Intercept Games

Hey! I’m Jon Cioletti, the Senior Technical Artist focused on lighting and VFX here at Intercept Games! In celebration of the upcoming total solar eclipse, today we are looking at some of the lighting tech around eclipses in KSP2 - but first we have to talk about eclipses in REAL life! To help with that, we reached out to one of our friends over at NASA: Senior Visualization Designer AJ Christensen. AJ works at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS), where he develops visualization techniques and designs data-driven imagery for scientific analysis and public outreach. AJ was kind enough to take some time out of his busy day to answer a few questions to kick this Dev Diary off right: Can you very basically describe an eclipse and why it is a special event? There are a lot of objects in space that pass between the Earth and the Sun at various times. We usually call it a “transit” when something that appears much smaller than the disk of the Sun passes in front of it, like an asteroid, or the International Space Station, or Venus. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky But through a crazy coincidence of physical size and distance from Earth, the apparent size of the disk of the Moon in the sky is almost exactly the same as the apparent size of the disk of the Sun in the sky, and so when the Moon transits in front of the Sun, we call it an eclipse because it blocks out a significant part of the Sun’s light. The Moon actually orbits around Earth approximately every 27 days, so you might think we would see an eclipse every 27 days, but because of the tilt of that orbit, the Moon is usually not lined up with the Earth and Sun. For this reason, a lot of orbits result in no eclipse, or only a partial eclipse. The total eclipse happening on April 8th is a rare event where the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun are all in a straight line, and the United States will be on the “day side” of the planet, meaning we get to experience the Sun being completely blocked out by the Moon for a few minutes in any given location along the path of totality. eclipseElements60fps_4-11-2023a_total_diagram.mp4 Credit: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio What should people expect to see when viewing the eclipse? Anyone within the contiguous United States will be able to see the eclipse in some way on April 8th. If you are outside the path of totality, you will have several hours to witness a partial eclipse in the middle of the day. This means that the Sun will have a bit of a crescent shape, but it will not completely block the Sun. This is a fun time to put on approved solar eclipse viewing protective glasses and look at the shape of the sun, and to make pinhole projectors out of colanders or crisscrossed fingers to see lots of little crescent shadows on the ground. If you are inside the path of totality, which is about 100 miles wide and travels from Texas to Maine, you will see that partial eclipse for several hours, but right in the middle will be 3-4 minutes of totality when the bright disk of the Sun called the “photosphere” is completely blocked. During totality, the temperature will drop, crickets may start chirping, and you will see sunset colors in the sky in 360-degrees all around you. totalGlow_4k_60fps_4-14-2023a_2160p60_2 (1).mp4 Credit: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio If you are able, it is definitely worth trying to get inside the path of totality. One place of many that you can find more information to plan a trip is this visualization my colleagues made: Credit: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio What happens to the Sun’s light during an eclipse? In the words of “Mr. Eclipse” Fred Espenak, a retired NASA astrophysicist, “there are no special eclipse rays.” The Sun continues to be what it always is – an extremely bright object in the sky that hurts to look at. This is why NASA insists that anyone viewing the eclipse should wear approved eclipse-viewing lenses, because even during a partial eclipse, you are still looking directly at the Sun. (Note, cameras can also be damaged if they look directly at the sun without a solar filter.) However, in the last seconds before totality, there are some dazzling effects we can see. The first to occur is called the “Diamond Ring Effect”. This is where some of the sun’s light wraps around the horizon of the moon like a ring, and a sliver of light still at the edge creates a huge amount of glare like a diamond. Credit: NASA/Carla Thomas The next effect we call “Baily’s Beads” which are visible for only a moment – these are a line of bright spots of light that poke through the valleys on the edge of the Moon. Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani And finally, once the Sun is completely covered by the moon, we get to see magic of the Solar corona, long tendrils of illuminated plasma in the Sun’s atmosphere. The corona is always there in the sky, but it is usually completely covered up by glare from the disk of the Sun, which is about 1 million times brighter than the corona. For these 3 or 4 minutes of totality, we recommend taking off your eclipse glasses and soaking in the corona with your bare eyes. Credit: Miloslav Druckmüller, Peter Aniol, Shadia Habbal/NASA Goddard, Joy Ng Once totality ends, Baily’s Beads and the Diamond Ring will appear again and we recommend putting your eclipse glasses back on to enjoy the rest of the partial eclipse. How does that inform your work with the Visualizations team at NASA? My team is called the Scientific Visualization Studio, and we use both observed and computed data to make images and videos that explain science research. We have been working closely with scientists and communicators across NASA to create computer graphics imagery to help explain what the April 8th eclipse will look like on the Earth’s surface and in the sky, the surprising geometry of the Earth-Moon-Sun system, and more. We even recently published a game aimed toward younger audiences on NASA’s SpacePlace website called “Snap It!” that gets into what transits are and how eclipses are a special kind of transit. You can find it at this link: https://go.nasa.gov/SnapIt. And, of course, you can view thousands of visualizations about the eclipse and other science topics at our website: svs.gsfc.nasa.gov. ---- So now that we have a good idea of what happens during eclipses in real life, let's jump into the game! Directional Lighting To try and simulate the lighting we see in our solar system we use a variety of systems, but for the eclipse we’ll be focusing on our direct lighting solution with the star of the solar system: Kerbol. While a star technically emits light in all directions, in our game we only really need to care about the star’s light that reaches our player. To handle this, we use a Directional Light which, by definition, is located infinitely far away and emits in one direction only. This works great for lighting our worlds with an intense light from a single distant source like a star. This directional light is also responsible for the direction that all shadows are cast in game. To make this directional light behave more like an actual star, we attenuate its intensity based on distance and occlusion. Distance is the easier of the two. If the player flies their Kerbals way out towards Eeloo they’ll noticed their vessel gets much dimmer. Looking back at Kerbol they can see it shrinking in the skybox as well. To manage this, in the lighting code we attenuate the light’s intensity based on the Inverse Square Law which states that “the intensity of the radiation is inversely proportional to the square of the distance”. The formula looks a little something like this: 1 /x ² . Things like artist adjustable overrides and camera auto-exposure play into the lighting too, but in general throughout the solar system, the further you get from the star, the dimmer it gets. For smaller objects like terrain, buildings, and parts, we use shadows to show light being occluded. But for something as huge as a celestial body we track how much they block our Kerbals from the star itself to attenuate the light intensity appropriately. As an example, we’ll use a solar eclipse with Kerbol and the Mun. Simulated eclipse Intersection of Circles When you think about it in a flat 2D space, this is just two circles intersecting each other. If that’s the case then we can solve for the area of overlap to determine how occluded Kerbol is. The diagrams and formulas below show more of the math being done behind the scenes: Our lighting system holds a reference to the current SOI celestial body, that body’s star and any neighboring bodies. All of these bodies are projected into a normalized sphere around the player where the system checks if any bodies are going to intersect. We can quickly verify this by checking if the sum of the body’s radii are greater than or equal to the distance between them. Once we pass this check, the intersection code starts and we begin solving for the amount of overlap to determine the percentage a body is blocked. First step is to solve for the distance each circle is from the center of the intersection. To do this we use the equation of a circle and populate it with the values we know. C₁: x ² + y ² = r ₁² C₂: ( x - d )² + y ² = r ₂² Then, isolate y ² in each equation and combine both equations like so: y ²= r ₁² - d ₁² y ²= r ₂² - ( d₁ - d )² r ₁² - d ₁² = r ₂² - ( d ₁ - d )² Finally, we can solve for d ₁ and d ₂ : d ₁ = ( r ₁² - r ₂² + d ²) / 2d d ₂ = d - d ₁ After that we can begin solving for the angle of the sector formed when tracing the radii of our celestial body to the intersection points: With our new θ₁ and θ₂ in radians, we can solve for the area of each body’s overlapping segment A₁ and A₂. The following formula is derived by subtracting the area of the triangle from the area of the sector formed by this angle: Area of a triangle = ( 1 / 2 ) r² sin⁡θ Area of a sector = ( 1 / 2 ) r² θ Area of segment = ( ( 1 / 2 ) r² θ ) - ( ( 1 / 2 ) r² sin⁡θ ) = ( r² / 2 ) * ( θ - sin⁡θ ) A1 = ( ( r₁² ) / 2 ) * ( θ₁ - sin⁡θ₁ ) A2 = ( ( r₂² ) / 2 ) * ( θ₂ - sin⁡θ₂ ) Total Area = A1 + A2 And there you have it, the area of overlap for the celestial body. This can then be used to determine the percentage of visibility the further body has by subtracting the occluded area from the total projected circle area and with that number we can scale the intensity of the light emitted by that source body. In our case for the eclipse that will dim the Kerbol’s intensity as the Mun passes over EclipseAtKSC_Attenuation.mp4 Simulated eclipse over the KSC Lens Flare Occlusion The final piece of the puzzle here is the lens flare of the star changing to show that it has been occluded by the Mun. The same visible percentage value is passed through to the lens flare system where it attenuates the scale of the flare to match the reduction of directional lighting in the environment. Unfortunately, this doesn’t capture the details of a total solar eclipse though. EclipseAtKSC_LensFlareAndAttenuation.mp4 Simulated eclipse over the KSC from the ground We have plans to improve the look of eclipses and celestial body occlusion beyond attenuation and add more noticeable “flair” to a total eclipse like Kerbol’s corona peeking out from behind the Mun! We’ll be keeping a close eye on the next total solar eclipse as reference and inspiration! And, if you're nearby and able to, we hope that you join us on April 8th in safely viewing this awesome event right above our heads. Thanks to AJ and everyone over at NASA for contributing to this Dev Diary - and thanks to you for reading! Cioletti .ipsEmbeddedVideo { width: 700px; }

Howdy Kerbonauts! We've got some BIG KSP2 NEWS that's going to rock your world! After much deliberation with the development team, fueled by copious amounts of leftover pizza and donuts (thanks Darrin!) we've decided to make a Kerbin-shattering decision. Kerbal Space Program 2 is officially transitioning from that new-fangled metric system to the good ol' IMPERIAL system. That's right - inches, feet, yards, and maybe the occasional nautical mile for your aquatic craft needs! Now, hold up - we can hear you typing that comment and getting those downvote bots ready - "But WHY Intercept?!?! Metric is loved by scientists worldwide!" Well, hold onto your butts, because we have some stellar reasons for this astronomical shift: One, as every space buff knows, the Apollo Guidance Computer was a big fan of the imperial system. Sure it did its internal calculations in metric, but what did it display to the astronauts aboard? That's right - IMPERIAL! If it's good enough to get us to the moon, it's good enough for the Kerbals. We're all about that authentic space experience!! Two - look, we're American developers. We grew up knowing how long a football field is, not how many meters are in a kilometer. We're still not sure, actually. Plus, who really knows what a "newton" is? Sounds like a cookie to be honest. On the other hand, everyone knows what a pound is - it's the weight of a hamburger. That's hard relatable science right there. Three, Imperial is just more fun! Have you ever tried saying "kilometer" five times fast? Now try "yard!" Whew - see way more fun! Plus, "miles per hour" is totally cooler than "kilometers per hour" - c'mon it doesn't even compare. Four, everyone likes it when number go up. Admit it, saying your rocket is 300 feet tall sounds WAY more impressive than a mere 91 meters. 300?!? That's like a Skyscraper!! Also, with this switch to imperial, get ready to ditch those pesky decimal points and embrace FRACTIONS! No more "meters per second," we're now cruising through the Kerbolar system at "furlongs per fortnight." And fuel measurements? Gallons, of course. None of that "liters" stuff. Once we go Interstellar though, we're using hogsheads. Temperature? Fahrenheit, because nothing says reentry like a number larger than your average oven temperature. Now, we can hear you saying "are you sure this is a good idea? Don't you remember what happened to the Mars Climate Orbiter?" And yeah - we do! But ya know, our math skillz are pretty good, so trust us - we got it ---- These changes are included with KSP2 v0.2.1.6.1.3.9.1-3a (final) which should arrive to you in only a couple inch-years! To help everyone adjust, this release will include a virtual tape measure, a new survey part for exciting new measuring missions, and an in-game abacus for all of your unit converstion needs. Also, Keri will be offering some new missions to help teach imperial units to our more metricly-inclined players. --- We're excited to take this next step of Kerbal Space Program 2's journey and can't wait for you to embrace the quirks and quandaries of the imperial system with us! And consider that this is not just a game update; it's a historical homage - perhaps a tip of the hat - to the days when measurements were as inconsistent as many of your landing attempts. We hope you are looking forward to having bushels of fun with this update as we redefine KSP2's gameplay experience - one pint, pound, and peck at a time. KSP2 Dev Team

Heya Kerbonauts, Welcome back to the K.E.R.B! A few updates to the table today, but nothing major as a significant portion of our past two weeks was spent on some very exciting sprint planning. Since you all enjoyed the last bug video we shared, as a treat here's a short clip QA Director Darrin sent over of him and Engineering Director Jeff reacting to a pre-For Science! buoyancy issue. Still had a lot of tuning to do! Darrin apologizes about using his phone to record his screen bouncy_1.mp4 See you in two weeks! KSP Team Community's Current Top Issues: # Bug Status 1 No trajectory lines in map view Fix being tested, investigating other causes 2 Incorrect "landed" status while in orbit causes trajectory to disappear in Map View Reproducible 3 Parts inside fairing heating up Fix implemented and verified 4 Broken DeltaV with multiple engines and/or with side tank attached [fuel tank placement order messes up dV calculations] Fixes being implemented 5 Rovers are hitting a physics glitch every 1000m from the Location of Rover Being Loaded into the Game with Disastrous Results Improved, investigating long-term solutions 6 Timewarp limit is too restrictive on some non-atmospheric planets (Gilly, Bop, Minmus...) Reproducible 7 Landing gear blocked when it is not [also happens with other deployable parts Unable to reliably reproduce 8 Parachutes didn't deploy Investigating additional issues post v0.2.1 9 For the difficulty of the LIL CHONKER mission, 35 Science as a reward is too low Fix implemented and verified 10 A Kerbal on EVA Exerts a Force upon the Vessel Reproducible 11 Control Surface Oscillation in Atmosphere Reproducible 12 Accelerate under Timewarp still not working in some cases (post v0.2.0) Investigating 13 Vessel icons block celestial bodies from being clicked on [when zoomed out] [Vessel Icons have priority over Celestial Bodies] Reproducible 14 Resource Manager (RM) disallows re-placement of a resource in the Transfer list of the RM, creating duplicates in the parts list of the RM Reproducible 15 When Trying to Close a Fairing on a Part, it will Disappear Instead Investigating 16 When targeting another craft close by navball indicators (prograde|retrograde etc) start moving in an erratic way. [Wobbly navball markers] Reproducible 17 VAB camera offset whenever middle mouse clicking on part after panning Reproducible 18 Game Thinks Entire Craft is Destroyed Even Though Command Pod is Still Intact Investigating 19 Flags in saves cause Kerbals, wheels and landing gear to fall into the ground and not function properly on many bodies (terrain bug) Investigating 20 Can't create a maneuver node within another SOI Working as intended. Evaluating as feedback Note: this report is not fully representative of the work our team is focused on. This is just to provide insight into our progress on the most concerning issues to our community. Additionally, the lack of a status update does not imply a lack of importance or general progress - we just do not have anything to share at this time.

Heya Kerbonauts, Welcome back to the K.E.R.B.! Bit of a short one today, no major updates to share on the Epic issues - though there's been a good amount of progress on a lot of the issues in the top 20. If you're looking for the news of the day, check out the 1 year anniversary post we just put out. It mentions that the team has squashed over 2441 bugs since launch, with a ton of those being directly resolved because of bug reports sent here on the forums. That's why we truly appreciate your bug reports! See you in two weeks! KSP Team Community's Current Top Issues: # Bug Status 1 No trajectory lines in map view Fix being tested 2 Incorrect "landed" status while in orbit causes trajectory to disappear in Map View Reproducible 3 Parts inside fairing heating up Fix implemented and verified 4 Broken DeltaV with multiple engines and/or with side tank attached [fuel tank placement order messes up dV calculations] Fixes being implemented 5 Rovers are hitting a physics glitch every 1000m from the Location of Rover Being Loaded into the Game with Disastrous Results Improved, investigating long-term solutions 6 Timewarp limit is too restrictive on some non-atmospheric planets (Gilly, Bop, Minmus...) Reproducible 7 Parachutes didn't deploy Confirming post v0.2.1 8 Landing gear blocked when it is not [also happens with other deployable parts] Unable to reliably reproduce 9 Control Surface Oscillation in Atmosphere Reproducible 10 Vessel icons block celestial bodies from being clicked on [when zoomed out] [Vessel Icons have priority over Celestial Bodies] Investigating 11 For the difficulty of the LIL CHONKER mission, 35 Science as a reward is too low Fix implemented and verified 12 A Kerbal on EVA Exerts a Force upon the Vessel Reproducible 13 Accelerate under Timewarp still not working in some cases (post v0.2.0) Investigating 14 Resource Manager (RM) disallows re-placement of a resource in the Transfer list of the RM, creating duplicates in the parts list of the RM Reproducible 15 When Trying to Close a Fairing on a Part, it will Disappear Instead Investigating 16 When targeting another craft close by navball indicators (prograde|retrograde etc) start moving in an erratic way. [Wobbly navball markers] Reproducible 17 VAB camera offset whenever middle mouse clicking on part after panning Reproducible 18 Game Thinks Entire Craft is Destroyed Even Though Command Pod is Still Intact Need more information 19 Can't create a maneuver node within another SOI Investigating 20 All Noted Tracking Station Bugs For Celestial Body Information (So Far) Multiple fixes implemented and verified Note: this report is not fully representative of the work our team is focused on. This is just to provide insight into our progress on the most concerning issues to our community. Additionally, the lack of a status update does not imply a lack of importance or general progress - we just do not have anything to share at this time.

KSP2 Update v0.2.1.0 Release Notes <-- This rocket denotes an issue or change that community members directly helped by sharing or suggesting it to our dev team. Thanks to all of you who send in bug reports and suggestions! Bug Fixes Construction Fixed: Game crashes when moving an assembly in the VAB with a nose cone as the anchor part and any non-single symmetry mode Fixed: Stack Separators placed below a vessel root part do not separate correctly causing destruction of the vessel Fixed: Clicking on the Orthographic Cube while holding a part or vessel deletes it while in the VAB Fixed: An exception is thrown when changing the Launch Assembly in the VAB, affecting the functionality of the Delta-V tools Fixed: Loading a vessel in VAB shows magenta cubes for a few seconds Environments Fixed: Black dots show on Jool when observing the planet from the surface [1] Fixed: Galaxy skybox does not rotate in some situations [1] Fixed: Stars are too dim when orbiting some celestial bodies Fixed: Lighting on vessels orbiting Kerbol at a semi-major axis of >=23,000,000,000 flickers EVA Fixed: Running a surface survey when planting a flag results in the Kerbal becoming uncontrollable [1] Fixed: Running a Crew Observation from the PAM on an EVA Kerbal does not show any animation Added new Kerbal Variety assets from the Exploration release to KSC Kerbals Fixed: Kerbal Rocket Pin haircut does not receive correct hair colors Flight & Map Fixed: Orbital drift compensation did not take axial tilt into account consistently, leading to additional drift near Celestial Bodies with axial tilt [1] Fixed: Orbital drift compensation decreases in quality over time [1] Fixed: Decouplers require two clicks to stage [1] Fixed: LT-5 "Bandioot" landing legs collapse to minimum length when any weight is applied [1] Fixed: Vessel and KSC icons on the map are too large, particularly when closer to the camera [1] Fixed: Switching to Mission Control when paused in flight hangs the game [1] Fixed: Shielded docking ports cannot be undocked after a reload Fixed: Shielded docking ports can dock when closed Fixed: Vessel collision with water often only destroys the first part Fixed: Heat shield automated fairings cause aerodynamic occlusion to parts near them Fixed: The vessel becomes active and the scene is switched automatically to flight view of the vessel. Fixed: Jet engines cannot be deactivated until throttled down to zero [1] Fixed: Surface teleport tool doesn't work in non-English languages Fixed: Surface teleport tool shows incorrect maximum altitude values for some celestial bodies Added new color theme to both A and B Intersect nodes on the Map Adjusted colors and iconography associated with Intersect Nodes on the Map Fixed: Flight Report does not appear when crashing a vessel if the previously launched vessel had been recovered Added a delay before showing the Flight Report after a vessel crashes Fixed: The velocity readout in the Flight HUD only shows 4 significant figures FX and Audio Adjusted reentry VFX trigger points to more closely correlate with start of reentry heating Fixed: Heat shields do not show heat glow during reentry Fixed: Procedural wings do not show heat glow during reentry Localization Fixed: Missing localization of some terms in the Mission control screen Fixed: Missing spaces in some languages in several sections of the Part Info window in the VAB Fixed: Incorrect localization for Research Reports collected around Dres Fixed: Incorrect localization for Research Reports collected around Jool Menus and Settings Fixed: Using the Teleport tool with the maximum AP selected teleports the vessel slightly outside the target Celestial Body Fixed: Cheats menu can become locked into a box on the screen and cannot be moved outside its boundaries Fixed: Time Warp controls are still available when exiting to the Main Menu from within a gameplay session Fixed: Part poses for some main menu animations are incorrect Missions and Tutorials Fixed: numerous errors in mission text [1] Fixed: Mission debrief text is repeated in "Minmus Monument" mission [1] Added a waypoint to guide the player as part of the "Tertiary Dibs: Platinum" mission. Fixed: An orange arrow/marker persists on the map during the tutorial "Establishing an Orbit" Optimization Fixed: Several memory leaks when launching or loading vessels Parts and Stock Vessels Reduced atmospheric shock heating in the upper 45% of most atmospheres significantly Increased heat transport away from parts in the top 20% of most atmospheres Increased stack decoupler and separator thermal masses by up to 3x Increased unshielded docking port thermal masses by 1.5x, increased temperature tolerance to 800K Increased thermal mass of light procedural wings, stabilizers and control surfaces by 1.5x Increased thermal mass of medium procedural wings, stabilizers and control surfaces by 1.75x, increased temperature tolerance to 1350K Increased thermal mass of spaceplane procedural wings, stabilizers and control surfaces by 1.2x Fixed: Surface attached lights don't function when first launching a vessel [1] Fixed: Solar panels occlusion is not calculated correctly near and past Jool Improved: RSCM-01 "Sample Grabber" arm incorrectly deploys in many situations Fixed: Crater Crusher stock vessel has its solar panels incorrectly oriented Saving and Loading Fixed: The Burn Timer window does not show staging events after loading a save with an active maneuver Fixed: Vessels lose functionality if loading a save that was made outside of flight mode in certain situations Fixed: Reverting to VAB with multiple vessels on the runway causes one of them to become unuseable Science Changed the behavior of experiments that take time: they will no longer pause when leaving a valid research location and will instead enter a suspended state until you return to the original region, where they will restart without player input Fixed: The Science action button flashes for already-completed experiments [1] Fixed: Mission notifications appear in Sandbox mode [1] Fixed: Experiment crew requirements depend on the vessel's crew intead of the part's crew Fixed: Orbital Surveys do not work in Low or High Kerbol orbit Fixed: Using the Transmit All button in the Research Inventory re-transmits already completed experiments SUBMITTING BUG REPORTS AND FEEDBACK If you'd like to provide feedback about this build, there are many different ways to do so: Submit Feedback through the Game Launcher Suggest a Change on the Forums Join us on Discord to discuss potential changes Bug reports should be shared to: KSP Forums Bug Reports

Heya Kerbonauts, Welcome back to the K.E.R.B.! First up, BIG KSP2 NEWS! v0.2.1.0 arrives NEXT TUESDAY (1/30) with heat balance improvements, map UI updates, and many bug fixes! Hope you're excited for that! We think reentry heating definitely feels better and we're looking forward to hearing your thoughts! The table has been updated below on bug progress and some of these fixes are shipping with the patch next week. Don't have many updates past that! One quick note: you'll notice that "SAS does not hold orientation during time warp" is absent from this list. As we've done before, we've decided to remove this one from the K.E.R.B. list to keep things moving, since we don't have any plans to work on this in the short-term. We agree that using time warp and SAS together during long maneuvers is a valuable goal, but this requires additional design and engineering work which is significant enough that it won't be coming soon. We'll share details on progress in this area when there's news. See you next week! KSP Team Community's Current Top Issues: # Bug Status 1 No trajectory lines in map view Partial fix being tested 2 Stage activation requires a double-click / double-spacebar pressing Fix implemented and verified 3 Parts inside fairing heating up Fix being tested 4 Incorrect "landed" status while in orbit causes trajectory to disappear in Map View Reproducible 5 Rovers are hitting a physics glitch every 1000m from the Location of Rover Being Loaded into the Game with Disastrous Results Improved, investigating long-term solutions 6 "Experiment" button shows available experiments even though the experiments have been done before Fix implemented and verified 7 Upper atmospheres heat up and destroy parts far too quickly Fix implemented and verified 8 Timewarp limit is too restrictive on some non-atmospheric planets (Gilly, Bop, Minmus...) Reproducible 9 Illuminators (lights) do not function [Flicker/Blink for a second and turn off] Fix implemented and verified 10 Landing gear blocked when it is not [also happens with other deployable parts] Unable to reliably reproduce 11 Parachutes didn't deploy Partial fix being tested 12 Control Surface Oscillation in Atmosphere Reproducible 13 Broken DeltaV with multiple engines and/or with side tank attached [fuel tank placement order messes up dV calculations] Investigating 14 For the difficulty of the LIL CHONKER mission, 35 Science as a reward is too low Fix being tested 15 Resource Manager (RM) disallows re-placement of a resource in the Transfer list of the RM, creating duplicates in the parts list of the RM Investigating 16 Dr. Keri Kerman repeating the first textbox on the Minmus discoverable mission debrief Fix implemented and verified 17 A Kerbal on EVA Exerts a Force upon the Vessel Investigating 18 Orbit decay still happening [Landing legs or certain parts interacting can cause it] Fix implemented and verified 19 When Trying to Close a Fairing on a Part, it will Disappear Instead. Investigating 20 VAB camera offset whenever middle mouse clicking on part after panning Investigating Note: this report is not fully representative of the work our team is focused on. This is just to provide insight into our progress on the most concerning issues to our community. Additionally, the lack of a status update does not imply a lack of importance or general progress - we just do not have anything to share at this time.

Heya Kerbonauts, Welcome back to another K.E.R.B. report - our first of 2024! We've processed A TON of bug reports from you all from over the holidays and, as you'll see, the top issues have changed dramatically. Some of these were on our radar already prior to the break so the team was quick to jump into working towards some (New Year) resolutions to these issues, while also investigating causes for issues found by you all! v0.2.1.0 is still coming together and we just want to warn that it's possible that some fixes mentioned here may not arrive in time - so they'd slip to v0.2.2.0+. We'll share an ETA with you all once we finalize the release. As always, thank you all for submitting your bug reports - and a massive shoutout to our Bug Hunters as well! KSP Team Community's Current Top Issues: # Bug Status 1 No trajectory lines in map view Partial fix being tested 2 Stage activation requires a double-click / double-spacebar pressing Fix implemented and verified 3 Incorrect "landed" status while in orbit causes trajectory to disappear in Map View Reproducible 4 Parts inside fairing heating up Fix in progress 5 Rovers are hitting a physics glitch every 1000m from the Location of Rover Being Loaded into the Game with Disastrous Results Improved, investigating long-term solutions 6 "Experiment" button shows available experiments even though the experiments have been done before Fix implemented and verified 7 Signals go through planets and moons (CommNet/Antennas not affected by occlusion) The current behavior is how it was designed. We will consider the feedback. 8 Upper atmospheres heat up and destroy parts far too quickly Tuning being tested 9 Landing gear blocked when it is not [also happens with other deployable parts] Unable to reliably reproduce 10 Illuminators (lights) do not function [Flicker/Blink for a second and turn off] Fix implemented and verified 11 SAS does not hold orientation during time warp Reproducible, investigating alternative solutions 12 Timewarp limit is too restrictive on some non-atmospheric planets (Gilly, Bop, Minmus...) Reproducible 13 Struts in higher symmetry than the parts they are attached to causes issues Investigating 14 Control Surface Oscillation in Atmosphere Reproducible 15 Parachutes didn't deploy Need more information 16 For the difficulty of the LIL CHONKER mission, 35 Science as a reward is too low Fix in progress 17 Inconsistent Framerate During Launch [Edit: The Video Shows a Gradual FPS drop as the Launch Continues] Need more information 18 Resource Manager (RM) disallows re-placement of a resource in the Transfer list of the RM, creating duplicates in the parts list of the RM Investigating 19 A Kerbal on EVA Exerts a Force upon the Vessel Reproducible 20 Orbit decay still happening [Landing legs or certain parts interacting can cause it] Fix implemented and verified Note: this report is not fully representative of the work our team is focused on. This is just to provide insight into our progress on the most concerning issues to our community. Additionally, the lack of a status update does not imply a lack of importance or general progress - we just do not have anything to share at this time.

Hey all, FOR SCIENCE! is out and you all seem to be loving it! It's been fantastic seeing the reactions to all the new features, bugfixes, and Discoverables that arrived in the milestone. As we head out the door for the holiday break, we just wanted to do a quick check-in on the K.E.R.B. to take a look at the community's top issues. For those who are just now discovering the K.E.R.B. (Kerbal Endusers Report Bugs!), welcome! This subforum is dedicated to tracking community bug reports and allowing the community to vote on issues that they are also experiencing. This helps the development team prioritize which issues to fix and also get in-depth information to help during investigations. You can submit bug reports to kerb.al/bugreport where they then will be evaluated and categorized by our Bug Hunters. If you're running into issues with For Science!, here's some common solutions: Quicksave, quickload Try a new save file Restart game Remove mods Verify game files Update drivers Reinstall game Thanks again to all of you who submit bug reports. We've seen a tremendous influx of bug reports and it's been extremely helpful during our immediate investigations post-FS! release. Also, yes we have seen Having to eat prevents players from being able to play the game non-stop but you won't see it on this list. We're prioritizing this and have moved it up to the top of our internal bug list. We'll let you know when we have more info to share. Appreciate you all and Happy Holidays, KSP Team Fundamental Feature Status Updates: Upper atmospheres heat up and destroys parts far too quickly (new) We don't consider this really a bug, the heat system just needs some tuning once we can take some time to gather feedback. As we said in the v0.2.0.0 patch notes, do not expect parity between KSP1 and KSP2 in this area! Current Top Issues: # Bug Status 1 No trajectory lines in map view Reproducible 2 Rovers are Hitting a Physics Glitch Every 1000m from the Location of Rover Being Loaded into the Game With Disastrous Results Should have improved with v0.2.0.0, investigating more robust fix 3 Moving a radially attached part with a strut on it, break the game Investigating 4 Stage activation requires a double click / double spacebar pressing Reproducible 5 Landing gear blocked when it is not [also happens with other deployable parts] Unable to reliably reproduce 6 SAS does not hold orientation during time warp Reproducible, investigating alternatives 7 Control Surface Oscillation in Atmosphere Reproducible 8 Inconsistent Framerate During Launch [Edit: The Video Shows a Gradual FPS drop as the Launch Continues] Need to confirm post v0.2.0.0 9 Almost all of the Navball stuff disapears Need to confirm post v0.2.0.0 10 Cannot create/edit a maneuver node when game is paused Reproducible, investigating solutions for this and other pause-related issues 11 "Experiment" button shows available experiments even though the experiments have been done before Reproducible 12 Incorrect "landed" status while in orbit causes trajectory to disappear in Map View and shows landed for the available experiment UI Need more information 13 In "Deorbiting" there is no heatshield in the craft. Investigating 14 More often than not parts are still blocked after fairings are jettisoned Investigating 15 Planets collide after switching vessels Need to confirm post v0.2.0.0 16 Moving a strut reset the camera Investigating 17 FPS drops critically in flight / wing trails in atmosphere are rendered multiple times Investigating 18 Wobbly navball pro/retrograde markers at low relative velocities Investigating 19 Dres's rings always rendering behind the planet Reproducible 20 Game Thinks Entire Craft Is Destroyed Even Though Command Pod Is Still Intact Reproducible Note: this report is not fully representative of the work our team is focused on. This is just to provide insight into our progress on the most concerning issues to our community. Additionally, the lack of a status update does not imply a lack of importance or general progress - we just do not have anything to share at this time. .ipsEmbeddedVideo { max-width: 700px; }

KERBONAUTS, WE HAVE LIFTOFF The time is now - For Science! is now available! We're so excited to release this major content update to everyone. Full release notes for v0.2.0.0 can be found here. We'd love to hear from you about feedback and bug reports on the update - please submit them to the suggestions and bug reports subforums. Dive into and explore For Science! – and don’t forget to share with us your creations, accomplishments, and discoveries. To celebrate the release of For Science!, Kerbal Space Program 2 is 20% off until January 4th, 2024 at 1PM ET. The For Science! update comes with a brand-new campaign type - Exploration Mode, which adds progression and Science collection through missions, experiments, and journeying through the Kerbolar System. Collect and transmit Science from unique locations and redeem it back at the Kerbal Space Center's (KSC) newly opened Research and Development Center to unlock new part technologies, learn novel concepts, and journey further away from the Kerbal's home planet. While working through the tech tree, unlock the means to extend your reach across the Kerbolar System - from right at home on Kerbin, to the furthest regions of Eeloo, and to the murky depths of Eve. Exponential progression ensures that the rewards for your efforts match your ambitions. How will you collect Science? With all new Science collection parts! Integrate these parts to vehicles (be sure to take note of their shape and mass, it matters!) to carry out different experiments, depending on your mission. Keep an eye out for new Kerbal animations when Science gathering during Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA)! We've overhauled the Science collection and transmission interface for KSP2. During flight, it's now easy to know when there's an opportunity to take measurements or collect samples via a new Experiment Actions button, which provides detailed information about what opportunities are available in your current location. The brand-new Research Inventory gives clear information about how much Science you've already collected and the ability to transmit Science data. The Mission Tracker app helps you keep track of in-progress and completed objectives. New flight planning tools have also been added to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), including altitude and environment-specific readouts that show thrust-to-weight ratio, burn time, and Delta-V for each stage. Data persists and continuously updates in-flight. On your journeys, uncover a wealth of new research locations and mysterious geological formations spread across the Kerbolar System. Locate them and unlock special Science-gathering opportunities - we wonder what you're going to find... The days of stress-free atmospheric re-entry have come to an end with the introduction of atmospheric re-entry heating effects and thermal part behavior. We've also made significant quality of life improvements: An enhanced joint system has been developed, dramatically reducing wobbliness of large vehicles Updated ambient sound systems An all-new Boat Dock - complete with cranes and gantries for use both in-and-out of missions. With this comes additional buoyancy improvements! From us at Intercept Games and Private Division, thank you. We hope you enjoy For Science! and your time amongst the stars!

KSP2 For Science! Milestone v0.2.0.0 Release Notes New Features and Content Added a new game mode called "Exploration Mode" Added Mission Control and R&D Center buildings Added a Tech Tree with 4 tiers Added the Mission Tracker App Added 11 primary missions and 30 secondary missions Added the Research Inventory App Added 9 new Science collection parts Added several unique points of interest throughout the Kerbolar System Implemented thermal system for part heating Implemented re-entry VFX Implemented delta-v tools in both VAB and Flight Added fully-functional buoyancy system for floating vessels Implemented a new Audio Ambience System Added the first iteration of the Cheats Menu (ALT+F8) Added a boat dock environment Added two new tutorials Added new messages to the Cadet Orientation System Added dozens of new items to the Kerbal Variety System Added the K0 starter rocket stock vessel Bug Fixes Construction Fixed: Attaching a subassembly to another part using the stack attach node of a symmetrical child part causes crash Fixed: LES "Bottle Rocket" Solid Fuel Booster appears as a white box icon in the staging stack Fixed: Assembly Anchors cannot be changed on non-launch subassemblies Fixed: Copied decouplers are not copied to a new stage Fixed: Symmetrically-placed parts remain held and cause a Null Reference Exception after removing and reattaching an edited subassembly Fixed: Area around staging stack in the VAB is camera movement dead zone Environments Upgraded water refraction for Kerbin and Laythe Adjusted Eve's ocean waves Adjusted ocean waves on Kerbin and Laythe Adjusted Eve's ocean underwater surface visibility Fixed: Visual artifacts appear in Jool's atmosphere while within Jool's SOI in flight mode Fixed: Visible steps in cloud rotation due to low float precision Fixed: Cloud shadows cause light flickering on vessels in low Kerbin orbit while on high quality settings Fixed: Clouds dissapear at some locations when set to low quality Fixed: Height mismatch between local and scaled clouds under medium quality settings Fixed: Eve's upper atmosphere has a semi-sharp upper border Increased resolution for close-range terrain textures on all celestial bodies Fixed: Laythe low quality clouds have a pixelated glow effect on them Fixed: Terrain appears pixelated when seen up-close Fixed: Dres ridge and some other decal-based landforms don't have proper collision Fixed lighting flashes when loading new scenes or changing vessels Updated collision mesh for Air Traffic Control Tower Fixed: Negative scale errors reported in log files EVA Fixed: Loading a game that was saved while an EVA Kerbal was holding onto a vehicle causes the Kerbal to fall off the vehicle Fixed: If a Kerbal jumps during time warp while in flight mode, the Kerbal becomes unresponsive Fixed: If ladder is shaking, Kerbal resting on ladder becomes offset over time Adjusted jetpack material to better match kerbal spacesuit Flight & Map Implemented reinforced joints system and accompanying player-adjustable joint mode settings Overhauled buoyancy behavior Fixed: Acceleration under time warp stops working after reaching specific in-game time (UT) while in orbit around some CBs Fixed: Buoyancy displacement incorrect for parts with variable drag cubes Fixed: Landing legs deployed at high speed are ripped off of the vessel Fixed: Vessels sink or are destroyed due to mistmatched terrain colliders Fixed: Vessel falls through the ground when camera moves more than ~2500m away from it Improved issue where rovers flip after driving a short distance from their load origin location Fixed: Visual drift on several engines when using high timewarp Fixed: Vessel's parts move out of place when switching to a rocket in orbit while at the KSC or Tracking Station" Fixed: Vessels end up in a bad state when switching away from the vessel in orbit Fixed: Vessel's parts are out of place after disengaging timewarp at very low orbit around Mun Reduced floating point precission loss on rotating reference frames Fixed: Ship is destroyed when switching away from the vessel while engines are running Fixed: Two docked vessels become stuck and unable to undock after a third vessel is docked Improved trajectory AP/PE values changing when saving and loading while in orbit around any CB Added AP/PE display to maneuver trajectories appearing within SOIs The projected trajectory and the actual trajectory now both show periapses for the targets in relative SOIs after a maneuver has been performed Fixed: Kerbals appear as vessels in Map Fixed: Orbit tag displays incorrect celestial body name Fixed: "Time warp to Point" appears as an option for planned trajectories Celestial body name is shown on both the default and expanded view of every AP/PE marker Changed "Enter/Exit SOI" marker to "Encountering/Leaving CB Name" Orbital markers inherit the color of the current trajectory or planned maneuver trajectory Fixed: Vessel and other icons clip into celestial bodies in map view Fixed: Maneuver gizmo can still be manipulated if the player pauses while manipulation is occuring Added "control" and "focus" to kerbal action buttons in Tracking Station to align with vessel actions Fixed: Returning to KSC while paused in another SOI breaks KSC Reduced the frequency of "Solar Panels Ineffective" notification Fixed: VesselOutOfElectricity message event does not trigger when EC is exhausted Fixed: Notification does not display when trying to increase time warp past the limit using hotkeys Fixed: Player receives "Loss of Control" notifications when discarding boosters Fixed: "Vessel out of EC" notification fires when the vessel or kerbal doesn't have EC to start with Fixed: Staging a vessel collapses the Delta-V information in the staging stack Fixed: Vessel continues to accelerate after resuming control from Tracking Station, and turning off engines Fixed: Vessels on launch clamps are not considered landed when at the launchpad Fixed: Throttle sometimes jumps to 100% when passing 20km altitude above Kerbin Fixed: Some engine gimbals don't work when offscreen (e.g. in Map mode)" Added Vessel loss prompt when using the Escape Menu option to leave flight while vessel is on a collision course Adjusted flight report to remove revert options from vessels that are currently in flight or have been recovered Fixed: Map UI info panel fails to display buttons and flight information for EVA kerbals Fixed: Portraits for both Kerbals are not present when docking vessels that have one Kerbal each Fixed: Jetpacks sometimes show up in kerbal portraits Fixed: Tooltips on map items duplicated due to camera distance Fixed: EC values from destroyed electrical parts remain in the Vessel Resources UI Fixed: Flight HUD velocity displays decimals but only updates on integers at velocities above 999 m/s SAS vector hold indicator now displays appropriate highlight when selected Fixed: Temperature gauges stay on screen when switching scenes Fixed: Disconnected parts sometimes remain linked when joints are broken between parts Fixed: Kerbol not visible betwen altitudes of 1000 MM and 750 MM in flight Fixed: Deployed parachutes that have moved from the parts bin to the first stage do not stage properly Fixed: Vessels landed on CBs other than Kerbin can be recovered using Info Panel in Tracking Station Fixed: Part destruction causes assertion error Fixed: Recovering vessel causes Null Reference Exception Fixed: Looking directly at Kerbol from a semi major axis of ~25,210,000,000 m or more causes error flood Fixed: Tracking station shows shows incorrect values for atmospheric pressure, sphere of influence and rotational velocity for CBs FX and Audio Fixed: Ambient sound stops working when leaving flight view and coming back Fixed: Audio events do not persist when entering the main menu upon exiting or saving a game Fixed: Audio mutes on text entry on Campaign screen if you use numpad 1 or 2 Fixed: Audio does not detect collisions with non-terrain objects correctly Fixed: Water impact splash does not change with part velocity Fixed: Water splashes spawn at incorrect orientations Fixed: KSC ambient music plays while in Cadet Orientation mode Fixed: Math issues in water level detection vs part bounding boxes caused apparent hovering of floating vessels Menus and Settings Changing from Full Screen to Windows maintains resolution settings Graphics Settings for resolution now default to the current resolution, if present on the dropdown Fixed: Some accessibility settings do not visually update UI to represent saved setting state Fixed: Graphics quality settings do not apply correctly when selecting medium quality Fixed: General settings don't have descriptions for all options Fixed: Part animations in Main Menu display incorrectly Updated KSP2 Credits Modding Changed unit culture to be invariant for some text parsing scenarios Optimization Improved performance of SimulationObjectView by returning pre-cached components Improved performance of loading stock vessel metadata by only reading from meta json files Moved buoyant force algorithm to job system to address spinning of floating parts and to improve performance and stability Improved water detection performance Terrain rendering time reduced by ~30-50% based on location Removed separate re-rendering of cloud edges to improve performance Fixed: Cloud resources not released after changing cloud quality settings Optimized shadow rendering for clouds Fixed: Light bulb parts cause performance issues Fixed: Frame rate drops when generating new Kerbals using the Kerbal Manager in the VAB Fixed: Memory leak in PartBehaviorSystem Parts and Stock Vessels Fixed: "RF-AD-XL 2500" fueled adapter model is invisible Fixed: "Tuba" engine experiences attachment offset at high warp speeds Fixed: Landing legs and wheel parts under compression fully extend during timewarp Fixed: Landing legs have issues when switching to map while they are extending or retracting Fixed: Labradoodle engine moves out of place when timewarping at 1,000,000x speed in flight Fixed: Already-deployed shrouds sometimes reappear when game is reloaded Added heatshield functionality to existing heatshield parts Fixed: DTS-M1 antenna collider stuck in deployed state Fixed: Surface attach node definition for MK3 engine mount is missing Added bottom node to inflatable heat shield Fixed: Stack-attached parts incorrectly detected as contents of a cargo bay Fixed: Missing drag properties for some structural parts Improved clipping of landing legs through terrain and other surfaces during time warp Minor tuning pass on many parts, including Command and Structural drag cube and buoyancy scalars Tuning pass on drag cubes for all parts Fixed: "Goliath" engine fan doesn't animate when throttled up/down Saving and Loading Fixed: Title freezes at loading screen after reverting to the VAB several times from flight Fixed: Save files take a long time to load, and in some cases the vessel is absent after loading Fixed: Struts don't appear on a vessel if the vessel was previously loaded onto a launch pad Fixed: Close button doesn't work in the Workspace File Name input field inside the Save Worspace dialog Changed "vehicles" to "workspaces" in VAB Save/Load menu titles to reduce confusion Fixed: Save Workspace menu shows vehicle names instead of workspace names for player workspaces Tutorials Fixed: Title crashes after deleting parts during tutorial 1 and then quitting to main menu Added a setting to disable Cadet Orientation after creating a campaing Fixed getting stuck on the final step after using time warp to reach a stable orbit trajectory during tutorial "Establishing an Orbit" Fixed voice over getting stuck when player fails tutorial "Manipulating Orbits" Fixed: Tutorial highlight overlaps Altimiter in the Flight Cluster Fixed: Engineer's Report and Flight Planner crowd one another in the VAB tutorial Updated arrows position for several tutorials UI/UX Updated UI for the KSC launchpad menu Updated UI for the Training Center Updated Launchpad Menu UI Updated UI on the KSC Menu Updated visuals for alert notifications panel Updated visuals for UI Notifications Passive notifications moved to the top of the screen Updated UI for all app windows for stylistic consistency Fixed: Alert & Passive Notifications don't scale properly when switching between resolutions Fixed: Passive notifications remain on screen indefinitely when the game is paused Updated boat launch icon Consistency pass on KSC facility icons Updated color for scrollbars Increased font size for Game mode descriptions Updated UI on tutorial arrows and indicator areas Resized tutorial arrows Tutorial gifs display at consistent size Fixed: Fuzzy edges on the VAB Tool Bar UI Fixed: UI does not properly highlight when hovering on the save vehicle save/load menu Fixed: Ellipses have incorrect vertical position due to font issue Fixed: Action Bar Bento Menu button text runs into edge of box Fixed: Text misaligned when viewing EVA controls in flight Fixed: Text is cut off and illegible in the Time Warp and Breadcrumb UI while on the lowest fullscreen resolution Fixed: Text cut off in Training Center due to scroll masking Known Issues If paused in-flight, switching to Mission Control causes the loading screen to hang Workaround: press '>' to resume time Orbit Surveys are difficult to run on small celestial bodies Workaround: geostationary or big elliptical orbits should allow the player to run those experiments. The intention of this part is for it to scan the regions underneath the vessel as it moves over them - however right now it pauses when a new region is encountered, something that occurs a lot when moving fast over some CBs. We are internally testing improvements to this so the part can get its data with less babysitting Miscellaneous text issues in missions, i.e. debrief text repeating Significant amounts of text went into this update, so of course a few things slipped through the cracks. Even if they're minor, please do report them! Separators below a root part will cause improper separation causing loss of control Workaround: Consider using decouplers instead of separators if you are running into this issue Solar panels are sometimes blocked when in Jool's sphere of influence even when Kerbol is in clear view After staring at the sun from Jool's 'surface', black dots may appear and persist even when transitioning back to the KSC Surface-attached lights don't turn on properly when launching for the first time Common Workarounds If you run into an issue, the first thing you should try to save and reloading. We have found many common issues to be quickly fixed using this method. You could additionally try reverting to launch. Performance may degrade over very long play sessions, but restarting the game client should fix this. A Note on Heat It's important to keep in mind that the Part Heat system in KSP2 is different than KSP1, so do not expect parity in this area. Tuning the numbers for the heat system will be a long-term project, so feedback is appreciated! SUBMITTING BUG REPORTS AND FEEDBACK If you'd like to provide feedback about this build, there are many different ways to do so: Submit Feedback through the Game Launcher Suggest a Change on the Forums Join us on Discord to discuss potential changes Bug reports should be shared to: KSP Forums Bug Reports

Curious about what you can expect in KSP2's first milestone update? We chatted with a few key members of the KSP team to give you an early look at For Science!

The team has been hard at work improving the performance of Kerbal Space Program 2 since launch, so we’d like to take a moment to really showcase the difference between the Early Access Launch (0.1.0.0) and the For Science! (0.2.0.0) release coming next week. Here’s a look at some graphs we use to understand the performance of the game and the improvements that have been made to our minimum specification and recommended specification machines: Min Spec Recommended Spec This represents a huge amount of work by the development team across a number of features and releases. With performance optimization being one of the most frequent requests since launch, we're looking forward to hearing from players how this work improves the overall gameplay experience. If you're curious about performance tuning and how we make decisions in that area, the rest of this check-in provides a high-level overview from our Engineering Team and should provide a bit of extra context for the above graphs. Performance 101 As you can see in the charts, performance varies quite a bit between various scenes players might find themselves in. When we’re investigating performance-related issues, we need to investigate many variables both in the game and on the physical machine. Let’s examine the basics of performance tuning and what we look at when trying to make decisions about performance optimization. In keeping with the theme of For Science!, we should start with defining our experiments and the measurements we will use to determine if we are moving in the right direction. So, let’s start with Frames per Second (FPS), which many of you will already be familiar with. A frame is the period required to fully recalculate what has changed in the game state and redraw the scene to the player. The more FPS the smoother the game looks - and feels, as this allows us to capture inputs quicker and update the game state showing those updates to the user in a more responsive way. When we are digging into performance, we want to look at that value in a different way: milliseconds per frame (ms). Why would we do that? Basically, we want to understand what, in a given frame, is taking up time so we can make it faster. For a 30 FPS goal, we get 33.3 milliseconds per frame, so it becomes a lot easier to set a budget for how much time a given section of the game should take. But what are we taking time from exactly? There are two pieces of hardware we generally are looking at for performance: the GPU and the CPU. At a high level, a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a piece of hardware that specializes in the types of calculations that are needed to render a given scene. It is much faster at smaller tasks in parallel than a Central Processing Unit (CPU) but much slower at running tasks in a series. In order to get the maximum performance out of a computer, we want to use both to their full potential and optimize the game accordingly. Now some of you are thinking “What about memory, storage devices or things like that?” And you’re right that we do consider those things, but for the purposes of this overview we are going to concentrate on the biggest items that affect performance. But bonus points all around. An example internal debug output One of the important parts of performance tuning is to understand what the bottleneck is in each scene, either the CPU or the GPU. In the image above the CPU is taking 44ms per frame on a scene and the GPU is only taking 19ms. The CPU is the bottleneck in this case, so it doesn’t matter how much more optimization we do on the GPU. To improve this specific case on this specific hardware, we need to determine and target the most expensive operations on the CPU. One of the challenges of making a PC game compared to consoles is the variety of hardware choices, specifically when it comes to CPUs and GPUs. There are thousands of combinations that someone could have, and each of them is going to perform slightly differently. That doesn’t even get into memory differences or software differences like operating system patches, hardware drivers, etc. This is why we publish minimum and recommended machine specifications - to help players understand what we have tested and if their machine should be able to play the game with adequate performance. Now that we have some background on what developers look at for performance tuning, let’s go back up to those graphs at the top. For one, these are per-configuration graphs, which are used to tell us how the game is performing on that specific hardware. We do lots of these which help us to remove the hardware variables from the tests and just look at how the given build is performing overall. It also lets us look at this data over time and see if things are improving or not. As we add features, these will always affect performance, so we need to be checking the deltas consistently to determine where we need to spend time on improvements. The other thing these graphs help determine is if a given hardware setup has abnormal issues compared to other similar setups. A given manufacturer may have optimized their hardware in such a way that we get different performance out of certain improvements and knowing that helps us optimize the game for the entirety of our player-base across a wide range of hardware options. --- We hope that this has been informative! As we work towards larger performance optimization goals in the future, we’ll be sure to share updates in posts just like this – and perhaps take a more technical deep-dive in performance-focused dev blogs, so let us know if you’d like to see that! Thanks for reading and hope you enjoy For Science! KSP Team

Hello Kerbonauts. I'm Ghassen, also known as 'blackrack,' the newest graphics programmer on the team. You have no doubt noticed that we have improved the atmosphere rendering in 0.1.5.0. Today I’m going to share with you some insights into those improvements, as well as some of the improvements that are going to be in 0.2.0.0. Inspecting the atmosphere: This is how our atmosphere appeared in 0.1.4.0 on Kerbin: We can see a very nice-looking sky. However, the effect is very subdued on the terrain, we have trouble reading the terrain topography: It is difficult to tell what we are looking at in the distance and the sense of scale escapes us. Are those mountains? Are those hills? Cut to 0.1.5.0 we can immediately see a big improvement in the scene’s readability: We can now immediately get a sense of how far away things are and we get a better sense of scale. This is what’s known as aerial perspective. How the atmosphere is rendered: We are using a precomputed atmospheric scattering method which is standard nowadays in computer graphics, and popularized by Eric Bruneton. It is precomputed meaning all the heavy calculations involved in simulating how light scatters through the atmosphere are done once, for all possible altitudes and sun angles, and then stored in compact and easy to access tables. The latitude and longitude of the observer on the planet does not matter because we can use symmetries and effectively just change the altitude and sun angles to get the scattering at any viewpoint. These tables can then be used to display the effect in a very performance friendly manner when the game is running. These are known as look-up tables. This what some of the slices in our look up tables look like: How aerial perspective is rendered: The look-up tables I’ve described earlier can be used to find the colour of the sky for any given viewpoint inside or outside the atmosphere, as well as how much the atmosphere occludes celestial objects behind it (this is known as transmittance or also extinction, it describes how much of the original object’s light is transmitted and makes it to the observer). The look-up tables only allow us to get the light scattered towards us from the edge of the atmosphere, and assume we are always looking towards the edge of the atmosphere, so we cannot use it to directly to get the colour of the atmosphere up to an object. This is because the look-up tables would otherwise become impractically big and would eat up our memory budget. However, since the look-up tables allow us to get the colour of the sky from any viewpoint, we can re-express the scattered light up to a point/object as the difference between two samples to the edge of the atmosphere, starting from different positions. We also must apply transmittance to the observer to second sample (in red on the diagram) for everything to be correct. Putting it in-game: So now that we know the method to render aerial perspective, we can plug it in-game, and see what we get. Behold: Hmm that looks really strange around the horizon, so what’s happening here? Recall that we are using look-up tables, these are loaded on the graphics card as textures, and they have limited resolution and precision (bit depth). The aerial perspective method described earlier only makes precision issues worse by taking the difference between 2 samples, especially on high variance areas (typically around the horizon) where any imprecisions are amplified. The way to deal with this is to first inspect the look-up tables, see if anything is stored in low precision textures or with any lossy compression, and use high precision instead where needed typically (16-bit and 32-bit per channel floating point textures). After that, we can then change the parametrization for how samples are distributed across the look-up table to maximize resolution where it is needed. The original paper offers a nice way to distribute samples, but we found that it works best for physical settings matching those of Earth, but not for some of the settings used at Kerbal scale. Finally, we review all the lossy transformations in the math and try to minimize any loss of precision and guard against various edge cases. This is where most of the engineering effort in implementing precomputed atmospheric scattering is spent. Right now we have gotten our implementation to a good place, however the inherent limitations of the method means that in the future we will move to a different, non-precomputed method which doesn’t suffer from these issues and would allow us greater flexibility. The importance of mie scattering: We simulate Rayleigh scattering (air particles), mie scattering (water droplets and aerosols) and ozone absorption, each of these is important to represent a different effect and render all the kinds of atmospheres we want. Mie scattering has a particularly noticeable effect and can be used to make atmospheres look foggy and cinematic, all the while keeping a realistic look. I took these screenshots early in testing the atmosphere changes to illustrate the difference increasing mie scattering makes to a scene: In the end we went with a relatively subdued setting on Kerbin and a nice heavy setting on Laythe to set them apart, also as a reward for flying to Laythe. Atmosphere as Lighting Recall that we have the transmittance that we discussed earlier as the part of light that reaches the observer and objects in the atmosphere. We can now use that to light objects, by applying it to sunlight, this gives us the very nice and soft lighting you can see around sunsets and sunrises: We can also use the transmittance on the clouds, notice how areas in direct light can get a nice reddish color, while areas not in direct light get ambient light, and we get a very nice contrast between the reddish transmittance and the faint bluish ambient: Using the atmosphere to do lighting also simplifies artists workflow, as the alternative was to try and approximate the different lighting parameters at different times of the day via various settings and it was very difficult to make the clouds look “right” at every time of day. Now we have less work to do and it looks better and more coherent. Speaking of clouds, next we will discuss of some of the performance improvements coming in 0.2.0.0, but first let’s see how clouds are rendered in more detail. How clouds are rendered: Modern clouds are rendered via raymarching, a technique that involves “walking” through a 3D volume, incrementally sampling properties like density and color as we move along, and performing lighting calculations. This method provides a more accurate and visually appealing result compared to traditional rendering techniques and is very well adapted to rendering transparencies and volumetric effects. This figure shows in red all the samples we have to do for a single ray/pixel on-screen: Because of the number of samples we must take during the raymarching process, it is very demanding performance-wise. A solution to this it to render at low resolutions and upscale. Temporal upscaling: Temporal upscaling was introduced in 0.1.5, the idea is to render a different subset of the pixels every frame. This is similar to checkerboard rendering if you’re familiar with the concept but generalized and not locked to half resolution rendering. This diagram shows how 4x temporal upscaling works, a full resolution image is reconstructed over 4 frames: In movement, the old pixels are moved to where they should be on the current frame, based on their position in space and how much the camera moved from the last frame, this is called reprojection. After moving the old pixels, their colour is validated against neighbouring new pixels, to minimize temporal artifacts, this is called neighbourhood clipping and is the foundation of modern temporal techniques like TAA. Despite the neighbourhood clipping, we were still getting artifacts and issues after this stage in motion, due to the high number of “old” pixels compared to “new” pixels, typically this manifests itself as smearing or flickering. Our solution was to re-render the problematic areas separately at normal resolution, since these areas are only a small part of the final image. This sounds great in theory, but while flying around clouds in a fairly heavy scenario we can see the following timings on a 2080 super at 1440p: Low-resolution rendering of new pixels: 5.45 ms Reproject old pixels and assemble full resolution image: 0.12 ms Re-rendering of problem areas: 4.11 ms Process and add clouds to the rest of the image: 0.09 ms For perspective, if we want to reach 60 fps we need to render in ~16.6 ms, so this step seems to take a sizable chunk of rendering time in 0.1.5.0, even though we are rendering faster than we did in 0.1.4 using this approach. This is because those re-rendered areas are at the edges of clouds where rays must travel furthest and evaluate the most samples before becoming opaque or reaching the boundary of the layer. For 0.2.0.0 we took a bit more inspiration from temporal techniques to find an alternative solution to re-rendering problem areas: If colour-based neighbourhood clipping isn’t sufficient, we can use depth and motion information like speed and direction of movement (on-screen) to try and identify when reprojected pixels don’t belong to the same cloud surface/area and invalidate them as needed. The idea is to store all this information from the previous frame, and every frame we do a comparison with the previous one to get a probability that a reprojected pixel/colour does not belong to the same surface we are currently rendering. After some implementation and tweaking this ended up working well and we can see the following improvement in rendering performance (screenshots taken on a 2080 super at 1440p, framerate counter in top left): On the launchpad we went from 77 to 91 fps In flight around the cloud layer we went from 54 to 71 fps That’s about a 17-31% performance improvement on the whole frame and we save 2 ms to 4 ms on the rendering of the clouds. You can look forward to these performance improvements and more in 0.2.0.0!

Hiya Kerbonauts and welcome back to the K.E.R.B! Hope you're all doing well! Did you hear that For Science! releases on December 19th, 2023 - in less than 3 weeks?!? We can't wait for you all to get your hands on all the new features, and we're working hard to squash bugs just in-time for release. We've been digging through the bug report backlog and really appreciate all of the reports that have been sent in. Your contributions are directly helping KSP2's development and have been critical in identifying root causes for many many issues. From everyone on the team, thank you. Before we get started, as a treat, we have a short clip to share from QA that made us laugh of an issue that was thankfully identified and fixed before it ever reached you all: Loading Save with EVA.mp4 Let us know if you want us to share more little behind-the-scenes clips like this! And now, onto the K.E.R.B.!! Fundamental Feature Status Updates: Wobbly Rockets Improvements have been fully implemented and are ready to ship for For Science! Here is a look at the upcoming configurable options for joints: Calculating Physics of all parts of all Crafts Improvements are fully implemented and are ready to ship for For Science! Camera Resets Position Map View Partial fix to camera orientation flipping, but remaining issues require refactoring on the camera system post v0.2.0.0. Cannot create maneuver nodes with 0 deltaV (new) This issue actually is rooted in Delta-v calculations which require continued design/feature work post v0.2.0.0. Current Top Issues: # Bug Status 1 No trajectory lines in map view Unable to repeatedly reproduce, need more information 2 Phantom forces when deploying landing legs/gear Fix implemented and verified 3 Rovers are Hitting a Physics Glitch Every 1000m from the Location of Rover Being Loaded into the Game With Disastrous Results Fix implemented and verified 4 Black visual artefacts when passing through cloud layer (AMD) Fix implemented and verified 5 Moving a radially attached part with a strut on it, break the game Partial fix implemented and verified. Continued work on struts being done 6 Surface Collision not even with Terrain Mesh Fix implemented and verified 7 On Undocking in Low Orbit, Landing Legs are Causing Massive Force to be Applied in a Retrograde Direction Even When Retracted Extended Landing Legs are Causing a Massive Kick in the Retrograde Direction when in Low Orbit After Disengaging Time Warp If a craft with landing legs is saved in low orbit, when reloaded the craft will experience massive force in the retrograde direction Merged. Fix implemented and verified 8 Landing gear blocked when it is not [also happens with other deployable parts] Cannot reproduce, need more information. Potential workaround: quicksave -> quickload 9 Engine Plate Fairing Respawns after load or switching vessels Fix implemented and verified 10 Acceleration During Time Warp Doesn’t Work at Times Fix implemented and verified 11 Stage activation requires a double click / double spacebar pressing Reproducible 12 Timewarp under Acceleration stops Engaging Properly after a certain amount of years have passed Fix implemented and verified 13 Struts: ctrl+z in the VAB renders struts/fuel lines invisible, visual bug Fix implemented and verified 14 Inconsistent Framerate During Launch Need more post-v0.1.5 information 15 SAS does not hold orientation during time warp Reproducible, investigating alternatives 16 Control Surface Oscillation in Atmosphere Reproducible 17 Almost all of the Navball stuff disappears Investigating. Potential workaround: quicksave -> quickload 18 Elliptical Solar Orbits Cause Timewarp Under Acceleration to Stop Producing Thrust Fixed, needs verification 19 Cannot create/edit a maneuver node when game is paused Known issue, investigating solutions for this and other pause-related issues 20 More often than not parts are still blocked after fairings are jettisoned Investigating Note: this report is not fully representative of the work our team is focused on. This is just to provide insight into our progress on the most concerning issues to our community. Additionally, the lack of a status update does not imply a lack of importance or general progress - we just do not have anything to share at this time. Lastly, this will be the last K.E.R.B. report before For Science! releases. We'll share some more details about what the future is for the K.E.R.B. soon enough, just setting expectations for two weeks from now! See you in For Science! KSP Team .ipsEmbeddedVideo { max-width: 700px; }

Attention Kerbonauts! We're ecstatic to share that.... FOR SCIENCE! WILL BE OUT DECEMBER 19th, 2023!!! Check out our last news post for information on features to expect! And stay tuned for an all-new Dev Chat later this week that dives deep into everything this milestone update has to offer! We'll share more details about global release timing when we get closer to launch. We can't wait for you all to get your hands on For Science!

Heya Kerbonauts and welcome back to the K.E.R.B! After the doozy of the last K.E.R.B. update, we have somewhat of a shorter post today. v0.1.5 has been out for two weeks and we've seen so much more engagement with the K.E.R.B. this update than ever before. As always, thank you so much for reporting and upvoting bugs - it truly helps the future development of KSP2 Last week we shared a major change to the K.E.R.B.: removing entries that require fundamental feature overhauls. You can read more about the justification for that change in the last update, but one of the things we did commit to was to provide insight on the issues that we remove from the list when we have notable updates. Thus: Wobbly Rockets: Improvements have been fully implemented (see the video in the last update) and are ready to ship for For Science! Calculating Physics of all parts of all Crafts: Improvements are fully implemented and are ready to ship for For Science! Surface Rendering Fragment Shaders are Inefficient: We believe this requires some reevaluation by fans post v0.1.5 as we implemented mesh bucketing for terrain which should have significantly impacted the original issues. Camera Resets Position Map View: Has been "upgraded" to this list as it and many other camera issues are planned to be addressed in future camera systems work, scheduled for post-For Science! And now to the list: Current Top Issues: # Bug Status 1 No trajectory lines in map view Unable to repeatedly reproduce, need more information 2 Phantom forces when deploying landing legs/gear Reproducible 3 Rovers are Hitting a Physics Glitch Every 1000m from the Location of Rover Being Loaded into the Game With Disastrous Results Reproducible 4 Black visual artefacts when passing through cloud layer (AMD) Fixed, needs verification 5 Moving a radially attached part with a strut on it, break the game Two separate issues, one with struts, one with symmetry. Investigating 6 Surface Collision not even with Terrain Mesh Reproducible, working on fix 7 On Undocking in Low Orbit, Landing Legs are Causing Massive Force to be Applied in a Retrograde Direction Even When Retracted Reproducible 8 Extended Landing Legs are Causing a Massive Kick in the Retrograde Direction when in Low Orbit After Disengaging Time Warp Reproducible 9 If a craft with landing legs is saved in low orbit, when reloaded the craft will experience massive force in the retrograde direction Reproducible 10 Engine Plate Fairing Respawns after load or switching vessels Fix in progress 11 Timewarp under Acceleration stops Engaging Properly after a certain amount of years have passed Fixed and verified 12 Acceleration During Time Warp Doesn’t Work at Times Fixed and verified 13 Struts: ctrl+z in the VAB renders struts/fuel lines invisible, visual bug Reproducible 14 Inconsistent Framerate During Launch Need more post-v0.1.5 information 15 Elliptical Solar Orbits Cause Timewarp Under Acceleration to Stop Producing Thrust Fixed, needs verification 16 SAS does not hold orientation during time warp Reproducible 17 Control Surface Oscillation in Atmosphere Reproducible 18 Landing gear blocked when it is not [also happens with other deployable parts] Cannot reproduce, need more information 19 Almost all of the Navball stuff disappears Investigating, might be caused by old saves 20 Cannot create/edit a maneuver node when game is paused Known issue, investigating solutions for this and other pause-related issues Note: this report is not fully representative of the work our team is focused on. This is just to provide insight into our progress on the most concerning issues to our community. Additionally, the lack of a status update does not imply a lack of importance or general progress - we just do not have anything to share at this time. Lastly, we've opened up a K.E.R.B. feedback mega-thread so if you have any suggestions, please let us know. We're planning for some pretty significant changes to the K.E.R.B. post-For Science! and, as this is a collaborative effort between the community and the dev team, we want to make sure you all have a voice in the way we approach bug reports moving forward. Appreciate it! KSP Team

KSP2 Update v0.1.5.0 Release Notes <-- This rocket denotes an issue or change that community members directly helped by sharing or suggesting it to our dev team. Thanks to all of you who send in bug reports and suggestions! Bug Fixes Construction Re-enabled ALT to disable stack attach Increased timeout for Fairing and Wing edit icons Fixed: A.I.R.B.R.A.K.E.S do not open when selecting Deploy in the parts manager in the VAB Fixed: vessels with changed assembly roots cause failure of surface attached parts, as well as broken save behavior Fixed: triangle panels placed with mirror symmetry are not oriented correctly Fixed: the "RA-15" antenna appears inverted when placed in mirror symmetry mode on a vessel in the VAB Fixed: the "DTS-M1" antenna is not oriented correctly when placed in mirror symmetry mode on a vessel in the VAB Fixed: the "Pegasus 1" ladder appears inverted when placed in mirror symmetry mode on a vessel in the VAB Fixed: the "Communotron 16-S" antenna appears inverted when placed in mirror symmetry mode on a vessel in the VAB Fixed: Max Impact statistic shows twice in part info tooltip [Original Bug Report] Environments Cloud lighting and shading improvements, including: application of atmosphere transmittance to cloud lighting, unification of ambient light calculation for raymarched, baked, and scaled clouds, recalculation of average position for clouds to accomodate density, updating scattering to use average/weighted position estimated from density samples, moving some code into functions, and separating cloud shadows out of scaled cloud shader and into a new shader that renders below the atmosphere Changed lighting at sunsets by using atmospheric scattering to soften lighting - sunsets are now realistically red on Kerbin, blue on Duna, etc. Improved atmospheric scattering integration on terrain and clouds to make atmospheres softer and horizons smoother Improved cloud blending with the atmosphere Implementation of biome and triplanar mesh bucketing for terrain rendering Optimized cloud shadows Adjusted dynamic resolution calculation for clouds Increased Eve's atmosphere scatter height Fixed: wrong scale on KSC light colliders creating log spam Fixed: decals not visible at higher altitudes above Eeloo Fixed: water is invisible when landing at a specific location on the surface of Eve Fixed: Bop's polar crater appears distorted in map and tracking station Fixed: terrain spikes at Bop's south pole Fixed: lighting is not consistent from all camera angles when viewing the surface near the poles of several celestial bodies [Original Bug Report] Fixed: lighting is inconsistent at Laythe’s north pole [Original Bug Report] Fixed: lighting is inconsistent at Vall’s north pole [Original Bug Report] Updated mipmap settings for scaled planet textures to improve appearance Fixed: seen from orbit, Jool's surface disappears while medium quality clouds are enabled EVA Fixed: attaching a decoupler that creates a fairing too close to the Mk1 command pod prevents Kerbals from exiting vessel Improved self shadowing on kerbal skin materials Improved smoothness of the blink animation Flight & Map Implemented conic section highlighting when cursor hovers over trajectories in Map view Fixed: orbital decay fix causes vessels to travel sideways above Eeloo at certain altitudes [Original Bug Report] Fixed: EVA Kerbals are unable to move along vessels via magboots or ladders while in Orbit [Original Bug Report] Fixed: discarded stage's orbit changes when timewarping with acceleration Fixed: joints break when decoupling parts on vessels with physicsless parts. Fixed: loading screen soft locks after a revert to launch while game is paused [Original Bug Report] Fixed: EC drains at the rate used by active reaction wheel even after torque is disabled and no actual torque is being applied Fixed: A.I.R.B.R.A.K.E.S. mirror symmetry clones deploy backwards [Original Bug Report] Fixed: fairings fly towards celestial bodies after being jettisoned [Original Bug Report] Fixed: vessel stage deploys after the Go button is pressed while time warp is above 1x and then dropped down to 1x Fixed: vessel focus behavior is wrong when using stack separators [Original Bug Report] Fixed: kerbals in non-launch assemblies are lost when launching the vessel [Original Bug Report] Fixed: LY-99 XL gear sometimes hover above runway upon landing Fixed: celestial body trajectories are a solid color when viewed in the Map or Tracking Station Fixed: light tree shows all green lights earlier than intended on maneuver burn timer Fixed: decoupled stage without probe core/pod is controllable FX and Audio Adjusted Logitech Lighting FX when vehicle crashes Adjusted Logitech Lighting colors when reaching some celestial bodies Fixed: wingtip vortices jump when entering celestial frame of reference Fixed: incorrect key colors during docking control for Logitech Lighting FX Fixed: booster engine VFX spawn to the side when flying past ~21.5k altitude on Kerbin Localization Text updated for antialiasing options in Settings Modding Upgraded Unity to version 2022.3.5f1 Optimization Optimized CPU use for cloud rendering Improved GPU performance at KSC by rendering KSC ground during terrain prepass Improved CommandBuffer performance by delaying execution until end of frame, avoiding unnecessary UpdateRenderBounds work Fixed: Drastic loss of performance during a specific time of day in Kerbin's atmosphere Fixed: vessel splashed-down behavior causes performance to drop Optimized MessageCenter to improve performance in flight scene Fixed: water and cloud render textures cause memory leak Fixed: stranded references in the Simulation Update code Fixed: ParametricLineGenerator leaks memory Fixed: memory leaks from VegatationSystem Removed unnecesary code when returning to main menu Removed unnecessary calls in SetOceanMaterial code Removed unnecesary planet textures to reduce GPU memory Removed unnecesary calls in GetLiftVector code Reduced memory usage on water rendering Reduced unnecesary calls in the IVAPortraits code Parts and Stock Vessels Added gridfin parts "GRFN-125" and "GRFN-250" Updated mesh generation code for fairings Fixed: extended engine bells load from save in wrong state for Cornet, Trumpet and Tuba engines [Original Bug Report] Fixed: LY-60 and LY-90 landing legs wheels are missaligned or flipped when extended Fixed: separating any part from ST-Micro-1 truss causes all remaining child joints connected to any other ST-Micro-1 truss on the active vessel to break Fixed: Docking ports cannot always be targeted Fixed: "LT-1" landing leg does not align to the ground when extended Fixed: Ground parts under compression fully extend during timewarp in game Fixed: Antenna ranges for fixed antennas not calculated correctly Fixed: rover wheels lose steering at low velocity Fixed: drag system errors when loading a vessel in atmospheric flight Saving and Loading Fixed: unable to launch a vessel under the Workspaces folder from the Launchpad menu at KSC Tutorials Fixed: reverting after using the Tutorial Menu to return to flight causes soft lock UI/UX Updated UI for Kerbal Manager Updated Part Manager UI style Fixed: Part Tooltip Info in the VAB shrinks or enlarges until it disappears on cursor hover [Original Bug Report] Known Issues Gridfins GRFN-125 and GRFN-250 are not affected by SAS This is due to a problem with control surfaces and how they interact with SAS that was recently identified. SAS is intended to work with Gridfins in the future, but for now they are manual control only. PF-AD-XL 2500 Fueled Adapter is invisible when viewed in VAB and Flight Aware of issue, investigating First Time User Experience Prompt does not appear when vessel loses power for the first time in Flight New to v0.1.5.0, investigating SUBMITTING BUG REPORTS AND FEEDBACK If you'd like to provide feedback about this build, there are many different ways to do so: Submit Feedback through the Game Launcher Suggest a Change on the Forums Join us on Discord to discuss potential changes Bug reports should be shared to: KSP Forums Bug Reports

Hey everyone and welcome back to the K.E.R.B! Oh boy, do we have some stuff to share today! First-off, if you haven't heard the news, infamous bug reporter @Anth has joined the KSP Team! Anth will be taking on a good portion of the responsibility of the K.E.R.B. moving forward, so we're super excited to have him. The K.E.R.B. is always a group effort and we always try to do it last minute to get you all the latest news, and we expect bringing Anth closer to the process will help us get these out faster and more on-time. Did you hear that we announced our first major Milestone release, For Science!? Included in the many new features coming in that update, we announced that there will be some significant improvements to K.E.R.B.'s #1 - Wobbly Rockets, with a new enhanced joint system that drastically reduces vehicle flexing by adding supplementary joints in a similar way to KSP1's autostrut. Here's a video of the comparison with v0.1.4.0, let us know if you can see the difference: more_wobbly.mp4 As a major change to the K.E.R.B., we are going to start removing entries to the K.E.R.B. that require fundamental feature overhauls to be "fixed" in the community's eyes, such as Surface Rendering Fragment Shaders are Inefficient and KSP2 is Calculating the Physics of all Parts of all Crafts. We see these as MAJOR issues to features, as you do, but we also understand the scope of what it would take to get these resolved. We really want the K.E.R.B. to be focused on issues that exist patch-to-patch instead of milestone-to-milestone. That doesn't mean that you can't expect major feature overhauls in-between milestones, though. We just want the K.E.R.B.'s list to continuously be changing and highlighting the community's most important issues that can immediately be addressed. However, we still have these issues on our internal lists, so when progress is made, we will keep you all updated. For example, we just started tested a potential short-term fix to the Calculating Physics issue we linked above. For context, here's some extra information on this issue from @Nertea.This change will only allow resources to update on the active vessel, vessels in physics range or when engines are burning. We feel pretty good about this as a short-term solution, and we expect some pretty significant performance increases from this change. We still need to do a lot of testing and see if there's been any butterfly effects caused by this change. Our goal is to have this short-term fix release with For Science! If you have any feedback on this change or anything else with the K.E.R.B., please let us know. With Anth's addition to the team, we are going to take a long look at this system and figure out what changes we can make to streamline the process and keep you all up-to-date on our development progress. One more thing, we need a bit of help! K.E.R.B. #4 - No trajectory lines in map view, we're having some trouble reproducing this issue! If you have experienced this issue, we'd appreciate it if you'd be willing to share some details in the thread. Anth will be keeping a close eye on this one, so make sure to include as much information about the steps you made. Until next time, KSP Team (now featuring ANTH!) Current Top Issues: # Bug Status 1 Wobbly Rockets Implemented fix and configurable settings options. Needs thorough testing, targeted for For Science! milestone 2 Camera Resets Position Map View Partially fixed. Remaining issues will require some refactor on the camera system 3 Phantom forces when deploying landing legs/gear Partially covered by one but needs further investigation. Different bug than we originally thought 4 No trajectory lines in map view See above 5 Moving a radially attached part with a strut on it, break the game Two separate issues, one with struts, one with symmetry. Investigating 6 Active Vessel Pulls Craft Close when in Timewarp Original bug fixed, but found new reproduction related to docking/undocking. Investigating 7 Surface Collision not even with Terrain Mesh Reproducible, working on fix 8 Part Menu Advanced Text Getting Bigger/Smaller Fix implemented and verified 9 Timewarp under Acceleration stops Engaging Properly after a certain amount of years have passed Fix being tested. Targeted for 0.2 10 Reloading a save and switching vessels retracts the LV-2000 Trumpets nozzle Fix implemented and verified 11 Acceleration During Time Warp Doesn’t Work at Times Investigating 12 Inconsistent Framerate During Launch Performance improvements in v0.1.5 may address. Will require retesting. 13 Engine Plate Fairing Respawns after load or switching vessels Reproducible 14 Elliptical Solar Orbits Cause Timewarp Under Acceleration to Stop Producing Thrust Fix being tested. Targeted for 0.2 15 Control Surface Oscillation in Atmosphere Complex issue, more details to come 16 Cannot create/edit a maneuver node when game is paused Complex issue, more details to come 17 SAS does not hold orientation during time warp Complex issue, more details to come 18 Struts: ctrl+z in the VAB renders struts/fuel lines invisible, visual bug Reproducible and scheduled 19 Timewarp is Distorting Planets Visually when Seen from a Tidally Locked Moon Reproducible 20 Mirrored airbrakes not deploying correctly Fix implemented and verified Note: this report is not fully representative of the work our team is focused on. This is just to provide insight into our progress on the most concerning issues to our community. Additionally, the lack of a status update does not imply a lack of importance or general progress - we just do not have anything to share at this time.

Hello Kerbonauts! Some exciting announcements as we enter the chilly months. In December, we'll release a major content update for Kerbal Space Program 2! In past dev diary posts and video dev chats we've referred to the update as Dot Two or Science. We're thrilled to officially dub this update... For Science! (Yes, the exclamation point is part of the update name. It’s the most important!) We’ve been sprinkling in sneak peeks of For Science! at the end of dev chats for everyone to digest. While we have more to share in the coming weeks, here are some features to expect from the update: (Please note all images are work in progress!) Exploration Mode The For Science! update introduces a new game mode called Exploration Mode. In this mode, you collect and transmit Science from unique biomes across the Kerbolar System; and then redeem Science to unlock new part technologies. Why is it called Exploration Mode and not Science Mode? In future updates, this mode will allow for resource collection and utilization, as well as the establishment of automated resource delivery routes. We want you to be able to continue the campaigns you start in December through all future colony, interstellar, and resource-gathering updates. Science Collection Parts and Interface As the name states, all new Science collection parts help collect Science. These parts are physically consequential, meaning shape and mass should be taken into consideration when building vehicles. The Science collection and transmission interface gives you the heads-up when there's an opportunity to take measurements or collect a sample. The research inventory gives a detailed view of all Science collected during a flight with clear information about what's been learned and what conditions need to be met to claim Science rewards. Tech Tree The Research and Development Center is open! Science can be used to unlock new categories on the tech tree, allowing the creation of more advanced vehicles. You can scout and preview future nodes to plan through dozens of part families. Mission Control Mission Control is also open for business - meet Dr. Keri Kerman who will send you on increasingly-challenging quests from learning about basic rocketry to attempting to build and maneuver an entirely new kind of vehicle. Heating and Thermal The days of stress-free atmospheric re-entry will come to an end with atmospheric re-entry heating and thermal behavior for parts. When For Science! releases, take those heat shields seriously! Wobbly Rockets Improvements We've been hard at work improving the wobbly rockets issue. An enhanced joint system will dramatically reduce wobbliness of large vehicles. Aaaaaand More! We can’t tell you everything, that’ll ruin the surprise! With this update there will also be significant improvements to quality of life and performance! As we continue development, we strive to make KSP2 playable on a wider variety of PCs. --- In other exciting news, today we’re at Space Creator Day – Creative Director Nate Simpson gave a first look at For Science! to space enthusiasts and creators. He also chatted with creators about the update and answered their questions. Check out their channels in the coming days for exclusive interviews and gameplay (and because they make great content!): ShadowZone Matt Lowne SpaceExplorerW Thank you for your patience as we gear up for the update, look forward to more information soon!

Hi all! Welcome back to another K.E.R.B (Kerbal End-users Report Bugs) check-in! Apologies for the delay, but we had to ship a hotfix! Release v0.1.4.1 went out last Friday addressing the widely-known Registry Issue - and we also managed to slip-in a major fix to orbital decay! We've seen so many stories from you all sharing how impactful the orbital decay fix has been, but we're also aware of a few remaining minor issues causing more decay. We want this issue GONE so we're investigating them right away. Wobbly Rockets continues to sit atop the list, but our goal is still to resolve this issue leading up to Science. We do not want your first impressions of our upcoming milestone release to be undermined by a major issue like this. That being said, we want to set the expectation now that we do not expect to majorly address this issue until after the next release v0.1.5. If you're curious about details surrounding the complexity of this issue and potential solutions, check out Nate's recent Dev Chat with David 'Trigger' Tregoning. In addition to that, we'll commit to sharing progress as we get closer to a solution (or solutions!) we feel addresses the core issue. As always, we appreciate all of you who submit new bug reports, upvote existing reports, and add critical details as replies. We're not only looking at these 20 - every single week we knock out smaller issues thanks to your reports as well. Thank you! The KSP Team p.s. because of the delay, don't expect a K.E.R.B. next week - instead it'll be two weeks from now! Current Top Issues: # Bug Status 1 Wobbly Rockets Experimenting with short-term solutions 2 KSP calculating physics all at once Investigated. (See Nestor's Post below) 3 Camera Resets Position Map View Partially fixed. Remaining issues will require some refactor on the camera system. 4 Phantom forces when deploying landing legs/gear Partially covered by one but needs further investigation. Different bug than we originally thought. 5 No trajectory lines in map view Unable to repeatedly reproduce, need more info 6 Timewarp under Acceleration stops Engaging Properly after a certain amount of years have passed Investigating 7 Acceleration During Time Warp Doesn’t Work at Times Investigating 8 Inconsistent Framerate During Launch Investigating. Have bugs impacting performance in flight, but unsure if those 100% aligned. 9 Moving a radially attached part with a strut on it, break the game Two separate issues, one with struts, one with symmetry. Investigating 10 Timewarp is Distorting Planets Visually when Seen from a Tidally Locked Moon Unable to reproduce, investigating 11 Active Vessel Pulls Craft Close when in Timewarp Original bug fixed, but found new reproduction related to docking/undocking. Investigating 12 Engine Plate Fairing Respawns after load or switching vessels 13 Reloading a save and switching vessels retracts the LV-2000 Trumpets nozzle Fixed implemented and verified. 14 Struts: ctrl+z in the VAB renders struts/fuel lines invisible, visual bug Investigating 15 Surface Collision not even with Terrain Mesh No reliable reproduction, investigating. 16 SAS does not hold orientation during time warp Investigating 17 Cannot create/edit a maneuver node when game is paused Known, investigating solutions for this and other pause-related issues 18 Elliptical Solar Orbits Cause Timewarp Under Acceleration to Stop Producing Thrust Similar to #6, investigating 19 Planets collide after switching vessels 20 Mirrored airbrakes not deploying correctly Investigating Note: this report is not fully representative of the work our team is focused on. This is just to provide insight into our progress on the most concerning issues to our community. Additionally, the lack of a status update does not imply a lack of importance or general progress - we just do not have anything to share at this time.

KSP2 v0.1.4.1 Hotfix Release Notes Bug Fixes Flight & Map Vastly reduced orbital decay in low gravity spheres of influence [Original Bug Report] Other Certain actions will no longer cause PQS data values to be written to the Windows Registry [Original Bug Report] PQS data values added to the Windows Registry in previous releases will now be removed upon launching the game Known Issues Remaining Orbital Decay Disabling engine thrust in a low gravity sphere of influence can sometimes cause a miniscule amount of orbital decay. We're working to resolve this issue and will keep the community updated on our progress. SUBMITTING BUG REPORTS AND FEEDBACK If you'd like to provide feedback about this build, there are many different ways to do so: Submit Feedback through the Game Launcher Suggest a Change on the Forums Join us on Discord to discuss potential changes Bug reports should be shared to: KSP Forums Bug Reports <-- This rocket denotes an issue or change that community members directly helped by sharing or suggesting it to our dev team. Thanks to all of you who send in bug reports and suggestions!

Hi all! Welcome back to another K.E.R.B (Kerbal End-users Report Bugs) check-in! Patch v0.1.4 has been out for two weeks and we've seen reports of notable performance improvements from a significant portion of players who previously reported performance issues. There are a few recursive bugs that have popped up, but we've quickly identified them thanks to the work of our QA team and your community reports. One of the most noteworthy updates here is that the team has recently implemented a potential additional fix for Orbital Decay. We hope to have more details to share in the next K.E.R.B. Report. As always, we thank you for all of your contributions to the bug reports subforum. We've seen a lot more engagement over the past few weeks and we appreciate you all. Have a good weekend, The KSP Team Current Top Issues: # Bug Status 1 Wobbly Rockets Experimenting with short-term solutions 2 Orbital Decay Testing potential fix 3 KSP calculating physics all at once Investigating 4 Camera Resets Position Map View Partially fixed, second fix in progress 5 Phantom forces when deploying landing legs/gear Known issue, investigating 6 Massive framerate drop when looking at planet in low orbit 7 No trajectory lines in map view Unable to repeatedly reproduce, need more info 8 Timewarp under Acceleration stops Engaging Properly after a certain amount of years have passed See #11 9 Engine Plate Fairing Respawns after load or switching vessels 10 Reloading a save and switching vessels retracts the LV-2000 Trumpets nozzle Investigating 11 Acceleration During Time Warp Doesn’t Work at Times Investigating [see Dakota's note below] 12 Inconsistent Framerate During Launch Investigating 13 Active Vessel Pulls Craft Close when in Timewarp Original bug fixed, but found new reproduction. Investigating 14 SAS does not hold orientation during time warp Investigating 15 Struts: ctrl+z in the VAB renders struts/fuel lines invisible, visual bug Investigating 16 Surface Rendering Fragment Shaders Are Inefficient Dupe of #6, will be merging 17 Velocity of Target Not Displayed as Relative to Target Reported fixed by community, unable to reproduce, still investigating 18 Moving a radially attached part with a strut on it, break the game Two separate issues, one with struts, one with symmetry. Investigating 19 Cannot create/edit a maneuver node when game is paused Known, investigating solutions for this and other pause-related issues 20 Elliptical Solar Orbits Cause Timewarp Under Acceleration to Stop Producing Thrust See #11 Note: this report is not fully representative of the work our team is focused on. This is just to provide insight into our progress on the most concerning issues to our community. Additionally, the lack of a status update does not imply a lack of importance or general progress - we just do not have anything to share at this time.

KSP2 Update v0.1.4.0 Release Notes <-- This rocket denotes an issue or change that community members directly helped by sharing or suggesting it to our dev team. Thanks to all of you who send in bug reports and suggestions! Bug Fixes Construction Fixed: Center of Thrust, Center of Mass and Center of Pressure markers appear when there's no vessel in the VAB [1] Fixed: the player is unable to change symmetry modes while holding the first part of a strut or fuel line. It is now only locked when holding the second part [1] Fixed: when Alt-copying a subassembly with wings, the copy has one of the wings flipped upside down [1] Fixed: Camera panning orientation does not update when toggling vehicle orientation modes in the VAB Fixed: engine shrouds are generated incorrectly when stack attaching a non-root engine above other parts Fixed: current anchor point and potential anchor points are not differentiated in the VAB Fixed: Fuel bar is sometimes empty when loading a vessel in the VAB Fixed: undo removes the held part Fixed: VAB, anchor points appear when they should not Fixed: Parts Manager shows the pod icon for all categories Reduced delay for disappearance of fairing and wing edit buttons when cursor has moved away from procedural part Fixed: new workspace not resetting history snapshots for the Undo tool Removed duplicate history snapshots for the Undo tool for compound parts Fixed: part of the LY-35 Landing Gear shakes uncontrollably when placed in the Vehicle Assembly Building Fixed: base size of TOOB-375 adjustable tube causes stacked tubes below to generate the wrong size fairing in the VAB Fixed: RF-AD-B 400 doesn't create a copy of the part when node attaching a part EVA Fixed: jetpack cannot be used on previously-EVA'd kerbals when EVAing a new kerbal Flight & Map Added input binding for toggling freecam in flight Added NavBall texture color changes based on velocity state Improved orbits decaying when vessels are not applying any thrust [1] Fixed: airbrakes respond to roll inputs [1] Fixed: camera orientation flips 180 degrees after switching to flight from map [1] Fixed: Normal SAS orientation maneuver burn at periapsis is inaccurate [1] Fixed: Kerbals eject with extra velocity when EVA'd from Grumble Seats while in space flight [1] Fixed: dates don't start on year 1 day 1 Fixed: activate/deactivate action button for engines gets out of sync Fixed: alternators produce power when engines are off Fixed: animated engine gimbal forces are incorrect after reverting Fixed: animated gimbals don't function when offscreen (when in map or offscreen during flight) Fixed: AP and PE markers of inactive vehicle in orbit stay on screen after switching focus to a landed vehicle within the Tracking Station Fixed: active vessel can be controlled while in the Tracking Station" Fixed: camera zooms in and out when scrolling in some flight apps Fixed: cargo bay aero shielding sometimes leaves contained parts out of collider checks Fixed: errors generated when launching a vessel with a fairing Fixed: hibernate In Time Warp doesn't work properly for probes Fixed: Mouse look does not stay active when pressing Tab in flight Fixed: probe cores stop consuming electricity after being decoupled Fixed: RCS blocks don't work in fine control mode Fixed: RCS thrusters remain on when switching away from a vessel Fixed: SAS and throttle sometimes reset when decoupling stages Fixed: SAS mode buttons don't always register clicks Fixed: Timewarp overshoots when crossing SOI boundary, causing orbit to change FX and Audio Adjusted timing of voiceover when reaching a maneuver in the burn timer Fixed: audio stopping under some circumstances Fixed: sounds based on time of day don't play correctly at KSC Fixed: vessel audio is not heard when throttling or staging the vessel while in map mode Localization Integrated: Localized strings for save gameplay menu Modding Fixed: LoadByLabel not properly respecting assets in addressables in mod asset bundles. Labelled addressables should load properly now Optimization Added LODs to some KSC buildings Added LODs to spotlight shadows at KSC Cleaned up code and UI to improve performance of some windows Improved performance when hovering over items in the parts picker UI Improved UI performance when adding or removing stages in the VAB Improved VAB framerate by optimizing part bounds calculations Massively improved speed of PAM deployment/closure Optimized code in the sonic boom system preventing unnecessary calls Optimized terrain shader by removing expensive and infrequently-used features Optimized undo and redo actions in the VAB to reduce update delays Parts and Stock Vessels Adjusted colliders for all landing gear parts so they are more accurately selectable/highlightable Fixed: LY-60 landing gear sometimes flips when extended Fixed: Rovemax M1 twitches back and forth at the suspension when off the ground in Flight. Increased fairing maximum length for AE-FF000, AE-FF125, AE-FF250, AE-FF375 and AE-FF500 parts Updated drag cube for the "HS-I Deluxe Inflatable Heat Shield" so that it properly changes when deployed and retracted Updated the side count of the RF-AD-L 800 fuel tank to better match like-sized parts Updated the side count of the RS-AD 800 fuel tank to better match like-sized parts Saving and Loading Fixed: error generated and failure to load when attempting to load a game with a crash-landed vessel Fixed: error spam while loading a game with a vessel orbiting Kerbol Tutorials Fixed: First Time User Experience confuses map view for tracking station view Fixed: the player loses keyboard and camera control when pausing and resuming a tutorial mission while in map mode in the Training Center Fixed: training center shows artifacts in the background when transitioning from VAB Fixed: tutorial "Deorbiting" does not detect a crash event correctly UI/UX Fixed: Flight UI flickers when using an AMD GPU [1] Adjusted interactable area on scrollbars Improved how loading tips are displayed to show more of them Updated fairing editor icons to improve legibility Fixed a HUD issue that occurred when scaled to 50%. Fixed: holding click and dragging some buttons can cause the wrong visual state to display Fixed: Only one celestial body name can be pinned at a time in the Tracking Station Fixed: part description does not expand when pressing Shift in the part picker Fixed: save window in the VAB can be dragged horizontally Fixed: Tracking Station Load screen remains visible when transitioning from Training Center to Tracking Station Known Issues Orbital Decay Improvements have been made to address the issue and we continue to work on eliminating it completely. Performance Degradation While we have seen improved performance in many ways as noted in the Optimization section above, some players may see issues on GPU bound setups while in orbit around Kerbin or on the surface of other planets. We are working to resolve this issue and if you see any change in your performance, please fill out a bug report through the link below. SUBMITTING BUG REPORTS AND FEEDBACK If you'd like to provide feedback about this build, there are many different ways to do so: Submit Feedback through the Game Launcher Suggest a Change on the Forums Join us on Discord to discuss potential changes Bug reports should be shared to: KSP Forums Bug Reports