KSK

Nice world building! I enjoyed reading that. And speaking personally - who cares about the necropost in this case. It's not like this thread was particularly contentious or that it's gone out of date with new game versions.

Nothing to fear in a straight shooting war, sure. Which is lovely if your opponents choose to engage you in a straight shooting war. Which, not being idiots, they wouldn't. A 21st century jet fighter wouldn't have much to fear from an Me109 but 21st century America can still be badly hurt by the undercover application of good old WW2 high explosives. I'm sure I don't have to point out the obvious modern example of those kind of tactics. You're also assuming that the rest of the world is going to happily stand by at let the US keep it's 75 year tech lead. For that matter, you're assuming that maintaining a 21st military force in a 1940s global economy and technological base is even possible. Worst case scenario, some faction will decide that if it can't beat the US in a conventional war, maybe a little NBC will get the job done. No that wouldn't be remotely sensible but when you're faced with a 75 year military disparity...*shrugs*. I think you're also placing rather too much faith in Europe helping out in any way possible. Even today, Europe is far from a monolithic entity - witness the distinctly mixed support for the last Gulf conflict. Immediately post WW2, particularly in the face of an overwhelmingly superior US, you're as likely to unite Europe against you as for you. Finally, what happens once you've 'won'? Spend the rest of your lives maintaining the Pax Americana in your resentful and uncooperative conquered territories? Because, if modern precedent is anything to go by, it's when the straight shooting war stops that events go south in a big way.

I can think of at least one historical precedent where that assumption went horribly wrong. And even if it was a case of USA uber alles, all that would accomplish is to stoke global resentment and bring about today's political landscape (based more on a fear of extremist groups than Russian tanks) that much sooner. Umm. Yay?

Excellent - thanks Kasper and thanks IPS for the speedy reply. Good to know I'm not just going nuts!

Hmm, iPad screenshots are easy - who knew. OK, this is a shot of the top of this thread.

Hi Kasper - thanks for the reply. No screenshots I'm afraid, as I only have a tablet to hand and so can't test this on another browser either. It works fine on my phone browser but of course, that's just getting the mobile version of the site. Briefly though, the home page looks normal. If I click through into any of the sub-forums, all the thread titles appear in vertical text. Clicking through again, the thread title is again displayed vertically but underneath, the thread content is displayed normally. Not sure if that helps? Hope it's a bit clearer than my previous post. By way of troubleshooting, I've tried clearing my browser cache and history but that didn't make any difference. Also, this only started happening last night - the forum was rendering fine up until then.

Hi, I'm having a problem with the forum. If I'm browsing threads the text appears vertically in a single column. If I follow a link to a specific post, e.g. through an alert or the 'last posted' link for a given thread, everything looks fine. Any ideas what could be causing this or how to fix it? I'm viewing the forum on whatever browser comes with iOS 6 but haven't had this problem before. Thanks.

Could that possibly be a poke at a certain popular virtual reality game? And I liked the cereal that only Calvin could love. Although if it puts Chadvey's voice in your head it's probably best avoided! Finally reckon I've got a handle on the the timeline too - am I right in thinking that is is a prequel that's run into the back of its sequel and is now overlapping it?

Looking forward to the fourth film - gonna have me a whale of a time. Ahem. Sorry. Anyway, back on track, the other problem with filmmakers venturing off the beaten track for a given franchise is that they tend to get an internet's worth of bile thrown at them for the privilege and mixed reviews to boot. And if you try anything as dangerously radical as doing a reboot where your main protagonists are *gasp* female, well there are no limits to the nerd rage that will get flung at you. So it's no real surprise that they play it safe, stick to the formula and rake in the cash. You only need to look at The Force Awakens for an object lesson in 'why fan service works'. It's exactly the same with games. There are genres, there are conventions for those genres and if you dare to innovate on them you can look forward to your player forum turning into yet another toxic internet sinkhole. TL:DR. If you want something original and new, don't go to a franchise movie. Sadly, that can be tricky in some genres.

In addition to adsii1970's comments, there's also a perfectly good alternative to acquiring the necessary skills yourself - find somebody else who has them and team up. Pretty much every successful innovation needed the details people to build it but, equally importantly, needed the big picture people to see why it was needed in the first place and inspire others to come together and make it happen. To use a suitably spaceflight example, I'm sure Elon Musk knows a fair bit about rockets. But more importantly he's put together a team of actual rocket scientists to do all the detailed work and then inspired all the machinists, concrete pourers, cooks, accountants, janitors and what have you to come together and make SpaceX in the first place. Then he inspired them to hang together at the start where nothing ever quite worked and they were on the verge of going bust. A lot of innovation is also about thinking out of the box - OK so we have this widget here, common as muck, everyone knows about them. But what happens if we add this and then use the two of them together for that..? Maybe something special would happen.

Plenty of ways. One of the easiest might be to go to college (assuming you're not already) and speak to your technology transfer office. They should be able to help you, or if they're not willing to help you directly, to give you some advice and put you in touch with the right kinds of people to speak to if you want to try and make a go of your idea yourself. Yes, you'll need investment. Yes those investors will want to see a return on that investment. Unless you plan to start making these things in your garage, that's the way the world works. Your investors will essentially be taking on all the risk involved in bringing your idea to market and they're going to want appropriate compensation for doing so. On the other hand it's not like people never got rich by having VCs invest in their companies. Before doing anything though, I'd recommend putting a business plan together. Taking a long hard look at some of the questions on this thread - and coming up with realistic answers, rather than just 'rule of cool' handwaving - would be a good start. If nothing else that will tell you whether you really want to be dumping all your time and energy into this project.

Hydrogen power is great if you can a) produce it in an environmentally benign manner and b) figure out a way to store it. Going back five years or so when the 'hydrogen economy' was the latest buzzword, most hydrogen was produced by steam reforming natural gas. Which kind of defeated the main selling point of hydrogen power and probably wouldn't be an option anyway in the scenario Red Iron Crown had in mind. Although you could, in principle, produce hydrogen by electrolysis using some form of non-fossil fuel reliant energy source to power your electrolyser. It would be expensive but if there wasn't a sensible alternative it would happen. Storage is the killer though. You've basically got a choice between conventional high pressure gas cylinders which are heavy and don't hold much hydrogen for their weight; cryogenic storage in (presumably) adequately insulated tanks, which still don't hold a great deal of hydrogen for their size; some fancy physisorption or chemisorption technology where you try and store hydrogen in the gaps in another molecular structure. Think intercalation electrodes for lithium ion batteries but intercalating hydrogen rather than lithium. In other words you've got a choice between two lousy solutions and one - so far - theoretical solution that hasn't, as far as I know, made it past the 'interesting demo' stage. Frankly, the best way of storing hydrogen would be to convert it into hydrocarbons.

And don't I know about those... Take all the time you need - we'll still be waiting when the words start coming again. In the meantime of course we have another 'easy' chapter or two to look forward to!

Take a peek at the Fanworks Library - there's a section in there on songs and poetry. The one I had in mind though was this: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/69289-The-Dream-The-Epic-of-Gilgaman-Kerman-as-recorded-on-clay-tablets by AdmiralAndre. One of my favourite fan works actually. Sorry about the clunky linky - I'm writing this on a small tablet with fat fingers - a precision editing machine it is not.

All solid advice Steuben but, if you don't mind me saying, quite a lot of it is probably looking a bit too far forward here. If TheEpicSquared gets to the end of August and has caught the writing bug then it all makes a lot of sense. In the meantime, quick tips to get started are required I think, if such actually exist. Also I think some of your advice makes a lot more sense once you've actually sat down to write something. Maybe it's just the way I work but I'm fairly convinced that I could have read 'how to write' books until I was blue in the face but much of what I was reading wouldn't really have clicked with me without that initial experience of sitting down and banging out some words.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of writing. "Go to it," it says "and good luck." OK, on a more serious note, deciding to start is half the battle. Actually starting is the other half. After that, all you need to do is keep going. Try and begin with a 'hook' (more on that in a minute) to bring new readers into the story, then keep the words flowing to keep them interested. Don't be discouraged if you don't get many (or any) comments to start with, this doesn't tend to be a high-comment forum (with one notable exception) for fanfics. Keep writing and they will come. For that reason though, make it a story that you want to tell, in a format that you want to work in. Prose, script-with-screenshots, graphic novel, or whatever. It doesn't matter, provided it's something you're comfortable with. For the record, I can point you to excellent examples of pretty much any format on this forum, up to and including epic poem. That 'hook' that I mentioned is probably the hardest part of the whole thing. There are quite a few career stories on the forum, so starting yours off with some kind of twist will help to make it stand out. I can't tell you what that twist will be - you're the writer after all - but it doesn't have to be a big one. Maybe the main protagonist isn't one of the usual four? Maybe we're seeing your career game from an unusual point of view, possibly not a kerbonaut's point of view? One last suggestion - if you only have until August, I would suggest keeping the story quite focused. Pick a place you want to get to in your career, pick a starting point, describe the missions that got you from one to the other, then stop. Maybe add an epilogue which hints at what came next. Hope this helps.

Some questions and observations. 1. Why all the fiddling around humidifying and dehumidifying the air to start with? Not sure how you gain from that. 2. Check the CO2 phase diagram. You can compress air as much as you want but you won't get any CO2 out unless you also cool it down to around minus sixty Celsius. Even then the pitifully low partial pressure of CO2 in air is going to make the whole process horribly inefficient. 3. For producing syngas, you might want to consider just going with the reverse water-gas shift reaction (CO2 + H2 ----> CO + H2O), take the water out (which you'll want to do anyway to drive the equilibrium of the WGSR the way you want it to go) and mix your carbon monoxide with hydrogen. 4. Efficiently extracting CO2 from air is a tough problem. Solve that one and you've just made the world a better place. 5. Reacting hydrogen with alcohols is apparently harder than it looks. I presume that it could be done with an appropriate catalyst at the right temperature. I'm not sure what you gain from it though as your end products are alkane and water, neither of which are as useful as the alcohol and both of which can be more cheaply made through other processes.

Man you're on a roll at the moment. And that ending was particularly ominous... Incidentally, I think I've found Tercella's coffee machine in our holiday apartment. Bright red, more complicated than I'm used to, makes excellent coffee - and sounds like a Converter with mismatched ducting fans. I'm presuming that left over HTP motors don't figure anywhere in the design though.

Wow - I think this is the first time my stuff has ever been linked to from the Add-ons forum. Thanks for the shout-out theonegalen! For those that don't fancy wading through all of First Flight, you could just try these chapters: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/30718-first-flight/&do=findComment&comment=510059 http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/30718-first-flight/&do=findComment&comment=605319 The first one describes one of the kermol villages that theonegalen mentioned and the second one goes into a bit of detail about how the basic kermol hut has been expanded into a lot of mainstream kerbal architecture. Many, many internet points to any 3D modeller who takes a stab at the Capital Building! And if you don't mind mass spoilers but want to know a bit more about these 'kermol' and why they're so important (in my version of Kerbin at any rate ), you could try this chapter: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/30718-first-flight/&do=findComment&comment=1061716, which is basically an overview of kerbal history and how modern day kerbal society has evolved.

A couple of those don't look quite right. For the first one, I'm not sure you'd get sulphur trioxide formed preferentially over sulphur dioxide but it's easy to rebalance. 2 Na2S2O5 + 3 O2 = 2 Na2SO4 + 4 SO2 Likewise for the third one, I don't think you'd get N2O3 as a product. My gut feel was that it would probably break down to nitrogen and oxygen and Wikipedia confirms. So... 2 Na2S2O5 + 4 KNO3 ----> 4 KNaS04 + 2 N2 + 3O2 Those are all pretty stable reaction products. Getting oxygen out as a reactant is weird, although you do have a lot of spare oxygen in that system. Maybe you'd get some nitrogen oxides out instead, just not N2O3 For the reactions involving iron oxide, I have no idea what you'd get out. The iron oxide is either going to be inert or acting as a catalyst (hence my uncertainty about reaction products) but you're already at FeIII and potassium nitrate isn't a strong enough oxidiser to move it to FeIV, so the iron oxide isn't going be participating in a net reaction.

*blushes* I got the reference in seconds - and then spent more seconds wondering if I should be worried about getting the reference in seconds. Then I disappeared in a puff of involuted logic.

Is mining worth it. Well, I haven't done much of it myself but I've read a lot by somebody who has. Right @Kuzzter? You see mining lets you build stuff like this...and run missions to Jool with it. And just so you know, this is the Jool 5 challenge done with a fleet carrier.

And more importantly - is this his sofa? Nor am I. Molecular biologists are even worse when it comes to naming proteins. Take Ring ligases for example. Important proteins and I always figured the Ring part referred to their structure in some way. Nope - it's an acronym for Really Interesting New Gene. And then there's this famous paper. Scientists enjoy a joke just like anybody else. Heck judges do as well - some judgements can be wonderfully snarky whilst also being exceedingly polite and formal.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

Yeah, so I'm picking the most trivial detail out of an otherwise moving and very atmospheric chapter but - I see what you did here. And Anastasia is back!