COACH KERBAL
KSP2’s developers are putting tons of work into tutorials, to help
teach the game’s many systems and, you know, astrophysics.
Tutorial animations for science concepts will explain big ideas
with cute visual metaphors. In this one, Kerbals teach you about
thrust using bicycles and a classic big guy, little guy setup.categories will intelligently show you other parts that will
fit on your rocket. There’s a painter’s palette that lets you
color your ship, customization that will be essential for
multiplayer. You can still rotate the camera 360 degrees,
but you can also enter Blueprint mode, which gives you a
perfectly ‘flat’ view to facilitate easy symmetry.
And—this is the megaton—you can now build multiple
assemblies in the same workspace, rather than having to
build a whole rocket in one go. “You can have a bunch of
different highly complex elements that are free-floating,”
says Simpson. “Then combining them with the symmetry
tools, you can make, for example, a radially mounted
booster that has a lot of complexity in itself, and then
attach or detach it willy nilly.”
I watched Markham build a rocket, then a booster that
would add the fuel and thrust needed to escape Kerbin’s
atmosphere. She simply highlighted the sub-assembly,
clicked a hotkey to toggle three-way radial symmetry, and
then attached three identical boosters to her ship.
You save an entire workspace instead of a specific ship,
so you can create variants, with parts and boosters that
are easy to swap out for different types of missions. This
will come in especially handy as you start building
colonies—you’ll have to haul an unwieldy ‘founder
module’ and other supplies to the build site, which will
require solving a whole different set of physics problems.The Vehicle Assembly Building has one more huge
feature up its sleeve: a built-in trip planner, inspired by
community members who created intricate charts to
show the potential velocity a rocket will need to reach
targets like the Mun or Duna. These became so popular
even the developers used them. “I’ll be glad to not have a
printout posted on my wall,” says Markham.
For many Kerbal players, the early hours of the game
are spent building a rocket and failing to reach your
destination, without necessarily understanding why. “This
is a way to tighten up that part of the iteration loop, by
giving you real-time information about how far your
vehicle can go in its current configuration,” says Nate
Simpson. The trip planner lets you set a destination and
shows the best-case velocity for each stage of your rocket.
As you swap out boosters and other parts, you can see
how that will affect just how far you can fly.
‘Potential’ is the key word there, because the trip
planner won’t stop you from building spectacularly
unstable, explosive rockets. Simpson says that with each
addition KSP2’s developers have tried to distinguish
between “constructive failure” and “frustrating failure”.
The new tools are meant to ensure failures allow you to
learn something (or at least laugh at Jebediah Kerman’s
horrified face as your rocket corkscrews back to the
ground at a thousand miles per hour).
“We don’t want you to make the same mistake twice,”
Simpson says. “We want you to make lots of different
mistakes.” And now when you make those mistakes, KSP
2 will have a lot more help to offer.CLASS IN SESSION
Truly getting into Kerbal Space Program inevitably means
spending hours delving into YouTube videos on rocket
science and the game itself. Even if you have a physics
degree, there’s still a steep learning curve to
understanding how to work Kerbal’s interface. KSP2 fixes
some obvious oversights and makes the user interface as a
whole more elegant.
Flight tools are now clustered together in more logical
ways, with navigation on the left and time controls in the
center, a place of prominence that reflects how important
fast forwarding will be as you start launching long
interstellar journeys. There’s now a pause button, which I
fervently hope gets a tool-tip that says ‘DON’T PANIC’.
Pausing will be one of the main ways players access
KSP2’s greatly expanded tutorials, which include a
mixture of interactive tutorials to guide you through using
interface elements, and animations that give you a crash
course in rocketry. The example I saw adeptly explained
high thrust and low thrust rocket engines with a pair of
kerbals biking up a steep hill (see left).
“We’re trying to create a system where the player
comes to the tutorial with the desire to gain a specific
category of information,” says Simpson. The tutorials will- Contemplating running out of
fuel in space. - Puny arms (aka a low-thrust
engine) - Comfier shoes for a longer,
slower ride.- Confident his muscles can
propel him out of Kerbin’s
atmosphere (aka up a hill) - Absolute unit biceps (not a
scientific term)
- Confident his muscles can
LITTLE
GUYBIG
GUY12312LEFT: We have
enough fuel to get
home, right?
Kerbal Space Program 2
COVER FEATURE
LEFT: Colonies will
start simple, but offer
new staging grounds
out of Kerbin’s
atmosphere.