Ultimate Steve

Note: This might be more suited for Forum Games. But it technically isn't a game. The title is really self explanatory. If you could, right now, meet any five people, who would you choose to meet? Assume you can speak any language. The people on your list don't necessarily have to be still alive. You can do your list over living people, dead people, both, or make separate lists for living and dead people. Me: (of the living people) 1. Elon Musk. Self explanatory. 2. Joey Tempest. The guy who wrote The Final Countdown, my favorite song ever! 3. Martin Molin. Lead songwriter/musician of Wintergatan, the band responsible for the viral video "Marble Machine" as well as my second favorite song ever, Starmachine 2000, and my fourth favorite song, Emerson (the unreleased demo). 4. Any moon astronaut. First choice Alan Bean, second choice Buzz Aldrin. 5. Felipe Falanghe. The creator of Kerbal Space Program. Me: (dead people) 1. David Bowie. (AGH, Starman is stuck inside my head again!) 2. The Grandma I never met. I was told she is very similar to me in a lot of ways. 3. Aristotle, so I could tell him that the Earth was round, and to bamboozle him with how we ended up going to the moon. 4. That guy who invented the wheel. 5. Wilbur and Orville Wright. (Well, If I met one, may as well meet the other) again to bamboozle them with stories of space travel.

Although if we need to retire it, I can't think of a more awesome way (within the fuel budget) than plunging it into Saturn.

Assuming the team would be used to make an epic in-game exploration initiative, Bradley Whistance, the guy who does Odyssey by Bill. Stratzenblitz75, another talented and underrated Youtuber. @Pine to make an awesome logo for this initiative. @Matt Lowne to edit awesome videos and play as well. Myself.

Step 44 (Darn it you took my third favorite number, 43): Get so sidetracked building an awesome SSTO spaceplane to lift the modules that you look up and realize it's 4 AM and you haven't studied for your Spanish test yet.

Hey, you typed my third favorite number! On a serious note, I found "The Martian Race" by Gregory Benford sort of interesting. It does its best to be mostly realistic. It is about two separate mars missions which are competing to win a 30 billion dollar prize. It also offers a realistic (or at least I think so) approach to finding life on Mars.

I heard that they got at least one half of the fairing down in the ocean, no idea if they brought it onto the boat (though they probably did). Each fairing has a parasail type thing and cold gas thrusters for maneuvering. In the future SpaceX will have a giant "bouncy house" on the water which the fairings will steer towards and (hopefully) land on.

What? It's already only 6 months away? NOOOOOooooo..... I agree with you, though! That animation is absolutely spectacular! Farewell, Cassini! You have served us well! *Salutes*

If only Shirley had bailed! The terminal velocity of a Kerbal on Kerbin is low enough that they won't die 90% of the time (provided they hit water)!

Yes, as @Jarin said pretty much everything floats. The only things that really sink are full ore tanks and girders.

I think a few of my pixels in the SpaceX logo survived! I didn't directly work on the rocket, but I worked on the series of "yes"'s below it. (For those that don't know, "yes" is a bit of a SpaceX meme.) At one point there were four, but it looks like New Zealand reclaimed two of them. I did actually start work on the second one, so at least something I did made it to the end!

It did not start out as that. One day, a dark green T-shirt with the text "BELIEVE IN STEVE" showed up on my porch. I have not found out who did it yet. One of the biggest things on my "High School Bucket List" is to figure out who gave it to me. As for Jack, I only found out about the song about a month after I got the shirt. I am not a big fan of certain words in songs, but other than that, I LOVE THAT SONG. *Goes and plays "All The Way" in the background*

I agree. Everyone's going to get in treble for this.

You don't like puns? Well, we just need more staff on the moderation team.

Nah, I'm a trombone player. I'll let errors like that slide.

For those of you who don't know, Reddit has a habit of doing social experiments every year around April Fool's. This year it is r/place, which is a *game* where there is a 1000x1000 (or so, don't know exact dimensions) grid and you can place a colored pixel every five minutes. The idea of this is that groups of people get together and build huge logos. At around 625, 225 the KSP Reddit (at least I am pretty sure it was them) has made a Kerbal! Depending on how this thread turns out, it might be better suited for the Lounge. Mods, feel free to move it! Just wanted to let you know about this! (I can't contribute to it right now, I am currently trying to make a second "yes" under the SpaceX section, which is just to the right of the KSP section. After that, I plan to help restore the "Starry Night" remake which was destroyed by another faction of Redditors known as The Void.)

As @DrLicor said, you can change it! Mine has been changed around 10 times now. I think I'll stick with "BELIEVE IN STEVE!" for a while.

I support this! Sorry for my initial assumption of it being an AF prank. Best of wishes to you, Sal! Enjoy this planet that we live on!

(Original Post deleted because it is not an April Fools prank) Well, then! If it had been an AF prank, I would have been completely fooled! Best of luck on your travels! Enjoy the world!

Good to know! Although this was an April Fools joke in case you didn't catch it... Now I know what to do if I accidentally delete PI for real!

Oh, look! It's April Fool's day! (Or, at least it will be in 20 minutes for me...) Exactly as the title says. This is rather similar to the wish corrupting thread, except you are telling the previous poster how their April Fools prank will go wrong, and then to provide a new prank for the next poster to foil. Example: Poster 1: I put a box of packing peanuts over a doorway and tie a string to the box and to the doorknob, so that when someone walks into the room he or she will have a box of packing peanuts fall onto their head. Poster 2: The people you intend to prank spot the box through a window and hesitate to enter the room. Someone else in the room pulls the string in an attempt to spill the packing peanuts on them, but ends up dumping them on you. My prank is to put all of the cereal bags in different boxes \so that when one person wants to have Lucky Charms, they get *shudder* raisin bran instead. And so on. My prank will be to install a small remote controlled switch flicking robot in my house's breaker box so that I can simulate a power outage.

Note: This post was an April Fools prank, as evidenced by the two links. So, I was playing Project Intrepid earlier today. And I was dealing with more operations around Dres, such as transferring the crew upwards to the Explorer. I was also in the midst of deciding what in the world to do with the second Magic Boulder. Anyway, I got to the Explorer and found that it was around twenty meters offset from the magic boulder (I had moved it back). Strange, as the game considered the two still as one craft. Me being me, I quicksaved and got Tomfurt out on EVA and jetted over to the exposed Klaw, wanting to see what would happen if you had two parts connected to the same Klaw. It was not pretty - First, Tomfurt completely glitched out and went full spaghetti. The ship/asteroid combo began spinning around the center of the camera, super fast. Suddenly every part began overheating and the spaghettification of Tomfurt increased, and suddenly the whole assembly jumped to a ridiculous velocity. Within seconds, I was past the orbit of Eeloo! So, me being me, I decided to time warp a bit. Eventually I got super far from the sun, and I decided to try unklawing Tomfurt. So, I did, and then the game went full black screen Kraken on me. At this point I was getting slightly freaked out and attempted a quickload. I quicksaved by accident. So then I attempted to open my recent quicksaves menu, but it ended up freezing the game when I tried to load it. So, I forcequitted KSP without realizing that I had a virus scan running in the background. It had currently began rescanning KSP at that moment and for some DUMB REASON decided "Oh, look! Changing files! This is obviously a virus!" and flagged my KSP file. Later, after the scan was over, I directed the program to clean up the viruses. BAM! No more Project Intrepid. All of my save files in that directory are gone now. Including up the game's backup folder. Ugh. I'm submitting a complaint to that antivirus company and never using that antivirus again. The last save I have is way back from 1.1. I don't even think I had the Eve ships built yet. I don't have the heart to redo everything. Sorry, guys. The Story of Project Intrepid Will Not Continue. Which is a shame, I was almost finished with the "Carl Sagan" class of planetary escape ships, which could hold about 7500 Kerbals each. If you hadn't already guessed, the whole idea of this was to use passenger spaceplanes to go to Minmus, build a base, then from there evacuate all of the Kerbals on Kerbin to Laythe, and build a massive Kraken Drive into the moon to push it onto an escape trajectory. This would have required enslaving the Kraken to create such a device. As an added bonus, the Monolith on Laythe would not need his huge portal to escape the end. However, the Kraken would have taken over his own drive and dumped all of Kerbalkind into the black hole instead of saving them. The only Kerbals left in the universe at that point would have been Hudson, Fred, and the two robots, floating in hibernation (long story) in the OCTAVIUS, having accidentally used their time travel device to travel into the far future. I intended the ending to offer a sort of sobering look on the fragility of our species to hopefully spark some interest into actually DOING SOMETHING (Yeah, I know. I was a total idiod to think my tiny mission report could help) to save our planet from future calamities such as asteroid impact, or a big war, or in general anything else. I wanted to include a second big war at around the 50 year mark to show how futile war really is. But, yeah. It's a shame I wasn't able to write it all out. Project Intrepid would have had 100-150 parts totally finished, and I would have aimed to finish it before 2020. Here is the rough outline I had of parts 39-100 ish. Also, here is a more in depth explanation of the storyline that would have been. Please read them. Yes, I know I'm a few hours early, but I'm going to be really busy tomorrow!

What? It's already been a whole year since Valentina's egg? Wow, time really flies.

A more expensive way? A gram of antimatter reacting with a gram of normal matter would produce 1.8×1014 joules of energy. The shuttle, as the OP mentioned, is about 1E13 joules. Simple division gives us 0.0555 grams of antimatter. According to one website, a gram of antimatter (and we have never made an entire gram of antimatter before) would take 62.5 trillion dollars to make. This is more than three times the USA's national debt. So, more division gives us: About 3.5 trillion dollars. Not to mention the development cost of an antimatter engine, making 800 more LHC's, and, of course, the gram of normal matter as the other source of fuel. And, why not make it moon rock, a 50k per gram?

Are you certain it gets stuck? Leave it for 5-10 minutes. Asset Bundle Definitions take fivever (FOURever but with five for emphasis) to load.

Yes, the ITS has its problems. But there are solutions to most of them and I agree that a revision of the design is necessary. Heat shield - yeah, that's quite a bit of risk. Not so much at Mars due to the amount of atmosphere, but at Earth, yes. Especially coming back from Mars. Fortunately, the heat shield should be able to be inspected en route using EVA's or maybe a camera robot or something. And with 100 ton cargo capacity, they would probably have something to fix small parts of the heat shield in the event of an impact. This is not entirely an ITS only problem, though. Any spacecraft flying the same mission profile will be exposed to the same conditions (Except the bigger you go, the higher chance of an impact). Abort system - If you fire all 9 Raptors at once the TWR is sufficient (iirc, read it somewhere). The vacuum engines will have the wrong nozzle length but will still produce a good deal of thrust. But I do agree, the current abort plan is sketchy at best. My personal solution would be to make the interstage a separate unit that can detach from both S1 and S2 and pack it full of solid rocket boosters. During a nominal launch, it would stay connected to the first stage and land with it. During an abort situation it would separate from S1 and stay with the spaceship and ignite its motors. At burnout the abort ring would separate and the spaceship would land. Also, another improvement would be to make the crew portion of the spaceship separate from the fuel section of the spaceship in the event of an even worse emergency, like an engine section explosion. During the Challenger disaster, it is believed that the explosion did not directly kill the crew and the cabin was blasted away in roughly one piece. The top of the ITS spaceship would have parachutes in the event of this separation. I'm pretty sure that the ITS does not use helium for pressurization, but I don't have the reference link so I can't prove it. As far as the whole tipping thing, yeah, three legs does not offer redundancy. However, neither does four. Five will, but at a very narrow angle. The landing legs extending to provide a wider footprint has already been pointed out. In the event of a tip over on Mars I suspect most of the crew would be alive, provided they were wearing pressure suits, which the first missions undoubtedly will. Ideally for the first crewed mission, another ITS will have already landed and the astronauts would likely be able to use it to get home. As far as launch failure with 100 people on board, the first ones will probably have less than a dozen. In a perfect world, ejection seats that blast upwards. By the time that SpaceX ramps up to 100 people per launch, they will probably have switched from sending them all up at once to sending them up in groups of 12 or so using a smaller vehicle (yet to be developed, but they probably will at some point. They will eventually want a smaller vehicle for satellite launches, because if Falcon 9 pricing gets down to 10 million optimistically ITS will be cheaper and overkill for a sat launch). Even though the ITS has been criticized a lot, there are still solutions to most of the problems. They might take significant time and cost to find, but they're there. Even though it may be dangerous and sketchy, at the current point in time it is the only method to land on Mars that people are taking seriously and actually developing. NASA does not have a plan to land humans on Mars, their current plans culminate in a flyby. China wants to do it eventually, but we know nothing of their plans. The ITS is actually being developed and hardware is being built. Hopefully, NASA will realize this and partner with SpaceX on the mission. Maybe ULA as well, because they may know a thing or two about reliability. Given the combined effort of the NASA, ULA, and SpaceX engineers, and the combined budget of all three, I think that Mars is feasibly reachable within the next two decades. (Also, YAY! The reflight was successful!)