are prioritizing a number of UI improvements related to legibility and ease of use. Areas that we're looking at right now: font legibility and scalability maneuver node usability, in particular the difficulty of selecting and dragging the gizmo itself trajectory tag iconography and differentiation trajectory tag stem organization (eg. the "stem salad" that you sometimes get when a bunch of tags are near one another) SOI transit "bullseye" indicators are too aggressive map icon scale issues and related difficulty of selecting a CB when you've got something in orbit around it difficulty of rearranging staging stack order when selecting the bottom- or top-most stage general part manager usability - in particular the tracking of fuel levels on a per-part basis, but also a bunch of general legibility/organization issues This is by no means an exhaustive list - we've got quite a pile we're working through. But we are in strong agreement about the opportunity for improvement in this area. Thanks as always for sharing your feedback!

I'm sorry to hear that! If something similar happens in the future, that corrupted save file would be extremely valuable in our effort to track down the problem. If anybody else has had this experience, please forward us your save file via the bug reports subforum.

We had a lot riding on the For Science! update that we released two weeks ago — it’s been a long first year of Early Access, filled with the arduous and mostly unglamorous pursuit of bugs, stability improvements, and performance gains. This update, the first of our major Roadmap Updates, had to achieve some big new goals for KSP2: it had to round out the core game loop with re-entry heating and buoyancy; it had to introduce a whole new progression system via the R&D Center and Mission Control; it had to introduce Science collection, Science parts, and dozens of new points of interest; and of course it needed to continue to deliver quality of life improvements (banishing wobbly rockets) and performance improvements. Also: there are boat docks now! In a nutshell, the addition of Exploration Mode transformed KSP2 from a sandbox experience into a proper long-form game. Working on something with so many moving parts, there’s always a little trepidation when we release a new build to the public - especially when there are so many new systems in play. We do our best to test every possible scenario, but there’s always a chance that something terrifying will rear its head once we’ve got thousands of people playing the game. It was with this fear lurking in the backs of our heads that we sat together in our own mission control room and waited for confirmation that For Science! had been released into the world. We nervously watched the first review videos appear on YouTube, and were relieved to discover that veteran players like Carnasa and Matt Lowne were excited about what they found in the new update. We cycled between the livestreams of Everyday Astronaut, EJ_SA, and Giantwaffle, discovering to our delight that all three were not only having fun, but were having trouble putting the game down! By the time we did our own livestream that evening, it was clear that we’d succeeded in creating a more stable and realistic universe, and that we’d given players some compelling goals to pursue within that universe. Our stream ran over an hour longer than planned because we, too, had a bit of trouble putting it down. That’s a story we’re hearing a lot - you sit down to play this game for an hour, and before you know it the sun’s coming up. Over the last couple of weeks, a clear picture has emerged - there are still some bugs, as well as some big opportunities to improve the player experience - but for the most part, those rough edges have not gotten in the way of some very ambitious exploratory missions. I’ll talk more about those bugs in a bit, but first I’d like to highlight some of this update’s biggest wins: The music. Yes, you all love Howard Mostrom. We’re going to need a bigger inbox for all his fan mail. The tutorials and first-time user experience have paved the way for a new group of first-time Kerbal players, and we’re not only seeing lots of you get to space, we’re also seeing a lot more players doing interplanetary missions. In many ways, the original justification for KSP2’s existence was to find a way to welcome more new players to Kerbal, and we’re very excited to see that this work has begun to bear fruit. We knew that bringing rocket science to the masses wasn’t going to be easy, and there’s still a lot more work to do in this area... but we’re making progress! Folks are enjoying the missions! We’re excited to continue adding new missions to the game via upcoming updates, and we’d love to hear your suggestions for compelling new exploration goals. In general, we’re beginning to see the flourishing of player creativity that we knew would take place once the most critical performance and usability issues had been ironed out. It’s been a pleasure to visit r/kerbalspaceprogram and our #bestof Discord channel and just bask in the awesomeness. People are making magnificent things, and it feels so nice to see all that imagination unleashed. Look at this stuff! Courtesy of Aravir Courtesy of Flypig07UA Courtesy of Dr. Seno Courtesy of BioticKeen Of course, one key benefit to our game being in Early Access is that we get detailed bug reports and feedback from a wide variety of players, and boy, did we get a big helping after releasing this update. Check out the spike we saw on our K.E.R.B. bug submissions at the end of December: There are some annoying bugs and usability issues in the mix - some are new, some have been around for a while but have risen in prominence now that other more consequential problems have been addressed. Areas of frustration include font scale and legibility, the maneuver node interface, thermal system tuning (including the propensity of some parts to explode even when they’re shielded and the insufficiency of fairings to protect their contents), as well as a few weird one-off stability issues (most of which can be corrected by reloading or restarting). We are triaging and trying to reproduce issues related to things like parachutes failing to deploy, trajectories vanishing from the map view, and Delta-V accuracy (which given the dependency of maneuver plans on accurate Delta-V projection, can result in being blocked from planning a maneuver). We’ve also noted some user experience gaps, most notably the game’s failure to properly communicate to new players that "Revert to VAB" is different from "Return to VAB" - an oversight that has led some newcomers to lose their progress after completing a mission. I’ll also take this moment to offer a new protip that I learned today after complaining to Chris Adderley about my spaceplane wings being destroyed on re-entry: while the heavier wings are more heat-resistant, the volume of every wing (and especially the wing’s thickness) affects its thermal mass. A thicker wing will be more resistant to destruction via heat! I’ll be trying out the "fat wings" approach tonight after work. Procedural wings sure are cool. Anyway, back to bugs. If you’re one of the people who have come up against a truly blocking or fun-destroying issue, please do take the time to share that information with us via the bug report subforum. We’re seeing much less of this after the For Science! update, but it’s still something we want to investigate aggressively when it’s encountered. We’re already hard at work on the v0.2.1.0 incremental update to address as many of these issues as we can, and we’ll update you here as soon as we know the exact timing and contents of that update. In the meantime, thank you for continuing to share your bug reports and feedback - your detailed reporting continues to play a huge role in helping us to improve the game. Another exciting new development: modders have started to produce some extremely cool augmentations for KSP2, including Orbital Survey, an alarm clock mod, and there’s even some planet modding underway! Our team is especially happy to see that the extensible tech tree file format created with future moddability in mind has paved the way for things like the new Tech Tree Manager mod. The Orbital Survey mod The 2.5x Kerbolar System mod The next major Roadmap Update, which will bring colonies to the game, is now also in progress. In the meantime, the current plan is to sneak a few additional missions into the next incremental update, just to keep things fresh. Now that there are interesting things to do in the game, we’re very excited about all the ways that we can continue adding new layers to that experience in the coming year while knocking out the bugs that remain. 2024 is going to be a very exciting year for KSP2, both for the players and for us developers! Nate

I just wanted to say on behalf of the team that we love seeing how much fun you all are having with For Science! We'll keep chasing down bugs while we build toward the colonies update, but we're super energized by all the enthusiasm we're seeing for the game. It feels like the wind is finally at our backs, and we have you all to thank for it. Cheers!

For us early fans of the original Kerbal Space Program, there were so many things to enjoy during those first sandbox days. Whether it was the slapstick fun of stringing together small fuel tanks (there was only one size) into impossibly huge rockets, or the eternal search for unlikely uses for the game's only “robotic” part (the landing leg), KSP was a good time from the very beginning. Ah, the good old days (courtesy of TD Channel) If HarvesteR and Squad had stopped there, Kerbal would likely still be remembered as a beloved curiosity. But then they added Science Mode. Suddenly, the game had goals: anywhere you went in the Kerbolar System, you could gather a Science currency that could be spent at the R&D Center to research new technologies. Over time, an expanding roster of new parts were added to the game, and lo and behold, KSP became undeniable. With the siren song of new celestial bodies calling out to me, my own campaign saves turned into epic sagas. I became attached to the individual Kerbals who crewed my first, stumbling Mun missions. Stranded survivors of landings gone awry could not be left behind. That first Mun landing was a moment to remember, but the first Mun rescue was even better! As that narrative emerged — and as I invested my crews with personalities and dreams — the game began to invade other parts of my life. I have a strong recollection of designing a Laythe rescue rocket in the margins of my meeting notes at work. It not only had to land upright in Laythe’s ocean, but had to deploy a boat to collect the survivors of a previous mission who had contrived to get stranded several kilometers apart from one another. And then the whole thing had to take off from the water again to rendezvous in orbit with a Kerbin return vehicle. The missions became puzzles that I couldn't put down. To feed my growing hunger for design ideas, I first turned to the /r/KSP subreddit, where others (some of whom clearly knew a thing or two about space travel) were achieving impossible things with their own space programs. Many of these creators drew inspiration from planned space missions, some of which were more speculative than others. Thus was I introduced to the strange and beautiful universe of “what happens when the Kerbal spirit is applied to the material world.” Could you propel a ship with nuclear bombs? Yes, and we almost did! Could you build a plane that takes off from a runway, then switches from air-breathing mode to oxidizer mode to fly to orbit? You sure can try! My Kerbal experience became a way to investigate many of these real-world mission architectures, and as a greater number of mods became available, virtually all things became possible. The real-world mission proposals all had awesome names that hinted at their audacity: Orion. Nautilus-X. Constellation. Sometimes it felt like I could wish them into being by building them in KSP. Not all of these dreams were as far off as they seemed — as SpaceX achieved the impossible goal of landing first stages propulsively, we all played along at home. This video game had introduced me to a new and beautiful reality. When I knocked together my first goofy rocket, I didn't even really know what an orbit was. HarvesteR didn't just give me a game, he gave me an endless undertaking, the pursuit of which would lead me to Atomic Rockets, the NASA Spaceflight forum, and the videos of Scott Manley. Tomorrow, Kerbal Space Program 2 is crossing that same threshold from “fun toy” to “trying to figure out in the shower how to make a rover when you haven't unlocked wheels yet at the R&D Center.” With the release of the For Science! update, the game receives several new features and numerous high-consequence bug fixes. I've been playing a single Exploration Mode campaign for a couple of months now, and I'm suddenly realizing that thousands of deeply-invested sagas are about to get underway. Just unlocked some probe cores, it's time to fly to Duna! My son was born a year after the original KSP’s debut. Now we're playing KSP2 together, and our own Exploration Mode campaign has just entered tier 3 on the tech tree. We've Gotten Weird With It, somehow managing to unlock the nuclear NERV engines before having rover wheels, extendible ladders, or any but the smallest batteries. We've returned samples to Kerbin from Duna's North pole and the deep craters of Gilly. We've disintegrated more than one probe in the thick atmosphere of Eve, and we're assembling a very big nuclear rocket in low Kerbin orbit, with the goal of exploring all the moons of Jool in one go. We’ve got a lot of empty docking ports on that main truss. Probes? Landers? Packing for Jool is always hectic It's so fun. It's really, really fun. How is it different from KSP? Lots of ways, big and small. Science collection is a much smoother process that involves a lot less guesswork, and the new Science parts are pleasingly diverse, asking you to think hard about how to take advantage of their unique properties. To give one example, the long collection time of the ASCM-A "Air Sniffer" atmospheric science module requires you to develop a loiter capability. You’re either going to have to make a plane, or you’re going to need to get creative with your lander design! We haven't unlocked the big engines yet, but that won't stop us from testing some spaceplane ideas! The new terrain system really comes into its own here, as well. There’s no way to predict what you'll encounter when landing at a new location, and I often find myself sightseeing when I'm supposed to be doing serious science stuff. Adding to that feeling of mystery are the new Discoverables — one-of-a-kind points of interest, a couple dozen of which have been scattered throughout the Kerbolar System. My son and I have run across one of them so far (won't tell you where), and it was every bit as exciting a discovery as I'd hoped! Tim C. Kerman clearly thinks he's discovered a delicious baked potato This update’s inclusion of re-entry heating and more rigid joints are of course hugely important to the overall experience, as are the recent corrections of a number of stability and performance issues. Buoyancy has also seen a major upgrade, and it’s now possible to build working seaplanes (and launch them from our brand-new boat docks)! The game is still in Early Access, which means there are still plenty of improvements to come (as well as plenty of opportunities to help us out by submitting your feedback and bug reports), but the simple fact is that the game is now very hard to put down. My first glorious seaplane flight in KSP2 (inspired by this amazing real plane) Go check out our announcement post for a breakdown of everything that’s arrives tomorrow at 10 A.M. Pacific Time in the For Science! update We've got an all-new Mission system that offers you interesting new goals to pursue in your quest for Science, and there's a completely revamped R&D Center with four tiers of unlockable technologies. Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing how deep into the Kerbolar System people can get with only the first research node unlocked. I suspect it's shockingly far. Could Eeloo be in play? Could somebody possibly manage an Eve landing and return? Only time will tell! Eve: beguiling yet deadly! The For Science! update is the first of a series of major Roadmap Updates. The next one brings colonies to the game, and future installments will add new star systems and new technologies to enable you to fly between them. We’ll also continue to listen to player feedback to get a sense of which changes are working well and which ones need further development. The fun is just beginning! 2023 has been a year of challenges for KSP2, and we appreciate the huge role our community has played in helping us to identify and pursue areas of improvement. I also want to give a big shout-out to our Pioneers, whose dedication and eagerness to dig deep into early builds uncovered a lot of previously-invisible issues. I hope that as we pass this new milestone, you can feel how much passion and hard work the team at Intercept has poured into this game. We are proud of how far KSP2 has come, and we are equally grateful for the dedication and patience our players have shown over the past year. We certainly have come a long way in the last ten months. From all of us at Intercept to all of you in the KSP community: thank you for your support. We’re excited to finally get the Exploration Era underway with all of you. Don’t forget to check your staging, and I’ll see you on Laythe! Nate

David's instinct to measure twice and cut once is one of the traits that makes him an extremely effective engineer. It was clearly honed over his years of dealing with similar challenges in KSP1. I'm always impressed by his calm and analytical approach - he never jumps to a prescription before we understand every dimension of the problem we're trying to solve. Trust me when I say that my own eagerness to solve a problem in the "obvious" way is almost always proven misplaced once we've done a deep dive on the causes of an issue. David is a treasure and we all love working with him.

This is a great question. We're aware that the people who have chosen to play the game in Early Access have done so because they want to have fun (while participating in the evolution of the game). There continue to be some bugs that are active obstacles to fun - these are distinct from bugs related to polish, presentation, or ease of use. Fun-killing bugs have to go to the top of the pile. Thankfully, the process of settling on a joint rigidity solution isn't made all that much more difficult by running through the potential remedies and recognizing that one of the lower-cost choices could make the game more fun for people while the extensible, interstellar-friendly version is under construction.

In case people are wondering why I listed "wobbly rockets" as our current top bug and not "orbital decay," it's because a hotfix just went out (38 minutes ago) that not only fixes the recently-detected registry bug, but also addresses the orbital decay issue. It's a huge relief, both as a developer and a player, to have this finally squared away:

I have a very strong idea when the short-term fix is likely to materialize, but the complexity of this game has a way of turning "low-risk" predictions into misstatements. To my eyes, it feels very close. But there are always questions that can only be answered by testing (which for a game like this can take time). Does it work in all situations? Does it introduce new bugs? Does it break a seemingly unrelated system in a hard-to-detect way? I'm reminded of how the joint reinforcement technique we introduced for a narrow subset of parts created an initially subtle but ultimately game-breaking fuel flow bug that flew under the radar for weeks. What I can say, without fear of misrepresenting things, is that it's a priority task for our most senior developers, and it is internally our most-wanted fix right now. We released this video to underscore that it's a priority for us and that we're approaching the problem with the nuance and openness that it deserves. Our goal here, given requests we've seen here for greater transparency, was to provide more visibility into the way we navigate the sometimes complicated terrain of requirements presented by this game.

I hope you enjoyed this chat! Since this conversation took place, David has been developing a tool that allows our team to compare multiple wobbly rocket remedies, including selective wobbliness for certain part categories, KSP1-style autostrut for the entire vehicle, and various flavors of packed vehicle physics. We are testing these now, with the goal of achieving a near-term improvement in vehicle rigidity while developing a more ambitious long-term fix that's performant at all scales. We'll post more information when we've arrived at a balanced solution. We know you've waited a long time for a solution to this issue, and we're excited to be closing in on a resolution.

I think you may be referring to the same phenomenon listed in the original post as "SAS causes runaway pitch oscillation for aircraft in flight." SAS does not currently like to provide incremental control surface commands - it's very all or nothing right now, which leads to the up-down seesawing. It's bad enough that I don't really even attempt SAS when I'm flying aircraft these days. It's a high-priority issue for us.

Good afternoon, intrepid Kerbonauts! Lots of stuff to talk about today! As many of you know, a couple of new bugs were introduced with last week’s v0.1.3.0 patch. The most significant of these bugs relates to a loss of atmospheric drag (and physics in general) when capsules are decoupled. For the first time ever, we issued a hotfix to correct that issue yesterday morning. Yesterday’s v0.1.3.1 hotfix also contained a fix for a VAB bug in which fairing editor UI elements were drawing on top of one another. We discovered after yesterday’s hotfix that people were unable to launch the game outside of the Private Division launcher. This was not intentional, and has been fixed — due to a configuration error on our end, we accidentally included Steam’s built-in DRM. KSP2 is DRM-free, just like KSP1. The fixed update was pushed to Steam this morning. Sorry for the headache! We’re testing a second hotfix (timing TBD) that corrects the blurry navball issue. And because we’re sneaky little devils, we’re also doing some testing around a fix for the SOI transition trajectory bug. If these fixes prove stable and low-risk, we’ll release a second hotfix. Fingers crossed! The work that’s gone into the SOI transition issue — number 2 on our top-ten most wanted bugs list — deserves a special mention. Engineers David Tregoning, Mark Jones, and Shalma Wegsman put in colossal efforts to both track down the cause of the issue and to craft a solution. This one has been a long time coming, and it’s great to be able to knock such a big item off the list. The credit for the fast turnaround on all the latest fixes goes to a well-coordinated joint effort between engineers, production, and QA. We’re still learning as we go, but things are feeling good. Bugs: The Next Generation Based on the Bug Reports subforum, these are the community’s 10 most-upvoted bugs: Orbital Decay [25 votes] Incorrect Maneuver on Inclination Change [10 votes] Cannot Change Craft/Vessel Name in Tracking Station [9 votes] AIRBRAKES Deploying on Roll [9 votes] Camera Resets Position Map View [8 votes] Graphic Glitches on AMD [8 votes] Engine Sound Effects Not Playing [7 votes] Cannot Change Symmetry While Holding Strut [7 votes] Center of Mass/Thrust/Pressure Vectors sitting on VAB Floor [6 votes] UI Artifacting [6 votes] Note: Navball Blurry [18 votes] and SOI Trajectory Line Issues [18 votes] have been left out of the above list since we're considering them for the second hotfix. Thank you to everyone who took the time to submit bugs in the subforum. Even if you don’t have a new issue to report, your upvotes help us determine the relative priority of the bugs that have already been posted. While we investigate the bugs above, two other non-feature items also feature in our top ten: Rockets are still too wobbly SAS causes runaway pitch oscillation for aircraft in flight Lots to do! Thanks again for submitting such detailed and well-documented bug reports. It’s going to be a busy month! Art Director Kristina Ness AMA Did you catch our Art Director’s AMA yesterday? She was asked lots of interesting questions, many of which ranged well beyond the domain of art. She gave fantastic and detailed answers, and if you missed the stream, it’s definitely worth watching here. With the help of streaming-wizard Dakota, she even got to show off some visuals as well! You can find a transcript of the AMA here as well. Thanks, Ness! KSP2 Steam Sale This is the second week of Private Division’s 20% off sale for KSP2, which ends on July 13th. If you’ve got any friends who you think might enjoy the last little bit of heat-free reentry during Early Access, now’s a great time to tell them about the sale! Weekly Challenge Last week’s Jool 5 challenge produced some of the coolest, most ambitious craft designs we’ve seen in KSP2. Check out this absolute unit from DarlesChickens: Or this beauty from Razorback: And here’s a unique one from Tr1gonometry: We know that in the Wobbly Rocket Era, missions of this kind can be extra challenging. Kudos to everybody who braved the bugs and slipped the surly bonds of Kerbin regardless! This week’s challenge? You’re putting on an air show! Build a maneuverable stunt plane and show off your fancy flying skills. Buzz the tower! Under the bridge! Do some barrel rolls! To get specific: Primary goal: Fly an inside loop, an Immelmann turn, and a split-s turn Secondary goal: Fly an outside loop, a barrel roll, and a hammerhead stall turn Jeb-level goal: Fly under the R&D Bridge as fast as you can Val-level goal: Fly under the parking garage bridges (from the water), under the R&D bridge, and then back through the parking bridges Tim C-level goal: Fly a loop arouund the R&D bridge so that you pass under it twice in one maneuver Don’t forget to wear your G-suit — you’re about generate some wing loads that’ll make your crew chief very grumpy! While your screenshots are always welcome, video capture will be the best way to show off your maneuvering prowess. Good luck! Summer Changes Now that summer’s here, with all its vacation-related comings and goings, I’ll be letting other parts of our team handle forum posting for a while. In the coming month, you’ll still see the following on the forums: Bug report updates More AMAs Challenges In addition, we’ll be uploading more gameplay clips to our social channels. I’ll still be lurking both here and on Discord, so you’ll see me in the comments from time to time. We’ve got a lot of good momentum coming off the last update and we’re already making great headway on the next one. I’m looking forward to sharing our progress with you soon.

We believe this issue is fixed in the v0.1.3.0 release build. Please let us know if any of you are still experiencing this problem. Thanks! Edit: Sounds like maybe this was premature. Still gathering data.

I am following up on this one today - my best theory is that we accidentally failed to exempt this texture from some MIP compression script. Will update when confirmed.

Thanks to Community Member @Kavaeric for making this banner Happy day-after-update, fellow Kerbonauts! Many of you have had a few hours to experience the v0.1.3.0 update, and hopefully you have found the gameplay experience improved! Many players are reporting significantly better framerates, but there are more than just performance gains on the menu. Among the new fixes and features we’re most excited about for this update: New parts, including three new engines, new docking ports, and the A.I.R.B.R.A.K.E. The Flight HUD UI is now rescalable via player settings Several decoupling-related flight bugs have been resolved We knocked out several of the vehicle-falls-through-terrain bugs We nailed that really annoying VAB bug that kept you from putting down procedural parts after picking them up We strengthened wing attachments with a new automatic multi-joint system We fixed the asymmetrical separation forces on radial decouplers, restoring the beauty of booster separations There are many other fixes, big and small. Take a look at our patch notes to get the full rundown. What's Next This update represents an incremental step in the ongoing Early Access process of addressing game-breaking bugs while moving toward our first Roadmap update, which will add Science collection, a new Mission system, and parts progression to the game. We still have quite a few game-breaking bugs at the moment, as well as aspects of gameplay that still need refinement (wobbly rockets, overactive control surfaces, strange SAS behavior). We will be posting our new top-ten most wanted bugs next week (three of which will be carrying over from our previous top-ten list). If you’re playing the latest update and you come across a bug that you’d like to report, please do so via the Bug Reports subforum; you can upvote existing reports, or if your issue isn't listed, you can submit a new report through the form. We will be following those threads very closely to track which issues are most important to the community as a whole.We are aware that one of the decoupling fixes in this update has introduced a new issue that breaks aerodynamic drag after a decoupling action. Thanks to early reports from the community, we have been able to reproduce the bug and are working on a fix. If the fix proves stable and low risk, we will consider releasing a hot fix in a few days. Some players have also correctly noted that the orbital decay and SOI transit trajectory bugs are still present in v0.1.3.0 - while we had high hopes for an eleventh-hour breakthrough, neither fix made it across the finish line in time. In the days after code lock, a new fix for the SOI transit issue was submitted and is being tested. Our engineers have also isolated the orbit decay issue and believe they have a good remedy on deck. With updates, there’s always the temptation to hold the build just a couple more days to sneak in additional fixes (which we actually did this week). Alas, at some point the train has to leave the station, but it’s at least comforting to know that these issues will be addressed in an upcoming update. We appreciate your patience, and we hope that the changes that did make it into this week’s update have improved the game for you. Other questions that we’ve been asked: Where’s reentry and heating? - We are working hard on both. We expect reentry VFX to arrive earlier than thermal systems and heat-related part destruction, so there may be a short phase during which reentering vehicles look like they’re being heated, but really aren’t. We don’t want to reverse any of our recent framerate gains, so we’re taking the time needed to make sure reentry is both awesome-looking and performant. To give you better visibility into the work taking place in this area, we will be posting a new dev blog about the heat system soon What’s going to be in v0.1.4.0? - As we continue to work through our critical bugs list, those that are fixed by the next update will be included. We are still targeting foundational bugs and playability issues. As we work down through the list, we’ll report on our progress. When is the Science update? - The first of the headline Roadmap updates - which will add Science, Missions, and an R+D Center, is still several months away. A lot of work is going into the "Dot Two" update — deep architecture work, bugfixing, new systems, and a lot of new content. We will continue to release incremental updates until that time, with the goal of eliminating the major game-breaking bugs prior to v0.2.0.0. We’ll provide a release date for that version as soon as we can Steam Sale With summer upon us, Private Division is holding a 20% off sale for the Steam Version of KSP2. The sale ends on July 13th. If you’ve got a friend who has an interest in participating in Early Access, now is a great time to hop on board! Upcoming AMA On Thursday, June 29 at 10am PST, our art director Kristina Ness will be fielding your questions about KSP2, and this is a rare opportunity to get detailed answers about the game’s art! You can submit questions for her via Discord, Steam, or the KSP2 forums. Weekly Challenge Last week’s "Score a Goal" Challenge was extra challenging, but those who conquered it created some very original vehicles! First, there’s this submission from Miss, which deserves special mention as it’s the only attempt that involves not only a ball, but a rocket-powered foot! Squidplaz did some reaction wheel magic to get a ball under the R+D Center bridge: User @pyasupro posted this beauty on Twitter, and made goals on both the Mun and Moho: Klapaucious made two glorious attempts, and both deserve a mention. First, the gigantic gumball ramp: Then he deactivated his targeting computer and hit the bullseye from the air: And finally, Mottl did... I don’t know what Mottl did, actually. How did this one end up going, Mottl? This week’s challenge: we’re going to Jool! Here are the deets: Primary goal: Launch a single-Kerbaled mission (only 1 spacecraft may depart Kerbin's SOI, but it can be built in Kerbin orbit) that passes through the SOI of all 5 of Jool's moons at least once before returning to Kerbin Secondary goal: Same as primary, but land a probe on each of Jool's moons (the probes don't have to return) Jeb-level goal: Same as secondary, but plant flags on Bop and Pol Val-level goal: Plant flags on all 5 moons of Jool in one mission before returning safely to Kerbin Have a great weekend, everybody!

Great comment. This is my favorite kind of feedback, thorough and well-argued.

It is entirely opt-in. You can just go and explore at your own discretion if you like, and you'll collect Science the same way that you did in KSP 1. The mission system just adds interesting additional goals for those who want them.

Credit to Kavaeric for this week’s update graphic remix Good afternoon, fellow Kerbonauts. The release date for the v0.1.3.0 update has been revised to June 22 (a two-day delay, from next Tuesday to next Thursday). We have a couple of critical bugs that we think will significantly affect the quality of the update, so we’re giving our team a couple of extra days to knock them out and test the changes. As always, we will post detailed patch notes when the update goes live. The list of fixed items is significant for this one, but major bugs still remain (to give just one example, we still have not completed our fix for the orbital decay issue, which is number one on our priority list). Once the update is live, we will reset the the Bug Reports subforum for new report submissions and re-assess our internal priority list based on both community feedback and our own internal testing. On the following dev update, I’ll post our new top-ten most wanted list based on that information. In the interest of avoiding repetition, I will not re-post the current top-ten list here, as all relevant fixes will officially continue to be in QA review until the update goes live. A Word About Wobbly Rockets Our team shares the community view that overly-wobbly rockets are a major issue in KSP2 (it is number 10 on our top-ten issues list). We have introduced a number of mitigations to address aspects of that issue (altering inertia tensor values to decrease joint issues that emerge when high-mass and low-mass parts are connected, introducing various bespoke multi-joint augmentations to areas of known over-flexibility), but we still see this as an area where major improvement is needed. For the record, this is our official view on what a successful implementation would look like, and against which we continue to measure the effectiveness of ongoing mitigation work: For inline parts that are connected serially, in most applications there should be little to no flexing. This is especially true when neighboring inline parts are the same core size For radially-attached boosters or cantilevered subassemblies with single-point radial connections, some flexibility is expected. There are some applications for which manually-applied struts should be required Wings should not require struts to stay rigid Docking two vessels in orbit should result in a strong, non-wobbly connection that doesn’t fold on itself as soon as the player tries to move the resulting vehicle Wobbly rockets are sometimes fun and funny. A big part of what originally got many of us hooked on the original KSP was the silliness and emergent problem solving that came from playing World of Goo with rocket parts. Broadly, we see this as part of the Kerbal DNA, and want to preserve it in some form. Whether that means limiting wobbliness to certain types or sizes of parts, or relegating certain behaviors to player settings, is the subject of ongoing internal discussion. We of course are following community conversations with keen interest, and this is an area where Early Access participants can have a significant impact on the 1.0 version of KSP2 Joint physics impact CPU performance, and as we progress through the Colony and Interstellar roadmap milestones the part counts will increase dramatically. Any solutions we arrive at for the above requirements must accommodate this reality We would like to move away from autostrut, or any other band-aid solution that involves hidden settings that automatically apply additional joints to make a vehicle more rigid. Whatever solution we arrive at, we’d like it to be predictable and transparent to all users. If over the course of Early Access we find that some form of autostrut is still necessary to allow the creation of ambitious vehicles, we’ll revisit this requirement As a person who has dive-bombed more than one physics meeting with an exasperated "can’t we just make the joints stiffer" comment, let me assure you that in true KSP fashion, this is not a problem with a simple remedy. We’ve got very capable people on the case, and we will arrive at a good solution. Ongoing Work for the Science Roadmap Update As our architecture-facing teams chase down critical bugs, the content-focused feature teams have continued to work on features for the Science update, which will introduce the first major suite of new features to KSP2 since the beginning of Early Access. While we don’t have anything to share yet on timing, the following areas have seen significant progress: An all-new Science collection and transmission system, along with the assignment of Science biomes to all Kerbolar celestial bodies A new Mission system that provides compelling player goals and tracks flight events to determine the achievement of those goals, along with the activation of the Mission Control building to access those functions New Science parts that are distinctive enough from one another that they provide interesting vehicle design choices to the player An all-new tech tree that provides an interesting part progression that will later expand to accommodate the arrival of future interstellar-grade and colony parts And of course, there are some new Kerbal animations for sample collection: eva_science_sample_ground_01.mp4 New Dev Blog Yesterday, we posted a new dev blog entry from Senior Designer Chris Adderley that goes into some detail on the aero occlusion bug that we fixed this month. It’s a nice example of how certain bugs can not only be tricky to detect (it was in fact a community member who first identified the problem), but how bugs within interdependent systems can compound on one another in ways that make tracking them down especially complicated. It’s a cool detective story, and now that we’re through it, I’m glad that Chris has broken it all down for the rest of us. Weekly Challenges Last week’s Build a Base challenge generated some amazing results. Kerman_von_Braun’s achievement appears to have involved the use of a time machine, as it was submitted to YouTube a week before the challenge was announced! But it’s so great, I have to give it a shout-out anyway: And then there’s Banana Base, by Suppise (some kind of signal noise appears to be corrupting some of these images - we’ll ask somebody to look into it): We also really liked this Duna tower and rover by Hammo1603: There’s also a recent trend of players recreating the Challenge banner art drawn by Matthew Poppe. For the record, I think Matt has really been enjoying this. Look at this one from Jaypeg: Congratulations to all the other people who conquered this one! We can only post a few here, but we enjoyed all of the creations posted to the Build a Base thread. This week’s challenge: Score a Goal! That’s right, those big spherical hydrogen tanks are about to be kicked, dunked, and spiked across the Kerbolar system! There will be extra (imaginary) points for style: Primary gooooooooooal: Use a crewed vehicle to roll an uncontrolled spherical hydrogen tank under the KSC bridge Secondary goooooooooooooooal: Deliver a spherical hydrogen tank to the surface of the Mun and knock it through a Mun arch Jeb-level goooooooooooooooooooooal: Roll a spherical hydrogen tank into the Mohole on Moho Val-level goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooal: After scoring the goal on Moho, dunk a second hydrogen tank from the same vehicle into the center of the KSC communications dish We are counting on you to perform some ludicrous displays. We don’t want to see anybody walk it in. Cheers!

It is my job, both within the team and outwardly to the public, to create and communicate goals. Another one of my jobs is to look at the current state of the game and talk about where we stand with respect to those goals. Those goals have not changed. We have shown footage and screenshots of as-yet unfinished features for years. That is a part of the goal setting and communication process. Have I sometimes thought we were closer to the finish line than we really were? That's a matter of public record. Given that I'm both a fan of KSP and an enthusiastic person, I often can't wait to share a cool thing I've experienced with other fans. Is that marketing? If "marketing" means "misrepresenting for profit," I don't think it is. Is it unwise to show off something before it has reached a shippable level of polish? Sometimes it might be, but when I think back to how much I enjoyed hearing about upcoming features back in the HarvesteR days, it's hard not to err on the side of oversharing. It is very nice to be the bearer of good news. As I've mentioned here before, the parts and environment art teams are always ahead of the other teams, just by virtue of how the pipeline works. That means that some updates will include new parts. This is not meant to obscure any uncomfortable realities. Those who have the expertise to fix trajectory or decoupling bugs are fully devoted to fixing them. Those who have the ability to design and implement parts are putting their hearts and souls into that work. One thing I do not have direct control over is velocity. Our team has learned quite a lot over the years, and I think both our production processes and our ability to communicate with one another have improved tremendously. But it is a learning process, as you've seen from the evolution of these forum posts. I understand that the community would like all of these planned features to arrive as soon as possible. Everyone on this team is doing everything they can to improve efficiency so that we're able to take the most direct path to those big roadmap goals. But we also are learning to measure twice and cut once, to reduce tech debt, to improve our testing protocols, and to improve communication between feature teams - all with the goal of making sure that when those roadmap features go live, that they are stable and performant. The goals remain the same, and the thing that keeps me going is the thought of one day driving a resource collection rover out of a colony VAB on an extrakerbolar planet. On the day I finally do this, I'll probably sublimate into a gas, my work on this planet finally having been completed.

This is by design: we are not trying to create a system in which wings never fail. We just don't want them to fall off inexplicably. Please take the new system for a spin and let us know if you think it's still producing frustrating results!

Excellent question. Actually, there is an analogous system in KSP1 that works similarly. Off the top of my head, I don't know how it handles decoupling or other non-propulsive physics events. This may require a scalable solution that can be expanded to include edge cases (for example, the effects of stage separation), but the current effects of which are so profoundly game-impacting that a simpler approach gets us to more stable footing sooner. My short-term goal for this feature is KSP parity. That said, I'll bring up your concerns the next time I chat about this with an engineer.

This is beautiful work! I really love the clarity of the arrow-in and arrow-out SOI transits. This would be great material to keep in the backs of our minds the next time we're contemplating a UI update. Cheers!

Hello, fellow Kerbonauts. The Intercept Games office is buzzing with activity as we submit our last check-ins for the upcoming v0.1.3.0 update and QA puts all the changes through their paces. We’re currently aiming for a June 20 update, but as usual I’ll hedge a bit by pointing out that QA always makes the final determination about whether the final build is release-ready. As we near that date, we should have more confidence about release timing, as well as more details about exactly what fixes and changes will be present in the update. As always, we’ll share detailed patch notes before the update goes live. Bug Status We have seen movement on most of the items in our top 10 list this week! It’s very exciting: Vehicles in stable coasting orbits sometimes experience orbit instability/decay Status: fix in progress We’ve figured out what’s going on here: when an orbiting vehicle is not under on-rails time warp, the effects of minor joint fluctuations within the vehicle rigidbody cause tiny but cumulatively significant changes to the vehicle’s velocity. The outcome of this is that orbital parameters can change due to all of this subtle wiggling. A system is now being crafted to prevent orbital velocity changes when a vehicle is not under thrust. This change will likely not make it into v0.1.3.0 update, but we know what’s wrong and the steps to fixing it are well understood. Trajectories change when vehicles cross SOI boundaries Status: fix in progress Engineers believe they understand the cause of this issue and are working on a comprehensive solution (at time of writing, there is a rumor that we've fixed this, but this news is so hot off the presses that I won't update the status quite yet. If it is in fact fixed, it will make its way into the 0.1.3.0 update) Certain inline parts cause aerodynamic drag numbers to spike Status: fix being tested Next week, Chris Adderley will be posting a dev blog entry describing the aero occlusion saga. It’s a doozy. The fix is in and being tested by QA. We believe it is solid for v0.1.3.0. Returning to craft from VAB causes craft to go underground (possibly related to Kerbals and landed vehicles dropping through terrain while being approached) Status: multiple fixes being tested This was actually two unrelated bugs, but happily we have submitted fixes for both of them and they’re both looking good for v0.1.3.0. Decoupling and/or undocking events result in various issues including loss of control, incorrect controllability of decoupled subassemblies, loss of camera focus, and other issues Status: may have many causes, but some fixes in progress This bug describes a nebulous family of bugs that have one thing in common: decoupling sometimes causes weird things to happen, and sometimes those weird things result in loss of control or other flight-killing outcomes. Our engineers have submitted six separate changes that address an array of decoupling-related issues, and they’re all being tested right now. These will be broken down in detail when we release patch notes for v0.1.3.0, but it’s a good bet that some edge case issues will still persist after the update. This is an area where public information submitted to the Bug Reports subforum can help shine a light on player stories that may be difficult for us to replicate internally. Save files get bigger over time (TravelLog experiencing "landed" status spam) Status: fix being tested We are cautiously optimistic that a fix has eliminated the runaway filesize issue. It is being tested for inclusion in v0.1.3.0. Opening part manager causes major frame lag Status: experiments ongoing We’ve been working on this issue from different angles for quite a while, with varying results. Currently, engineer Patrick DeVarney is working on a method of invoking entries within the part manager on an as-needed basis, rather than always loading all part attributes simultaneously on PAM deployment. This fix will not make it into v0.1.3.0, but if the experiment bears fruit in the future it will have a significant impact on PAM deployment lag. Major post-liftoff frame rate lag immediately above launchpad (associated with engine exhaust lighting) Status: fix being tested As we said last week, the short-term remedy for this issue was to turn off shadow casting for point lights associated with engine exhaust. We’ll likely revisit this once we’ve got other performance-impacting issues sorted out. Root parts placed below decouplers cause issues with stage separation Status: fix being tested This is actually related to bug 5, and relates to engine plates being the root part. It has been fixed and is in QA review. Vehicle joints unusually wobbly, some part connections unusually weak Status: under investigation, some fixes in progress We are testing a fix for one of the most irksome manifestations of this issue, and I’ll elaborate below... Wings be poppin' One of the trending bugs on the Bug Reports subforum relates to wings spontaneously popping off of vehicles. This phenomenon is exacerbated by wings in KSP2 being large, unitary parts with a single connection point - a situation that was less problematic in KSP1, where wing stresses were spread out across a large number of parts and joints. You may have been aware that for some inline stack nodes, we automatically apply a trio of additional joints to increase the rigidity of the connection. Engineer Jamie Leighton has implemented a new system that applies a similar multi-joint reinforcement to wing roots, and does so in a way that is physically correct. Now, the surface attach node of a wing element is augmented by additional joints that are placed linearly along the wing’s root, and the distance between those joints is controlled by the length of the wing’s root. Check it out: Magenta circles show the positions of wing root joint reinforcements This fix is being tested and is slated for release in the v0.1.3.0 update. There are lots of other bugs going down this week as we’ve entered the cherry-picking process going into the final stretch on v0.1.3.0. It's important to keep in mind that while we've been focusing on sharing our progress on top community issues in these dev updates, a lot of work has been done to solve a lot of lesser-known issues as well. We’ve fixed the issue with not being able to rename vehicles in the tracking station, for example. We also think we’ve knocked out an inertia tensor bug that was causing radial decouplers to eject with inconsistent force directions and magnitudes (and messing up our Korolev Crosses). While we’ve knocked out quite a few big bugs over the past couple of months, there’s still plenty of work to do. We’re hoping that this upcoming update makes a big dent in some of the most frustrating issues you’ve been encountering, but we don’t intend to let up at all in our pursuit of the remaining bugs and performance issues standing in the way of a stable, reliably performant gameplay experience. Our bug-hunting momentum is good and morale is high. Bug Reports Subforum I mentioned last week that Dakota Callahan and the Community Team were continuing to add new functionality to the Bug Reports Subforum. You can now upvote issues that you have encountered, add additional information to existing bugs (especially handy to the devs when a bug is caused by a weird or complex edge case - for example, it’s already been instrumental in helping us to track down a VAB "not enough resources" issue), and see the list sorted by prevalence. This will give our team an up-to-date view of the community’s most requested fixes. After the v0.1.3.0 update goes out, our hope is that both we and the community can get a faster and clearer picture of community priorities via this subforum. Check it out and let us know what you think! Weekly Challenge Last week’s challenge produced some very clever Gilly landers dockers, and some very original low-gravity rovers. How about this space dualie by Socraticrat? Or this incredible lander by ChaddingtonDuck: In addition to celebrating all the challenge-inspired community creations over the past week, we also posted a Player Highlight calling out Coriolis, one of our most prolific vehicle builders. We’ve been enjoying their creations for a long time, and we can’t wait to see what they come up with next! Another Coriolis masterpiece This week, we’re challenging you to make bases! Sure, you can land in a cool spot. But can you land other stuff near the same spot to make an off-planet village? We’ll have colonies one day, but that’s no reason not to do some early scouting for the best camping spots! Here are your goals: Primary goal: land a habitat that can hold at least 20 kerbals on the surface of the Mun or Minmus. It should have solar panels and at least one antenna Secondary goal: Near your initial habitat, land a pressurized rover that can hold at least 6 Kerbals, and land an observation tower that is as tall as possible (for scanning the horizon for interesting rocks from the comfort of a sofa or beanbag chair) Jeb-level goal: Use the same transport vehicle design (booster, transfer stages, sky crane, etc.) to deliver each of the above base elements Val-level goal: Build this base on a body outside Kerbin's sphere of influence. Tim C-level goal: Build this base within 1km of a unique point of interest (e.g. the mohole, Dres canyon, Vall crevasse, etc.) Good luck, space campers! P.S.: The title of this post is not my fault. Please blame our Art Director, Kristina Ness.