MedwedianPresident

Hello KSP Community, I have been playing this game since the 0.12 era, I proudly consider myself a veteran. What I liked most about the earlier days of the community, when it was still small, was the Kerbin Political Roleplay. It was removed from this forum due to drama and then eventually banned but the spirit still lives on. As such, I am asking whether any other users, veterans and newer users alike who want to learn about the history of the KSP community and experience the nostalgic feelings of the early 2010s, want to start a political roleplay community that emulates that of 2012. Pick a spot on the map, carve out a country, and then start writing about how you want to assassinate the rival nation's leader at a formal dinner. We can do it on a dedicated forum, or on NationStates. Please reply here or PM me. Note that actual roleplaying is banned on the KSP forum and as such will not occur in this thread. @Ascensiam @Charzy @Spearka, Please also notify any other veterans you know.

Kerbal Space Program?

Agree but might be bad for those who don't have the character on their keyboard.

Yes, I remember it as well.

Yes

Gentlemen, let us embark on a short journey back in time. To an era in which rockets still wobbled properly, no planets beyond the Mun were discovered yet and flying to this only available foreign destination required wild guessing and multiple passes during which Jeb, Bill and Bob prayed for Mun's gravitational field to catch their capsule. When the atmosphere was a hard wall and reentry produced no flames but a characteric sound more reminiscent of a WW2 bomb. When Medwedia actually existed on Kerbin, eventually being brutally partitioned by neighboring countries. What are YOUR most nostalgic memories of the old KSP community? Sorry if this is the wrong forum. Bonus if you find me (or yourself).

Kerbal Powers a political roleplay game set on Kerbin Note to anybody who thinks that this contradicts the anti-RP rule: I have asked @Vanamonde whether I am allowed to recruit on the forum, and he permitted me to do so. No actual roleplaying is permitted to occur on this forum or specifically in this thread. Violations of this rule will lead to moderation actions. Kerbal Powers is a Reddit-based roleplaying community that bears many resemblances to the classic forum roleplay of KSP’s early era (and is frequented by many veterans). Nevertheless, we are also open to new players, as long as they are wishing to contribute interesting and meaningful content. Whether you like BD combat, political intrigue or complex economies: Kerbal Powers is an interesting place for you to prove yourself. Commanding a country on the planet Kerbin, it is up to you to decide whether you will advance it through space colonization, trade or military conquest. Will you turn your nation into a socialist utopia or will you choose to oppress your kerbals in a fierce totalitarian dictatorship? Or will you rather create a megacorporation and offer your services to the world's superpowers? Upon applying for entrance, you will be able to choose your territory (if you want to make a country) and political ideology. We have a custom economical system and simulate military conflict by means of AI BD Armory battles (a limited modpack which you can find on our reddit includes this mod). However, text-based roleplay still plays a great role (no pun intended) in the game. All veterans of the old forum roleplay will feel at home in Kerbal Powers. Interested? Come and join us!

Where is magic boulder?

Now that we may remove helmet rings the possibility to create non-spacesuit clothing (military uniforms, casual attire, etc...) is given. I request that the modmakers take this notice into account.

No, I am not meaning Texture Replacer but removing the COLLARS of the suits.

I don’t have access to KSP right now, so I’m gonna ask this before I sit down and check: Do the new suits have a fixed collar or can it be removed with the helmet, at least for the IVA version? If this is not the case, I urge Squad to make a collarless suit model for use with texture mods. Lots of people need it in their cinematics, machinimas and other stuff, including me. Sorry if this is in the wrong section.

Anyway, for the premises of the novella I am writing right now (The Kronos Maneuver), I will be doing a standard human approach, even thiugh I am of a different opinion about kerbals. The kerbonauts are an extended family descending from an emigree from the Kerbal equivalent of Germany who had a title of nobility (Wehrner von Kerman, Jeb’s grandfather). Due to a mistake in the birth register, Wehrner’s two sons (one of them Gene Kerman, Jeb’s uncle) got registered as just “Kerman” instead of “von Kerman” and therefore lost their nobility. Wehrner might have tried to fix that, but eventually he said “screw it”, so the name of the family formally changed. Fun fact: the same scenario probably applies to Scrooge MacDuck and his nephew Donald Duck.

Hm...never thought about that, especially considering how even the movies portray J, B & B as not relatives. Wehrner’s “von Kerman” might be a higher version of the honorific reserved for older people. Is he possibly a former kerbonaut?

One 14:53, 1st of August, Mission Control, Kerbal Space Center, Central Kafrican Republic ”Goddamnit, Winkler, we lost him!” ”What did you say? We lost him?” ”Yes. Five degrees off the prescribed deceleration trajectory. Messed up the whole vector - last ping we got contained thermal alert. He’s either fried or crashed. And so is the material.” ”He must have saved himself. Did he have a parachute?” ”Yes, but parachutes are not of great use at Mach 5. He’s dead. Just like Humphrey and Anders last month. Just like Lieutenant John Briankerb. He went poof. And moreover - he crashed in goddamn Medwedia.” ”Good grief. Well...the good thing is that the Igors will have to collect the pieces and bits and not we. And I must say, that’s probably gonna be a great cleaning job, right?” ”Stop being morbid, Frank.” The two men immediately interrupted their lunch as Gene Kerman entered the mission control room. Everything went silent. The color of the face of the Head Mission Director (Operations) was not the pale yet formidable green his subordinates were used to but an unusual medium red. Gene was the uncle of Jebediah Kerman. ”Stand up.” Gene Kerman’s was speaking calmly (like he always did when he was furious), and yet his voice sounded like thunder. Those who were finishing their coffee turned to him. ”Stand up. Everybody.” ”What has happened, Mr. Kerman?” - somebody courageous had dared to interrupt the silence before the storm. ”We’re fired”, said the Head Mission Director (Operations) calmly, “all of us. This is the last order from the Director of the Space Program before he resigns.” A hearty murmur went through the majestic control hall. Kerbonauts died, even crashed in Medwedia, and every time, a funeral with weeping mothers and widows held at the space center paid by the Program closed the affair. Yes - it was Jebediah Kerman, the man who had stepped onto the Mun thirty and onto Duna fifteen years ago, but... ”No, it’s not what you think. It has nothing to do with my goddamn nephew, who seldom missed opportunities to get into trouble,” proceeded Kerman, who was now noticeably intoxicated by a mix of coffee and wine, “it’s much, much worse, at least for me.” A newspaper fell down somewhere, and everybody heard that. ”This morning, I have been accused of diverting thirty million dollars from the space program’s budget. Gentlemen, this is the end of the civilian space program. Even if I can prove that I - and you - are innocent, we are doomed. This is the end.” ”What is happening now, Mr. Kerman?” ”I don’t know, Mr. Davies, but I can assure you of my suspiction that this is all orchestrated in order to get the civilian program, a thorn in the eyes of certain persons, as we know, out of the game. Do you think somebody who wants orbital laser cannons will suddenly give a new grant for an orbital greenhouse after inauguration?” ”So we are basically uneployed from today on, Director?” ”Yes. At least most of us. Who is in the military?” Ten employees raised their hands. ”I have been asked to forward a new offer to you. You will be taken over with the infrastructure here. Mediocre pay. The rest of us - and that includes me - can just as well go knocking of the door of the homeless shelter.” A sight of relief went through the part of the room where most of the officers where sitting, and sixty pairs of envious eyes stared at them.

When I ask myself if the engines will burn out when sitting in a plane. When I remember 0.12 amd 0.13 - KSP was a game far different from modern KSP then. When I remember the Kerbal Roleplay.

In 0.12, I did a Direct Munar Ascent. I just aimed at the Mun and crashed into it without even entering Kerbin orbit. My subsequent attempts involved entering a high-eccentricity orbit and waiting until the Mun catches the spacecraft while Jeb, Bill and Bob starved to death and suffocated. There were no Patched Conics in 0.12 and 0.13, you had to guesstimate your Munar Transfer Orbit.

Thank you, I have composed and sent a message to him.

So Copenhagen Suborbitals is not dead even though its ex-boss murdered a Swedish reporter?

The RP rule can be avoided by transferring the forum to the website and/or working on a discord server. Just the most important results and achievements will be presented here.

I am not saying "let's not ask", just saying "as long as we ask for permission, they will surely say yes".

I’m sure that they will not prohibit this as long as the site stays non-commercial and we will only use the coastlines of Kerbin.

1. Create a OSM tile server 2. Extract a basic heightmap (e.g. just the coastlines) - this should be doable. Import it. 3. Add the most important features manually. 4. Begin fictionalizing and detailing the terrain (e.g. adding countries, cities, fields, space centers, roads, railways, etc...).

There is an interesting website called OpenGeoFiction where contributors can create fictional countries within a world that uses the OpenStreetMap framework. This results in a giant map with lots of lore and documentation. I wonder if something like this could be done for Kerbin. The main problems would be: a.) setting up the respective OSM server, b.) importing at least the major coastlines of Kerbin into the map and c.) determining to which extent terrain can be fictionalized. If done correctly, a successful Kerbal Geofiction project would open up a whole new dimension for the forum community to cooperate. What do you think?

According to this article, we are close to detecting an exomoon, e.g. a moon orbiting an exoplanet, for the first time in the history of astronomy. https://gizmodo.com/new-hubble-observations-boost-evidence-for-elusive-exom-1829494435 Astronomers have confirmed thousands of exoplanets—worlds outside of our Solar System—but they haven’t nabbed a single exomoon. New research is bolstering the case for a suspected exomoon first detected last year, but scientists say the evidence is still not definitive. To date, astronomers have confirmed the existence of 3,851 exoplanets—an impressive number given that the first exoplanet was discovered just 26 years ago. Yet during all this time, and after all those amazing planetary discoveries, astronomers haven’t been able to prove the existence of an exomoon, that is, a moon in orbit around a planet in another star system. This is a surprising result, given that exomoons are surely ubiquitous across the cosmos. Take our own Solar System, for example. Our eight planets host 185 known natural satellites. Of these, 79 belong to Jupiter and 62 to Saturn—an embarrassment of riches that showcases the potential of gas giants to harbor large collections of natural satellites. What’s more, a hefty portion of exomoons are likely to be habitable, as argued in a research paper published earlier this year. But we still haven’t found any of these moons. Indeed, exomoons are proving to be frustratingly difficult to detect, and for obvious reasons. Unlike enormous gas giants and super-Earths, moons tend to be on the smallish side. Not only that, but they’re spinning around an object that’s also spinning around an object; after a few observations, astronomers can predict when an exoplanet will pass in front of its host star, but knowing when an exoplanet’s moon might make an appearance is a different challenge entirely. So it makes sense that astronomers are struggling to make a definitive detection. As some of you may recall from last year, astronomers using the Kepler Space Telescope detected a faint dip in the brightness of a star called Kepler-1625, which was interpreted to be a potential sign of an exomoon. The data wasn’t definitive, but the observation resulted in the astronomers getting 40 hours access to the Hubble Space Telescope. With Hubble, astronomers Alex Teachey and David Kipping from Columbia University were able to collect data that’s four times more precise than what Kepler was able to acquire. The results of this second survey, published today in Science Advances, further the case for the existence of this exomoon. “Our initial report was based on Kepler-data alone, which we always felt was not sufficient to claim a discovery,” Teaching told Gizmodo. There are basically two features of the new data that suggest the presence of a moon. The first is an apparent dip in the brightness of the host star following the planet’s transit, which the astronomers attribute to the exomoon. The alleged exomoon is in orbit around a known exoplanet called Kepler-1625b, a large gas giant that’s several times bigger than Jupiter. From our perspective, it takes Kepler-1625b around 19 hours to travel across the face of its host star. Astronomers can’t actually see the planet, which is 8,000 light-years away, but they can detect a drop in the host star’s brightness when it passes in front; it’s this eclipsing effect, called a transit, that allows scientists to detect distant exoplanets. Around 3.5 hours after Kepler-1625b performed its transit, Hubble detected a second, significantly smaller dimming of the star’s brightness. In a statement, Kipping said it was consistent with “a moon trailing the planet like a dog following its owner on a leash.” Unfortunately, however, the scheduled Hubble observations ended before the complete transit of the supposed exomoon could be measured. The second key observation was the presence of transit timing effects, which indicate there is something in the system tugging on the planet gravitationally. “Basically, when a planet has a moon, the planet is of course pulling on the moon gravitationally, but the moon is also pulling on the planet, and they’re both actually orbiting their common center of mass—a point in space along the line between the centers of the two objects,” explained Teaching. “So because the planet is orbiting this point—called the barycenter—it wobbles in its orbit around the star. What that does is, it affects the timings of the transits. Sometimes the planet transits a little earlier, sometimes a little later. Those are the transit timing variations, or TTVs.” Teaching said the moon explanation is superior to other explanations, such as the gravitational influence of an undiscovered exoplanet in the Kepler-1625 system. The exomoon explanation also has the added benefit of being a single explanation for the two observed phenomena. But as Teaching and Kipping admit, the data is still incomplete, and something unknown may be influencing the observations. “We would just stress that this remains an exomoon candidate,” Teaching told Gizmodo. “It’s a tantalizing result, certainly, but it really still needs to be confirmed by more observations and, hopefully, other teams replicating our results.” Regardless, a picture of this exoplanet and moon is beginning to emerge. If this is an exomoon, it’s actually quite large—about the size of Neptune. By comparison, Jupiter’s Ganymede—the largest moon in our Solar System—is 3,270 miles (5,268 kilometers) in diameter, compared to Neptune and its 30,500-mile-wide (50,000 kilometers) diameter. This exomoon is about 1.5 percent the mass of its host planet, which, interestingly, is the same mass-ratio between Earth and our Moon, but on a far less grandiose scale. By the standards of our Solar System, this is a moon of gargantuan proportions—an attribute the researchers say is largely responsible for its discovery. Natalie Hinkel, an astronomer at Arizona State University who wasn’t involved with the new study, was impressed by how the authors vetted their data and analyses. “They considered a wide variety of angles, caveats, and avenues that could render their findings null and void—but all lead them back to the likely presence of an exomoon,” Hinkel told Gizmodo. “However, because there have been no observations of this kind, I agree with their assessment that it is the ‘unknown unknowns’ which may make or break this discovery.” University of Southern Queensland astronomer Rob Wittenmyer said the paper was thorough and that the authors did not overstate their claim. “The result is not surprising, as evidenced by the abundance of moons in our Solar System,” Wittenmyer told Gizmodo. “As moons go, this one is quite large, and hence detectable. I suspect that, like exoplanets and cockroaches, exomoons are everywhere—when you see one, there are many more you missed. As techniques are refined, we will surely find more exomoons in the coming decades.” David Bennett, a scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, agrees that additional observations will be required to brand this a definitive discovery of an exomoon. “Also, the planet is 10 times more massive than Jupiter, and the predicted mass of the moon is close to that of Neptune. So, if we saw these objects in isolation, we would consider them both to be planets,” Bennett told Gizmodo. “If the observed companion to the planet is confirmed, there is a good chance that it would be considered to be a binary planet instead of a moon. It could be a Neptune-mass planet that was captured by a super-Jupiter planet during the formation of the planetary system.” Which is a good point. How is it even possible that this particular planet-moon architecture even exists? If it’s confirmed that Kepler-1625b hosts such a large moon, astronomers will have the added challenge of figuring out how this particular star system took shape. Another neat fact about Kepler-1625b is that its orbit resides within its host star’s habitable zone. Now, it’s very unlikely that this gas giant, and its equally gassy, Neptune-like exomoon, could harbor life. But what if this purported exomoon has its own moons, and those moons are of a terrestrial nature? Could life actually emerge on the moon of a moon? “If there is truly an exomoon around Kepler-1625b, a whole new subfield could open up, one we scientists—as well as sci-fi writers—have only speculated about, regarding the discovery and possible habitability of exomoons,” said Hinkel. “Essentially, it could be like the TV show Fireflywhere people live on core worlds as well as the outlying moons.” It’ll be awhile before we can solve these sorts of problems, but this latest observation means we can at least start to pose the questions. [Science Advances]