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KSP Weekly: The Asteroid Miners


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Welcome to KSP Weekly! Fan-favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, predicts that the world’s first trillionaire will be an asteroid miner. Asteroids are leftover material from the formation of the solar system and range from around a meter to hundreds of kilometers in diameter. Being the primordial building block of rocky planets, asteroids are very rich in mineral resources. If we are to sustainably keep growing economically and technologically, we will have to look up to this natural resource that has never been touched, is effectively inexhaustible, and has a value large enough to disrupt entire economies. There are three main types of asteroids in our solar system: Type C-type (carbonaceous) are the most abundant, accounting for more than 75 percent of known asteroids. These types of asteroids probably consist of clay and silicate rocks, and are dark in appearance. They are among the most ancient objects in the solar system.  S-type (silicaceous) asteroids follow in second place accounting for about 17 percent and are mostly made up of metallic iron mixed with iron- and Magnesium-silicates. Finally, there are M-type (metallic) asteroids, which are composed mainly of nickel, iron and other heavy elements. These are leftover cores of larger asteroids that were destroyed by collisions. If an asteroid is big enough it will undergo a process called differentiation. A process that happens during an asteroid’s formation when the heavier elements sink to its center. Although all these materials are plentiful on Earth, metals in particular are more accessible in asteroids, since the differentiation process happened in Earth as well, putting most of those valuable resources deep within our planet’s core.

Asteroid mining is not a simple endeavor: it would take years of work by dedicated engineers and scientists and billions of dollars to extract useful and profitable asteroid material. While all asteroids are potentially profitable, the right combination of valuable contents, mission essential resources, and accessibility is key. A perfect asteroid to mine has a decent amount of water, a high abundance of valuable materials, and is large enough to be worth the effort and accessible by an economical spacecraft. With this in mind, the first asteroid miners will probably look for a near-earth asteroid. Identifying the ERO (Easily Recoverable Object) is the current focus of effort of companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, who are developing robotic prospector spacecraft for this purpose.

The extraction of platinum group elements and rare earths from asteroids might be the most lucrative. Both are essential in the production of electronic components, batteries and fuel cells, magnets, as chemical catalysts and reagents, and a huge range of advanced materials. Iron, nickel, aluminum and titanium, on the other hand might not be cost effective to bring back to Earth, but could be useful for the mining process itself as it could go into building infrastructure in space, including more asteroid mining facilities. Water is also abundant in asteroids, which can be dissociated into hydrogen and oxygen, becoming rocket fuel. In the long haul, there are even proposals to farm on asteroids, as it could end up being more cost efficient to provide food for long term missions, and “c-type” asteroids are known to be packed with organic compounds and soluble nutrients.

Once the enterprise proves to be profitable, we could see a real development and economic explosion, and maybe in a few decades there will be various mining outposts in the Asteroid Belt. Kerbals realized this a while ago and Kerbodyne even developed the “Drill-O-Matic” Mining Excavator with this in mind. How many asteroids have you mined so far?

[Development news start here]

This week the team focused mainly on bug-fixing tasks. With the help of the community, the focus group team and QA testing teams identified various issues that needed attention and several have been solved and are ready to be merged into an upcoming patch.

Some solved issues are related to Steam Workshop. We talked about a couple of them last week, and in the past few days, the team managed to solve a couple more, among which there was a bug that prevented some ships from being selected in the VAB Steam Tab, forcing players to subscribe via the Steam Workshop page. There was another one that impeded the prompt update of Steam item statuses or showed incorrect information. Although a part of the problem can be attributed to delays with remote servers, there was indeed a conflict that was luckily identified and corrected.

Likewise, the team also solved some Making History Expansion issues. Among these, the team fixed a bug related to the Mission Award system, which prevented the “Boldly Going” award to show up and caused the “Homesick” award to appear when it shouldn’t. The problem for this one was that the node distance checking never started because it asked the vessel to launch, then land, and then launch again in order to meet a certain distance from the target. Additionally, the team fixed a NullReferenceException issue that was triggered after using “Vessel Explode” node on an unfocused craft within physics range, as well as a bug that prevented users to delete missions from the in-game interface. The “Landed Vessel” node also presented some issues, as it didn’t mark the node completion when some facilities were set as the landing location.

Moreover, we managed to fix a bug that froze the game when the Mini Settings window was closed using the “Esc” key. Similarly, there was a game freeze problem that occurred when certain node connection configuration was made and the mission was saved in that state.

Issues related to the base game were also addressed. For instance, and as requested by the community, we adjusted the offset engine shrouds. Coupled with that, within the technology tree some part icons weren’t being displayed correctly. That’s fixed now too. Some of you might have also encountered a bug that made your crafts immediately float away and off the surface when loading into the Exploring Gilly scenario. That was solved as well.

There were some wheel related issues looked into as well. One of which caused landed vessels to jump when rovers attempted to dock with them. In like manner, a bug that caused wheel suspensions to explode when two vessels attempted to dock was fixed. Work was put into improving suspension and wheel performance particularly oscillations, bouncing and overloaded wheels.

Parallel to our work, BlitWorks has continued their maintenance work on KSP Enhanced Edition. Our testers have been continuously testing builds and helping to ensure that we can pack as many fixes and adjustments needed in these versions. We know it has taken us a while to release this patch, but it’ll be worth the wait.

Remember 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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Great news! Please complete it quickly and then stop with the maintenance releases so modders can catch up and I can actually play the game again :)

Thanks - Tyko

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2 hours ago, Tyko said:

Great news! Please complete it quickly and then stop with the maintenance releases so modders can catch up and I can actually play the game again :)

Thanks - Tyko

Hopefully you don't have to cause we try to not update anything that should affect mods in the revision releases. To my knowledge that's the case with all the 1.4.x releases. I updated mine for 1.4.0 as there's been no changes that need rework on those since, and pretty sure I've seen LGG (who maintains a massive list - I dunno where he finds the time) and some others too with the same.

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24 minutes ago, TriggerAu said:

Hopefully you don't have to cause we try to not update anything that should affect mods in the revision releases. To my knowledge that's the case with all the 1.4.x releases. I updated mine for 1.4.0 as there's been no changes that need rework on those since, and pretty sure I've seen LGG (who maintains a massive list - I dunno where he finds the time) and some others too with the same.

Thanks for the advice, but I play GPP which requires Kopernicus...

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2 hours ago, Tyko said:

Thanks for the advice, but I play GPP which requires Kopernicus...

That’s unfortunate that some mods have coded into them that they only work with a specific release. But I can understand from the past why they have done that. Perhaps they will reconsider in light of how we are now trying to not do this for point releases as TriggerAU said.

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1 hour ago, RealKerbal3x said:

Yeah :P Squad/T2 will likely keep developing KSP until it doesn't make any more money, and that could take a long time.

My uneducated guess is that the long tail of KSP must be close to over.  How long have people been able to purchase it?  5+ years?  No real reason to speculate I guess.  I just want a good and stable version without the fear of a new update fixing some things, but bringing new problems.  Back to waiting for 1.4.5 for me.

Edited by klgraham1013
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1 minute ago, klgraham1013 said:

My uneducated guess is that the long tail of KSP must be close to over.  How long have people been able to purchase it?  5+ years?  No real reason to speculate I guess.  I just want a good and stable version without the fear of a new update fixing some thing, but bringing new problems.  Back to waiting for 1.4.5 for me.

It's hard to say. Will 1.4.5 be the definitive version? Probably not. Will it be 1.5? Could be.

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11 minutes ago, RealKerbal3x said:

It's hard to say. Will 1.4.5 be the definitive version? Probably not. Will it be 1.5? Could be.

Anyways, what should come to an end must come to an end.
Probably not so soon, though.
Wish the game became stable enough as it was in 1.3.1.
(Also heard that @katateochi didn't get any words from the devs though the devs knew that what they are adding is (well, supposed to be) something similar to KerbalX(apparently that's why KerbalX is mentioned.). I quite don't think that this is a good practice in developing a game... If it's considered an incorporation, then the original modder should be mentioned, and if it's not, at least the modder should be told that something like the mod is coming... maybe I'm the only one thinking like this?)

Edited by DunnoAnyThing
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Why are so many people clamoring for the game to end development instead of just enjoying that we're still getting new content? If it bothers you that much you could just pick the existing version you like and stick with it, but why wish that development would stop for other players? 

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2 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

Why are so many people clamoring for the game to end development instead of just enjoying that we're still getting new content? If it bothers you that much you could just pick the existing version you like and stick with it, but why wish that development would stop for other players? 

I've been trying very, very hard not to comment and just stay quiet about all this... but... well... what he said ^

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You may notice we're coming on the 5th patch for 1.4 after a generally considered stable and good 1.3.1.  Any new features we get come at the expense of actually addressing long standing issues.  @DMagic has shown how beautifully dv and twr could be integrated into the UI; how good the tracking station could be.  I'd rather Squad give us a stable product so modders can finish the game if they have no intention of improving upon or adding the features that are obviously lacking.  I appreciate what Squad has done.  This game is truly unique, but it's uniqueness has been a get-out-of-jail-free card to some.  I just want KSP to be the best it can.  Maybe I've just lost faith at this point.  The game has been "released" for a long time after all.

Edited by klgraham1013
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33 minutes ago, Vanamonde said:

Why are so many people clamoring for the game to end development instead of just enjoying that we're still getting new content? 

Fear of changes.

They are/were happy with the present/recent status-quo, and fears what they think can happen (intentionally or not) as things change.

Will my favorite mods still be supported? Will my friends move on leaving me playing alone my favorite missions/scenarios/multiplayer mod?

Will everybody just go Workshop, and nobody will ever upvote my crafts on KerbalX again?

Things like that. :)

Edited by Lisias
I hate mobile softkeyboards.
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Myself, I don't want them to ever stop adding and improving on the game... ever. Each time a new update comes out, it gives me new stuff to do, and more important, new stuff to write about in Emiko. And this last update has been a massive gift to my story. I'm still just laying the groundwork for how to add in the Dessert airfield... and it's going to guarantee me at least 20-30 more chapters from what I had originally planned... at least!

There are still so many things Squad can do... why would anyone want them to stop???

This is just my opinion... I'll see myself out now... y'all have a great day.  :cool:

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2 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

Why are so many people clamoring for the game to end development instead of just enjoying that we're still getting new content? If it bothers you that much you could just pick the existing version you like and stick with it, but why wish that development would stop for other players? 

 

2 hours ago, Just Jim said:

I've been trying very, very hard not to comment and just stay quiet about all this... but... well... what he said ^

I don't want them to stop developing. I think it's great they're still adding more in. My problem is the method by which they are doing it. They should (according to standard the development process used by most companies) have released 1.4 with whatever new features they wanted, then used maintenance releases to fix bugs. Instead they kept trickling in new features with each maintenance release which caused new things to break. 

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56 minutes ago, flart said:

What about another launchpad on KSC beach (in water) for submarines and ships?

I would not be opposed to this... ;)

20 minutes ago, Tyko said:

I don't want them to stop developing. I think it's great they're still adding more in. My problem is the method by which they are doing it. They should (according to standard the development process used by most companies) have released 1.4 with whatever new features they wanted, then used maintenance releases to fix bugs. Instead they kept trickling in new features with each maintenance release which caused new things to break. 

I'm afraid I can't comment on that one way or the other.

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While everyone is entitled to their own opinion, as well as posting it on a public forum, I personally think it's rather improper to insist KSP development should end in the Weekly development update threads.  Essentially what you (and I mean a generic "you", not any one user) are doing is replying to Squad's work updates by saying you wish for them to end their current jobs and move on.

Take 2 owns the intellectual property rights to KSP, but employs Squad and Blitworks to develop and maintain their respective KSP versions.  If/when the development and maintenance cycles for Kerbal Space Program end, there is no guarantee Squad will continue to be contracted by Take 2 to develop follow-on KSP products, or any other software titles.  Further, as an indie game developer, Squad could very well be shut down, and the individuals working under the Squad banner would have to find other jobs.  As players, we have no obligation to ensure the continued employment of Squad's coders, artists, producers, etc, but repeatedly stating that you want KSP to end is sort of rude to the people that work on it.

[Speculation: it's very possible Take 2 has future plans for Squad to develop other products, and we just don't know about it since that is internal knowledge only; I'm just using the facts that we know to make a point.]

On the flip side, I understand the frustration of bugs introduced that affect existing craft behavior, especially when said behavior breaks the functionality of a proven craft.  I'm taking a break from KSP for this very reason (structural tube drag).  But what tempers my frustration is the fact that Squad is more receptive to community feedback than most game developers I've seen, even though it may not be readily apparent sometimes.

Bottom line:  Yes, I am frustrated with the bug fixing cycle as of late as well.  However, because this game is targeted to such a niche community of gamers (i.e. nerds :sticktongue:), it could be quite some time before we see anything like KSP again.  The study-level combat flight-sim gaming industry was quite prevalent in the mid to late 90's, but entered a dry spell for over a decade until recent years.  I am hopeful for continued KSP development, and evolution, for a long time.  I also have faith that Squad will also evolve their update/release practices to be more predictable, efficient and stable along the way.

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16 minutes ago, Raptor9 said:

As players, we have no obligation to ensure the continued employment of Squad's coders, artists, producers, etc, but repeatedly stating that you want KSP to end is sort of rude to the people that work on it.

I hadn't considered it from this POV, but I think I agree...

I'm not sure how I'd feel if some said over and over, "Would you just finish up Emiko and be done with it already???" 

Wait, I take that back... I think I do know how I'd feel... :(

 

Edited by Just Jim
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6 minutes ago, Just Jim said:

I hadn't considered it from this POV, but I think I agree... I'm not sure how I'd feel if some said "Would you just finish up Emiko and be done with it already???" 

Wait, I take that back... I think I do know how I'd feel... :(

 

Makes sense. Maybe my feeling could be interpreted as "I want this done better, but it doesn't necessarily means that they're not good at it... just want them to do a little better."...

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On 7/7/2018 at 6:00 AM, SQUAD said:

Neil deGrasse Tyson, predicts that the world’s first trillionaire will be an asteroid miner.

I guess nobody told him the world's first trillionaire has already happened. And they're not an asteroid miner.

(Hint - their name isn't -and will never be- on Forbes' World's Richest list. They don't like publicity.)

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