Ten Key

This is true to a large degree, but I think there's something to be said for spitballing. Sometimes when I'm stuck the "throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks" approach is a good way to get things moving again-- you never know when something random is going to bounce off your brain in just the right way to spark off a new idea or subplot. Seconding this. Beyond a certain point I cannot tell you how you should write something. . .I can only tell you how I would write something. And that will not necessarily be an improvement. The following isn't directed at you specifically Owl, but there are a number of reasons I might skip past a request for feedback, and this seems like a good excuse to talk about some of them. First and foremost, I may simply not have the time. Putting together of list of suggestions that is coherent, concise and helpful is fairly time consuming and, depending on what else I've got going on, I may simply not be able to set aside enough time to put together anything useful. There are several talented writers who provide feedback here, but not enough to where we don't all occasionally get busy at the same time. Sometimes there just isn't enough for me to work with. Three to five paragraphs? Sure, I might be able to offer a point or two on sentence structure, or maybe pacing, but storytelling? Writing? No. Unless the writing is very tight, 3-5 paragraphs isn't enough for me to be able to tell where you're going. And if the writing is that tight. . .trust me, you do not need or want my help. Sometimes the story just isn't in my wheelhouse. I do not do horror, nor am I a big fan of "whodunits". I have written war stories in the past, and I find Kerbal Space Program to be a poor vehicle for those kinds of tales. War can be an element of stories in the KSP setting, but not a main focus. . .I just cannot wrap my brain around the idea of it. So to, the milieu of KSP is so firmly rooted in the "Space Race" era that I have a hard time with "far future" stories that focus on warp drives and interstellar travel. I'm not saying it's not possible to write any of those things well, but rather that it's unlikely I'd have anything useful to say on the matter. Sometimes the story includes pictures of places in the game I haven't been yet. A big part of KSP for me is the "I wonder what's over there. . .", and the first time I visit a new place, I want it to be a new place. So far I've managed to claw my way to Kerbin's moons, Moho, Eve and Gilly. We choose to go to Duna, not because it is easy, but because I really want to read Kuzzter's schtuff! Demum perveniemus. . . Sometimes the writer's English is just a complete train wreck. The unfortunate reality is that I have no way of knowing who is a native English speaker and who is not. . .and making assumptions in that regard sounds like a great way to get my head ripped off. If your story reads like it was machine translated from another language, I'm going to keep walking. Sometimes it feels like there's too much of an age gap. I am nearly 40, and I have more than a few gray hairs in my head. I have lived through wild triumphs and ridiculous failures. I have lost family after long illnesses and have had friends taken from me with no warning at all. I have done good. I have screwed up. I have been in a fairly serious car accident. I have fallen bassackwards into a great job. I have been "escorted from the building". I have hired people. I have had to fire people who hadn't done anything wrong. I've had to put up with people who should have been fired but couldn't be. And I can think of at least three occasions where I should have died but didn't. All of that, all of it, has become a story telling tool, a well of experience I can draw on when I'm writing. Sometimes I will read something, and for whatever reason it just rings false to me. People don't talk like that. They don't act like that. And maybe. . .maybe it's just a mechanical issue that could be smoothed over. It happens to everyone. But maybe the writer is just very young, and due to the absolutely necessary rules on this forum, I cannot ask. And if it is an age issue, there's nothing for it but time. Survive long enough and you'll have some stories to tell too. Finally, sometimes if I offer commentary on too many stories at once, I start feeling like a Big Jerk. I know first hand that writing is a very personal process, and I try very hard to be helpful and polite. But sometimes due to time constraints I have to choose between being terse and not posting at all. If I do too much of that, I wind up feeling like a self-important gas bag and have to take a break for a while. My desktop is littered with notepad files for this very reason. All my stuff is in the RTF format. The file size is a bit larger than it needs to be, but I find the near universal compatibility to be worth the cost. A word of warning. . .be careful opening RTF files from unknown sources. RTF files can be a vector for malware. Failure to signal a gravity turn. . .now that is priceless.

The altimeter in KSP is magic. It knows, with perfect certainty, the distance between the aircraft and sea level at all times. Altimeters in real life work on air pressure-- an airliner flying at 35,000 feet cannot "see" the ground at all with respect to determining its altitude. It only knows the pressure of the air it's flying through at any given moment. I am not a pilot. I suspect, to get a fully accurate reply to your question, you'd need to corner one. But I think real life aircraft probably would pitch up slowly over time when traveling long distances, if not for the fact that the pilot/computer is already having to make constant adjustments for air conditions and fuel consumption.

Kerbin's radius is 600 km. The Earth's radius is about 6,400 km. Kerbin's much smaller size makes its curvature far more noticeable.

Velocity is not conserved. Angular momentum is conserved. As your rocket increases its distance from the center of rotation, its angular velocity will decrease so that its angular momentum remains constant.

I think a lot of SpaceX's reasoning has to do with fixed costs and launch cadence. It's not necessarily about saving money on the individual rockets, but rather about saving time. If they can refurbish and reuse a first stage 10 times in the time it would normally take them to build one (I am pulling numbers out of the air here), that would allow them to maintain a higher rate of launches and thus spread out their fixed costs, reducing the price of each individual launch. If memory serves, this was the primary driver for trying to recover the fairings. They simply take too long to manufacture. I don't know that anyone knows for certain where the breaking point is in the numbers. SpaceX certainly thinks there is value in reusability, but I think their business model is still an experiment at this point. Even if it doesn't work out though, SpaceX has successfully disrupted an industry in desperate need of disruption.

It would probably be a good idea to figure out what's going on first. . .otherwise the same thing could very easily happen to the replacement threads.

Am I the only one imagining what's going to happen if one of these people can't get back into their seat in time?

I would add, there's value to be had from other forms of media as well. . .movies, TV shows, graphic novels, and even more abstract things like paintings and music. They may not teach you anything about writing, but they can teach you a bit about storytelling. And if nothing else, they can be wonderful kindling for your own imagination. I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree here. In some ways creative writing is an exercise in contrasts, and a good piece of story can become a great piece of story if it's properly supported by the writing on either side of it. A happy scene will land harder if it's preceded by a sad one. A serious scene will be more poignant if it follows a humorous one. Love and cruelty, hope and despair, light and dark. Descriptions of violence have a role to play in this, but they should be used sparingly-- if used continuously the reader will become numb to it, and that contrast won't be available when you need it. Sometimes though, you need to convey violent and/or dark events to the reader without necessarily delving into them. In these instances I prefer to keep the events in question "off camera" and focus instead on the aftermath.

I love solid rockets. As long as we're sharing videos, this one's fun.

I use Irfanview for basic image editing. It's fast, free, and very good at cropping, rotating and resizing/resampling images. It will also do color correction and a bunch of other stuff, but at that point I usually jump into Photoshop.

You may be thinking of a different accident.

That fairing picture is incredible. I would love to have that one up on the wall.

You know what? When I was reading through that draft, I figured you'd just smashed random chemical sounding things together and fired for effect. Never mind the actual compound. . .that word looks like it's going to erupt into a rapidly expanding cloud of vowels and consonants at any given moment.

Seconding this. Windows has gotten increasingly protective of anything installed in the "Program Files" folder(s) over the years. . .try reinstalling Steam somewhere else.

I'm not sure that nose cap was there for aerodynamic reasons-- it looks more like a protective cover to me. It doesn't seem like there are many decent pictures of it. . .all of the pictures I can find of the Gemini spacecraft on the launch pad are from below, and that makes it hard to see the cap on top. This was the best I could do. . . It looks like the fairing is perfectly flat except for that small raised bit that accommodates the UHF antenna. It doesn't seem to significantly change the shape of the nose.

The second Soviet satellite launch had a dog aboard and was non-recoverable. I think subsequent flights with dogs were test flights of the Vostok spacecraft (under the name Korabl-Sputnik) and were designed to be recovered.

If I had to zero in on one single part to throw out and redo, it would be the 2.5 meter decoupler. It works well enough as part of a rocket, but it's also the obvious linkage between the Mk 1-2 command pod and its service module. And in my opinion, those two parts just do not work together.

I think at some point the additional weight and complexity of a streamlined cover overwhelms any aerodynamic gains you might see from rounding that blunt nose off. It's worth noting that the Mercury escape tower also had a more or less flat nose.

Vostok had a parachute for the capsule, but even with the chute it hit the ground hard enough to potentially injure the squishy human inside. The follow on, Voskhod, had a braking rocket on the parachute line to soften the landing. NASA mostly sidestepped this problem by bringing their capsules down in the water, but even then hard landings were a problem. If memory serves, Gemini 9 was swinging on its parachute and punched into the side of a wave hard enough to rupture one of the internal water tanks. There was enough of a leak that the crew had a brief moment where they thought the capsule was sinking.

I am certainly not an expert when it comes to this sort of thing, and I'm sure the other folks posting here will be able to help you out more, but I had a couple of questions based on the above picture. . . Is there a reason your throttle is not all the way forward? You're pretty much out of the atmosphere at this point, so drag losses aren't a problem. Unless you're having attitude control (steering) issues at a higher throttle setting, there's really no reason to not "stand on the gas". I'm running an older version of the game at the moment, back when the atmosphere of Kerbin had a lot more drag to it. And even in that environment, I have almost always pitched all the way over to 90 degrees by about 30 - 35 km. In this picture you're at 55 km and still only pitched over to about 45 degrees. For the purposes of getting to orbit, your rocket's velocity can be neatly split into two components-- horizontal and vertical. Any energy you spend in the vertical direction is only temporary. . .Kerbin's gravity will eventually "eat" it. The only velocity you get to keep is your horizontal velocity. The only reason rockets launch vertically is because of atmospheric drag. If Kerbin did not have an atmosphere, and there were no mountains in your way, you could launch a rocket horizontally right off the pad. In this picture, your rocket is more or less halfway between horizontal and vertical, which means fully half of your energy is going to vertical velocity. And you don't get to keep that, so in effect you're wasting half of your delta-v at this point in your flight. According to your navball, your rocket's heading in this picture is currently 63 degrees. Unless you're trying to reach an inclined (non-equatorial) orbit, you should try to stay as close to 90 degrees (due east) as possible. The reason for this is that your rocket is not sitting still on the pad. . .it already has an eastward velocity due to Kerbin's rotation. By launching due east, you pick up some extra delta-v for free. Thrust-to-weight ratio can be found with the following equation. . . TWR = Thrust / (mass * gravity) Thrust is the total thrust of your engines. Mass is the current mass of your rocket. Since rockets are mostly fuel, this number changes wildly during flight. Gravity is the local gravity field. Kerbin's gravity is right around 9.81 m/s2. If your TWR is less than one, your rocket will not lift off the pad. If your thrust to weight ratio is barely above one, it will crawl off the pad. If your TWR is too high, you will experience greater drag losses down in Kerbin's lower atmosphere. If your TWR is way too high, you might start to have control problems. Aside from redesigning your rocket (too much TWR means too much engine, and engines are heavy) you can use thrust limiters (right click on the engine, its in the menu) to keep your thrust under control. If you can't redesign your rocket for whatever reason, you could also try stagger firing your solid rockets. . .if your have six SRBs in your first stage for example, you could try starting with only four, and then fire the other two once the first four have burnt out.

Gemini had ejection seats instead of an escape tower.

This doesn't necessarily apply to your specific situation, but it's something to be aware of. It's my understanding that a ship in KSP cannot collide with itself, so for the most part the game ignores collisions between anything attached to the same parent vessel. However, if a clipped part becomes detached from the parent, either through intentional staging/undocking or as the result of a impact, that part's collider mesh will violently reassert itself. You know those practical joke cans with the spring loaded snakes inside them? Pretty much just like that.

Can confirm, the word count is rolling ever upward.