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I don't know where you got "Resource Nodes" from, but I think it's a good idea. My expectation is that resource availability will vary by biome like KSP1. I question whether your description of building rovers and separate mining sites will be a necessary part of colonies. I expect resource extraction and conversion to mostly come in the form of colony buildings, to be completed entirely on the site of the colony. This would be more simple, perhaps in a way that's less interesting, but also less tedious. I bet we unlock large parts by or before we get colony parts. Or maybe they will be on entirely separate branches on the science tree. But more importantly, the best engines regardless of size will depend on mid- to late-game science unlocks and on resources extracted from colonies. That's basically how Nate described it, yes. The first time colonizing a new star system will undoubtedly be the most interesting part of KSP2. Will it be sufficient just to plop a colony module down on the first planet you see? Or is it better for the player to send out probes and scanners to find ideal conditions? Can colonization be brute forced merely by producing hydralox? Or will it be necessary to manage resources carefully? How difficult should it be? Many questions for Intercept to consider. I can feel that, and it's probably too late to speculate and make suggestions, but how would that work? Maybe I can imagine recovering samples from the oceans of Eve, bringing them back to Kerbin, and making an exciting discovery that enables the construction of new pressurized parts. There could even be a text blurb or cutscene to talk about the chemical makeup of the ocean and how it led to the discovery. Is that how visiting each body should work? There might be something interesting to that, it might even be educational, but would it be grounded or realistic? In the real world, I think improvements in space technology come more by trial and error than by observing celestial bodies. KSP1 concedes on realism there and I don't see how or why KSP2 should do any different. Ultimately whatever the player discovers about the universe is going to be logically disconnected from the part unlocks that he gains by those discoveries, no matter how talented the writing team is. Beside that, the type of science that you're imagining would risk harming gameplay. To my mind it would look like a rigid checklist of tasks for the player to complete. Probably no one wants that. KSP1 is fun because it is open ended. I would like to see a new vision of science as much as anyone, but the more time I spend thinking about it, the more I feel that Squad got it right the first time. KSP1 science never forces the player into narrow gameplay constraints, and it rewards the player for milestones, for missions, and for direct science gathering while hopping from biome to biome. It is far and away better than any implementation of research gameplay that I've seen in other games or in any of the suggestions that I've read on this forum.

In KSP1, the illumination on the planets was set by simply adjusting several colors for the filters. You could do pink shadows and an orange sky. Checking scatter is pretty easy - will the flag turn a different color at sunset? If not, then in KSP2, several light filters have been added to the planets for different situations. Many players do not see retracing, so developers who keep up with the times can also not add it to games, limiting themselves to the usual reflections of the 2008 level. But in this case, there is no need to talk about RTX

I called it a "conspiracy" for a reason. However I was indeed talking about the immediate follow up video in my previous post, the one called "thoughts and impressions". Maybe you're talking about another video? There's one about performance posted FEB 22 called "Performance and Content issues": He starts by saying the first hint of performance issues was the system requirements... He was invited to the ESA event on the 9th meaning he knew the performance of the game playing on a 4080... 8 days before the reqs were released. He said not everyone experienced problems, and he only suffered micro-stutters and anything else wasn't consistent in occurring. He then goes on to say that the PCs on the event were having performance issues which he magically didn't experience but show up on all non sped up footage. That's all for performance, and he goes on to talk about content, he doesn't mention the lack of re-entry heating for release, so he maybe still has the information that it was gonna be part of release like he mentioned before? Later on he talks about the game having 300+ parts, and say PD has been very open to the game being EA and missing content, saying it's ok to wait for more content to arrive and that it could be that way for quite a while. After that, he criticizes the price, something I agree with. Again, a clear lack of critique and an even more dreary feeling that he either got extremely lucky, or is reluctant to actually take an issue with a game having performance problems in a 4080. I hope by now you can clearly see how this softball approach is something I strongly disagree with. Playing on release I had my ship explode on launch, explode on save load, had the KSC following me, had the game be barely playable, unstable orbits, had to battle the UI and control choices constantly, had my ship fall through the surface, the crash screen appearing for no reason, my save deleted, and so on. The game didn't have "performance and content issues" it was (and still is for a lot of people) unplayable.

That it is not a cosmetic feature as you stated, and I clearly fail to understand where the game being finished comes into play into that argument, which is why I asked. Just in case you've gotten lost or want to clarify something I might've misunderstood: You were the one to mention the cockpit has been made but incomplete for at least 3 years. I mention that it could be either because they're juggling artists or are incompetent (which the former already implies, but hey). You mention it doesn't matter because it is a cosmetic feature irrelevant to gameplay It is clearly not, as it is a part of an actually promised gameplay feature that requires all IVAs be done. You bring up colonies to (I guess) imply that IVAs are not relevant to anything "important" and that could be why they might not yet be done. I feel compelled to remind you that it's not just "IVAs" and they're actually part of a feature. You ask me if the game is done, which I guess implies we can't talk about anything being incomplete because the game is not done. If I understood correctly, then that's gotta be the dumbest argument. If they don't actually complete things, the game will never be done, specially if they can't complete a cockpit in 3 years.

@regexIf I did quote you, I feel stupid. I meant to not quote you, so I apologize that i did. It was my mistake. The rest of what I said was NOT aimed at you. You don't need to itemize what I said and attack my points. I mean its a free country, so do what you want, but I'm not trying to specifically attack you. I was saying in general that there are some themes that keep being presented and I was questioning those themes, not you. Edit to ruin my non-existant credibility: Its funny seeing who comes out of the woodwork to to tell me I'm wrong when I wasn't trying to talk to them in the first place. Many people have taken up the point that KSP1 sucks hardcore and we should be glad KSP2 exists. I disagree. I'm happy to discuss this in a format that does not involve personal attacks. Edit 2: The fact that we are discussing such menial tings means that KSP2 has nothing positive to discuss, or we would be discussing it. I mean that in the best of ways. It feels like being disappointed at your kid at this point...I'm not even mad. I just want the best for this franchise and when I see things that actively erode that, I say things.

There's been a lot of talk regarding space infrastructure, such as space trains or space elevators. Personally I dislike most of these proposals because they tend to circumvent game features more then they expand on them. Instead of designing a rocket to send materials up to orbit, you just select the space elevator launch pad and you're in orbit now. Space train falls into this issue as well because it'd be hard to make a space train designer that's integrated with the rest of the game. I do think there's one major piece of space infrastructure that can integrate itself with a lot of game systems organically though. Mass drivers/space guns have been a frequently discussed topic for sending large amounts of payloads up to orbit cheaply. These are large and expensive pieces of hardware, but capable of saving loads for resources. Personally, I think this game would benefit from two types of mass drivers, but first lets establish some commonalities in function between the two. The first commonality will be some colony behavior. When fired, mass drivers will consume large amounts of energy and produce lots of heat all in a short burst. This means you have to build the infrastructure to support the energy and thermal loads from a mass driver. Launching from a mass driver will be as simple as selecting the mass driver launch pad, you can also select the exhaust velocity of the mass driver with power consumption scaling alongside it. Each type of mass driver will have a mass and/or size limit as well. A spacecraft will first spawn in/on the mass driver, with the same orientation as how the mass driver is pointed. Then, the mass driver will simply make the spacecraft move with the exhaust velocity of the space gun in the direction of the orientation. This means that if you do this in an atmosphere, if you're not careful you can overheat your spacecraft. Now, with all the common behavior established, lets get onto the differences. The first space gun you will unlock will be a light gas gun in the style of project harp. This part is expensive but requires simple materials. The barrel (thus max exhaust velocity), is constant. This space gun needs hydrogen to fire. This space gun will consume any excess power to pressurize this hydrogen to get the gun ready to fire, when fired this hydrogen will be gone. This means the demand for the burst of power is lessened, thus less energy infrastructure is required, however the inefficiencies in this will lead to more heat being generated. This space gun can also be reoriented freely, giving it a lot of versatility. With the small barrel, the spacecraft has tight size and mass restraints, with the max diameter being 1.25 meters. The fast acceleration of this means that any craft will have to be unmanned. This gun is best suited for the early days of colonies, requiring minimal infrastructure to support it, however its versatility with orientation gives it a unique edge later in the game when you want to do things like a single launch to get from a moon to a planet. The second mass driver you unlock will be a linear railgun. This railgun will be expensive, and require fancy materials to make. This railgun would be modular, you can add additional railgun units to the end of it to increase the length thus the max velocity. This railgun has a few downsides. It accelerates much slower then a light gas gun, meaning you need a longer track. It is also linear, the direction it is constructed will be the only direction it can launch a vehicle at, this means that this works best when built around slopes. The railgun only consumes energy as well, this is both an upside as it means you don't need to waste hydrogen, but its also a downside as it means you need more energy infrastructure to support it. To make up for this, this comes with plenty of upsides as well. The size requirements are practically removed, allowing much larger launches. This gun is also more energy and heat efficient compared to the light gas gun. The lower acceleration also means that you can allow kerbals to fly on this thing without them turning into mystery goo. The railgun is best suited for built up colonies, the linear nature could in some situations could require colonies built on the slope of craters just for launching goods, and the increased need for energy infrastructure can complicate things. However the increased energy efficiency means that it can increase the efficiency of orbital delivery, and the ability to launch large manned missions from this is also very useful. This would also be highly useful to launch planes as well.

Personal remarks removed. Keep it polite and talk about the game rather than each other.

So they have showed us pictures of working multiplayer earlier. So yes. They are well away with interstellar parts and colonies. Before 3D modeling, texturing, painting, glow effects and how all those materials behave in planetshine, sunshine, moonshine and so on, they will sketch out parts on iPads or paper or napkins or whereever. Talk about them. Brainstorm them. So there are loads more to come, that they most definitely are working on! We are just not allowed to peak behind the curtain yet. But why oh why, why do you find the need to just post this here? This does not give any meaningful content to the forum. I would love for you to flesh out your post a bit about why you don't believe and maybe start a (healthy) discussion about it, but please. Just posting this does not keep the forums a great place.

Definitely! It'd be great to see what things we could do with KSP's source code! Yep... It was really having a sort of renaissance before the release of KSP 2! It would've been great to see where it would've gone! You could also talk with the admins to see if they'd be willing to pin or showcase your post. (If Reddit does that lol)

Did Nate mean "release to the public" or did he mean "release a finished game"? Quite frankly I don't care whether there was talk about early access or not, that's not my concern, but the question still remains, when/where did Nate say "the game is nearly completed"?

At work so I can't watch it. Was the talk about problems with physics or the Crisis in Cosmology (Webb is seeing complex structures at a presumed age where many expected immature systems)? I've seen nothing credible that Webb is challenging physics, but several recent papers claiming our understanding of the early universe needs work.

Banned for av talk

Hopefully this is a good topic to stick this into. Just recently there was a bit of a talk about the JWST discovering "problems with physics." There's now convincing research on what's going on, and this is a very good video explaining it in simple terms.

I came to this conclusion not so much because of the offensive remarks (I don't think they will help but of course people are allowed to feel this way and express their feelings). I also don't talk about the many kerbals who are highly criticial of the state of the game but having good points (e.G data mining showing that KSP2 ist actually just a refactored KSP1, managment issues at IG,T2 , obvious showstoppers going into release, underwhelming communication with the community etc). Obviously these girls and guys are NOT entitled teenagers. But to expect that people will doing a walk to Canossa (1), risking their job just to please some angry video game nerds (who will still be angry afterwards) is just ridiculous and childish. To expect that the developers won't have any vacation until the game is feature-complete and free of bugs too. And I can't help but guess that these kind of people never actually had a job in a company with an own PR department. Which people are most likely to not having these experiences? Teenagers. I don't blame them for it but I don't take them to seriously either. They are entitled to their opinion about the game and I'm entitled to my opinion about them (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Canossa

How about at least building a proper test stand for the full engine assembly, digging an exhaust trench like others do, and probably not putting so many engines in a cramped skirt where they burn each other (square-cube law?) ? (And that's even before the aerobraking cylinder, which will bring more surprises in its time). Private companies still use public physics. There is no special PhysicX for SpaceX. They talk about the Mars colony, but don't spend money at least on a proper launch site. Nuff said.

Congrats on your space station and refuelling flights, looks great! But I need to quickly interject before you put a lot of work into something that'll only end in frustration. That satellite you've shown there? That may well not work for a communications network. I'm not 100% sure it won't work, but given the "sort of there but not really" implementation status of the commnet feature, the probability is high. You really need to run a test before you spend time deploying dozens of these. It's not that you made a mistake. Given the information available ingame, you chose antennas according to your needs. But if we assume that KSP2 just cloned the KSP1 implementation (or just copied it over wholesale and changed some range numbers), there may be additional factors to antennas that the editor simply isn't showing you. For example, you'll notice that for many ranges, there'll be two antennas - one of which will be significantly heavier than the other, despite there being no difference in stats whatsoever. In KSP1, that was because not all antennas could actually be used as a comms relay. There were "direct" antennas, which were light and frugal with power use, but could only talk to KSC. They could be bounced through a comms network, but they could never be part of one. There were also "relay" antennas, which had the same range but were heavier and required more power, and only those had the ability to act as relay stations in a comms network. The Communotron-16S you chose? Not a relay antenna. In KSP1, it wouldn't be usable in a comms network. (And yes, even though it is three times as heavy as the regular Communotron-16. It was an outlier. It had these stats because it was a strengthened variant resistant to aerodanymic forces, for use on planes or re-entering spacecraft, where a regular antenna might snap off.) Second point, antenna combinability. If you've read the relevant KSP1 wiki page, you may have seen that multiple antennas on the same vessel will add their strength together to increase the vessel's total comms range. Given the much higher ranges on antennas in KSP2, I'm not sure if you actually need to combine antennas for a Kerbin SoI commnet... but just in case this was something you were factoring in: the 16S, being an outlier, was the only kind of antenna that you couldn't combine. Ergo, having two of them on the satellite in the screenshot is just aesthetic, it doesn't actually improve the range. Third point, antenna strength. Any comms network you deploy around Kerbin will remain almost completely unused. That is because vessels prefer connecting to the strongest antenna they can see. And the strongest antenna around, by a very large margin, are Kerbin's ground stations. They are gigantic, and can draw whatever power they want - so they are orders of magnitude more powerful than vessel-mounted antennas. Any vessel that can see Kerbin will connect directly to Kerbin, always, completely ignoring any and all commsats in Kerbin orbit. The only time one of your commsats will be used is when a vessel cannot see Kerbin. Meaning, when it is in a Mun or Minmus orbit, and currently behind the moon, so it occludes Kerbin. As a result, what you really need is not a comms network around Kerbin, but rather one around the Mun, and one around Minmus. I mean... you can still build one around Kerbin anyway, for the challenge It just won't do anything. I recommend that you do a test run to see whether these assumptions carried over from KSP1 still hold water in KSP2. Specifically, you should test if your Communotron-16S equipped satellite can relay at all. To do this, put one in a high Mun orbit, and then have a vessel in a low Mun orbit where it will be cut off from connecting directly to Kerbin. See if it'll bounce through the satellite. Use an uncrewed craft for this, so the game will actually tell you when it loses connection.

Lol yeah I saw that thread, you're getting shredded out there. But it's not your fault. The community is up in arms and for understandable reasons that have very little to do with you and a lot more to do with the history and the state of the project, how it was hyped for years and ultimately a huge let down for many people. Intercept really squandered years of positive community building by Squad and rebuilding it is going to be difficult. I'm sorry you didn't see KSP in better days. Talk to JustJim who used to do QA if you want to hear the stories.

I realize that, but my wife's cousin was basically a diplomat/spook, and was fluent in Chinese. Lived in Beijing, then Hong Kong (he had a 2-floor apartment (!) with staff on the side of Victoria Peak). I think he would likely not get fooled—plus having a bunch of this around was literally part of his job as USN attaché to the PLAN—he'd get his cohorts drunk and hope they'd talk too much, and they would reciprocate at their functions hoping he'd drink too much, lol. Not to say he'd never get ripped off, but I imagine his staff did some of the footwork here to have the right bottles around for the locals he was entertaining. Unsure what to do with it, to be honest. Even at the lower end of prices it's more than I would spend. I could get a unicorn bottle of something I know for a fact I would enjoy for a fraction of that (since I'd not pay much above suggested retail for any whiskey, I'm an aficionado, not doing it as an investment). If I crack it open it will be for some event with enough people that I can spread the trying around.

Tempers are getting too high. Please stop trying to tell each other what to think and how to express it. Talk about the game rather than each other.

If you're gonna remove all variables and your end result is "I really want this game even if only to talk about it", you were never doing an opportunity cost analysis, you're just trying to justify your spent $50. If you or anyone wants the game that much, that's great, but don't say it's the result of a cost of opportunity analysis, it is not. We were talking about a cost of opportunity analysis. Thankfully for business owners worldwide, they're not subjective.

i think where the criticism begins is with IG having a QA team and the game released in the condition it was with basic things not working is where the trolling starts. I'll admit i was one of those people who was like "what the hell is this?" "QA approved this?" when i first tried the game. Reading things nate said that "productivity was suffering because the devs are busy playing the game". And i think to myself...all these people playing the game before release and nobody noticed this bug or that bug? I noticed it right off the batt. How can they NOT know? Basic stuff like reentry and all the other bugs makes people think "i paid $69 for this?" THATS where alot of it is coming from. It is hard to wrap your head around how can they release a game in this condition AND for this price? So if you could talk about that, that is what people like me wants to know. Who pulled the trigger on that decision to release and in this condition? Its not even a matter of who...but WHY? I understand NDA and all that but if you could answer that question I think it would prolly calm the negativity down a bit and offer a little more InSite into how this process is going to work going forward. if we just knew why then we could all move on. But see this is the problem.....I see stuff like AMA (ask me anything) but then i see its not really ask me anything its ask me about the pre-screened, pre-approved, questions the team approve of and not the questions everybody want to know. They go around all that. We see things like you guys have to have "media training" before you can answer questions or deal with the public and then turn around and praise yourselves on how transparent the team is and in the meantime the forum and steam are blowing up with negativity about the game. So what do we see next? Here come the PR marketing guys to try to save the day and talk the game up with contests and stuff nobody really cares about they just want their ksp to work. In this post/thread you were pretty straight up with us and i appreciate that yet the elephant in the room still exists. This is my way of giving what you guys asked for and thats constructive criticism. I hope we can both learn from each other

If you have gateways that talk to both protocols, and can implement tunnels for the parts of the network that doesn't support one or the other, then the network remains fully connected. It's a bit like tunneling IPv4 traffic over IPv6 or vice versa. In practice, I expect Russia not to have resources to implement a new protocol at all, because where are they going to get enough custom switches even from? And China isn't going to shoot itself in the foot so hard as to cut themselves off from the WWW. I fully expect China to have gateways and tunnels natively supporting TCP/IP.

I think I expressed myself incorrectly. What I mean is that there's almost no cost of opportunity analysis capable of making KSP2 worth the $50. I agree with what you say. $50 to $70 in optimistically 2 to 3 years is almost nothing. The price increment during EA is clearly not a motivator to spend early. If we talk about only the present, considering the state of KSP2, there's much better games, as single titles or multiple, that'll give you much higher returns on your $50. It will go on sale anyways, so you'd be spending money on a broken product now vs less money on a working product further ahead. Even if it goes on sale from $70 to $50, you'd still be losing now. The only way to reach the other side of the spectrum, is extreme loyalty to the franchise, or charity spending to "fund development" (don't, that's not how this works). The most important lesson is for companies. You make something premium price, customers will expect premium quality. Happened to like 90% of modern AAA games, that have been steadily rising prices for nothing in return to the customer, and in fact even worse products every time.

The poll is a bit biased. 1. Do you think that the issues in the game will be fixed? I’m between Yes and No, because some will some won’t. Even KSP 1 after a decade still has issues, you just gotta dig really deep to find them compared to KSP2 2. Do you think the game will make it to 1.0? I guess, I hope Yes. While exciting, I thought it was a tall order when I heard the team talk about it in the last couple of years, and I’m sure it’s extremely difficult to pull it off. With the current way things are and with this launch, I now say it is most likely to Be impossible without removing some of the features (multiplayer for example) or dumbing down compared to the high complexity of gameplay we were promised. 3. What is your opinion of the game right now? I haven’t touched it since 0.1.0, if Science update is very simple and doesn’t add a whole lot, I’ll most likely not play it again until 1.0 if that day comes.

No Mountain High Enough Before I start, I just wanted to say thank you all so much! The thread has reached an incredible 10,000 views! I would've never expected such a positive reception, and your support and kind words mean a lot to me as I continue to write this story. Beautiful desolation, as Buzz Aldrin put it. As the crew of Orpheus 1 stand in awe of the lunar landscape, they are reminded that they have a busy surface stay ahead of them. EVA 1 is dedicated to the crew setting up the first set of surface instruments and experiments. On top of this a few deep surface samples are taken. The EERM for this mission is rather different than the original unit used on Apollo 27. After the blatant stability and performance issues, the vehicle's chassis, suspension, and drivetrain were given a complete overhaul. Now looking more like a 6 wheeled lunar pickup truck, the EERM is expected to handle much better for this mission, and NASA expects the crew to put it through its paces. Launched 2 days after ACOV departed from the Moon on a Jupiter 423-A, the EERM will be landed once again by an automated LM descent stage. Although this isn't the optimal landing setup, it is the only available option as Grumman begins to jointly study new landing vehicle designs with NASA for missions beyond Orpheus 3. Once the crew complete EVA 1, they are allotted a rest period, as the EERM and its descent stage reach the Moon. The crew begin preparing for EVA 2 after they awake to the song "Ain't No Mountain High Enough", as the rover begins its descent to the lunar surface. The landing site is an area roughly 2 kilometers north of the ALSM's location. The astronauts will take a slower pace walk to conserve oxygen until they reach the EERM. Upon landing, the EERM is autonomously rolled off and deployed. The descent stage purges and safes itself, and the crew begin their 1 hour walk to the rover. Reaching the rover, the crew step onto the back, as it depressurizes and allows entry for the astronauts. Hatch closed, the rover re-pressurizes and the crew are able to take off their helmets for a much more relaxing ride back to base camp. Once they have returned to the ALSM's landing site, they disembark the rover, and conclude the EVA by deploying the second and final set of surface instruments. The crew are then given the next 2 days to focus on scientific work on samples and other materials inside the lander, before embarking on Geology Expedition 1. This covers a total of 50km around Mare Crisium, with many stops to collect samples and record data from portable instruments. There are 4 such trips throughout the course of the mission, on top of 3 more EVAs. Each of the 4 trips takes a different direction from the landing site, effectively trying to form "quadrants" of exploration around the landing site, with each GE being dedicated to a quadrant. This leads to a staggering total distance covered of nearly 180km. The redesigned rover holds up exceptionally well, and is definitively a necessary component of Orpheus missions going forward. But after 2 fruitful weeks on the lunar surface, for the crew of Orpheus 1, their time on the lunar surface comes to an end. Departing from the surface on May 26th in the early morning hours back on Earth, they are content in their job well done on the Moon. Rendezvous with ACOV is successful 3 hours later, the crew dock to their spacecraft, transfer all of their equipment and samples, along with themselves, and bid farewell to the ALSM. ACOV then performs a rendezvous maneuver of its own, to reach Tranquility for refueling before the return trip home. Arriving at Tranquility, an anxious 2 hours pass as ACOV is slowly refueled. The fueling job is accomplished by a deployable mechanism on the side of the tanker module that attaches to a fueling port on the service module. The same pressure differentiation process, on top of some assistance from pumps on the mechanism, permits the transfer of propellants. There are two mechanisms and two ports to accommodate the transfer of both fuel and oxidizer. As mentioned, the process takes about two full hours, after which ACOV undocks another 30 minutes later, and gains distance from the station before performing the Trans-Earth Injection maneuver. The cruise back to Earth is rather uneventful, only characterized by a few (just a few) hiccups with ACOV's new navigation and star tracking system, which is largely derived from the Space Shuttle's. The computer which controls the system has a bad habit of shutting down and rebooting itself with even small errors. This will likely be fixed to make it a more robust system before Orpheus 2. Screaming through Earth's atmosphere 4 days later, a gentle thud and blast from the retro rockets concludes Orpheus 1 as ACOV performs the first ever touchdown of a US crew capsule, on the dry lakebed of Edwards Air Force Base. Touchdown, as opposed to splashdowns, are an essential part of reusing ACOV, and will minimize the refurbishment and maintenance necessary between flights. With the first of a new era of lunar missions complete, next up is the all-important first half of the Mars Collection finally arriving at the Red Planet. On May 26th, Mars Scout successfully inserted itself into an elliptical orbit between the planet itself and Phobos, the innermost Martian moon. This orbital location is ideal for planned flybys of Phobos and eventual flybys of Deimos as well. Following it up, on May 28th, the Erikson lander separates from the orbiter stage a few hours before its insertion maneuver, and comes screaming through the Martian atmosphere, before deploying parachutes, and separating out of its aeroshell, making a soft landing on the Martian surface in the Srytis Major region. However there are some major issues... To start, although yes it is a successful landing, two of the instruments immediately fail after landing, one of these being the main television camera on the lander. This means that the Erikson lander cannot return back color images of the Martian surface, on top of the other failed instrument being the internal hydrometer that was to detect moisture content in collected soil from the onboard scoop. Thankfully the rest of the lander is functioning as intended, and will continue to perform the planned scientific mission. The orbiter stage and Mars Scout are also working as intended, and will return their own images of Mars. There is also still a second identical Orbiter/Lander with the second half of the Mars Collection. Keeping the Viking name trend, it is named after the King of Norway during the invasions of England in 1066, Harald Hardrada. The Hardrada mission will launch at the end of 1986 during that transfer window. With these missions out of the way, the rest of 1985 is comparatively sleepy. The headline Galileo launch has been postponed to next year due to an issue with one of the spacecraft's electronic buses during environmental testing at JPL. With that major delay and minor PR crisis, NASA looks forward to a positive few Shuttle missions, as Columbia returns to flight on STS-81E with a new crew to Skylab. This flight ties Columbia with Atlantis for the record of most flights by a single Orbiter, and this race continues to heat up as Challenger and Discovery are not far behind and both seeing regular use. Speaking of Discovery, the next flight just a few weeks later, STS-81F, performs the second deployment of the Long Duration Exposure Facility. Retrieved back in January 1984, it has proven to be a fascinating platform for space science, which pushed NASA to deploy it a second time as soon as possible. This mission is short and straight-forward, concluding successfully after 3 days in space. With all this talk of NASA's accomplishments, the Soviets decide they'd like a bit of the limelight. The world's foremost communist nation has been undergoing quite a lot of turmoil in this part of the 80s. Their leaders keep passing, with Chernenko dying in March of this year. But the newest head of the USSR is different. A man by the name of Mikhail Gorbachev. He brings a new attitude to the world superpower, he stops to talk to civilians on the streets, he is far less threatening and aggressive, and his wife is one of his closest advisors. The Reagan Administration remains weary, but the two are scheduled to meet at a summit in Geneva this November. Politics aside, Gorbachev is supportive of the restructuring of the space program, and pushes them to finally select 2 new robotic spacecraft to be launched by 1991. After much deliberation, they choose the unique route, in order to snag a few firsts. The first spacecraft, Tserera 1, will be a Ceres orbilander (orbiter/lander spacecraft) that will be the first to visit, orbit, and land on the largest object in the asteroid belt. It is expected to be launched by 1989 or 1990 if all goes well. The second spacecraft, Merkuriy 91, will be the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, the innermost planet. As the name suggests, it is expected to launch in 1991. Both spacecraft are expected to launch on Sokol-K, where its new hydrogen upper stage will be very useful. To conclude the year, as Reagan and Gorbachev shake hands at the Geneva Summit for the first time, NASA holds a press conference to detail its progress on the Magellan mission architecture. It is, in total, a 3 hour long conference, but a summary is published in the major newspapers the next day. Magellan 1 is now NET 1992 Michoud expansion is expected to be completed in 1988 Good progress on early architecture pathways, teams are still submitting designs and refining options Funding is above threshold, no delays expected from budgetary constraints Looking into Japanese and European partnerships Long Duration Skylab Endurance Mission (LDSEM) will be conducted next year to study the long term effects of the transit time to Mars. With this promising update, 1985 is concluded. As everyone looks forward to an incredibly busy 1986. Компонент 1 станции доставлен на Байконур, график запуска остается в соответствии с ожиданиями.