CatastrophicFailure

Sigh. Can't see this one, gotta go drive now. That breaks my streak. Good luck, SpaceX. I trust this thread will keep me updated.

Looks like they needed MOAR struts. Or possibly MOAR boosters. One of those.

@EpicSpaceTroll139 On those station contracts, you only need the capacity for x Kerbals, so you can even launch empty and still complete it.

I came across this photo on SpaceFlightNow... I thought they weren't recovering anything on this flight, but those square...ish, green off-green taupe light colored bits at the top of the fairing, cold-gas RCS ports, maybe? How bout that blue gas cylinder at the bottom?

Digging those recessed mounts, what are they from?

Read slow. I'm aiming for a couple of chapters a day, but there's no way (that works ) to un-link the chapter list to give any indication of how far I've gotten.

I... I didn't mean to click it! The Kraken made me do it!

So, if anyone's still following this old thing, I've finally started fixing it after the Great Forum Derp a couple years ago. So many umlauts. And typos. So, so many typos! How did I not see them all before?!? And absolutely nothing being retconned! No sir-ee! No retcons, here! Tho I may throw in a couple surprises. Or not. But maybe. I hate editing.

Man, I don't know how you're doing it but your scope pix are gorgeous.

That's how they've always looked. Seems about right to me, other than some odd shadow effects when seen from the ground, they look great!

As I recall, MEthane's biggest advantage is that it's clean burning, vs kerosene that leaves deposits. Important for quick-turnaround reusability. That it's also cheaper is just an incidental plus.

@Galileo

Hah! I see you there, F-117 stealth fighter! You're right... um... no, that's a smudge...um... right... could have sworn it was right there a minute ago...

Aaaaaand just like that I'm out of likes for the day again. And I haven't even gotten thru this one thread. Yes, @GDJ, you have been challenged! Bring some absurd cargo to some absurd place! Maybe... go full meta and use your absurd plane to bring another absurd plane some place absurd, then use it to return an absurd cargo to KSC! also, what's that beast do to your framerate? What the heck kinda weird-S park has most of a missile just lying around next to a picnic table and is that a flarping warship in the middle of Omaha?!

Oh, since you're here...

Year 4, Day 278... At least, I think it is. The mission clock is saying year 6, day 41... it's all very confusing. With the new orbital telescope, our long-term full sky survey is continuing, but it has confirmed what we've all known since the beginning. There are no stars here. Well, except Grannus.

That's what I said once upon a time, too. Tho I really, really, REALLY! want to see how you pull all this together. Rule of Drama says that any moment now, something's gonna go REALLY! wrong.

I think I've technically written one. Just finished copying + pasting another 40 chapters into my big, disorganized backup file, and the final tally is in: (via WordCounter.net) 209,422 words 465 pages Reading time 12 hours, 41 minutes Handwriting time: Just.. no... That's about on par with Moby Dick, longer than any one of the Harry Potter series, not even close to any of the Wheel of Time books ('cept the prequel), and based on a recent, ahem, revelation, also far eclipsed by @KSK's First Flight (). There are certainly some allegorical elements, I may even be aware of some of them. Books have been written on, well, books that have been written, pondering on exactly what had been written, with the author saying, "wait, I wrote that?" D'awww, shucks. Which brings me to some proper acknowledgements: Thanks, first off, to my readers, for joining me on yet another long (really long!) strange trip. When I first started putting words down in June 2015 I had only the vaguest idea where things were going and no solid ending in mind. The words weave as the words will, I suppose. I had plenty of internal moments of "Why do you people read this drivel?! It's crap! A liquored-up monkey farting on a keyboard could write better than this!" Fortunately, I listened to y'all and not myself. Also thanks to @vsully, @Alpha 360, KSK and others I'm no doubt missing for supplying crucial bits right when they were needed. And a very special thanks to Ten Key for sticking with me and dumping Kerm knows how much of his own time (that could have been spent on his own story ) into making mine so much better. The snippets below can't begin to do justice to his own storytelling ability (which really needs to be brought to the main forum more, hinthint), just ask him about the "bag of cat crap" icecapades. Eh, I think that would take all the fun out of it and make it entirely too much like work. Of course, a big pile of money from a publisher would go a long way towards assuaging that. (But fanfiction writers are very rarely privy to big piles of money from anyone.) Tho it's funny how this thing bites you. For about 30 seconds after posting the epilogue I had this feeling of great relief and now I can just relax... ...then I thought, "well, maybe I can start putting down a few words to the prologue for Revelations of the Kraken... just... a couple... three maybe... I've got it mostly figured out in my head... just like, six...I don't have a problem! I can quit any time I want!" And now for some actual entertainment. The soundtrack has been updated with the final few songs, tho I never could find a version of that, ahem, traditional Gednalnan hymn that I liked. You'll have to use your imagination. Also, as his his style, Ten Key often demonstrates how he might write a certain thing. Below are a couple examples picked out from the stacks of messages I rooted through. From around Chapter 28... -- As mentioned, this whole scene feels very "NASA", and just doesn't work for me. I would go dark with this, maybe have the engineers grasping for a solution, and then have the political officer appear, with the sad, fake smile. It is fortunate that Dibella did not die in space, for that would embarrass the Imperium! No, Dibella has returned safely after a successful mission, and has chosen to retire to a place of solitude, where she might be free from the attention of the foreign media! Any one who talks, dies. Some of you may die anyways, that is the way of things. Papers please. ... So the political officer shows up, Darkwing Duck style, and scares the heck out of Bald spot and friends, and slams the door on Dibilla's life. And Valentina tears him apart with her bare hands. There would need to be some careful writing here, not unlike when Edgas killed Edmund on the beach in Shadows. But this time, Valentina wrests control from the darkness. And that also is going to take careful writing, the darkness at first exulting and then, suddenly the sense of victory becomes one of fear. And then, do the flash of light thing through the window, the engineers, stunned, starting at her. And she points out of the window. "You see that?" She pulls a slip of paper from the dead Kommissar. "We have the launch codes for that." No weakness here, no turning back. And at the end, have someone come in, a technician (faceless NPC time, maybe see if you can pull one of those faceless techs from the last chapter) steps through the door and sees the Kommissar's broken, mangled body. "Oh my God! What happened?!" And Valentina sets her jaw, again the feral smile, steps over the bloodied corpse and heads for the door. "He slipped on his tea." And where are we going with this? Where does it end? With Valentina victorious, but with a broken mind, and in an Imperium asylum. But perhaps she escapes, and somehow makes her way back to her broken home, where what's left of her spends its days prowling the forests like an animal, and its nights talking to her departed deda. And it is sad, and it is heart rending. And she is so happy.... *** ...So, let's say the ship is meant to use an N2/O2 mix, but the life support system isn't fully integrated/tested/whatever. The quick and easy junkyard fix is to swap the N2 tanks with Helium. It's much safer, and far more tolerant of gas imbalances. And it has the hilarious side effect of making everyone sound like Mickey Mouse.... In a similar vein, you had mentioned Dibilla had been sick from space food in an earlier chapter. If their suits are connected, and if Dibilla is still having gastrointestinal issues, well, you can't go wrong with a good fart joke. (I may have to steal this one later...) *** From Chapter 74... There's a belching joke in there somewhere. -Was there EVER. I think that pretty much made the chapter. *** From Chapter 96: [Raw Scene] Dibella stands in the <Memorial Square> in the dead of Ussari Winter. She huddles in her coat against the cold, emotionally drained. General descriptions of the cold stone, the barren earth, the stark government buildings. She stands alone in front of two graves, the markers indicating high ranking members of the Party. They are her parents. She ruminates on the futility of standing against "forces". She can see, in the corner of her vision, dark, cloaked figures entering the cemetery, but she does not take her eyes off the graves. The wind cuts through her coat and she knows her time is short. The figures surround her, and now she does lift her eyes, not to the intruders, but to the window of the Kommisar's office in one of the nearby buildings. Her parents had gone all the way to the Kommisar for help, but in the end, it hadn't been enough to save them. They had, after all, gotten in her way. "The Kommisar takes his lunch alone in one hour. I have arranged for that wing of the building to be empty. See that it is done." One of the cloaked figures bows, sharpened teeth briefly visible under the hood, and then they depart. Dibella lights a rat tail, regards her parents graves for a few final moments. There could be no loose ends. She turns and moves to leave, eyes moving now to Valentina's grave marker. No, no loose ends. [End Scene] BrÜtal. Just brÜtal. With a capital umlaut. I love it! *** And my personal favorite: [Keep the tone dark.] I would end with P. Kerman arriving at 42 Wallaby Way. This scene is longer. It is happy. He enters his home, moves from sunlit room to sunlit room, finds his wife standing next to a large piano, her back turned. He starts to apologize, to explain, and she hunches, hugs herself, still turned away. "Please Meg, I promise. . .I need you." And she turns to him then, raises a pistol, points it at his head. Her face is the same hollow mask he had worn earlier. "But we do not need you." And she pulls the trigger. The End Then you tack this onto the end of your music play list and start working on Part III. Wow. Nice going, Meg.

Psst... about imaging close-in planets...

It looks so lonely without legs. What happened to "that last one was the last expendable flight!"

No, 'tis I! ummm let's go out on a limb here and try @Badie!

O, irony.

MJ makes a wonderful teacher for a game with a steep learning curve.

Whew... now that I have a few minutes in this very Kerbal day... There will, of course, be another work in the pipes... figured that shifty fellow at the end made it obvious. But not right away. I'm going to take a few weeks off before I start anything else. Firstly I need to un-derp Shadows of the Kraken (Remastered Special Extended Special Edition! ), then I'm going to take some time to just read, which I haven't done in forever. Beyond the forum, another pass through Steven King's The Gunslinger is high on the list, what with the upcoming... sigh... movie. I'm behind on the last couple of Pratchetts, James Rollins. And of course, the Revelation to John, Ezekiel, a bit of Daniel, and maybe some Bhagavad Gita and old Norse stuff. Because research. Funny, I'm always thinking I wish I could write like KSK... and @Ten Key... and @Just Jim... etc... etc.... ... you may have already met him

Well, once you've had the Good and the Bad, the Ugly can't be far away All worlds must break, all Towers must fall, all Heroes... must surely fade away. more witty commentary to follow.