Ehco Corrallo

This would be awesome! Rovers are awesome, but there's rarely a use for them... I wonder if there'll be ground level contracts introduced in 1.1 with the rest of the contract overhaul. It'd be a good fit with the wheel improvements. Wishful thinking I suppose, but still...

Thanks for the feedback! I'm glad you like it! Incidentally, I'd agree with you about detail, that's why there's a slightly faster pace through the later chapters. I wrote the Pilot a while ago, and my sense of pace has improved immensely since then.

Here, have another character bio: Emily Hamilton Gender: Female. Hair: A mundane shade of brown. Eyes: Green, the way oatmeal is purple. Height: Between 5’ and 6’ Weight: 117 lbs. Build: Inconspicuous. Handedness: Right. Clothing: Wears shirts with long sleeves, and pants with double-knees. Dresses in yellow and grey most days. Sometimes forgets to take off her lead apron, and wears it into the cafeteria. Sleeps in her clothes. Personality: Defensive. Shy around strangers, outspoken around friends. Age: 27 Nationality: Born and raised in Minnesota. Occupation: Astronaut and overzealous engineer. Aliases: Gazpacho Joe for reasons too complex to begin to mention. Likes: Tinkering and refinement. Blast furnaces. Conrad Munroe. Loves: Clattering, clunking, shaking, rattling, shuddering, jangling, thudding, and squeaking; it means there’s work to be done. Dislikes: Mold, oatmeal, and Conrad Munroe. Hates: Jonathan Griggs. Manuals. Writing with a pen. Wants: To take apart the ship so she can put it back together again. To figure out her love-hate relationship with Conrad. General: A brilliant engineer, tends to break things by trying to fix or improve them. Some things just aren’t meant to be messed with (stasis fields, fusion reactors, Cypris’s collection of Baseball trophies). Has excellent motor skills, but still seems clumsy.

I glanced through The Asteroid Sentinels, and the pacing seems fine, but then again, I didn't read too far through the beginning... I'd offer some general rules about pacing, but there aren't really any. I've been reading Dune recently, and the main story arc doesn't start until the two hundred and someteenth page. In a novel I'm working on, everything starts very quickly but it took to page 105 or so for things to really start rolling. Pacing is one of the harder things about writing, but like most things, it's really just determined by how comfortable you are with a certain pace. In general though, and this has been mentioned before, spend more time on important or dramatic events, and less time on rote ones. My recommendation is this: If you feel like you should pick up the pace, pick up the pace. If you write selfishly; if you write what you want to write, the way you want to write it, there's a good chance whatever you're writing'll come out better for the passion and interest you wouldn't have necessarily put into another project, another method, or another route. (Sometimes we have to write things we don't want to, and that philosophy falls into shambles, but that's for another brick of text.) Did that help?

I'm opting for frequent short updates, because I wrote something excellent (and hysterical and also very typical) and was very proud and wanted to share it. Each chapter will be between 4 and 8 pages. Here's the latest release and an excerpt: (again, it's linked away from the forums because of profanity usage; ye have been warned) Orbit "The Saturn V has stripes down the side. Thick black stripes. It weighs 6.5 million pounds, and the first stage produces 34,000 newtons of thrust. The Saturn V is very big, very expensive, and very white. It’s also very safe, considering the majority of its mass is highly combustible. It has provisions for saving the crew in the event of rapid unplanned disassembly (Astronaut-speak for conflagration and horrible death) and is far, far less likely to dismember its crew than the Phoenix IV is." Let me know what you think! Also: 100th post!

Not so surprising if you consider that all the adults who play KSP would have played KSP when they were teenagers if it had existed then. To bring it back on topic: I got on the forums because I'd stranded a crew on Duna. I've stayed on the forums because within four hours I had more information about landing on Duna than I thought it was possible to have.

I've started working on the next chapter: It should be up "soon". In the meantime, take a gander at this: Conrad Munroe Gender: Male Hair: Sandy and wavy and short. Eyes: Quite possibly brown. Height: 5’ 9” Weight: 168 lbs. Build: Stocky. Handedness: Right. Clothing: Jeans and jackets; sometimes a hat from a casino, often wears sunglasses. Personality: Optimistically apathetic. Rarely indignant. Age: 30-somethingish. Nationality: Irish, raised in Spain. Occupation: Reluctant Astronaut. Aliases: Surprisingly none. Likes: Alcohol and time on his hands. Loves: Luck of any kind. Dislikes: Authority. Hates: Pedantry and pauses and also poetry. Wants: To see the moon up close. General: Good at playing poker and brewing beer. Fiercely loyal, generally friendly, rarely but gloriously vindictive. Can be sarcastic. Shortsighted; wears contacts instead of glasses. Finally, a question: Would you rather see frequent short updates, or infrequent big ones?

Having a bail-out feature mapped to the Abort button would be awesome. That said, I've used this particular feature to fly Jeb down from a catastrophically failing rocket so that I could land him in one of the tracking station dishes, and it was just as awesome as a bail-out button.

Just finished reading. Bravo.

I've always thought of this as a useful bug. It's a good alternative to personal parachutes. And though I've used it on a number of occasions to save lives, I've never managed to save more than one Kerbal. This won't work with a high horizontal velocity I've noticed (by throwing Kerbals from aircraft in an attempt to eject them). Mostly I think this is a fun thing, and similar to Kerbals surviving for an indefinite amount of time in a command pod the size of a phone booth while they orbit endlessly. Maybe it isn't the most realistic thing, but it makes Kerbals seem different and weird and BadS.

I actually wasn't trying to make it stand out, I just happen to like Courier, and the story's written in Courier New, so I though to keep the aesthetic. So... New Times Roman, because there's nothing more comforting than the pedantic glow of an MLA-approved typeset. (Ironically, I'm not being ironic.) Georgia is much better. Thanks. (I changed the story's font as well)

That explains it perfectly. I was watching my grammar very carefully, and as a result, everything ended up in an identical format. It's not deliberate, but it's a style I often fall into when writing about motion and movement. The pace varies greatly through the remainder of the story. Thanks for the excellent feedback! You convinced me to write a new chapter, and I did!

There was a speedbump on the runway. The VAB implodes.

I've encountered the same issue: too many ideas. Creativity is a disease for which there is no known cure. (Daytime television has been shown to have a marked effect however.)

I was realizing that. I'm reading them in order, and making sure to keep tabs on the WIP. I've got some reading to do.

I'm glad you like it. The choppy rhythm is probably deliberate. I'm not sure quite what you mean, though. The digressions are very deliberate.

Here's a highly extended metaphor: "The engineers looked up from their card game. Conrad nodded to Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker, Emily tried to say something but all that came out was a mumble that sounded vaguely like Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker’s name (which was far more complicated than she would have liked, and a constant sore spot for her. The crew used it whenever they could.) and then another sound at the end. The second sound is not unlike what happens when someone attaches a garden hose to the wrong end of a whale and tries to turn it on. The result of course is something considerably like a blubbery whale wail, but altogether different entirely (whales rarely wail in absolute anguish. Typically, their anguish is partial. It could be (and unfortunately has been) said that whales are partial to anguish). In simpler terms, Emily was laughing at herself for being foolish enough to try and say Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker with burned lips and a face swaddled in bandages, while Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker was glaring at her because she suspected that Emily had been trying to say her name with burned lips and a face swaddled in bandages." And here's the biography of my esteemed and excessively monikered protagonist: Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker Gender: Female Hair: Strawbury Blonde. Eyes: Grey, like storm clouds or concrete. Height: Much too tall to be average. Weight: 132 lbs. Build: Slightly heavier than she would prefer. Handedness: Right. Clothing: Dresses with almost catatonic abandon. Personality: Insecure, occasionally violent, mostly kind. Age: 233,544 hrs. Nationality: Third-generation Italian, raised in Chicago. Occupation: Astronaut Aliases: Maricela Likes: Chocolate and rasburies. Late nights in a city she can no longer visit. Loves: Her ex-husband. Dislikes: The smell of grass. Awkward silences she suspects she cause. Hates: When people lie to her, when people use her full name, and when people mention that she was married at some point. Her ex-husband. Wants: Answers, possibly a decent plaque or flattering statuary piece. General: Cypris tends to second-guess herself; she can’t place trust in her decisions even though she wants to. She doesn’t like to remember he marriage because she thinks she made a mistake. [Writer's note: the creative spelling of strawberry and raspberry (that you didn't notice until I mentioned it right now) is entirely deliberate.]

I write frequently. Something that came, almost entirely by accident out of a dizzy spell, a moment of foolishness, and too many hours of playing a game about space, was a short introduction, then another short introduction after that. These introductions eventually turned into the Pilot episode of a serialized short story that I decided (in a fit of pique and pedantic specificity) would be called A Book About People Who Want To Be Astronauts, and would be about people who want to be astronauts, and would have a protagonist with a ridiculous name, and would be proper science fiction, with space and everything. Apparently, I also decided that it would be satire, for some reason. Here's the introduction: (which doesn't particularly pertain in any way to either the style or the plot of the actual story) "There is a day when everything will end; when the last flakes of matter will drift away into unending darkness and be lost forever; when ties stronger even than time or distance will snap and hurtle away into a lonely silence, and the very thought of silence will become arbitrary without a frame of reference, because nobody will have heard anything in an infinity after time came to its syncopated end but even that won’t matter, there won’t be anybody left to wonder why time stopped and why a nameless blankness took its place. But that is a long time away; an infinite time away. (infinity is the only concept that holds its meaning in meaninglessness, because it’s half meaningless to begin with). And somewhere in between now and the end times, there will be a war that tears our galaxy in two; there will be a human with an excessively long name; there will be a long silence that decides to become a beginning." And here are links to the first and second parts of the pilot: Pilot, Part One Pilot, Part Two And here are the other episodes: (more to follow) Orbit Home Interim (short) Phone Engine with Wings Rattle The First Bit The Next First Bit Space is Big Real Danger War Council NOTE: There is some profanity, and lots of humor. The language might not be nearly as strong or proliferated as in The Martian, but swearing is swearing, and swearing isn't okay on the forums. That's why I included links instead of posting the text en masse.

Thanks for the heads-up! I'm now following the other one.

When I'm playing KSP, I'm playing KSP for science and the glory of space. On the other hand, building fighter aircraft with BD Armory is a lot of fun. And occasionally I go on tangents where I do nothing but build combat vehicles for a few hours. Mostly though, I build airplanes and go to space.

I love the mix of story and mission report. Awesome designs and mission premises too. I'm now following this.

A novella is longer than a short story, but shorter than a novel. If it's a serialized short story, then it's a serial story, like you said. The Mün is an excellent setting.

Maybe. I've never really liked writing based off of an existing idea; I'd much rather blunder into conceptual ether. I've written a number of short stories and other things, but I didn't think they were fit for posting on a forum devoted to KSP. Mostly, I just wanted to offer opinions and advice to anyone who needs opinions and advice. I've done a lot of work with characters and plotting; the result: I'm pretty good at troubleshooting characters and plotlines. If someone's interested, they'll likely include feedback in with their pestering. If they don't, I have a strategy... Just blackmail them: "No more updates until you give me focused feedback and also reply to a survey, a poll, and a barrage of follow-up questions." That said, nobody's asked me for updates. Maybe I'm just posting in the wrong places...Stupid blog. I did notice the link to the archive thread in your signature and took a look at First Flight. You've got a great sense of pace, and you've managed to put more dialogue into the first handful of chapters than I have in the whole of the hundred page draft I'm working on currently.

I haven't written anything for KSP, but I've written a lot of other stuff (novels mostly) and I've been looking for a thread like this since I realized that people write long elaborate stories about KSP, and I finally found it. Anyway, hello.

Realism Overhaul Overhaul: You now have to build rockets piece by piece and program the telemetry and pay for them with your own money. A mod to instantly do away with trial-by-error engineering. Adds gulls. Removes timewarp. Honor Guard Redux: Plays Amazing Grace when you crash a rocket. Complete with procedural sobbing and hysterical news reporters.