Ready To Launch: Kerbal Space Program 0.22 Is Out Today

I've seen plenty of movies and documentaries about humanity's mad attempts to explore outerspace, but each one of those was a story of triumph, of humans overcoming ridiculous odds to achieve the impossible. When I play Kerbal Space Program, that's not how things go. The indie game about building rockets out of blocks and executing your own space missions is about failure, exploding repeatedly on the launchpad in the face of ridiculous odds, and abandoning your Kerbals to a lifetime of drifting aimlessly around our solar system.

Today's patch 0.22 is only going to make it harder, and there's a new trailer below to mark the occasion.

As Craig explained last week, patch 0.22 is about taking steps towards turning the current galactic sandbox into a structure campaign. To that end, it adds a bunch of R&D tools, so you can perform science experiments with your Kerbals while in space, and then bring that data back to Kerbin to be used as a kind of currency for expanding your space program.

As the version number suggests, Kerbal Space Program is a long way from being finished, but it's fantastic even now. Steam tells me I've put 22 hours into it, tinkering around with spaceship designs, and trying desperately to dock two ship parts together in mid-orbit. The trailer above - and the fanmade trailer below - sell the sense of majesty and beauty that the game wrings out of even low-poly spaceships. But also remember that it's about explosions and this grinning face (drawn by this fine fellow).