Specialist290

Nicely done. I'm especially impressed with how you used in-game parts to model the alien ship.

Nicely done! Another one for the "Clever Ideas I Need to Copy Someday" pile.

As with all stories, it depends on how you spin it. Is the sextant-reading itself exciting? Not necessarily. But from a storytelling perspective, let's consider a few things: -- How does the character taking the readings go about it? Does he do it by-the-book, or does he ignore protocol and do it his own way? If he's challenged by someone else who thinks differently, how does he respond? -- Our minds tend to wander when we're doing mundane, routine tasks. What is he thinking about while he's taking the readings? What does that say about him as a character? -- Why is he specifically, and not some other character, taking the reading? Is he the most qualified to do it? If not, why him, and not someone else? -- What if he notices something that's different from what he's expecting? How does he react? What's the first thought that crosses his mind, given what he knows about his job? If he tells someone else, how do they react, both to the information and to the character for revealing it? -- What does everything the characters do say about who they are as people? Answering those questions, in any genre, is the bread-and-butter of storytelling. Attention to detail is ultimately in service to the plot itself, but ideally you want a good plot and well-researched details. You seem to be implying, if I'm interpreting your argument correctly, that it's impossible to have both at the same time. EDIT: Just to add one last point: I am in the course of reading stories taken from the nonfictional personal accounts of actual astronauts. There's plenty of stuff in that that makes for good stories -- John Glenn's account of his first space flight, the Soviets' first spacewalk, the Apollo 1 and Soyuz 1 disasters, Apollo 13 (I heard they made a movie about that one...), the Mir fire, and so on. Real life is about as "realistic" as you can get -- and it can get exciting at points, too.

Fair enough. Just thought I'd raise the point. Still a good story overall.

If you use Kerbal Engineer Redux's Flight Engineer mod, the Rendezvous tab allows you to target planets and moons from a dropdown menu. Of course, you have to have the Flight Engineer chip attached to your rocket to use it.

You say that as if you don't realize that people don't get worked up over inauthentic mechanics and actions in historical fiction as well: For instance, using weapons in a movie that are too old or too new for the setting, or having your "professional" army break out of a perfectly good formation to engage the barbarian warriors in single combat, then getting their fannies handed back to them for exactly the reason that the real army in history chose to use formation fighting in the first place. (I'm looking at you, Gladiator.) Again, it's possible to write both realistically and entertainingly -- I've even given recommendations.

The problem is that you're confusing "realism" with "banality." You can write realistic fiction without including every single day or explaining every single detail. Seriously, go read Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, or Isaac Asimov some day. They're all authors who made realistic and entertaining stories. EDIT: Also, seconding everything Nikolai just said. There's a difference between "writing that's informed by your research" and "bludgeoning your readers over the head with inane details." EDIT2: And now I'm half-tempted to actually turn that little summary into a full-fledged story itself, just to prove to you how wrong you are. I'm not promising anything, but it I do write it, it'll show up in the Fan Works section.

Nice to see this again! One thing that's been bugging me lately: Do you think you could add dialog tags so we can tell who's speaking what lines? It's sometimes hard to follow who's talking to whom without them.

I'm still partial to the "evil-clone-knife-fight" theory, myself. Then again, that's because I just invented it five minutes ago.

Destination Moon's a good one (although one I have yet to actually see). Helps that Robert A. Heinlein was a technical advisor; he never would have let the producers get away with cutting corners if he could help it. There's also Fritz Lang's Frau im Mond, which had Hermann Oberth's guidance and had one of the first multi-stage rockets in film. It's also the one that supposedly inspired von Braun to put those black and white checkers or stripes on every rocket he ever launched, including the Saturn V.

If the ship has docking ports, dock it to the space station. The evil doppelgangers will try to overpower the real Jeb, Bill and Bob in a knife fight, but the good guys will win, because Good Always Prevails. Alright, the "evil-clone-knife-fight" bit is some artistic license on my part, but putting two of the same kerbalnaut on the same ship seems to cause one of the duplicates to vanish, since there's technically only one in the actual persistence file; he's just showing up in two places at a time. At least, I think that's how it works.

One of my latest Mun rovers pays its respects to a less fortunate older brother that ultimately made its success possible.

1. Unfortunately, there's no way I know of to actually get the icons to combine reliably. It seems to be a rather arcane and inscrutable quirk of the programming. 2. If you use your scroll wheel while your cursor is over the staging column, you can scroll it up or down. EDIT: Ninja'd by three people. My reaction times are slipping.

I remembered this one from before the crash. It's helped inspire my own modular and semi-reusable space program at present. Glad to see it's back up and running again!

Awesome find! Always thought it would be cool to try something like this. If Telemachus works over the Internet, maybe some people could get together for a collaborative livestream. Or to kick it up a notch in another direction: Get somebody to try it in real time, without time acceleration. Hope they don't have plans for the next few months...

Calculating delta-v ain't hard; it's just long and tedious (if you do it by hand). It's basically a function of your engine's efficiency and the ratio between the mass of the fully-fueled rocket and the mass of the final payload. There's two pages that I always recommend whenever the subject comes up, because they explain the basics in fairly simple terms and using no more math than you need to operate a calculator. Of course, if you're willing to use mods, then things like MechJeb and Kerbal Engineer Redux can do all the math for you.

Generally, movies tend to get things very wrong. I seem to be linking to this site a lot lately... Space fighters in particular get argued about a lot. This page (warning: TV Tropes) has a fairly comprehensive discussion of the pros and cons, but I'd say that the biggest blow against them is the fact that there's effectively no horizon in space. Your weapons are only limited by accuracy, not absolute range, and bigger ships would have the space for both bigger weapons and better targeting computers. But yes, you're not likely ever going to see space fighters turning like airplanes in space, no matter how good the engines get. Spaceflight just works differently from atmospheric flight, to keep things short and sweet.

Another site you might find useful is Project Rho's Atomic Rockets. Tons of useful stuff all over the place, and even has the advantage that you don't really need to do any advanced-level math to get the basics down.

Makes me wish I actually had decent video editing skills myself. Nicely done!

Welcome to the community! ...Is it a bad sign that I can recognize both of the TV shows your avatar is referencing?

The principle's the same, though. The world's first EVA was conducted from a Voskhod capsule, too, which was basically a scaled-up Vostok.

The joke * ---> .......... .......... .......... ..___... ..|- -|... ..___.... Your head

Square brackets keys let you switch between any objects that are close to one another.

Another handy thing to learn would be Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation, which lets you calculate the delta-v (potential change in velocity) of your rocket as a whole. These two pages explain the process in detail, but also in fairly simple terms. It takes a while if you do it all longhand, but it's handy to know the equations even if you let a plugin do the actual calculating for you just so you understand what's going on. For reference, the delta-v target for getting into LKO is ~4,500 m/s.

So a thought just struck me a moment ago. As many of you know, (SPOILER WARNING if you don't) there are two incredibly deep wells at Moho's north and south poles. No one's ever able been to reach the bottom of one successfully, but some people have managed to get quite deep. (Unfortunately, I think the thread detailing this was eaten by the Great April Forum Kraken.) Meanwhile, here on Earth, there's a region of the planet's lithosphere called the Mohorovicic Discontinuity -- or "moho" for short -- that defines the boundary between the crust and the mantle. A number of scientific groups have tried drilling "moholes" all the way down there, but nobody has made it all the way just yet. The question I pose is: Is it possible that Moho gets its name because it has a pair of natural moholes that reach all the way down to Moho's own moho?