KSK

Don't know about Musk personally but his company sure contains a lot of very level-headed types. Musk does seem to be rather optimistic about timescales but a lot of what he's talked about has eventually flown. Definitely a supervillain though - or perhaps the cliched front-man supervillain to distract attention from the real villain behind the scenes...

Yeah - me too! Just a thought - space travel by monolith would be cool. No need to muck around with all those dangerously explosive boosters! Or would that just weaken the essential kerbal character?

That's the big hope, yes and it's what SpaceX are banking on I think. And as an unabashed space nerd, I hope it happens too. But there's a finite amount of government money available for science and/or prestige projects and I'm honestly not sure what the next steps for private space are. Tourism might get us a bit farther but that still leaves a lot of missing links to figure out before we get to the cool sci-fi stuff such as Mars programs and Moon bases. Edit. Stupid spellcheckers. Yes I did mean 'sci' and not 'sic'. Preserve me from computers that try to be too helpful.

I think we're losing some humour in translation here, folks.

I didn't need my eyebrows anyway.

They did - sort of. The F9 first stage was designed to be modular from the outset - The Falcon Heavy first stage is just three F9 first stages joined together and I imagine it would be quite capable of lifting a reusable second stage and a good sized payload.The question is whether it would have been worth the cost of building a larger first stage for the sake of saving some money by recovering the second stage, bearing in mind that developing a recoverable second stage was also likely to be quite expensive? Apparently the answer was: no it wouldn't.

Don't sweat it. Real life does that - we'll still be here when you get back! Your plan for daily updates sounds pretty ambitious - seriously don't worry if you don't manage one every day.

Looks like you picked the wrong day to stop using tropes... I'll get my coat.

Intriguing start! I have a fondness for written word only, so I'm happy with the lack of pictures. They can be a good thing (witness the many excellent graphic novel style stories in this forum) but they can also be a bit restrictive, especially if you're using screenshots. I've seen some amazing scenes put together with KSP parts (most notably @Just Jim's scaffolding around a busted Tracking Centre) but they do have limits. With that said - your story, your rules! If you decide that pictures would help, then go for it. Couple of possible suggestions about the writing (again - your story, your rules, so feel free to ignore any and all of this). You did make some very large jumps between an out-of-funds KSC, to Jeb's suborbital flight to a fully fledged, Minmus capable spacecraft. I appreciate that you were just setting up the main story but a bit more detail would have been nice. Also, you could probably ease off on the numbers a bit, unless they're really important. Using your asteroid as an example, telling us it's mass is fine because that instantly tells us that it's a big one and that our characters could be in trouble. Telling us that it's 100m in diameter and moving at 10 m/s doesn't really add to that - we already know that it's heading towards Kerbin and that it's going to make a mess when it gets there! But those are fairly minor points. It's going well so far - you keep writing and we'll keep reading!

It would definitely be a convenience. I delete my orbital debris anyway, provided that it's periapsis is below 70km - at that point I know I could 'fly' it until it reenters and crashes but I can rarely be bothered to so I just delete it. Anything in a stable orbit gets left, to be dealt with 'properly'. Having all that happen automatically would be nice. I'm not completely sold on the contracts but I see no reason not to include them. After a while, I think they would suffer from the same immersion problems as the rescue mission contracts - who are these other space programs that are littering space with busted satellites? And why do they always need me to bail them out? But that's just me.

Actually I have 4 but I play with three as an 'armless little self imposed rule to make the game more challenging.

Whew! I'm not sure that the Ussari state really goes for the 'iron fist in a velvet glove' metaphor but if it does, that chapter removed the glove, used it to stub out a rattail and then unceremoniously discarded it leaving nothing but bare steel behind. Thank goodness for the bit of trademark CatastrophicFailure humour at the end. The Kommissar - does he collect jokes about himself by any chance? He seems like the type.

Comments like this wind me up. If you're speaking as a writer (or any other kind of artist for that matter) then I disagree with your opinion but I can respect it. Otherwise, speaking as a writer (for want of a better word), I'll thank you kindly to stop patronising me by telling me why I should write or what I should think about my writing. I can't speak for anyone else on this forum but I write my KSP fan-fiction for many reasons. Yes, there is the joy of writing. There's also the desire to share my version of the kerbals and their world with other KSP fans. Then there's the joy of interacting with my readers and seeing them entertained by my work and getting enough out of it to want to talk about it with other readers. Last but not least, there is a desire to see the story through to the end, for my personal satisfaction but also because (after all this time), I do think I owe it to those readers to see them through to the end as well. Sharing my work on this forum has been an enormous privilege. I've had side discussions about parts of my fictional world that I haven't been able to work into the story. Along the way I've had readers get so immersed in the story that they've filled in some of the blanks in my world-building in the most wonderful ways. I've had readers posting drawings or screenshots of spacecraft, other vehicles and scenarios from my story. I've had readers respond to some chapters by posting links to pieces of music rather than try and answer in words. Last but not least, there's a sequel to my story and if its not quite set in my 'verse, it's for sure set in the 'verse next door. And you'd better believe that it's that kind of stuff that keeps me writing at least as much (if not more) than some airy-fairy, arts-for-arts-sake, 'doing it for the joy of writing' kind of reason. Like I said, it's a great privilege. It's certainly not a right - I can't force people to read my work, let alone like it, let alone give me rep, likes or feedback on it. And because of that, any and all comments, likes or whatever are all gratefully received. On the other hand - I work at my writing. I have a full time job. I have other commitments and a limited supply of free time. I choose - for all the reasons I've set out - to use a lot of that time for writing. Sometimes that writing goes really well - I've reached a part in the story that I've been itching to write for ages. Sometimes it takes more effort and sometimes, frankly, it's a slog. So you'd also better believe that I like to log onto the forum and find a couple of likes or a friendly comment waiting for me. That's a privilege too - it's not something I can expect but for darn sure I appreciate the encouragement and the fact that people have taken the time to offer that encouragement. If that makes me shallow then so be it.

For that last part, I can recommend this thread, started by Kuzzter as a good place to start for writing graphic novels or fanfic. Just caught up with the end of Emiko Station. Guess that's one lunch break I'll never see again - but I regret nothing! Very much enjoying the story and I can safely say that it's the first one I've ever read that made me go all 'd'awwwww' at menacing, spiky UFOs. I can also definitely empathise with Just Jim's confession that most of the story so far has been an unintended detour. Been there, done that, more often than I care to remember. I do have a couple of comments if you're interested Jim - happy to take those off-thread.

Aye - luckily my space-bar doesn't seem to have a remote control function.

Now that is badS. Forget about flying everything that can fly - or even some things that can't. BadS is charging headlong into an alien monolith to get your buddy back. General Order Zero - you better believe it.

If you're counting deaths and injuries then it may well go to black powder, because any idiot can buy a firework and get themselves injured by it. I'll see your black powder and raise you alcohol. On the deaths, injury and general human misery scale, alcohol is pretty darn dangerous.

If a tree falls in the forest but nobody was there to hear it - did it make a sound? If a cheat cheats in the privacy of his own game - is it cheating? Yes, technically you can cheat in a single player game but then you get into the vexed question of 'what is cheating'? Even KSP includes a bunch of options that are nominally cheating (infinite fuel etc.) but they're all easily accessible, indeed designed to be accessed from within the game. Is it 'cheating' to just use the tools you're provided with? We could argue about that all day and that's without getting into the perennial Mechjeb arguments. At the end of the day, Tex_NL's point still stands - however you define cheating, in a single player game, the only person you're cheating is yourself.

I thought that Falcon 9 was intended to be reused but the original plan was for parachute recovery? That didn't work (they did try a couple of times IIRC) so they went for powered landing + legs as their next plan. Pure speculation here but when they redesigned the thrust assembly (to the current Octaweb configuration) for version 1.1 of Falcon 9, that would seem like a good time to have designed in the landing gear as well (and all the load bearing issues that implies), or at least the ability to attach landing gear at a later date.

Not to mention going to school and learning to read. Horrible hacks both of them - you should teach yourself everything from first principles. On a serious note, no, it's not remotely cheating to use .craft files. I haven't done it myself (probably because my designs tend to be fairly boring) but if I was getting stuck trying to build something, finding a good .craft file to download, use or reverse engineer would be one of the best ways of of learning how to get un-stuck that I can think of.

That sounds...promising.

Took me a quite a while to find the easy answer. Geneney and Lucan were two of my kerbonauts in a long gone save game from a long gone version of KSP. After that, much scavenging through picture threads on the forum and/or noting down good names from my own games. Some of the female names were adapted a bit to make them sound more feminine - female kerbonauts were definitely not a thing when I started writing so I had nothing to go on there! Eventually I found this wonderful site for all your kerbal-naming needs.

I read somewhere that they already did for Falcon 1.2 but I have no idea how reliable that is. In the meantime, At Least the Pieces were Bigger This Time, would make a splendid name for a third drone ship.

Oh well - they've shown they can do it when the ground isn't inconveniently bucking up and down under them. Wonder how much they can reinforce the legs before they get too heavy - and whether it would make enough difference to be worth it? Fingers crossed for 2nd stage relight!

They haven't left either though which is a more hopeful sign.