Coach Kerbal
run out of money and have to start over. Colonies won’t require tons of micromanagement. If you leave one in a dangerous state, without enough power or food, it’ll simply underperform. You can ignore it and keep on building that next rocket – the one sure to be your masterpiece, once you solve that little ‘exploding on the launchpad’ problem.
It’s rocket science
The more time you’ve spent in the original Kerbal’s rocket building module, the more likely you’ll gasp, hand covering your mouth to ward off surprise like it’s an alien facehugger, when you see Kerbal Space Program 2’ s new tools. The interface is much refined at a glance: there’s a new toolbar for finer control over objects you’ve selected, and parts within categories are now arranged into size tiers, which was a necessity for the “much higher part count in KSP2,” says Simpson. “In early playtesting, the game became ‘find the part you’re looking for’.”
The truly exciting features take a bit longer to spot. Once you start building with a part, those size categories will intelligently show you other parts that will fit on your rocket. There’s a painter’s palette that lets you colour your ship, customisation that will be essential for multiplayer. You can still rotate the camera 360 degrees, but you can also enter Blueprint mode, which gives you a perfectly ‘flat’ view to facilitate easy symmetry.
And – this is the megaton – you can now build multiple assemblies in the same workspace, rather than having to build a whole rocket in one go. “You can have a bunch of different highly complex elements that are free-floating,” says Simpson. “Then combining them with the symmetry tools, you can make, for example, a radially mounted booster that has a lot of complexity in itself, and then attach or detach it willy nilly.”
I watched Markham build a rocket, then a booster that would add the fuel and thrust needed to escape Kerbin’s atmosphere. She simply highlighted the sub-assembly, clicked a hotkey to toggle three-way radial symmetry, and then attached three identical boosters to her ship.
You save an entire workspace instead of a specific ship, so you can create variants, with parts and boosters that are easy to swap out for different types of missions. This will come in especially handy as you start building colonies – you’ll have to haul an unwieldy ‘founder module’ and other supplies to the build site, which will require solving a whole different set of physics problems.
The Vehicle Assembly Building has one more huge feature up its sleeve: a built-in trip planner, inspired by community members who created intricate charts to show the potential velocity a rocket will need to reach targets like the Mun or Duna. These became so popular even the developers used them. “I’ll be glad to not have a printout posted on my wall,” says Markham.
For many Kerbal players, the early hours of the game are spent building a rocket and failing to reach your destination, without necessarily understanding why. “This is a way to tighten up that part of the iteration loop, by giving you real-time information about how far your vehicle can go in its current configuration,” says Nate Simpson. The trip planner lets you set a destination and shows the best-case velocity for each stage of your rocket. As you swap out boosters and other parts, you can see how that will affect just how far you can fly.
‘Potential’ is the key word there, because the trip planner won’t stop you from building spectacularly unstable, explosive rockets. Simpson says that with each addition KSP2’ s developers have tried to distinguish between “constructive failure” and “frustrating failure”. The new tools are meant to ensure failures allow you to learn something (or at least laugh at Jebediah Kerman’s horrified face as your rocket corkscrews back to the ground at a thousand miles per hour).
“We don’t want you to make the same mistake twice,” Simpson says. “We want you to make lots of different mistakes.” And now when you make those mistakes, KSP2 will have a lot more help to offer.
Truly getting into Kerbal Space Program inevitably means spending hours delving into YouTube videos on rocket science and the game itself. Even if you have a physics degree, there’s still a steep learning curve to understanding how the hell to work Kerbal’s interface. KSP2 fixes some obvious oversights and makes the user interface as a whole more elegant.
Flight tools are now clustered together in more logical ways, with navigation on the left and time controls in the centre, a place of prominence that reflects how important fast forwarding will be as you start launching long interstellar journeys. There’s now a pause button, which I fervently hope gets a tool-tip that says ‘DON’T PANIC’.
Pausing will be one of the main ways players access KSP2’ s greatly expanded tutorials, which include a mixture of interactive tutorials to guide you through using interface elements, and animations that give you a crash course in rocketry. The example I saw adeptly explained high thrust and low thrust rocket engines with a pair of kerbals biking up a steep hill.