Nate Simpson

Gurdamma is comparable to Kerbin in scale. The Kerbolar planets are the same scale as in KSP1, and we are keeping to the 1/10 rule for new celestial bodies. If you're asking "will the topology be the same for all Kerbolar celestial bodies," the answer is "our artists often begin with the original KSP heightmap but sometimes make significant alterations." In at least a couple of cases, the topology has been radically altered to tell a slightly different story than the original game (if you look at how Dres has changed, you'll see a good example of this). But stuff like the shapes of Kerbin's continents has not changed too much. Of course the masses, diameters, and orbits of the Kerbolar bodies have not changed from the original game.

Correct!

I think we may dial it back a bit - as other commenters have pointed out, we don't want to spoil too many of the new celestial bodies! This one got grandfathered in because we actually already gave you a peek at an earlier version of it in this video:

The story we're trying to tell with Gurdamma is that it's similar to Earth during the Hadean Eon, relatively shortly after the formation of the Moon. I was actually pretty surprised myself how close the Moon was immediately after its formation: 16 times larger in the sky than today, and just a whisker beyond the Roche limit! To get a sense of how close, check out image 3 in this sequence: https://www.lpi.usra.edu/exploration/training/illustrations/earthMoon/ We are still making adjustments to the distance of Gurdamma's moon, but it'll still be both close and fast-orbiting (and Gurdamma has a very short day). Different star system.

Deformable terrain is beyond scope at release (edge cases abound, especially when you consider multiplayer). This is our best solution at the moment, but could be an interesting area of experimentation going forward. It sure would be cool!

Busted! We have a couple of "safe" craft files lying around that don't show off any unannounced parts. I need to find some spare time to make a few more of these!

Everything on stilts, more or less. There are structural foundation parts that can be attached to the bottoms of colony parts - they work similarly to launch clamps in the original KSP, with height automatically adjusting to reach the ground. The player has full control over them - they come in a range of types and sizes. Keep in mind that resource extraction is a big part of colony gameplay, and once you're making stuff at colonies you're not limited to just landers. These are very heavy, but you can side-mount them on wheeled vehicles that you build close to an area of interest. Or, yes, some of the later engines do make the sort of thrust needed to fly these around. We did place a stack attach node at the top so that one of these could be suspended beneath the center of a stack.

Yes, the runways have been significantly lengthened. As someone else mentioned in the thread, the inspiration for the new runways is the Space Shuttle Landing Facility. In general, we are trying to create more elbow room in a lot of areas, including within the VAB itself. They're there -- the camera just didn't catch them this time. In addition to being able to spawn vehicles at launchpads and on runways, you'll be able to spawn ships at the docks directly from the VAB.

Yes! This is more of Howard Mostrom's original score. He's a treasure!

Yep, test scene. That's just a skybox and a temp terrain. Lots of moving parts, always a few warts on display.

This is an excellent note. Consider that hill deleted. There will be multiple space centers.

Design requirement #1: gotta have some stuff to fly under!

I believe the lion's share of the challenge for porting part packs to KSP2 relates to remaking the assets for PBR. I know that a number of part modders are champing at the bit to get underway on building for KSP2, so we'll release more information regarding asset guidelines as soon as we can.

By all means, send in an application!

We know there are a number of part modders out there who have that rare blend of space engineering love and aesthetic chops, so if any of you want to design and build rocket (and colony) parts as a day job, please drop us a line! We're looking for somebody who will sweat the small stuff (i.e. what kind of MLI makes the most sense for a certain fuel tank) while also having an intuitive sense for what looks good.

From build to build, stuff that's under construction tends to come and go -- that's why we try to be up-front about all of this footage being in progress. That said, it's probably worth clarifying that for every celestial body in the game, there is a local space terrain and a scaled space mesh -- the former is the procedurally-generated, highly-detailed thing that you actually land on, while the latter is the simplified representation that is seen both from a distance and in the map view. There is a seamless blend between the two versions as you near the celestial body. In the case of clouds, there are two completely different implementations for scaled space and local space. The far harder version is the local space version, as those are volumetric, traversible structures that have all sorts of complicated lighting attributes. That has been the first priority. The scaled space version is much easier to implement, and was visible a couple of builds ago... but apparently somebody was fiddling with it when this capture was taken. This is a good example of the way the "in-progress-ness" of the build can surface in the capture footage.

We have honestly not come to any official decision on nomenclature for this feature, and I am famously bad at terminology ("degrees Kelvin," "combustion products"). I may in fact be the only person on the team who calls it Time Zoom. I bet Shana and Tom are crawling out of their skin just reading this. Time warp. Time warp. I'll call it Time warp from now on. Apologies for the confusion.

It's actually pretty easy to tell the difference between the test scenes (like the turnarounds we showed of the fuel factories) and real flight. There are an unusually high number of real in-game shots in this particular video - anything showing a vehicle and a planet in the same shot is in-game footage. I believe this is also the first time we've shown time zoom in action - that was a shot that Tom Vinita (of FRIDAY fame) took during some testing that just happened to look really cool. The surface shot on the Mun is a real PQS terrain, but it was easier to find a pretty spot with good lighting in the test scene. The other non-game shot was the final turnaround of the Mun - that was the asset review video submitted to the team by Brandon Orden, the Mun's creator. The asset (as you can see from the in-game shots) is the same scaled-space mesh as in the real game -- again, showing it in a test scene just makes it easier for us to control lighting and camera angle. In a lot of cases it's about convenience -- the more we can use already-generated assets for these show and tells, the more time we can devote to actually working on the game. So all in all, I'm happy that as we move forward we're able to show more and more footage of the real game in action. By volume, this is the most "real" footage we've shown in a very long time.

Yep! Howard Mostrom is our resident music and sound genius. I hope at some point he gets to do a dev blog, because... I don't think I'm allowed to explain the cool thing he's doing yet. So yeah. Watch this space.

Busted! The shot at the end is a scaled space asset showcase - i.e. the artist just spun it in a random direction to test lighting. Pol in-game has the same orbital properties as in the original game. Good catch, though!

You noticed the docks! I think Manley asked for that one personally. You are correct about the temp terrain - there is some deep new work going into that system right now that's going to knock your socks off. But yeah, if we waited for everything to be done before showing something off, we'd never show anything off! That said, I am really looking forward to the next terrain show-and-tell. So much beautiful stuff coming from both the graphics and art teams. We're finally getting to the part where things get pretty!

Your eyes are correct!

We're still getting our materials/reflection probes dialed in. Let's just say the rocket just came out of the car wash, and Jeb sprung for the full wax treatment?

Thanks to all who did my Googling for me! Digging into this now. Cheers!