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KSP Weekly: Mars In-Sight


SQUAD

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Welcome to KSP Weekly everyone. This Saturday, if everything goes well, NASA is going to launch its first mission to Mars in 5 years! The mission is called InSight, which stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, and it consists of a robotic Mars lander designed to study the interior and subsurface of Mars, which would help scientists to understand the history of Earth and the solar system.

InSight’s objective is to place a stationary lander equipped with a seismometer and heat transfer probe on the surface of Mars to study the planet’s early geological evolution, making it the first mission to study the deep interior of Mars. InSight’s team hopes that by studying the deep interior of Mars, we can learn how other rocky planets form. By comparing Earth’s interior to that of Mars, scientists hope to better understand our solar system. What they learn might even aid the search for Earth-like exoplanets, narrowing down which ones might be able to support life. The lander also will try to detect marsquakes for the first time. Scientists have seen a lot of evidence suggesting Mars has quakes. But unlike quakes on Earth, which are mostly caused by tectonic plates moving around, marsquakes would be caused by other types of tectonic activity, such as volcanism and cracks forming in the planet’s crust. In addition, meteor impacts can create seismic waves, which InSight will try to detect.

Unlike all of NASA’s interplanetary launches, InSight will be the first to launch from the West Coast, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It will ride on top of a powerful Atlas V 401 rocket, which allows for a planetary trajectory to Mars from either coast. Vandenberg was ultimately chosen because it had more availability during InSight’s launch period, which is currently scheduled to launch in the early hours of May 5, around 4.05am local time. If the launch doesn’t happen on that day, it has a three-week window to get going, when our two planets are aligned. The mission is planned to land on the surface of Mars in November this year.

The Atlas V rocket that will loft InSight beyond Earth will also launch a separate NASA technology experiment: two mini-spacecraft called Mars Cube One, or MarCO. These briefcase-sized CubeSats will fly on their own path to Mars behind InSight.Their objective is to relay back InSight data as it enters the Martian atmosphere and lands. It will be a first test of miniaturized CubeSat technology at another planet, which researchers hope can offer new capabilities to future missions. If successful, the MarCOs could represent a new kind of data relay to Earth. This sure looks like a mission that Kerbals could attempt and create through the Mission Builder.

[Development news start here]

This week the team worked on bugs and improvements that we are going to add into an upcoming PC patch. We will continue to identify and solve issues to both the base game and the expansion in upcoming patches, so stay tuned for more updates.

At the moment we have already implemented a simple yet useful new feature for the Mission Builder Canvas. It is the Snap to Grid button for the mission canvas. This button will help you keeping your canvases nice and tidy while designing and tweaking missions.

Additionally the team was able to finish fixing an issue regarding the new Dessert launchpad and runway, which were rotated slightly from the intended north/south directions, instead of being north referenced. This is thankfully now fixed and awaiting to be merged to the project that will become the next patch.

The team also took some time to optimize the Mission Builder canvas, which could get a bit glitchy when handling complex missions that required many nodes. Now it runs smoothly regardless of the number of nodes that your mission has. Here are a couple of GIFs that can give you a better idea of how this improvement affects the overall canvas’ performance. Before and After.

In other news, our friends at BlitWorks continue to work on a new patch for KSP Enhanced Edition. This week they were able to solve several bugs, including one where the game becomes blocked if a quicksave name is set to one or more emojis during a flight. While minor, this was not supposed to happen as the KSP team is quite fond of emojis. Our testers will be validating the fix as usual to make sure everything goes as it should. Another issue that was solved this week involved the Simplified controls preset specifically. While on this preset, an error allowed players to press the “Recover Vessel” button placed on the top panel of the screen at any moment, even if that vessel couldn’t be recovered on that moment. This isn’t supposed to happen when a vessel is not under recovery conditions. Now it is working properly.

Don’t forget that you can also share and download missions on Curse, KerbalX, and the KSP Forum.

That’s it for this week. Be sure to join us on our official forums, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Stay tuned for more exciting and upcoming news and development updates!

Happy launchings!




*Information Source:

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Yay! Go InSight! I'm going to find a way to watch the launch this weekend. 

More thanks for continuing to patch the game. However, I'm not seeing a big difference Before and After. Am I missing something obvious..?

Edit: Oh, it looks like the framerate is smoothed out. Nice!

Edited by KraterKreator
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It struck me as odd that three hours after this topic was created there were still only three replies. That seems a little unusual for a dev notes. Then again, the notes have been rather vacant lately. That led me to check out the view counts. My feelings were corroborated by the data. View counts on dev notes from one year ago are on average twice as large. (weeklies from the past few months rarely exceed 5000 views while from a few months around a year ago are occasionally over 10 000 views)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. @Darth Badie and @SQUAD, we don't come to the dev notes to read essays about space history or news that likely many of us would much rather get from the source. We come here for the notes on development. We like to hear about what challenges the team is working on/have overcome etc. 
 

Anyway, it's your game, and your dev notes. This is something that has been complained about in the past, so I know I am beating a dead horse here a little. I just thought I'd point out that I've noticed there is tangible data to show that these dev notes are less well received than they were in the past. Any info you give us is great, and thank you for continuing to put out a weekly. 

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Replies are light so far, but this is sorta typical after a good release or patch... players still have things to complain about, but several hot issues have been addressed. I think some people are playing the game!   Also... its getting close to nice weather in some parts of North America... I think some other players are trying out the "Real Life" game ;)    

Edit(add): Also, I like the Real Space / historical news section... dev notes are clearly marked, so readers can find what they are interested in.

 

Edited by basic.syntax
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1 hour ago, Errol said:

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. @Darth Badie and @SQUAD, we don't come to the dev notes to read essays about space history or news that likely many of us would much rather get from the source.

I'll add that we notice when they rip sentences from obvious sources like wikipedia such as "InSight’s objective is to place a stationary lander equipped with a seismometer and heat transfer probe on the surface of Mars to study the planet’s early geological evolution" @Darth Badie @UomoCapra @SQUAD if the dev end of the weekly Dev note is boring this only becomes more apparent, and we honestly don't have much else to talk about. :/ 

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Go InSight!! Let's hope NASA doesn't fall foul of the Great Galactic Ghoul this time! (for those uninformed, the Ghoul was a joke made up by engineers when Mars probes kept failing, sorta like the Kraken :P)

Thanks for realigning the Dessert launchpad! Also, has anyone noticed that 1.4.3 added a water tower to the Woomerang site? As far as I know, it wasn't there before.

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12 hours ago, SQUAD said:

Additionally the team was able to finish fixing an issue regarding the new Dessert launchpad and runway, which were rotated slightly from the intended north/south directions, instead of being north referenced.

Those pesky little floating point critters are back again, good to see you've chased them away. :D

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3 hours ago, Errol said:

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. @Darth Badie and @SQUAD, we don't come to the dev notes to read essays about space history or news that likely many of us would much rather get from the source. We come here for the notes on development. We like to hear about what challenges the team is working on/have overcome etc. 

 

They aren't dev notes.. and haven't been called that for some time.

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6 hours ago, JPLRepo said:

They aren't dev notes.. and haven't been called that for some time.

Pfft they may have tried not to be but that like every other non-dev note pr move squad has made its a spectacular failure(seriously its the only thing they ever did right when it came to pr). The only reason to come here and read this is development news ergo it's the dev note, it has always been the dev note, and it will be the dev note for the foreseeable future until squad ceases speaking of development entirely...

Changing the name and using that as an excuse is honestly disingenuous and pathetic on part of the pr team.

Edited by passinglurker
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I was just checking over at the Stardew Valley Blog the other day to see if 1.3 was out and noted that they communicate with their fans about once every 3 months. Stardew Valley outsold Call of Duty last year. Yknow, in case anyone was feeling grumbly or interested in a comparison.

Edited by Pthigrivi
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49 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

I was just checking over at the Stardew Valley Blog the other day to see if 1.3 was out and noted that they communicate with their fans about once every 3 months. Stardew Valley outsold Call of Duty last year. Yknow, in case anyone was feeling grumbly or interested in a comparison.

I was actually a supporter of slowing down the dev...err...KSP weekly frequency post 1.0.

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1 minute ago, klgraham1013 said:

I was actually a supporter of slowing down the dev...err...KSP weekly frequency post 1.0.

That sounds like a wonderful idea  if they go every other week then they can't call it "weekly" anymore and will have to acknowledge its thier devnote again.

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Or you could just tune in once every 3 months or so and read through the weeklies to see whats new? A lot of folks like to see the fun science stuff and see whats going on a more regular basis, especially around when a new release is coming out/getting patched and whatnot. That way everyone's happy?

Edited by Pthigrivi
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Although i do enjoy ksp weekly, being, well, weekly, honestly, I feel like if you do not have any information, or have to find something to say, it isn't worthwhile for me. Also I dislike all the history section, it feels like its copied/pasted from wikipeda and was written by a robot. If you want to put in history, make it exciting. I know it sounds strange, but have you ever been in a boring history class where its rote memorization? it sucks, it dosn't bring history out. now, ive been lucky where i had many exciting history teachers who made it exciting and fun WHILE still learning dates and important parts. My first major at school was originally economics with a minor in history. Ive read many exciting books on space history, and none of these history sections have been at all exciting. Its constantly a letdown honestly.  I would rather have a pr person write up a history using extremely broken English, who cares about it, over a lame Wikipedia type article! believe me, if i want to find out more information, most forum readers can find it out with a simple search.

I love KSP, it is my favorite game, but i'd rather have a chunk of good and worthwhile information that excites me, at a less regular rate, then have a small amount of pushed (filling in space)  information, with a wikipedia type article!

in my mind, when ksptv was active with its own show, playing an unmodded version and showing it off, while sometimes making announcements, that was the best! It was a great way to promote the game, show features that were new or hidden, and just make it a nice environment. I could care less if the person wasn't a great English speaker! The love of the game, the amount of fun they had, and the news was exciting! I enjoyed watching it, and most of the people who work at Squad, speak English really well, especially the PR team!

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Yay! For once in a while I don't have to complain about the Weekly!

Now, I can say that I woke up very early in the morning, and got to watch the InSight probe launch from here in Vegas. Yeah, I know, I'm just as shocked as you are. Though I only saw the Booster Engine Cutoff and Second Stage Ignition, but I can now say I've seen a rocket launch!

Edited by LegendaryAce
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