CatastrophicFailure

Sooner or later I wanna sea this beast in space. With a pirate flag. Arrrrr.beep.

Ah so. Your space program is truly a marvel of machine-like efficiency. Heartless and unwavering

Cool a space sta-- wait a sec what happened to poor Nelsy??

Tadpole having a poo. I lol' and people are staring. And that hat landing was fine, you still have half an airplane.

Possibly. At this point even I've lost track of all my shout-outs.

Given that ULA's Atlas RD-180's come from Russia, I think he meant more business going SpaceX due to a lack of Atlas V's.

Hmm... more reading required!

OK this is embarrassing, um... any idea where I can find a nice 8k Kerbin texture? My source seems to have evaporated...

Ok. I think that's the one i grabbed, but how do I ensure its the one being used? IIRC there's some model manager switchery involved and 64k ends up superseding several things (i.e. RemoteTech)

I'm futzing about with the 64-bit workaround (yeah, I know, bad user! No support for u!) anyway, what's the highest resolution texture for Kerbin available?

Chapter 31: A Prelude to Silence "Auto-sequence start..." The light on the little metallic box changed from red to green, and the capsule shook as the eight engines far below burst into life. The darkness in the window was instantly replaced by a light so brilliant Valentina had to shade her eyes. "Eight at one hundred." "Tree..." "Dva..." "Odéen..." She quickly put her head against the thick, leather-covered pad, crossed her arms over her chest, shut her eyes and braced for the bone-jarring-- "Liftoff!" What? Valentina's eyes shot open. Something's gone wrong! The engines must have-- "Kokos, you have cleared the tower, yaw program running." Her eyes flew over the instruments. Everything was... perfectly normal? There was no explosion of sound, no crush of acceleration. There was barely any sensation of movement at all, only a light push and gentle rocking. Even the rumble of the engines sounded distant and indistinct. The light in the windows faded away as the rocket climbed beyond the gantry. "Yaw complete. Roll, pitch program." Valentina's eyes wandered to the mechanical IVAN. Numbers and flight data scrolled on a small CRT nearby. There was no lockout on the flight controls. She eyed them reproachfully. There was no need. It had been explained to her in explicit detail all the awful things that would happen if she did touch the flight controls during launch. Canned meat again. Humph. Her crossed arms became folded in annoyance. For a moment she considered crossing her legs, too, but the acceleration was finally starting to build. "Kokos, control." Valentina blinked, "go ahead control...?" "Be advised, confidence is high, if you keep pouting like that a little birdie will come along and poop on your lip." Her mouth fell open. She searched the panels and... there! The O of her face became a scowl. The IVAN box, the lights on it. It really was staring at her! Valentina stuck her tongue out at it. "Copy that, Kokos. Telemetry now indicates if you keep making that face it will freeze that way." She recrossed her arms. Canned meat again and she had to deal with this. For a moment, here eyes flicked to the space on the panel marked ABORT. It was nothing but a blank panel, of course. Like so many other things, the abort motors were inert ballast. So Valentina went on grumbling about being nothing more than ballast herself. Her fears for Dibella, her anxieties about this impossible rescue... they were sealed deep in the back of her mind. She knew if she gave them breath for even an instant, now, they would consume her. So she went on fretting about trivialities, letting distraction flow and her thoughts wander as the acceleration edged into discomfort. "Two, four, confirm shutdown. Pressure is good." The capsule lurched and her stomach knotted. The force crushing Valentina down into her seat abated as two engines shut off on schedule. IVAN went on cycling through its numbers. In her window, still only darkness. Darkness. Oddly, the voice seemed somehow distant, diminished. Valentina began to feel a strange sense of clarity as she climbed higher into the black sky. How long since she'd been here? She couldn't say anymore. Back then, she'd been full of dreams and aspirations, and some slim hope that the world might make sense again. The rocket thundered ever onward. The world hadn't made sense in a very, very long time, Valentina knew. Not since the day she had awoken and her deda had not. She'd soldiered on for a time afterwords, alone in their small cabin. A year? Two? It was getting fuzzy now. He had taught her well, she knew how to live in, and from, the taiga. One of the villagers probably turned her in. They feared the taiga-dwellers, mistrusted them. Even thought they were aligned with darkness or evil spirits. Yet they would still trade coin for a decent pelt. One day when she came to trade, the men were waiting for her, and the last of her old life dropped away. "Coming up on staging... MECO in tree... dva... odéen..." For an instant, Valentina was shoved forward in her harness, then slammed back into her seat as the separation motors pushed the stages apart. Four loud, simultaneous bangs, and the inert abort motors fell away, the upper stage now continuing on its single sustainer engine with glassy smoothness. Stages, yes. It just wouldn't do for one so young to be alone, that's what they'd told her. Especially one with her... history. Valentina stared, unseeing, into the darkness in the window. Flashes of a memory blinked in her mind. ...have to go now... ...never should have... ...searching house-to-house... But again, the more she stretched for it, the more it drifted away. Whatever they had done, it must have been unspeakable. So the truancy apparatchik had given her a simple choice: join the factories, and disappear; or join the martial service, and serve the Imperium. Serve, and atone. To Valentina's continued surprise, she had tested into the Air Force, and surprise beyond that, into the test pilot corps. As her mind drifted and the rocket accelerated, she finally made the connection. That horrible feeling in the mission control room, when the world had crumbled away and she hung helpless on the precipice... she recognized it. She recognized it from a day long ago, face down in half-frozen mud, no food or sleep for three days, crawling beneath barbed wire, explosions all around, and a spiteful-eyed drill officer firing his revolver into that mud inches from her face. Everyone in the martials slogged through the same basic training. The brave, the fierce, the powerful, the smart, everyone. It was said they must break you; shatter you and grind you down, burn away the unwanted like ore in the furnace. Destroy you, and forge something new. Something of their will. The darkness wanted a tool. And a tool has a purpose. "Coming up on SECO, now. Standby Kokos." "Copy, control." "Shut down in tree... dva... odéen... mark!" The distant rumble and push of acceleration quickly died away, then a series of lights flashed across the panels. "Shut down complete, venting chambers... clear. Telemetry nominal, stand by for spacecraft separation." "Copy control, ready." "Sequence, ready and... mark." A muffled bang, joined by four smaller ones shook the capsule. Light flared in the windows as the discarded rocket stage backed away with its separation motors, then sound died away to the soft hum of air handlers and instrument gyros. Tentatively, Valentina opened her faceplate with a whisper of air. Her stomach twisted uncomfortably at this odd new sensation, now that she finally had time to appreciate it. She turned the buckle on her harness, and the belts sprung out and bounced in strange ways. Oblivious to the world, she drifted from the seat and pressed her face close to the window. Below, or really above from her current perspective, the lights of Bylia and Gytep spread out like jewels on the felt of the globe. Zarya drifted along the borderline, the web of illuminated roads twisting chaotically as they followed the unseen contours of the land. Then the lights disappeared beneath clouds, and the ship passed high over a storm raging in the Yaltik Sea. Sporadic flashes of lighting lit the clouds from above and below, the arcs stretching out and rebounding like the neurons firing in her mind. And further beyond, a thin rainbow line of airglow marked the distant curve of the horizon. But Valentina Kerman saw none of this. As the craft slowly tumbled, her eyes remained fixed on the stars, exploding forth in their billions upon billions. So many, so many she could never count them all, with a vibrancy and depth that shamed even the clearest night back home, sitting on the roof of her cabin in the cold. The disc of the galaxy was painted in light across the reach of space, stars proceeding from it like any army. For a moment, a wordless, unformed thought drifted in Valentina's mind, of fortresses and armies and desperate last stands. But no, that was for another. This, now, was hers alone, a knowledge that no night was never truly dark. "I finally made it, Deda," she whispered. A flash of noise in the headset brought her back to the world. "Kerbin to Valentina, come in, Valentina..." "Huh? What? Yes, I am here." "We know. We have been staring at your knee for the last ten minutes." Ten minutes?! Valentina tried fruitlessly to stammer something. "Relax, Kokos," Tercella sounded bemused, "thirty minutes still to your first maneuver. You will need to calculate a phasing burn at apokee, then we need a thruster control check." "Copy," Valentina said with a hint of a sigh. She settled back into her seat and hooked the toes of her boots under straps on the pedals. Her hand reached for the IVAN keypad, then froze. The voice. It was... gone. Not merely distant, but gone. Her head was clear for the first time in a long time. Any further thought on the matter was cut off, however, as Valentina noticed the writing etched into the keypad housing. It was subtle, difficult to see if she wasn't looking at just the right angle. Along the top edge of the panel was a complex, dense script she thought might be Gytepi, but along the bottom were familiar Kerillic letters, giving her the distinct impression they said the same thing. Mech.IVAN rev. 202 A product of Wutani-Kokuni, LTD That was... odd. With all the secrecy, Valentina had assumed the strange little box was a product of the research department. But, with all the Foreign goods flowing into the Union, who could tell anymore? Bah, that was a thought for another time. She flipped through the paperwork, entered the nonsensical hexadecimal string into the keypad, then hit the 'INPUT' button. The tiny CRT on the panel flickered and changed: HOHMANN TRANSFER TO TARGET RECALCULATING. . . .DONE MANEUVER NODE IN M+33:42 END OF LINE Valentina frowned. That sounded right... sort of. The thruster check should make more sense. With only a moment's pause to think, she threw the relevant switches on the panels, and finally set her gloved hands on controls. A side stick was to her left, controlling pitch and yaw. The pedals below the panel controlled roll, and a thick, stubby knob to her right controlled translation. Hesitantly, she moved the stick, and a flash of light in the window and sound like a muffled gunshot announced the RCS thrusters were working. She spent a few moments moving the ship about, finding she adjusted naturally to the slightly odd control arrangement. It responded crisply and precisely to her commands, with no hint of overshoot, again reminding her of a well-designed aircraft. As Valentina watched the sparkling lights of Kerbin's cities shift around in the window before her, she found to her dismay that she was happy. Despite everything that had happened, everything that was yet to come, despite knowing that her friend was up here, somewhere, alone and clinging to life, Valentina was happy. And it dug into her heart like a knife.

Ahoy, thar! Shiver me timbers & blow me down! Thar do be a fine lady o' the seas, arrrr.

Ok, I give up. How do I access PM's on mobile? Better yet, how do I turn off mobile altogether and force desktop mode?

THIS is how to Air in KSP. Love those Learjet engines, took me a while to figure out they're stock parts!

Next chapter well on the way, middle of this week I'm thinking.

Cool.

... In the tropics, tho?

Wait a sec, where did you get those nifty flames & smoke trails?!

That's.... Pretty significant

In Soviet Russia, rocket ignite you!

What he said. Whatever you do @Generalstarwars333, do NOT google it! some things cannot be unseen...

They should probably be more concerned with what's in the garbage

Like so many others, this thread is as interesting as it is pointless . Ford or Chevy, Mac or PC, MechJeb or no MechJeb. The thing with one-dimensional, disposable characters is that they lend themselves completely to the imagination of the player. Or not. On any new save I typically "retire" Jeb, Bill & Bob right away and assemble a cadre of randomnames specifically so I can create any world I want for them... or no world at all and simply smash them into the ground with no guilt. Ok maybe a little. I certainly never thought I'd be the kind to write fanfic. Squad "officializing" female Kerbals of course opens up a whole realm of implications... or you can just strand a bunch of the little buggers on Eve and forget about them. There's no "right" or "wrong" way to play the game, or daydream about it. It's what the player makes it. But we should all take a cue from our Kerbals and not take anything about it too seriously. Insist that your Kerbals are gender-neutral fungal fruiting bodies if you like. Insist that their interpersonal relationship drama rivals daytime TV if you like. Heck, go full-on Rule 34 if that's your thing. Just don't tell me anything about it!

Not all bad. Gives some of us time to catch up. I'm no longer 70-some pages behind. But I'm back on page two again.