KSK

Just don't forget the servicing and maintenance. Regular baryon sweeps will keep your deflector in tip-top working order.

The perfect picture to go with the old 'Motivating Kerbals' loading hint.

Totally agree. So far as I can tell from a bit of reading around, the NK-15s were technically far more advanced in many ways - more complex combustion cycle, advanced metallurgy to allow said combustion cycle to work, high ISP and low structural mass. The F1 was a conceptually simpler engine (and certainly far less efficient with a sea level ISP of 263s) but scaling any rocket engine up to F1 levels of thrust was an incredible achievement.

I can't think of a reason why you couldn't use aerozine with a nuclear thermal engine. At least in principle - I'm not sure about the exact materials science involved. You wouldn't get KSP levels of ISP though without using hydrogen as a propellant. But KSP engines are all over the place anyway when it comes to propellants and performance.

Perhaps slightly ironically, I think that a big issue with the Soviet space program as a whole was the number of competing design bureaus involved and the reluctance of the Soviet government to manage the program from the top. In contrast, after the initial planning stage for Apollo, everyone involved settled on one mission architecture, one booster, one program. Everyone had their job to do and everyone got on with it. The Soviet program suffered from in-fighting between designers (especially once Korolev died) and a lack of clear direction and political buy-in for a Moon program. A lot of the political support from the Kremlin was fairly opportunistic and the I don't think the will was there to fully back a project of that size. Technically, the N-1 was right on the very edge of what could be done at the time. I think a lot of their problems were down to the KORD system for controlling all 32 engines (or whatever the number was) in the first stage, and at that time control systems were just not up to the task. Funding was also an issue - the resources weren't there for a methodical test program, so effectively each N-1 launch was an all-up test flight. In particular - or so I've read - each of the engines could only be fired once with any sort of reliability, so they weren't tested individually before integration with the booster. Finally, quality control was an issue, probably due to a lack of resources and political pressure to get the job done regardless.

I wouldn't say its pointless if you're a company. Patenting natural DNA sequences is extremely difficult these days but if you could do an end-run around patent law and copyright those sequences instead, I could see a lot of commercial interest in that. Of course commercial interest isn't necessarily public interest but that's a whole other can of political worms that it's probably best not to open on this forum. I've done a bit more digging on the internet and found various more-or-less convincing legal theories either for or against DNA copyrights. Ultimately, I think the idea will fail for policy reasons, particularly at the USPTO. After the recent high profile cases ruling against gene patents, I just can't see them reopening the whole mess by letting DNA copyright sneak past them.

Interesting - and alarming. Have to see if I can get hold of that because at face value it doesn't make much sense. I mean sure, I can write out a nucleotide or amino acid sequence longhand and it would qualify as a literary work under copyright law but unless making the actual chunk of DNA or protein counts as 'copying' that sequence then I don't see the point. You're right though about exceptions not being useful. More worrying, the bar for originality in copyright law is quite low (you just need to prove that your work wasn't copied off anybody else), whereas the bar for novelty in patent law is fairly high. So an 'original' gene sequence (in copyright terms) doesn't necessarily mean that sequence is at all new. Damn. Mind you - the abstract for that article is a bit bizarre: "I propose here an approach to encoding that will allow genomics companies to make their sequences available to the public while retaining some intellectual property (IP) protection. Using this approach, such companies would transform the DNA sequences in their databases into music files (e.g., MP3 format)."

That first paragraph sums up my experience with Career mode pretty neatly. And I would love to see a version of stock KSP where I could agree with your second paragraph. The problem is (as I've posted elsewhere - can find a link if you wish) is that KSP Career mode at the moment doesn't do much of anything. It's gameplay mechanics are simply too limited to allow for real meaningful tradeoffs. Building a bigger rocket is the answer to most questions and paying for that bigger rocket (which should be one of those tradeoffs) is a matter of grinding out a couple more contracts. Time isn't a factor so the only thing preventing the player from doing so is personal boredom threshold. Pessimistically, I don't think this is going to change much. We might get a couple of extra bells and whistles to play with but the core of the game is, I think, going to remain much the same. Therefore, rocket design in KSP* will remain a mostly aesthetic choice, whichever game mode you're playing in. And that being the case, I think more parts are a priority. Back to the two-kerbal pod - you're right that its not going to change much. However, I'd like one, so that I can fly mixed crews earlier in my game. (As it is, poor old Bill and Bob don't get to go to space until I've unlocked a basic probe core or the Mk2 pod). I'd like one for flying rescue missions with an actual pilot, again before I unlock the Mk2 pod. I'd like one for flying mini-Apollo missions - one crewmember stays in orbit whilst the other goes down to the Mun in a Mk1 lander can. I will cheerfully concede that none of those scenarios are remotely required in the current Career game and indeed they're all arguably sub-optimal over anything we can do with a simple Mk1 pod with a probe core glued to the roof. I also think that's a great pity in either a sandbox game or a strategy/management game - which KSP purports to be in Sandbox (duh) and Career mode respectively. Edit - for what its worth, I've also had excellent value for money from KSP. The concept behind it is essentially my dream game. It's just a shame that the execution is so limited. *Edit, I agree with @tater's comment about spaceplanes. Design matters more for those.

We're getting a bit off-topic so we should maybe continue this discussion on a separate thread but I'm curious to know more about these banned techniques. Humanization isn't banned so far as I'm aware and recloning is a standard technique - unless we're talking about different things here? Well no - it's an artificially engineered fusion protein so we won't find it in nature, or at least we're extremely unlikely to. We have plenty of information about it though, the primary sequence is published here (and that database is linked to by other sources so it seems to be legit). The European Medicines Agency seemed to be satisfied with the structural information provided as well. Ouch. Personal bugbear - and not directed at you personally, since I see this a lot on the internet - but please don't mix up copyright and patents. Yes, they're both forms of IP but that's about it. They're very different legal frameworks intended to protect very different things. And speaking as somebody who works with patents for a living, I'd be very surprised if it's that simple. I very much doubt that they could get a blanket patent to a 10-30 residue fragment of a larger protein for example.

That's a bit of an over-generalisation. I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'copying the functionality' in this context, so please bear with me if I don't get this quite right. If you're talking about finding a different chemical that can interact with the same biological target as the laboratory produced chemical, then that itself is not a trivial task and basically requires it's own research program. Knowing what target you're trying to hit is an important first step, no question about it, but it's only the first step of many and with modern molecular biology techniques, one of the more straightforward ones. Target identification, compound library screening, hit to lead work and lead optimisation are well within the means of many university departments. Getting preclinical candidate compounds out of a university program is relatively common (which is not to disparage them in any way). Ideally, they'll be packaged up with as much preclinical data as the university(s) can put together before they're handed off to industry. Even then, there can be an awful long way to go (and still with a high drop-out rate) before that preclinical candidate makes it into clinical trials, let alone into patients. A pharma company licensing in a compound from a university program will still have a lot of development work to do, including formulation and scale up - which isn't a trivial task either - chemistry that works on the lab bench may be completely unsuitable for scaling up to commercial levels. Then, as @wumpus mentioned, the clinical trials and regulatory approval steps are the expensive part. Regarding @wumpus's point about companies controlling publication, I'm optimistic that we're going in the right direction as regards publishing clinical trial data, negative results and all. See this article in Ars Technica for example. Regarding scientific results in general, standard contract terms for university-industry collaborations is to delay publication only for long enough to secure patent protection (if appropriate) and then publish the results. Any company that can't agree to those terms is going to find it hard to partner up with an academic institution. Publishing null data is probably still an issue but no more so than in scientific literature in general.

After much fiddling with suitable launch vehicles I managed to get the Kerbin Archipelago into orbit. Crew transport operations are proceeding slowly but surely. Projected on-orbit crew is fourteen kerbals. Maximum crew is of course much higher but this is supposed to be an island of tranquillity not a flying sardine can. I decided that I really couldn't be bothered assembling this on orbit since getting everything to line up nicely would have been a frustrating exercise and all the extra bits and pieces needed for docking the various modules would have spoiled the overall look of the thing. So - single piece launch it was and to the kraken with any sort of pretensions to a realistic launch vehicle. After much fiddling around careful experimentation, I settled on a design using outrigger boosters attached to the uppermost Hitchhiker modules and a sustainer stage coupled to the base of the lab module. Reckless overuse of swept wings (basically serving as giant fins) on the sustainer stage gave it enough drag to keep the whole contraption pointing nose (for want of a better word) forwards during atmospheric flight and I'm sure the aerodynamic nose cones on the outriggers played their part too. It was a bit finicky to fly (and thank the Kerm for autostrutting - also used with reckless abandon) but fly it did and I think the end results are rather nice.

Hey folks. Found a new kerbal name generator for anyone who needs one.

Would be useful for boats too. Or at least it would look better than having every boat powered by jet engines.

Disagree entirely. We've got simple, stripped down gameplay and it's dull. Personal opinion aside - how stripped down do you want? I can't think of many (if any) contracts that you couldn't complete using 1.25m parts and a one kerbal pod, especially once you unlock even a basic probe core. You don't need 2.5m parts for anything and 3.75m parts are clearly a dangerous waste of memory that could be used for more spaceplane parts. Since we don't actually need anything apart from 1.25m parts for gameplay purposes what's the point of having anything else. Simple answer - KSP is a sandbox game. More parts, even if they only differ aesthetically is good. More ways of letting players accomplish the same goal is good too. I can't see a single reason not to include a 2 kerbal pod and some 1.875 parts to go with it. And this isn't aimed at you personally but I utterly reject the tired old 'there's a mod for that' argument. If I buy a book, I don't expect to be presented with a plot summary (even quite a detailed one), a couple of chapters to start me off and then be told to go and cobble the rest of the story together from random chapters that other people have posted on the publisher's internet forum. If I buy an album, I don't expect to get twelve bass lines, a drum solo or two and then get told to go learn guitar so I can play the rest of it. Likewise, when I buy a sandbox game, I would quite like to get a decent amount of sand to play with thank you so very much. Or at least the possibility of more sand to come. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to find the correct side of bed to get out of.

Strictly speaking it sounds as though it should go in the general Fanworks subforum. There's plenty of after-action-report style stories in there so it fits. With that said, I reckon you'll probably get more views if you bung it in the Mission Reports forum and if it's written in a mission report sort of style I doubt anyone would complain. Worst case scenario, somebody decides to moan about it and the mods shift it over to general Fanworks.

Except the article had nothing much to say about any of that. It didn't even mention any particular scientific field. It's main argument was that the current system favours small, exploratory studies which might generate new eye-catching results, rather than medium sized or large studies to confirm those results. No conspiracy theories in sight. It seemed like a pretty fair and reasoned article to me. I would add a couple of things: Those medium and larger studies are also a lot more expensive so the chances of getting a research grant to pay for them is (sadly) correspondingly lower. The idea that scientists like to discover new things rather than repeating old work, doesn't come as much of a surprise to me - I would imagine that most scientists work in science precisely because they want to discover new things. On the other hand you also get scientists that care deeply about checking results and making sure they are reproducible - I know a number of them personally. I wonder if the model used in the article takes different lines of evidence into account? For example, scientist A comes up with a result based on a small study. Scientist B carries out a different small study which provides different evidence to support scientist A's result.

Nope. It's been a while since I played with KCT but if I remember correctly each vessel got a score depending on what parts you used and how many times you'd used them before. In KCT that score translates into research points, although they're more of a bonus than something you'd rely on for all your science needs. In my hypothetical career revamp, vessel score would translate into engineering points which would be the only way of unlocking the tech tree. As I said - build ships to earn points to unlock parts for better ships. Building bigger ships with newer parts also takes more time so the player needs to take that into account. Conservative designs that you've flown multiple times before can be assembled quite quickly but don't get you many engineering points. More experimental designs take longer to build but let you open up the tech tree faster.

Not sure what @SilverlightPony has in mind but I've read a Harry Potter fanfic that was basically an alternative universe retelling of all seven books. So that must be up in the million word range I would think. It wasn't at all bad either - I preferred significant chunks of it to the canon material.

That's my solution too. My kerbals have noses, eyebrows, ears and all the rest of it. Also eyelids.

Thanks! My thinking was that if you're supporting your program on a single activity then you would have to go all out to make that work. Diversifying is easier financially but requires a bit more juggling from the player. But yes - you've pretty much nailed it with your last paragraph. Want to build giant aircraft and fly hundreds of tourists around Kerbin? You can. Want to do the stock LKO to Mun to Minmus progression? That works fine. Want to skip the Mun/Minmus, focus on building infrastructure in LKO and lobbing uncrewed probes to explore the rest of the Kerbol system. Knock yourself out. What you should never have to do is be forced (or nearly so) down a particular path to grind enough science points to continue.

There already is. @JakeGrey's The Next Frontier is set around 30 years after the events of First Flight and takes place in the same universe. Or the universe next door anyway - Jake was writing his story in parallel with mine so unsurprisingly the two don't dovetail exactly. A word of warning - parts of TNF are officially not forum friendly which is one reason why the link points to a completely different website. If you don't mind that though, I can thoroughly recommend it - for me it's a great standalone story with an obvious and very personal bonus. Will I write a sequel? Possibly. Maybe. It really depends if I can think of something fresh to say about Kerbin, its inhabitants and their space program. As I found out early on in First Flight, there's only so much you can do with 'flags and footprints' - eventually writing about yet another rocket launch or yet another landing (this time on a different rock!) gets a bit old. At least it does if that's the whole story. There's always the monoliths and other easter eggs I suppose but again, finding something different to say about them (rather than doing warmed-over 2001) could be tricky. Which isn't to say that it'll never happen - I just don't have much of a notion how it would happen right now. Anyhow, there's quite a bit of First Flight to go yet. We're on the last lap, I know where the finish line is but we're far from done! Incidentally, I ran a word count for interest (since we're talking about sequels) and the story so far weighs in at 258,953 words. The final count probably won't be far short of 300,000. Depending on typesetting, a paperback will normally have about 350-400 words per page, so we're looking at a final page count of somewhere between 750 and 850 pages for First Flight. I reckon that's either two decent sized novels (for the genre), a slightly undernourished trilogy or possibly the kind of doorstop tome that normally comes with a fake gold leaf embossed title and will serve as a spare table leg in an emergency. A sizeable pile of words either way.

You're OK. The last chapter is written but it won't be the next one to be posted by a long way. I just got a bit stuck with the next chapter in the story so I took a break and skipped ahead a bit. I've had the last chapter and epilogue in my head for quite a while anyway, so this seemed like a good time to set them down. In fact I've had the last few lines of the whole thing in my head for over a year I reckon.

Yeah, the problem is that there's really not much progress to do, so making it gradual just makes a pretty thin experience even thinner. I normally find that Tier 2 buildings are fine for all my practical needs - apart from R&D obviously. My craft designs tend towards the boring, minimal but functional which helps keep the part counts low as well. End result - I can do everything I need to do with 1.25m parts, maybe detouring into 2.5m parts for roleplaying or loading up a space station with large quantities of fuel. I never really get to use the high end parts because I've normally lost interest by then. So what to do? Building on the current system, I would make Kerbal Construction Time (KCT), or something very like it, stock. When time actually matters then a lot of other decisions suddenly matter as well. Can I actually complete that contract in time? Can I research the necessary technology to get my cluster of Eve comsats on orbit for the next transfer window? That sort of thing. Also KCT adds a whole slew of possible upgrade options for the Space Centre, which makes the base upgrade side of the game a bit deeper. In short, it's a relatively straightforward way of building out the space program (rather than individual mission) planning part of the game, which is what I thought Career mode would be all about. Yes - I know I could just install the mod. Yes - I need to get round to that sometime. More speculatively (and I've said this before), take anything @tater has said about the exploration game and just do it. Keep the current Kerbol system as a default option but for the love of Jeb's sweaty socks, give us some variety too. Give us something to actually explore. In an ideal world, I'd rip up Career mode and rebuild it from scratch. KCT is actually quite a solid foundation (for the reasons outlined above), so I'd start there. For those that haven't used it, KCT lets you earn science by building rockets. I would make that the main progression loop that drives technology progression. Build spacecraft, earn Engineering experience points and use them to unlock better parts for building better spacecraft. Put in a diminishing returns mechanism so you can't cheese your way through the tech tree by churning out endless 'Mk1 pod + Flea' suborbital hoppers. Next - make life support stock. Doesn't have to be a complicated system but give us some logistics to figure out and manage. Next - proper kerbonaut training and career logs. Give us a reason to care about them, give us a reason to actually manage them, allocate them to appropriate missions etc. Get rid of the current 'get to level 3 and now I can repair wheels / magically get more science from a thermometer / figure out how to orient my craft antinormal rather than prograde' nonsense. Instead a spacecraft needs a certain level of crew training before you can launch it. Crew accumulate training over time, the more experienced a particular kerbonaut is, the faster he/she accumulates training points. Next - tie reputation to exploration and science. Boldly going where no kerbal (or probe) has gone before - and beaming back the pictures to prove it - keep the public interested and earns reputation for your program. Repeat missions also earn rep but on a diminishing returns basis. Likewise, gathering science points earns you the approbation of the Kerbin research community and builds your reputation. Finally - let us choose how we want to earn our funds. Reputation grants you a 'base salary' to spend on your program. If you have a sufficiently high reputation, that might be all you need. Running tourist flights will earn you money - build your ship, set your price and see the punters roll in. Or not. Passengers will generally pay more to go to more exotic locations in more spacious spacecraft. Conversely, once the novelty has worn off, passengers won't pay much for the 'privilege' of being cooped up in a Mk1 pod for a month, regardless of how good the view is. Building infrastructure like space stations and Munbases will also earn you money - building nicer infrastructure will earn you more money. Building infrastructure in far-flung parts of the Kerbol system will earn you even more money. I would probably leave the task of building and maintaining the infrastructure to the player but have passenger transport handled automagically - or at least make that an option. Building and maintaining commercial comsat networks will earn you money. Alternatively, building networks of Kerbin observation and other science satellites, space telescopes etc. will earn you science and therefore reputation and so (indirectly) money. Finally, if you really insist, testing parts and accepting contracts from other companies will earn you money. In general though, I'd prefer to ditch the notion of contracts and having the player earn all their money by completing random tasks for faceless companies. Sorry for the wall o' text!

For me, Career mode needs to involve time as a meaningful constraint and needs to involve something more than flying missions. I tried playing a 1.2 Career (now abandoned due to boredom) and whilst 1.2 is definitely a step forward, I'm still hitting the same roadblock in Career that I always have - that gap between Mun/Minmus missions and interplanetary missions where the game gets very repetitive. I always seem to get to a certain point where I've unlocked most of the tech tree, the KSC is all updated except for maybe the Admin building and the Spaceplane Hangar, (neither of which I tend to use very much) but I still have several months of game time to get through before any transfer windows start opening. At which point I just get bogged down in endless, not very varied or particularly exciting contracts.

For what it's worth it seemed about right to me. Low gravity so surface tension plays a bigger role and thus fluids don't flow as well. Sweat feels more viscous simply because it's not running off you as easily. Getting Bezo's astronauts to do some - literal - dripping tap experiments would be instructive too. The transition from turbulent (dripping or 'just on the verge of dripping') flow to laminar flow would be interesting.