KSP Weekly: What a week!

Welcome to KSP Weekly, everyone. What a week! A big week rounded off by big news: The Kerbal Chronicles, the Localization Pre-release and of course the Making History Expansion. We are very excited and we hope you are, too. With all these announcements we can also start sharing more information in these weekly updates, something we’ve been dying to do over the past few months, so without further ado, let’s begin.



The whole team has been working impossibly hard to get the Pre-Release ready in time. There’s still polish to do, but most of the gremlins have been slayed now. The core QA team have found it harder and harder to play KSP in multiple languages as more and more of it was localized. However, the language specialists came to the rescue, not only in providing refined translations, but also reporting the problems we could no longer read. We owe them a debt of gratitude. Now it’s over to the many players who are now able to enjoy KSP in their own language, and we hope there are not too many mistakes. Please let us know via our bug tracker. The big news is now out of course, and we are now free to not only talk about the other project, but shift more effort into testing the expansion out. Things are looking great so far. Parts are sublime, and the layouts for the editor are exciting for the creative possibilities they will offer.

QA expert and poet, sal_vager, wrote a little poem to express his excitement about the Making History Expansion, maybe even given some further details between the lines…

The expansion was revealed, as you can see With many new parts to fill the tech tree Plus mission creation and historical flights That we can share, and play through the nights Vostok, Gemini, Apollo and more Crafted by Roverdude, so no eyesores Drag n drop editor, weave your own story The Mission Expansion, making history

Robbonaut, our game designer, might be the most excited of us all, since he can finally talk about what he’s been up to after months working in silence! Yes, you’ve guessed it - he’s been working with the team on the new expansion. And like all of us, he is really looking forward to showing you all what we have in store and of course talking more in the coming weeks about all the exciting features we have planned!

The programming team had a very busy week, too. They’ve been working on localization: refactoring code, adding tags to strings and lots of bug squashing to get as many kinks ironed out of the Localization Pre-Release as possible, which is looking good, but with plenty of work to go. And now, with the help and eyes of the wider community we’re sure that all new languages will have the same Kerbal experience to offer.

But yes, now that the big announcement is out devs, who during all this time have also been working on design and development of Making History, can talk about the expansion work in future KSP Weeklies!

To give you a taste of the work that has been done: Roverdude focused last week on finishing up our new 1.875m lander inspired by the Apollo LEM. And since a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s a screenshot. Usual caveats that all parts have to make it through QA, etc. Some interesting things on our LEM - RCS is built in, it supports a crew of two Kerbals, and while it lacks a reaction wheel (depending on RCS for maneuvering), it does have space for LFO, and can be connected to either a 1.25. or 1.875m stack.

We also want to take this opportunity to give a huge shout-out to all participants of The Kerbal Chronicles contest. We’ve said this already but Art3misa, Badie and UomoCapra really enjoyed reading through all of the participant’s articles. They were incredible and although not all made it to the final magazine, we really encourage you to read them, because they are worth it. You can do so by visiting this thread.

And, of course, if you haven’t seen the final magazine… check it out!



We had a blast working on it, specially Leticia, our lead artist, who, as you imagine worked on the awesome art of the magazine.



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!