Ultimate Steve

Here are some pictures from my visit to Starbase with dad:

While I will sadly not be around for the launch, I did visit Starbase and Boca Chica Beach today! Got some pictures I will hopefully post later - And I managed to snag a few fragments of the launch pad that got blown up on flight 1!

We had managed to alter our trip to also be here Friday, RIP We give ourselves three days and Starship randomly decides to take six. But it is how it is.

I visited the Houston space center today. I have now seen all three remaining Saturn V rockets!

Flight 7 failure summary is out: https://www.spacex.com/updates/ Highlights: Engine out during was an aborted startup due to a low power state on an igniter. So finallly, a failure that can be directly attributed to Raptor. The wording ("pre planned upgrade") suggests that they had already thought this might be an issue, and that they have already been working on fixing that for futute engine versions. Ship failure was due to fires in the "attic" that happened because of leaks that happened because of vibrations several times stronger than expected, implied to affect the new raptor vacuum fuel feed lines. The recent long static fire was testing various fixes for this. Ship did not go pop until the AFSS went off about three minutes after contact was lost.

Typical for it to be delayed to the 28th immediately after we put in hotel reservations for the 26th and 27th.

I am well aware, we have the driving durations planned out.

Yes. Moving down to Texas for work. With an extra 1.5-2 days of driving, I might be able to be in the Brownsville area on the 26th and the 27th. Possibly the 28th as well.

The odds that I will be in the right place at the right time have gone up significantly.

Zubrin is not thinking big enough.

There is a very small chance that I might be able to go see this one. Extremely small. But possible.

I am so glad you enjoyed it! I always get so happy whenever I get the like notifications of someone making their way through this story over the course of a few days. As for your question - don't get too excited and don't hold your breath on it coming any time soon, but I have been messing around with ideas for another story set in the Voyage universe for the past few months. Given the fate of most of my other forum stories, I don't want to start posting until I have a decent backlog and have a decent chance of, if not finishing it, at least getting far enough along to satisfyingly conclude the first arc. It isn't lost on me that V:TFW is probably the single largest creative project I've ever completed, starkly contrasting against a graveyard of other unfinished works. I don't want to post a successor to the one thing I've managed to finish only to never finish it. Take Wizards! for example. It isn't dead but it is going much slower than I would like. I would love to have at least 3-5 chapters completely done before I start posting, and I am starting a new job soon, so who knows what will happen. There's not much concrete right now (aside from one chapter I finished but restarted because I didn't like it), but I had the final battle of V:TFW in my head years before actually getting around to writing it, and I've already started thinking about similar moments for the new story. So that is a good sign. But again, this is not a formal announcement. If it gets made, it won't come out for a while, and if it gets made, it won't be finished for a long while. For everyone - While I'm at it, I will say that I have backed up Voyage: The Final Warning in two spots, both on Google Drive and in a massive 1+GB PDF on my computer. I have been intending to eventually do a major formatting pass and release it, but it keeps getting pushed back. If the forum goes down permanently before this happens, contact me through my YouTube channel (also called Ultimate Steve) and I'll set up a spot to regroup. If that doesn't work, bounce around various Kerbal Discords, you'll run into one with me in it eventually.

Best of luck! I can relate to that - I'll go around daydreaming all the worldbuilding and story, spend hours writing a python script to verify the expected performance of a fictional starship, and then sit down to write and nothing comes out. It has gotten to the point where I have another promising KSP story in progress, but I dare not start posting it until I have several chapters done to ensure there is a decent chance I will actually finish it. I hope you continue! It is a very interesting concept. To be fair to the global economy, I did graduate into an oversaturated market with a mediocre GPA, no internships, pretty much no preparation, and with the only notable thing I did being a failed CubeSat. But yeah, it is quite rough in general now.

I have wonderful news!

Impact probability is back down to 1 in 71.