KSP Weekly: The discovery of the Kerbol… I mean TRAPPIST-1 system

Welcome to KSP Weekly, everyone! On Wednesday we were all surprised by the reveal of the largest batch of Earth-size, habitable-zone planets around a single star by NASA’s scientists. We’re talking of course about the TRAPPIST-1 system, which not only has an interesting resemblance to the Kerbol system, but three of its planets are firmly located in the habitable zone of this ultra-cool dwarf star and most likely could have liquid water on them. The key ingredient to life as we know it! This system of planets is relatively close to us at around 40 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. Although we won’t see a mission to the TRAPPIST-1 system during our lifetime, this discovery will move forward our understanding of Earth-size exoplanets in the universe and the likelihood of life outside the solar system. So hyped, but we’re here to talk about everything Kerbal, so let’s begin.



The QA team have been testing tutorials, working hand in hand with the art department to check KSPedia and overall making progress on the localization. At last the big picture is coming into focus. Additionally, the terrain fix is coming along nicely, but not quite there yet, it’s good to have the thorough eye of QA to check up these kind of things. Behind the scenes, our bug tracker software has received some upgrade love. There’s just a few visible differences that you may notice when reporting bugs, but more importantly it brings it up to date and will allow us to use it in more efficient ways in the future.

As expected, the programming front has also been busy with localization, looking at strings, reading strings, finding strings, refactoring variables. Similarly, the team has been making changes to the KSP code to support localization of Biomes, Science, Vessel situations and CelestialBodies Names. The Lingoona grammar engine has also been documented by some of the devs: good practices, pitfalls and and how it’s been applied across KSP source code.

And of course, there’s been some bug fixing, including the seam issue on the KSC’s Runway, which is being tested by our QA volunteers as you read this just to make sure that it all works properly. In fact, JPLRepo wrote a Developer Article called Who needs a level runway anyway? Which talks about about the whole process, so if you haven’t, we recommend you to give it a look, it is very informative and interesting.

The artist have been busy, too. Paul Amsterdam, for example has been fixing KSPedia layout issues and is working on some video tutorials for the localization update.

Furthermore, the team has been working on some illustrations for something you’re gonna see rather soon (if you haven’t, yet). We all love the era aesthetics and the team is certainly having a good time doing these.

Finally we just want to let you know that we will make an important announcement in the forum next Thursday, March 2nd at 16:00 EST. So stay tuned!

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!

Happy launchings!