Calvinball? More like Spherical Hydrogen Tank-Ball!

[Nate Simpson]

Credit to Kavaeric for this week’s update graphic remix
 

Good afternoon, fellow Kerbonauts.

The release date for the v0.1.3.0 update has been revised to June 22 (a two-day delay, from next Tuesday to next Thursday). We have a couple of critical bugs that we think will significantly affect the quality of the update, so we’re giving our team a couple of extra days to knock them out and test the changes. 

As always, we will post detailed patch notes when the update goes live. The list of fixed items is significant for this one, but major bugs still remain (to give just one example, we still have not completed our fix for the orbital decay issue, which is number one on our priority list). Once the update is live, we will reset the the Bug Reports subforum for new report submissions and re-assess our internal priority list based on both community feedback and our own internal testing. On the following dev update, I’ll post our new top-ten most wanted list based on that information. In the interest of avoiding repetition, I will not re-post the current top-ten list here, as all relevant fixes will officially continue to be in QA review until the update goes live.

A Word About Wobbly Rockets

Our team shares the community view that overly-wobbly rockets are a major issue in KSP2 (it is number 10 on our top-ten issues list). We have introduced a number of mitigations to address aspects of that issue (altering inertia tensor values to decrease joint issues that emerge when high-mass and low-mass parts are connected, introducing various bespoke multi-joint augmentations to areas of known over-flexibility), but we still see this as an area where major improvement is needed. For the record, this is our official view on what a successful implementation would look like, and against which we continue to measure the effectiveness of ongoing mitigation work:

• For inline parts that are connected serially, in most applications there should be little to no flexing. This is especially true when neighboring inline parts are the same core size
• For radially-attached boosters or cantilevered subassemblies with single-point radial connections, some flexibility is expected. There are some applications for which manually-applied struts should be required
• Wings should not require struts to stay rigid
• Docking two vessels in orbit should result in a strong, non-wobbly connection that doesn’t fold on itself as soon as the player tries to move the resulting vehicle
• Wobbly rockets are sometimes fun and funny. A big part of what originally got many of us hooked on the original KSP was the silliness and emergent problem solving that came from playing World of Goo with rocket parts. Broadly, we see this as part of the Kerbal DNA, and want to preserve it in some form. Whether that means limiting wobbliness to certain types or sizes of parts, or relegating certain behaviors to player settings, is the subject of ongoing internal discussion. We of course are following community conversations with keen interest, and this is an area where Early Access participants can have a significant impact on the 1.0 version of KSP2
• Joint physics impact CPU performance, and as we progress through the Colony and Interstellar roadmap milestones the part counts will increase dramatically. Any solutions we arrive at for the above requirements must accommodate this reality
• We would like to move away from autostrut, or any other band-aid solution that involves hidden settings that automatically apply additional joints to make a vehicle more rigid. Whatever solution we arrive at, we’d like it to be predictable and transparent to all users. If over the course of Early Access we find that some form of autostrut is still necessary to allow the creation of ambitious vehicles, we’ll revisit this requirement

As a person who has dive-bombed more than one physics meeting with an exasperated "can’t we just make the joints stiffer" comment, let me assure you that in true KSP fashion, this is not a problem with a simple remedy. We’ve got very capable people on the case, and we will arrive at a good solution.

Ongoing Work for the Science Roadmap Update

As our architecture-facing teams chase down critical bugs, the content-focused feature teams have continued to work on features for the Science update, which will introduce the first major suite of new features to KSP2 since the beginning of Early Access. While we don’t have anything to share yet on timing, the following areas have seen significant progress:

• An all-new Science collection and transmission system, along with the assignment of Science biomes to all Kerbolar celestial bodies
• A new Mission system that provides compelling player goals and tracks flight events to determine the achievement of those goals, along with the activation of the Mission Control building to access those functions
• New Science parts that are distinctive enough from one another that they provide interesting vehicle design choices to the player
• An all-new tech tree that provides an interesting part progression that will later expand to accommodate the arrival of future interstellar-grade and colony parts

And of course, there are some new Kerbal animations for sample collection:

New Dev Blog

Yesterday, we posted a new dev blog entry from Senior Designer Chris Adderley that goes into some detail on the aero occlusion bug that we fixed this month. It’s a nice example of how certain bugs can not only be tricky to detect (it was in fact a community member who first identified the problem), but how bugs within interdependent systems can compound on one another in ways that make tracking them down especially complicated. It’s a cool detective story, and now that we’re through it, I’m glad that Chris has broken it all down for the rest of us.

Weekly Challenges

Last week’s Build a Base challenge generated some amazing results. Kerman_von_Braun’s achievement appears to have involved the use of a time machine, as it was submitted to YouTube a week before the challenge was announced! But it’s so great, I have to give it a shout-out anyway:

And then there’s Banana Base, by Suppise (some kind of signal noise appears to be corrupting some of these images - we’ll ask somebody to look into it):

We also really liked this Duna tower and rover by Hammo1603:

There’s also a recent trend of players recreating the Challenge banner art drawn by Matthew Poppe. For the record, I think Matt has really been enjoying this. Look at this one from Jaypeg:

Congratulations to all the other people who conquered this one! We can only post a few here, but we enjoyed all of the creations posted to the Build a Base thread.

This week’s challenge: Score a Goal! That’s right, those big spherical hydrogen tanks are about to be kicked, dunked, and spiked across the Kerbolar system! There will be extra (imaginary) points for style:

• Primary gooooooooooal: Use a crewed vehicle to roll an uncontrolled spherical hydrogen tank under the KSC bridge
• Secondary goooooooooooooooal: Deliver a spherical hydrogen tank to the surface of the Mun and knock it through a Mun arch
• Jeb-level goooooooooooooooooooooal: Roll a spherical hydrogen tank into the Mohole on Moho
• Val-level goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooal: After scoring the goal on Moho, dunk a second hydrogen tank from the same vehicle into the center of the KSC communications dish

We are counting on you to perform some ludicrous displays. We don’t want to see anybody walk it in.

Cheers!

[Kavaeric]

What the...

GHOSTII

[BeastHunter]

Could you share some images of the new airbrakes and such coming in patch 3?

[Clayel]

nice to see that joint wobbliness is being looked into seriously, i feel like it was only "fun" in ksp1 as in "look at this amusing bug" and not "i want to purposefully make wobbly rockets"
would prefer if it was massively reduced or removed

[Ace27]

Love the animations for the surface sampling. Good work! Exciting to hear about the advancements in Science gathering too. 

[Acid_Burn9]

On 6/15/2023 at 8:35 PM, Nate Simpson said:

We would like to move away from autostrut, or any other band-aid solution that involves hidden settings that automatically apply additional joints to make a vehicle more rigid. Whatever solution we arrive at, we’d like it to be predictable and transparent to all users. If over the course of Early Access we find that some form of autostrut is still necessary to allow the creation of ambitious vehicles, we’ll revisit this requirement

Eliminating the need for autostruts in the first place is the best route you could've taken. No half-measures, no treating the symptons, just straight up fixing the problem in it's core. Very hyped for this. Keep up the good work <3

[Datau03]

Thank you Nate for the exciting Upnate! I'm looking forward to Patch 3 and all future updates  I wish you all a nice weekend!

[WelshSteW]

Meh, I can't be bothered with this anymore. I won't be playing until science is done.

[AstroEvada]

Hopefully we can customise suits at some point! Loving the sampling animations.

A question I have is that can we implement custom animations for mods?

[Strawberry]

Nice and simple dev update, conveniently the delay doesnt effect me as I wouldn't even be able to play the update immediately without the delay, that being said the delay sounds pretty understandable and its only two days so oh well. The science stuff is vague (understandable as it sounds like even yall aren't certain when science will come out yet), but theres definitely interesting stuff there. Personally if science is going to be an update 5/past 5 deal, I'd like the development cycle of update 4 to focus more on qol and ui stuff,  Kaverics patched conics suggestion would be great.

The emphasis on "An all-new Science collection and transmission system" is interesting, the only thing I can think of this meaning is some parts having collection over time, which would be cool. Also the "along with the assignment of Science biomes to all Kerbolar celestial bodies"  implies that kerbol will have biomes, this implication is likely unintentional, but missions to study the suns poles sound cool, getting seriously rewarded science wise for doing a parker solar probe style mission in a polar orbit would be great. Also I hope that "An all-new tech tree that provides an interesting part progression" means that the tech tree will be less linear in some regards, it always felt like a missed opportunity that you didnt get some lines that crossed over to the other side of the tech tree (Something like unlocking basic nuclear thermal rockets and advanced jet engines allowing you to grab a nuclear air breathing rocket).

Edited June 16, 2023 by Strawberry

[cocoscacao]

28 minutes ago, Nate Simpson said:

"can’t we just make the joints stiffer" comment, let me assure you that in true KSP fashion, this is not a problem with a simple remedy. We’ve got very capable people on the case, and we will arrive at a good solution.

I gotta admit... It's scary there's still not even a plan on how to deal with wobble at this stage of development...

Edited June 16, 2023 by cocoscacao
improved writing

[Warshawski]

36 minutes ago, Nate Simpson said:

Credit to Kavaeric for this week’s update graphic remix
 

Good afternoon, fellow Kerbonauts.

The release date for the v0.1.3.0 update has been revised to June 22 (a two-day delay, from next Tuesday to next Thursday). We have a couple of critical bugs that we think will significantly affect the quality of the update, so we’re giving our team a couple of extra days to knock them out and test the changes. 

As always, we will post detailed patch notes when the update goes live. The list of fixed items is significant for this one, but major bugs still remain (to give just one example, we still have not completed our fix for the orbital decay issue, which is number one on our priority list). Once the update is live, we will reset the upvote counters on the Bug Reports subforum and re-assess our internal priority list based on both community feedback and our own internal testing. On the following dev update, I’ll post our new top-ten most wanted list based on that information. In the interest of avoiding repetition, I will not re-post the current top-ten list here, as all relevant fixes will officially continue to be in QA review until the update goes live.

A Word About Wobbly Rockets

Our team shares the community view that overly-wobbly rockets are a major issue in KSP2 (it is number 10 on our top-ten issues list). We have introduced a number of mitigations to address aspects of that issue (altering inertia tensor values to decrease joint issues that emerge when high-mass and low-mass parts are connected, introducing various bespoke multi-joint augmentations to areas of known over-flexibility), but we still see this as an area where major improvement is needed. For the record, this is our official view on what a successful implementation would look like, and against which we continue to measure the effectiveness of ongoing mitigation work:

• For inline parts that are connected serially, in most applications there should be little to no flexing. This is especially true when neighboring inline parts are the same core size
• For radially-attached boosters or cantilevered subassemblies with single-point radial connections, some flexibility is expected. There are some applications for which manually-applied struts should be required
• Wings should not require struts to stay rigid
• Docking two vessels in orbit should result in a strong, non-wobbly connection that doesn’t fold on itself as soon as the player tries to move the resulting vehicle
• Wobbly rockets are sometimes fun and funny. A big part of what originally got many of us hooked on the original KSP was the silliness and emergent problem solving that came from playing World of Goo with rocket parts. Broadly, we see this as part of the Kerbal DNA, and want to preserve it in some form. Whether that means limiting wobbliness to certain types or sizes of parts, or relegating certain behaviors to player settings, is the subject of ongoing internal discussion. We of course are following community conversations with keen interest, and this is an area where Early Access participants can have a significant impact on the 1.0 version of KSP2
• Joint physics impact CPU performance, and as we progress through the Colony and Interstellar roadmap milestones the part counts will increase dramatically. Any solutions we arrive at for the above requirements must accommodate this reality
• We would like to move away from autostrut, or any other band-aid solution that involves hidden settings that automatically apply additional joints to make a vehicle more rigid. Whatever solution we arrive at, we’d like it to be predictable and transparent to all users. If over the course of Early Access we find that some form of autostrut is still necessary to allow the creation of ambitious vehicles, we’ll revisit this requirement

As a person who has dive-bombed more than one physics meeting with an exasperated "can’t we just make the joints stiffer" comment, let me assure you that in true KSP fashion, this is not a problem with a simple remedy. We’ve got very capable people on the case, and we will arrive at a good solution.

Ongoing Work for the Science Roadmap Update

As our architecture-facing teams chase down critical bugs, the content-focused feature teams have continued to work on features for the Science update, which will introduce the first major suite of new features to KSP2 since the beginning of Early Access. While we don’t have anything to share yet on timing, the following areas have seen significant progress:

• An all-new Science collection and transmission system, along with the assignment of Science biomes to all Kerbolar celestial bodies
• A new Mission system that provides compelling player goals and tracks flight events to determine the achievement of those goals, along with the activation of the Mission Control building to access those functions
• New Science parts that are distinctive enough from one another that they provide interesting vehicle design choices to the player
• An all-new tech tree that provides an interesting part progression that will later expand to accommodate the arrival of future interstellar-grade and colony parts

And of course, there are some new Kerbal animations for sample collection:

New Dev Blog

Yesterday, we posted a new dev blog entry from Senior Designer Chris Adderley that goes into some detail on the aero occlusion bug that we fixed this month. It’s a nice example of how certain bugs can not only be tricky to detect (it was in fact a community member who first identified the problem), but how bugs within interdependent systems can compound on one another in ways that make tracking them down especially complicated. It’s a cool detective story, and now that we’re through it, I’m glad that Chris has broken it all down for the rest of us.

Weekly Challenges

Last week’s Build a Base challenge generated some amazing results. Kerman_von_Braun’s achievement appears to have involved the use of a time machine, as it was submitted to YouTube a week before the challenge was announced! But it’s so great, I have to give it a shout-out anyway:

And then there’s Banana Base, by Suppise (some kind of signal noise appears to be corrupting some of these images - we’ll ask somebody to look into it):

We also really liked this Duna tower and rover by Hammo1603:

There’s also a recent trend of players recreating the Challenge banner art drawn by Matthew Poppe. For the record, I think Matt has really been enjoying this. Look at this one from Jaypeg:

Congratulations to all the other people who conquered this one! We can only post a few here, but we enjoyed all of the creations posted to the Build a Base thread.

This week’s challenge: Score a Goal! That’s right, those big spherical hydrogen tanks are about to be kicked, dunked, and spiked across the Kerbolar system! There will be extra (imaginary) points for style:

• Primary gooooooooooal: Use a crewed vehicle to roll an uncontrolled spherical hydrogen tank under the KSC bridge
• Secondary goooooooooooooooal: Deliver a spherical hydrogen tank to the surface of the Mun and knock it through a Mun arch
• Jeb-level goooooooooooooooooooooal: Roll a spherical hydrogen tank into the Mohole on Moho
• Val-level goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooal: After scoring the goal on Moho, dunk a second hydrogen tank from the same vehicle into the center of the KSC communications dish

We are counting on you to perform some ludicrous displays. We don’t want to see anybody walk it in.

Cheers!

Hello Nate!

I've been playing KSP since the first public release, and really enjoyed it - to this day I still play KSP1, usually with the RO modpack installed. I have so far enjoyed 2, but I am currently waiting for more content before diving back into it. (Can't wait for science!)

If I might make a suggestion that would perhaps blend the community's desire for non wobbly rockets while still allowing for some wackiness, why not tie those (somewhat) wobbly joints to decouplers?

Say you've got a rocket stack - maybe something like an SLS, for a reference - and you slap it together with a couple of decouplers for the boosters. If it's possible, we could have that core stage welded into one physics entity, unaffected by wobble, but the decouplers still utilize joint physics, and thus the boosters can wobble. So an actual Node connection should be as solid as steel (or aerospace grade aluminum) but lateral decouplers could be subject to wobble. Just a thought!

Thanks for the dev team's hard work!

Edited June 16, 2023 by Warshawski

[Strawberry]

6 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:

I gotta admit... It's scary there's still not even a plan on how to deal with wobble at this stage of development...

35 minutes ago, Nate Simpson said:

Our team shares the community view that overly-wobbly rockets are a major issue in KSP2 (it is number 10 on our top-ten issues list). We have introduced a number of mitigations to address aspects of that issue (altering inertia tensor values to decrease joint issues that emerge when high-mass and low-mass parts are connected, introducing various bespoke multi-joint augmentations to areas of known over-flexibility), but we still see this as an area where major improvement is needed.

It sounds like they have solutions both completed and still in work, but no one silver bullet. Honestly I dont think there is one silver bullet here. For my two cents, I'd rather not have no wobble on certain sizes, but Id be pretty fine if large rockets and above wobbled a lot less. 

Edited June 16, 2023 by Strawberry

[regex]

39 minutes ago, Nate Simpson said:

• A new Mission system that provides compelling player goals and tracks flight events to determine the achievement of those goals, along with the activation of the Mission Control building to access those functions

I certainly hope interacting with this system is purely optional. While systems like this are fun sometimes, they're tedious at others, and I'd prefer to drive my own space program rather than have you guys dictate the direction it goes in order to get better replayability and challenge potential.

Thanks for the update.

Edited June 16, 2023 by regex

[BigCheesy]

Are autostruts not being implimented ? I always saw that as a simple way to counter act wobbly rockets. 

[Kavaeric]

5 minutes ago, regex said:

I certainly hope interacting with this system is purely optional. While systems like this are fun sometimes, they're tedious at others, and I'd prefer to drive my own space program rather than have you guys dictate the direction it goes in order to get better replayability and challenge potential.

Thanks for the update.

Hm, wouldn't this just be a matter of playing sandbox, then? Unless I'm missing something.

It does give me a thought on how perhaps rather than choosing between pre-defined "modes" (sandbox, science, career in KSP1) it instead is presented as which buildings you want active in the KSC when you start a new save as stand-in for which gameplay features you want to enable. Could do something wacky like a playthrough with the entire tech tree unlocked already but still limited on budget.

[HammerTyme]

Thank you for the update Nate. I’m looking forward to patch 3. Ive been on a short break from KSP2 lately, but I plan to dive back in once patch 3 drops!

Hopefully… Maybe….. MAYBE… in the next Dev update you can give us a sneak peak at a possible estimated time frame the Science Update will drop.  Maybe a  month?  Like, sometime in September?  Or sometime in Q4?  Anything.  Something.     
 

Thanks!  

[regex]

1 minute ago, Kavaeric said:

Hm, wouldn't this just be a matter of playing sandbox, then? Unless I'm missing something.

You are, the tech-tree progression isn't present in sandbox. "Organic" progression where I make the choices is much more preferable to following specific missions doled out by the game or KSP1's absolute garbage system of rolling missions until I get one I actually want to do. I want progression, I don't want a railroad or explicit guidance.

[Strawberry]

21 minutes ago, regex said:

I certainly hope interacting with this system is purely optional. While systems like this are fun sometimes, they're tedious at others, and I'd prefer to drive my own space program rather than have you guys dictate the direction it goes in order to get better replayability and challenge potential.

In AMA 1 it was explicitly stated that this mission system is opt in.

[DeadJohn]

16 minutes ago, BigCheesy said:

Are autostruts not being implimented ? I always saw that as a simple way to counter act wobbly rockets. 

I think KSP2 is trying to avoid autostrut as much as possible because they are already known to cause problems in KSP1. Docking, undocking, or physics timewarp can twist craft into pretzels. Robotics, including docking port rotation, don't like struts. Large craft can lag because each generated autostrut behaves as a new part.

[Meecrob]

59 minutes ago, Nate Simpson said:

Wobbly rockets are sometimes fun and funny. A big part of what originally got many of us hooked on the original KSP was the silliness and emergent problem solving that came from playing World of Goo with rocket parts. Broadly, we see this as part of the Kerbal DNA, and want to preserve it in some form. Whether that means limiting wobbliness to certain types or sizes of parts, or relegating certain behaviors to player settings, is the subject of ongoing internal discussion. We of course are following community conversations with keen interest, and this is an area where Early Access participants can have a significant impact on the 1.0 version of KSP2

My intuition thinks that wobbly rockets are fun for people who want zany and wacky. They are probably not the core audience of the game. People who want LOLZ probably aren't doing Jool-5 missions.

Having said that, maybe you guys can get some cash deposits from casual players, but ultimately, I doubt they will be the people that form the core of the community.

[Alexoff]

1 hour ago, Nate Simpson said:

While we don’t have anything to share yet on timing, the following areas have seen significant progress

Well, I thought we were being announced more

1 minute ago, DeadJohn said:

I think KSP2 is trying to avoid autostrut as much as possible because they are already known to cause problems in KSP1. Docking, undocking, or physics timewarp can twist craft into pretzels. Robotics, including docking port rotation, don't like struts. Large craft can lag because each generated autostrut behaves as a new part.

But on the other hand, autostruts solve a huge number of problems.

[jimmymcgoochie]

I’m of the opinion that rockets should require some design / construction work to make them fully rigid, but it shouldn’t take much more than a few strategically placed struts or some common-sense design principles. Rockets shouldn’t ping around like an accordion when the engines are switched on/off, bend in half between stages or have boosters oscillate in and out until everything explodes, and the player shouldn’t have to add dozens of autostruts to every other part to hold everything still. Real rockets almost never have single points of failure when things like boosters are concerned so adding struts to stabilise those feels reasonable, but throwing struts at every interstage, payload fairing and wing joint is excessive.

Depending on how part progression is implemented, unlocking all the tanks of the same series e.g. all the 1.25m cylindrical tanks, at the same time would avoid creating monstrosities with large numbers of small parts stacked together when one or two larger parts can do the same with far less wobbliness.

[TickleMyMary]

Tiresome at this point... Nothing to look forward to in the next update.

Also, now you're looking into wobbly rockets? Until a couple of weeks ago, that was a feature you'd baked into the game as a 'core KSP' feature... Best to check out of this because what you're doing is an embarrassment imo.

[Strawberry]

8 minutes ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

Depending on how part progression is implemented, unlocking all the tanks of the same series e.g. all the 1.25m cylindrical tanks, at the same time would avoid creating monstrosities with large numbers of small parts stacked together when one or two larger parts can do the same with far less wobbliness.

The gating of tank sizes always sucked and I hope they get rid of it for KSP2, it always felt like it was that way just so the tech tree felt larger then it actually was. Same deal for how the aerodynamics side of thing had way too many nodes, thus making it way to expensive to sink your points into. 

2 minutes ago, TickleMyMary said:

Tiresome at this point... Nothing to look forward to in the next update.

I'm looking forward to a lot more of the major bugs being fixed, the vacuum engines look cool too