KSK

Why am I getting the feeling that Bill has just spotted a new opportunity... But that's probably a topic for the main thread.

I thought a Kerbulan torpedo would be a small, single seater capsule with a Klaw mounted on one end and a suitably sized SRB stuck on the other. The capsule interior is decorated with carefully selected photographs of Kerbulans being kind to cute fluffy animals, helping their enemies' grandmothers across the road, handing over all surplus Brownball 'equipment' to the referee when politely requested to do so, and other images chosen to send the capsule inhabitant into an incandescent berserking rage. Upon arrival at the target vessel, the Klaw chews through the hull, the capsule hatch pops off and the payload is released. Said payload is now in the correct frame of mind to single-handedly lay waste to anything and everything within the enemy ship, including crew, ancillary equipment, and minor bulkheads and load bearing members. (For the avoidance of doubt, this post is not a request, suggestion nor expectation of any sort regarding the Kerbfleet universe. Ideally, it should not be taken remotely seriously and will cheerfully be deleted at Kuzzter's request.)

Nothing earthshattering I'm afraid. My own efforts at a graphic novel page are lurking on this thread somewhere and it's rather less than stellar. If it's any comfort though, it took me an evening to put together (in Keynote) so I completely sympathise about the time it's taking you to do your comic. I guess it becomes easier and quicker with practice? I think I remember Kuzzter saying that he has a library of kerbal images that he can draw on when he needs a particular pose or expression? I would think that would take a while to put together but would save a lot of time in the long run. One thing I would say though is - go Sandbox. You don't need to use all the high end parts (the reader probably won't ever see the inside of your VAB) but you'll have immediate access to all the fiddly little parts you might need, without having to slog through the tech tree first. The tech tree isn't particularly logical when it comes to ordering parts by technology progression anyway - I don't think a ladder (for example ) is an absurd thing to put on a very low tech spacecraft but it does take a lot of tech tree grinding to unlock them.

It's no bother. I'm fairly sure that some forum sites let you attach files to posts but sadly KSP isn't one of them. Even for image files you need to host them somewhere else - Imgur is a popular choice - and then link to them from your forum post. And seriously, if you wanted to take this off-forum, I'd be happy to read your work and offer what critique I can. Wouldn't be any trouble.

Yep - it's a good community here. Welcome aboard and glad it's somewhere you feel comfortable enough to share your work! Silly question but is it a pdf you can extract text from or just a scanned image? Starting a thread for it might be awkward if it's not a kerbal story but I'd happily read chunks of text sent by PM. Or drop me a note and I'll send you an email address you could use to send me the pdf.

Ooohh - that's gotta hurt. Gonna take some serious cheeseburger trance to walk that one off.

I can easily imagine intelligent life evolving on an aquatic world. I can imagine that life developing civilization and culture. Art, symbolic representation of concepts, an oral tradition, philosophy, hunting, farming, certain sciences, pharmacopeias - all of those could be developed by an intelligent aquatic species. A technological civilization on the other hand would be significantly more difficult at least, as James Kerman has already pointed out, human style technological civilization. Certain branches of science and key scientific concepts would also be an awful lot harder to develop. Astronomy is the obvious one but a lot of classical mechanics would be pretty tricky too. Working out Newton's 1st Law in an environment where things demonstrably do stop moving if you stop pushing them, would be even more impressive than it was for Newton.

I'm not sure I completely agree with that. Read the mission journals for Apollo 10 sometime, especially the part where Stafford and Cernan are heading down to the Moon. Likewise for Conrad and Bean on Apollo 12. Or, on the other side of the Cold War, Gagarin's radio reports for Vostok 1. I would argue that the brevity only really kicked in when there was danger or when something needed doing urgently - both of which scenarios were hardly uncommon in early spaceflight (or I guess, modern day spaceflight). Besides - that's astronauts. No reason why kerbonauts should be the same. That's a good point about journalistic style vs astronaut style though. Lots of scope here for presenting the same mission through three different lenses: the relatively dry, technical stuff over the air-to-ground loop, the sensationalist newspaper reporting, and the personal commentary written up in one of the kerbonaut's personal logs.

Yay - it's back! And it keeps getting better! I enjoyed the view from Mission Control and Joe's slide rule made me laugh, as did Jeb's speeding tickets.

@Motokid600 and @The Yellow Dart So much for thinking aloud. Thanks for the answers both!

Just thinking aloud but would you need actuators on the landing legs? Make them spring loaded (with decently stiff springs so you don't end up with wet noodle legs), have the upper pivot point above the booster's centre of gravity and presto - a self compensating system? Edit - and is it just me, or are the cold-gas thrusters at the top of the booster firing? They could help keep it stable, at least for a little while after touchdown.

Grats! I remember much cheering and jumping and down when I finally stuck that landing too. Taking Jeb down the ladder, planting the flag, jumping about in low gravity... yeah that was one of my all time best videogame moments. Onwards and upwards!

Depends what you're docking. For a complex station or large ship, those 2 degrees can make the thing look ugly or even mean that some parts won't fit together properly.

Zaphod's such a hoopy frood that he doesn't need a towel.

Oof - I jumped that particular shark a looong time ago. With that said, I tend to agree with Jim, especially as I'm running multiple plotlines in parallel in my fic. I can usually find a good place to stop with one of them, maybe swap over onto another for a section or two, just to give the reader a sense that events are happening in parallel and then stop. My chapters tend to end up somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 words apiece, so quite a bit longer than Ehco's rule of thumb. Apparently an average paperback page length is about 350-400 words depending on typesetting, so that makes my chapters anywhere from 9 to 14 pages long.

The article is understandably light on actual numbers but apparently this stuff is good for blocking gamma rays and neutrons. If we ever do get around to seriously using NTR powered spacecraft, it sounds like a useful material to build your shadow shield from.

Thanks GKSP and welcome to the thread! Good to hear that you've gotten as far as page 24. f I'm reading that right, then I think you've got some of my favourite parts still to come - hope they work for you as well.

Exactly so. I'm not saying that things won't go wrong but KIS management have all worked on the production line (such as it is), at some point, which has kept any 'us and them' mentality to a minimum whilst avoiding Go fever. KIS rockets launch when the engineers are happy, end of. It's perhaps a little cynical but the 'we all build them, we all fly them' approach has also helped a lot. Nothing helps keep your mind on quality control like the sure and certain knowledge that you or your mates could be going up on the rocket that you're building. From way back in chapter 17: Jeb took a swig of coffee. “All I can say is that everyone building Moho 3 is sweating the details at least as much as the flight control team." He looked at Wilford thoughtfully. “I was watching Ribory and Seanan building the heat shield for Camrie's flight. Everything looked fine to me but Ribory had obviously spotted something. She drilled out the entire section of shield that she'd spent the last two hours on, picked up that caulking gun and just set to work again." Jeb swirled his mug absently as he went on. “I saw Ordun machining the mounts for the Moho 3 wiring looms and they were a work of art. Then he polished them just to make sure. I was curious because these were loom mounts for Kerm's sake - there was no need to make them to those tolerances, never mind shine them up to the point where you could use them as a mirror. Ordun just looked at me. 'There's a bunch of things that could go wrong with this machine, Jeb' he said 'but I can tell you that none of them are going to happen because of parts that I've made.'" That's no guard beast incidentally, but it does look like a fine haunch of baked creva or perhaps roast kaya.

First generation biofuels - obtained from plant oils or sugars have the problems that Nibb31 mentioned. Second generation fuels (derived from lignocellulosic material such as woody crops or plant waste in general) are possibly more promising but harder to manufacture economically. Lignin is a pain to deal with but unfortunately it's also what gives plant stems much of their structural strength. You can breed or engineer low-lignin plants for improved digestibility, but there's a fine balance between a plant stem that's more easily processed into biofuel and a plant stem that's too weak to grow properly. Lot's of research going on at the moment, both into process conditions and underlying biology of biofuel crops. Even with second generation fuels, I suspect there's going to be a balance between using plant waste for fuel and using it as a raw material (ploughed back into the soil) for growing new crops and maintaining soil quality.

Couple of ideas off the top of my head. Revealing the connections (if any) between those three characters could drive quite a lot of your story, so what the connections are is up to you - don't want to put words in your mouth there. How you reveal the connections is a different matter but for some examples: Investigative journalist digs up Wernher's tragic/murky/heroic past as scientist for the other side. Jeb gives series of personal interviews after shooting to fame as a kerbonaut. Gossip magazine makes scandalous allegations about Jeb, which are refuted in your more serious newspaper. Whistleblower leaks information about one of Kirrim's colleagues, which eventually leads to details about Kirrim (and whatever backstory you plan for him) being published too. Wernher does von-Braun style articles, on the future of spaceflight,for a magazine or newspaper. Wernher ghostwrites a regular column for whatever your version of Popular Mechanics is in-story. One of the ground crew at the KSC writes a diary which becomes the latest publishing sensation, appearing in respectable newspapers across Kerbin. I'm sure there are plenty more you could think of. Almost all of the above could be serialised if need be to suit your AAR. Edit. As for the character development - it doesn't need to be all about the backstory, although that's a great start. Show us snippets of your characters lives away from KSC. Do they have families? Hobbies? Pet hates? Whatever it is, if not's something that you'd expect the character in question to do, or be interested in, then so much the better. Maybe Jeb sneaks away from KSC every second Munday for reasons unknown. After much unwarranted speculation that he's a turncoat and a spy, it turns out he just has a secret taste for musical theatre and is sneaking away for rehearsals. The story arc finishes with a review of the breakthrough performance by Jeb's amateur dramatics group.

I don't actually have a problem with inertial dampers in a setting that posits faster-than-light travel, especially if that's based on a Star Trek style warp drive. All (yeah, bear with me here) you need for an inertial damper is an artificial gravity field inside your ship that can apply sufficient pull on the crew (and any loose or squishy bits of gear) to compensate for the push exerted by the engines. However, If you've got the space-time bending technology to make warp travel feasible, then by definition you've also got the tech to build artificial gravity fields and thus inertial dampers. That brings me to another point when ignoring (or not) bad movie science - context is everything! If movie science can't be correct, it can at least strive for self-consistency, although mostly it fails pretty badly at that too. However, in a universe where telekinesis, precognition and FTL travel is possible, I'm really not going to get bent out of shape by 'Spitfires in space' flight physics.

This. 'Movie science' is almost invariably an oxymoron. For the most part I try and roll with it and enjoy the occasional bit they get right rather than stressing about the majority they get wrong. Frankly, life's too short to nitpick at that level. However, if the movie is supposed to be a realistic depiction of something (hello, Gravity) then I do get more irked by the mistakes even if I can understand why they're in there. Well yes. Yes it is.

Heya Skykooler. Haven't seen you on this thread for a while - glad you're still reading along! Short answer - Wernher made them, albeit with the resources of Kerbin's premier aeronautical research institute to draw on. He was a jet engine designer originally so would have been used to working with turbomachinery. I confess that I didn't think too deeply about this at the time, but if you want a little retrospective justification: Wernher's background with jets probably coloured his thinking about rocket propulsion, his early engines were all turbopump driven, he never really trusted solid fuels (that much we do see early in the story) and the idea of pressure-feeding the propellants never really occurred to him. Even if it had, he probably wouldn't have had time to do much work on them at the Institute before he, Jeb and the rest of the fledgling KIS got kicked out. Outside of the Institute, the KIS were more concerned with building something that worked rather than research for research sake. What worked for them at the time was turbopumps. The LV-1 was more of a technology demonstrator than a flight-worthy engine, simply because it was too small and it's thrust-to-weight ratio was too low. The larger LV-2 and LV-3 engines, developed by Wernher and Jeb as part of Jeb's final year project, were enough (barely) to get a couple of sounding rockets off the ground. The early KIS engines were all plagued by power issues to a greater or lesser extent, right up to the LV-15 used on the Kerbal and Kerbin boosters. For comparison, here is a Goddard P series rocket, which were the first of his to use turbopumps. In First Flight terms, that would be about an LV-3 equivalent. The pumps were essentially home-made - Goddard did approach a commercial company to make them but they weren't interested in producing such small pumps. Throw the resources of the Institute at the problem and making LV-1 sized pumps looks at least vaguely plausible.

Well that's a relief. We only need to expand global production by a factor of a billion then.

Agreed. I'm not sure there is any one 'fundamental' that makes a great story. Some stories you remember for the dialogue and characterisation, even if the plot is a bit hackneyed. Some stories just blow your mind with dizzying concepts but the dialogue is workmanlike at best. Some stories have well observed characters, others are poignant slices of life that you can relate to, others have breathtaking descriptions (it was said that Tolkien, if nothing else, could write a beautiful mountain). Some are epic in scope, others are short and to the point. How many stories have you read that started off as a bit of a slow-burner but turned out to be something special? I can only speak from limited experience but I don't think there is a substitute for just knocking the words out. Or, for a graphic novel, cranking out the pages. “Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!” - Bradbury They won't all be sparkling pearls of wisdom (at least not to start with) but that's fine: "Dans ses écrits, un sage Italien dit que le mieux est l'ennemi du bien."(In his writings, a wise Italian says that the best is the enemy of good.) - Voltaire In other words, spend too long trying to get everything absolutely perfect and you might never get anything done at all. To illustrate that with a more personal example, I dressed up the first two parts of my KSP fic as ebooks for a friend of mine. I'd mentioned this story I was working on a couple of times and he's a good enough mate that he asked to have a look at it. Anyhow, for giggles, I added a short foreword to the first part. My friend's first comment? There's a noticeable improvement in writing style between the foreword and the rest of the first book. No real secret to that, other than nigh on three years practice and bashing out somewhere around 150,000 words in the interim. It's not all been easy mind you, and that's with the benefit of an infinite canvas that I can sprawl my story all over. If I want to put a bunch of kerbals in orbit around the Mün, all I need is a couple of sentences and it's done! Better yet they got there in a magical morphing spacecraft that the reader can mould to suit him or herself. I don't have to worry about the realties and limitations of actually building that spacecraft. I don't have to concern myself with composing screenshots, page layouts, working with a limited amount of dialogue and, most of all, the discipline of telling a complex story in this format. You do. Writing is tough enough by itself. Writing a graphic novel - I tip my hat to everyone on the forum who engages in such a crazy (but wonderful) pursuit! In the end, I can do no better than to paraphrase Douglas Adams: "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the topic of writing. Go to it, it says, and good luck!"