KSK

Well no wonder it didn't work! Really, Wernher should have spotted that - although he was under a fair amount of pressure at the time.

Cheers! I saw you were getting close to it - glad it worked when you got there. To my mind it's very much the key chapter, so much so that I was originally going to call it 'Shadows of the Past' after the chapter at the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring, where we learn about the Ring and its implications. Interesting question about Jordan. I would have to say 'not consciously' but I can see the parallels now that you mention it. Echoing your excellent advice of "Keep at it, that's how you learn. Maybe consider a creative writing course. And, of course, read copiously," it's quite possible that bits of Wheel of Time bobbed to the surface of the great stew of ideas, fragments of language and other such bits and pieces that you accumulate through the latter. But I can honestly say it wasn't intended to be a direct shout-out. Thanks! I just glanced over that again and good grief some of the lower entries in that list. I mean War and Peace is the archetypal epic novel but it's only after writing a (considerably shorter) novel that the real weight of that 587,287 word count really sinks in. Some good guesses there. There's a Word of God answer if you'd like it but I don't want to spoil the game...

Nice list. Strikes the right balance (as it was no doubt intended to) between adding to what we have but without radically overhauling the whole game (which aint going to happen anyway). I particularly liked: New abilities could be added for higher level kerbals, such as aerocapture and landing site prediction for pilots and perhaps simple KAS-like abilities granted to engineers. and Add more flexibilty. Ex: Play with reputation but not money, science and money but not EXP. Two quick questions: 1. If funds were out-of-play I was wondering if KSC building progression could be tied to tech tree progression in some way. It would be really nice to play an essentially Science mode game but not start off with a fully upgraded shiny space centre. 2. is that 'aerocapture prediction' as a skill? That would seem to be more consistent with having landing site prediction as another skill. Alternatively, aerocapture prediction would play very nicely with: Science experiments should be more involved, such as studying the results. I was researching this recently. We had a reasonable idea about the upper limits of density and pressure for Mars' atmosphere from ground based observations but it wasn't until the Mariner flights that we pinned their values down more precisely using radio occultation. Proper values of atmospheric density of course, are rather helpful for aerocapture predictions. So maybe a combination of pilot level and having completed at least a flyby of the relevant planet would be necessary to unlock aerocapture predictions. I think that plays quite nicely in terms of game mechanics and has the side benefit of being similar to how such things are done in real life, for those that like such things.

I'd like this too. I tend to use the plaques as small mission summaries: "On this day, Jeb and Bill first set foot upon the Mün..." but sometimes I forget one of the names, or want to correct a typo or something. It would be nice to be able to edit my plaques. Not at all realistic of course but I'm happy to let that slide on such a minor point. Sure - it's a small 'nice to have' but sometimes it's the small things that can make a game.

yeah... I let my romantic side off the leash for that one. Moving on a few chapters to the Emergency Comms Array, enquiring minds need to know - was Wernher using positively charged ore tanks? In which case, clearly all Thompberry had to to was to reverse the polarity. Which as we know is the guaranteed way to fix anything!

Agreed. If we're limited to current game mechanics then again I agree. With expanded game mechanics (which I think we both agree would be good), then there's no real reason why the early game can't be as engaging as the late game. If I'm playing Civ (in any of its versions or guises), the early game works fine because there's plenty to do right from the start and, once you become familiar with the game, it's rather like chess in that the early game can shape the flow of the whole thing. Here's hoping! If anyone was interested in doing such a thing, I'd gladly donate some writing time to it. I wouldn't be any use as a coder or graphics guy but I could cobble together some reasonable flavour text for contracts and such, redo the tech tree descriptions etc. Judging from mods like Kerbal Construction Time (and I know I keep banging on about that one), I think there's a lot of quite fundamental changes and extensions to the game that could be modded in.

Joe Haldeman's Forever War starships would get my vote, once you get past the plotdrivium powered tachyon drive. They're basically big, squat functional blocks that can accelerate at 30g and reach relativistic velocities (time dilation being a key part of the story). They're only crewed for political reasons, the crew spend the 'battles' zipped up in a ton of anti-G protective gear (which doesn't always work), leaving the actual fighting to the computers. Combat consists of one swift pass at extreme range, unloading whatever drones you have at the enemy and then going nuts with the countermeasures and hoping to goodness that their drones don't hit you. Dogfighting in space it is not.

Yes but you don't have to leave the atmosphere on the very next launch after you accept that contract. There's good money to be made from progressively flying higher and further before then. I actually think Squad has done a pretty good job with the early milestones, if anything they're perhaps too finely grained for the available rocket parts but that's not a real problem. Agreed but I don't think your idea really addresses that since it basically just uses the existing game mechanics (find Science, break Milestones) to build a not terribly interesting prelude to the actual business of getting into space. I think your suggestions would be fun to play through once for a change of pace but I wouldn't want to play through them every time I started a new non-Sandbox game. Other people may beg to differ of course. On the other hand, if the game was more of a program management game then I'd probably really enjoy your prelude stages. Figuring out a way to bring in enough funds and raw materials to build your early rockets, wheeler-dealing your way from a hobby scale rocket launching club to your first significant milestones - at which point the world starts to take you a lot more seriously and new options open up. Heck, I wrote a book about this kind of stuff. But that would require a ground-up rewrite of the game rules which, realistically (and not unreasonably at this stage in KSP's development), just isn't going to happen.

Nice - thanks! The horizon has gone a little weird though. As promised - and courtesy of MadHorse - the flag of all Kerbin: \ Edit: And that's me finally done with cleaning up the busted formatting for all the older chapters. Hopefully I won't have to do that again.

Space tape - there's nothing it can't do!

Hey Just Jim, I'm a bit late to the game here as I've just started following your story, but Chapter 2 was great! Heartwarming and very very kerbal. Makes me glad I have the office to myself so that I don't have to explain my goofy grin.

Agreed - seems like the simplest solution to me! I guess you could restrict the 'fine tuning' available via the gizmo, so that you need to dock in approximately the right orientation but that seems a bit unnecessary. In gameplay terms, the player would still need to master rendezvous and docking - the gizmo would just take the tedium out of lining up your docking just-so. Seems like a good compromise to me.

That would be great and it would certainly make large scale orbital construction less frustrating. Would the rotation gizmo be applied to the docked vehicles?

Or, as they say in Cerima: - And thems is fighting words!

I'm not sure how well this would work but I'd be tempted to have the tutorials explain all the quirks of the user interface (how to do Science, what Docking mode is, how to do fuel transfers, what those weird controls in the VAB do... etc. etc.) - and that's it. Show players how to use the game but not how to play it, if that makes sense. I think it would be quite possible to tutorial KSP to death. I truly don't mean to be snarky but where do you stop? A tutorial about getting to orbit. That's nice, gives new players a helping hand. But now they're stuck because they want to go to the Mün. No problem - we can do a tutorial for that. Minmus - yep we can cover that too. The problem is that KSP is the kind of game where there's always another hill to climb and unless you want to provide tutorials for absolutely everything, at some point the players will need to start figuring stuff out for themselves. So show them how to use the interface and then let them cut their teeth on the early stuff and get into that 'figuring things out' mindset early on. Don't give them the false hope of providing tutorials for the easier stuff and then leave them even more stuck when it comes to the harder stuff. Give a player a rocket and they'll have one rocket. Teach them to build rockets and they'll have as many rockets as they ever need.

This is going to sound a bit dumb but whether somebody would find Story mode fun to play will probably depend on how much of an appetite they have for reading. The reason I say that is that KSP isn't particularly interactive. Outside of building and launching rockets and landing kerbals (or probes) in specific locations, there's not a lot the player can actually do to influence a story or move it forward. So a Story mode would probably need to be bit like an old style real-time strategy game, where you have discrete missions with cut scenes between them to tell the story. Cut scenes would be a lot of extra work for Squad, so a story mode is more likely to become a series of missions interspersed with chunks of text. I'm honestly not sure how well it would work and I say this as somebody who's written a fairly extensive backstory for KSP which could probably be boiled down into a series of missions for an in-game story, starting from sub-orbital flights out of the Tier 1 space centre (or conceivably, the Barn if that ever makes an appearance) and going all the way through to a very definite reason to do major interplanetary missions.

It's water under the bridge now but for what it's worth, I agree. If someone is being a jerk, deal with them accordingly whether they're roleplaying or not. Conversely, if someone is being generally pleasant and harmonious, nobody should care whether they're roleplaying or not. Punish the action not the excuse for that action.

Sorry about the gratuitous double post folks but the last one was getting a bit long and I really wanted to share these. Two videos linked by the good people over at Spacebattles in response to the last two chapters. I give you: Jeb's Theme. Well not really but it's how I'll always think of it now: And if Bob ever decided to do folk music, it would probably go something like this... Cheers. KSK.

It's been a while but Kagame - if you're still following this, I would love to have a picture of this scene: "On the screen in front of him, two mirrored helmets faced one another across a landscape of grey. An orange glove clasped a white glove. And between them, in the background, the flag of all Kerbin flew proudly above the Munar plains." For that matter, if anyone else wants to take a crack at it, the more the merrier! I'll dig out my flag of all Kerbin and post it. And you're more than welcome! Thanks. I've said it before (I hope) but thanks for staying along - the ongoing support and comments are very much appreciated. And I really can't ask for more than that! Thank you.

Ahh man, that was a good chapter. The description of this vast enclosed space was spot on, I liked the way all the rank and file of Ussari society were mentioned, right up to the Empress (may she live forever) and I'm also guessing that the march was suitably Imperial, DД.? And Tercella - Tercella never changes. There's a kerbal who very rarely gives any sort of a PЦTIЙ! I think of all the high points about this story it's the characters that really do it for me. Val, Igor, Tercella, Comrade Political Officer - they're all just really really vivid and well drawn. Likewise, Ussari herself in a strange sort of way. Not really a character, rarely mentioned directly but definitely comes across as a Soviet style state, albeit a slightly more relaxed, kerbalised one. Great work all round.

I'm all for more sub-forums because I think they provide an easy and quick 'coarse filter' to let people find the kinds of topics that interest them most on the forum. And actually, I would take the opposite approach - it's not the big popular threads that need to be hived off into a sub-forum, it's the relatively niche threads that otherwise get lost in the noise. For both those reasons, I don't like the way the forum migration got rid of some of the sub-forums but no doubt there were good reasons related to maintenance, moderator coverage or whatever. Admittedly, I have a personal bias on that point. My main forum 'thing' is writing, which I think it's fair to say as a bit of a niche (compared to say, cinematic videos or artwork) within a niche (Fan Works in general). Hence I wasn't terribly happy when two of the old Fan Works forums got rolled together. But I digress. However, I'm not sure that creating the number of sub-forums that you're suggesting is a good idea. Somehow it just seems a step too far. What would help is a better search function (which is being worked on), so that searching those 50+ pages of a thread isn't quite such a chore. One thing that I would also very much like is to bring back a standard set of thread tags. In the old Fan Works forum, there were a set of tags you could apply to your thread title: writing, art, inventions, video... etc. They made it very easy to quickly flick through the forum and pick out the kinds of Fan Work that you were especially interested in. I think the current tagging system, whilst more flexible is a step backwards because of that flexibility and also because the tags are smaller and harder to read. Assuming that people bother to tag their threads in the first place, there's a lot more variation in the tags they're using, which sort of defeats their point. An indexing system is great - but it doesn't work very well if anyone can add new entries to the index at random.

Or you could just launch the really big engines into space on a rocket. Or for really, really, colossally huge engines, launch the pieces and put them together in space. But yeah building a Death Star would be like building the Mothership in Homeworld. First build your orbital infrastructure. Then use that infrastructure to build moar infrastructure. Repeat as necessary then use your nth generation infrastructure to build the Death Star.

You just answered your own question. Build it in space - it's what the Empire did in the films.

Aye-aye - that's a bit over the top. I think the new forums are a step backwards for many reasons (A WYSIWYG editor does not improve the mobile experience for one) but they don't make Squad evil. Personal peeve - I'm tired of the New Internet definition of evil as 'company doing something I disagree with' but that's beside the point. As for withdrawing money - we're paying for the game not access to the forums, so I don't think that's a fair complaint either. Some of your other points though, I fully agree with.

Uhh, levitation wouldn't be a problem since it's just floating in space. Moving a spacecraft the size of a small moon is another matter of course but we're talking about a fictional setting where faster than light travel is routine, so I presume the Death Star relies on hyperdrive to move about rather than gigantic propellant based engines.