Calvinball? More like Spherical Hydrogen Tank-Ball!
Credit to Kavaeric for this week’s update graphic remix, thank you!
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 on the KSP Forums 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.
[h3]A Word About Wobbly Rockets[/h3]
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.
[h3]Ongoing Work for the Science Roadmap Update[/h3]
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.
For an HD render, check it out here.[h3]New Dev Blog[/h3]
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.
[h3]Weekly Challenges[/h3]
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:
Congratulations to all who conquered this one!
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.
We are counting on you to perform some ludicrous displays. We don’t want to see anybody walk it in.
Cheers!
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