'You can do Gravity, although Gravity is horribly inaccurate in many ways. I asked Simpson what sci-fi movies would be possible to stage in Kerbal Space Program 2 and he had a few ideas. (Image credit: Star Theory) You can pretty much reenact The Martian in KSP2 And yeah, that sounds like a thing that'd be cool.'

So we're hoping that we're continuing to add interesting content in this game for the coming decade. We are building a platform, the purpose of which is to be highly extensible, highly moddable and to have a very, very long life. In the same way KSP1 was, it's a product that's continued to evolve and be supported over nearly a decade. We just gotta run into some black holes out in the vastness of space, right? Well, Simpson says they haven't built them into the game yet, but left the door open to that happening during development, or being modded in. So yeah, we're still kind of banging away on that type of problem.' There are no black holes in Kerbal Space Program 2 'currently' There's certainly an argument to be made that you could get into some spoiler territory by giving people access to literally the super, super, super advanced stuff all at once. 'For example, the base progression and stuff, that's a whole set of problems that are currently being worked on right now. I asked if I'd be able to start sandbox mode out in the galaxy somewhere, and Simpson said that's still up for discussion. But because Kerbal 2 is so much bigger than its predecessor, the developers are still figuring out exactly how much freedom to give you. But there's also sandbox mode, where you have freedom to build whatever you want without the game telling you what to do, or slowly dishing out new parts. Kerbal 2 will have a career mode, with objectives that guide you from Kerbin to orbit to the Mun and eventually through interstellar travel. (Image credit: Private Division) In sandbox mode, Star Theory is still deciding how much freedom to give you So now I feel the entire tech tree is now well justified in utilitarian terms.' I'm pretty proud of the solution we came to there. And actually, I think it was pretty clever. I won't get too into the details about how we've done that, but there are now planets and moons for which the ideal solution to that challenge is the crafting of a specific sort of vehicle. So we want there to be an emergent need for you to build an aircraft that has wings. And fortunately we've got a bunch of new celestial bodies in this game and they've given us an opportunity to create specific landing puzzles or landing challenges that require the use of some of these parts that previously might not have been indispensable to the core progression. We didn't want them to just be this vestigial branches on the tech train. At the same time we wanted to justify them. 'We absolutely wanted to preserve as many of the parts from the original game in our version of the game. KSP2 is actually building those kinds of experiences into its career mode. I mostly think of Kerbal as a rocket ship sim, but the game supports other kinds of vehicles, too, and some players had no interest in exploring the Kerbol system: they just wanted to fly space planes into orbit. Whichever way you want to do it, you will be rewarded for doing it that way.' Progression mode will give you reasons to use all sorts of vehicles, like space planes

You can explore every celestial body in the game and be rewarded for doing that exploration. You can completely ignore the mission progression. And you will be rewarded for doing it that way as well. You could also just see that the Mun is up there, and go land on it of your own volition. So if you want to pursue it in that way as part of a sort of progression of missions? You can do it that way. There is a mission to go plant a flag on Mun.

Kerbal space program 2