JakeSparkleChicken

I'm playing on Linux and have found that I can no longer launch the game from Steam, but launching from the command line works fine for some reason. Have you tried launching it directly instead of through Steam?

If someone had told me a year and a half ago that at the age of forty I'd find a video game that had me seriously looking into going back to school and tying to change careers from network monkey to aerospace engineer, I would have laughed and asked you to share whatever drugs you must obviously be smoking. Yet, here I am, with a whole mess of edx.org courses bookmarked, thinking that it may be time to finally get a degree. For me, KSP has been a reminder that it is not too late to follow childhood dreams, no matter how long ago they were given up on.

In my current career, just a few SCANsat probes in polar orbits around Kerbin, Mun and Minmus. My previous careers are another story. The last career had a mothership with two landers and two probes attached in orbit around Duna that fell victim to the dreaded docking bug, ten frozen Kerbals waiting for me to get up the guts to edit the save file and manually fix the ports. The loss of that mission was one of the driving forces behind starting my current career, but I probably put in another fifty or sixty hours cleaning up some other loose ends before pulling the plug. In a career using KSPI-E and OPM, I grossly overestimated how well my microwave transmission constellation would work over interplanetary distances and thought that the solar panels were magic. I unlocked the warp drive, sent Val out to Plock as my first test, and had no means of coming home. She sat out there, all alone, waiting patiently for me to send a rescue mission that never came. I still have the save file, so she still has a glimmer of hope, but I know in my heart that that particular universe's Val is destined to float in inky darkness forever.

I've been lurking on the forums for almost a year. I created an account specifically to let you know that I finished the Jool contract this morning and it was absolutely brilliant! At first, I thought that the Kraken had eaten poor Bob, but.... I had a ton of fun with the contract pack, and it pushed me to do some things that in all my time playing KSP, I'd not yet done. Thank you for all the effort you put into this!