Kerbal Space Program
The little green astronauts achieve escape velocity
AFTER FOUR YEARS in open beta, there surely can’t be anyone with even a passing interest in spaceflight who hasn’t tried
Kerbal Space Program yet. You drag and drop engines and fuel tanks to build a rocket, you strap strange little green dudes into the cockpit, and you fire them into orbit. But if you tried KSP a few versions ago and weren’t hooked, or exhausted everything the early sandbox game had to offer, is version 1.0 worth a second look?
The big change is that the aerodynamic simulation has been vastly improved, to match the already realistic orbital physics. Gone is the infeasibly thick “soupmosphere” that required you to fly straight up for 10km and then pitch over 45 degrees to fly into orbit. Not only is the air thinner close to the ground now, the density varies with temperature as well as altitude, which means it’s thinner over the Equator at midday and thicker during the night over the poles. Drag and lift properly account for how streamlined your rocket is, and the sound barrier feels like a real barrier you have to punch through. Fly too fast, too low, and you’ll experience compression heating.
Theoretically, this means that your spacecraft can now burn up on re-entry, but the system is quite forgiving and catastrophe is only likely on the most extreme return trajectories.
To protect your delicate payloads from all this atmospheric buffeting, cargo bays and fairings have finally been added to the stock game. Fairings can be built to any shape in the editor and have an excellent “exploded view” feature that moves them out of the way so that you can continue to tweak the payload within. In flight, things are less satisfactory though. Fairings jettison in a shower of shrapnel, rather than two neat halves, and it’s very difficult to make Apollo-style interstage fairings that behave correctly. They are also very heavy, and the physics engine treats the mass as being all in the fairing base, which remains behind after the fairings are jettisoned. For many designs, it can actually be more efficient to launch your payloads without fairings, which is a pity.
HARVEST TIME
The number of planets and moons in the solar system remains unchanged at 16 (though there are now asteroids in the orbit of Dres, as well as Kerbin) but there is a new reason to visit them: mining. Deposits of a nonspecific “ore” are now randomly generated for each save on each body.
To harvest them, you must first use the new scanning antennae from orbit. Rather than scanning the surface in real-time, as you orbit above it (which just involves a lot of tedious messing about with time acceleration), the game simply requires you to place your scanner in the correct polar orbit. It then unlocks the whole resource map for that planet. The mining drill and ore refinery parts are bulky and heavy, so you can’t just slap one onto every ship to give them infinite fuel, but off-world refueling stations are now a credible alternative to regular resupply missions from Kerbin.
Career mode has been in development for a few versions and the 1.0 release hasn’t made any groundbreaking changes. The algorithm that generates random commercial contracts has been tweaked to eliminate the oddest ones and there are new mission types that require you to ferry space tourists, and establish bases and space stations.
Rescue contracts aren’t just a lone kerbal floating in his spacesuit anymore, but can involve a damaged cockpit or piece of debris, or a kerbal crash landed on a
distant planet. Kerbals that you rescue get added to your crew roster, which can be very lucrative, since hiring new kerbals gets more expensive for each new recruit.
For all the new parts and improved systems though, KSP1.0 doesn’t quite feel finished. You can still pull up the debug menu and tweak the “drag cube multiplier” or the “heat convection factor”—it’s as if developer Squad still hasn’t made up its mind about the best values. Orbital maneuvers, particularly interplanetary transfers, are still too frustrating to set up and adjust. There’s nothing to tell you the thrust-to-weight ratio of your ship, or its delta-V, neither when you are building your rocket, nor when you are in flight.
These numbers are critical to success or failure in space, but the game leaves you to either eyeball them or break out the calculator and crunch the numbers yourself. Career mode also lacks purpose. You take on contracts to earn money, but money isn’t especially useful. The space center building upgrades feel like they’re just removing arbitrary restrictions. The tech tree gives you more parts as you unlock new nodes, but they aren’t necessarily more advanced parts. You start with the smallest fuel tank, for example, and unlock larger ones, rather than beginning with a heavy primitive tank in several sizes and unlocking lighter, stronger ones.
MORE TO COME And yet, for all that, KSP has dominated our game playing since we first downloaded version 0.16, so it’s doing something right. The comparison is often made with
Minecraft, and it’s not just a business model that they share. Both are games without a storyline, without a victory condition.
KSP gives you a box of tools and a world of challenges and leaves you in charge of the rest. In fact, trying to “beat” the game is probably the least satisfying way to play. Everything new in 1.0 is an improvement and, for all the shortcomings that remain, you can download a mod to plug the gap.
Squad has made it clear that 1.0 is not the last update, just the latest. If you’ve already paid for one of the beta versions, you can download the release version for free and, if you haven’t, it will probably be the best $40 you’ll ever spend.