It’s time to take the science interplanetary: Kerbal Space Program’s latest expansion, Breaking Ground, is now available and lets you travel to other planets with scientific equipment and brand new gear in order to collect and analyze bits and pieces around the solar system.
There are a ton of new gizmos to pack into your rockets’ payloads, and brand new space suits for your kerbals to wear while they’re floating around in orbit or exploring the surface of extraterrestrial worlds. You’ll be able to collect, analyze, and return with samples you find on planets, which now sport various crystalline formations to examine.
There’s also a remote-controlled armature for sample collection, or for a mounted camera – as always with Kerbal Space Program, the only real limitations are largely set by your own creation goals.
Even more exciting, there’s a collection of new parts to use for creating space vehicles, and these have been designed with an eye toward robotics. Using hinges, rotors, and pistons, you can now build long-legged walkers to traverse the surface of the Mun, or possibly just fall apart when they impact on the surface. Science is messy sometimes.
And that’s a good thing, because one of the new gadgets you have available is an active seismometer, and you use it by deliberately crashing things into interplanetary bodies and reading the shockwaves that the collision emits.
Breaking Ground is on sale now for $14.99 USD (or your regional equivalent), while the base game is 75% off until June 6.
To infinity and beyond: The best space games on PC
If it’s been a while since you sent a rocket full of screaming Kerbals into the atmosphere, now’s as good a time as any to hop back in. And hey, that science isn’t going to do itself.