Kerbal Space Program 2

The long awaited follow up to Kerbin Space Program is finally here, in Early Access.

Early Access means the game is far from finished, so I am expecting it to be buggy. But let me take a look on what has been changed, based on my experiences from the previous game. But before we start with the game, let us look at the roadmap.

The game is released in Early Access, I’m expecting a lot of patches up ahead. The game is limited to sandbox mode for now, while these things are solved under the hood. Next out is Science, and most likely we will see a Carreer mode like we are used to in KSP1. After that it looks like we will get all the new stuff. Colonies, Interstellar Travel and Multiplayer. The Exploration part would most likely “only” be additional star systems to explore, and possibly different resources to extract fuel and building materials for your colonies and interstellar missions.

Because of those insane grahic requirements, first thing I did was turn graphic details way down. Actually I minimized anything I thought could impact on my framerate, and I put up the framerate counter on my screen. My computer isn’t the beefiest, though I would say even with 3 years it should be strong enough for most games. I’m running the game on an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X with nVidia GeForce 1660Super and 16GB of RAM, running the game from an M2 SSD. With this my framerate fluctuatet between 15 and 30 fps most of the time, though I saw the framerate briefly drop below 5 on multiple occacions.

There was lots of improvements to the VAB, and with the customized mission colors preset in all the parts I can easilly make the spacecrafts with my chosen pallet. I’m guessing these customized colors will give a personal touch to things when we get multiplayer, where each player can have their own scheme.

I started off building a simple forst rocket. Basically the same as you would build as your first one in KSP1, just a Flee solid fuel booster with a small command module and a parachut. At launch I got a Kerbal countdown, I have in KSP1 been using a kOS script for countdowns, so this is welcome. Of course it should be Jebson Kerbal doing the countdown, not the KAL9000 module. Weather at first launch must have been perfect, as my trajectory 10.000m streight up and down again landed me just next to the launch pad.

Next mission to get into orbit and back down. I built a larger rocket, added a cargo space for a satellite, turned out I had space for two. A few boosters to get to a descent altitude, and off I went.

Things have moved a little around on the screen, and there are some minor changes to the physics, which created some minor challenges. In addition, I suffered a bug in my first attempt on returning from orbit, resulted in the entire craft with crew to explode. Oh well, it is Kerbin after all, we DO fail with style.

The game is still far from playable, at least with my hardware, but from what I could see, the physics engine is much better, and everything is much more detailed. From orbit I saw something looking like a possible town, or another space center, or some huge anomaly, on the mainland not far from where Nye Island is on the KSP1 map. Yes the overall map seems to use the same planet, the continents are roughly the same shape, BUT WITH WEATHER AND DETAILS.

I’ll be doing more flights over the next couple of days, but most likely I’d wait a few service patches before putting in serious game hours.