Kerbal Space Program: Making History
Kerbal Space Program: Making History lets you perform mission control.
Kerbal Space Program’s rocket-building sandbox has attracted modders since the beginning, and after seven years they’ve crafted hundreds of additions—everything from planetary bases to ion drives. So what can Making History, KSP’s first official expansion, offer players that hasn’t already been done? Not its collection of real-life spacecraft, which is a curious inclusion given that space history is one of the most popular subjects for mods.
The expansion offers a pretty good version of the Apollo 11 lunar lander module, for example, but a perfect recreation has been available since 2014. As such, and in keeping with what already makes KSP great, Making History’s best addition is not an object, but a tool—a new way to experiment and create. The Mission Builder, which players can use to script and plan missions and stories using simple tools, turns the expansion into a must-buy.
For most of its life, KSP was a sandbox game. The only missions were the ones I made for myself. Contracts that reward players with money, science, and prestige in career mode were a late addition, and I’ve always found them to be the weakest part of KSP. Instead of focusing on big-picture goals, like taking my first steps on distant planets, contracts have me duct-taping and kit-bashing single-use spacecraft to take a new landing gear to a certain height and speed, checking off a box to get paid.
Contracts provided some goals and direction in the open world Kerbal arena, but they were never about telling stories. The new Mission Builder and History Pack (a set of prebuilt missions based on space race launches) change that. For the first time, I can fly and build missions that follow a script.
In one of the first missions, my Soviet spacecraft is suffering from a cascading electrical fault, and my only hope is to rendezvous with a nearby satellite and use its diagnostic systems to reboot. As I carefully fly over to the satellite, random systems explode and my time begins to run out. After I finally get the computers to reboot, mission control throws me a curveball: Is there any way I could deorbit that satellite so the R&D team can see the computer logs? Suddenly, I’m on a white-knuckle solo flight home in a satellite that wasn’t meant to fly. For KSP veterans, improvization and surprises only happen as a result of our own incompetence. Thanks to Making History, space can be a dangerous place again. Random failures might cut a mission short. A meteor shower might puncture all of my solar panels, leaving a deep-space crew stranded until help arrives. All of these variables are present in the Mission Builder, which is a great tool for scripting your own stories, as if you’re a sci-fi dungeon master running a deep-space tabletop RPG.
Drag and Drop pod
Everything in the Mission Builder is drag-and-drop. To script a mission to the Mun, drop a Spacecraft Launched icon and a Spacecraft Landed icon and draw a line to connect them. Start at Kerbin, land at Mun. Drop a score bonus and a time limit, and draw new lines to wire them in to the script. Zoom in and tweak a menu option to make the objective more specific. Add a scripted event. Give the player a choice between salvaging data and saving a stranded Kerbal.
The building blocks are simple, and there’s no limit to how deep you can stack the Mission Builder’s scripted emergencies and radio messages. I’ve been astounded by KSP modders’ technical skill and devotion to historical engineering minutiae, and I’m sure that will all be applied here—perhaps with minuteto-minute recreations of Apollo 11 driven by actual radio transcripts. These tools can do that.
KSP’s devs have built a new set of tools that the community hasn’t provided for itself. The KSP community is fantastic, and more ways to create and share space adventures is exactly what it needed. For the price, it’s nice to also get the big dump of new, historical parts, but Making History is great for the making, not the history.
Making History’s best addition is not an object, but a tool