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Everything posted by KSK
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How to reduce the number of posts wrongly placed in KSP Discussion
KSK replied to Deddly's topic in Kerbal Network
Is it worth trying to implement a 'wizard' of sorts by reordering the sub-forums? There's a also a lot of relatively dead space at the top of the forum at the moment - reading from top to bottom, General Discussion is the first useful looking sub-forum you come to and I'm wondering if that's why it tends to be a dumping ground. In which case, re-purposing or removing the white space, to expose more of the sub-forum list without scrolling might help, as well as trying to filter out the more common misplaced post types from the General Discussion forum by making sure that the relevant sub-forums appear above it in the list. Purely to kick off the discussion (so feel free to shoot any of these ideas down in flames), I would: Remove Squad's advert or relegate it to a more appropriate sub-forum such as Add-on Releases or Add-on Development, where potential developers are likely to be hanging out. Move the General section (Announcements and the Daily Kerbal) into the sidebar with the Devblogs. The General section definitely needs to stay since it's the Voice of Squad on this forum but purely from the number of posts it attracts, I would suggest that it's not the first port of call for most visitors. Rejig the General KSP section to include - in order - the following sub-forums: Welcome Aboard, Gameplay Questions and Tutorials, Suggestions and Development Discussion, General Discussion. Insert a new Community Content section to hold the Spacecraft Exchange, Challenges and Mission ideas and Fan Works sub-forums. Rename the Gameplay and Technical Support section as simply the Technical Support section. Everything else can stay where it is since it's less immediately relevant to new players. -
Whispers of the Kraken (Epilogue: Revelations of the Kraken)
KSK replied to CatastrophicFailure's topic in KSP Fan Works
Or Val foils this assassination attempt but can't prevent that stabbing for whatever reason. Heck, given the tone of this story to date, it could be Val herself that does the deed, after finally losing her battle with the darkness inside. Then again, this is also a CatastrophicFailure story - that dot could equally well be a cat distracting laser pointer, or a reflection from a totally-not-Pokemon toy. -
Stock "Fairings" vs Procedural Fairings
KSK replied to AlamoVampire's topic in KSP1 Suggestions & Development Discussion
Haven't we already flogged this horse to death, buried it in soft peat for a year, recycled it as firelighters, ignited a fire with said firelighters and then, for an encore, perfected the art of molecular nanoassembly and reconstituted the poor beast from the ashes? -
Well any publicity is good publicity I guess. With that said, that 'top ten of all time' is farcical and heavily skewed towards a couple of game types. In my opinion of course.
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Whispers of the Kraken (Epilogue: Revelations of the Kraken)
KSK replied to CatastrophicFailure's topic in KSP Fan Works
Folks - could we get back to posting stuff that's a little more related to the story. Thanks. -
It's back! Big time. An awful lot to digest there but one thing in particular caught my eye... In the words of the great John D. Clarke - I recommend a good pair of running shoes. Or possibly a trundle. Or a train ticket. For everyone. On the off-chance that anyone is unfamiliar with the chemistry concerned, try a quick internet search for FOOF... For once, the Urban Dictionary definition, whilst completely unconnected (and definitely not Forum Friendly) also seems fairly relevant.
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Whispers of the Kraken (Epilogue: Revelations of the Kraken)
KSK replied to CatastrophicFailure's topic in KSP Fan Works
Time for Val to stand, be true and remember the face of her father. And influencing somebody whose work I greatly admire - it doesn't get much better than that as a writer. Thanks. -
I always thought justified paragraphs were OK for formal reports but weren't supposed to be used for prose? I'll freely confess that I have no idea where that came from though or whether it's remotely correct. However, I do wonder if full justification might contribute to the 'wall o' text' problem on smaller screens?
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"Debunker" says Falcon 9 does not go into space.
KSK replied to Scotius's topic in Science & Spaceflight
Who cares. The guy is either a troll, willfully misinformed, a conspiracy theorist or a combination of all three. It's not worth arguing with any of those mindsets since small details like 'facts' and 'logic' rarely figure in the discussion and are almost never persuasive. Thank you for the link but I refuse to endorse it by watching. -
Whispers of the Kraken (Epilogue: Revelations of the Kraken)
KSK replied to CatastrophicFailure's topic in KSP Fan Works
Actually, I think Val is about to find her inner Kyle Reese. Assuming that the above quote is foreshadowing. But Gene though. That's hard to take. I know they're completely different stories and I'm in no way claiming any credit for this but I can't help seeing the happy bunch of rocketeers that Chadvey knew so well, as a mirror of my own KIS. Seeing that dream be brutally dismantled and then systematically eradicated, piece by piece is particularly tough for this reader. -
Storm Clouds - A KSP Story (With added skulduggery and explosions)
KSK replied to peadar1987's topic in KSP Fan Works
Nice aircraft! Can't see too much of the Elbas-19 but I do like Matrick's sportsplane. Enjoyed the update too. Matrick is certainly living up to his reputation: "Nobody had flown higher or faster than Matrick Otreised. Only a few in the world had the skill and knowledge to even come close." Speaking personally, I think you could have merged those first two sections into one without running into 'monster wall of text' territory. Then again, posting large chunks of text at a time is how I work, so I've probably got a slightly skewed outlook on that. You'll be the best judge of what feels long enough to post! -
More on Val in a couple of chapters which will hopefully clear things up a bit. And you're right - international flight is still a thing but it's being increasingly disrupted by the heightened tensions. Air passengers get a bit nervous at the sight of fighter jets out of the window and for their part, the various border security forces get very nervous about civilian air traffic. It's unlikely that anything will go wrong but it just takes one mistake... That's one of the reasons Wernher was sent over on a private jet. Not to mention that, right now, VIPs don't get much bigger than cutting edge rocket scientists assigned to a potentially major part of Project Starseed. There's also a certain amount of 'waste anything but time' kicking in, so private jet travel for key KSA personnel is less of an issue than it might have been. Finally, private jets are well... private. Which is helpful if you're reviewing highly confidential briefing notes on nuclear reactors. Especially compact, high powered nuclear reactors. In fairness the risk of a random air passenger even understanding what most Wernher's notes meant was pretty low, but the KNSA isn't noted for its willingness to take risks.
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I don't think you're being old fashioned and in any case, if that's the 'by the book' standard, then it's a good habit for writers to get into, although it's not one that I'm consistent with myself. Speaking personally, it depends on format. I find that indented paragraphs look very odd on-screen, so I tend to go with skipping a space between them and likewise between speakers when I'm writing dialogue. However, I've also converted the first two sections of First Flight to ebook format and found they needed extensive reformatting because skipping a space between paragraphs just looks just as odd on the page as properly indented paragraphs look on the screen. I don't think that really answered your question did it?
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It's not a matter of defending anything, it's a matter of basic decency and respect for the dead. Yes, the Apollo 1 astronauts knew the risks and (I don't believe) would have wanted Apollo 1 to stop the Moon program or (in some cases) space exploration in general. That's still no excuse to use Apollo 1 for a cheap one-liner in a video game or anywhere else. Edit: I'm sure it wasn't intended as such, but it can clearly be misinterpreted in that way. Fallacious argument on two counts. One - leaving a mistake uncorrected for a given length of time says nothing at all about whether that mistake should be corrected in future. Two, most video games from Pac-Man to Call of Duty are about more or less cartoonized violence. That doesn't mean that video games can't cross lines. I can think of several examples where various scenes, or allowed player actions in a game have drawn large amounts of criticism for various reasons, especially when torture or murdering civilians was involved.
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One of the more interesting 'FTL' drives I've read about is the Shapirov drive (never actually referred to as such but I need a name for it!) briefly described in Isaac Asimov's Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain. For those that haven't read it, or seen it, the original Fantastic Voyage was basically a cold war novel in which the balance of power was maintained by the ability to miniaturise things rather than by nuclear weapons. An eminent scientist on one side makes a breakthrough in miniaturisation physics and defects to the other side. Unfortunately, during his extraction, he suffers a brain injury which a) puts him in a coma and b) can only be treated from inside the body. Cue, a miniaturised sub and it's crew sent in to the scientist's body for a spot of microsurgery. Asimov wrote the book of the film but was never really satisfied with the handwavium powered miniaturisation device. Fantastic Voyage II was his own novel, based on a related premise but with, amongst other things, a much more coherent explanation of miniaturisation and its ramifications. It was pretty much a classic example of 0111narwhalz's seventh point - the physics were clearly slightly bunk but they were internally consistent and their ramifications drove a lot of the plot. There is a point to this. Miniaturisation in FV II was supposed to work by reducing the size of Planck's constant over a finite volume of space. It was energy intensive, inefficient and metastable which made it very dangerous for a variety of reasons. Shapirov (the Soviet scientist who developed the technique in the first place) had a theory that Planck's constant and the speed of light were linked. Decrease one and the other should increase to match. The problems with miniaturisation arose because the two constants were uncoupled. Figure out a way of coupling them and firstly miniaturisation becomes an easy, stable and energy efficient process and secondly, faster than light travel becomes possible. Or rather the speed of light becomes arbitrarily high such that a suitably miniaturised starship can travel faster than 3x10^8 m/s without violating relativity.
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I don't think it was anybody's to keep. Besides, Isildur was a proud and mighty king in his own right and a Numenorean to boot (the elder race of Men - think Aragorn only much, much more so.) Taking the Ring from Isildur by force would have been physically difficult even for Elrond. Basically, if Isildur wasn't going to give it up voluntarily, forcing its destruction wasn't going to happen. Just to make things that little bit tougher, the Great Rings afforded power according to the strength of their wielder - and, I'm guessing, exerted a corresponding hold over their wielder. Remember the bit in the film, where Galadriel refuses to accept the Ring from Frodo because she knows it would corrupt her? Bilbo giving up the ring of his own free will was unprecedented (and if you're being uncharitable, another cheap way of moving the story on) and was only possible because he was a hobbit (who are repeatedly called out in the books for being tougher than they look) and because he wasn't otherwise powerful. Isildur was extremely powerful and the chance of him relinquishing the Ring was essentially zero. If somebody had managed to kill Isildur (for the greater good of taking the Ring from him to destroy it), then my guess is that the killing to knowingly gain ownership of the ring is likely to be a rather quick way of bringing yourself under its influence, thus swapping one problem for another.
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Thanks! I'm curious though - what picture did you get when you joined the dots?
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I can relate to both of those. I view posting without post-post editing in the same way that I view playing KSP without F5 or F9. It sounds great, I can see the attraction but as a practical matter it remains but an aspiration.
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Can't agree enough with this, especially that last sentence. I would throw in use of paragraphs and (going back to CatastrophicFailure's post), more-or-less correct presentation of dialogue, too. If I'm commenting on a piece of writing, I'll usually refrain from spelling and grammar nits unless they're too bad to ignore or the author has specifically asked for them. (There's also a certain element of stones and glasshouses here). However, I'll almost certainly give a gentle hint that breaking a huge chunk o' text into paragraphs, or that starting a new paragraph each time you change speaker, would help readability.
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Well alrighty then. I'm sorry, I'll stop now. I've always done my writing off-line, mainly because the old forum used to eat my posts if I took too long composing them. Even then, there's invariably something I miss and which needs fixing once I post it. I think there's something about taking a chapter off one screen and putting it on a different screen - it moves the words around just enough that it's no longer quite the same familiar text, so parts that I've been unconcsciously skipping over during proofreading are suddenly back in my face again.
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So if a spacebar needs a space, what does a crowbar need?
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Storm Clouds - A KSP Story (With added skulduggery and explosions)
KSK replied to peadar1987's topic in KSP Fan Works
I imagine that feels a bit like driving down a steep incline just as a trailer careens past you. "Hey, that one looks just like my trailer..." Nice start, good 'hook', looking forward to the next chapter! -
The tech tree progression is ridiculous
KSK replied to Wjolcz's topic in KSP1 Suggestions & Development Discussion
Not remotely. What I would like is a tech tree that lets me start at Sputnik (or Vostok) and work my way through to building the ISS without having to detour through Apollo. -
The tech tree progression is ridiculous
KSK replied to Wjolcz's topic in KSP1 Suggestions & Development Discussion
There's a line from "A Few Good Men" which is not forum friendly enough to quote but which sums up my feelings nicely right now. Put another way, that resounding slap you just heard was me facepalming. Hard. Oh - and the rest of your post was spot on. Thanks. -
The tech tree progression is ridiculous
KSK replied to Wjolcz's topic in KSP1 Suggestions & Development Discussion
I'm not trying to be contrary for the sake of it but actually, I think changing the tech tree layout could help, especially the 'multiple parallel lines' style of tech tree suggested at the start of this thread. As a very crude example, imagine having a 'science line' in which Tier 0 gives you a thermometer and Goo, Tier 1 gives you the Science Jr and barometer, Tier 2 gives you the accelerometer, Tier 3 gives you the MPL and Tier 4 gives you AN other instrument (the gravity scanner is quite high tech and appears later). I can now spend a comparatively small number of science points and build myself quite a tricked out unmanned probe. I'll need some other parts of course, so I can't focus too heavily on a single line of research but neither do I have to get all the way down to Tiers 7 and 8 before getting to the interesting science stuff. It's not greatly different to what I expect most players already do (does anyone go through the tech tree tier by tier?) just a bit more streamlined and player-controllable. Want to start crewed? Not a problem - you'll need some parts from the Rocketry line and to have opened at least the first node of the Capsules and Habitation line. This will probably require a bit of Science Grinding at KSC, much like now. At this stage you can entirely ignore batteries (as you can in stock at the moment), so you can ignore the Electricals line altogether. Want to start uncrewed? Again you'll need the Rocketry line but you'll want to open the first node of the Electricals line to make sure you have a battery and possibly the first node of the Science line so that your sounding rocket can earn you some science points. Starting with planes. No sweat. Ignore Rocketry altogether and go for Flight techs instead.