KSK

Fromaged?

Provisional title - Ker-balls?

You know - I don't really have any good First Flight craft but yes, a good screenshot would make a great cover picture. I'm liking the look of Porkjet's new engines - maybe I'll see what I can build with his LV-T15. Might have to find a copy of the old demo parts as well - the old three kerb pod was the inspiration for the Kerbal 1 and Kerbal 2 capsules after all. Yeah - if I can put together (or possibly borrow from this thread) a good Kerbal 1 and get a screenshot of it on a sub-orbital trajectory over Kerbin, just before, or maybe at the point of, booster separation. That would do nicely. Copyright info looks perfect - good idea keeping it in the footer! And yes - feel free to update and post new links as new chapters come out - that would be great! Thanks!

You know - I think I just blanked out the typo and read it as 'fertile'. It could have been worse though - Queen Ahmahoyep the Feral would have been an eyebrow raiser for sure.

Oh wow. No complicated designs required unless you wanted to - I'd be curious to see what cover picture you chose! I was thinking of something simple, maybe something like this in centred text, font and spacing as you see fit: First Flight A Kerbal Space Program novel. By KSK Then the two links somewhere under that. No need for a formal copyright page at this stage. And yes - if anyone does want to grab all of First Flight in a single file - now's your chance!

We choose to go to the Moon to prove that it has dead whales lying in its craters - and because Jeb told us to. And Jeb loves his monster rockets!

Hey Plecy, Appreciate the enthusiasm and you've surely made a nice job of pulling the story together into a single piece! Thanks. If you were planning to share it at all (which is fine) please could you add a title page at the start with a quick acknowledgement of me as the author plus a link to this thread and a link to the main KSP website. In the unlikely event that anyone reading a kerbal fanfic hasn't heard of KSP, I think it would be good to at least point them in the right direction for finding it. I'm probably being a bit over-cautious here (and I'm sure you've figured this out already) but please don't put First Flight up for sale on Amazon or otherwise distribute it for money. Partly because - well it's my work you'd be selling - but mostly because Squad, quite understandably, would not be happy with people selling kerbal-related stuff without their say-so. A quick last point for future reference. Without being too much of a curmudgeon about this, it would have been nicer if you'd asked me first about making a physical book rather than popping up on the thread and announcing it as a fait accompli. Like I said, I'm cool with it, I definitely appreciate the enthusiasm and you've made a great job of the book. Other writers might not be as relaxed though, so best to check first okay? Cheers, KSK.

*does a happy dance* Glad you're enjoying it and thanks for dropping by to subscribe and comment! Doesn't look like the next chapter will be out by Friday although it is ticking along nicely. Got a wee bit stuck on a particular point of worldbuilding last night and discovered that I'd lost my notes on it. Luckily there was a version of sorts on the forum, so I was able to rebuild (and embellish) the notes but then I also had to check back through the rest of the story to check for any continuity gaffes. That took a while. So - not quite as many as many new words as I was hoping for last night but at least I've got Kerbin's governing institutions straight in my head.

Not sloppy writing in my opinion. Quite the opposite - I've found this to be a really useful trick when you want to conjure up the impression of a large group without being too specific about its size and you really don't want to add in any more bit part characters. For example when Jeb is down on the factory floor about to break some rather significant news... “So what do you think, Wernher?" Ribory turned her head and realised that she'd been talking to herself for the last two minutes. “Wernh... JEB!" Everyone's head snapped round. “Jeb!" “Hey boss!" “What happened, boss?" “What's with the sheets over everything?" Jeb raised his hands to fend off the jostling throng of kerbals. “Woah, woaaah - everyone take it easy. There's been a little change of plan that's all." “What plan, Jeb?" “What do you mean - change of plan?" “Are we mothballing the ship, boss?" Jeb gestured for silence. “I'll tell you all about it in a minute folks, once the rest of the team are here.“ On a separate topic, thanks everyone for the kind words regarding writing about conflict sans villains. Count me in for the CatastrophicFailure Burning Ears Club!

Oh sure - give us an easy one why don't you. I like writing dialogue and in all honesty probably rely on it a bit too much for laying down exposition. Which means I'm maybe not the best person to be answering your question but if you don't mind me throwing some ideas out for discussion, lets have at it! First - can we get rid of the conversation altogether? The detail that your characters were going to be talking about - can we show that some other way. Show not tell, in other words. Second - why are we including these details? Are they driving a plot point? Are they adding colour and flavour to the story? Or are they just you, the author, going "well I researched the mulch out of this detail so you'd better believe it's all going in the story."? If you're including detail to drive a plot point, go for it. That detail probably needs to be there. If you're adding flavour - be careful. A bit of salt in a dish can really make it special but too much salt can make it unappetising at best and inedible at worst. If you're just showing off your research - probably best to dial that detail back a bit. Incidentally, I'm pretty sure I've been guilty of that last one on occasion and I know that I've over-seasoned some of my work, especially some of the earlier chapters. Knowing how much detail to include is a real trick and (I believe) only really comes with practice. OK, so we really need this conversation and we really need these details. How to set about writing that conversation down? I think my big tip would be: write to the characters and not the reader. If you've got two engineers talking about a point of engineering, then going right back to first principles for the sake of exposition just looks clunky. On the other hand, if you've got a character who's job it is to ask questions, then it can work. I use that a couple of times in First Flight - I've written in a popsci level science and engineering TV show called Engines and Engineers. Naturally, they sometimes have guest kerbonauts on the show, for example to commentate on a particular mission or give an update on the Space Program as a whole. The TV presenter is there to ask the layman level questions and the kerbonaut is there to answer them. Used sparingly I don't think it's a bad way of wedging in some exposition here and there. My other tip would probably be to read your dialogue aloud (or at least mumble it to yourself ) If you're starting to sound as if you've swallowed an encyclopedia with a thesaurus chaser, then you might want to rework that dialogue to be a bit less formal. Or, as Andem pointed out, a scattering of slang or a few colloquialisms can do wonders for a conversation. Colloquialisms are also a great way of doing a little impromptu worldbuilding on the side! Just my thoughts anyway - like I said at the start I'm maybe not the best person to be getting advice from on this one - looking forward to hearing what everyone else says.

Hang on - half the width means a quarter of the area surely? Which suggests you should be able to have a cluster of four Poodle Compacts. In which case the current balance looks OK to me. Even then I'm not convinced that you need to balance clusters the way you've suggested. Different tools for different jobs.

Disagree. From the Wikipedia article you quote: "Alexander Bolonkin and Louis Crane, Shawn Westmoreland offered and published a paper and book [1 -3] investigating the feasibility of this idea. Their conclusion was that it was on the edge of possibility, but that quantum gravity effects that are presently unknown will either make it easier, or make it impossible." So we don't actually know whether it's even theoretically possible. But anyway, even assuming all of your alien futuretech works, the idea that we're going to be fighting it using Orion battleships is absurd. In fact the idea that we're going to be fighting it is absurd. From Wikipedia. "The Oort cloud (/ˈɔːrt/ or /ˈʊərt/,[1] named after the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort), sometimes called the Öpik–Oort cloud,[2] is a theoretical cloud of predominantly icy planetesimals believed to surround the Sun to as far as somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 AU (0.8 and 3.2 ly)" 0.1c appears to be a good cruising speed for an Orion ship. Assuming that acceleration and deceleration times are negligible, it's going to take about thirty years to get out to your alien starship, even assuming we had a convenient Orion battleship parked in orbit and ready to go. That's going to take a chunk out of any lead time we get by being able to track the aliens as they decelerate towards the Oort cloud. But, even assuming we manage to overcome that and get an Orion there in time, before the aliens manage to magic - excuse me, nanotech up their unstoppable fleet, that Orion is going up against a starship propelled by ridiculously intense gamma radiation. Aliens spot Orion coming, Aliens turn spaceship around, Aliens fire up their gamma ray drive. Bye, bye Orion. Or bye bye Orion as an effective fighting vessel anyway.

Sounds good. Ohhh-kay. Black hole engines sound totally legit and within the realms of scientific possibility. Personally, I'd go for an Infinite Improbability Drive but whatever. Not much point having molecular nanotech if it can't tbh. We do? Obviously. Although any spare antimatter from that pion drive is going to make a real mess of an Orion. If the aliens are packing enough antimatter for interstellar flight, they've probably got enough left over to use as munitions. Hey - I can play the 'probably' game too! It sure did make for a great sci-fi novel.

Agree with this. Take Porkjet's engines, add extra tankbutt and voila - a different engine. Not really a better one in my opinion.

Yeah, that one got me right between the eyes. Gonna have to start calling you Ser Davos. He too was an onion knight..

On its way. Just under 2,000 words in, probably not going to be much more than 3,000 - 3,500 all told, unless it decides to expand in random directions in the writing. I got a bit stuck with the chronology on this one and thought I'd boxed myself into a corner for a while. Figuring out a way to fix that took some time and last weekend was the first proper writing time I've had for a while. Not a lot of time for writing this coming weekend either (nephew's 5th birthday and I can't let the wee man down) but I'm hoping to have something out by Friday. Unless it sucks, in which case it'll be a while longer.

Ah, I see. An offer I cannot refuse. In that case - I will not refuse it. Poor Matrick.

I don't know if this'll work for everyone - but sometimes it's fine just to compete with yourself. Don't worry too much about comparing yourself to the others and just take pleasure in finding out that, whilst you might not be very good at something, you're better than you thought you would be going into it. Personal example - I used to do trampoline. Now, if we were sitting down face to face, this is about the time you'd burst out laughing. Possibly. You seem like the polite sort, so you'd probably manage to put on a good poker face but inside you'd be laughing. Trust me. But that's OK because you'd be in good company - I'd be laughing along with you. Grace, natural poise, agility - all of these things I have not got. I'm just plain not one of nature's gymnasts. Which is one of many reasons why I used to do trampoline. But that's OK. I went from bouncing randomly over the trampoline bed, to more-or-less keeping in one plane when bouncing, to doing a few basic moves, to turning simple somersaults. That's about as far as I got but it was way, way further than I expected to get when I started and it was satisfying knowing that I had managed to improve even if I'd pretty much found my limit - or at any rate, the point where serious improvement was going to require a boat load more work. More to the point, I enjoyed it. I didn't get too far but I had a ton of fun along the way, made some friends and in general, do not look upon the whole experience as a waste of time simply because I'm no longer doing it. Plus I got a couple of coaching certificates and found that I could teach other people to trampoline. Actually I could teach them stuff that was a step beyond anything I could do myself. That was fun too. TL:DR. Never be afraid to try new stuff. Don't worry about not being that good at it - you'll almost certainly be better than you could have imagined. And maybe one day you'll find that thing that you really are good at and want to take to the next level.

I'm fairly sure they're a kerbal thing to provide a gameplay workaround if you need a bit more electrical power for early spacecraft before you've unlocked batteries or solar panels. I guess you could run an alternator off the turbopumps in real life but it would make the engine a lot more complicated for negligible benefit and probably make the turbopump (and therefore the whole engine) less efficient. Interestingly, battery powered electric turbopumps are a thing, so it works perfectly well in reverse. Edit: I am not a rocket engineer, so this is just my best guess.

Wha...? Who...? How...? Wha?? *KSK folds in on himself and doesn't say anything terribly coherent for a while.* *blinks* *wipes away drool* OK, what in the name of ВЯЕZНЙЕVS ТФЕИДILS ДИD ВЕЦУ-ВЦТТОЙ FLЦГГ just happened? More reading required.

Woot for the thought - eventual execution at author's discretion naturally. As an alternative, KSC could always use ReMorse code to signal Intrepid. ReMorse code is (of course) backwards Morse code which ought to be confusing enough anyway and all the more so for Kerbulans. Because.... Wait for it... Kerbulans do not know remorse. I'll be here all night folks. I recommend the soup of the day - it's oignom.

So what is the kerbal equivalent of pig latin? Kowgreek? Hattay ouldway ethay Erbulanskay or.... That would confuse the Kerbulans. Heck it confuses me.

I disagree. Overhauling the rocket part artwork is long overdue and with any luck it's going to be more than an art pass anyway, if we're getting three versions of each engine to play with and (fingers crossed) upgradeable engines too. New game features, new scope for creative designs, all wrapped up in a prettier box. I can't see any downsides to that.

It's all personal opinion of course but the current Poodle makes a pretty lousy Apollo SPS too, aesthetically at least. A compact Rhino would be a better fit. Assuming that I'm understanding compact correctly of course, which is 'fits onto the next sized down fuel tank to the standard version', and so the compact Rhino will fit onto a 2.5m tank.

Couldn't agree more. I've expressed concerns about the rocket part overhaul on other threads and I'm very happy to admit that I was wrong! The engine designs look great anyway and having the regular and boat-tailed versions of each is inspired. A simple (in hindsight) and effective way of letting people pick between a more rugged, early space program aesthetic, or going for someting sleeker if that's their preference. Top quality job @Porkjet!