Nate Simpson

The ground colony VAB is already out there -- it's even in the last shot of the announcement trailer. It's that thing that the final rocket falls off of. Basically a big box with a landing pad on its roof.

There are facilities that are extremely power intensive. I bet this group can make some pretty informed guesses as to what that might be.

Yes. Fusion reactors just shut down when they fail. Neither fusion nor fission reactor destruction results in an explosion. But there are other things in the game (namely fuels and fuel factories) that REALLY go boom. While the ground texture is from the game, I believe this is a test scene. The terrain system is still evolving, but I believe we are tracking toward something that looks better than this does. More to come, but yes, ionizing radiation does have effects. It is. I can't wait for you to hear more of it. Howard Mostrom has created some AMAZING music for this game.

Yep, there's a fuel factory for every discrete type of fuel (though the basic phase 1 fuel factory replicates the old Convert-o-tron's ability to synthesize a couple of basic fuel types). As you'll see soon, the sizes for some of the more advanced fuel factories are quite large.

I think we need some more @DAFATRONALDO2007 IN SPACE to get this party going.

This is correct. Of course we would love audiences of all ages to be able to get more out of the game, and we're putting a lot of additional effort into teaching core concepts more effectively, but the physics and core gameplay are immutable. And quite a few areas of the game, particularly as you move deeper into the tech progression, offer new levels of interesting complexity.

This is pretty much what we're looking at. Phase 1 colonies are constructed from modules and crew that are brought to the site by vehicles, and once they gain ISRU capabilities they shift to Phase 2, which is self-sustaining and the population of which grows organically.

I understand the temptation to read into the cadence and content of marketing materials to get some insight about how development is going. I remember poring over every word that HarvesteR wrote, desperate to know when docking would come online. I was crawling out of my skin, desperate to start working on a proper Grand Tour supership (and of course when docking ports finally came, it was wobble city). I feel your pain. In the broad strokes, the order in which the video topics are presented was planned out quite a while ago, and those topics were chosen based largely on when each of those areas of the game was expected to cross a threshold of presentability. Many areas of development simply aren't that photogenic until near the end, and any time that we spend making them pretty earlier in the cycle is time we're stealing from elsewhere in the project. We have a large and talented team working on all systems in parallel, and there is excellent progress being made in all areas. I'm sure I speak for the engineers in particular when I say that I'm looking forward to watching you play the finished game. We had an internal show and tell yesterday and one thing in particular was so cool that I got slightly choked up. The game is looking great and it's going to be great. Thanks for hanging in there with us.

Jeb's unique among flagship franchise characters in that he not only provides an iconic emblem, he also embodies a philosophy of play. KSP, at least on paper, sounds like the kind of game you'd be bad at when you first pick it up. The magic of Kerbals is that they turn that reality into a virtue: of COURSE you'll be bad at it, and that's hilarious.

Zimm already answered you, but I wanted to add how happy I am to get a chance to sing Tim's praises. Very early in this project, he was the only modeler working on the prototype - he built our first PBR assets, our first full collection of rocket parts, and our first interstellar ship. He also went through a GAJILLION iterations on those first Kerbals. There was so much weight on him to get those first assets to a place where they could be used as the quality bar for everything that came after. You see a lot of his work in our announcement trailer - the multistage rocket, the interstellar ship over Jool - that's 90% stuff that he built. I remember the first time we got PBR shaders and lighting working in the prototype, how much it blew our minds. We both just sat together and stared at a shot of a small ship spinning in space, with all the dynamic reflections and lighting - both just grinning like idiots and shaking our heads. There was a universe of promise in that one shot, and ever since then our team's goal has been to deliver on that promise. Tim and I met in 2001 at a little game company in Costa Mesa, and we were friends right out of the gate. We swapped Dr. Evil impressions while walking to the local 7-Eleven every afternoon. Our careers took us to separate locations, but never for very long - we both ended up in Seattle and kept up the afternoon walks (to the local donut shop now, while quoting Matt Berry's UK Rowing video). Tim had an amazing family who loved him and whom he loved very much. And we all loved him too. I miss him every day. I hope with all my heart that a little bit of his light will shine through in the finished game. I know he loved what we were building, and I can't see the Kerbals without seeing him too. We love you Tim!

I've been looking forward to sharing this with you all -- the Squad and Intercept teams got a chance to talk a little bit about how Kerbals have changed over the years. Also, we finally got to highlight the role that my friend Tim Cox played in the development of KSP2! Here's to a 2021 filled with exciting advances, both on Earth and on Kerbin! Happy Holidays!

Officially Glumo and Merbel.

Is there proof that you're not?

Thank you, @DAFATRONALDO2007 IN SPACE! Your cheerleading has increased our productivity by at least 14 percent. I feel like if you went back to the big font, we'd become so productive that we might be able to squeeze in another planet or two.

Yep, this is what we're doing.

There is actually something quietly revolutionary being shown in that mockup: the addition of visible surface attach nodes (that little round bean on the right side of that fuel tank) makes vehicle construction significantly more user-friendly. I think I played KSP for a few years before I realized that there is in fact an invisible, but very real, third node on radially-attachable parts that exists alongside the visible stack attach nodes at each end. Being able to see that node, and representing it differently from stack nodes, helps the player understand why when they attach something radially it may suddenly rotate 180 degrees, or why it'll get a good connection when offset from its parent by 8 meters, but not by 9 meters. Little improvements like this do accumulate, and the devil is absolutely in the details. It's Levin's job to obsess over these incremental adjustments, but once you actually get your hands on the game you'll see how well it pays off. As a side note -- especially with UX/UI design, we very often use screenshots from KSP1 as a baseline. As others have correctly speculated, using areas of the game that are under construction just adds new variables to track, and Levin doesn't want to have to spend additional time clarifying what's part of the official plan and what's just a bug. This is a much cleaner way of handling mockups.

Yes, the color controls in the VAB allow for application of color on a whole-vehicle or a per-part basis. You select your default color scheme when you start a new game, and your vehicles automatically have that color scheme. But I've found that you can make some incredibly cool-looking vehicles by changing the color of individual parts. For example, this candy corn rocket:

This idea is incredibly cool.

It's not a bug. I was wondering when somebody would notice this.

This is with team colors turned off. When they're applied (which you've probably seen in other released footage), there's a coat of paint on the vehicle that is much more matte. You can apply different team colors (a primary and a secondary) either to the whole vehicle or on a per-part basis. You can also modulate the opacity of both team colors. Lots of rainbow rockets getting made here at Intercept!

Hey look, it's Friday! In the interest of further opening a window into the on-the-ground development of KSP2, I'm going to occasionally post images of things that are still in-progress (but which are cool enough to share anyway). In this case, we've got Kerbals under glass, and you can catch a peek at some IVA details inside the Mk1 and Mk1 inline cockpits. Just seeing these guys in their seats was a very exciting moment for us. Credit to Matt Reynolds, who built the cockpits and interiors, and animator/engineer Paul Zimmer, the bringer-to-life of all things Kerbal! Maybe one more little treat. Artist Sung Campbell was messing around with terrain the other day and took this lovely test shot: Have a great weekend, everybody!

Hello, all. Gonna rip the band-aid off fast here: Kerbal Space Program 2 will release in 2022 instead of fall 2021. I know this is frustrating, especially considering that this isn’t the first time we’ve adjusted our schedule. We knew we were taking on an immense technical and creative challenge when we started this project. We’ve heard time and again from this community that quality is paramount, and we feel the same way. It’s not enough to deliver a bunch of new features – those features have to be woven together into a stable, polished whole. We’re creating a reliable foundation on which players and modders alike can build for another decade or more. That involves solving problems that have never been solved before, and that takes time. We’ve got a team of talented people working every challenge from every angle, and because I’m lucky enough to get a front row seat, I can see the huge leaps we’re making. It’s killing us how much of this we have to keep under our hats until the game is released. We can’t express how much we're looking forward to soaking up all your reactions and discoveries on that day. In the meantime, we’ll keep posting cool images here to give you a taste of what’s in store. We will also continue to release feature videos and developer diaries that go more in-depth on specific areas of the game, and hopefully those will help 2021 to go by a little faster. Stay tuned for a new dev diary coming soon, as well as a new Feature Video this winter. Thanks as always for sharing our commitment to making KSP2 as great as we all know it has to be. -Nate Simpson [Click here to enter the discussion thread for this post ]

On your first point, that is correct. Especially given that you'll encounter some very deep gravity wells in other star systems. On your second point: yep, transferable through regular docking ports.

Yep, this is correct. The BAE is just a VAB for colonies, and colonies can be built on the surface or in orbit. As has been speculated elsewhere in this thread, the BAE has its own parts palette that is populated based on various constraints (tech tree advancement, colony population, presence of nearby not-yet-unpacked phase 1 colony modules, presence of various construction-blocking capabilities like ISRU). On the surface, the BAE includes the local topology as a building constraint.