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Mister Dilsby

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  1. Mister Dilsby
    I can imagine the interview now: "Kuzzter, your threads are the most-replied-to in the history of the Internet. How do you do it?" "Well, Ellen, I have to give all the credit to my readers. Really. I didn't ask them to post a complete line-by-line performance of Much Ado About Nothing, but they did it!" Yes, of course we should do that. I'll start casting immediately. But forget about the greenscreen, it wouldn't look right without a complete human-scale model of the Intrepid. I'll call @Eucl3D for a quote.
  2. Mister Dilsby
    Nope, but I flipped through all the pages anyway to be sure. (really--I couldn't remember if I'd used that joke!) Good times Nailed it. Sorry, but any undertaking of that magnitude will have to wait until the big Dres mission, which BTW will be hand-drawn and set to original music. Yeah. Folks, please at least make an attempt at content, OK? Or else maybe start a Forum Game of "rate the signoff of the person above you!" Whooooo, fun!
  3. Mister Dilsby
    Love that I introduced the term about an hour ago, and there's already headcanon. Surprised no one's asked for a complete list of rules already.
  4. Mister Dilsby
    No. No you don't Right, I admit that was as much the motivation as anything else. Thinking ahead to "Chapter 9: The exciting planar correction burn in which nothing else happens!" pretty much decided the issue for me. And me as well! And if you hadn't guessed, today's episode is brought to you by Distant Object Enhancement. Thanks, @MOARdV! I was able to configure it very easily to put Kerbulus and its moons in the correct colors. Correct on all three counts, thanks. Hey now, even if there was such a thing in non-April Fools Kuzzterverse, there would have to be some kind of General Order about the CO 'fraternizing' with a noncom. Nope, the probes have just enough intelligence to act as an enlisted crew under NCO supervision, and it's a compliment to Sarge for the Captin to inspect his unit. What?
  5. Mister Dilsby
    All right, let's finish the ejection burn, and the chapter. So, I was thinking about how I could keep Kerbulus hidden from everyone for the next two years. Bob could have asked Val to roll the ship away from the sun, so he could study distant galaxies without light pollution. They could have had a kitchen explosion and been forced to go into hibernation. Or I could have gone with some sort of running gag where every time someone could have seen Kerbulus, an object (the lost Mohoball!) got in the way. In the end, I decided Val's competence in celestial navigation should override all other considerations, and at least this would give you all something to talk about while you wait for the next chapter. (which I am not in a hurry to get to, as I would like to wait for 1.1) An Interlude may be next.
  6. Mister Dilsby
    Yeah, that definitely looks like one of my transfer orbits
  7. Mister Dilsby
    All correct regarding word length for a novel. My advice would be to err on the short side when publishing serially in your own comments section, online attention span being what it is This is why I tend to publish one scene at a time rather than a full chapter. So, what's a scene? A single, continuous sequence in the story. What's a chapter? At least one scene, but usually two or more, that when put together comprise a complete-ish chunk of plot and character development. An over-simplified but possibly fair test: as you're telling the story and stringing scenes together, what's the first moment where you could naturally "go to commercial"? You should be leaving the viewer/reader satisfied that something meaty and interesting has happened, give them something to ponder as they pause to go to the fridge, and prepare them for the next chunk when they sit back on the couch with fresh snacks.
  8. Mister Dilsby
    Fun challenge. We did this on Minmus a while back and had a great time I didn't circle Minmus but I came pretty close--torque abuse FTW!
  9. Mister Dilsby
    To add: know the backstory, and let it come through in your story--but don't tell the backstory instead of the story story. Yes, it can seem like a shame to construct a complete biography and history of each character and then not tell everyone every single detail. But you must resist that urge This is the sort of thing we mean when we throw around terms like "show don't tell". So, your question "how do I achieve this in a newspaper style AAR?" @KSK has lots of good suggestions. I think you'd do well to occasionally throw in a piece of direct and literal backstory--e.g. a newspaper article about a character's past. But I encourage you to focus on the present. For example, let Jeb's history as a combat pilot come through in the story of his latest civilian spaceflight mission. How does he approach the job differently than someone who wasn't in combat? How does he interact with teammates? If you do your job right, readers should be able to say "that guy must have been a combat pilot" without you ever saying "Jeb used to be a combat pilot".
  10. Mister Dilsby
    No one knows when, other than Soon(tm). Also, note that Community Guidelines forbid messages that inquire about release dates--that might feel unfair to some, but I'm sure we can all imagine the morass of WHENEHENWHENWHENWHEN we'd have to wade through the to find actual content, and it's not a question the devs can really answer anyway
  11. Mister Dilsby
    Well that's kind of the trope definer, right?
  12. Mister Dilsby
    I think we can rule that one out; @Parkaboy is a much better writer! And remember, yes this was a Kappa shoutout, but so was the whole crossover in which Looty Kernel Jeb Kerman of the Kerbfleet Air Service did indeed jump through an alien computer thingy and end up in another reality. He just doesn't remember it, nor does Kerbfleet Bill.
  13. Mister Dilsby
  14. Mister Dilsby
    Absolutely correct--but if I ever run out of oxidant, I can't refuel! Qwammer and the Intrepid's ventral landing engines both require it. Also, while I allowed a 4-hour window in which to execute the ejection burn, I may have less time for capture. So I did indeed trade some dV for safety
  15. Mister Dilsby
    Now now, @Geschosskopf--you should know as well as anyone that all gravity effects end at a body's SOI. Everything else you said is spot on though.
  16. Mister Dilsby
    I'm pretty sure none of my readers have ever run into such a limit Other than the 25 replikes per day there aren't any other restrictions I know of, except that you can't rep the same post twice, and you may not be able to rep posts in certain subforums. It does appear that you liked a post of Snark's recently: [KocLobster liked an answer to a question: School bus : a "Level up" mission design] I wonder if maybe you clicked on it twice accidentally?
  17. Mister Dilsby
    I think what @KAL 9000 was getting at was "how is it even possible that there exists this parallel world so similar to Kerbin, when no one from either planet knows of the other's existence?" Hopefully, if I ever do give an explanation, the readers will find it plausible. I'm sure it won't be as bad as the multiple alien parallel worlds encountered by the Enterprise, including at least one that duplicated all of Earth's history up to WWIII.
  18. Mister Dilsby
    Oh, it shouldn't be so bad. Certainly what I'm used to for a long-range ship that values high deltaV. Thought experiment: for a ship in the 1000t range, how much (stock) engine would you need to get a more acceptable TWR? I suppose 4x Kerbodyne Rhinos could do it, that'd bring it up to about 0.8, but with less than half the ISP of the nuclear engines. Intrepid has some margin, but not that much--we'd be out of fuel now with nothing left for capture. Sure, a less ambitious ship would do fine with chemical engines and a higher TWR, but that was never what this mission was about, was it? And, teasing... Woo hoo! Now I can make the pages. Note the intercept is actually a little ahead of schedule--NImzo estimated we'd reach Jool on Year 9 Day 110, and that periapsis is for 9-64. Of course, nothing's certain until the final correction burn. Still haven't decided exactly what track to plot on system entry, but I should probably visit Bop or Pol first so we can refuel. Tylo assist would certainly be in order, and fun to execute. Laythe or Jool aerobraking: not so much That's a really good question. But it contains at least one unwarranted assumption, and I'm not talking about SpongeBob.
  19. Mister Dilsby
    Exactly the plan--that's why I'm suffering a 1hr+ burn now so, I can use the big engines later. Firing the auxiliary engines will more than triple the thrust, and of course we'll be a couple hundred tons lighter than when we lifted off Minmus. If I can fire off a few scansats on the way in that'll help as well...I expect TWR to be 0.3 or better at start of capture burn.
  20. Mister Dilsby
    As long as there's no possibility the ship will "softly and suddenly vanish away", I might just try that. But this maneuver scarcely needs a node. The solar orbit is big enough that the curvature is essentially flat within a few hours either side of the node--so I just keep thrusting prograde until the altitude matches Jool's, which should be any day now
  21. Mister Dilsby
    So glad this thread didn't turn out to be what I thought it was after reading the first 2/3 of the title.
  22. Mister Dilsby
    That's not just a sound principle, it's a trope! Hopefully the design staff will be able to gruntle again soon. I've been in businesses that have lost their gruntle and it can be hard to find it again. So much else to like in this update. Like "nick of time" I think it was J. Michael Stracynski who said that all ships travel "at the speed of plot". If it needs to get there just in time, it does. If it needs to be 12 seconds too late, it is. And above all, it has to get there in style
  23. Mister Dilsby
    Outstanding! Would love to know the stories behind some of those crashes
  24. Mister Dilsby
    The dialogue is a lot cleaner, yes. As to the portal thing--isn't this the second or third big concept you've thrown into the story? I'm not saying take it out. I'm not saying do something different. What I'm saying is that there is not a plot point, character, image or twist that anyone can add to make a story "great". I think you have to be consistent and build. I worry that trying to give you any more specific advice will have you making more changes in pursuit of that "fundamental" you think you're missing that will will turn the magic switch from "not great" to "great". You don't need to chase my approval or anyone else's, and doing so may make the story too inconsistent to build readership. Just tell your story and try to be patient in your development as a writer.
  25. Mister Dilsby
    Well, the times are already messed up since I turned off the game to make breakfast and then reloaded afterwards. In the first session before shutting down H-pod I had accomplished about 1/3 of the burn, but when I reloaded it gave me no 'credit' for that, and restarted the deltaV countdown from the top. So, I guess I keep burning until the apoapsis is about 72 million km... now 21 million and counting. Whoo!
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