macdjord

Ch. 13: Took me a couple tries to figure out the italicized part was Obrick thinking, rather than emphasis. Recommend separating this into two sentences for better readability:

Ch. 8: On rereading, I now find myself wondering if Jonton inadvertently triggered the birthing of the seed here, by dreaming of exploration and new lands, thus triggering the kerm's 'there is space available to expand to' instincts?

Ah, I hadn't caught that it was a different, empty tank from the one they whacked. Okay then. I remember the staging failure on what, IIRC, is their next flight. Just saying that these problems should start earlier. Also, you've not yet fixed the 'The Fan Works Library' link in your sig.

@KSK Glad to be back! (All thanks to @Brotoro, BTW; I logged back in for the first time in years to reread his Long-Term Laythe series.) And thanks for fixing those links. Though I just noticed the 'The Fan Works Library' link in your signature is also an old-style, and thus broken, forum link. Also, it looks like @Yukon0009's lovely fanart has been adversely affected by the changes to Photobucket's changes in hotlinking policy for free accounts. I see he is still an active forum member, though, so I shall PM him to inform him of this degradation. Apologies for what is likely to be a string of multiposting by me. As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm starting a much-needed reread of this fic from the beginning. Due to this forum software's lack of support for saved drafts, multi-quote, or raw BBCode editing, it won't be practical to save all my comments and replies for one big post at the end; I'll have to post them as I go (though I'll try to collect at least a few thread-pages' worth at a time to keep the numbers down somewhat).On that note, does anyone know any way that you can use the 'Quote selection' function without it automatically scrolling down to the bottom of the page? Edit: Correction: This forum does support multi-quote, but only of whole posts, not highlighted selections. Also, apologies, @KSK, if I end up explaining things to you that you already know perfectly well; long experience editing fanfiction online has taught me to assume that every error is the result of ignorance of the underlying rule, and to accompany every correction with an explanation of why it's wrong and how to fix that error in the general case, until conclusively proven otherwise. Prologue: I have to say, I really like how this description really captures the image of a clunky, low-tech rocket. I can't help but envision the Kerbal 1 as being made out of the old pre-0.16 rocket parts - the tiny Mk1 Pod atop the old Liquid Fuel Tank, surrounded by Solid Rocket Boosters. (Though, now I think about it, this may be a case of perspective shift; to me reading this now, those parts are a dimly-remembered relic of the Old Days, but this was written in June 2013, less than a year after the big part remodels of 0.16 and 0.18, when those parts would have been considered superseded and obsolete but not particularly old.) Ch. 1: Need a paragraph break between 'grin' and 'Ornie'; right now you've got two people speaking in the same paragraph. Ch. 2: Is this referring to [AAR] Odysseus: Voyage to Jool by RogueMason, or is there another fanwork of a similar name? Ch. 3: Should be 'where he wants to be: sitting in the' Ch. 5: First, while this isn't actually an error, these should probably be one paragraph. When you have a conversation - i.e. a block of text which is mostly quotations and represents two character speaking back and forth - generally each new paragraph represents a switch to the other character as the active character, i.e. the one talking or doing the actions, but here both successive paragraphs are about Jeb. This is compounded by the fact that the second paragraph identifies Jeb only by a pronoun which, because both characters are male, doesn't uniquely distinguish them. Second (and this is an error, though a minor one), the comma after 'eyebrows' should be a period. When you have a sentence of narration followed by a quotation, you only end the narration with a comma if it's a dialogue tag for the quote. For example: In the first line, you use a comma, because that's actually all one sentence - 'Let there be light!', while a complete sentence in itself, it in this case the thing that Alice is saying. In the second line, you use a period, because 'Bob shook his head' is a complete sentence. 'We're out of candles.' is an entirely separate, also complete sentence; the fact that its wrapped in quotation marks tells the reader that it is being spoken aloud, and the fact that it is in the same paragraph as Bob doing an action tells you who is speaking it. Finally, the comma after 'Jeb' should also be a period. While 'replied Jeb' is a dialogue tag, it's trailing a dialogue tag for the quotation before it (which is why there's a comma after 'speaking' and 'replied' isn't capitalized), and is grammatically unconnected from the quotation after it. The only time you have a trailing dialogue tag with a comma like that is when the quotation before it ends with an incomplete sentence which the quotation after finishes: 'I went to the store yesterday and bought some more.' is a single sentence, despite being split between two quotations (which is why 'and' is not capitalized), so both quotations must be considered one quotation, grammatically, which acts as the object of the sentence of which the 'Alice replied' dialogue tag is part of. Again, you've got multiple successive paragraphs with the same active character. Now, there is a common alternative format besides the standard alternating-paragraph-conversation which is sometimes used for telephone calls where only one side of the conversation has their dialogue written out at all; in this case, all paragraphs have the same active character - the person on the end of the call that we can hear - and each new paragraph implies an unheard reply from the other party. I believe that's what you were trying to do with the paragraph break after 'how much do you sell these for?', and possibly also with the next paragraph break after that. Unfortunately, since you've already had Thomplin contribute audible dialogue, you're already locked in to the back-and-forth format, so you need something in between to indicate Thomplin responding, even if you don't want to write out the actual number. Here are a couple solutions: Note how, in the first one, an action performed by Jeb, namely wincing, is used to imply Thomplin responding, because Jeb is the active character for that paragraph, but the second one has Thomplin as the subject, since it's his paragraph this time. Also, when you have one paragraph which ends with a quotation being spoken by one character and the next paragraph starts with another quotation spoken by the same person - which, despite what I've said before, isn't always a bad thing; sometimes, for clarity or impact, you really do need to have multiple successive paragraphs with the same active character, in which case you have to depend on careful use of formatting and dialogue tags to make sure it's always clear who each paragraph belongs to - the way to format it is to omit the closing quote mark on the end of the first paragraph like so: It may seem odd, at first, but that is in fact the standard and correct way to indicate a paragraph break which is inside a quotation, rather than being part of the narration. Just wanted to mention I like the way you drop little bits of world-building in like 'Münday' here. Ch. 6: There seems to be a distinct lack of any mention of draining or venting whatever is already in the tank before (or during) filling it with monoprop. Ch. 7: First bit of critical review, rather than praise or proofreading: Things have been going a bit too smoothly up to this point. You might want to add some bumps in the road - maybe the engine fails to develop full thrust during the hold-down test and they have to abort the launch, fix it, and try again. Or the main parachute fails causing a moment of terror before the reserve deploys successfully. Hrm. I'm only up to the end of page 2, but this is already getting pretty long. I think I'll post this now; I really don't want to lose everything I've written so far in case I accidentally hit 'next page' in the wrong tab.

@KSK I just started rereading this after having stopped following it for several years. FYI, the links in the 'Artwork and Crafts' section of the first post are all old-style forum links and thus do not work.

Seems odd to try for a lander before even doing a flyby - let alone succeeding at it.

... well, some of the ends are pointing towards the ground. Does that still count as a Bad Problem?

Huh. Event horizon. Well, could be worse - after the mention of 'synapses all through it', I was worried it was The Beast.

Actually, they're both he same root definition, just applied differently. 'Homely' means 'common' or 'familiar'; applied to a place it ends up meaning 'comfortable' or 'homelike', whereas applied to a person's appearance it means 'average' or 'unexceptional'.

Awesome!

Hey, any one you can walk away from, right?

D'awwwww.

Alt-L (I think) will lock staging so you can't stage until it's unlocked.

Ah! What you need there is a little arrow on the navball telling you which direction the marker is in when you can't see it. (I suggested this earlier.)

Click on the navball where it says 'Orbital' to cycle between orbit, surface, and target mode manually.

Hell, make that a general rule: When UI elements anywhere overlap, clicking should only trigger the top one.

Option 1: Big-@ss Booster Build a big, single-stage booster under the payload. Add lots of fins at the bottom. Add radially attached SRBs, drop tanks, or asparagus-staged liquid boosters if necessary; make sure they don't interfere with the fins. Useful tip: Engines always draw from the most distant tank first. For vertical rockets, this means they empty the tanks in their stack from the top down, which causes the CoM to move downwards making the rocket less stable in the atmosphere. Solution: in the VAB, lock fuel flow from all the tanks except the bottom one. During launch, keep an eye on the fuel levels in the bottom tank, and, just before it runs out, unlock the next tank up. Alternately, just install TAC fuel balancer and tell it to balance fuel between all the tanks in the stage. Option 2: Traditional Vertically-Stacked Multi-Stage Booster (i.e. Saturn V-Style) The solution for stability is the same: fins at the bottom of the rocket. However, the vertical staging adds a complication: each time you ditch a stage, you have a new 'bottom of the rocket', which needs fins of it's own. But, since stock KSP doesn't have any deployable fins, fins at the bottom of your 3rd stage will be well above the CoM when you're burning the 1st stage, which makes them counter-productive. Thus you need to use successively larger sets of fins at each step, e.g. 2 small fins on your 3rd stage, 4 medium fins on the 2nd stage, and 6 large fins on the 1st stage. Unless you're trying for a purely ballistic launch, any stage that fires off above 40km or so can probably dispense with fins entirely, and just use reaction wheels or RCS. Option 3: Balanced Twin Boosters Instead of building one booster underneath the payload, use two boosters radially attached to the sides. Make sure the boosters extend up above the payload as much as they do below it, thus keeping the payload near the CoM. You'll still want a couple fins for control, but you don't have to compensate for payload drag just to maintain stability. This solution also lets you asparagus stage the payload's engines off the boosters and use them during the launch, thus boosting TWR. The downside, or course, is that your frontal cross-section is potentially up to tripped, increasing drag losses.

Useful tip: If ditching a stage just before reentry, always point the stage normal or anti-normal before decoupling it. That way, there is no possible combination of drag and gravity which will send it back into you. Video is private.

The ascent failure is because your rocket is being controlled from some part in the lander, which is upside down. The landing failure is because your engine wasn't turned on, and auto-stage only works during ascent unless you arm it manually.

Jet engines now draw from all tanks equally.

Also, add more fins to your tail. That will help keep you from flipping out.

Put a hard limit of, say, 5s on how long a Kerbal can ragdoll before becoming controllable again, and make them immune to ragdolling again for at least 2s. This includes while skidding or bouncing along a surface.

Yay worldbuilding!

I can screenshot it next time I'm playing. I know my staging and fuel lines are correct, though, because they design does work in practice. Hell, it even autostages correctly! It's just the delta-v window that is wrong.

Is it just me, or does the latest version of MechJeb not handle asparagus staging and drop tanks as well as previous ones did? My current launcher uses a Skipper on an orange tank as it's primary booster, but since the payload uses radial engines, it fores those off at the same time with fuel pipes to them from the orange tank. I recall that previous versions of MechJeb would handle this correctly, showing the first stage with the combined thrust and delta-v of all the engines, and then the next stage, after the booster and orange tank are decoupled, with the thrust and delta-v of the payload running off its own internal fuel. But now it shows all the delta-v in the first stage and 0 in the second, as if it were assuming that the empty tank would not be jettisoned until all the engines were dead.