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UnusualAttitude

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  1. Darn it... I have to say, I'm not surprised. I have already experienced this to a certain extent at much lower physics warp settings (x3, x4...) with reasonably sized vehicles on my vintage Mac. Take the example of that 9 hour burn I made at x4 for one of my probes. I started the burn 4.5 hours before the node, but it wasn't complete until 10 hours after the node in game, even though only approximately three hours of real time had passed. I guess this sums it up...
  2. I dealt with that by, umm... not even noticing the RSS/RO incompatibility warning and installing it anyway. To the best of my knowledge, all of the command modules, crew capsules and station modules work perfectly well. So do the numerous solar panels, if you're using the stock EC system. The mod is well worth it merely for these parts (the bridge and solar panels of Prosperity, the core of LDRO Station, the Opulence command and service modules, etc...) I had to write in some Real Fuels values for the engines (I only use a few of them). As eloquentJane said, I edit the part statistics. There are several ways of doing this, and I can explain some of them if you're interested. You can create a Real Fuels config file, you can write a Module Manager patch, or you can modify the part .cfg file directly. My gamedata file is an absolute mess of various .cfg hacks, which is also the main reason why I have never shared any of the craft that appear in the Logs. Any other user opening them and launching them with another setup would likely have a lot of nasty surprises...
  3. My thoughts precisely. Whether I do these burns legitimately or not will ultimately depend on A: What day of the week will it be when these probes arrive at their targets..? and B: Will the weather be nice enough for me to go and ride my bike while Remote Tech does its job, or not..? I still have my multitude of plastic polyhedrons from my roleplaying days somewhere at the bottom of a cardboard box in my attic. I put them there when I grew up and moved away from my roleplaying friends. Then the Internet was invented, and now I spend months designing space probes and crewed missions to distant planets in an attempt to impress people on the aforementioned Internet. This all takes a lot of my time, so I don't think I will leave such a huge amount of work to chance. That, and the feeling of nostalgia from rolling those dice will kill me... Courtesy of Texture Replacer and Scart91's texture pack. I promise that Camwise will gradually get filthier over time.
  4. This. Very interesting ideas. Both of which I could have used to reduce the real-time duration of the sun-diving oberth maneuvers (although I couldn't get BetterTimeWarp to work in this version for some reason). In the end, I simply entered the burns into the Remote Tech computer, left it at x4 and went out to ride my bike. This must be one of the rare upsides to Remote Tech..! And, as Geschosskopf mentions... thrusting in the background. There may come a time in the Camwise Logs where this will have to be a thing. It's the 3.75m 6-seat command module from the SSTULabs mod, based on the Orion capsule. SSTU is full of awesomeness, particularly for Real Solar System, and a real life-saver in terms of part count. You might want to consider it for your RSS save: it has Soviet-styled modules, station modules and engines based on real-life equivalents. It even has a Shuttle fuselage as a single component.
  5. 4.5 hours was just the time to node in this case. The actual burn was more than nine hours, so a 40 km/s burn would take the best part of a day. The Ice Giants have massive Hill Spheres due to their distance from Sol, but you're probably correct to assume that such a burn wouldn't fit into Pluto's SOI. That doesn't really matter though, as we can start the burn well before we encounter our target. With such a transfer, you're basically screaming in on a perpendicular course at tens of kms per sec, so it's the equivalent of a 90 degree handbrake turn to match the body's velocity. At such speed with ion thrusters it isn't possible to gain anything from burning close to the target anyway. Indeed, DSP's dual-stage gridded thruster (courtesy of the Near Future mod) is still overpowered by at least a factor of x1,000 in terms of thrust (with a hypothetical advanced ion thruster and a multi-megawatt reactor you might get a few Newtons, not 5,5 kN..!) so in reality such a probe would have to start matching the target's trajectory several months out. I'm not gonna lose any sleep over this and I may end up simply hyper-editing the probes into orbit and dumping the corresponding fuel to avoid locking up my computer for a day unnecessarily... Unfortunately not. He has only his pain and loss, and the ghosts of his departed loved ones to haunt him in the darkness, until a violent death eventually liberates him from this living hell. But when you put it like that, it does sound like something you might find on NetFliks....
  6. YEAR 14, DAY 254. CAMWISE. ...and so, we toiled. I worked for days to get the mining rig set up on the asteroid's surface, smashing all previous records for time spent on EVA. With assistance from Jenbles who sat comfortably in the relative safety of L'Orphelin's cockpit, I spent hour after hour crawling through the black dust of the asteroid's surface. Most of these spacewalks were carried out untethered, and were risky. You might have thought that the presence of the asteroid's solid surface would make things easier... Nope. In fact it was a hazard that added far more problems than it solved. Its negligible gravity field wasn't helpful in any meaningful way. Y13-HO3's crust was covered in loose material that I had to avoid disturbing, unless I wanted to work surround by clouds of dust and grit that wouldn't settle for several hours. Because there was no pull towards the body's centre, the rocky outcrops I worked around appeared to me more like vertical walls than rough but largely horizontal surfaces. My inner ear, by now well attuned to floating in the void, was constantly tricked into telling me that I was about to fall from the top of a sheer cliff. I returned from every single sortie with my space suit covered in jet black grime, absolutely filthy. I secured mounts for our equipment and pipes in the crumbling, grainy regolith. I connected the long power lines that formed a web across half of the rock's sunward hemisphere. I made sure that the mining rig and the reactor were properly attached and would not budge when the laser was eventually switched on, melting into the innards of our new home. And when all of this was accomplished, I collapsed, exhausted, at L'Orphelin's engineering station and flicked the master switch that turned on the massive nuke. I was almost too tired to care or worry whether it would work or not. Or whether the bulge in the asteroid's surface that we had put in between the rig and our ship would be sufficient to block the radiation. Radiators deployed. Control rods slowly retracted. Kastria's new disasterpiece, crafted with help from alien robots, began to warm up and the dosimeters in our crew cabin remained silent. Running at a mere fraction of its maximum output, the monstrous reactor was already providing enough power to run our life support systems and charge our batteries. Switching on the drilling rig wouldn't even make it break sweat. Our power source was officially up and running. It was time to report back to Prosperity and tell Commander Astrice that she could make her merry way back to Lunar orbit, and leave us to our work. From there, no doubt, Prosperity would be sent on another mining expedition. Delivering another crew to another Near Earth rock. Abandoning more of her children in deep space. From the Resource Company's point of view, we had already served our purpose. We had set up the ISRU equipment, and in a few month's time, a solar tug would wing its way across the few million kilometres that separated us from Earth to collect our harvest of water. Y13-HO3 was a quasi-satellite of Earth, meaning that it was in a 1 to 1 orbital resonance with our home planet, but its trajectory was more eccentric. For half of the year, we would drift sunwards and ahead of Earth's path around Sol, before lagging behind and returning to approximately the same position after one complete revolution. This meant that unless the Board authorised Prosperity to perform a costly – and unlikely – high energy trajectory rather than wait for a transfer window, there would only be one chance each year to hitch a ride home. Until we delivered the goods, such a waste of precious reaction mass was unlikely to occur. We could therefore look forward to at least twelve months living on our tiny island in space, in an artificial cave dug out by a nuclear-powered laser beam. Prosperity would return to our asteroid eventually, of this I had no doubt. Whether Jenbles and I would still be alive – or sane – by that time was something that remained to be seen.
  7. Hey there. Contrary to appearances, I have been working on this at least a couple of nights each week since the last post. And boy, some of the stuff I've been doing has taken a real long time. Like the Board's new probe fleet trying to brute force its way to the Ice Giants and the Kuiper Belt in 2-4 years with sun-diving oberth transfers on gridded ions and nukes. Mmmh, delta-vee... but just look at that burn time... The bad news is that with such transfers, orbital insertion around Uranus and Pluto will require more than 40 km/sec. The other bad news is that there is no good news. However, once I'm through these burns, and once I've counted the additional white hairs in my beard since I started them, I should have enough material to write several new episodes of the Logs. In the meantime, a small addition will be published shortly. I should really have included it in the previous episode, come to think of it. And, who knows, maybe as a Christmas or New Year gift, we might finally get around to finding out what the hell happened to your favourite character on this show...
  8. Launching supplies for a station in high lunar orbit that is about to run out of snacks...? You're cutting the fast food delivery a little bit fine, aren't you?
  9. Well, congratulations and good luck with the terrible twos. These mission report thingies do have a habit of dragging you back if you leave them unattended for too long... Your description of Pol is deliciously creepy. I am now mulling over possible explanations for a subsurface ocean of pus that might explain the volcanoes of goop. Maybe with gravitational tides, a sprinkle of comet dust and a few billion years of evilution, anything is possible...
  10. I can't speak for everyone, of course. But having read a lot of the threads and comments posted here, I get the impression that writing war stories and military reports is just not everyone's cup of tea. There are a few exceptions though: @DarkOwl57 has written several stories based around war on Kerbin, and @adsii1970's story also includes military characters and some combat action, I believe.
  11. A very impressive crew shuttle! How well does she do during re-entry and hypersonic flight when empty? I still have to wrestle with my larger vehicles to keep them on course, particularly when they hit the thicker parts of the atmosphere. PS: I see you're not using Real Fuels, any particular reason why? Getting a reuseable TSTO to space with the ISP of kerosene or hypergolics is pretty cool though... PPS: Now, try putting it back down on the runway.
  12. Yes, but just remember that this is a career save and, unlike Mr Martin, I have to buy my characters with hard-earned funds. Those little green dudes are getting expensive due to the size of my roster... One could also argue that the Resource Companies' total body count far exceeds anything the most bloodthirsty Targaryan or Lannister could achieve, if you take into account many years of their repressive policies applied on a global scale. Also, this story is far from over....
  13. Look on the bright side, I am still more productive than George R R Martin.
  14. Hey, it's cool to see you're still around, Per. Happy bingeing, although I'm afraid I wasn't very productive this summer, so you will catch up pretty quick. Still, take regular breaks !
  15. I sometimes take professional visitors on PR tours of the factory where they are built. Pictures not allowed, unfortunately. But last year, this happened... We have seen Mriya a couple of times in Toulouse. By now, I'm used to being around big planes, but Mriya is just... awesome.
  16. Yeah, let's just hope that they were designed by Froemone, and not Karanda... And maybe worth the risk if you consider the alternative: pooping in a bag for a year. Being the progressive kerbalist soul he is (at least in his rational moments), I'm sure Camwise would love to debate the idea that, as the only known intelligent life-form native to the Sol System, Kerbals have greater responsibility and should seek to rise above their instinctive behaviours for the betterment of nature as a whole. Or something. But, section 2.2b and all that... Mmmh... foreshadowing. Love it. Well, he is only three feet tall, but I gather this is the average height for a Kerbal. Having said that, Napoleon himself was actually of average height for his time. This would be disastrous indeed, because he is now a skilled engineer in possession of a multi-megawatt nuclear reactor and half a million tonnes of potential reaction mass that could be turned into kinetic energy. What were you thinking, Resource Companies....?!
  17. YEAR 14, DAY 248. CAMWISE. Because she was designed for efficiency and hard work rather than gazing idly into infinity, the good ship Prosperity's only windows into space were situated at the front of the vessel, on the bridge. Jenbles and I therefore took turns to observe our final approach of asteroid Y13-HO3 from the jump seat at the back of the flight deck, as Commander Astrice and Second Pilot Kimet manoeuvred the great solar-powered ship cautiously into a position close enough to deploy the hardware that we had brought to this fight. Naturally, Prosperity faced away from our destination as she ended the burn to match orbits with the lonely space rock. The manoeuvre had been a long one. Although it had taken just a few dozen metres per second to eject from Lunar Distant Retrograde, in the interests of stepping up the pace of our conquest of the Solar System, a swift transfer had been plotted. Four million kilometres sunwards and prograde in just three months. It had taken more than two kilometres per second of delta-vee to arrest our velocity relative to the target. Although Prosperity's revolutionary plasma thruster was orders of magnitude stronger than the ion drives that equipped the probes we had sent to the outer planets, the correction had nevertheless lasted several hours. The ship's rear facing radar told us that a massive obstacle, hundreds of metres across, lurked in the darkness right behind us. A last puff of ionised water was jetted out of the thruster nozzles, and our velocities were finally matched. Only then could Prosperity perform her slow about-turn that brought Y13-HO3 into view. Jenbles and I elbowed each other to catch a first glimpse of what was to be our home for the next year or so. We might have not bothered: at first glance, it wasn't much to look at. Y13-HO3 was a hulking body with an irregular shape and about two hundred metres across at its widest point. Being a carbonaceous type asteroid, most of its surface was as black as pitch and seemed to suck up the sunlight that fell upon it, in ways that not even the lunar Maria did. There were a few areas that presented subtle nuances of very dark grey, and here and there, the odd patch of the deepest browny blue imaginable. But mostly, it was just black. Its surface was lumpy, but on the whole fairly spherical compared to some of the weirder-shaped potatoroids and contact binaries we knew to be out there. There were a couple of larger hollows that had probably been carved out by ancient impacts dating back to when our star system was still young, but none of these features seemed worth writing home about. Y13-HO3 was covered almost entirely in a thick layer of dust that had been tilled by billions of years of space-weathering and micrometeorites. And it looked old. I have seen ancient landscapes before: the tired, worn-down precambrian hills of northern Europe, the frozen pre-nectarian highlands of Luna. But this was something else. A tiny, lonely geological microcosmos, unspoiled since the dawn of our system. Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of what was basically star stuff with most of the hydrogen and helium removed... and several million kelvins cooler. I must admit that I felt guilty about my own scathing appraisal of what was, after all, a fascinating celestial body that had meandered through the inner system for ages before we had arrived to disturb its relatively uneventful existence. I had known many Planetary Investigators from my former team at Omelek who would have readily given up significant portions of their own anatomy in exchange for a chance to study this relic of the early days of our star system's history. A glimpse of genesis, frozen in time through long aeons. A silent watcher in the eternal light that had gazed upon our star and seen her through the throes of a violent youth, then her growth to maturity. A star that bestowed her warm, steady glow upon the spheres that made up her inner cohort. Nurturing the third rock from the sun. The special one. The one that would harbour life: plants, animals, and eventually small green creatures that would haul themselves ponderously out of her gravity well and venture beyond the protective cloak of her atmosphere. Blinking in the pure, harsh light of the vacuum, their destiny was to contemplate the new worlds that surrounded them in sheer wonder... ...and then bring up the nukes and the drills to mine this insignificant dump, turning its guts inside out for every last drop of rocket fuel that it could provide. Way to go, Kerbals. In your face, Solar System. My train of thought was interrupted by Prosperity's Commander. “Time to saddle up, Kerski.” I looked around the bridge at Astrice, Kimet and Ering. Here was a crew of earnest greenhorns who had risen to the challenge of taking an unproven, revolutionary ship on her maiden voyage into deep space. During the three-month transfer, they had bonded and formed a close team. I had no doubt that they would remain fast friends if ever they made it back home alive. I was reminded of the spirit of camaraderie that I had experienced on the Icecrawler back in Antarctica, but this time I would have no part in it. I had stubbornly refused to become friends with anyone else on board: a luxury afforded by the comparatively vast accommodations of the great solar powered vessel. I was and would remain Kerski, that strange, impenetrable dude who rarely spoke to anyone. Kerski, and his sidekick Jenbles, who had just arrived at their stop and were about to be kicked off the ship for a long winter in the outback. “Don't worry, Kerski.” Astrice seemed to read my mind. “Someone will come for you next spring.” “Well, the Board will certainly want their water. They might want their nuke back, too. So we can always hitch a ride on one of the tugs,” I said. “But we might not meet again, so take care Commander.” Indeed, Prosperity's crew was scheduled to rotate back to Earth once they had returned the ship to dock at LDRO station. Prosperity would be back for us at some point, but it would be with another crew, so it was unlikely that our paths would cross again. And with this cursory farewell out of the way, Jenbles and I headed aft to the docking hub and prepared the MUV for launch. A couple of hours later, our tiny vessel had undocked and, dodging the hazards of our mothership's hull and centrifuge, we set out purposefully towards the asteroid with the massive reactor and several year's worth of food in tow. We wouldn't be planting flags on the surface of this new world. They probably wouldn't stick anyway. No, we would be planting a nuclear reactor coupled with a high powered laser to melt the asteroid's surface... As the MUV drifted slowly across the gap to our target, propelled at mere centimetres per second by solar power wired into miniature versions of Froemone's ELF thruster, the epic scale of our surroundings suddenly struck me. Behind us lay the long and wiry shape of Prosperity. Even without the expanse of her solar arrays, which had been retracted out of harm's way during our undocking procedures, she looked impressive. The finest spaceship that my humble species was able to field. Before us loomed a massive, uncaring wall of primeval rock that made my head spin the closer we got. In a sense, Y13-HO3 felt like the biggest single thing I had ever seen. Not as vast as an entire planet or a moon, which is objectively several orders of magnitude larger. But the thing is, seen from orbit, a planet never feels like an actual thing, but more like an immense abstract landscape. You can't see the minute details. You can't take it all in one glance, unless your orbit is high enough to begin using quaint metaphors such as marble or jewel. In contrast, we were about to get up close and personal with a pile of gravel and stone that massed the best part of half a million tonnes. Subjectively, an asteroid punches far above its weight in terms of size. And in between, our tiny utility vessel. Hopelessly small. Completely outclassed in the overall bigness of things, we bridged the gap to our target ever so slowly, rejected by our mothership. Then, as I watched over the proceedings from my seat behind Jenbles, an idea came to me. “Hey, pal. This ship just got a name.” “What, the MUV?” “Yeah. You gotta call her L'Orphelin du Vide now.” “Uh... what..? Is that your eastern European dialect?” “Sort of. It means 'Void's Orphan'.” Jenbles turned and rolled his eyes at me. “I'll never remember that.” “C'mon. You have a whole year to practice getting it right.” “Yeah, but can't I just call her Orf..?” And so we bickered over the name of our ride as we made our way slowly round to the sunward side of the asteroid where we were to make our initial test-run of the drilling rig. The first borehole was important: it would determine the composition of the asteroid and would also serve as living quarters for Jenbles and myself, and any subsequent crews that may be sent to watch over the mining process. If all worked as planned, the rig would melt and suck up molten material from the rock's interior, then inject it back in to form an airtight pocket that we would then be able to pressurise and live in, once we'd moved all the necessary furbishing across from L'Orphelin's tiny crew cabin. We would get to keep our vacuum toilet, and enjoy the added bonus of many more cubic metres of living space and several metres of hard rock above our heads. Thus, in theory, we were guaranteed to be safe from solar storms, cosmic rays, and the risk of slowly going crazy. Pointing our nose away from Y13-HO3, Jenbles finally backed up until the surface was a huge, dark wall filling the screen of our docking cameras. Following his training, he gave a long blast on our puny thrusters in order to make contact at sufficient velocity for the drilling rig to stick. With a muffled crunch and a gentle kick, we came to rest at the bottom of one of the depressions in the asteroid's surface. “Contact...” muttered Jenbles to no-one in particular. Comms had been cut off as metres of rock had come between L'Orphelin and Prosperity. Once we sure that our expensive package would not try and escape the moment we turned our backs on it, we undocked and made our way around one of the outcrops to find a suitable place for temporary stowage of our life support. This was a mere matter of pitching it somewhere and coming back for it later. Boulders, dust and pebbles slid by L'Orphelin's viewports just metres away, clinging improbably to a soaring cliff that stretched away in all directions. Even the whispering caress of our electric thrusters raised small clouds of powdery material in our wake that would settle minutes, or even hours later in the weak gravity that somehow kept Y13-HO3 together. Our final task of the day was to return to Prosperity one last time to retrieve the water tanks that we were supposed to fill in the coming months. Once these were safely docked to the mining rig, we recovered the life support unit and parked L'Orphelin for the night. While we rested, Prosperity would manoeuvre sunwards and put some distance between herself and the asteroid, enabling a clean comms link whilst staying clear of the radiation when we powered up the reactor for the first time. If this test was successful, she would leave us to it and return to Lunar orbit for her next assignment. I never thought that I'd feel homesick after all that had happened back on Earth. Maybe it was just fear of the unknown. Maybe the fact that after weeks on the float, we'd finally struck something that vaguely resembled solid ground once more. Or maybe the stinging irony of my long journey: I'd gone from growing up as a cave-dweller in the bowels of planet Earth to becoming one of the first troglodytes in space. Burrowing down for safety, as our species always had... Whatever the reason, I couldn't help feeling a moment of loneliness as Prosperity rose majestically over the nearby crest that was our horizon. But by the time she had sailed off into the sun's undying light, the cold emptiness – and my resolve – had returned once more. We are kerbonauts, and our destiny is to be abandoned over and over again. The secret is, each time it hurts a little less.
  18. OK. Just to keep you guys in the loop, I have made good progress in the last couple of weeks, and the next part of the Logs is nearly ready for release. If you don't believe me (and I don't blame you at this point), here is a gratuitous screenshot of the next part of the adventure. And for those of you who are joining us, or who have read the Logs but can't remember what the hell they are about after all this time, here is my best attempt at a brief summary of the story so far... Part One: the Moon vs. Me Part Two: the View From Phobos Part Three: Lunacy Part Four: Too Big to Fail Part Five: L'Enfant Sauvage Workin' on it, see you guys soon...
  19. Uhm... hello. Thanks to you all for chiming in and keeping faith while I've been away for a bit. This summer I decided I needed to get fit again and so I've spent most of my free time during these past three months on a bicycle of some shape or form, riding up and down any hills I can find in my area, grinding alongside the runways to work against vicious headwinds, and generally getting leaner and muddier. Mmmm... Refreshing. But the weather is now turning grim, and I've been missing Camwise recently. Also, the end of Cassini made me want to boot up RSS right back up and get out there into the great black desert. So, if all goes well, more will be coming soonTM. Thanks! Glad you made it in the end. I too have some catching up to do with the Forgotten Ones and I hear that great revelations are afoot... The RSS spaceplane is such a fun challenge, but with hindsight I think I should have introduced it later on in the timeline of the story. It jars a bit with some of the other tech my Kerbals have been using until recently. Maybe I should have started with a shuttle, which I guess is another daunting challenge of its own... And your encouragement has almost single-handedly kept me writing it at times, in particular back in the early days. Thank you so much, it's awesome to see you back. I'm looking forward to reading the Circus' new shenanigans. I love the Alternis Kerbol system! Thanks pal, I'm fine. I just needed to open the capsule window for some fresh air. Thank you for being so patient!
  20. Looks like I need to shop around for some good habaneros, which may be a challenge. French cuisine is wonderful, but they wouldn't recognize a decently hot pepper if one jumped up and bit them on the nose. I've spent years trying to get my family accustomed to capsaicin by means of small, homeopathic doses. I'm getting there, slowly... Your advice might also apply to my sweet peppers too. They often wilt in bright sunlight and heat despite my efforts to give them enough water. I'll probably plant all my peppers in pots next year so I can move them around and experiment... thanks.
  21. Hullo @regex. Sorry our threads were merged but, as improbable as it may sound, I started a gardening thread here a few months ago. Nice plot you have going there. I'm particularly envious of your chilli peppers. I've tried growing them several times but so far the results have been pretty underwhelming. I managed to munch through most of my last crop without breaking sweat. Little capsaicin at all. I'm wondering if this is due to the species I grew, or due to the climate here (South of France, probably similar to the milder parts of California if you live across the pond...). Does anyone have any thoughts on this? My tomatoes have finally ripened, though. I will leave you with the first 800g (1 & 3/4 lb) monster we ate this week... juicy. http://
  22. That's unusual, because many people consider both basil and mint to be effective insect repellants themselves. Some gardeners even suggest planting basil in between rows of tomato plants to keep away various pests, and in window boxes to keep mosquitoes out of your house. I must say, your basil looks exactly like my basil does when I don't give it enough water... just sayin'.
  23. Wow, time flies. Time for a long overdue update... Good news, though. This year looks like it's going to be a good one, despite an early heatwave and temperatures well above 35 degrees. I've put in a lot of work just to keep everything properly watered but it's starting to pay off already... Like the 20 kgs of taters harvested yesterday evening! Sorting for storage... ...in a cool, dark, but above all dry place. The house where I live used to be bar/restaurant, and the bar is still here with refrigerator cabins underneath it, although the actual refrigerators have been removed. Perfect. Inevitably, some potatoes were damaged by fork and spade during the harvesting, so these are no good for storage and will go straight to the kitchen to be cut up for tonight's potato salad. I've also put aside the smaller potatoes and will attempt to seed them later this summer, hopefully for an autumn crop. You gotta love the awesome "free food" aspect of 'taters. Elsewhere in the garden, my tomato plants are already over a metre high... (peppers and courgettes in the foreground) ...and the first fruit are growing. It is worth noting that the plants that are (by far) the most vigourous and precocious actually sprouted wild at the bottom of my garden from fruit left to rot last year. The plants that I grew from seed in my greenhouse are all less than a foot tall at present. They are comparatively weedy and flowers are only just starting to appear on some of them. That's nature for you... Also, sweetcorn is doing just fine... ...as are the melons... And a final gratuitous shot for all you Basil fans, @tater and @Beehelp... "There's something about this that's so green, it's like how much more green could this be? And the answer is none. None more green."
  24. Lunar Distant Retrograde Orbit. This is the orbit that was considered as a likely destination for NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission. It is stable over long periods of time (centuries), and getting to it requires less delta-vee than Lagrange points L4/L5. Such an orbit allows you to eject to interplanetary easily, as well as access the lunar surface. Transfer there takes longer than to Low Lunar or L4/L5, though. At least a week, sometimes two. Let's hope Sol's undying light is kind to our Kerbals and blows no solar storms their way. That little capsule has little in the way of radiation shielding....
  25. I'll take that as an awesome compliment, since I find that Cat is the most entertaining writer on these forums. However, no supernatural Kraken beasties here. This is hard sci-fi. Cam's tortured mind is due entirely to the hardships that he has endured. Huh? Sorry, it's late here and my brain hurts. Please clarify.
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