we here at ionic symphonic protonic electronics like knowing things. but the other day, an intern tripped over a cable in the office and went shooting off into the stratosphere. suddenly, it seems like we don't know anything at all. that's where you come in.

it looks like they're either abandoning KSP or someone fucked up big time, either way you can LITERALLY GET IT FOR FREE ON THE WEBSITE RIGHT NOW ACCORDING TO THIS REDDIT POST

you ONLY need to add the email thats in the post. and then you have FREE kerbal space program. YES THIS INCLUDES THE DLC!!

Project Hail Mary AU where at some point when Grace and Rocky are preparing to investigate Adrian a third spaceship comes screaming into the system on a completely different vector from what it would need to take to have come from Sol or 40 Eridani. It gets surprisingly close before they notice it because it doesn't have an astrophage drive plume so it only shows up once it's in radar range, however it is also decelerating way faster than either the Hail Mary or Blip-A, at like 3-4 g, which increases to 5 g as it becomes obvious the unknown spacecraft is going to completely overshoot its destination. It gets into actual Adrian Orbit a few days later and moseys over to the pair of ships. It proceeds to buzz them at terrifyingly high relative speed and close distance, then actually maneuvers closer. At this point both Grace and Rocky are seriously concerned that this unknown life form is legitimately hostile.

Up close, it becomes clear that this looks more like an Earth spacecraft than an Eridian one in terms of materials and general design. The main drive is a mystery, but the secondary drive, which it's been using to maneuver around, consists of a massive cluster of goddamn nuclear-thermal rocket engines, which only really have any radiation shielding except between the engines and the crew quarters, so it's lucky the Hail Mary has astrophage shielding. There's also not much radiation shielding anywhere else on that ship. There are multiple smaller vehicles strapped to the sides.

The unknown vessel hails the Mary on the radio, with what is recognizably speech in a language, but filtered through a horrible McDonalds Drive Thru tier connection. It transmits for nearly 15 minutes with what appears to be a stuck mic. The vessel pulls alongside with maneuvering lights blinking on its hull. Then an airlock opens, and a tiny, bipedal figure just steps out into the void with no tether, completely freaking Rocky out. It jets towards the ship on RCS thrusters, maneuvers itself up to the windows, and starts waving and knocking on the glass. Grace is just reflecting on how this must be how stupid he looked trying to communicate with Rocky at first when the alien retracts its reflective visor, leaving Grace staring at some kind of fuckass green muppet.

into

Obviously this practice was abandoned for safety reasons. But Kerbals don't have such concerns.

So Kerbals, of course, operated slip coaches on some of their passenger rail lines.

But one of the stated benefits of the space program is that it provides spin-off technologies to improve Kerbal lives and industry here on Kerbin, not just in space.

Consequently, Kerbals began employing "reverse slip coaches," where a coach would rest in a siding off to the side with a protective wall between the siding and the passenger station. When the train passed, it would, with precise timing, fire rocket motors provided by Periapsis Systems of 'sepratron' fame, to accelerate the coach up to speed, so that it could couple onto the passing train. It was a tremendous success! *

The bug was later fixed by defining the active spacecraft itself as the origin of the game's coordinate system. In effect, the spacecraft no longer moves; instead, the spacecraft remains stationary and the entire universe moves around it. Owing to how relativity works, to the player this is indistinguishable from the spacecraft moving about within a fixed coordinate system, and it ensures that the body of the craft and its components will always be modelled with maximal precision.

While elegant, this solution introduced a new problem: it was now possible, by doing certain stupid tricks with relativistic velocities, to introduce floating point rounding errors to everything except the active spacecraft. In extreme cases, this could result in the destruction of the entire observable universe.