Kerbal Space Program 2 Early Access Announcement

Kerbal Space Program was probably the most important factor in giving me the audience I have, I was always someone who liked to talk about science and tell stories, usually to friends over drinks, but when the game first appeared as a free demo in 2011 I was able to build the core of an audience by talking about the game and using it as a platform to tell stories about spaceflight. Eventually I moved away from the games into almost all science stories, but sometimes KSP still makes an appearance, for example to illustrate how a Dragon capsule might boost the orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Sequel, KSP 2 was announced in 2019 with a planned 2020 release date, and I was always skeptical of this, because I knew the underlying code needed a complete overhaul. For example the original simulation engine performs poorly and expends a lot of CPU time just managing memory under .Net, I would have a top tier graphics card and it would barely be taxed as the engine ended up constrained by CPU activity. 

So, an early access date of February 2023 feels in line with a team that did more than just apply mods on top of the existing game engine, and I'm looking forward to this!

maxresdefault.jpg (YouTube)