CatastrophicFailure

Careful... once you go 6.4 scale you never... ok rarely... sometimes... it's just cool, OK?? Those visual mods look great, what's the setup? No, @TimePeriod's craft.

Um... UMBRELL-A?

KSP in a nutshell.

asdf This is... beautiful... This is some NASA-level photohackery right here! Is that inset from an actual telescope or did you just zoom way out? This is... unfortunate. Why not simply wait till the Mün rotated 180 degrees into daylight? Lack of comms?

If it weren't for all the "might as well" contacts I keep snagging, I'd probably have finished by now. Someone needs to lock the doors to the Mission Control center. Precisely why I won't be touching it till my parts and crew are safely off the surface.

Had I not (successfully. Mostly) just schlepped 28 tonnes of rover over halfway around Duna I might be tempted. But I'm close to actually finishing this long, strange trip, so I think a return trip will be in order. With @Galileo's extra-crispy terrain added on.

Today... I kicked my own butt with yet another day of moving. The last time I kerballed... which I'm fairly sure was recently but everything is kind of fuzzy right now... Ah yes, our intrepid crew of 5 makes their way southward onto the frigid Dunian ice cap... Moving on...

fwwwoooooooooosharglbarglegarglenasdknfasdjnasjktsakgkaajkgkjsaknskjsadkjalknjkdasfasdfasfsjnjkgyhaxkjagkjahdgfksjagasjkdgkjshgaskjhsduasdhliughasugasgnsagsajcnelaijunepibpipibajsdhfasdjtsjkdadkljasfladhsjkhfajksfaksjfkjgwwwwwwwwwwwwwwaskjtkjsdhakjsdncacjnasldjkhaskjtyhadskjasdkjhcdskjnkjansdlkdsjnajkdhltkjhpop! is the last thing SpaceX needs to be doing right now. They need to just keep it to a nice, boring dull roar for a while.

Just what the flarp do you think I've been doing, man?? I don't have a problem, ok?? It's... it's just a phase! I can quit any time I want!

I hate spaceplanes! Hatethem!Hatethem!Hatethem! They're slow and delicate and fiddly and they take sooo looong to get up and down! They just don't have the visceral, verile power of a bazillion pounds of highly flammable fluids meeting all at once and going fwwwoooooooooosharglbarglegarglenasdknfasdjnasjktsakgkaajkgkjsaknskjsadkjalknjkdasfasdfasfsjnjkgyhaxkjagkjahdgfksjagasjkdgkjshgaskjhsduasdhliughasugasgnsagsajcnelaijunepibpipibajsdhfasdjtsjkdadkljasfladhsjkhfajksfaksjfkjgwwwwwwwwwwwwwwaskjtkjsdhakjsdncacjnasldjkhaskjtyhadskjasdkjhcdskjnkjansdlkdsjnajkdhltkjhpop! And yet.. sometimes... they just sort of... happen.

Messed around some more with my... sigh... spaceplane today. Try as I might, I just couldn't figure a way to cram 6 comm relays into the cargo bay (due to the probe core & big SAS therein), so I strapped a cargo pod to the back. As planned, dumping four of the six Whilpashes once their on-board fuel supplies are exhausted, now relying on a Vector for the push to apoapse. Successful 110 km orbit. Cargo pod is jettisoned and fairings released. It'll now boost itself to KTO. Shortly after, the six relays detach and disperse. Should have rigged a probe core on the boost stage, now it's just junk in an oblong orbit. Meanwhile, the still-unnamed spaceplane rendezvoused with that pesky piece of space junk I have to return. Still tumbling badly after the last ill-fated attempt to retrieve it, had to grab it with the cargo bay to hold it still. Then Good Guy Bill hops out, with tools this time, and promptly secures it. Another uneventful, on-target return to KSC. Hey, I'm getting good at this! The remaining pair of jets is just enough for a brief low-altitude cruise to account for any targeting inaccuracy without bogging the ship down with superfluous weight. The comm relays spend the next few days sorting themselves out into a properly space keosynchronous network.

Continuing my odddyyssseee (can never remember how many of each letter) across Duna... Once Ceralla finally got her rear end sorted out and hooked the trailer up, the crew of five returns to the location of the first pickup... ...which had, for some reason, decided to spawn 6km off the ground... Um... guys... over here... you're standing behind the flag... guys...? Guys...? Sigh. It's lke herding cats... Stupid cats...

I dunno how you can even do that. If I tried to skip ahead like that everything would unravel in an instant, it's hard enough to concentrate on one chapter when I'm alreafy Love seeing stuff like this in stories, the rational and practical analysis and application of what is effectively "magic" in everyday life.

Dang, you are a fast one. Pity, tho. Any chance of an alternate release with a caveat for that?

Does this update bring back the bumpier bumpiness?

Always interested in your walls o' text. As long as it doesn't distract too much from actual chapter writing. Such is the danger of worldbuiding. Or maybe the next chapter needs someone sitting through a documentary on the Discovery Khannel. Hmm. Apparently adding K to every word doesn't always work out.

So, on an unrelated related note, my overactive imagination just came up with this little gem of fridge logic: With Kerbals being marsupial & all, is there a medical specialty devoted to in-pouch-ero care or is that something a Kerm might do? I imagine crushing injuries for.... whatever they call a pouch-attached neonate... are all too common. darnit now I made myself sad

You see, Ivan, when make spaceplane look like duck is look silly but always land right side up!

asasdfasdf Also remind them every one of a million parts was built by the lowest bidder. ...er, I think you mean "dorsal," ventral would be on the bottom and probably not condusive to reentry. *runs & hides*

Ah, once again another fascinating wall of text from a simple question (that's a good thing ). @Ten Key once observed it's easy to be a bit jealous over your convenient source for blasphemy . I dunno if it's just an English thing or what, but a writer can do so much with such a simple phrase as "oh... Kerm!" etc. I was a little unsure of it at first but yes, the way you weave it into your world makes perfect sense in context. It makes the whole place seem very... alive. No pun intended. I, on the other hand, will thumb my nose at politics and flirt with off-color humor, but I'm not touching Kerbal religion with a ten foot pole (or a 3.3 foot Russian).

Smart Parts FTW! What mod are those chutes from? They look awesome.

While my rover crew on Duna kept... roving... I tweaked with my accidental spaceplane a bit. I just needed a quick multi use launcher, OK?? It's not a habit or anything! I can quit anytime I want! Made a more shallow ascent, spending more time on the jets. Had to rekajigger some things, without dumping the Whiplashes on the way up the COM is way off of the center of thrust, hence the Thuds. Still wanted to flip out tho. Rendezvoused and rescued a random Kerbal... doing OK so far... Now to retrieve this piece of space junk,,, Um... what do you mean, it won't fit? And none of you brought your KAS tools? NONE?! Not one? Why the flarp did I drag the three of you along? Oh, the contract said so. Ok. But snacks for you! I'll have to come back for it. Another unremarkable but very aesthetic re-entry. And speaking of aesthetic, cruising at night over the sprawling cities east of the Space Center. A tricky night approach to KSC. Never done this before. Completely threw off my depth perception (read: it took several tries). Just running on two Whiplashes on approach. Finally, a (mostly) safe touchdown. Lost one of the jets though. I'll still call it a win. I think I'll ditch four of them on ascent next time, shlepping all that weight to orbit really cuts into the available delta V, even with the Skipper. Which is less than ideal anyway. StageRecovery will still pickup the ditched engines, but at least that way it won't be a proper SSTO anymore. I do have a reputation to protect, after all.

. . . conspiracy theorists on your Kerbin must have no shortage of source material.

So... what about before Kerbals? Which came first...? I have the impression the Kerm are very old.

5100 words... and still going... Soon™ Eventually(patent pending)