Off-Nominal - 97 - Figure This One Out, Howard!

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

Jake and Anthony are joined by Howard Mostrom, Audio Director for Kerbal Space Program 2, to talk about how he recorded audio for the latest in the hit franchise of space video games.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 97 - Figure This One Out, Howard! (with Howard Mostrom) - YouTubeKerbal Space Program – Create and Manage Your Own Space ProgramKerbal Space Program 2: Episode 7 - Recording Rockets - YouTubeFollow HowardHoward Mostrom | Composer – Audio Director- Sound DesignerFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Hello, everybody. Happy Thursday. Well, I just checked the calendar because I thought maybe for a second, it's not Thursday, but we've been weekly on Thursdays for months now. I don't know why I got self-conscious real quick.

Yeah, yeah. That happens sometimes, right? It's how it goes. How's it going, Jake? Yeah. I'm good. I'm a little laggy today. I was saying before the show,

I'm having some Starlink problems. It's very windy and it doesn't end up the wind. But anyway, I was having a, I thought, that my Starlink satellites are probably built by Carmel, and they're just a little flaky today. So we just got to get through that. So I apologize.

But we have a great guest today. So I'm excited to have Howard. Howard, are I saying that right, Mostrum? Is that the right way to say it? Mostrum. I don't know if that's even the correct way, actually.

That's how my family says. It's the correct way. Yeah. Yeah. So Howard, Howard is the sound designer for Curbel Space Program, too. Is it the right title for you? So it's audio director, but I handle everything related to audio.

So I write the music, do the sound effects, work with the VO artists, mix the game, everything. So there's a lot to it. That's great. And we should have known, we had, you called in and right away we can see all this audio equipment. We're like, oh, yeah, of course you would have a great set up. Obviously, this is the right person I have on the show. So, yeah, we're really excited to have you. So should we do some drinks first?

What's going on here? Yeah, what? Did you make something fancy, Jake? I did. Yeah, I wanted to, I wanted to have something green. I was going to say, is it curvil color? So this is what I came up. It's a day martini, I guess.

A what martini? It's just like mint and jade. The rest of you said jade. I don't know. You cut out for second. I thought you was called a Miami-Dade martini. And I was like, that's a really local. some water kind of situation.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's just that it's mint and rum and lime juice, I think. So anyway. Is that, I don't know about mint and rum. I'm a little skeptical. It's a little weird. It's a little weird, but I'm digging it. All right.

What do you got? I've got a trog's beer from the mix pack called, oh, this is a different mix pack, though, Jake. This is the spring mix pack. This is a nugget nectar, which is real. Springy taste and tastes like some pine trees and some other stuff. It's delicious. So, Howard, you look like you're in a spot that maybe doesn't have the most room for fancy drinks because there's a lot of expensive hardware around you. So what are you so bold as to bring in there? I also have like a table that I can set aside to have drinks on. So that doesn't spill in any

equipment or anything. A lower level table. So yeah. Yes. Yeah. So I actually brought, because I'm in Seattle. I brought some coffee. Nice. And because that's kind of like oxygen for us. But then I also brought a stout. So I'll be switching back and forth. That's a pray for power by Tim Hurl. Yes. Yes. It's just going to stay level. That's great. This one is actually, for whatever reason, I have the hardest time getting, like there's, in the area, there's like one gas station that has it. But no grocery stores or anything, but it's absolutely amazing. What a niche beer.

This is sold at one gas station in the Pacific Northwest. Right. Otherwise, you have to drive to Oregon. That's amazing. You've got to find out why that one gas station imports it. It's just like the guy that runs it really likes it. I guess they have like really good selections of stuff. It's pretty awesome.

And oddly really good. Fried chicken. This place sounds amazing. Okay. When a foodie craft beer lover opens a gas station, this is what we get, right? Jake, at what point in this conversation, have you been sorry that you left the Pacific Northwest or Pacific Southwest, as you used to call it? Well, we had gas stations in Canada, too, so it was good. It was fine.

but no no I'll live let's slip that way I'll live I'll live without the fried chicken Gastation fried chicken and craft beer yeah anyway we're off to a good start we're doing great we're doing awesome here so I guess where I want to start Howard I really want to understand like what is some of the high level strategies you took with this whole new game because it's I mean it's

really fun to have the like a clean late, right? You're not going for a curable space program 1.2 with like some iteration change. Like you get to kind of start from the ground level and that counts for sound too. So I'd like to hear sort of just like, you know, how did you approach it and what were some of the things you really wanted to like nail with this game? So from the beginning on this game, I really wanted there to be a couple different things. I wanted there to be like levels of emotion and lots of emotion that you can experience. And that can be through sound. That can be through music, but I wanted to go lots of different places.

Curbles are more than just funny or positive. There's lots of different things. So I wanted to have an array of emotion. So like with rockets, I want that to go through for like having a very, very big explosive rockets and little tiny things and have it be relative to atmosphere to all this different data. So I've worked really, really hard to have everything be data. driven as much as possible. In this game, one thing you can't do is know the player's

intent, but you do know data. So I can interpolate that data into different things to make the soundscape sound different, and it's been great. It's a lot of data. I mean, probably over 200 sources of data for parts. It's crazy.

Wow. Like, yeah, like we can change sounds. Oh, go ahead. No, no, no. I was going to say, like, what do you mean by sources of data, are the inputs from the environment that are that are changing or these are sources of what makes sound in the game? So actually like how, like take for example, atmosphere. So when the rocket goes further up in the atmosphere, the sound is filtered.

As it gets further up. So it takes a lot of work to make sure that that happens accurately per planet. So we're making the system I have changes it. So if you're on Duna, it sounds like the atmospheric pressure for Duna. And that's not just for any part. There is some degree of artistic license there because obviously, like, in a vacuum, there's not sound, but I've tried my best to make it so it's like a good combination of data and science. That's the ever-present problem.

There's no sound in space, but yet the game will feel empty if not. So everybody wants to know their engines running by, you know, not being able to see it at the time. Exactly. Like the one unrealistic element that we're all like, yeah, but it would be better if there was sound at space. Like that would be a generally better experience. We can improve space. If the whoever's in charge of space, you'd just let that one go through. That'd be great.

I should have bought that one through a little bit more than you did. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, those effects are awesome. Like, that's the, honestly, it was the first thing I noticed when I launched the very first rocket in KSP 2. Because I think I was expecting like the, the KSP 1 experience where I hit that space bar and like immediately the thing jumps off the pad and we're just, we're off. Oh, no, you first have to do the support release sound as well. Yeah, yeah. But no, but like right away, there was like this fanfare and then there was like,

countdown and like the music like swelled up and I was like, whoa, this is like a very emotion filled thing, right? And then the, yeah, the way the, the rocket sound changes over the course of the profile is like,

it's perfect. So like you guys nailed it on that. That's like my favorite part of the game so far. It's just that sound. Oh, thank you. There's a lot of variation within that too for fuel types and size. there's a lot of different things change that sound, as well as like Doppler when things go around.

There's a lot of stuff. I kind of went overboard, I think. That's how the game works, really. Literally the point of the game. From day one, the point is, how overboard could you do something if you wanted to be overboard about this? Right, right. Well, we don't know what the players are going to do. So we have to think in that mindset to a degree

because we want people to be able to do whatever they have their heart wants to. Was there specific stuff from KSP1 that you looked back at and took some lessons learned from about, obviously this, I don't know how much of that data-driven approach exists in KSP1 if it does at all? Is that totally a new concept?

Was there some stuff that you were like, we can't get rid of that thing that the game does because that's like the essence of it? I don't think KSP1 was as data-driven. They had a lot of events that would happen and sounds would trigger from those events, but even simpler things like you zoom in and out of the rocket, it wasn't very tuned well to filter, like, that kind of thing.

But I think one lesson I did like, one thing I really did like about KSP1 was certain sounds, you hear them and you know, oh, that's a, we just decoupled. Or certain things, your brain just really memorizes. And I didn't, I want players to know that. I want them to build, I mean, it's not something you get instantaneously, but like part on my end, it's like I can't have so much variation that they don't know what the sound is.

So it's a balance of like, how, well, how, how interesting can I make it a variable, but still you recognize what it is. Yeah, you build some muscle memory. So you've kind of have that familiar sense of what's going on. You know, obviously in the original game, it was like, oh, I made it space now. Here's the music. I finally did it. Yeah.

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah.

I'm like really excited now to go to a different planet and listen to this sound in a whole different way. I didn't actually even piece. I haven't gone past the like the central main system, like the curbel system yet. So I haven't touched any other atmospheres out of the. than the starting one. So now I'm like, oh,

now I got to write this. I got so much to do in this game. It's like a checklist. There is so much. Like even just on curb and there's so much to do. Jake, it's almost like you should start a historically accurate series of missions that you develop through KSP history and something like that.

That would be a really good project to maybe kick off. Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe I'll think about it in the, I'll toss that ball. around and see how it goes. We got to talk about the trip to see this rocket launch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Recording these sounds.

Yeah. We need to hear these stories. It was very, very epic. I don't know if you, well, on the timeline, I started with the hurricane. So we were actually supposed to be there a week and a half prior to that. But Hurricane Ian came and ruined all our plans. So yeah, actually it was like the day of we're back and forth, should we come to Florida right now? And it was kind of up in the air and finally it was called like, nope, don't come. It'll be hard to get to Cape Canaveral if you do.

So what was the, you know, at the beginning I see it says like ULA and Boeing reached, did they reach out? Or was this something that you were trying to find somebody that would let you go strap an ungodly amount of, microphones near their rocket. Like, what was the interaction there? How did they... Because I know they've been involved with KSP in the past. They had some interaction a couple of years back. Did they just stay friendly and they wanted to hear what an Atlas sounds like in a video game?

Like, what was their motivation? I mean, honestly, we were trying for years to do a rocket recording. And it really comes down to dates and times and security clearances and all that. There's so many different details that have to be right. to happen. I feel pretty lucky that we were actually able to do it. Even the hurricane and all that. But yeah, they've been a great partner. I mean, we had Jeb go up into space with them, and they've been really great to work with. So I'm glad with them that they were able to pull us in and able to go to their VAB as well is pretty awesome. I love that segment. I'll skip ahead to that part,

because it was interesting to see like the things that you were interested in hearing around the facility. So this is the Starliner facility now, but formerly the shallow facility. You're popping balloons in there to like get a sense of what the building sounded like. There's just different machinery that you're recording where they're actually like manufacturing stuff. Did you just like, tell us about this day. Did you just wander around and bother engineers for like an hour? Or what was it like in there? It was for a long time, actually.

I'm not sure if it was probably a couple hours I was in there recording. And yes, it was. It was like, hey, can we do this? And they'd have to clear the section or whatever and get the right person to do gear, different parts of the gear. So, yeah, we had like gas leaking. It was pretty amazing. Like, that facility is so huge.

That crane is. is ginormous. Like, actually, they showed a little clip of me, like, messing with it. It was like a little kid at a playground. They were like, okay, Howard, you're good now? You're done now? Is this like the crane? This is literally the crane.

But it was a lot of fun. This is the most epic crane that exists. It's a spaceship crane that exists in this building. At next door is like a highly classified environment, too, because I think that's where they do the... the secret little space plane that the space force flies. So you were probably not too far from stuff that you're not allowed to know about, which is also fun.

I'm sure they were thrilled when you brought in. It was a blast. Things that looked like what you're holding here in your hands, shotgun mics. It probably was like absolutely thrilling for the people to do credentials. Honestly, like even just popping the balloon, I wasn't sure if they were going to let me do that. But they did. I mean, it was very helpful.

too, like being able to hear the reverb and analyze it, and it was really, really nice. That's right there. They were in their machine shop, and they're, like, actually, like, running a lot of the machines for us. It was great. You could tell that they were having fun, too. How did this kind of stuff make its way into the game? Is this more of giving you a base of understanding for these different scenes that will happen in the game, or are you literally using these as, like, Foley Clips?

So most things I do, I will, like, I'll use and I'll manipulate. It's not necessarily like a direct one-to-one of just playing the sound. But some of the stuff, like, I mean, stepping back, I have 600 gigs of recorded audio that I did for this trip. So there's a lot to get through. There's no way that I could get through it for now. But I mean, for our initial release, but there's a lot that I still need to get through as we go. But like in the VAB, I'm using the alarms a lot. I'm using ambience from the room, the crane stuff.

There's a lot of stuff that's made its way into the game. So what is what is you mentioned, you know, this is early access. So this game just came out. It's not done yet. And we're trying to get it out to users soon, sooner rather than later. What are you going to be adding? Like, what's coming down the pipe as the early access becomes normal access, on time access, but I don't know what you call it.

Yeah, yeah. Time access. That's the word for it, Jake. Yeah. Nothing in Game Studio likes more than the word on time, for sure. Yeah. Well, for audio, there's a, there's a, stuff that I'm doing.

Like, I try to do things in different stages and then like, like, this, it's very complex to get stuff in and be data driven. So having, like, the tech working is, like, the first thing, making sure all the different scenarios that I can account for are working. And then I start doing content swaps for that to make sure that it's working with whatever sources I have. So I think I have pretty good coverage, but there's certain things. I'd like to just detail more and like replace sounds. And so there'll be a lot of that. There'll be a lot of me writing a lot more music as well for the game. I still want to do.

I have a lot of plans for music and making it more dynamic. And yeah, there's a lot. Anything specific that you were looking for? or fit? Well, I'm just curious, you know, because like found those things where like, I mean, you can, you can add parts later for the rockets. So like along there's some parts to start with. Adding parts later doesn't like throw anybody off.

But if there's sound missing, then it's like, what do you do? Right. So I'm kind of curious of what, how you approach that from a sound perspective of like what, what is, is there now, but doesn't feel like I'm missing it. And how you layer that in is kind of an interesting technical problem to me at least. yeah um so there there's there are elements that are yeah i would say that i am going to replace or that i have in a minimal state but i'm going to expand upon so ambience is one one of those things um i have a very extensive ambient system for all the different but i i need to uh vet that system

more and work on that more so there it's much more dynamic and changes because of night and day There's lots of different things like that that I really want to expand on. That's cool. We have a question from the chat here who's saying, did you take any inspiration from the modding community because the, or we can do this question first, sure. Modding community. You're flipping around.

Mods or movies. But the Ks PMSModing community is obviously like pretty tremendous. there was some audio-based mods. Did you take any inspiration from them or get any help from them? I definitely, we have an amazing community. And I definitely did look at as many mods as I could find. In particular, like the voice chatter thing I thought was great. And I did implement a whole system for doing herbal chatter in the game.

And that's another thing I want to expand on as well going forward. but yeah for sure our community is awesome and like all that stuff is great I want to build as much of a system that I can and then give toys to them to play too but that was giving my follow-up is are there interfaces into the system you're building that allow monitors to do more with sound

in KSP2 than they could in the first one so like modding is a whole it's a whole whole thing Yeah Our community I like the episode two of this interview Yeah There

Our community is amazing I mean they've already modded stuff I've seen mods already in the game now So Like some of it is going to depend on like our interaction together On how we do things as well Because I could come up with this solution

But they want something and that's different or or and i want i want to be able to be flexible with that but also have some tools place that makes it easier for them to use or use some of my filters or things like that because there there is so much in this game that is not just play a sound it's like play a sound through all these things and that's what the sound is um yeah uh yeah there's there's so much data and filters and there's a lot to it. But I do want to go more in depth with all those systems later on. You know, like a podcast player, like Curbel Radio maybe, where there's like a couple of

really good podcasts that are in the game and just kind of get played when you're flying around space or something or. And it's all the Curbelies and it's as long as they look like us. That would be a hours. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That would be hilarious. Just like deep dive.

Like, yeah, six hours of Kerbalese podcast content. Tom did the everyday kerbal. You need a filter that takes normal human speech and converts it into Kerbalese. That's what you need to get. That's the next filter you have to do. That would be fun. All right, all right. Yeah, so this other question here from the chat is about movies.

So any inspirations from favorite space movies? I don't know if you have any or if you considered that in terms of soundtracks or other sounds. Sure. I'm obviously science and science fiction fan. So, I mean, there's a lot of it that just is there just automatically. But I did specifically go and find every movie I could and watch their rocket launches. and see how they handled not having sound in space or in sound in space. I had like a spreadsheet going for all that kind of stuff.

It was kind of fun to do that and just screen capture all these different scenes and everything. There is a lot of, like, once you really get into the sounds that NASA has made public, you hear them everywhere. It's like the Wilhelm screen. It's like the Wilhelm scream, but of rockets. Yeah. You're like, oh, man, there it is again. There it is again.

St.S. 108. There it goes again. Yeah. I know the Apollo 11 movie was, there was a crew next to where we were standing Jake for Falcon Heavy that was recording for Apollo 11 or were they were recording for first man. I forget which movie it was that they were. Yeah. First man. Yeah.

Okay. But they were using Falcon Heavy as a base. I don't know if they had as good of access as you did. We didn't even get to that part of the story where you were, where you were strapping these mics on the launch pad because it was a pretty extreme location where you were setting up. There was some moment where there was an announcement that started and you were like pretty nervous about why there was an announcement happening at the launch pad at the moment. It was not quiet either. It was pretty loud. Concerning the lightning protection tower and the lightning protection tower.

getting announcements or whatever it is, yeah. Yeah. It was pretty surreal being that close. I was about 50 feet, which is much closer than I had anticipated. But that's where power was. And since we have to record 26 hours in advance of the launch, power is kind of helpful. That would be a thing that you would want. We did run into some issues with power, but

the folks at ULA actually so I switched to battery power and later that night or earlier that next morning some folks at ULA switched it to we had a UPS put in and switched all my settings from battery to to actual power so that was really nice because I was I didn't sleep that night at all like all nervous that wasn't going to record yeah darn I'll have to come back and see that'll be a bummer right come back and see another one I did have one, I had multiple rigs there and one of them was never at risk at all. So like there was trauma, but it was like still a level of protection I had for the recording. I totally thought you were going to say one of them was never seen again.

Like it got melted by the rocket or something. It's like, wow, what is the story here? Did you get any tips from anyone about like how to prepare your gear for this environment? Because, I mean, you know, there's photographers out there all the time, but I don't know about how many of them are setting up really expensive shotgun mics and whatnot that you had there. Yeah, I did. I reached out to several friends of mine who are big recordist. A guy named Frank Brie and Andy Martin are like really, really top in this field for just field recording.

And yeah, like I made sure that I had wind protection and we had these blimps to that water protection as well. So I didn't have any damage to any microphones at all, but I did have some damage to some of the cables. Not during the thing, but the RP1 fuel is like really, it's really corrosive. Like within like a day, I could see where I didn't clean the cables very well, and it's already rusted after like a day.

Wow. Yeah, it was, like, as soon as I got back to the hotel, I put everything into the bathtub. and you simple green to clean everything off. And it probably took like, I don't know, eight hours to clean everything. And still, I had corrosion on certain things. Wow. Wow.

I'd never thought of that. Number one, the fact that you would clean cables instead of being like, well, business expense. These are getting framed on my wall as like the rocket cables that are all corroded and weird looking. But that's an extreme. It wasn't just cables. Right, yeah. There was like other mounts and stuff. Zooms and whatnot.

But all my recording gear was I had inside of a Pelican case. So that was untouched. So I was glad to have that there. I was a little worried about it like overheating because it was pretty hot. But it was fine. Do you have plans to do more of this? Like, you know, this is a pretty beefy rocket with solid rocket boost. There's a very small rocket that electron flies now from Virginia.

It might be a good spot to do, you know, maybe early career mode is going to have smaller rockets with no solids. Maybe that would be a good target. I don't know if that's, you know, are you looking for more content? I have a ton of content, but that, like being there, actually informed a lot of the other content that I had and what it should sound like and like solidified what I thought it should. sound like. Listen to so many rockets

and tried to know the difference between different types of rockets, but like having a control point to like pull from, like really changed everything for me. But yeah, I would love to do more recordings for sure. But still having that point to draw off of like

immediately without like even putting a single asset in the game, I had like 30 changes. I was like, oh, I have to do this and this and this and this different. Because I had nine, I had nine mics on the pad, and then I had like 14 more just to further out on the causeway. And I tried to place them strategically to like get different angles of this,

of, you know, of things and get reflections off buildings and whatever I could to get more, different sound sources from that. So I learned a ton. Was that the first launch that you had seen in person as well? It was, yeah. Wow.

I mean, that alone, I would be curious about your observations from that because there is like a weird sound phenomena that happens with the way that you experience a launch, especially as close as you where. You were standing really close to the old Air Force hangers, which I didn't even know they let people stand where you were standing, which was really cool. I have to find that one screenshot of where you were at because it was like, yeah. I mean, if you've been to the Cape, you know, like, where this particular shot was near the near, you're right up on them. You're real close. It's right there. Yeah. How was that?

What is your experience like as that thing took off? It was super emotional, actually. Like, I mean, I didn't sleep. And then also, just like waiting for the countdown, you know, not knowing if it was going to happen or not until. right before. But the actual launch itself, there's so many things that was different than I expected. I expected to be like hurting your ears a lot.

But it was more like this flutter all through your body. It was an amazing sensation just like throughout your body. And those crackles, it was like it was very like you could feel them just like individually. I don't know. I love haptics in game too. I do a lot of that as well. And this kind of thing, it just like resonated your body. It was, it was amazing. Honestly, I'm surprised that we didn't have footage of me like just sobbing. Yeah. It is weird. There's the two phases that are unexpected. Because I think the first time you see launch, you're expecting ignition to be this moment where you're like overtaken by sound and it's it's not it's like 10 seconds after ignition

is like the loudest but the coolest sounding part is like a minute and a half into flight when it starts getting that the sky is getting torn apart sound like the you can't even explain it to somebody until they've heard that particular sound like when it's above you about a minute later after launch it's i think the coolest part of uh of the whole experience i agree completely that like hearing rocket recording and hearing that crackle and pop, like it doesn't, like it matching with the vibration on your body,

and it makes it so much more visceral, like feeling it and hearing it. Whereas now I get that correlation when I see those videos a little bit more. It's pretty crazy. It's like the memory that you have in your head of it. It's different. Yeah.

I kind of equated to pictures of the solar eclipse, where before I saw one with my own eyes, I was like, that is a beautiful photo of a solar eclipse. And then after, I was like, oh, that's just a regular photo. But that one is what it really looked like when I was there. And that one hits different, you know? Like there's just that intangible sense of the in real life experience, which I'm really excited about.

I've not gotten a chance to fire up the game yet because I am over here as a person without a gaming PC. And Jake is the one of us that has a gaming PC, so often visit his house. to actually play it before it's out on a Mac. But just like, I don't know, if I get that little twinge of nostalgia every time I launch a vehicle in the game,

I'm going to be super pumped. Yeah, yeah. You do. I'll vouch for it, now, like it hits. I remember you, the first time that you fired it up, and then you, the first thing, but this was before we had arranged Howard to come on the show,

the first thing you said to me was the sound is amazing. So I will vouch for Jake not being a total homer that we're here talking to Howard. That was legitimately like the first observation you had. No, it's funny too because we reached out and we said, you know, we want to have someone from the game design be on the show.

You know, I was not thinking about sound design. I was like, I just want someone who is like involved with the process. And then they, you know, they replied and said, we're going to get you the sound designer. I was like, oh, yeah, that's exactly who I want to talk to. Yeah. Thank you for reading my mind because I'm not telling you that, but it is exactly who I wanted to be connected to you because this is so,

it's so much fun. I wanted to ask, too, so one of the things that's really interesting to me about the sound of a launch is this, it's this phenomenon where, like, when I had only heard recordings, I thought that the sound was clipping because it was too much for the microphones, right?

You hear this, it's this clipping sound. I'm like, oh, because the microphones just, there's no microphone on Earth that can absorb this power of a rocket launch. But then when I saw one in person, I realized it's actually the atmosphere that's clicking.

And the mic's doing is the spine. There's not an Earth on Earth, too. Camptu to assume. Yeah. So how do you deal? How do you record that one? Like just even the sound itself, like nature is already trying to break it down because it's too much.

So like the distance mics are much easier to do. And it actually captures that. I think the crackle and pop pretty well. But the air, the air like naturally like in air, there's a compression

that happens with sound, a natural compression. But with the audio engine, I can add additional compression too to make sure it's more contained or more varied. There's a lot of things I can do inside the engine to make sure that some of those things are captured within the game engine. But I recorded everything 32-bit

because it can just totally peak. And without that technology, I would just lose those recordings. But, you know, to do that, you can actually go like 700 db above. This is just total audio tech talk. But you can go 700 db above. All the other people listening, screw you. This is me and Jake time right now.

Yeah, here we go. But yeah, there's there's, I had a, I paid a lot of attention to how I was setting things up. Like, I had to put my gains as low as I could. Because it's just, the dynamic range. of a rocket The rocket will do the work for you. It's the best pre-empt that's ever existed is a rocket engine. Yes, exactly.

Any of the rocket companies can use that as well. If ULA wants to run with that, they're welcome to. I know they're in the marketing phase right now, Jake, so they might want all the fluff that they can get. You might talk about that a little bit, but. Oh, dear. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

I think that it was really well done. And it definitely evokes the right emotions for the launch, for sure. Can we talk a little bit about music? I don't think I realize if you're also involved with writing the music as well as just, you know, producing it. Like, is that what you're doing? I do. I write all the music as well.

Wow. Because I know for KSP1, like budgets were tighter, I guess. And they were just using a lot of, you know, public domain stuff. So you can go and get a lot of the KSP on music and use it for yourself for free. I've heard it in some spots. I forget what it was. There was like some ads sometime. I was like,

that's just KSP. Like they're just riffing that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the guy's name. You used them for your theme song. Yeah, it's all Kevin McLeod's stuff. That's it. Yeah, yeah.

He just like produces a ton of music. It just puts it on there. And so the Wee Martians theme song is actually one of his songs too. So there's a shared heritage there. Awesome. Yeah. So tell me about that. Like, what do you, I don't know, how do you approach the music writing design phase of that?

You have a lot of jobs. Like, you must be a busy guy. I don't know. But writing music is also. They were like, Howard's available for this interview. Sounds like you're really busy. Yeah, writing the music was a blast for this game. I think there's a certain elements of it that I wanted to bring, besides comedy, I wanted to

bring like a sense of home kind of, like an emotional base for when you're at Curban, when you're coming to Curban, that you, when you are like arriving from another planet, you get there and it's like, hey, I'm at Curban. Or when you first get to KSC, there's kind of an emotional thing that I want to happen when you're there. But I also wanted it to be dynamic and be able to change based on lots of different things. So if you have a large ship, different things happen. Like when you're launching, drums will be louder or more varied, depending on how larger vessel is.

Or if you have your, how much thrust you have, how much speed you are, the direction you're going. Like you'll have different music playing which direction you're going up in. It's, there's so many things. There's a lot of different systems in place. Jake didn't even realize he's like, all my rockets work. So I didn't notice the ones that were crashing. None of my rockets have come down yet. So it's, you know, it's a, actually, that's not true.

My very first one, I did the, I followed the, the, the curbel tradition and didn't check my staging. I didn't listen to, to Scott Manley's very sound advice. And it's just, the thing just toppled over because I had four engines and one of them lit. And so I just kind of went, did a, you know, was right. Yeah, it did Astrodonis and just toppled over. So I got that music, whatever that one is. That's really funny. I do have a system too that it changes as it goes through the atmosphere.

So the higher you get, it changes. So there's kind of more, like as soon as you're in orbit that you have for music than you do when you're flying. It's been fun. And I would say there's been a lot of things I've tried that it was like, oh, that didn't work so well. But it's been taking a lot of just like building a rocket. It's like throwing something in there and seeing what works. And like some things that would do would work really well in one scenario. But you put it in any other scenario, it's like, whoa, that seems very out of place.

So there's a lot of boxes to check to make sure it works in lots of different scenarios. Yeah. So you spend a lot of time in the MAB then the music is building is what you're saying. Yes. Yes, oh yes, exactly. We got another good question from Daniel and chat about futuristic engines, and you know, you went down and saw an Atlas 5, and that very much exists today. But stuff that doesn't exist yet when you get to just create it whole cloth,

is that the most fun thing or the least fun thing to do? I think what my current plan is, me and my son have a project where we're working on making those futuristic engines. you know it's amazing I know there's I think

I mean I mean interstellar travel and then I'll let you know what it sounds like and I'll put it in the game it's like wow the budget really is great

for KSP2 it's huge that is who's buying ULA somebody mentioned it in the chat squad buying ULA so that they can figure out the future of space travel that would be fun

we really need community involved on this launch. So I think for the futuristic engines, though, I'm trying to base as much on science as possible. I don't want it to sound sci-fi. I do

want it to sound cool and not like abrasive, which a lot of physical things sound very abrasive. So there is a little bit of like artistic license I have to take to make sure I'm not like breaking people's speakers. and making an experience that's like people just turn off the sound.

But I do want as much to be based on science as possible. But I do have to be mindful of like, we have to keep this game within a dynamic range. And we want things to sound big, but big sounds gets really, really old pretty quick. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, there's a bunch of things. You can only hear like those horns in like,

those trailers, like, you can only hear those for so long before you're like, hey, yeah. Let's go someplace off. I know, like, you know, one example of the futuristic rocket that is also real would be like this nuclear stuff, right? So there's like, you know, the NERVA engine is a very historical part of Kerval Space program because it's also like a real engine. I don't even know, though. I can't even think off top of my head what that's, that rocket would actually sound. because I don't think I've ever seen even a test firing video or anything. So, like, do you have access to any kind of data for nuclear stuff?

Or is that all pretty much just like, you know, faster than light stuff too? We're about the shut down by the U.S. government. Do you have any data on the nuclear test firings? They're coming after us. I mean, that one is a tough. I mean, it's all about vantage point, too. Because, like, if you're in the middle of a nuclear explosion, sounds only there for a moment. At least from your vantage point.

Nobody knows what that sounds like. Jake, there is video of NERVA, though. Is there? I've never watched it. I don't know. But they're also not going to be lighten these things on the ground, right? Like, these aren't not things that are going to be operating at one Florida atmosphere. No, right. Directly pointed into the desert is not really the environment that this thing would be doing itself. No. And normally, so yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is the video. I don't know if the sound is any good. I can turn on the sound, but probably not very good.

I doubt there's any at all. I don't even think there's any sound of this. No, it's just some dude talking. It's a classic 60s video. In a desert. Oh, he fired a thing. But again, that's like the, that's the, that's the in-space stuff that we're talking about, where, like, you don't want space to have no sound because it's a game and you want to experience.

I mean, in a lot of ways, I always considered it as, like, You know, the way that I write it in my head is like, if I was sitting in this rocket, what would it sound like in there? And there has been even like a couple of those videos on the space station where they'll be doing a reboot. And there's a video like, here's what happens inside the space station. Anything you forgot to tie down is now on the other end of the space station because it's floated over there because we've thrust it that way a little bit. Sure. So there's like, you know, ways that you can kind of think about it is that, yeah, if you were sitting outside this rocket, you would not be hearing it this way. but if you were sitting inside this rocket,

it would have a certain rumble to it regardless. And if you're just getting that vibe, or even like you had said Howard, that like you want to know, you want to use those audio cues to build muscle memory to know what's going on in the game and maintain situational awareness. Like, that's,

it's a game experience. That's the point of it. So as long as it rings true and it doesn't, you know, feel like it's a totally bizarre sound for the thing that you're going through. Like, it's totally an, enhancement of your experience.

And like, that is literally your job to figure that out. And apparently you're very, very good at it because like you're doing, they've entrusted you with all of the sound that's coming out of this game. So. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I echo that for sure. There definitely is like, I mean, you want excitement.

You want you want, like to know all the details about an engine too. Like you're out of fuel. you know, what state your engines in, all that kind of thing. So there's a lot of detail that can be given and emotions and all that. So a lot to consider for like everything I do, I have to consider in so many different levels. And they're very, very conscious decisions about, okay, we're going to hear this because the player needs to hear this. Or we need to build that they've worked really hard to get to this point. This has to be a fun moment.

That kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. I'm reminded there's, I listen to this podcast. I'm not going to remember which podcast it is now. I'm going to be a terrible plugger of whoever made this great thing. But it was some podcast that was talking about the development of like jingles. Right. So these like little tiny three, four second audio clips that need to like carry a ton of definition. Right. So the one that really focused on this podcast was the Intel inside sound. Right. You know, dun dun dun, then, then like that that like four no. And it's over like that. And it has this like, it captures like a ton of what they need to do for this brand. And so I'm kind of thinking of the same thing. Like you're, you're trying to, you're trying to evoke an emotion. You're trying to like signify game mechanics that are happening at the same time. You know, this means this, this means this.

You're trying to be real. You're trying to be artistic. There's a lot. Yeah, I totally believe you that there's a lot to think about every, every clip you put in this thing. So, huh. Wow. It's pretty crazy.

I mean, you, you see. this type of things on like dryers nowadays. They'll play a little song or something. Unfortunately. Yeah. Or an Instapot or whatever. They're like, wow, that was an interesting jingle from a appliance. A microwave is unfortunately very musical.

And it's like, I didn't need the whole song to play. It's really a lot. It's a lot. Give me some options here. My last dryer was like it played, it had like verses and a chorus and a bridge. I'm like, you just need to tell me. the laundry is done. Jake, what you don't know is here in the U.S., all of our appliances play the Star

Spangled Banner every time it does anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A little flag comes out, yeah. Oh, dear. Just imagine what Maryland's like, Jake. They love their flag. Yeah, I know Maryland. I know some people from Maryland.

They're really into flags. Really? They're all into flags. It's wild. And they have the worst one, which is a whole thing. Yeah. If you want to look up a really interesting flag, look up the Maryland, flag.

And you can you can you can you can think about what kind of emotions that evokes for you. They're turned into a podcast for one, an audience of one person right now. One audience member. But they're really into it. They're like, ah, they're so angry right now. They're so angry. They're typing an email right now. Like, trying to.

Oh, my goodness. He's calling me right now. No, I'm kidding. Um, what was I going to say now? I can't talk to me about old, old base seasoning now is all I can think about. I guess so, I mean, we're getting close to the end here. I would love to know, like, sort of like, what's for all the people that are, that are totally bought into this early access, like, what's the next, what's the next thing?

Like, there's a, I know there's like a patch coming for the first update. Is there anything that's got Howard's fingers all over it? Like, what are we seen first here? So lately I've been doing a lot of, so, a lot of balance in the game. Like the volume of things is a very, very important thing. You get scale. You get,

that's a bit of huge focus, but it's not as easy as just like, let's turn this down. Let's turn this up. I have really complex systems. Like if your engine is like really roaring, I can, I have a little,

I'm actually monitoring that level and adjusting the UI level based on that. So you can still hear that because otherwise, you want to hear UI sounds. and the rocket's going, I'd have to put them so loud. And then, like, you're on the Luntpad, and you're like, ah, ah, ah. So it's like the car feature, right? When you speed up, your music gets a little louder and you hopefully don't notice it because you're just going faster.

So the car's louder. So it's just a little bit louder. So it's the same level to you. Exactly. Exactly. Except in this scenario, there's like 20 different of those levers. And a full-ass rocket to contend with it. Yeah, and we're not making it easy on you with just like a single solid rocket boozger.

I'm putting 15 swivels and one one NERVA in the middle for later. And then I'm strapping three or four different kinds of solids. And I'm strutting it all up. Yes. Figure this one out, Howard. Balance that. That's an incredible motivation, Jacob. Like, I'm going to have bold a thing so screwed up that Howard couldn't have coded for this one.

Part of early access is about trying to break it so they know what to fix first, right? Well, I'm going to go try and break the sound. I'm going to see if I can hide an engine somewhere in some sort of acoustic pocket that doesn't get out. We're just going to make a mod for like the, I forget what the name of these audio panels that are behind here that are like the, what is it, NRC 1.0, right? Like no sound comes out of the thing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're going to make a mod where it's like one of those panels that you can coat your engine bay in. It was like directional sound for your rocket.

Depending if your cameras on one side of the rocket, you hear it or not. Yeah. We have a lot of great ideas. If your developers want to give us to call. There is a lot of, like, acoustics inside of like cargo bays and all that inside of tanks and everything, it's pretty compelling. I'd love to at some point talk to the people who did the science behind the science behind. that is uh i think that's pretty interesting we all right new project jake last week we're working on getting lance bass to space this week we're looking to get howard fully encapsulated in a faring

with all of his audio here take me to the moon i'm just fully encapsulated and the air conditioning on like he's on the pad and see what it sounds like in there honestly though i don't know if anyone knows what it sounds like in there like there's some payload mics but they're not they're not as good as the mics that you've been touting around the Cape. So, yeah. Space X, you've got a lot of fairings. Can we just need, we just need two of them? Can we throw Howard in there?

Yeah, we just need to put Howard in the surprise. He's not even that far away. You could drive there. Howard was in there the whole time. Stop at that gas station, pick up some fried chicken and beer, and he'll be right down there. We've got to figure it out. We solve problems on this podcast. This is what we do.

So, yeah. Oh, completely. Cool. Well. If people are interested in your work generally, is there a place they can go to check the world of Howard out? So, I mean, lately it's been all curable, but you can go to Howard Mostrom.com. I have some of the stuff I've done on there. I'm not that great about keeping it up necessarily, but there are some things on there.

It's a long list. But yeah, probably that list is not even updated either. My son was like, you should get chat GPT on that or something. He's automating you out of a job, yeah. You're like, well, that's what you're for. Please update my website and keep it up to date based on what I've been working on. Oh, wow. Jake, have you been getting anything done or you've just been playing KSP too?

Mostly just playing KSP too. Yeah, yeah. I have to say that is something. I tried to fix. We had a Discord bot that. is running in our community discord that broke last episode, and I thought I fixed it, and it broke again this episode.

So, you know, that's on my plate right now. We're just see if we can get this thing going, develop stuff. It's really access, really, if you get down to it. And never will leave that. And you'll only test it while we're live. That's the only way that you like doing it. So it'll never be on in the session in the week or anything to just try it out.

No. It's not on my testing strategy. But yeah, so, you know, not much going on for me right now. Taking a little bit of a break. It's good. How about you? Nice. I know you had a new episode out recently. Yep.

Space Force put out their RFP or draft RFP. They didn't even release it yet. But it's going how I would like it to go, Jake. So if you're into the National Security Space Launch program, Miko is where you want to hang out and look for that. And also, New Glenn. Like, there's sneakily posting photos to the Blue Origin Gallery. And I don't know.

But their engines still aren't really working on the whole thing. So. We've got a whole discussion about that. Next week, Jake, we got a good one. Yeah, yeah. We've got, well, now I'm, now I'm guessing myself. I think I know who we have. That's Scott Potee.

Yes, I've got Scott Potee coming on. A U.S. Air Force Thunderbird pilot, a member of Polaris Dawn, the mission director of Inspiration 4. He's going to just, he's going to tell some stories because he's got awesome stories. He's a story guy, yeah. Yeah. If you want a guy who knows what engines sound like. He's got a lot of engines in his history.

I'm pretty pumped about that. He can get you some sounds inside of an F-16 and you can figure out what that sound. We didn't even talk about the airplanes. There's a whole other part of this game. Oh, yeah. There's so much data for airplanes, too. It's pretty crazy.

Oh, dear. All right. Okay, well, when we have you back for beta release or whatever, we're going to dig into that. If people are not up to date on the KSP 2 situation, can you just give them a little elevator pitch on maybe they've played KSP, maybe they haven't, what should they know in their life right now? So about KSP and KSP 2 in general?

Generally, yeah. Like what's the situation? Can they play it? Should they buy it? That kind of thing. Oh, yeah, yeah. So you can go to, it's on Steam and Epic Game Store. We're in early access.

We can simulate rockets, rocket launches. It's such a fun experience to even just like make things blow up. It's just a lot of fun. And it's fun to be able to be involved with the community on this and just, like, really work on this together. It's a great experience. I'm having a lot of fun overall. If someone's listening to this and they have not played KSP, Jake and I are personally very angry at you. It's like, I'm serious.

It is the greatest game. It is the best game. I distinctly remember where I was. I think I was at, like, a conference in Denver in, like, 2013 or 14 or something. and I saw Notch, Minecraft fame Notch, tweeting a screenshot or something of a rocket he was launched and I was like,

what the hell is this thing? And I've been obsessed ever since. It's been damn near a decade at this point that it has dominated the playtime of both Jake and I. And again, I can't play KSPT yet because I don't have a system

that's ready for it, but that's driving me nuts. I'll be real about that. So I really, remain jealous of Jake and thankful of you, Howard, Howard, for hanging out. This is awesome. It's super cool to hear about what you're working on. So thanks for hanging out with us. Yeah, thanks so much, so busy. Thank you. This has been fun.