CatastrophicFailure

The local fire department must love them.

@joacobanfield what @qzgy said. Also, please note that STS-type shuttles in KSP are hard, because we lack the real thing's software to automatically gimbal the high-gimballing engines to maintain thrust through the center of mass. Vector engines are your friend here, excellent thrust, good efficiency, and lots of gimbal. The SAS can sometimes compensate enough with that to keep it stable, but expect lots of throttle adjusting as you go up. Also worth noting, there is a certain amount of voodoo involved. I once slapped together an STS-type shuttle one night, in 6.4x scale no less. I was, shall we say, not entirely in my right mind at the time, but the thing worked. The next morning I tried to make it work better, and as soon as I touched anything with the design it simply quit working (read: lots of badabooms). No matter how much I tried with my full concentration, I never did get the thing to work again. YMMV.

Was there a great disturbance in the Force? As if millions of voices suddenly cried out... "eh, that wasn't so bad." ?

@kraden ah yes, you've learnt the SpaceX lesson about static fires.

. . . aaaand somebody cue up Ain't Superstitious.

If that does indeed turn out to be it, I believe I shall owe you an absolutely non-alcoholic carbonated malt beverage.

I would think it'd be cheaper to contract that out?

So... looks like it's still 39A... wait, what? SpaceX has their own steamrollers?!

Boom! Making it look easy once again! ok, maybe not the best word to use with rockets...

Just tuned in, saw a big cloud coming at the camera.

Quite so, one of the options I'm considering. Going interplanetary is going to be a challenge to say the least. But I've got some stuff coming up to expand the horizons.

Ugh, that fog looks delicious. I'd settle for any kind of moisture here. IIRC, it was a foggy launch like this that led to one of the landing failures, ice in the landing gear mechanism or the like. Have they remedied that vulnerability yet?

For the moment. I'll have to keep a close guard on the number of active flights, one of the reasons I'm debating whether to ditch or double down on the station. It seems it takes an awful lot of poo on the walls to equal a single mm of lead. Who knew, right? I suppose I could send more Kerbals per crew and tell them to start polishing, too, but the fridge logic on that leads to a very dark, smelly place. Also, frame rate is really starting to suffer. Welding docking ports do seem to work, but rebuilding the whole mess with them just wouldn't be feasible. And now if you'll excuse me, I feel a powerful need to wash.

Braa-AA-aaa------ins! (BrainsBrains!)

Year 7, Day 1... Happy new year! I think. Time is strange here. And somehow, we've ended up with at least two different calendars saying two entirely different things, but the crew around here has never needed much of an excuse to run around yelling and screaming and occasionally blow something up. But someone tried to push a big, round fuel tank off the top of the VAB to celebrate, and I had to put a stop to that. Meanwhile, the long-duration crew on the UpLab has also celebrated their first and last New Year's in space. Now, it's time to come home. In the end, it's not the claustrophobic conditions, recycled air, constant threat of agonizing, near-instant death, or even the layers of poo shielding smushed all over the walls that's finally driving them home. It's the radiation. This, we didn't see coming. Literally, because it's like, invisible. But after 200-some days (I think), Jencine and Gilfrey have reached 86% of their mission tolerance, and are beginning to run out of places to stick the extra limb's they've grown.Also, their NewShip itself is beginning to break down, so Jencine stuff her superfluous extremities into a space suit and goes out to fix some things. And... why's there a fish in my sock drawer again? And... why's it have whiskers?! And a long, skinny tail? And-- Mmrgrphff!

Bad-S=True. Awwwwwww yiiiihhhh.

In the dead space behind the sink with the cats.

So, when last we left our intrepid remotely-controlled lander, someone at a console with a two-second comm delay was trying very hard to land within walking distance of his target without actually landing on the target. Now, despite the statistically large area such a maneuver encompasses, Murphy's Law dictates that it is, in fact, extremely difficult. What a dated Foreign TV show is doing dictating statistical anomalies in the first place, we're still not sure. Nor are we sure why the engineer is watching TV when he's supposed to be landing the flarping lander, but as I've said, this place is strange. But oddly enough, it works! Maybe it's time to pay attention to the crew on the space station, now. They've been awfully quiet recently. I'm sure that alarming yellow heart icon is perfectly normal.

Serious question, cuz there are smart people here (mods move this if you must): Is there like... a table anywhere, comparing the light levels during the eclipse to what it might look like on another planet? Like, 90% totality, this is what Ceres would look like, etc. I was really surprised how much of the sun was covered before I could notice any drop in ambient light.

Just so's you know... the kind of eye damage you get from an eclipse usually doesn't show up till the next day...

Because despite the fact that it is crucial to my job, my vision insurance sucks. Wait... "of maar..." Would that be St, Maarten?

Obligatory: Apparently I had the exposure settings off during the best part.

He's back!

Liking based solely on title and opening quote while trying not to actually see anything.