Welcome to KSP Weekly everyone. Yesterday, 15 years ago, the Space Shuttle Columbia was returning to Earth after a 16-day scientific research mission when it disintegrated during re-entry near the end of its 28th mission, resulting in the deaths of all seven crew members. We want to take this opportunity to commemorate Columbia and its crew.
Columbia was the first space-rated orbiter in NASA’s Space Shuttle fleet. The Space Shuttle was different, new, and advanced. It launched vertically like a rocket, flew like a glider on its wings after re-entry, and landed on its wheels on runways; It also had a robotic arm capable of grabbing satellites in orbit for repair in space, or bringing them back to Earth. It launched for the first time on mission STS-1 on April 12, 1981, the first flight of the Space Shuttle program under the command of John Young. Over 22 years of service it completed 27 missions. Its construction began in 1975 and was named after the American ship Columbia Rediviva which, from 1787 to 1793, under the command of Captain Robert Gray, explored the US Pacific Northwest and became the first American vessel to circumnavigate the globe. It is also named after the Command Module of Apollo 11, the first manned landing on another celestial body. After construction, the orbiter arrived at Kennedy Space Center on March 25, 1979, to prepare for its first launch, which was delayed because of technical problems. It was finally launched on April 12, 1981, coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the first human spaceflight (Vostok 1), and returned on April 14, 1981, after orbiting the Earth 36 times, landing on the dry lakebed runway at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
The Space Shuttle Program was expanded due to the success of Columbia, and it was not long before the fleet of Shuttles was expanded by Challenger and a few years later by Discovery and Atlantis. Endeavour was the fifth and final operational shuttle built. These five shuttles flew 135 missions over the course of 30 years. Some of these included several Spacelab missions; the construction of the International Space Station (ISS); crew rotation and servicing of Mir and the ISS; servicing missions, such as to repair the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and orbiting satellites; manned experiments in LEO; carrying the HST to low Earth orbit (LEO), as well as carrying the Chandra X-ray Observatory to a higher orbit, a mission perform by Columbia itself.
Columbia’s final successful mission was STS-109, the fourth servicing mission for the Hubble Space Telescope. Its next mission, STS-107, culminated in the orbiter’s loss when it disintegrated during reentry, killing all seven of its crew, including the first ever Israeli astronaut. The fate of the shuttle had been decided during its take off, when a falling piece of insulation foam struck the left wing and damaged the heat protection system.
The Columbia disaster was the second fatal accident to hit the fleet (the crew of Challenger had been lost in 1986), and consequently, President Bush decided to retire the Shuttle orbiter fleet by 2010 in favor of the Constellation program and its manned Orion spacecraft. The Constellation program was later cancelled with the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 signed by President Obama. Despite the tragic missteps, we can’t undermine the legacy of the Space Shuttle program. Everyone involved should be very proud of what they achieved in a 30 year long trajectory. We can at least keep launching shuttles from the KSC and look back and honor the heroes that gave their lives in the name of exploration and science.
[Development news start here]
Another week full of hard work. At this point of the development process of update 1.4 and the Making History Expansion, the projects are looking pretty much as they will at the release. The main features and components are already implemented, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of work ahead of us. On the contrary, at this stage we need to polish, add the final components, and ensure that everything behaves as it should.
Along those final tasks, and talking about Making History specifically, is the implementation of Tutorial Missions for the Mission Builder. We talked about this last week, and we have made a lot of progress on that this week, and now we are undergoing a review for the advanced tutorial scenarios. To give you a brief idea of what you can expect from the tutorials in terms of content, we can share with you that they’ll be divided in three categories: Basic, Intermediate and Advanced tutorials.
The basic tutorial will teach how to use the nodes and place them in succession for a mission to make sense. You’ll also learn how to save your creations in this tutorial. The intermediate tutorial will introduce additional techniques, like taking advantage of the Action Panes and tailoring specific scenarios and events, i.e., situations that change the course of a Mission, as well as taking advantage of the Scoring system. Finally, the advanced tutorial will cover how to set requirements for crew and parts, custom messages for the success and failure dialogs, the validation dialogs, and how to export your creations to let others play them. As with the base game, taking the time with the tutorials will certainly give you an edge to become an excellent mission creator.
The team has also been working on a cool feature that will allow Mission Creators to preview the light on celestial bodies while in the Mission Builder. This will be done via a slider, which will have values based on the length of the light cycle of each Celestial Body, eg: Kerbin 0-6 hours (a full rotation period on Kerbin last 6 hours). This feature will also work for tidally locked bodies, such as Mun, where its rotation period encompasses a full orbit around Kerbin (6.43 days, or 1 Kerbin Month). The slider will adjust the position of the sun given the universal time of the solar system. This tool will give creators a clear grasp of the shade of a celestial body at a certain point in a mission.
Additionally, the developers are busy improving a Vessel/Part selector feature for part related nodes based on feedback provided by our dedicated testers. With this tool, Mission Creators will be able to determine the vessel and the part that will be affected by the node. A Creator will select the vessel through a drop down menu on the Setting Action Pane (SAP) and then will be able to select the part through a vessel visualizer found in the Graphic Action Pane (GAP).
Having expanded the part catalogue for the game also means that it has become important to balance them and specify where new parts should be located in the Tech Tree. Tasks need to be carefully assessed to give each part a role and place in the game, which can turn out to be more complicated than it seems.
Moreover, this week we began the process of wrapping up our part configurations and file organization for the new parts. All told, between Making History and 1.4, we are including about 75 new parts, not counting mesh and texture variants (include those, and we’re at over 100).
With that many parts, there is a lot of work. From more mundane tasks like asset consolidation, tags, and localization, to more interesting tasks like picking out manufacturers, part names, and flavor text for part descriptions.
One thing we have said for a while now is that the parts should be viewed as being ‘reminiscent of’ rather than 'replicas of’ historic parts. We’ve carried this over to the part names as well. So while you won’t find an RD-108, AJ-10, or an F1, you will see their analogues in the RK-7 'Kodiak’, RE-J10 'Wolfhound’, and KE-1 'Mastodon’.
We have also (finally!) done our balance pass of all of the monopropellant tanks, as well as the Xenon tanks. The QA and Dev teams spent a lot of time figuring out how to make these tanks follow consistent rules without causing major issues for our players.
Monopropellant tanks will follow the same wet/dry ratios as our liquid fuel and LFO tanks. Xenon tanks were all over the map, but have now been standardized, and on the whole, will end up with a slightly lower dry mass, and a bit higher fuel capacity.
We’re also taking a hard look at the new pods, decouplers, etc. to make sure their mass, crash tolerance, cost, etc. are all consistent. The guiding design principle is that the new parts should complement the existing part lineup, without forcing players to either use the new parts exclusively, or hobble them to where they are only useful in the context of the expansion.
As always, all of this will still have to go through another round or two of QA. And while this effort is not all encompassing (we’re focusing on expansion parts and our fuel tanks - both old and new), we’re happy to finally begin zeroing in on better standardization and consistency across our part catalog.
By the way, we have an awesome treat for you. Back when we announced the expansion, we mentioned that we were including a new vintage-spacesuit for Making History, well here it is.
[Click here for high-res pictures]
The spacesuit will come in three different colors, veteran crew members will get their own (orange) and the blue and brown suits will be used for EVA and IVA. Here’s where you’ll help us out! Which color would you rather have for each situation? Click here to enter the poll.
In other news, while we continue to compile feedback and reports regarding Kerbal Space Program Enhanced Edition, several issues have been already solved and our friends at BlitWorks have delivered a new build to be revised and tested by our QA team. If everything goes well, this means that we will be able to release our first console patch fairly soon. In the meantime, you can still help us out by providing us with feedback and by reporting issues in the Bugtracker. Here’s also the Bug Reporting Guide we shared with you last week in case you missed it.
Finally, we encourage you to participate in our latest KSP Challenge - Lithobraking! This time around, the challenge consists of landing on an atmosphereless body with no engines run after 1000 meters radar altitude, and safely landing by using parts to dampen the crash. Are you up to the challenge? 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!
*Information Source:
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Dunbar, B. (n.d.). Space Shuttle Overview: Columbia (OV-102). Retrieved February 01, 2018, from https://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/shuttleoperations/orbiters/columbia_info.html
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(n.d.). Retrieved February 01, 2018, from https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/resources/orbiters/columbia.html