CalculusWarrior

That's a great idea! I like the idea of having it be a 'just in time' system, so it's less hassle overall. The lack of large fuel tanks should help with mobility as well! Got any pictures?

KSP is shipped DRM-free, so you can have as many installs as you'd like! Just make a copy of the game folder, wherever it is located (either in the Steam games directory or the downloaded copy from the website).

Right, so no one has asked this as of yet: what's the story on updating the mod to 1.2? Is it being worked on?

Woo! FF is updated for 1.2! And I also sympathize with you as to EU4, Rights of Man is looking like it will suck up a lot of my spare time as well.

There seem to be a couple of complaints as to the choice of hotkey to toggle the altimeter reading. Perhaps you could add the option to swap to the radar altimeter when in Surface mode on the Navball? It seems to me that those two use cases are identical.

Well said, it's all too easy to speculate on apocalyptic meanings for this announcement, when it simply could be as simple as they did their jobs and don't want to continue further.

The Bill (that is the governmental policy) being capitalized is a joke that sort of ran away with itself; I'll try and keep a lid on that in the future. Glad you're enjoying the story!

Another chapter has been completed! This was originally meant to be a quick part about how the USKK gets its groove back, but I don't like things to be too easy for our kerbals, and so I managed to extend it to over 8000 words somehow. Be thankful I decided to cut a segment of Bill's backstory, that pushed it to over 10 000!

I write a similar styled story to this one and I have mine in the main Fan Works section as well. I've always thought of Mission Reports as summaries of single missions, not the multiple ones these novels wind up being. I'm not a moderator, so ultimately my opinion is irrelevant, though.

1.2 allows for kerbal creation through the debug menu. I've not yet played with the feature, but it sounds very cool!

I hope we're going to see a Gary Powers-type situation and not the...alternative. Poor Jeb.

It's been a very long time, but the next chapter of Kold War is at last completed! As stated previously, I've been waiting for this for a very long time, basically ever since I first discovered that you could create custom launch sites in Kerbal Konstructs. I hope you enjoy the chapter, and feel free to comment with your thoughts!

Very nice! I can definitely see the similarities to Kold War, (not that I mind!) and I think that you handled the early introduction much better than I did; I do like the atmosphere the pictures of the Prime Minister's plane provide. I will definitely stay tuned for updates!

I'd be happy to beta test for you, Nereid; I do love the mod and it's awesome that you've managed to update it for 1.1!

You can transfer a store-bought game to Steam if you bought it prior to April 2013 I believe; it's what I did in order to get 1.1 access. It's possible regex did this, or found some other way of getting access to 1.1.

It appears you made the ship with the Space Shuttle in mind. Nothing wrong with that, but it's flight performance was related to a 'flying brick' for a reason! I'm assuming you want to just make a regular plane to fly around the Space Centre and Kerbin. For this purpose, your ship is rather large and heavy, not to mention fuel-inefficient (I can't imagine you'd get much burn time out of that rocket engine). To fix this, you're going to want to lighten the load significantly. Use only one or two liquid fuel tanks, and replace the rocket engine with a jet engine. This lets you fly for longer and not have to carry as much fuel, reducing the amount of mass you have to lift (rockets, while very powerful, require that heavy Oxidiser, which is superfluous in Kerbin's atmosphere). I'd also recommend going down to a MK 2 or even MK 1 fuselage, as the MK 3 ones tend to be very large and heavy, useful more for very large ships. Lastly, if I've misjudged the mission of your ship and you do want a rocket plane, just let me know and I can revise this advice. Moving on. For takeoff, I can see three problems from the picture. Firstly, it appears your landing gear are set up such that the nose points down on the runway (or in more aircrafty terms, a negative angle of attack). This is a good thing for ships which need to land safely (think the Space Shuttle), but will make lifting off extremely difficult at anything less than super high speeds, as you've seen. I suggest using smaller rear landing gear and a larger nose one, which should let the ship sit level on the runway, or even pitch the nose forward. Next, the rocket engine is attached further upwards of your centre of mass; this will produce a negative moment on the runway, and essentially fight any attempts at pitching the nose upwards. Move that down to be more in-line with the centre of mass, or follow my above advice to swap it out for a few smaller jet engines. Lastly, the wings of the ship are quite small as well. The Space Shuttle had small wings as well, but its primary goal was to land, and even with that it behaved like a flying brick, as above. You want larger wings for sure, try experimenting with the structural wings, I find the BigS wings are difficult to use in anything but Shuttle replicas. If you've followed all this advice yet you're still having takeoff problems, add a pair of canards to the nose of the ship. These will have the side-effect of making the ship more manoeuvrable, but they help immensely in getting ships off the runway sooner. They aren't magic though, and if you just slap canards onto that design it will likely still flip out.

I believe that the bug has been confirmed to be fixed in 1.1.

The impression I get is that the way the Space Center is managed is slightly abstracted, in that you don't have to pay an upkeep fee every month for maintenance on the facilities, wages for kerbonauts/general staff, nor do you get periodic grant money from sponsors, thus not requiring an 'income/expenses/profit' readout like you see in most management games. Squad appears to have decided against that style of play for Career Mode and instead have settled on the current method of doing things. In this, you only pay for the 'big' expenses, such as building and launching new missions, repairing damaged/upgrading new facilities, and hiring new crew members. I assume a lot of the implicit cost is baked into the up-front cost, as you don't have to make sure you have at least 10 kerbal cooks to feed your kerbonauts enough snacks before hiring a new member, but hiring your 25th kerbonaut is much more expensive than your initial few due to this requirement of support staff they'd need. Just my thoughts on why the game is set up in the way it is. I personally quite like it; as it's a different take on the 'tycoon' genre than most other management games, in which there is much more emphasis on flying missions than there is on making sure your Space Center is always profitable.

Very well-said, @Kuzzter! I've taken a hiatus from writing my story to really work on establishing a structure with, as you say, a solid beginning, middle, and end. I find a sort of 'fractal' approach works best. Essentially, I begin with the three most key ideas/themes I want to tell (i.e. what the audience ought to take away from the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story), then choose 3 or so points which make up each of those points, and so on. Eventually, I wind up with a large document with many nested lists of bullet points after a while, and it becomes easy to start tweaking things so I can have setups and payoffs throughout the story and such that everything is connected, rather than just writing each chapter in a vacuum. Still working on exactly how to flesh out characters, though looking at the overall themes, my story's really more about the two overarching nations, as opposed to individual kerbals.

Das seemed to hint it was an on-screen button in the stream I linked.

DasValdez discovered a new feature in the 1.1 Experimentals build (see his recent Twitch stream here: https://www.twitch.tv/dasvaldez/v/53247671?t=04h33m53s) and was given permission to share the images! It appears to be a cutaway mode, where by pressing a button, the interior view of capsules can be visible from the outside of ships. The pictures he showed are below: He confirmed that it is not possible to move kerbals around inside, however. But given by the inclusion of that feature, I certainly wouldn't be too surprised if the devs build on it and eventually include something like FreeEVA into stock!

With the absence of Jeb, and Bob not providing sufficient direction for the Program, Bob Kerman takes it into his own hands to create a seperate research team of the Space Program, the Advanced Projects Division. Unbeknownst to most, it also works on projects for the USKK's spy division. This Bob should be Bill right? Ah thank you, it should. Fixed now.

In this case, the 'Main Page' means the first forum post. I think I'll keep the timeline exclusive to the forum, as I feel like it would ruin a new reader's experience if they read that first rather than the story itself. With that in mind, I added a 'spoiler warning sign' and shuffled some things around in the main post.

Thanks for letting me know, it's fixed now, and the whole website should have the same font for every section now. In addition, I'm posting my timeline for the story so far on the main page. I drew it up over the last few days as a guide to me to keep a good idea of the story so far and how it will progress into the future. That seems to me to be the sort of thing which would be useful to everyone, particularly those who have forgotten what's happening because I take so long to upload new chapters! Of course, I will crop out the future sections so nothing is spoiled. You may notice that I'm retconning a few things, such as Wehrner's 'discovery of up', which doesn't exactly mesh well with the tone and direction of the rest of the story. A few other things are tweaked here and there, in particular the dates between parts. This can and no doubt will change as I work further on the story, but as it stands it is a good sense of where the story's been, and the themes and ideas I wish to emphasize going forward. I am also taking a leaf out of the Star Wars Expanded Universe's book by setting dates as lengths of time from a critical event, in this case, Werhner's discovery. Also, thank you very much for your compliments, @superstrijder15! However, I don't think the world is quite ready for a Kerbal Space Program fanfic quite yet, so I'd best not quit my day job.