I've been thinking for a while about some ideas for a KSA star system, mostly on the track of "reminiscent of our solar system" with some clear "analogues" for most planets. (personally I think it's important for the system to be recognisable even if it's made up). I've got a pile of ideas (which you can read a totally unpolished draft of here if you're so inclined), but I've had a question nagging at me - how can KSA make the boring planets genuinely interesting to visit? KSP has Dres which is so ignoreable that it's a meme, but even that's more fame than Moho gets as "most annoying stop on a grand tour". Tylo is only interesting because it's such a pain in the butt to land on, but once you're down... you'd be having more fun if you'd gone to Laythe or Vall.

Here's the ideas I've had bouncing around for ways that 'boring' places could be made more interesting;

Dwarf Planets with Crossing Orbits

In trying to make some interesting [dwarf] planets (think "Dres"/"Ceres"/'Vesta"), there's only so much cool surface features (water ice? big ol' canyon?) can do. So what if getting to them (and getting between them) wasn't just a challenge, but something fun to master? The idea is to a few dwarf planets right near each other that you can swing between for not much Δv, or use for weird manoeuvres to save fuel getting home.

I was thinking four; a big one (which I've nicknamed "Jerk") as sort of a Ceres analog which could as a bit of a challenge to land on (decent gravity, and no atmosphere), a moon-sized one just a little closer in ("Snap", think Vesta) two smaller dwarfs (big asteroids, really) in a distant binary pair ("Crack" and "Pop") a little further out. A few big canyons and mountain peaks (cryovolcanoes?) to check out, and we've turned one boring lump into a dwarf-planet-hopping travel itinerary. The exact orbital parameters of this lot would be hard to get right to balance "realism" and fun.

High Heat and Cool Canyons

"Mercury" is tough to make fun to visit. A planet in the inner solar system with no atmosphere is hard to get to no matter what. My first idea was caves; the Moon has Lava tubes that we've never explored, what if "Mercury" had a whole interconnected network of lava tubes to explore, map out, make bases in, run rocket-powered races through? Think walking down through Outer Wild's Ember Twin, but less extreme (and no dying after 20 minutes).

...unfortunately we're not getting surface features like caves. So - modifying the idea a bit, I was thinking of a network of deep canyons where a lander (or a base, or a racer...) can shelter from the sunlight and heat. If heating was a genuine problem this close to the sun, these canyons could make exploring the stars' nearest neighbour more interesting than just "it's the moon, but brown, and really really hard to get to", especially if they were linked together like old drawings of Martian "canals".

That being said, deep canyons are an instant bump in the cool factor for any planet, and I don't know if this on its own make Mercury worth visiting, so I'd be open to more ideas.

Life Everywhere

What if there's life to be found on nearly every planet and moon? In most places, probably it's just microbes and a bit of a green texture. But maybe on "Mars" there's a tiny crevice in a canyon with a little oasis of liquid water? Or Like KSP2's Vall, maybe there's some plant life where the subsurface ocean pokes through? Taumoeba in the atmosphere of "Venus"? Fish in methane lakes on 'Titan', ready for cats to make extraterrestrial sushi?

I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts, if you've got any more ideas!

---

^(Please note: I'm the moderator here, but I am not affiliated with Ahwoo or Rocketwerkz)

Posted by Taylor (Ahwoo) on Discord:

> We’re giving the community the chance to design custom KSA patches for our jumpsuits.

> Submit your artwork for the chance to have it turned into an embroidered or woven patch, which will be displayed on one of four Kitten Space Agency jumpsuits.

> These jumpsuits will be used to help publicly promote the game, so your design could end up being seen by players, press, and space fans around the world.

> We’d love to see what you come up with.

> Submit your designs here: https://forms.gle/k376ucVu4Wx3XeseA

Images: the jumpsuits, some examples

(This is a contest put together by Ahwoo (the game's distributor), not a fan contest - I don't know any more than you do!)

You're welcome to post your submission to the subreddit, but make sure you've submitted it first so nobody can take credit for your work! And we've been told this is mostly for fun - so don't take it too seriously!

I know people have been banging on about the lower VFX budget this season, but it's really noticeable that we haven't seen a single picture or shot of the Kosmos-1 spacecraft. Not even a still photo in one of the newsreels, unless I missed it.

Are there any concept drawings for it?

There's a possibility that Kuragin reused old Mars-94 hardware, and there's almost certainly spare parts around the place, so it's not even unreasonable that they could reuse assets from Season 3 with a couple of new emblems and some black and white tiles painted on (since that's what a lay audience understands a heatshield looks like)

>!There's narrative and budget reasons we don't see Kosmos-1 skip off Titan's atmosphere, but surely an establishing shot of ST and K1 talking could have had the camera fly from one to the other?!<

I had to remove Citrix Workspace from my machine today in order to upgrade to Fedora 44 - is there any reason Citrix still hasn't got around to updating the dependency on webkit2gtk3? It's also been a problem on Ubuntu since 24.04, but there's apparently a built-in workaround in the Ubuntu deb package, which has a copy of the outdated library bundled in, which wasn't done for the rpm package. I was hoping this might get fixed in v2601, but no luck.

It seems this has been reported for months over on the official forum, but there's been no response from any staff there. Anybody know what gives?

I've yet to try the manual workaround suggested in this post, but it seems a bit absurd to have to work around something like this when using proper enterprise software.