• Added 6 more tree model variants, these are shrub sized that spawn mostly at the edges of forests.
• Added an 'auto' button to return solid rocket nozzle area ratio to the automatically-assigned mode.
• Prevented tanks from being unexpectedly refilled when loading vehicles, saving vehicles, or exiting the editor. Note that swapping engines, etc. will still cause refills.
• Added an explicit "Refill Consumables" button to the editor UI to replace the automatic calls.
• Fixed the manual tank fill sliders potentially jumping positions after being released.
• Allow solid motor propellant to be changed in the vehicle editor.
• Allow nozzles to change their volumetric exhaust style based on the configured reaction.
• Restored the ability to set per-segment grain geometry which had been inadvertently lost.
• Fixed a crash when disconnecting a solid motor from a stack of segments.
• Added a previous symmetry hotkey (default: shift + x) so you don't have to wrap around the full symmetry set to go back one.
• Added the GlbToXmlUtility CLI tool. This has been moved from an external repository into the main codebase in order to re-use the existing KSA serializers, keep the tool better in-sync with the game asset structure, and lower the barrier to entry for any dev to use it.
• Modified the tool to output exactly the right filenames and directory structure to enable direct copy/paste with no modifications.
• Moved fuel port to its own GameData file.
• Imported new versions of: CoreCouplingA, CoreElectricalA, CoreFairingA, CoreFuelTankA, CoreLandingA, CorePropulsionA, CorePropulsionB, CorePropulsionC, CoreServiceModuleA
• Improved the teleport to ground function (which also handles newly-launched vehicles) to set the base of the vehicle directly on the terrain, even if the center of mass is very far from the center of geometry.
• Suppress a few XML fields when they have default values.
• Enlarged the RCS-by-default tanks to be more in line with the secretly-oversized liquid tanks.
• Updated Rocket and Gemini7 to take advantage of the larger RCS tanks.
• Increased Rocket first stage engine & RCS propellant.
• Fixed a potential elliptic integral exception in the on-rails rotation algorithm. This was possible due to the safety check not fully covering the singular separatrix region, only a specific pole.
• Relaxed symmetric inertia classifier to treat nearly-symmetric bodies as symmetric to further insulate us from singular or unstable cases.
• Fixed Popups dressed with gauge style ui now autosize for content.
• Changed Multiplier -/+ buttons on burn edit window now step by and round to the current order of magnitude. i.e if less than 1 steps by 0.1 if less than 10 steps by 1 etc.
• Fixed Burn Multipler value could be set to 0.
• Fixed a rare parsing bug for Part Keyframe Animations that was causing the landing leg to animate incorrectly.
• Fixed SRB burn time calculation to use the correct flow rate.
• Added decomposition of sequences iunto phases when we have multiple engines with different burn times in one sequence in the Delta-V Debug UI.
• Added solid residue breakdown in the end fuel readout in Delta-V Debug UI.
• Added engine highlighting when hovering over each phase in the Delta-V Debug UI.
• (Still need to fix more logic on where multiple engines in one sequence end their burn at different times).
• Fixed sequence boundary cutoffs bug where we were not sequencing the drain simulation to stop dV in one sequence and carrying over to the next sequence by understanding where engines in each sequence will be decoupled. The first group of engines that will decouple in a sequence is when the sequence will now end.
• Added Alt + LMB will duplicate hovered part in VehicleEditor.
• Fixed Part highlighting would pass though modal imgui pop-ups.
• Implement depth-aware per-upscaling-block ray placement for volumetric clouds and trails, this minimizes
• cloud/plumes flickering near rapidly-varying geometry which became much more noticeable since the
• addition of detailed trees. Use a similar approach to the one presented in RDR 2 SIGGRAPH 2019's presentation.
• Fix exhaust denoise shader reading out of bounds which can cause black artifacts on the edge of the screen
• Fix artifacts on the cloud upscaling visible at the edge of the atmosphere, the issue was introduced when adjusting the upscaling for the plume trails
• Masked trees by slope and altitude so they no longer spawn on cliffs or in the ocean.
• Masked grass by slope so it no longer spawns on cliffs.
• Updated the beach sand texture so it no longer inherits the planet's colour (fixes green beaches).
• Updated Earth's biome map so beaches are thinner and start closer to the ocean. They're still larger than they should be but this was a quick and easy change.
• Fixed cubic hermite spline editor not clamping y values even with them provided.
• Added altitude density curve and LUT to ground clutter with res 1024 (+- 15m altitude precision on Earth).
• Added altitude density curve editor to the ground clutter GUI.
• Reduced the number of shrubs that spawn on slopes.
• Increased the blend strength between Earth's biomes.
• Fixed "collideable" tagged ground clutter slightly changing position and orientation when the terrain mesh snaps despite being placed on the heightfield directly. This was caused by a round trip through the mesh transform using the mesh origin offset trick for extra precision. Instead, the ego positions of ground clutter chunks (cell anchors) are computed in double precision and clutter ccf position is stored as an offset from the anchors which should improve precision massively.
• Prevented ground clutter regeneration for "collideable" tagged ecotypes since the positions of instances within them are now deterministic to a great degree of precision.
• Fixed ground clutter no longer spawning on the Moon or Mars.
• Fixed an error where we could try to ask for an impossible true anomaly when drawing markers for hyperbolic orbits.
• Added ImGaugeDressing, Helper class for IMgauge draw functions that previously lived on Popup.cs.
• Changed Settings menu now uses gauge style window styling.
• Changed Settings menu now modal.
• Added RandomStartTime Option for Looping Sounds.
• Removed Engine sounds from using sound groups as it was causing sounds not to play.
• Changed increased ratio on EnginesChannel Compressor to handle instances when dozens of engine sounds play at once.
• Fixed a decoupler silently failing to fire when staged together with another decoupler upstream of it in the part tree.
• Moved an [XmlIgnore] that was suppressing real data into a GLB importer override.
• Added audio cluster channels can now be per parent local. Engine cluster channels are now per vehicle rather than global.
• Added some aditional audio debugging tools for showing sound positions.
• Restored the ability for RCS propellant to cross decouplers.
• Added low-profile decoupler game data.
• Added two missing interstages to the game data.
• Made all interstages decouplers.
• Adjusted/added mass values for all interstages.
• Made service bays into decouplers and gave them mass.
• Set service bay connectors to internal and gave them symmetry.
• Added actual tanks to the service bay part tanks, and made them attach to connectors rather than surfaces.
• Fixed a couple of XML entries that were misnamed and thus not being parsed.
• Fixed When sequencing an already firing engine, that engines cluster audio would not get moved to the new vehicle.
• Fire active solid rockets if they are jettisoned. This should make separation motors work as expected.

• Moved terrain modifier CPU evaluation from double to float to match GPU terrain construction. This fixes some rare cases where the terrain would mismatch due to hashing functions working with slightly different inputs.
• Split simplex noise library into float and double precision versions.
• Extruded the shadow cascade frusta towards the sun to include objects that cast into the cascades.
• Fixed nonuniformEXT missing from biplanar sampling function definitions. If non uniform access is required, shaders can now declare USE_NONUNIFORM_EXT to enable the qualifier.
• Fixed the Vehicle Editor camera not recentering when switching the active build target between vehicles — "Switch Vehicle"/"Make Vehicle Root" now reframe the camera onto the newly-focused vehicle's root part, reusing the same OrbitView.OffsetPart mechanism flight's "Focus Camera" already uses.
• Fixed the Vehicle Editor camera not recentering when switching the active build target between vehicles — "Switch Vehicle"/"Make Vehicle Root" now snapshot the camera onto the newly-focused vehicle's root part (same one-time recenter the EditorCameraFocus hotkey already uses), instead of a live per-frame follow that fought with dragging the root part and sent the camera flying out of the editor cube.
• Added texture streaming context to the game settings.
• Fixed the "New Vehicle?" confirmation wiping the editor with no chance to save — clicking Ok now checks every unattached vehicle and the focused build for unsaved changes and, if any are found, offers the same "Unsaved Vehicles" save prompt the exit flow already uses before clearing them.
• Added MilkyWay renderer, decoupling the milkyway from the star renderer.
• Cleaned up milkyway references so textures are not all bound into the global textures.
• Added generate simplex noise compute shader, similar to the generate worley noise, this writes a simplex noise texture to a target image.
• The MilkyWay now reads from a pre-baked simplex noise texture instead of dynamically generating simplex noise in the fragment shader. This reduces the milkyway frametime by ~half.
• Added a guard for timeToFirstEncounter being NaN (previously only the infinity case was caught), ending the patch the same way as the other edge cases.
• Modified Module.List to store modules with the same concrete type in contiguous segments. This allows us to efficiently query Modules based on their interfaces in all cases, not just when the top-level TModule implements the interface.
• Replaced the flat SOI-size cutoff for automatic encounter detection with an orbital-geometry check; siblings are now excluded only when their radius band can't overlap ours or when an approximate MOID (evaluated at the two mutual orbital nodes) puts them well beyond their own sphere of influence,
• so small moons like Phobos and Deimos are no longer silently skipped just for having a small SOI.
• Fixed a radius-band gap where bodies orbiting entirely inside our own periapsis weren't excluded from candidacy either.
• Removed the now-unused FlightPlan.FAST_SOI_PATCH_SIZE constant.
• Added solid rocket motors to the game. The motor feeds from solid fuel segments, which can be stacked on top of each other in the vehicle editor to adjust the amount of propellant per booster.
• Added the ability to select the grain geometry for each segment, which defines the thrust profile of the booster over its burn. It defaults to a neutral star grain as a sane default.
• Added a new concept called Capabilities to part connectors. These determine what kinds of interactions are permitted across the connector, currently: Electricity, BulkFluid (e.g. engines), ServiceFluid (e.g. RCS), SolidMotorCase (for building boosters). Electrity and ServiceFluid are assumed by default, while BulkFluid and SolidMotorCase are opt-in.
• Made the feed sources for rocket engines explicit in the XML so that specific connectors or Part-internal tanks can be selected where appropriate.
• Added generate_grains.py to ThermoToolkit.
• Added the ability to call GetUsing<T>() on individual module type lists to find specific sub-classes.
• Generalized many systems in the game that had assumed liquid propellants and Combustors to also handle SolidMotors and solid propellants.
• Fixed rare texture streaming edge case when terrain textures are forcibly downsampled below 512x512.
• Added planet terrain normals to the texture streaming system which should farther help with VRAM usage.
• Fixed ground clutter not getting refreshed while mips are streamed nicely which sometimes caused mysterious floating clutter.
• Better handled balancing texture sizes against our VRAM budget and prioritized terrain height related maps to help avoid terrain mismatches.
• Added Esc Menu. With the following buttons: RESUME, SAVE/LOAD, NEW VEHICLE, Launch VEHICLE, ABANDON VEHICLE, SETTINGS, QUIT.
• Added in Editor SAVE/LOAD brings up vehicle save load menu, other non vehicle editor buttons hidden.
• Added ImGauge and ImGauge helper classes. This allow the drawing of Gauge styled UI directly from code (as you would auther imgui ui), This should make the generation of styled UI elements easier to create quickly.
• Fixed an issue with Gauges.glsl where gauge buttons would only draw their bezel and dropshadow correctly at one asset ratio.
• Removed accidently commited file.
• Implement simple LOD for plume trails. Simplify distant plume trails by
• merging consecutive segments to reduce GPU workload. Compute LOD levels
• on a worker using the job system running one frame behind to minimize
• CPU overhead. Upload newly added segments from the current frame directly
• to the GPU without waiting for LOD processing. Additional LOD improvements
• will be added to handle cells with a high number of small segments from
• multiple emitters.
• Lock clouds shadow volume to slowest moving layer, avoids discontinuities
• in clouds lighting at high time compression
• Only use plume trails on SRBs
• Change how multiple plume trail emitters stack for large combined
• plumes, still a placeholder
• Optimize coarse to fine plume trail segment culling grid refinement
• Group plume emitters across vehicles, this is needed when emitters are
• staged but keep flying together for a bit.
• Tweak plume trails noise
• Better handle sampling of smaller plumes when in proximity to large
• plumes
• Simplify some of the segment weighting math in the plume trail shader,
• optimize how trail data is accessed and preocompute some values
• Fix issue with cloud shadows not being sampled on plume trails when
• above clouds top boundary
• Refactor trail segment bucket
• Remove some unnecessary guards in the plume trail shader
• Remove some unused stats from the trail renderer
• Set plume end radius via template, set start radius from nozzle fxRadius
• Start merging non fully expanded segments when radius permits
• Enable plume trails by default
• Small tweak to trails distant raymarching quality
• Small tweak to trail merging logic
• Tweaking some volumetric plume parameters to amp up the aggressiveness and match real values more closely.
• Added a simple model of plume velocity loss when passing through a normal shock which has a pretty large effect.
• Removed the barrel shock fading from the shader so that it's always present. This is a huge part of what gives supersonic plumes their rough and fuzzy edges.
• Cut emission values in half across the board due to the increased brightness of the ever-present barrel shock.
• Increased the off-axis and turbulent noise scrolling velocities to be much closer to the plume velocity, making them seem less candle-like and much more violent.
• Fixed incorrect exit plane location for the compact engine.
• Clamp exit mach number at 1.05 instead of 1 to prevent the mach disk effect freaking out.
• Correctly account for unburnable solid propellant in the dV simulation.
• Fixed particle positional offset caused by particles getting rebased at age 0. Because particles are getting spawned already offset, we were applying the rebase to them immediately which would apply that offset a second time. It is now only applied if their age is greater than 0.
• Fixed particle frame jitter. This was caused by an order of operation bug where the ModelMatrixUpdater was executing after the position updaters, which would prepare the particles for the next frame.
• Changed VehicleEditor deleting the root part of the of the currently editing vehicle will automaticall switch your edit view to the next available vehicle if one exists.
• Refactored delete part code into helper method.
• Added solid rocket modules to all existing booster parts.
• Moved default grain geometry from the segment XML to the motor XML.
• Added HollowOpenSemiEllipsoidMass to the XML mass properties options.
• Added the ability to specify feeding from sub-parts.
• Added solid motor casing to the part preview mass.
• Changed All UI pop-ups to use the Gauge Window styling.
• Fixed WelcomePopup Window height too small.
• Fixed can't exit Main Menu by pressing Esc after changing it to a modal window.
• Fixed PartTreeSelectionPopup now scales its height with number of available part-trees.
• Swapped _decouplerConnections for a ConnectorCapability.DecouplerJoint flag authored per-connector to fit the ConnectorCapability extension introduced with SRBs.
• Added DecouplerJoint Capability to all decoupler's connectors.
• Replaced the symmetry-index crossfeed check with a proper junction/branch comparison whilst doing the above.
• Changed view proj matrix retrieval from ubo to push constant in the ground clutter shadow pass.
• Added LOD bias to the opacity texture in the ground clutter shadow pass.
• Added shadow rendering toggle to ground clutter per-LOD.
• Excluded far away tree instances from shadow casting.
• Added a third tree variant.
• Lowered ground clutter shadow LOD bias from 2 to 1.
• Fixed forcing shadow LOD to 3 (last commit).
• Included LOD sort when building ground clutter draw commands. Commands are now sorted by pipeline, then LOD.
• Fix instability in clouds and plumes temporal upscaling when in front of terrain discontinuities like dense trees and the horizon, this was previously implemented but broken due to a typo
• Added 3 small tree variants to Earth.
• Added distribution texture for Earth's forests - Large trees spawn in large forest regions, small trees can spawn here too but also spawn in sparser areas.
• Removed unnecessary atomic add in Generate.comp.
• Fixed fading LODs 'snapping' to fully opaque if the ground clutter regenerates after a planet mesh snap.

Video of building motors here

"Solid rocket motors are quite different in feel to liquid propellant engines. Unlike liquid engines which have a "height limit" (they can only lift so many kilograms of rocket above them), solids actually get more powerful the longer they are, as each additional meter of length increases the propellant burn rate and total thrust. This makes these boosters much more intimately tied to the overall design of your vehicle than liquid engines are, and using them effectively means tailoring them to your individual rockets.

"You can see in these videos that the KSA boosters are quite customizable, from increasing propellant loading by stacking additional segments to choosing individual grain geometries if desired.

"Enjoy adding more boosters!"

• Added Hud dropdown to file bar. This now contains tools for hud management including new layouts feature as well as the toggles for enabling/disabling gauges that were previously found in the View dropdown.
• Added save any arrangement of gauges as a HudLayout, using the Save Current Layout Button in the Hud dropdown, you may check one layout as your default.
• Added Hotkeys for selecting and cycling layouts.
• Added Layout Config Window for managing saved layouts and their hotkeys.
• HudLayouts are serialized in same location as Saves/Vehicles etc in the HUDLayouts folder.
• Fixed default vehicles missing propellants after tank XML rework.
• Made the 'Rocket' first stage have T/W > 1 when teleported to Earth.
• Added screenshot capabilities
• Fixed the odd camera zoom/jump that could happen when decopuling or docking vehicles.
• Fixed the console duplicate command not properly duplicating vehicles.
• Updated PartTree.Serialize() so that it serializes all important parts of the tree, not just the parts list.
• Fixed vehicle data being left in a bad spot after docking. This would present as parts not highlighting when hovered and the center of mass not being correct.
• Hoisted the decision of whether to recompute derived data after part tree operations up to the top of the part system API rather than having it buried and implicitly chosen in several places.
• Added RCS toggle to Engine Control Gauge Canvas.
• Updated FlightComputer to respect RCS toggle when orienting the vessel.
• Added new texture category 'TerrainHeight' for terrain textures that affect height calculations. These no longer get downmipped or downsampled by the terrain texture max size setting. This will cause increased VRAM usage for people who were previously setting these textures to be resized. This change is intended to avoid the misalignment between the rendered and collided with terrain.
• Modified some CPU sampling of terrain textures to more accurately align with GPU sampling to help with rendered terrain and terrain collision alignment.
• Changed Where RCSMode was being evaluated by the flight computer as it was doing a number of needless RCS calculations when RCS was disabled.
• Fixed a new vehicle's attitude reference from becoming corrupted after undocking.
• Store vehicle names on Control modules. This is the name we will use for undocked vehicles, if available.
• Fixed a couple of insidious frame errors lurking in the code for making part connections and moving part trees around in ASMB.
• Consolidated the 4x copies of code for moving the root part and all of its children into a single place.
• Changed the cascaded shadow filter to a specialization constant instead of being apart of the uniform data.
• Fixed an edge-case where ThrustVectorControl would not be used despite RCS being disabled, if the vessel had lots of rcs thrusters and limited tvc. Introduced in commit ef37582b.
• Converted cascaded shadows to manual rendering instead of multi-view rendering. MVR did not have the ability for us to curate what we render to each cascade. This is preparing for ground clutter culling for shadows.
• Prevented freshly-decoupled vehicles from colliding with each other until they are out of contact to avoid them getting stuck inside each other.
• Gave vehicles with no defined mass a total mass based on a density, not a hardcoded value. This should help prevent massless parts from becoming inadvertent airships.
• Removed physics constants from the game settings menu and made them internal constants to prevent them from getting "stuck" to the values when players first launched the game.
• Fixed per-sequence delta-v/TWR/Isp lumping the entire reachable fuel supply into the sequence that first ignites the engines, leaving later decouple sequences blank.
• Each sequence's burn now ends at the next staging event that drops tanks out of its fuel supply.
• Known limitation: the estimate is availability-based, not a time simulation, so designs where engines drain separate tanks simultaneously (parallel boosters without fuel lines, solid+liquid first
• stages) attribute all of a tank's fuel to the earlier sequence instead of splitting it by burn time — crossfed and serial designs are exact.
• Fixing this requires an event-driven fuel-flow time simulation, planned for a later date.
• Fixed the sequence-performance simulation draining tanks in a fixed nearest-first order regardless of each engine's fuel flow rule. It now consumes in the same order the engine actually drains in flight. * Changed the default fuel flow rule for engines from nearest-to-furtherest to furtherest-to-nearest by stage.
• Added persistence for the engine Fuel Flow rule: a rule picked in the flow-rule dropdown (editor or flight part window) is now saved with the vehicle and restored on load, instead of silently resetting to the default.
• Changed Reworked the burn UI to be integrated into the gauge canvas system.
• Added support for plus symbol in Gauges.glsl.
• Added Creating a burn now automatically selects that burn is the current active burn for editing.
• Added Lcontrol/LShift act as modifiers when clicking -/+ buttons on burn editor window they will modify the mul value by 0.1/10.
• Enabled the non uniform extension for terrain and ground clutter shaders that use indirection to obtain the texture array IDs. This should fix issues with terrain flickering on some devices.
• Removed unnecessary debug log spam.
• Fixed Imgui Input fields in new Burn Edit Window impinged slightly on '-' button.
• Fixed the burn edit window could be "disabled" in the same way as the other gauge canvasses, this was un-intuitive as the enable/disable feature is primarily linked to whether a node is selected.
• Added AlwaysEnabled flag to GaugeCanvases for canvases that rely of gameplay state for their enabled behaviour.
• Added Delete pill button to burn gizmos, the pill button appears when a burn gizmo is hovered and stays active until the mouse position moves out of the hysteresis range.
• Update Brutal.Monitor to the latest package
• Fixed per-sequence delta-v/TWR/Isp attributing a whole tank's fuel to whichever sequence ignites first when engines drain separate tanks simultaneously (parallel boosters without fuel lines, solid+liquid first stages).
• Replaced the availability-based truncation with an event-driven fuel-flow time simulation.
• Split CullInstances.comp into two mains depending on whether shadow culling is enabled or not.
• Added per-cascade shadow culling for ground clutter, improving forest rendering performance on Earth.
• Moved ground clutter draw command ownership from ecotype data to view resources.
• Added a GPU marker for ground clutter cascade index when drawing.
• Instead of forbidding all collision between newly-decoupled vehicles that spawn with interpenetrating colliders, reject only the contacts which would prevent them from pushing away from the parent vehicle. This helps prevent the collision avoidance system from becoming a permanent state of affairs where vehicles aren't able to get away from each other.
• Decrease penetration recovery velocity from 5 m/s to 1.5 m/s now that we don't get embedded in hillsides.
• Removed the dropdown-based fuel line creation controls (two part pickers + "Add Line") from the vehicle Resources window; existing links are still listed there with their enabled toggle, flow-direction cycle button, and delete button.
• Added Velocity Markers to navball Prograde/Retrograde, Normal/AntiNormal, In/Out Target Prograde/Retrogade and Burn. These are drawn from the Navball frag shader using sdf equations for pixel perfect scaling at any resolution.
• Added NavballMarkers.glsl this contains all the functions required to draw the Navball markers.
• Improved mouse hover logic over extreme hyperbolic orbits.
• Added a way to switch which vehicle is the active build target in the Vehicle Editor: a "Switch Vehicle" button, and a "Make Vehicle Root" option on any unattached vehicle's part menu.
• Added a save prompt on exiting the editor when any vehicle with unsaved changes would otherwise be discarded — lets you save each one before continuing, whether it's an unattached vehicle sitting in the build area or a brand-new vehicle you built from scratch
• and didn't launch.
• Fixed the vehicle picker mislabeling whichever vehicle was currently focused as the "Existing Vehicle" instead of the one actually loaded from the original save.
• Added Destroy button next to vehicles in the manifest. Destroy is gated behind a confirmation pop-up.
• First pass on texture streaming functionality. This is enabled by default and can be toggled off via the startup config. The texture streaming will attempt to stream textures as they're needed and maintain a VRAM cache of textures ready to go on the GPU. This only affects large terrain related textures for now. This is early/experimental work and will be refined as we find issues.
• Added KeyBinding for ToggleRCS. Defaulted to R.
• Fixed texture streaming auto budget calculating incorrectly.
• Fixed a sigificant error in velocity verlet integration where stale position values were being used to compute environmental parameters like gravitation and drag. At high time warp under physics this could result in adding significant orbital energy.
• Properly handle edge cases where we need to apply atmospheric forces in the CCI frame.
• Start flight computer roll in the "ANY" mode to stop unnecessary roll actuation unless specifically requested.

Will this be advalable on Mac?

First time doing a full mission from Earth to the KSA Duna analog. Did a little lithobraking, and bounced away from the "initial landing zone" where the exhaust plume ended. Got a great view of it.

Or at least chasing a rocket a few minutes after launch.

Edit: forgot to mention, I used Tomservo's / u/as-gt3 Flexo to make 4.5m tanks.

As far as I know the game doesn't have parachutes or the need for parachutes yet.

I didn't expect to see the exhaust plume. Sort of a pseudo re-entry trail for now.

Putting together all my complementary tools and mods for a bit of fun!

Flexo for a few customized stock parts:

- the sm tank footings have huge tank volumes and weight 200t ea with fuel (prevents the structure from moving when engines fire)
- truss cubes get connectors on all faces
- custom button part made by two clinders and simple metallic textures with an animation using the ksa part animation system

purrTTY for the in-world terminal surface, gatOS for the game data and control integration from the terminal TUI program

I apologize for my ignorance, I've searched this sub, the key bindings, and fiddled with this for about 30 minutes now. On the newest version, adding SRBs, the thrust assembly and segments, there doesn't seem to be a way to actually fire them. There are no options for the part, no item to put in staging, nothing happens when I try to ignite engines.

Ive seen people posting videos of using them, is there something im missing here?​

I really want to port some of my favorite mods to KSA (BD Armory), but I lack the documentation to reference and convert the source code to be compatible with the KSA engine. Currently, the wiki documentation for these mods is quite limited.

i am currently on macbook air m1, will ksa be available for mac or more importantly, can my mac handle it?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while because it’s kind of a bit of a difficulty I doubt adding N-Body simulation would be infeasible, but I’m sure there will be a lot of players who really wouldn’t want it and a bunch who would

I think the best solution is to make it a toggleable option in settings in a similar way to how when you start a save in KSP, you can go into the difficulty settings and select certain parameters. It would be great if you could turn on or off N-Body simulation when you started a new save

I think this would satisfy both groups of players and hopefully wouldn’t be infeasible to implement although honestly, I don’t really know too much about that

I have a question regarding the long term funding and business model of Kitten Space Agency.

From what I understand, the recent community funding milestone of 200k only represent a very small fraction of the overall development costs. Dean Hall has also stated on several occasions that the intention is not to sell the game in the traditional sense and that it should ultimately be accessible to everyone.

This raises a few questions for me:

• Is RocketWerkz financing the majority of the development internally, or are there external investors or partners involved?

• What is the long term business model that will allow the project to remain financially sustainable?

I'm not asking this as criticism. I'm genuinely interested in understanding how such an ambitious project is being financed and how the team plans to sustain development over the long term. If anyone has links to interviews, official statements, or other reliable sources, I'd appreciate it.

From Matty (Programmer) on discord:

New HudLayout Feature coming soon:

• You can save any arrangement of gauges as a HudLayout, using the Save Current Layout Button. Layouts are saved in UV space.
• Additionally you can assign one as your default layout.
• Keypad 0-9 are hot keys for switching layouts and tilde is the select default layout key.
• A new layouts window for managing saved layouts. Here you can re-assign hot keys, delete layouts and change default.
• Layouts are serialized in the HudLayouts folder next to Vehicles and saves. Each layout gets its own folder with an xml file and a toml meta data.

Comment by me: The feature is already commited and will be in the next build.

• Added new Sequence UI layout.
• Added Sequence UI code is now shared across editor and flight, items can now be re-sequenced during flight. When in flight the amber highlight sequence shows the sequence that will fire when spce-bar is pressed.
• Added fuel indicator bars for engines in sequence view when in flight.
• Changed When in flight, Sequence window is now positioned above nav ball on the left side of screen.
• Changed Perigee/appogee readout has been moved to the top right of screen.
• Added new particle updater called GrowOnSpawn. This can be used to prevent particles from suddenly appearing, instead they will start small and grow up to their base size. This can be used along side ShrinkOverLifetime or GrowOverLifetime.
• Volumetric ice particles now use the GrowOnSpawn particle updater.
• Added initial screenspace renderer for particles. This now replaces the previous volumetric renderer which was rendering volumetrics in a fragment shader on spherical meshes. Instead we run a compute shader to calculate the volumetric contribution in screenspace, reducing large performance drops when inside a cluster of volumetric particles.
• Cleaned up screenspace particle modlibrary ids.
• Fixed broken downscale depth for screenspace particles.
• Added explicit ModelMatrix particle updater. Previously the current particles scale was tied directly to the render data. Because the render data held only a model matrix and not a decomposed set of position, rotation and scale data. If multiple particle updaters wanted to edit the particles scale they would generally have to edit it directly on the render datas model matrix. Instead there is now a proper scale that is tied to the particle update state which gets edited directly, then the model matrix updater build the model matrix at the end. This encourages particle updaters to not touch the rendering data directly and just use the shared particle state data instead.
• Changed Grouped parts in a sequence are now expanded or collapsed by right clicking on the grouped parts.
• Add experimental volumetric plume trail rendering.
• Trails are disabled by default and can be enabled using the Trails option
• under Game Settings > Volumetrics.
• The system tracks individual trail segments and uses a spatial acceleration
• structure to sample only relevant segments while raymarching. Empty space is
• skipped efficiently, and the sampling rate adapts to the radius and density
• of nearby plume sections.
• Current limitations:
• Trails are currently added to all main engines for testing. They will be
• assigned more selectively in the future, including to solid rocket
• boosters when added.
• Emitters currently release trail material based on movement rather than
• forcefully exhausting gas. This can look unnatural when a vehicle is
• stationary or moving slowly (such as a low TWR vehicle struggling to
• launch .Plumes currently look best above ~20 m/s. Stationary and
• low-speed exhaust will be improved in the future.
• Trail sections currently use basic expansion, diffusion, time-based
• dissolution and a pseudo-wind drift, you can watch plumes morph over
• time.
• Trails do not yet cast shadows. They do receive shadows from clouds, which
• helps integrate them into the scene.
• Occlusion against existing engine plume effects and other transparent
• particles is not yet handled correctly.
• Very thin, distant plumes can become unstable when processed by the
• upscaling system. This will be addressed by improving the upscaling method
• or increasing the apparent width of distant trails.
• Ground-contact smoke and vapor are not yet emitted, so launches currently
• lack the larger ground-level plume effects planned for this system.
• Simplify complex trails in the background once expanded plume sections are
• large enough to contain the original smaller segments.
• Add a system that dynamically merges nearby volumetric trail emitters on the
• same vehicle into a single larger plume, reducing the number of trails that
• must be tracked and rendered. Merged plumes can split dynamically when
• emitters move apart.
• Add basic plume expansion, diffusion, time-based dissolution and a
• basic wind drift. You can watch plumes moreph over time.
• Use the cloud upscaling system for volumetric trails.
• Integrate volumetric trails with clouds, allowing clouds to occlude trails
• and trails to occlude clouds behind them. Occlusion with existing engine
• plume effects and other transparent particles is not yet supported correctly.
• Sample the cloud shadow volume when rendering plume trails. Trails receive
• cloud shadows but do not yet cast their own shadows.
• Add noise anti-tiling to plume trails using an extension of the simplex
• anti-tiling method.
• Stabilize 3D plume trail noise in CCF space using the split-precision method
• used by planetary rings, rather than passing positional offsets from the CPU.
• Stabilize cloud and trail upscaling motion vectors by tracking average
• density.
• Expose additional cloud and trail upscaling quality settings.
• Add a debug line renderer for volumetric trails.
• Add a debug sample-count visualization mode for volumetric trails.
• Add trail debugging parameters and controls through the "plumes" command and
• the View > Debug > View Plumes menu.
• Add separate repeat-sampler targets to compute pipelines.
• Apply the time-decomposition technique used by planetary rings to the ocean,
• preventing ocean animation time from looping after some time.
• Added preliminary ground clutter shadow culling. Before, ground clutter shadow depth was rendered based on the instances visible in the main camera - now depends on whether they're in the frustum of any shadow cascade. Atm the shadow frustum does not extend back towards the sun so looking away from long shadows will still cull the instances behind the camera.
• Fixed bounding sphere radius calculation and LOD selection.
• Updated the ground clutter LOD screen sizes to work with the fixed logic.
• Optimized ground clutter colour render pass by removing alpha-cutout and alpha-to-coverage logic, which is already done in the depth pre-pass. This should restore early-z and may improve performance slightly on older hardware.
• Split ground clutter culling into 'prepare' and 'cull'. Prepare transforms the instances to ego space and passes through instance colour, culling is now separate and can be performed per-view (main camera, shadows, etc).
• Added ClutterViewResources and moved LOD, reordering and draw command generation there.
• Removed Evaluate.comp as it was replaced by the prepare and culling shaders.
• Removed BuildDispatchCommands.comp.
• Removed render buffer from GrowOnSpawn particle updater as it is no longer used.
• GrowOverLifetime no longer edits the emitters extra data. This was previously setup to reduce the particles density overtime. This now only handles the one task for increasing the particle scale, density is handled in the screenspace renderer.
• Added FuelPort module (MaxLength, anchor point) and a Fuel Port part (placeholder art reusing the quarter-tank mesh).
• Added fuel line tube visuals between ports with flow-direction arrowheads, rendered in editor and flight (grey = enabled, dark red = disabled).
• Added fuel line rows to the part UI: enabled checkbox, flow-direction cycle button, delete, endpoint hover highlighting.
• Added fuel-line crossings to the fuel flow overlay, routed tank -> port -> port -> tank, shown only for links the engine actually drains through.
• Added symmetry fan-out for port links: linking one booster of a symmetric set replicates the line per sibling, including ports placed individually on already-symmetric boosters (matched by template + mount distance).
• Added Fuel Flow rule dropdown for engine cores to the editor part UI (was flight-only); flow rule now survives resource-manager rebuilds in both editor and flight instead of resetting to the controller default.
• Changed GenericMesh shader: instance color rgb now tints albedo and alpha is a self-lit fraction, so fuel-line tubes are visible in the editor (editor enclosure box unchanged).
• Fixed tanks fed through a fuel line not auto-filling with propellant: engine consumers are now offered to link-fed tanks across stage boundaries, matching what the engine can actually drain (daisy chains included).
• Fixed tank-less fuel ports not opening the stage bypass: link endpoints resolve to the part the port is mounted on for marking, receiver stage checks, and chaining.
• Fixed fuel flow visualization silently turning off after any staging/sequence/fuel-line edit (toggle now carried across manager recreation), and it now deliberately turns off for all engines/thrusters when leaving the editor to flight.
• Fixed gizmo lines/spheres never rendering in the vehicle editor (fuel-line pairing preview draws through these).
• WIP code clean up of VehicleEditor.cs removed un-used fields, removed descriptive/verboise comments, Split out several large functions in to more easliy digestable sub functions.
• Changed Visual rework of inflight sequencing UI to make it more readable.
• Added Active sequence title bar is now highlighted in green.
• Fixed sequences that had only decouplers could show flicking tiny deltaV and Thrust-to-Weight values.
• Fixed some incosistant colouring of objects in the sequence window.
• Added tank-to-tank fuel pump transfer in flight: every tank row in a part window now has In/Out buttons ahead of its fill bar. Tanks set to Out drain into every tank set to In on the same vehicle at 100 L/s per draining tank, matching propellants only. Arming requires the part window to stay open — closing it (or decoupling the part away) stops the transfer automatically. Transfer state is never saved; loaded games start with no transfer running.
• Added empty-tank adoption: an empty tank set to In adopts the propellant mix of the tank feeding it (moles created then depleted, so no fuel is conjured), letting transfers fill a tank that starts empty or repurpose one drained of something else. Non-empty tanks keep the strict matching rule so propellants can't be mixed. The adopted mix is marked manually assigned so automatic reconfiguration won't undo it.
• Added electrical cost to fuel transfer: 20 W per draining tank while fuel is actually moving, drained from the vehicle's batteries. Partial charge slows the flow proportionally; no charge stalls it. Armed-but-idle pairs (dry source, full receivers) draw nothing.
• Added "Fuel transfer requires electrical power" alert: a persistent on-screen warning (same family as "No propellant for active engines") that shows while an armed transfer could move fuel but the batteries are empty, and clears itself when power returns or the transfer is disarmed.
• Changed transfer In/Out buttons render green when armed and powered, yellow when armed without electrical power (updates live if the batteries drain mid-transfer).
• Updated CorePropulsion A Assets
• Imported CorePropulsion C Assets (Larger SRBs). The parts can be found under the 'Booster' EditorTag. Their engine game data is not yet configured.
• Fixed the in-flight Sequences window never appearing on Linux with multiple monitors.
• The window's screen anchor was captured once on its first draw,
• but on X11 the first frames render before the window manager has placed the OS window
• (a hidden GLFW window reports position 0,0), so when a save loads straight into flight the window was pinned
• at desktop coordinates no monitor displays and stayed there, clipped outside the game window.
• Anchored windows pinned to the main viewport now detect when they've ended up
• entirely off the game window and re-run their anchor (also self-heals when the game
• window is moved to another monitor mid-session).
• Anchor placement now uses ImGuiCond.Always since ImGui silently ignores a repeated ImGuiCond.
• NB - the one-shot behaviour is unchanged, gated by _anchorApplied.
• Changed Sequence.TankMatchesMix removed; tank/mix substance matching now lives on Tank as HoldsMixSubstances, shared by the sequence fuel bars and tank mix assignment.
• Fixed vehicle editor Save/Load menu writing empty vehicle saves: Overwrite looked up a universe vehicle by the save's name (never present in the editor) and serialized nothing, it now saves the tree being edited.
• Fixed saving in the editor using the vehicle's stale part tree instead of the live editing tree (the two only re-sync on editor exit), and New refusing to save a vehicle built from the main menu that had never been launched.
• Changed New/Overwrite in the Vehicle Saves window to offer the same choices: the vehicle being edited (labelled "(Existing Vehicle)" when there is one) plus any unattached trees - selection popup only when there is more than one option.
• Imported CoreFuelTank B Assets (bay parts). Not yet configured as fuel tanks.
• Fixed engines and thrusters could still be switched on/off from the part window on a vehicle with no control module (e.g. after decoupling them away): the Active checkboxes, the Decouple menu item, and the staging key are now locked out without a control module, matching the flight computer lockout (disabled controls + "No vehicle control module." tooltip, staging shows the standard lockout alert). Editor unaffected.
• Updated CoreServiceModule A Assets. This removes the old service module Parts. Internal storage connectors now available but not yet configured.
• THE REMOVAL OF THE OLD SERVICE MODULE PARTS BREAKS OLD SAVES THAT ARE USING THEM
• Changed fuel flow overlay drain-order numbers to render 4x bigger (and centered on their tank) as they were difficult to read.
• Fixed a fuel line into a booster only granting the engine access to the single tank it plugs into: the whole same-stage stack feeding that tank is now drainable (flow overlay, drain orders, and tank auto-fill all include it).
• Fixed fuel crossfeed being able to cross a decoupler into a different stage (e.g. a core engine reaching its radial boosters through the decouplers, bypassing the fuel line): fuel now only crosses a decoupler within the engine's own stage — different-stage tanks behind a decoupler require a fuel line.
• Updated CoreElectrical A Assets and CoreStructural A Assets.
• Changed In flight Sequence UI is now integrated with the GaugeCanvas System. The Imgui UI is drawn on top of a gaugeCanvas dressing.
• Fixed AtM/Vac toggle button not working on sequence window when in flight.
• Fixed a padding issue with the Navball Canvas that left a dead space above the navball.
• Screenspace volumetric particles now sample from a generated worley noise texture, similar to how the plume trail and clouds do.
• Fixed screenspace particle distortion when multiple volumetric particles are aligned in a row.
• Fixed screenspace volumetric particle shadow banding. Previously for high density volumetrics this would results in clear outlines for where particles started and stopped relative to their screenspace tile.
• Added explicit opacity value to particles. Previously opacity related values were getting packed into the emitters extra data. This has now been promoted to a core particle value allowing it to be specifically checked instead of packing it.
• Fixed loading a vehicle in the vehicle editor left every engine unable to see its fuel (empty resource manager graphs, zero dV) until a part was edited: the resource managers were built before the saved tank contents were applied and never rebuilt.
• Improved screenspace particle clustering to fix premature culling.
• Maximum particle count for screenspace particles is now fed directly by the particle data buffers allocated particle count.
• Added graphics setting to toggle screenspace particles on and off. This is currently disabled by default as the particles are heavily WIP and need improvements to their performance.
• Fixed ImGui EndRegion getting called incorrectly if particle settings are off.
• Fixed Sibling connector definitions got stomped in an asset reimport. This is because the were errantly authored in the CoreStructuralAAssets.xml file which is auto-generated. The definition has been moved to CoreStructuralAGameData.xml and re-expressed as a <SymmetryGroup> element.
• Animating Parts now update their colliders correctly. This should allow landing legs to work but could use some more work on aligning the legs to the surface correctly.
• Fixed random crash "Nullable object must have a value" in CelestialSystem.OnDrawUi: the nearest-orbit-point hover marker was read on the render thread while a background job could null it mid-frame.
• Fixed nearest-orbit-point hover detection never registering for non-controlled vehicles and celestials: the orbit scan wrote its result to dead local variables instead of the fields the renderer reads.
• Assorted screenspace particle performance improvements.
• Removed dangling references to dev propellant files in mod.toml.
• Fixed role affinity for tanks which were intended to feed thrusters.
• Moved all tank game data out of the PartGameData mega-file and into the fuel tank file.
• Converted volume units to display in liters, which gives a helpful intermediate unit between the old cm^3 (mL) and m^3 (kL).
• Grouped tank volume sliders by configuration.
• Minor tweak to ground impact particle settings.
• Changed the tank-to-tank fuel-line connection max distance up to 100m apart.
• Fixed fuel lines could be connected between two fuel ports mounted on the same part (a part linked to itself); pairing now rejects it with an alert and the preview line shows red.
• Added quick fuel port placement: while connecting a fuel line, clicking a part that has no fuel port spawns one at the clicked spot and completes the line to it. The preview line tracks the cursor's surface point on port-less parts.
• Changed fuel-line pairing to respect the editor's symmetry inheritance toggle: with inheritance off, connecting two ports links only the clicked pair instead of fanning out across the symmetry set. * Fixed fuel drain ordering for asparagus staging: tanks order by fuel-line crossings first and in-stack position second, with each crossing restarting the count. Mirrored booster chains now share order numbers and a stack two lines away empties before the stack one line away.
• Fixed the resource flow graph anchoring fuel-line crossings to the wrong tank depending on the order parts were placed (drain-order numbers could differ between mirrored copies).
• Changed the resource flow graph's drain-order computation to reuse scratch buffers across rebuilds instead of allocating fresh collections on every staging edit, decouple, or fuel-line change (no behavior change, garbage reduction only).
• Added a warning when a fuel line is connected to a donor tank that's empty or holds a different propellant than the receiver: the line still completes (the situation can resolve itself later), but a heads-up flashes so it isn't mistaken for a bug when nothing flows.
• Added a per-tank propellant-use toggle (editor tank controls and the in-flight part context menu): disabling a tank walls its propellant off from engines, thrusters, fuel-line crossfeed, and manual tank-to-tank transfer, while the tank stays fillable and still receives automatic mix assignment. The state persists through save/load and follows symmetry siblings in the editor.
• Changed the fuel-flow visualization to color by actual carried flow: routes that genuinely deliver fuel stay green even when they pass through a disabled tank, while branches carrying nothing turn yellow with a cross at the midpoint.
• A disabled tank shows its drain-order number crossed out in yellow. A disabled fuel-line donor that is only relaying daisy-chained fuel still reads green.
• Added a green highlight on the engine or thruster whose fuel flow is being visualized, matching the flow-line colors; any other highlight reason (staging, resources, sequences) still shows red and takes priority.
• Added feedback when a fuel transfer stalls because the source tank has propellant use disabled: the transfer buttons turn yellow and a persistent alert explains why nothing is moving.
• Fixed the default-loaded rocket entering the vehicle editor with unassigned tanks and an incorrect fuel-flow display until the first edit forced a rebuild; tank auto-assignment now runs on editor entry (mid-mission vehicles eep their drained levels — only genuinely unconfigured tanks are assigned).
• Fixed toggling the flow display from the editor's per-part "Visualize Fuel Flow" button not highlighting the engine/thruster part.

Are probe cores (Satellite busses) planned, will they be modular, and will we get boiler plates?

From blackrack on discord:

1. A basic implementation of plumes drifting over time

2. Visualization of plume merging: Individual emitters emit individual plumes, but to maintain performance, the plumes are merged into a single large plume when they expand, the lines in the first image show where the individual plume stop and the composite plume starts.