Vaporo

Inspired by my wise (and, according to my family, infuriating) driving habit, I bring you The Quarter Tank Challenge. Mission Control decided that they wanted to send a Kerbal to Laythe. Jeb was stationed on the Mun for the next year, Valentina and Bill were floating in orbit somewhere over Duna, so that only left Bob. Now, Bob is not exactly known as a risk-taker around KSC. For that reason, Mission Control opted not to tell him about the rather... dubious delta-V budget that they had planned out. The launch date came, and Bob was hustled on board before he could ask too many questions. The rocket launched. As far a Bob could tell, everything was going as planned and... say, wasn't this stage that they're using to circularize supposed to be used only for the interplanetary transfer? He contacted Mission Control about it but they said that this was always the plan and that they were totally not making this mission up as they went. The transfer window opened and the burn began. Again, everything normal and... Ok, he knew that the Laythe lander wasn't supposed to be used for this part. He again contacted mission control again, but they again wrote it off as being all part of the plan. Upon arrival at Jool, mission control directed Bob through a Tylo gravity assist, which went off without a hitch. Then they directed him to use the last of the lander's fuel to get an encounter with Laythe. "But Mission Control, how am I supposed to circularize when I get there?" "You're going to perform an aerocapture, of course." "But... this ship wasn't designed for aerocapture!" "Don't worry about it, Bob. We've got this all figured out." As you can imagine, Bob was getting pretty nervous by now. His nerves (read: "utter terror") especially showed through when one of the solar panels (and a landing leg and parachute) exploded during the aerocapture. At this point Bob assumed that they would scrap the "landing" portion of the mission. He could dump the lander in orbit and just fly home. He just about screamed when they told him to transfer fuel from the return stage into the lander. He landed, planted a flag, and returned to orbit, this time with plenty of fuel to spare (which would never have been transferred back to the return stage, had he not reminded Mission Control). The window back to Kerbin opened, and Bob was sent through a convoluted series of gravity assists to minimize the Delta-V he had to use... and he came up short. Monopropellant, LFO, all gone. The only thing left was to get out and push. So that's what Bob did. It took nearly all of his EVA fuel, and he barely had enough left to get back to his pod, but he was on his way home. After that mission, Bob utterly refused to fly in anything that had a tank that dropped below 1/4 fuel. So, the challenge is simple: run a normal mission, whatever you want to do so long as you reach orbit, but never allow any of your tanks to drop below 1/4 fuel. Because of the open-ended nature of this challenge, there is no scoring. There is also no reward for completing this challenge, other than your own accomplishment, so I won't check too hard for cheaters. But if you do something obviously against the rules, I won't put you on the list of people who completed the challenge. Rules: 1. No tank on your vessel may ever drop below 1/4 fuel (excluding seperatrons, so long as you don't use them as propulsion) and must be staged or shut down before reaching 1/4. I'll count stacked tanks and non-asparagus tanks that are connected by fuel lines as a single tank. i.e. Each stage of an asparagus staged rocket counts as one tank, but tanks attached together in a single stage are one tank. 2. Your mission must at least reach orbit. 3. No Hyperedit, Infinite fuel, etc. Keep to the spirit of the challenge. 4. Refueling is Allowed. However, your fuel source may not drop below 1/4 fuel. 5. You may not detach a booster and let it push you. 6. Mods are allowed, so long as they don't add anything that would be overpowered relative to the stock parts (No KSPI). 7. Give some proof of your success via screenshots of your mission, including shots of your tanks' fuel levels at decoupling (MechJeb has a convenient "stage burned mass" feature that can be used to keep track of your fuel levels.) If you have a question about the rules, just ask and I'll do my best to answer it. Challenge Completed By: Vaporo: Simple one-and-done mission to the Mun and back. Could have brought a Kerbal, but forgot. My mission: The Half Tank Subchallenge. Maybe...

I think the answer is simple. Can you burn water (excluding nuclear fusion)? No. Not "anything" can be rocket fuel. Even if you limit yourself to flammable materials, like dried apples, I'm still pretty sure that they would not contain enough energy density to lift anything off the ground. Someone who has finished a chemistry course should probably weigh in, though. EDIT: However, you can literally use anything with mass as a propellant. Not fuel, though.

On occasion, yes. Jool is visible from Kerbin even without mods. It's just a flickering pixel when it does, though.

When you click the links on this screen? I just tried it a minute ago and it worked fine. Try downloading it again. The problem may have passed.

The procedural vs random argument has always bugged me. I'm sure that the developers knew when they originally said it (and certainly know it by now) that "procedural" does not technically imply "random" if the game uses a hard-coded seed that everyone has. It's just that, after working in an environment where every knows what you're talking about, you tend to use those words that all of your co-workers know when talking about your projects to someone else. However, creating an entire universe procedurally could imply millions or billions of planets and just as many possible experiences. The rarity of two players arriving at the same planet that's not in the few dozen stars immediately surrounding Kerbin would be so astronomically low that there would be effective randomness. Think of Space Engine. How often do you come back to the same star after you've forgotten where it is? The odds are a billion to one. Even if you limit the universe to just a few hundred stars, think about how many planets that implies. Thousands, at least. Right now, there are few enough bodies that I can name them all off without much thought. But if there were thousands of planets, this wouldn't happen. The basic solar system, plus a few other particularly interesting bodies in nearby systems, would be all that the community would be able to refer to quickly without giving some kind of coordinates. I'd like to see a modder flex some programming muscle to make completely procedural planets happen, but I understand Squad's reasoning behind keeping to just the one system.

Hanging around the forum games.

As far as I know, no. Terrain in the game is created from basic heightmaps which, while convenient, makes it impossible to add any kind of overhang without adding some way to represent them on a heightmap. Even if you do find a way to deform the terrain mesh to create them, Unity's terrain systems probably gets some performance enhancements by assuming that there are no overhangs in the terrain. Creating overhangs could cause some interesting bugs.

I considered using Alternis Kerbol (I'm still considering it, in fact), but I think that I like New Horizons better for this story. I want to keep the Kerbals' origins a mystery for now, but I will say that it actually only took about two million years from the time that the Kraken awoke to the time that the Kerbals first appeared, so make of that what you will. The harvesters I am more open about. They are members of an (extremely) extremely advanced civilization who are, essentially, professional Kraken hunters. The look for massive unexplained anomalies (things like solar systems being rearranged on a daily basis) and go to them in hopes of finding a Kraken. When they find one, they catch and imprison it so that they can use its reality-bending powers in their own technology. The Kraken in this story is abnormally powerful, though. In fact, it is the most powerful Kraken that any Kraken hunter has ever seen. That's why it was so hard for them to catch it.

A few months ago, I decided that I wanted to do a modded-planet mission series, similar in style to xtoro's Avalon mission. The plan was to use the New Horizons planet pack, along with a few other mods that I would figure out when the time came. Unfortunately, life got in the way, so I never really got around to doing it. Recently, though, I had enough free time (that was totally not borrowed from sleeping and studying because I was tired of sitting on this) to write out a prologue for the series. The idea is that the ultimate goal of the series will to be to reach a station that I will Hyperedit into low solar orbit before I officially start the series, so this prologue tells the story of how the station got there, along with how the Kerbals' system got smited from the stock planets into New Horizons. The prologue doesn't deal much with the Kerbals themselves, instead explaining how the Kraken ("It" is the Kraken, which is, in this story, a break in in reality and the embodiment of error) got stuck inside of a station in low solar orbit. I'm not sure when (or even if) I'll get time to start the series proper, so don't hold your breath too much (But if you like it enough that you want to hold your breath anyways, that's fine by me). I will post an announcement in this thread when do I start it, though. I didn't do much in the way of editing, so there may be errors that I didn't catch. This is also the first time that I'm posting any of my writing publicly, so feedback is much appreciated. It hadn’t been there since the beginning, but it was close enough that it could say so without committing too much of an untruth. The first thing it remembered was languishing in the thin sands of the desert planet, watching the sun rise over a lifeless ocean through a dead brown atmosphere. It was beautiful. It watched the sun arc across the sky over its head, until it slowly set on the other horizon. That was beautiful as well. Not just the sunset, but watching the sun slowly stretch across the heavens, patiently warming the surface through the thick, cold, toxic atmosphere. That was beautiful as well. So it excitedly waited for the next day, waiting for its little patch of ground to cross the dark side of the world so that it could watch the sun rise again. And it was rewarded. Slowly, the sun rose, and then passed across the sky, and then set. It was marvelous. And so it waited patiently for the next day. A hundred times, a thousand times, a million times, it did this. Watched the sun rise and set, like a perfect, cosmically beautiful pendulum. And then each time it waited patiently through the night. And why shouldn’t it wait patiently? Time had no meaning to it, other than the fact that one sunrise happened before and after another. And why should it matter when the sunrise happened? They were all beautiful. Gradually, the air of the world began to change color, slowly morphing from a dark, dank brown to a beautiful, vibrant blue. The oceans changed with it, shifting from murky brown to murky green, then to clear blue to match the sky. Soon after, the first plants began to set root around it. Then the animals came, shortening the plants and keep them from blocking its view of the sun. Not enough, though. A forest quickly sprung up around it, then that forest turned into a jungle that shaded the sky and blocked the sun, but it didn’t care. The trees blocking its view only lived for a few hundred years at most, and only a very rare few could shut out the sun completely. The rainforest morphed to mountains, then the mountains morphed to a shallow sea, then the shallow sea became a desert. All this time it stayed, contentedly watching the sun rise and set. Then they came. It first glimpsed them crossing the sun as it rose, then as a red streak crossing the night sky, lighting the world more brightly than the moon. It was curious, but it did nothing. It had a sunrise to wait for, after all. For three thousand years, it saws nothing more of the strange red-streak-in-the-sky, and soon stopped wondering about it. It had seen many strange things crossing the sky in its years of watching the sun, and a fiery red streak that lit up the entire world and did not cloud the sky afterwards was not the oddest. When it first saw the hunters, it originally ignored them, dismissing them as nothing more than oddly shaped animals. Then they camped around it, making odd gestures and strange noises. They looked at it with wide eyes. Wider than they normally were, that is. Such strange eyes. So bright. So… intelligent. They left a few days later, and it soon dismissed them from its mind. They weren’t the first creatures to come sniffing around at it, and many did thing far less pleasant than just sniffing. But then they returned with hundreds, no, thousands of others, all making the same strange noises and gestures when they came near it. Its curiosity was roused, now. This was a display the likes of which it had never seen before. They seemed almost… reverent of it. The way they pressed forward, trying to get a glimpse, maybe brush their fingers against its surface… Yes, reverent. They pulled back after a few hours and started to build shelters for themselves out of sticks and animal hides. Then the shelters became more permanent, built out of stone and mud. None built near it, though. And that was fine by it. Nothing to block the sun, after all. Then they built on top of it. It started as nothing more than a wall separating it from the village: nothing to be concerned about. Then the wall grew higher, and higher, and in a few short years they had covered it completely. It was annoyed, but unconcerned. The sun had been blocked from its view before, and it always returned. In any case, the creatures performed their strange rituals inside the structure, which served as plenty of amusement until the sun could come back. For a thousand years it waited watched them perform their rituals. The way they spoke changed with time, and the individuals were replaced as they aged, but the rituals remained the same. How strange. They seemed to think that it cared enough about their antics that it wanted them to do the exact same rituals over and over again with complete perfection. But then the rituals stopped. One day, the creatures simply did not enter its chamber for the ritual. It waited for ten, a hundred years for them to return. In that perfect, totally sunless darkness, it found that, for the first time in its life, it was bored. It waited a thousand years for the structure to crumble, but it did not. It waited another thousand, but still the structure stood. Then, after three thousand years, for the first time in its countless eons of life, it began to feel anger. How dare those creatures show up and block its view of the sun! How dare they leave it here, forgotten, without even coming to amuse it with their complicated rituals! The gall! It that was countless millions of years old. It that had watched the first sunrises on this world, and would live to see the last. It would… It would… In its rage, the thing leapt from its perch on the planet’s surface and reached out its many arms to fling the thousands of tons of stone covering it into the sky. It moved across the world and quickly found their cities. They had learned much since it last saw them. Instead of mud huts, their cities were made of steel and glass and stretched up impossible high into the sky. It obliterated these without a thought. It watched the remainder of their population scramble and cry, unknowing what had happened. Was it a war? A horrible accident? None of those made sense. They would never know. But devastating their population was not enough. It wanted them to suffer. So it moved their world closer to the sun. Not much, not enough to kill them, but enough to make everywhere except near the poles into a baked desert. Satisfied, it settled perch on top of a mountain to watch the sun rise. But it could not get comfortable. No matter how it positioned itself, it found that the simple joy of watching the sun rise eluded it. It shifted to another peak, but it was still bored. It began to move between the other planets in the solar system, but it found their sunrises unsatisfactory as well. Frustrated, it moved one of the bodies to the old orbit of its home world. Still, the sunrise was boring. It began to tweak the solar system more and more, trying new positions and new orbital configurations for each planet, but no matter what it found that it simply couldn’t enjoy the sunrises. So it began to create new worlds. It made each of them carefully, tailoring each of them to its exacting preferences, hoping that one would have a sunrise worth watching. None of them did. It began to move the planets again. It moved them together. Close, impossibly close. But it was clever. It tweaked their positions and momentum carefully. Slowly, an impossible orbital configuration began to take shape. One that included all the worlds at its disposal, but was still stable. Even for it, this was difficult. Creating a stable orbital configuration of over twenty worlds in such close proximity was no mean feat. But, oh, the sunrise would be majestic! Yes, it would. Then, after much, much work, it was done. A beautiful, perfect dance of all of the natural and built worlds, all completely stable. And then, as it settled down on the surface of one of its worlds, it found that it didn’t care about the sunrise. Excited, it began to move the planets again. Quickly, if created a new configuration. Not as complicated as the last, but beautiful all the same. So, it moved them again. And again. It created orbital configuration after orbital configuration, each beautiful. Even if they were ugly and chaotic, they were beautiful. It looked about as the planets swirled around it. How could it have ever have thought sunrises beautiful when there was this? This beautiful, perfect cosmic dance. But it never forgot its home world. No, it never forgot the strange, intelligent creature living on its surface. Every time it moved the planets, it made sure that that they got some particularly unpleasant torture. An elliptical orbit that brought them dangerously close, then dangerously far from the sun. A place near a gas giant, where the tidal forces caused global earthquakes and eruptions. A clever orbit that ripped away a bit of their atmosphere on each pass. No, it did not forget. It didn’t do this out of spite. In an odd way, it was even grateful to the little creatures for showing it that there was so much more to the world than sunrises. But it still tortured them. It was simply too amusing to watch them scurry about in a panic every time their world’s new orbit rendered their old homes unusable. No spite, though. It was above spite. For over three thousand years it did this. Not that a year had much meaning, now that nothing followed that particular measurement of time. The harvesters came without warning, pushing through the edge of the system silently. It didn’t even notice them until they were within the orbit of the planet that it was tweaking at the time. It moved towards one of them, vaguely curious. It was more than a little surprised when a stab of pain shot through its essence. It reeled back, reaching out its arms to destroy the ship. It was even more surprised when it encountered a solid wall that blocked its power. Suddenly terrified, it charged past the ships ignoring the streaks of pain that shot across its body as it did so. It fell back and hid inside of the core of a gas giant, confused and enraged. It spent a few minutes nursing its wounds. It hadn’t even know that it could wound. Carefully, it explored outward… And found itself again blocked by the net of pain. The ships were inside the core with it, drilling through the solidified hydrogen with the same barriers that prevented it from touching them. It reached out and pulled the core towards itself, heating it and igniting nuclear fusion. Apparently, that was too much for the ships, which quickly pulled back from the heat. It rushed from the core and found a new hiding place, this time careful to keep watch on the ships. The chase lasted a month. A grueling battle for them, a brief struggle for it. Sometimes it seemed that it might finally destroy the invaders. Sometimes it seemed that they may finally catch it. Eventually, though, they did catch it. It struggled when the net of pain surrounded it so tightly that it could barely move, and it struggled as it was dragged into a low orbit over the sun, where they had set up a strange device. It pushed against the pain-net as it was forced towards the machine’s horrible, horrible clamps. But it was pushed in anyways. The clamps closed around its arms and it felt its strength suddenly drain, pulled into their contraption and sent away for their own use. They then moved the system’s worlds to stable orbits, pushing the creatures’ planet to a position where the inhabitants would not be burned or frozen. Then they were gone. So there it sat, watching the planets slowly spiral around it. It watch the creatures on the world slowly develop back through the stone age as they began to relearn some of what they had lost. It watched the clock-like cycle of the planets orbiting around the sun. It was not idle, though. The machine that held it was not perfect. How could anything be perfect when the very fabric of reality was so flawed as to allow something like itself to exist? So, as their technology developed, it poked at the creatures. Prodded them in careful, subtle ways. A strange dream giving instructions. An electrical impulse to drive a sea creature mad and crush a passing ship. A DNA strand torn so that it could watch them scurry about as one of their own died from a disease that they did not even understand. In truth, the last one was usually just for its amusement. Someday, they would relearn how to traverse the heavens. Someday, they would come to investigate the strange device orbiting close to their sun. And, if it did things right, maybe, just maybe, it could be freed. So, its eye facing outward from the sun, it watched, and it waited, and it hated.

Jebediah doesn't move through space. Space knows better and stays well out of his way.

What do you do if the mothership goes down, though? Just add some landing gear as a backup system. ALWAYS include a backup, because the primary system WILL fail, eventually.

I missed the magnifying glass one. I am ashamed. It's sad how little most of the public knows about science. People are always impressed that I know things that I consider common knowledge. Last summer, everyone at my summer job was amazed when I knew how a blood moon worked. It's sad, really.

While trying to fix a broken bit is a bad idea all around, you probably don't want to try and solder it back together.

Possible. We could be being treated as some kind of "nature reserve." But it's more likely that there's either nobody (nearby, at least) signaling at the moment, that the transmissions are so faint that we just can't hear them, or a dozen other possibilities. The "nature reserve" option is probably the least likely, IMO. EDIT: If our own technology is any indication, broadcast signals only exist for a short time before being largely eliminated by more efficient things like fiber optics. As for interstellar communication, it's probably much more efficient to focus a "laser" communication as opposed to wasting energy screaming into the void in all directions.

5/10 Fits your name, but kind of dim and blurred.

6/10 It just seems a bit small.

What kind of person you are depending on how much ram you have: 2 Gb: I just want to surf the web. 4 Gb: I'm humble. I don't care much what other people think, 4 Gb is really enough for virtually all everyday tasks. I don't really need more, so 4 Gb is all I have. 8 Gb: I would probably be fine with having 4 Gb of ram, but I really like having the extra. Just in case. 16 Gb: I enjoy the finer things in life. While I don't like to spend all of my money in one place, I do enjoy splurging a bit from time to time. 32 Gb: A 16 Gb person who has higher income (or is broke) and just wants to show off. 64 Gb: Unless I'm a high-end video editor, I'm probably compensating for something. My computer has 8 Gb of ram. I don't think I've ever gotten above 6, and nowhere near 8. That might change with 64 bit KSP, though.

5/10 Seen you around a bit.

The frustration part is when they tell you that poetry has no rules, but then they make you write poems that have to follow a very specific syntax.

Severely overestimating my delta-V needs for everything except for Mun missions. Those I have pretty well down.