Search the Community

Talk like Up-Goer Five: Express complex ideas using only very simple, common words. For anyone who has somehow managed to miss it, a while back xkcd had an absolutely brilliant strip: a schematic of the Saturn V, carefully labeled.... but with all terms restricted to only the thousand most common English words. This is where the KSP community gets the term "you will not go to space today." https://xkcd.com/1133/ This game is to talk like Up-Goer Five. That is, you have to express complex ideas using only the most common English words. Here are the rules: The person before you ends their post with a brief paragraph of something reasonably complex to explain. You need to take their post and re-word it using this tool (it lets you type what you want, and draws a red line under any "forbidden" words): http://splasho.com/upgoer5/ You can paraphrase if need be (you'll probably need to). The one really hard rule is, your "translation" has to fit in that tool's edit box with no red "forbidden words" underlines at all. Post your translation inside a spoiler box, so that people reading your post have a chance to guess an answer first, if they want to. Then provide a technical paragraph of your own for the next person to take a shot at. You're not allowed to answer your own post; someone else has to. But you're welcome to come back again after some other folks have had their turns. Guidelines for the "technical paragraph": Don't make it too long, please. Just a sentence or two is plenty. (Otherwise nobody will want to take the burden of "translating" it.) Don't make it so hard that nobody understands it. It should be something that a typical KSP forum user can understand without having to go look stuff up. Ideally the post should be about KSP-relevant topics, e.g. spaceflight, astronomy, engineering, KSP game advice, etc., but that's not a strict requirement, just a suggested guideline. (Props to @Deddly for pointing out the upgoer5 tool to me, which is what gave me the idea for this game.) Just as an example, here's a sample technical paragraph: SRBs are useful as boosters on the launchpad, because they're inexpensive and provide a lot of thrust. However, they're less efficient as upper stages, due to having a low Isp. Here's my stab at translation, using the above-linked tool to validate it: Fair 'nuff? Okay, to get the ball rolling, here's a technical paragraph for someone to start with: Building a SSTO spaceplane is challenging, because not only do you need to balance air-breathing engines with those that work in a vacuum, but also the ship needs to be aerodynamically stable at high velocity.