The Kerbals are doing some cute animations on the basics of spaceflight
Starting with: Missing the ground.
Kerbal Space Program is releasing a series of tutorials in the weeks leading up to the February 24th, 2023 release of Kerbal Space Program 2. Rather than explicit game tutorials, however, these are primers in the very basics of spaceflight presented for those who might not be rocket design enthusiasts and/or actual NASA engineers and/or astrophysicists.
The video stars fan-favorite Valentina Kerman in an adventure about how to throw something into the sky so hard that it misses the ground on the way back down. Which is how you get to orbit around a planet.
"Missing the Ground is one of the early tutorials in KSP 2, part of a series of animated tutorial videos to improve the onboarding experience of KSP 2 while learning about various science concepts. These video tutorials are the introduction to concepts after which players will experience interactive tutorials to further learn the concepts shown in the videos," says developer Intercept Games.
In short, these animations will be inside Kerbal Space Program itself, helping you to understand and design for spaceflight basics. Each one will be shown before an interactive tutorial that then executes the concept you've learned about.
KSP 2 will be the sequel to the unlikely hit that was Kerbal Space Program, a somewhat-comic and quite realistic simulation of rockets and aerospace flight. Kerbal Space Program is a consistent entry on our list of the best PC Games, but its always been pretty hard to get into for those who don't have existing knowledge of what's going on.
One of developer Intercept Games' big steps, then, is to create tutorials that are both engaging and informative for people who don't know jack about rockets. Rocket science, as we all know, is complicated, but it's also pretty approachable when the game supplies all the cool parts for you to assemble. I highly recommend that part over exploding yourself in real life.
You can find out a lot more about Kerbal Space Program on its website, and you can wishlist it or whatever on Epic or Steam. It'll be $50 on launch, or is $50 now that it's out, if somehow you're reading this from the future.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
If you're curious about what's going to be in KSP2 at launch, check out our article of Everything We Know About Kerbal Space Program 2 and watch this nice gameplay presentation from last November either here, below, or on YouTube.
Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.