KSP Weekly: A Voyage in a Lifetime

Welcome to KSP Weekly everyone. On August 10, 1989, the Voyager 2 spacecraft detected two partial rings of debris around Neptune, providing the first direct evidence that Neptune has rings. Neptune’s flyby was the last planetary visit by the probe and to this day it has been the only spacecraft to ever visit the ice giant. The Voyager 2 space probe was launched by NASA on August 20, 1977, to study the outer planets. Part of the Voyager program, it was launched 16 days before its twin, Voyager 1, on a trajectory that took longer to reach the Jovian (1979) and Saturnian systems (1981) but enabled further encounters with Uranus and Neptune, the former having also only been visited by it in 1986. Although its primary mission ended with the exploration of the Neptunian system on October 2, 1989, Voyager 2 is now in its extended mission to study the outer reaches of the Solar System and has been operating for 39 years, 11 months and 22 days as of today. It remains in contact through the Deep Space Network and at a distance of 115 AU (1.72×1010 km) from the Sun, Voyager 2 is one of the most distant human-made objects, along with Voyager 1, New Horizons, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. The probe is moving at a velocity of 34,390.98 mph (55,346.92 km/h) relative to the Sun and is traveling through the heliosheath. Upon reaching interstellar space, Voyager 2 is expected to provide the first direct measurements of the density and temperature of the interstellar plasma. If you want learn more about the mission, its status and see the wonderful gallery of images taken by the probe, click here. Have you ever tried to visit as many planets as Voyager 2 on a single trajectory in KSP? Kinda difficult, right? But let’s move on and talk about KSP development.



This week the development team was busy completing the preparations for the upcoming 1.3.1 pre-release. Soon we’ll announce its release details, so stay tuned for that.

In other news, the upgraded version of KSP for consoles continues. This week specifically, the QA team worked their way through a growing list of Ready-To-Test fixes from Blitworks on the bugtracker, and discussing with design on how best to refine the various KSP controls and control modes for the console platforms. As you can imagine, the QA team provides the devs with very valuable input on this regard, since they spend a huge amount of hours playing these builds and all of them are already very experienced KSP players.

As usual, work on the Making History Expansion was also part of this week’s tasks at hand and things are going very well and progressing nicely! For starters, its design work continued, each week details here and there are tweaked so that the pathway that devs follow remains clear and makes sense as a whole. At the end of the day, every project needs to follow some sort of blueprints to be successful and these guidelines need to also have the flexibility to adapt to the given circumstances and needs that unfold as the team moves forward. Coupled with the design, there are the task that involve distribution of assignments, which involve among other things the rounding out of the backlog stories and work lists for the expansion so devs can plan out the work and sprints, as well as reviewing each other’s work through our internal review processes before a story is completed.

Devs have also been working on a system for displaying mission objectives in a way that makes sense. Objectives form the basis of what the player sees on the Mission Summary Screen, giving the player an idea of what that mission entails. They have also been working on getting crew assignment working nicely in the Mission Builder.

Besides the work mentioned above, the devs also dealt with the merging of the vessel placement code with the overall Vessel Management elements in the Mission Builder. The team has also been working on a new tool for celestial bodies to specify target areas on their surface. This tool will be pretty useful to mark objectives, or perhaps hazard zones. Similarly the orbit editor, which we mentioned last week, is still being worked on and, as with anything that has to do with orbits, there’s a whole lot of math going on there to keep our devs entertained for a while! And to wrap up the Making History Expansion’s development update, the new Service Module’s code is still being written into the game.

On the artistic side of development, while also work on the next American-inspired engine and on the Voskhod 2 -inspired IVA continues. There has been some modeling in the agenda, too, specifically on the Mk 1-3 IVA.

Finally, we encourage you to participate in our latest KSP Challenge - The Atari Challenge. This time around, the challenge consists of capturing 2 asteroids with a single vessel and a single launch from Kerbin. There’s a scoring system to determine who the most adept asteroid hunters are. Are you up to the challenge? Check it out and share your creations!



That’s it for this week. Be sure to join us on our official forums, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Stay tuned for more exciting and upcoming news and development updates!

Happy launchings!