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First Flight (Epilogue and Last Thoughts)


KSK

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3 hours ago, DualDesertEagle said:

EXCELLENT description right there, the same thing happens when u get close to stalling in an ASK-21 (glider).

Thanks!

3 hours ago, DualDesertEagle said:

Damn, it feels great to know exactly what someone's talking about through own experience!

I wish I could say the same. :) Although it feels just as great to know that something I wrote 'because it sounded about right' is that close to reality!

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3 hours ago, KSK said:

Thanks!

I wish I could say the same. :) Although it feels just as great to know that something I wrote 'because it sounded about right' is that close to reality!

Yeah, I've got some first hand experience in that case. I got into that situation when I was taught how to control the plane at very slow speeds (very, VERY little aileron movement [too much may induce spiraling] and a little more on the rudder) and when I was taught how to recover from spiraling after a stall had already happened.

 

And I have to say, that description sounded like u'd had some experience with similar situations too.

 

 

EDIT: One question tho, is Val's plane equipped with a fly-by-wire system or mechanical connections? Coz the above only applies to planes that have their controls connected to the corresponding control surfaces through mechanical linkages.

 

EDIT 2: Actually, why am I even asking, I didn't even leave u any choice for what it can be, except ur honest enough (not sayin' I doubt it) to admit that u had fly-by-wire in mind and not a purely mechanical linkage.

Edited by DualDesertEagle
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To be absolutely honest, it was more of a narrative convenience to show that Val was flying right up on the edge of the envelope than something I'd put a great deal of thought into. Which is why I was delighted to find that it matched up to your real-world experience! Of course you're absolutely right - that description only makes sense if the plane is controlled through direct mechanical linkages. 

I did give some fairly serious thought to the general performance of Val's plane though, which was inspired by the MiG-25. It's by no means a direct borrow (or in other words I'm leaving myself some wiggle room here :) ) but I did enough research on the Foxbat to reassure me that the altitudes and speeds that I was having Val reach, were credible for a jet that my kerbals could feasibly build at their level of technology.

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  • 3 weeks later...
46 minutes ago, DualDesertEagle said:

I'm a little surprised that there hasn't been any kind of chatter going on here, I expected several pages of that since my last visit. Oh well, that gets rid of the catching up, so I'm fine with that.

I’m inclined to agree. Fan works in general seems mighty quiet these days. :(

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7 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

I’m inclined to agree. Fan works in general seems mighty quiet these days. :(

That made me check back on Emiko Station and yes, there's also been a surprisingly low amount of chatter. I hope it's not due to people leaving coz it takes to long to up a new chapter by now.

 

Not ike I'm not eager to read on in both stories but I understand that the further an author advances in a story the tricker it gets to keep all the ends tied together and not have inconsistencies, so I just keep quiet and wait.

I'm currently experiencing the problem myself writing my own book, and I haven't even written 50 pages of it yet. I always have to re-read certain passages to remember how to fit the upcoming events to what's already happened

 

And I'm not even sure yet wether or not to release that book to public coz I don't consider myself that good of a writer.

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I think Emiko has slowed down now that Just Jim has joined the Squad team. 

But yeah, there's not much chatter around the Fan Works these days. I think part of that is just that KSP is pretty old and has been a released game for quite a while. The old guard have moved on, the medium guard are moving on and the new guard have different priorities in a gaming forum.

Community participation - outside of rehashing the same old stuff in the Suggestions subforum and nitpicking Squad updates -  seems to have been in a downward spiral for a while now, and this is reflected in the token level of of interest and participation in Forum Thread of the Month and Mission of the Week (which also seems to have died a death).

Mind you, Squad engagement with the community has been declining too - witness how we've gone from the Daily Kerbal to a weekly update (with occasional JoolTubes) and now we're apparently moving to a quarterly update. It's a vicious spiral I think - community works aren't showcased as much as they were, so folks don't take the time to check them out, so content creators get discouraged, so there's less work to showcase...

Which is a little ironic given that the central plank of Making History was a set of tools for players to create new game content.

That has also been a problem I think - KSP has been pretty stagnant for years as far as I can tell and Making History didn't do much to address that beyond a scattering of new parts. Sure there have been bug fixes here, an art pass there, an(other) attempt at fixing wheel physics there - but the core gameplay hasn't changed much at all. And without new gameplay stuff to discuss, the community discussions have largely devolved to the aforementioned nitpicking and rehashing.

Or maybe I'm just a crusty (and slightly bitter) member of the old guard at this point, who has a boatload of house chores to do to get the place ready for sale, and is contemplating a return to work tomorrow after a week off. YMMV.

 

Edited by KSK
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Not sure about you, but for myself personally I wouldn't be surprised if the reduced chatter is because of school and those kinds of commitments now popping up. 

I know I've been more occupied by school. 

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22 hours ago, KSK said:

Or maybe I'm just a crusty (and slightly bitter) member of the old guard at this point, who has a boatload of house chores to do to get the place ready for sale, and is contemplating a return to work tomorrow after a week off. YMMV.

Be that as it may, you’re not getting off that easy. We few, we happy few, do expect a proper conclusion, Mr. Writer Man. Take all the time you need but the story must be told. :sticktongue:

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4 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Be that as it may, you’re not getting off that easy. We few, we happy few, do expect a proper conclusion, Mr. Writer Man. Take all the time you need but the story must be told. :sticktongue:

Speaking of one of those happy few, I concur. :)

 

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On ‎10‎/‎7‎/‎2018 at 3:14 AM, KSK said:

...

Community participation - outside of rehashing the same old stuff in the Suggestions subforum and nitpicking Squad updates -  seems to have been in a downward spiral for a while now, and this is reflected in the token level of interest and participation in Forum Thread of the Month and Mission of the Week (which also seems to have died a death).

...

 

I know for me personally, KSP came during the hayday of my college (and post college education) days so I haven't been able to participate nearly as much as I've wanted to in the challenges, mod making, hype trains, etc. One more semester to go finally, otherwise I hope there will still be a somewhat vibrant community around to participate in. I've been keeping challenges and ideas for different playthroughs stashed around for a long time. 

I know I have seen a change too back from 2013-14 and even 2015 when there were more AAR's and good world building stories in general to go around. Sigh, the good old days. 

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46 minutes ago, aeroeng14 said:

I know I have seen a change too back from 2013-14 and even 2015 when there were more AAR's and good world building stories in general to go around. Sigh, the good old days. 

Memories that become legend, legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten... yet all things serve the Beam. -_-

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On 10/8/2018 at 8:45 AM, CatastrophicFailure said:

Be that as it may, you’re not getting off that easy. We few, we happy few, do expect a proper conclusion, Mr. Writer Man. Take all the time you need but the story must be told. :sticktongue:

+1

Well even if KSP is losing attention, being stuck with 1.0.2  and unable to fix that Squad can be sure to sell me another copy of the game when I find the time is right! At least the requirement of getting a MUCH more powerful PC has finally been fulfilled, now I just need to find something of all the other stuff I want to reduce the priority of.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 10/7/2018 at 2:54 PM, qzgy said:

Not sure about you, but for myself personally I wouldn't be surprised if the reduced chatter is because of school and those kinds of commitments now popping up. 

I know I've been more occupied by school. 

Same here: Marching band + AP courses = very little free time

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  • 2 weeks later...

Not quite out of fuel - and the gas station is in sight.

Three weeks to go and I'll have served my notice on my current job, then I get a two week break before starting the next one. Not sure when the house will be sold though so we'll probably need to be keeping that in good saleable condition for a while yet.

Basically, life is stressful and busy at the moment and I'm not finding the 2-3 hours at a time that I need to take a solid run at the next chapter. But that's going to change.

Edited by KSK
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Well, I'm all caught back up.  Sorry, I took a bit of a reading hiatus for a while, but I think it was worth doing.

Glad to see the MACE hadn't been forgotten.  And yeah, I bet Val would have loved to have a tank of liquid Oxygen about then.  Right up at high altitude, engine threatening to starve from air-deprivation, control surfaces are barely working, that's the best time to engage Rocket Mode and set sail into the starry black.

Just hope whoever designed her plane had the bright idea to make sure it's RCS equipped, or getting back down might be a little bit troublesome...

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On 11/7/2018 at 7:08 AM, Madrias said:

Just hope whoever designed her plane had the bright idea to make sure it's RCS equipped, or getting back down might be a little bit troublesome...

Except the cockpit was fitted with reaction wheels by default like basically every pod in KSP :sticktongue:

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Adding my reasons to the list here: University requires a lot of study time, funding it requires a lot of job hours, and most of my reading inbetween is now on r/HFY. One of the reasons I barely participate on the forum is also that I don't play KSP anymore: A single install without mods is all I can spare on the weakling SSD that my current laptop has, and my laptop can barely run it even at worst graphics, and I am thoroughly out of the flying practice and not even trying airplanes anymore.

 

At least I recently finally actually bought the game instead of using my old pirated pre-1.0 stuff (that actually ran reasonably well on my laptop) and then 1.0 and 1.1 (which... didn't nearly as much)

 

Also, I suffer from 'They changed it, now it sucks' syndrome, more so with things I did back halfway through high school then way less for a few years...

 

Anyway, I am very happy to see my favorite part of the story develop, and proper science done on the Kerm and their Keepers!

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Ooh, and on the parachute thing a few pages back, I currently have a class on database design and although I don't know how they do it now, it seems to me it should be possible to do it with 0 bytes for an undeployed parachute, only the kerbal name for a destroyed one and then quite a bit (relatively) for one that is currently deployed. But you don't usually have thousands of chutes deployed at one time, so that shouldn't be an issue.

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9 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

So....

in place of the customary, “mOaR!!.??!11” here’s a question...

that has probably been addressed already, but still...

Kerm dropping seeds are well established, but do they flower? :blink:

You know, I'm not at all sure that has been addressed - and its an interesting question. Thinking aloud though, and working from Terran style biology (rather than just handwaving this as 'because Kerm') we can constrain the answer a bit.

Firstly, from the in-universe lore that we've seen, Kerm are most probably self-pollinating. Because when a mummy Kerm and a daddy Kerm get close together, they fight. Although I suppose they could be arboreal praying mantises where one tree pollinates the other before it dies.

However, in-story, we've also seen that the Kerm seeding caught the kerbals completely by surprise, which suggests that they don't flower - or not visibly enough to provide a warning of things to come. That's not a problem either - from a hasty perusal of Quora this morning, Terran trees can be divided into gymnosperms (naked seeds)  and angiosperms (covered seeds). Angiosperms flower and produce fruits - hence 'covered seeds', gymnosperms don't, although they do produce analogous structures such as pine cones.

So the exact details are likely a bit weird (which is okay because Kerm are an alien species after all) but we can think of a  Kerm as a single cone alien pine tree!

And on a completely different note, writing has resumed. By way of a small teaser, I promptly got sidetracked into researching exactly how ISS modules are attached to each other and I now know how the KSA plans to join their Starseed modules together. 

Spoiler - it doesn't involve Magic Magnets. :) 

Edited by KSK
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47 minutes ago, KSK said:

However, in-story, we've also seen that the Kerm seeding caught the kerbals completely by surprise, which suggests that they don't flower - or not visibly enough to provide a warning of things to come.

Alternatively, they flower all the time but nearly never set fruit. The kerbals could see flowers every year, or even every day, and think nothing of it because they never turn into anything. That which designates everything and all that.

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21 hours ago, KSK said:

can think of a  Kerm as a single cone alien pine tree!

Welp, if they’re anything like the pine trees around here (we have one or two gymnosperms  in the Evergreen State) they could be pollinated entirely by the wind without any two trees ever touching. Tho Kerbals would probably have noticed this. For A couple weeks every spring, everything around here is covered in yellow. Contemplating this for too long leads too all sorts of unpleasant fridge logic. 

 

21 hours ago, KSK said:

And on a completely different note, writing has resumed. By way of a small teaser, I promptly got sidetracked into researching exactly how ISS modules are attached to each other and I now know how the KSA plans to join their Starseed modules together. 

Spoiler - it doesn't involve Magic Magnets. :) 

flarp this flarping mobile editor

Space tape? Space tape. 

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