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Kerbal Space Program, the award-winning, indie space agency sim game from Squad, released its latest update, Economic Boom, and it is available to play today. Updates are free to existing players. KSP: Economic Boom offer new players the most fully-realized version of the game, which is still in active development for PC, Mac and Linux as an Early Access title on Steam and via the game’s website. Players will experience a new challenge as the Kerbal Space Center, where players build and launch their rocketships, is now fully destructible. Buildings can be decimated by poorly-steered rocketships and in the game’s Career Mode, require costly repairs for players trying to manage their space agency. Among these buildings is the new Administration Facility, in which players can select and activate Strategies. The Strategy system is a new gameplay mechanic, where each strategy, once accepted, applies effects over several game aspects, specifically Kerbal Space Program’s three in-game currencies, Funds, Reputation and Science. Some examples include: Aggressive Negotiations: Enables players to get a discount on the cost of parts but at a cost to Reputation on each ‘discount’ Open-Sourced Technologies: Divert Science earnings to make them public domain, increasing Reputation. Unpaid Intership Program: Boost your Science earnings without spending any Funds by hiring unpaid interns to do the data crunching. Working for the Space Program surely is its own reward, isn’t it? Well, as long as an agency’s Reputation lasts that is. “Career Mode is getting a significant addition with the Administration Building and all that comes with it,†Felipe Falanghe, Kerbal Space Program creator and lead developer said. “The Strategy system gives players great freedom to change the rules around, and ultimately it allows them to tune the game to fit their own ways of playing. Also, as it’s fully moddable and new strategies can easily be added, this new feature has a lot of potential for expansion.†The team also worked with modder, Christopher “PorkJet†Thuersam, to incorporate his popular SpacePlane+ parts pack mod to the game. This was more than a simple addition however: Each part was updated for even better looks, and to offer players parts that are there not just specifically for spaceplanes, but that can be used in as many combinations as possible. The game is now available for 40% off on STEAM and from the KSP STORE.

What is KSP: Economic Boom? This is a new update to Kerbal Space Program, also numbered 0.25, as each update to the game has a number attached to it. It is free for existing players and new players will install this version when they download the game. It focuses on expanding the reach of career mode, as well as enhancing existing features, like spaceplane parts, visual effects, plus the usual batch of bugfixes and improvements. Check out the full changelog which always accompanies the release for a complete list of changes. When is it coming out? Update 0.25 will be available the 7th of October, 2014 This update came out really fast. It's not a dream, is it? We’ve taken on a new direction in the way our development schedule runs. It allows us to plan and implement a smaller set of features that we can deliver to you without some of the wider update gaps we’ve released things under in the past. What are the main new features in Update 0.25? New spaceplane parts, the administration building with the strategies contained within, and an in-depth difficulty settings panel that will let you customize your gameplay experience. There is also the matter of destructible buildings at the KSC, which is a smaller (though much more visible) feature in this update that lays the groundwork for something coming in 0.26. What are some of the smaller new features in Update 0.25? An enhanced navball, a key binding for maxing out your throttle immediately, a button to return you to the space center much like the Recover Vessel one, also on the altimeter, a function to turn off surface attaching on a part to help with the brand new cargo bays, vessel markers at KSC, destructible buildings, just to mention a few. Have any old features been tweaked? We’ve added in the ability to toggle surface attachment for parts by the way of pressing the modifier key (Alt for Windows). Construction also got a small tweak. Spaceplanes are way cooler now. The navball is highly functional. We even fixed a couple terrain textures. There’s a ton of small scale fixes. What bugs were fixed in Update 0.25? We’ve had a bunch of good ol’ bugfixes and tweaks for Economic Boom. Nothing too massive, other than the OSX mouse input issue, but definitely much needed ones. The changelog in the readme.txt should have all the juicy details. Will this update break my saves? On the tests conducted on the stock version of 0.25, saves were not broken. We do not intend to push an update that will break saves, but due to the sometimes unpredictable nature of an update push, combined with other factors, there’s always a small risk involved. If there are any problems, check out the support forums for help, or report them to the bug tracker right away and we will have a look at the issue. Please keep in mind that modded installs are much more likely to stop working. We recommend starting off with a clean install and add mods gradually so you can spot if one isn’t working. Is the 64 bit Windows build any more stable than from 0.24? Ted: The 64-bit Windows build suffered some significant stability issues with 0.25. However, after a lot of debugging, issue tracking and all around hard work by the developers and testers, we've implemented some hopeful fixes for the issues that were presenting themselves. Despite this though, it should be noted that the 0.25 64-bit Windows build is still inherently unstable and may be prone to crashing - even stock. These issues are unfortunately beyond our reach to fix, but please let us know if you find any useful test cases or workarounds, as those can possibly lead to fixes either from us or from Unity. Why are the parts on my craft misaligned? Why does my craft look screwed up? Is this fixable? Will I have to redo my craft? Because we’ve removed a bunch of the old Spaceplane parts and replaced them with shiny new Spaceplane+ parts, the game will be loading in the new Spaceplane+ parts in place of the older ones. The reason for these offsets is that the new parts aren’t the same dimensions as the old ones. But no fear! For vessels that you’ve still got in the SPH/VAB and aren’t rolled out yet, you can simply pick up the offset parts and place it back down to correct the misalignment. For existing vessels, that vessel will have the offset on the parts and you won’t be able to change that - outside of going into the persistence file and manually editing the connections. We recommend recovering all vessels that contain spaceplane parts before the update. What’s this about a shrunken SAS? Using the most advanced methods of editing part configs, we’ve changed the Inline Reaction Wheel to be a 0.625m size part. The SAS values have also been adjusted with this in mind, so it’s not as powerful as it once was. After all the revisions to the SAS system, the old Inline Reaction Wheel became redundant with the Advanced Reaction Wheel module, so we decided to repurpose it as a size 0 module, which didn’t exist. What happened to the MK3 parts that were mentioned a while back? After spending some time with them in QA, we decided that they weren’t ready for public consumption and didn’t reflect what we actually want the Mk3 parts to function as. Needless to say, they shall make a return and the old Mk3 parts still remain for the time being. For that matter, what happened to Kerbal experience? Kerbal experience is planned for 0.26. We decided to hold off on our original design, and we’re very glad we did. More on that later. Why is my game no longer set to 1080p? Why can't I switch back? If your resolution and textures got reset after applying the update and you cannot get them back to how they were, that means your settings.cfg file got reset. You will need to redo every setting you had before the update, including custom keybindings. While this does not appear to be a common issue, we will be looking into it further. Why the big fuss over destructible buildings? They fit the aesthetics and theme of KSP, were fun to make and in reality are just a bonus from a big feature coming in 0.26. Ted also has a shorter reason: Because they're Destructible. Freaking. Buildings. What’s this long term plan we’ve been hearing about and what does it have to do with the buildings? We’re not quite ready to unveil this one but pay attention to the devblog because once we are ready, we’ll unload all the gory details there. How’d the idea for destructible buildings come up and how long did it take to implement? Destructible buildings have been in the roadmap since just about the beginning. Changing our effects system and adding the new building-centric system just gave us the perfect opportunity to put them in. In the process of implementing them, we also created several very useful tools that will be very handy to add other features. For instance, the new KSC vessel markers share the same base implementation we wrote originally for the context menus to let you repair the destroyed facilities. What does having destructible buildings add to the gameplay? A harsh punishment for reckless flying near KSC. Breaking one of your buildings could possibly end your career right there. Also, fun to blow up in Sandbox. Why was destructible buildings implemented over new biomes, planets or other community requests? As explained before, adding them wasn’t precisely hard or time consuming once we got the new systems in. Their being there is really just the visible side of a much larger revision of the KSC and Kerbin setup, plus the addition of new sound and particle effects. Adding support for destructible facilities was the best way to implement all these new things, and didn’t require us to go silent for several months on a large part of development. How does the admin building work? You go in and enact strategies, which cost a certain amount of your currencies to be turned on. Provided, of course, you can afford them. Also, to get to the highest levels of commitment for a strategy, your reputation must be above a minimum level. What are strategies? In RPG-speak, they’re passive buffs and nerfs to different parts of your space program. They affect simple things, like contract payouts and currency interactions, or more complex ones like improving the recovery factor for vessels recovered away from KSC. I know that I can earn resources, but are there any costs involved? Any penalties? There’s a cost for setting up the strategy, a minimum reputation level for each level of commitment, and all strategies also have penalty factors. No freebies here. How tricky will it be to employ these strategies in order to get the resources I want? The stronger your commitment to the strategy, the higher the payoff, and usually the lower the penalties. However, setup costs increase very steeply, and you’ll need plenty of reputation to max out commitment levels. Careful planning is advised, welcomed and expected. How balanced are these strategies? Strategies are balanced against themselves. That is, in order to gain something you must lose something else, like increased Launch Costs for increased Recovery Gains, or a reputation hit for a discount in launch costs, but really, the purpose of Strategies is to make the overall balance of the game more flexible. You should be able to find a system which maximizes results for your style of playing, or set yourself up with huge challenges to break out of your comfort zone. How moddable are the strategies? Like almost all of KSP, the strategies are highly moddable. Have fun! What’s Spaceplane+? It’s a particularly excellent pack of parts that many players have put to good use to augment and enhance their plane-making experience. The modder, Porkjet, does remarkable work. Why has this mod been implemented into stock KSP? We thought Porkjet did a great job creating the parts so it made sense to ask him to work with us on implementing his parts into the game as a stock feature. He was great to work with and we think it will be pretty clear for those who haven’t used his mod, what a massive addition this is to our parts. Do you have the permission of the mod author to do this? Yes. We worked with Porkjet to make this happen. He’s been a great partner to Squad during this process and we’re really pleased we could work with him in this fashion. Was any work done to better implement Spaceplane+ into the game or did you just do a 1:1 mod port? Most of the parts in SP+ were improved from the original mod. Porkjet is really passionate about his work, and made a point of delivering top-quality assets for us. We were not disappinted. The new Mk2 fuselage sections are incredibly versatile, and well, the improved visuals speak for themselves. Are there any other new parts in the game? Other than the superbly styled and detailed SP+ parts from Porkjet, we’ve also revised the mk1 fuselages and cockpit to fit the KSP style and tweaked the balance on several parts for improved consistency. IVAs? The cockpits that belonged to the SP+ part pack have brought with them their own IVA views and they’re mighty fine looking. The Mk2 cockpits have a spectacular IVA space, which was adapted to not have any mod dependencies.. What will happen to the old parts? Parts that have direct equivalents in Spaceplane+ have been removed with the ones from Spaceplane+ taking their place. The old Spaceplane parts that don’t have equivalent parts in Spaceplane+ remain. There's a possibility that we may one day collect all our old parts into a Legacy Pack and release it as a mod, but that isn’t certain at the moment and definitely shouldn’t be expected before we complete all the part revisions we have planned. Is there any indicator that marks the difference between new parts and legacy parts? No, but it should be easy to tell just by looking at them. Tell us all about the new navball markers. Additional to the vectors you could already see on the NavBall you will now see the radial and normal vectors as well, if you are familiar with maneuver nodes you already know them, if not, the normal and antinormal (the pink ones) are perpendicular to your orbital plane, in the positive and negative direction respectively. The radial ones (blue-ish) point directly towards and away from the current reference celestial body. For more information about the effects each has we recommend you redo the tutorials, as they’ve been updated to include this information. In addition to the radial and normal vectors, now there’s also an arrow indicating the general direction of the maneuver marker on the NavBall when you are using one, so no more looking around like crazy looking for it, now you will know exactly where to point. Why did you make new navball improvements instead of implementing enhanced navball, similar to what you did with Spaceplane+? The way we implemented the NavBall markers is not exactly the same as the Enhanced NavBall mod from a gameplay point of view. That’s not the case for Spaceplane+, which was exactly what we were looking for out of the box. How were the explosion FX redone? One of the best things about Unity is that there is no shortage of add-on packages to be found. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we searched for the best FX packages out there and put together a stunning collection of blasts, thumps, thuds, sparks, flares and fire, plus a vast collection of new sound effects. Then we set out to modify them to work in the absurd coordinate spaces of KSP (did you know the Space Center is sideways? Kerbin is aligned north-side up, and KSC is at the equator, so it’s rotated 90°). Were any other new or redone FX put in? Indeed. After we had these new explosions done, it would have been wasteful to only use them for destructible buildings. We replaced pretty much all of the old explosion effects from parts, for much more impressive, loud and violent displays of rocketry going wrong. Why just those instead of X feature? Couldn’t that be asked of anything? There are tons of ideas, but our development resources are very much finite. That means we always have to make choices when we set out the plan for a new update and these features not only fell nicely in line with our longer-term goals, they also provided nice achievable steps to implement larger subsystems that will support other features on the following updates. Sometimes the logic behind these choices may not be immediately apparent, especially when you consider that every player has their own unique wishlist of features, sometimes pulling in completely opposite directions. Not only that, but also consider that we strive to improve the game not just for veteran players, but also for players who will have their first encounter with KSP on this version. How many new difficulty options are there? There are four levels of difficulty - Easy, Normal, Moderate and Hard. We also have a Custom mode that lets you dig in deeper and modify each difficulty parameter on its own. Our goal is to offer as much freedom for players as possible, to make the game easier, or to set up nearly impossible challenges for themselves. Can I mix and match the new options? In Custom difficulty mode you absolutely can! Some of the variables can be toggled, such as permadeath for your Kerbal buddies. Others are percentages that you can use a slider to tweak, such as Reputation income. Can I have different options with each save? Yep! On creation, each save has the ability to be created with its own set of difficulty option values. Are there recommended easy or hard settings? We recommend you choose the difficulty level you like best. We do not recommend taking the advice of others about what the recommended difficulty to play at. If it’s fun, then it’s right. What are those markers all over the KSC? Once a vessel is safely landed (or splashed) reasonably close to KSC, A marker in the Space Center scene will appear at its position, this will give you information about the vessel and shortcuts to either resume flight or end it. Wait, what markers all over the KSC? Once you go on at least one successful mission and return home safely you will see what we’re talking about. How does an internal crew transfer work? Mouse over the crew hatch of a crewable part, once you see the Crew Hatch label left click to bring up the Crew Hatch Dialog, in there you will see the part’s crew, with options to EVA or transfer, once you are in transfer mode, click any other crewable part with at least one available seat et voila (or press Esc to cancel). Will I be able to transfer a Kerbal through anything? Squeeze it through a tiny grate? Yes, a Kerbal can go from crewable part A to crewable part B, no matter what comes in between. Just how the Kerbal managed to get to part B is open to interpretation. Any hints as to what might be in store for 0.26? Good question. There have been a few hints already if you’ve been reading carefully this far, but that’s all we have to share at the moment. Stay tuned for new announcements soon though.