be context-aware, so if you pause
after leaving the atmosphere, for
example, you’ll be able to easily pull
up a tutorial on how to execute a
gravity turn to escape Kerbin’s orbit.
You’ll perform that maneuver in ‘VR
space’, then go back to your real
rocket and put what you learned to
good use. Hopefully.
“The big thing for me is that these
are actually bite-sized, so you have a
whole tutorial section about going to
the Mun, but it’s broken up into a
large number of subsections so you
can learn and practice a specific
piece,” says Markham. And the game
will make suggestions, too. When a
launch inevitably goes awry, the
post-flight report can highlight a
tutorial based on what went wrong,
so you’ll learn as you go.
Given how much of the joy of
Kerbal Space Program lies in
discovery and personal achievement,
there is a risk in over-explaining. The
dev team is aware of that pitfall
because they’ve already stumbled
over it. In early tutorial iterations
they leaned too far into telling players
how to play—the most
straightforward tutorial, after all, is to
tell someone what rocket parts they
need to reach their goal—but realized
that the gratification comes from
figuring it out yourself. “The
important thing is to provide people
with puzzle pieces and informational
context, but don’t tell them how to
isn’t keeping even grander ships with more advanced
parts, secret for now.
The same goes for the planets you’ll explore and the
challenges you’ll face landing on them in adventure mode.
Simpson says they don’t want to mess with the Kerbol
system, which fans know intimately at this point, so much
of the environmental work must be going into other parts
of the galaxy. There’s also a new game system, called
delivery routes, built around connecting your colonies.
“We’ve heard this concern many times from fans, and
it’s something we wanted to address really early on in the
design, ‘Once I’ve successfully performed a resource
delivery between two distant locations, I’m not going to
want to do it again’. So you establish those footholds and
then let them run automatically,” Simpson says. “The
thing that makes it an interesting experience, as you’re
setting up all these individual resource collection
operations, is the puzzle of successfully landing on and
extracting the resources on every celestial body is ideally
different enough that you’re having to solve a new set of
physics problems with a new vehicle design. That’s even
more the case with the new celestial bodies we’re
bringing in on some of the other star systems.”
There are multiple solar systems, then, and tech and
science advancements that continue well into the
intergalactic phase of the game. With mod support
already promised, it’s easy to imagine Kerbal Space
Program 2 lasting for years after launch, even before
updates roll out (and launch is definitely just the
beginning of this team’s plans). But how does multiplayer
fit in? The developers wouldn’t tell me if it’s going to be
small scale or more massively multiplayer. But while
talking about colonies Simpson did reveal that “in co-op, if
you and your friends have all established a base in a
certain spot and are independently bringing different
kinds of resources to store at that base, then you’ll be
seeing a lot of people coming and going”.
I want to know more about Kerbal 2 desperately. But at
the same time I want to forget what
I’ve already learned until it’s out in
2021 and I can play it, because that
sense of discovery really is the magic
of Kerbal. Even more than the new
UI, the tutorials, the colonies, and
everything else I saw, it’s this line
from Nate Simpson that I keep
thinking about, which makes me
confident this team understands the
spirit of Kerbal that lives underneath
all the shiny new toys. “One of the
things I loved about my first
experience with KSP1 was how quiet
a universe it was,” he says. “And how
I had to come to it.”
Let’s see what’s out there.FUTURE TECH
There are no warp drives in Kerbal Space Program 2. So how will you reach far-flung star systems? The developers
have consulted experts and heavily researched plausible future tech that could make interstellar travel possible.
These rocket concepts represent some of those possibilities.These engines use
metallic hydrogen,
which could be twice as
powerful as current
rocket propellants.
KSP2 predicts how
magnets could keep
its 6000 kelvin heat
from melting down
the engine.The ‘holy grail’ of
propulsion tech,
these ‘torchship’
engines are both
high thrust and
fuel efficient. The
fuel type is still
a secret.make the rocket. Concepts, not
prescriptions,” Simpson says.
Kerbal Space Program 2 is clearly
going to be a far easier game to start
playing, but the changes to the UI
and a proper campaign mode should
excite its loyal kerbonauts, too. What
I’m really dying to know—and
unfortunately saw precious little
of—is what awaits outside the Kerbol
System, and what it’s going to be like
exploring it with friends in
multiplayer.SPACE WALK WITH ME
I learned precious little about just
how big Kerbal Space Program 2 truly
is, but I did come away from two
days of interviews with some clues.
The team is around 30 people and
still growing, and that’s not including
support from publisher Private
Division’s QA team, who the
developers praised as being seasoned
Kerbal fans and very helpful. It’s
easily the biggest team Kerbal has
ever had behind it.
The ships you’ll eventually be able
to build are immense. Shana
Markham showed me a space station
with an interstellar craft docked at it,
and that ship wouldn’t be possible to
construct on the planet’s surface (its
engine would take up most of the
Vehicle Assembly Building, which
places hard limits on the size of
whatever you’re building). And I’d be
more than surprised if the dev teamKerbal Space Program 2
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