Inverurie Jones

Today I came back after an absence of several months and found all my mods were out of date and my old saves were dead. There may have been a bit of screaming.

Prefix denoting experimental or production craft and any specialist role- X, K (general use), O (orbiter), A (aircraft) for instance. Number denoting size bracket- 1- 19 = small; 20-39 = medium; 40+ = large. The K-1 is a small, two stage satellite launch vehicle while the K-50 is a big (by my standards) ship designed for prolonged continuous use in space. Individual vessel names vary by class but the K-50s, for example, all carry the names of famous figures from Kerbal mythology which, it turns out, is very similar to Greek mythology but everyone is shorter. The K-40 product tankers are named after merchant ships I remember from my days with the coastguard. Currently active ships include: KSS Ajax, KSS Achilles, KSS Daroja and KSS Trailblazer. This last was my first really successful 'Munship' but she's now being moved to the Mun permanently to serve as a shuttle between Munbase Alpha and the new Mun Station One. Bases get letters, stations get numbers.

An unfortunate glitch resulted in the simultaneous de-orbiting of Spacelab 1 and the KSS Discovery. I sent all the crew to the REKT escape pods and ejected them in the upper atmosphere. Unfortunately one pulled a Goose and collided with part of the station as it ejected, destroying its parachute. Five little yellow pods floated slowly down to the surface while the sixth spun off into the distance, following roughly the same trajectory as the pin-wheeling wreck of the station.

Today the HOTH received a new refuelling boom, visible on its starboard side (left of the picture). Shortly after the first two storage tanks- one RCS and one liquid fuel/oxidiser- were sent up, as was an AX-1 shuttle on a crew change flight. The shuttle launching: And docked: The two storage tanks are clearly visible in the foreground attached to the boom. They were launched individually as unmanned craft and manoeuvred into place by means of egregious use of MechJeb. The actual 'craft' part was then jettisoned, leaving only the tanks.

I sent up another module to my new High Orbit Transfer Hub. The new part is the long docking section. Then I completed a contract, got a bunch of money and sent up another one. This started out as just a big relay satellite in synchronous orbit over the KSC with a hab unit attached to give me a place to do crew changes with my big, non-landing ships but it's kind of taken on a life of its own.

Launched my first true 'spaceship', the K-50 Class K-501 KSS Ajax. It went up surprisingly easily with only 6 boosters and a jettisonable Skipper engine.

My first big(ish) station of my 1.3 career game: Spacelab. It's actually two older stations docked together on a newly-launched central core. It has four berths and lifeboats for six. It is likely to be expanded again soon. Also on the cards are an expansion of the small research and refuelling outpost at Minmus (aka 'the Gas 'n' Go') and the construction of a station around the Mun and a much larger, multi-purpose station in synchronous orbit above the KSC.

MA (Hons) in English Literature at the University of Aberdeen, licensed pilot, late of the Royal Corps of Signals, Royal Navy and Her Majesty's Coastguard (consecutively, not concurrently), so while my degree wasn't in a science my career path has been largely technical and revolving around the arcane magic of radio and satellite stuff. Which is weird, given that I really wanted to be an archaeologist.

Tell me about it! Me: I need to land this fuel tank next to my Munbase, I'll use mechjeb to save a bit of time. Mechjeb: Okay dokay! Let's put it down in this random place, via the side of a mountain! On top of that I had to land my largest space station via Hyperedit after a glitched docking board led to it becoming one with the crew change shuttle, the KSS Discovery, which was left dangling off the side of the larger machine for all time, like a horny angler fish. On the plus side, it did remind me of a verse in TISM's 'Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me'.

I never thought about combining JT and KSP. Given Bill's stats I think 'Thick As A Brick' is pretty much his leitmotif.

I have dreams about a huge black cloud on the horizon and people running around panicking, then a tall man whose face I can't see tells me we have to get ready. So that's not worrying or anything.

I like this one for when I start my ships' main engines and send them on their way. ...and this (which I discovered a while back via a KSP youtube series) for when everything inevitably goes horribly wrong and leaves yet another floating hulk or pile of wreckage behind.

A Kerbal, a creature evolved from the mystery goo, a hologramatical Kerbal and a mechjeb, adrift for 3 million years...

I have launched my 'Duna Express' probe. I'm looking forward to its arrival at Duna in about a year. Oh, well, I suppose there's still plenty to do in the K/M/M system.

Jeb giving the newly-extended Spacelab 1 a walk float around.

Jeb recently came within 100 metres of being wiped out by a stranded Kerbal. I'd launched him on an unrelated mission and was sorting out his orbit when he got his hair parted by a dark shape. I hit 'cycle craft' and found it was a Mk.1 command capsule with Cerman Kerman in it. We got two contracts completed for that- rescue Cerman and rendezvous two craft in orbit.

Mun Run 5. Here we can see Munbus 01 carrying members of a relief crew for Munbase Alpha who recently arrived on the KSS Achilles, making the fifth regular passenger flight or 'Mun Run'. KSS Achilles is the first of the K-22s, representing an upgrade in payload capacity over the older K-20s (KSS Stargazer and Trailblazer) allowing tourist trips to be combined with crew change flights. In the background we can see Munbase Alpha's laboratory complex, storage unit and Tug 01, a small cargo lander. Here's the bus leaving Munbase Alpha's command and habitation tower with the homeward bound crew:

Pfft. I killed the little bugger eight times yesterday morning trying to sort out a thrust problem on a VTOL. God alone knows how many times he's died now, but he's my chief test pilot, so I'm going to say...a lot.

I thought the 1.0 trailer was pretty funny. Maybe it's because I work in the emergency services or because I'm a pilot or ex-military, but laughing at theoretical catastrophes caused by stupid things is not out of bounds for me, not by a long shot. Especially not when the people involved are little green, functionally-indestructible aliens.

Two terrible accidents! Two scientists were killed following a structural failure on re-entry that tore off one of their craft's parachutes and led to it slamming into the ground at far too high a speed. Unfortunately they'd been in orbit for several launch-packed weeks, so reverting wasn't possible. Later a staging error led to a catastrophic launch failure. The crew survived as the command capsule separated in time, but as they floated down they got a lovely view of one of their boosters as it traced a beautifully smooth arc up in to the sky, then down, down, down, under their capsule and straight into the front door of the VAB. Honestly, it was like it was guided by some sort of malevolent intelligence.

I love mods, mainly because without them all my stations and bases would just be identical stacks of hitchhikers and MPLs. And the vanilla hiring cost system is horrible.

I generally arrange it so that I drop debris onto a planet from a great height, resulting in pretty 'splodes and no litter but it doesn't always work, so my last save (before some kind of weird bug broke it) had big-ass fuel tanks all over the Mun and a sort of incipient Oort cloud of uncouplers, farings and dead probes. There was also that upside-down rover in the Farside Crater... Jeb should have got a medal for covering a record distance across the Mun on foot after that.

Came pretty close last night on my new Career game. First manned Kerballed Mun land-and-return mission. Fluffed the orbit slightly, so I had to burn more fuel than anticipated to rendezvous with the Mun in the first place, which meant my 'Big Engine' ran out of fuel earlier on the approach than intended and I had to use more of the fuel from the 'Get Our Arses Back Home' supply to land on the Mun in one spaceship-shaped piece instead of one pancake-shaped piece. Naturally, the fuel ran out early and left the KSS Trailblazer in orbit around Kerbin with an AP around 250,000 metres and a PE of around 68,000 metres. Watching it slooooooooowly bleed off height and speed with each dip into the atmosphere was...well, mindnumbing, actually. I was infinitely less frustrated, though, than I would have been had the PE been a couple of Km higher, I suppose. 'Oh, look, we're a space station now.'

Today saw the launch of KSS Astute, the first ship built to leave Kerbin's atmosphere and never return. She's currently in orbit around Moho on her space-trials. She'll be returning to Kerbin orbit soon for repairs as Benjamen Kerman had a mishap on EVA and managed to break off two of the ship's solar panels...with his face.

First Kerballed mission to Duna and back! Sooooo muuuuch sciieeeence....