KSP Weekly: Taking a ride to the Moon!

Welcome to KSP Weekly everyone. In 1971, the ninth manned mission of the Apollo program took place, Apollo 15. It was the fourth to land on the Moon and it was the first mission on which the Lunar Rover Vehicle was used. The mission began on July 26 and ended on August 7, but it was on this day, an hour before the burn to take the crew back home, that the last activity in lunar orbit took place: the release of the Apollo 15 Particles and Fields Subsatellite (PFS-1). The satellite was released into lunar orbit from the SIM bay. Its main objectives were to study the plasma, particle, and magnetic field environment of the Moon and map the lunar gravity field. Specifically, it measured plasma and energetic particle intensities and vector magnetic fields, and facilitated tracking of the satellite velocity to high precision. The satellite orbited the Moon and returned data from August 4, 1971 until January 1973. In later years, through a study of many lunar orbiting satellites, scientists came to discover that most low lunar orbits (LLO) are unstable. Fortunately, PFS-1 had been placed, unknown to mission planners at the time, very near to one of only four lunar frozen orbits, where a lunar satellite may remain indefinitely. The Apollo 15 mission was regarded at the time as the most successful manned flight ever achieved and it was very well documented, giving us some of the most emblematic video and photographic footage of the Apollo missions (NASA’s full image archive for the mission is located here). How many of you have tried to recreate this mission on KSP, with both the LRV and PFS-1 deployments? It’s certainly a challenge worth trying, but now let’s move on to what you all came here for…news regarding KSP development.



The QA team is continuing with the verification testing of the final bug fixes for the upcoming 1.3.1 patch release. As part of this effort, the team has to double-check various hard-to-find strings, to ensure that they are present and correct. String testing, in case you didn’t know, is the testing of a collection of units that have a logical relationship or flow from the user’s perspective. As with every patch, we try to include the biggest amount of fixes we can and QA plays a crucial part identifying the issues and verifying the ones reported by the community, so that the devs can correct them.

Similarly, QA is playing a huge role on the current phase of the development of the updated version of KSP for consoles. As we’ve explained, we are currently putting the console builds under the most scrutinous testing we can with both the internal and external testing teams throwing everything at them. This close inspection has allowed us to detect even the smallest issues. For instance, the team recently found an interesting console bug, where going back to the Space Center will also revert a craft to the runway under some circumstances. This and any issue found is immediately and directly reported to our friends at Blitworks, who with the help and expertise from our team work to find a solution and implement it for the following builds. Additionally, at this point we can confirm that there will be partial support for the cheats menu on consoles, but not everything will work as it does on PC today. However, we will try to improve the support in future versions we release.

The development of the Making History Expansion continues and each passing week it’s looking better. Although the work on its design continues, that hasn’t stopped the devs to advance with the development and to continue the work on some of the features. Some of the tasks involves improving processes that help to organize ourselves. For example, this week we’ve spent some time on the build pipeline so we can start testing the work on asset bundles and expansion loading throughout the entire process. This involves updating the Jenkins build jobs, adding steps where necessary and sorting out the distribution endpoints as well. Jenkins is a server that helps to automate the non-human part of the development process, with continuous integration and facilitating technical aspects of continuous delivery. It’s not as exciting as coding in KSP, but is sort of important if we want people to be able to play all our work.

In other respects, the devs completed the work from last week regarding the UI elements for all vessel parameters and setup for the start of a mission. They also completed hooking up the Mission Builder scene to the VAB and SPH scenes to allow the Mission Creator to switch to these scenes in order to create vessels they wish to supply as part of a mission. Also saving of vessels in the VAB and SPH during mission building persists these files to the mission folder and when the Mission Creator returns to the Mission Builder Scene directly from the VAB or SPH any craft files they have saved become immediately available for them to assign in their mission. As a Mission Creator you can provide already built vessels for a mission or allow the player to build their own within the constraints defined by the Mission Creator.

The vessel placement on celestial bodies feature got its final touches this week, too. It is now integrated with the rest of the Mission Builder and the Mission Creator will now be able to rotate vessels and edit their positional values in the different panels of the UI. So now we are able to add vessel placement and information within mission nodes. Hopefully this will all be finalized in the next week and this will bring a great deal of functionality to the Mission Builder, along with the other features that are already implemented as we are starting to see some features of the Mission Builder drawing closer to development complete. Similarly, some of the devs have been working on a new Orbit Editor, which will let Mission Creators manipulate the orbit of different objects, such as the vessel location, and make orbit comparison tests around the celestial bodies.

Apart from the tasks mentioned above, the team has been working on importing and exporting missions in nice compressed packages, as well as on a UI selection system for the Mission Builder parameters. This new system shows visual cues on the selected parameters and handles the activation and deactivation of the parameter Graphic Action Pane, for short, GAP ( if the parameters have one). The team also spent some time working on the new service module’s code - yes, the one we showed you last week.

Simultaneously, on the artistic side of the development, the team finished with the modeling of the Voskhod 1- and 2-inspired IVAs and are now texturing the details. The artists have also began designing a mobile launch pad! This launch pad has to be modular to fit various diameters, and has to have a terrain leveling system. The artists are taking inspiration from the crawler-transporter with some elements from other industrial facilities and applications. More details will be released later about this mobile launch pad and how it will work.

Finally, we remind you that you still have another week to participate in our latest KSP Challenge - The Mun Arch Speed Challenge! So go 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!