The Kerbal Space Agency is dead, long live the Kerbal Space Agency! (Survey results posted!)

[Drew Kerman]

tl;dr - the KSA will be completely rebooted in 2016. Lifetime Survey results posted below.

The Grand Experiment

Last year I asked myself if it were possible to do what I'm doing now. I had tried something similar with The Sims 3, and while I recently went back and read through all my sim tweets and laughed a lot and had a great time reading them I never managed to amass any sort of real following whatsoever, despite The Sims having a huge fictional community writing stories on the forums similar to KSP - but not enough bothered with twitter it seemed. My only hope in regards to KSP was that where my Sims followers would mostly have to also be interested in The Sims, all people really needed to be attracted to my KSP account was an interest in science, space, gaming in general or KSP. In other words, I had a much broader audience I could reach out to, which is why I worked so hard to make it not just about KSP and be sure to mix in real science and astronomy.

Compared to my Sims account, @KSA_MissionCtrl has been a huge hit. 2k+ followers, exchanging tweets with and being retweeted by actual space agencies & astronauts, and an active and responsive follow-base (this still makes me smile so hard) - not to mention the 50+ other KSP twitter accounts that have come along since I began.

Still, it was just an experiment. Can I do this? No real planning, no real expectations, no real idea how it was all going to play out.

Well, I feel I've done it. And then some - the Flight Tracker is something I'm immensely proud of being able to create. So the general feeling at this point is "well, that was fun, good job, time to move on" - but in this case "moving on" means going back and starting fresh based on everything I have learned and developed over the last two years.

Seeking Stability

One of my major hurdles over the course of this project has been continuity. I've put a lot of effort into maintaining the look and feel of things since I started with KSP v0.23. If you look at the oldest images posted you'll see the ugly white horizon from the surface of Kerbin but that's pretty much the only thing that visually changes over the course of the KSA. Besides the visual look, both major and minor updates have brought enough changes with it to require copious amounts of time making sure everything I have in operation is still working okay. Knowing what breaking changes are coming down the road (such as wheels) has restricted me in what I can do and hope to carry forward.

KSP is at full release now but the pace of change in the game hasn't let up, especially in the mod community! Holy crap have you seen the new ocean shaders? What EVE is now capable of? All the new planets popping into existence thanks to Kopernicus? And this is all before Unity 5 hits and brings with it even more options I can't even fully comprehend at this point. Really, the v1.1 Unity 5 update is what really forced me to think seriously about a reboot. A lot of long-toothed mods that don't see much active development anymore might not even make it to v1.1. The new signal relay system could really shake up the RemoteTech community. I'm just tired of trying to keep up based on what I started with in 0.23, as proud as I am I managed to hold things together this far.

So What Happens to the "Old" KSA?

Obviously I'm not going to toss two years of work into the trash. I've already created the archive.kerbalspace.agency sub-domain that will host everything you see on the website right now (including all the mission logs, plot synopsis, etc I still have to add) while the www.kerbalspace.agency site is stripped to bare bones content. The archive sub-domain will also host its own Flight Tracker and Crew Roster and all the data for the old craft. Once I download my December twitter archive, all tweets will be erased and the archives will be hosted on the sub-domain. I can't set flickr albums to private, so the albums will be deleted but the images will all remain and have an "archive" tag added to them so that when searched from the Flight Tracker or Crew Roster under the sub-domain they appear while the newer KSA images do not once they start being uploaded. I will include the old photos in a Wordpress gallery on the sub-domain as well. Youtube videos will all be made private so that they don't appear in the channel but direct links and embeds continue to work from the sub-domain. Instagram will be cleansed as well.

Basically the public and front-facing KSA appearance will be a clean slate while retaining all followers and subscribers, but everything that came before will still be accessible if you know where to look (in the sub-domain, which will be linked from the main domain).

What is the "New" KSA?

The core concept remains the same and game days will be locked to real days. The only difference is the game's 0 epoch will remain 2/16/14 for a number of reasons. One is simply because I don't want the planets all going through the same thing I've already experienced. Another is that I plan to keep all of the astrophotography photos that don't show the KSC and those would have happened in the past. Finally and most importantly I plan to keep the Asteroid Tracking Network data intact, which relies on the game's starting time also staying the same.

When will it begin? That's up to Squad and when they release v1.1. I want the barn. If it's not in v1.1 I will wait for it. When I first began, there was a lot more real story happening in regards to the KSA finding its feet. But having such a professional-looking facility that is obviously capable of so much more always bothered me, and I even eventually fell into a more "professional" mindset in how things were being handled. I really want to get back to putting more character development into events and I want the space center to be a character as well, not just a static set piece that says "NASA" to anyone who looks at it.

How will things progress? Well the main change is I plan to mostly put away the joystick and program my rockets. One of the reasons I started this whole thing right after first playing the game instead of gaining any experience was so that I would actually make all the newbie mistakes while still being a newbie space agency. Although this time around I'll have a lot of experience flying rockets up into space, I still don't have any real experience programming rockets to fly up into space, so all the struggle I will have doing that will be real. The Community Tech Tree is also a great thing, and will give me a much better progression now that I can also properly tune my science intake.

In addition to all this the other major change is I also plan to add Outer Planets to the mix.

Moving forward, until the new KSA begins I will continue to finish developing the Crew Roster and the launch telemetry streaming. Yea, we'll find out how the MkIII sounding rocket flies!

Look, This is Happening OK?

Help me out by completing this survey on your experience with the KSA over its lifetime.

I very much look forward to getting things started again at some point in 2016. Happy holidays and New Year to all!

Edited December 21, 2015 by Gaiiden

[Drew Kerman]

Just a bump. Closing the survey at the end of this weekend. Thanks to all who participated!

I guess there's really not much to discuss about the whole reboot since it's a thing that's happening regardless but if anyone has input on what they'd like to see in the new KSA please leave it here if you're not one for surveys

[Drew Kerman]

Got some great feedback from the survey, a total of 37 people participated which is actually more than I hoped for. I’m going to directly address all of the feedback here to give everyone an idea of how it will affect the new Kerbal Space Agency coming in 2016

Twitter is succinct. Can you recall any tweets that didn’t really make sense or came across as hard to interpret?

I take pride in the fact that although this question was optional a lot of people still bothered to say “no”. Or, maybe they didn’t realize it was optional

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sunrise/set tweets

Tweets with the sunrise/sunset

This was surprising, and unfortunately although I gave people a large text box to elaborate in this is all I got. So I’m left to conjecture about the exact nature of the confusion surrounding these tweets (example) and the best guess I have is people didn’t understand how they applied. I think it’s pretty obvious the tweet is telling you the sun will rise at this time and set at this time – but people may have been confused about what the times meant, not understanding that events I tweet about play out in real time? The idea of these tweets was so I could say “launch will be after 2nd sunrise” in order to use a general time rather than a specific time. People could then reference the timetable tweet to see when 2nd sunrise is. You could also use the times to better take certain tweets into context knowing when it is night and day at the time of the tweet. I also think the tweets gave a nice sense of progression since the times change based on Kerbin’s position around the sun.

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Well there were some tweets that seemed to be from one of KSA workers rather than official KSA tweets

Pretty sure this was a reference to my night janitor sub-plot, which did confuse a couple of followers who thought I got hacked or something. That was sort of the point tho

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Some of the words when shortened down due to the character limit

Yea… not much I can do here except remind everyone that you can always tweet at the account to get clarification when needed and I will respond. Again, a longer answer was allowed for this question and I wish some examples of unclear abbreviation had been given. For what it’s worth, I always try to use popular abbreviations and not make up my own.

What about the KSA did you find the most entertaining?

I was pleased to see this had the most responses out of all the questions. They basically fell into a few themes:

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The real-time aspect, (even if you don’t do it in game. How dare you ruin that for me in that last question below!)

The real time interaction with followers!

Live tweet manned missions

The live updates

The fact that it was in real time

Being the basic idea behind the whole endeavor, it was nice to see it is something many people enjoy. Thankfully doing this is quite easy now that Tweetdeck supports the ability to schedule tweets down to the minute – something that wasn’t available when I first began and actually had to rely on a paid service to get that feature. Moving forward real-time tweeting will continue to be the main focus, and now that I have the Flight Tracker able to tweet, I can post launch tweets within a minute of each other for better coverage via twitter for those not able to watch the live stream.

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The “events” – whenever an anomaly, or anything not nominal, happened

Following along with the Kerbalnauts.

UKKR Takeover

The mystery goo

The storyline pulling it all together

Dessons launches and manned missions. The manned missions were so built up and really felt like a big deal. Dessons launches were more common but still exciting

Story lines. Mun disaster, Kirk’s crash, hacking etc

clear continuity and progression of events

The storybuilding. Everyone fleshes out Jeb’s character, but fewer have done so for an entire space agency, or even Werner van Kerman

So after the real-time tweeting my next goal was to actually tell stories, not just sound like a twitter bot and state game events – “launched mission to Mun today”. Boooring. I knew this would be challenging but I’m glad to see I’ve managed to pull it off. As I ran out of lead time, it became harder and harder to plan out and execute these various plot lines and that’s one of the main reasons I decided to reboot things. I want to do a lot more of this with the new KSA and keep a strong focus on character development beyond just the astronauts.

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Ofc, vessle launches and reports about current vessels orbiting

Realistic space program development

The sense of progress, the many errors it took to arrive there.

The fact that someone runs a “real” space agency. When I read it it’s like I’m reading NASA’s feed.

The immersion. The feeling that this could be a real space agency.

The overall feel of it.

And here would be my third and final goal and was in fact part of my original inspiration for doing this – reading tweets from actual space agencies. I get a lot of inspiration from NASA, ESA and all of their probe/rover accounts tweeting. I hope to take the development of the space agency to a new level when I can start with Tier 0 facilities rather than a NASA-like space center. I want the space center itself to be an evolving character that grows with the Agency over time. That was one of the biggest things that bothered me ever since the upgradeable space center debuted.

What are some things you think we did best?

A bit repetitive after the last question, but for that I wanted people to focus on the thing that stood out most for them from following the KSA and here I provided a larger text box to let people talk more in general. I mainly ended up with more of the same that I highlighted above – good story lines, realistic space agency representation, live updates. One addition:

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Accurate planning for missions

Your flight tracker stuff is pretty impressive

Flight tracker and that kind of thing.

The flight tracker, graphs, stats, all the science was amazing

the flight tracker

Mission briefings

All this is going to get even better with the recent Flight Tracker 3.0 update that I’ve not even really been able to fully leverage before killing the current KSA iteration. Mission planning will continue to be a fully fleshed-out process that will be communicated through various blueprints, orbital plots and videos (need to make more of this!).

What are some things you think we did worst?

I was very happy with the responses to this question. By and large they were the reasons I decided I had to stop things and reboot in 2016. To be specific:

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Too much low-excitement activity. I know you want to simulate a real agency, but I can only be interested in so many of Desson’s sounding rockets before I’m like “you need an Eve mission, bro”

Yup, pretty much this. The thing about Desson’s rocket launches is that they were relatively easy to set up and run and then tweet about. As I ran out of lead time and had more and more things I wanted to do with the Flight Tracker I had less and less time to really properly plan and carry out more complex missions. I barely had any time to even introduce new plots to keep things busy. Eventually I realized I just needed to stop and finish up all my backend work and set myself up for a new story line altogether.

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I know you have your reasons but the break from launches you took has been long.

Unfortunately this is probably something that will occur with the new KSA as well. I’ll try to prevent it as much as possible but real life tends to find a way to screw with you

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Bit slow on the activity scale

Not really the worst, but I would prefer more actual launches

Launch intervals

Keeping up. As you lost lead time, the story lost that final polish.

Yup, yup, yup and especially yup on that last one. I had some stupid mistakes slip in to many tweets when I ran short on time to edit and as I was sleep-deprived writing them. One of the reasons I ran so quickly out of lead time was due to the increasing complexity of missions, but that was also coupled with building the back-end stuff to handle them (mainly the Flight Tracker but also setting up and managing a YouTube channel and other media accounts) as well as figuring out processes to get them all written up and shared. With a lot of that streamlined & finished before starting the new KSA I’m hoping that when missions eventually start getting complex again I will be able to keep up. I’m hoping.

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Storyline to cover up the Hiatus

I assume that refers to the long summer break. Again I wish people had been more elaborate, especially in regards to how the storyline was lacking.

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YOU. KILLED. JEB.

It was an accident I swear. I also imprisoned Bill. Doesn’t anyone care about Bill? I will try to keep Jeb alive in the new KSA. No promises – he’s pretty crazy.

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The website was confusing to navigate.

Well, glad I fixed that!

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The transition between KSP versions – sorry

That’s surprising, given that I didn’t have to de-orbit any vessels or scrub any missions on account of a version update. The only noticeable difference I can think of was the admin building, which I wrote into the story well ahead of it actually appearing. I’d really like to hear more about this from anyone who agrees and can point out specific examples. Or maybe they meant during the time it took me to switch over things were a bit on the dull side in terms of activity?

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Capitalization

I… err… okay? Without citing anything I can’t really see what I did wrong here.

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You used NovaPunch. God it looks terrible

But it works great! Function over form, I say.

What would be your preferred methods for following along with KSA activities?

Not too surprising, except for Youtube this pretty much falls in line with my own priorities when it comes to spreading news and information. Videos are a major time sink but I will do what I can to improve the content I put up on Youtube as well as the frequency.

How did you originally learn about the KSA?

I was really curious to see how the breakdown would turn out between Reddit and the forums. It makes sense Reddit would beat out the forums though since if I get something upvoted well on there it gets shoved in front of people whereas a post in the Mission Dispatches sub-forum is only ever seen by people who actually choose to go there.

BTW the “other” responses for this and the previous question were from a troll on Reddit. Someone took the time to troll my survey! I feel so great. Thank you troll!

Have you ever felt @KSA_MissionCtrl flooded your timeline in an annoying way?

This was an important one, and good to see I stayed on the majority of people’s good sides here. I took a lot of care to make sure I wasn’t drowning out the other accounts people are following in their twitter streams. Due to the real-time nature of the account it was impossible at times to prevent a lot of tweets in a short time period, but in most cases I was able to just not tweet a lot of stuff in “the moment” and instead push it off for “analysis” so I could elaborate more at a later time in the day and space things out better.

Other than one vote Yes from the troll, 3 respondents said Yes and two provided details:

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While amusing, the Komunist arc was a bit too much.

The funny thing about this is that it wasn’t supposed to be such a huge deal. I wanted a little break so I had the KSA get hacked so I wouldn’t have to do much over the weekend! Turns out I was more busy managing all the responses from the community than doing anything else haha. Still, I feel for the followers that had to get carried along. I’ve temporarily unfollowed accounts I felt were being too “loud” before and don’t mind if that’s what people want to do when things like this happen.

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Multi-tweets about model rocket launches

I’m going to interpret this as “repetition” because none of my tweets about Desson’s launches exceeded the amount put out for larger mission launches.

How do you feel when we go an entire day without posting a photo?

Ah good, that’s nice to know. I honestly did get stressed out quite often worrying about what images I should share on a given day to make sure I’m posting images frequently. It’s hard to come up with good images to post when you don’t have a lot of new stuff to feature, so part of that was just a result of losing my lead time and not really advancing the story all that much.

Do you use twitter mainly just to follow us?

I figured there were some people out there that did.

Twitter polls

Pretty much what I expected. Given that you can only have two options (currently) I doubt I’ll find much use for them, especially considering that it makes no sense to poll for things when you’re playing with a lead time.

How often would you follow links to the Flight Tracker?

A surprisingly large number of respondents for “What’s the Flight Tracker”, and I was hoping red would beat out orange but otherwise mostly in line with what I suspected.

How many of these Flight Tracker features did you know existed?

You can look back at earlier times for the Kerbol and Inner Kerbol system views
You can see the location of flags planted on Kerbin
You can see the location of flags planted at KSC
You can see the static orbit displays by clicking on a ground plot on the dynamic map
The craft description pops up when you hover your mouse over or tap the craft image
The craft description is updated with each new vessel event
All images and underlined text display tooltips with additional information
You can get the current engine alternator and solar panel energy output from the Electrical Charge resource icon tooltip

The results just prove to me that the Flight Tracker could use a guided Help system for first-time visitors (which will be everyone once I enable cookies for those that allow it) so that people can learn about some of the more “hidden” features that you can’t discover without playing around a bit.

How often do you visit the Flight Tracker?

Whenever it’s linked in a tweet
Sometimes when it’s linked in a tweet
Regularly on my own
Every now and then on my own
I don’t bother with it much if at all

The usage pattern shows I have some dedicated fans but the majority only interface with the Flight Tracker when it’s needed to get a better understanding of events that are being tweeted about, which is totally okay. Just know that being able to elaborate in the craft description box saves me a lot of tweets and will continue to be the normal way of providing mission event updates.

What would you like to see added/changed to the Flight Tracker and/or Crew Roster?

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More information regarding the crew with story line

There’s a crew roster?!

Astronaut mission list

Pretty much all this will be taken care of in the v3.1 update of the Flight Tracker/Crew Roster. All the astronauts will have background and bio information in a scroll-up box that appears over their photo like in the Flight Tracker for vessels. There will be a link added to the right-hand menu to let people transfer from the Flight Tracker over to the Crew Roster – right now the only way you’d know there was a Crew Roster is if you saw a crewed mission, which has links to the crew’s roster pages. The right-hand menu will also appear in the Crew Roster and let you sort astronauts based on their current mission, among other filters.

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For crafts that have a camera, a picture taken every few hours

Not going to happen, because that means I have to load every craft and let it take photos. Of what? Whatever it happens to be pointing at at the time? That wouldn’t be very interesting, and if I wanted it to be oriented for good photos that’s more time spent. So yea, I can’t see any appreciable gain for that amount of time.

That said, I have had thoughts about eventually having a space station that streams live video like the ISS.

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Sattelites and/or space stations?

Space stations would be a natural progression and the only reason there are none is because the KSA never progressed to the point of being able to build one. Plenty of satellites already though so….?

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More stream lined site

More launched craft ;). But seriously maybe the it could be more colourful and graphically appealing.

Great suggestions, but without specific feedback on what needs to be improved and ideas of what you would think is better I can’t do much. As far as I’m concerned it’s all pretty streamlined and functional. I’m not a wizard web designer so don’t ever expect much in the way of fancy design. I just need it to work.

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Better live functionality

This could mean so many things. All I can say is that I will at least take a closer look at what the hell is wrong with Chrome HTML5 video streaming for my live launches for Flight Tracker v3.1

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A home page, with an organized list of all active and inactive flights

The right-hand menu is an organized list of all active and inactive flights.

Do you have any suggestions for our website?

There is a paid mobile version for the current WordPress theme I have installed, at some point I will get around to purchasing and installing it. Can’t say when I will feel like bothering with it but it will happen at some point before the new KSA launches.

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A weekly newsletter or RSS that summarize the events of the week (both mission related and perhaps some extras like backstories)

Yes, this was something I was planning to do every Friday as a “week in review”.

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More info on how you plan missions

I suppose a page for each mission would be a nice thing to have for the website, and also give me a place to go into more details on planning. Will do.

You know I don’t actually play out entire missions in real time in the game right?

I’m going to make this abundantly clear in the About page for the new KSA website. I don’t want people getting the wrong idea about how I play the game and try to emulate me only to find out that’s not what I’ve actually been doing. Time warp FTW!!

Thanks again to everyone that responded. If you’re one of them and would like to elaborate on any of your responses, leave a comment below please.

Edited December 21, 2015 by Gaiiden