KSK

No - I don't think we do disagree and that's a very good point about taking the wider view. Like it or not, I doubt the core gameplay of KSP is going to change much now so, yeah, additions need to factor that in. For what its worth, I thought your ideas for satellite networks were great!

Personally, I think that design philosophy is holding KSP back. Back in the days where getting to orbit was most of the game (and maybe the Mün if you were really good), trial and error worked fine. All your flights were relatively short and you could iterate quickly. If you stranded the odd kerbal on the Mün, then help (or likely another crash ) was just a day away in game time. These days, trial and error just gets in the way. Game mechanics can't be too challenging because the penalty for failure can't be too extreme. Game mechanics are hobbled in some cases because they're just too hard to balance assuming the player is using trial-and-error. The parts test contracts spring to mind - given some decent planning tools they could be a lot more fun. As it is, I'm either not going to bother trying them for the paltry reward, or I'm going to 'revert flight' a whole lot in the process - which takes away a lot of the point of Career mode since it allows the penalties for failure to be eliminated at a stroke. Doing anything interplanetary is discouraged because who wants to spend months of game time flying a ship to Duna, only to have it fail at the last minute because you didn't trial and error your fuel load correctly? Finally, as you mentioned in an earlier post, simultaneous missions are discouraged because if you do pancake that Duna probe you have two unappetising choices, either reiterate, start again and wait another umpteen months of game time, or redo the mission and lose whatever progress you made on your other missions. I also think that flexibility is KSP's weakness as well as its strength, particularly in career mode. It makes for a superlative sandbox and a career game that tries to be all things to all people but also falls short of the mark for all people. I appreciate what you're saying but I also think that Sandbox mode provides ample scope for all the Ferris Wheels, trains, helicopters, or whatever you want to build. For Career mode, I say dial back the flexibility and give us more of what was intended - a space program management game. If that means that some creative freedom is lost along the way, then so be it. That doesn't necessarily mean layering on oodles and oodles of detail (such as fuel sloshing and limited restart engines for example ) - the very best games combine simplicity and depth. The problem with KSP Career mode is that it doesn't have either - the basics of playing the game are not simple and the game as a whole lacks depth. And it lacks depth because, in most cases, adding depth would be unfair on players - if they're assumed to be playing through trial and error. Just my thoughts anyhow. Feel free to disagree.

Not a problem - thanks for the apology and I hope whatever got you up on the wrong foot is better now.

Writers thread is here. I'm afraid I missed the Chronicles of an Administrator first time around, but I'm making up for that now! I'm enjoying it so far - nicely lighthearted, very well presented and a very cool (if slightly ad-hoc ) series of Mün missions. Your main characters also make a refreshing change from the Original Three. Great job all round!

Cheers, Bill - I'll try that if it happens again but I'll need another workaround if I'm logged on from a mobile device. Anyhow - apparently its on the list of Things Being Looked at, so give it a couple of days and it'll likely be fixed.

I believe it goes something like - "On the internet, there is a porn site for anything you can imagine and a lot of things you don't want to imagine."

If I could just add to this, it's not obvious how to delete the quote box from a mobile device, at least from an iOS based one. I tried highlighting and cutting and tried deleting the text within the box but neither seemed to work. Like Kuzzter and his keyboard, it's possible that I'm missing something about the mobile site interface though.

Hi, I couldn't find a consolidated thread for this but please do move my post to that thread if it exists. I've been having a couple of problems with the forum and would like to either flag them up as bugs, or get some help with them if I'm missing something obvious! 1. The forum doesn't seem to be counting thread views. New threads all seem to be stuck at 0 views, existing threads are stuck at whatever count they had before the forum migration. 2. Quoting a post - please could we get a 'cancel' button for this feature? At the moment, I'll reply to X by quoting their post, think better of it and then have no way of cancelling my post. From then on, every time I want to reply to somebody else, X's quote appears in my reply automatically. 3. Ignore lists. Do not work. I can search for a name, get a little dialogue box asking if I'm sure I want to ignore that user and then nothing gets added to my ignore list.

Sounds dead boring to me to be honest. Building elaborate spacecraft, spending months of in-game time getting them to other planets... and then watching them explode. Woot. But regardless of personal opinion on how fun it would be, I think it would need KSP to be basically re-written from the ground up, or modded into oblivion to make it work properly. Stock KSP has extremely basic base-building and logistics features that wouldn't make for a particularly engaging strategy or warfare game. Given the expected amount of work involved I would expect to pay rather more than £10-20 for it.

Ahh, man that was a good chapter. You got the 'prototype spacecraft' feel just right, although I hope it all goes better than Soyuz 1...I chuckled at IVAN too - a surprisingly unforced acronym! One question - is there a broken radio in bin TK421?

I had some thoughts about this a while back - this thread looks like a good place to chuck them out for discussion. Or possibly to watch them sink without a trace. Anyway - here they are: Step 1. Take off and nuke the Career game from orbit. Chuck out the science system, the kerbonaut training system and the contracts system. Hang onto some of the contracts though - we might need those. Oh yeah - and the building upgrades? They stay, subject to a major overhaul. Step 2. Dig through the mound o' mods. We're going to be using Life Support, (take your pick), Final Frontier (so that our brave kerbonauts have a service record to distinguish them from hundreds of other brave kerbonauts), Kerbal Engineer Redux (or the data reporting and planning modules from Mechjeb) and most importantly, Kerbal Construction Time. Repeat after me: Kerbal. Construction. Time. For those that haven't played with that particular mod, it's a gem. As the name implies, building spacecraft now takes time. But that's the least of what it does. R&D takes time. Rolling out spacecraft once constructed takes time. Refurbishing the launch pad after a launch takes time. Best of all it implements a points system whereby you can upgrade your VAB and/or SPH to speed up construction or run multiple builds in parallel. You get a similar feature for research - you can upgrade the number of research points you earn per day or, crucially, the number of research points you get from building spacecraft. Roll KCT and Life Support together and there's the core game. Time now matters. That affects logistics and it adds much more urgency and tension to events. It also makes for a more integrated feeling space program, with more stuff happening in parallel. Finally, it adds a much more solid, and much more granular, set of building upgrades. When all the steps of building a spacecraft and prepping it for launch take time, then suddenly there are a load of reasons for upgrading your facilities to make those steps faster which can either supplement or replace the current upgrades. Now that missions are time critical, we need decent planning tools, hence KER or Mechjeb. Trial and error flights have a certain charm and are great in Sandbox, but have no place in a Career game. The basic progression loop now becomes. Build spacecraft, earn research points for building spacecraft, use research points to research better spacecraft. Doing science in space now becomes merely one way of making money. Reputation (by boldly going where no kerbal has gone before) provides a second. Building infrastructure and renting it out provides a third. Tourism provides a fourth and plays well with Infrastructure. This is KSP so launch costs are cheap and labour costs are negligible, so we can go absolutely nuts with Infrastructure. Space hotels, orbital fuel depots, comsat networks, asteroid mining, powersats in kerbosynchronous orbits. All perfectly possible with existing game mechanics. How you make your money is entirely up to you - your program can do a bit of everything or you can focus on one aspect and tweak your building upgrades and research priorities accordingly. Something else to bear in mind - you build the infrastructure, do the science etc. and then try to sell it, rather than the current 'accept contract to do x' model. Demand for for each of the four routes to making money will fluctuate. You can monitor this via the Strategy Screen and plan your activities accordingly. Contracts as we know them do make an occasional appearance as Events. These are largely bonus activities, such as rescue missions. Typically the player will not be penalised for failing them but will receive a substantial rep bonus for achieving them, which can of course be parlayed into extra funding. Finally - kerbonaut training. Simple system - missions need a certain number of training points to be accrued before you launch. This takes time. Kerbonauts earn training points faster, the more experienced they are. Kerbonauts gain experience by having flown on previous missions, much like the current system. Ideally, a Mun mission would require more training than a LKO mission but I can't figure out a graceful way of doing that. How you allocate training is up to you. One highly trained kerbonaut who does it all, or a crew of three, each less well trained but more specialised - up to you. There is no fine-graining of tasks - a level 1 scientist will get you exactly as much science as a level 5 scientist but merely take longer to train up beforehand.

Cheers! Glad you're still enjoying it. I'm gradually working through the old posts, clearing out the formatting, replacing busted links and fixing some of the worst punctuation mistakes along the way. (Can't blame the forum migration for that last part though. ) Ten chapters down - I'm trying not to think about how many are left to go.

Another 75%er here, although actually, I'm probably more like an 85%er. I would love to see life support rolled into stock and I completely agree with juanml82's comment about payload limitations - it would be great to have more parts to allow that to happen. I also agree with GagaX's comment about kerbal aesthetics. Given a semi-realistic physics model, a rocket is going to look much the same (pointy end up top, engines at the bottom) whether it be a human or a kerbal rocket. However, I think a more consistently 'kerbal' art style would add a lot to the game. Shape-wise KSP rockets would look pretty similar to real ones but the art style would make them a bit different. Unfortunately this doesn't really help the folks that like to build replica craft - and there are quite a few of them on the forum. I guess that including 'human aesthetic' parts could be left to mods but I'm not sure how popular that would be.

Yeah - Putin to the broken formatting. Looking forward to the next chapter when it comes!

The follower count will be interesting for sure. I used to get a rough idea of that from dividing total views by post count, but I'm not sure how accurate that was. Tagging - confirmed what Kuzzter said. Took me a fair bit of fiddling around to work it out.

I'm back but yeah, the new forum is taking some getting used to and I'm not finding all the whitespace particularly restful. Good call about the tags - I'll add something suitable to First Flight. How are people finding the formatting? A lot of my punctuation seems to be borked, especially speech marks and ellipses, which has mucked up substantial chunks of First Flight. I'll leave it for a bit in case it is something that can be repaired across the forum but after that... gonna be a long clean-up job.

Well that was one swift refurbishment! The library is now open again and management would like to extend a big thank-you to KasperVd's Archival Repairs Company for getting the job done double-quick.

Maybe it'll grow on me, especially once the dev team have had time to address some of the outstanding issues, but first impressions are not good. I didn't like the new look in the preview shots and I don't like it now. If anyone finds a way to apply a theme, please do tell. Yes, this was flagged up in advance but I'm disappointed with the broken links. It's broken the contents page for my fanfic and it's completely broken my Fanworks index thread. That's going to take some time to fix. Some punctuation marks haven't transferred across properly turning large sections of my long-running posts into gibberish. That's going to take even more time to fix. I dislike the new rep system, although perhaps I'm just being old and grumpy. I don't like the 'likes', I don't like the way that the rep bar plus amusing title has been replaced by a single number shorn of any particular context and I miss the ability to send the thread author a comment when I give him/her rep.

Urgh - looks like I have a lot of reformatting to do on previous posts. In the meantime, the next chapter is up. This one is for Ten Key for showing me the right perspective for the second half! One Small Step A pall of cinnamon-scented woodsmoke hung against the evening sky, lit by the rays of the setting sun. Beneath it, flames licked against the tree trunks, a single sapling wreathed in smoke with thirty-six smaller saplings leaning against it. Together they made a briskly burning chimney. Donman bent down and picked up a leaf. Its edges were singed by the flames and it’s once glossy green surface was dulled by heat and smoke, but the spots were still visible; a scattering of dull black eyes staring at him accusingly. He turned to the kerbal standing rigidly beside him. “Would you like to talk about it,” he asked gently. “They mutilated my child and left it to die in the dark, Ambassador. What else is there to talk about?” Despite himself, Donman flinched. “I know this is difficult,” he said quietly, “but we need to know what happened, Enely. We must know what went wrong.” Even if it means intruding on your grief, he added to himself bitterly. Enely’s flat gaze regarded him incuriously. “Why? How many other Kerm were you planning to murder, Ambassador? Because that’s what any attempt to uproot them will be. Murder.” He looked around. “Where is Ambassador Burvis?” “I spoke to her,” said Donman carefully, “and we both agreed it would be better if I came in her place.” “Oh.” The smoke caught at Donman’s eyes, making them water. He looked down guiltily at his handful of shredded Kerm leaf and slipped the fragments into his pocket. “They tried you know,” said Enely conversationally. “Dug a great big pit, unearthed all the roots they could find, teased out the fibres with gloved hands. I was there - I saw it happen - but it didn’t make any difference.” His face crumpled with grief, the momentary brittle facade splintering like skim ice under a careless footfall. “D...d...didn’t make any difference.” Donman sat down on the grass and stared into the fire. One of the saplings shifted in the blaze, the charred filigree around its base crumbling into ash. Beside him, Enely’s face was buried in his hands, shoulders heaving spasmodically, breath hitching in his throat in little mewling hiccups. Donman dabbed at the corners of his eyes and waited. “We managed to replant them all,” said Enely thickly. “The second year saplings were flourishing on the mainland - hardly surprising after spending all their lives in thin volcanic grit. We gave them a month to settle in, then the proper four months for Knitting. The seed-sapling was looking healthy enough - all its branches were growing back, all its leaf clusters were green and glossy. I lay down for first Communion…” Enely paused to wipe his eyes. “And everything seemed just fine. I wasn’t anywhere near prepared for it of course - those itching, burrowing leaf hairs and then that first touch of another mind against yours!” He sniffed. “The poor thing seemed a bit subdued, a bit slow compared to some accounts that I’d read but some kerblets start out quieter than others, so why shouldn’t Kerm be the same, especially after all this one had been through.” Donman nodded. “For a while,” Enely continued, “everything just got better and better. My Kerm learned to recognise me - I taught it a picture of a smiling kerbal and afterwards that was always how it greeted me! It tried to show me things although they never made much sense, just coloured blotches and swirls. Maybe they would have made sense in time, but then the pains started.” Enely stared at him. “Have you ever had earache, Ambassador? That’s what this was like. Not too bad - not to begin with, but always there and nothing you can do about it. You can’t reach it with a cold compress, you can’t draw it out with a hot poultice. And how do you give a Kerm painkillers? The Archives weren’t any help but I did everything I could think of - checked the soil to make sure there wasn’t anything attacking it - although a Knitted Kerm should have been able to look after itself. Mostly, all I could do was to Commune with it, try my best to comfort it, tell it that everything was going to be alright.” Enely’s face twisted. “Although by then it was obvious that things were far from alright. Finally, I plucked up the courage to go digging. I didn’t want to - not after the Forseti - but I had to…had to find out what was hurting so badly.” He looked at Donman through tear-blurred eyes. “The fibres were cracked and leaking, Ambassador. All sticky and pink and crusted with mud. I don’t know whether it was something in the soil that it wasn’t used too - nothing much grows in volcanic grit I don’t expect - or whether it was an injury from the uprooting that had gone bad. Whatever it was, it was too far spread to be cut out.” A hard lump settled in the pit of Donman’s stomach. This is worse than talking to Jonton. He bowed his head, unable to meet the other kerbal’s eyes. “A...after that,” said Enely, “there was nothing else to do but hope that my Kerm could fight off whatever had infected it. But as the pain got worse…” He shook his head, wincing as his poncho rubbed over his shoulders. “Some days I couldn’t get through at all and some days I was afraid to try.” He saw a flicker of expression cross Donman’s downturned face. “I did try once, Ambassador but it was like…well you wouldn’t cross the path of a scallan with toothache, would you? And it got worse. It started off angry and confused - I couldn’t make it understand why it was in pain - and then the anger just turned into misery. Showing it pictures of happier days didn’t help - it couldn’t remember those days or what the things in the pictures even were. It began to ignore me and then near…n…n…near the end, it didn’t even recognise me. At least it couldn’t feel the pain anymore either - I suppose that’s something. All the fibres must have been dead or nearly dead by then.” Enely drew a handful of Kerm leaves, matted with dried blood and stray hairs, out of his pocket. “And then it just stopped. No pictures, no voice, no…. no more pain. The leaf clusters wouldn’t let go - I had to tear my head free.” He swiped the back of his other hand across his eyes. “The rest you know, Ambassador. So what happens now?” For a long moment, Donman was silent. “You need to speak to…an acquaintance of mine,” he said at last. “If there’s one person on Kerbin who could understand what you’ve been through, it would be him.” He caught Enely’s disbelieving look. “I communed with him - trust me, he’ll understand.” “You communed with him?” “Yes. He used to be a Keeper too. He lives in a Grove near Barkton - his name is Jonton Kermol.” “You communed with him?!” “I did,” Donman replied. “It’s a very long story, and one which he is far better placed to tell. You can trust me on that as well.” He looked reassuringly at Enely and passed him a small square of card. “Whenever you’re ready to travel, just present this at the airport and ask them to put you on the next flight to Barkton.” Enely’s eyebrows shot up. He looked closely at the card, noting the number stamped on it in gold and rubbing his thumb over its embossed seal. “Is this really…?” “It is,” said Donman. “You’ll be travelling under the auspices of the Twelve Pillars. Not something we do every day but then - these are unusual days. Don’t lose the card on your flight - you can also use it to requisition transport to Jonton’s Grove.” —————— There was a knock at the window. Aldsen looked up from his monitor and lifted his hand in farewell to the tired looking kerbal standing outside. As he turned back to his work, he heard a door closing behind him. The lights in the main laboratory went out, leaving nothing but the faint glow of sleeping computer screens and the blinking lights of row upon row of disk drives to illuminate the room. Aldsen sipped his tepid coffee and pulled up the day’s list of satellite images for review. I need a bigger monitor for this. And better software running on a faster computer. And a chair made of hand-carved Mün rock. He snorted softly and tapped out a command, leaning back as the first sub-sector of Kolus appeared on the screen. The Blight was clearly visible, dark ellipses of dead vegetation boxing in the brighter spots of cleared ground that marked the new Groves. Like eyes watching us even as we watch them. Doesn’t seem to be any un-contained Blight though, thank the Pillars. The keyboard clicked rapidly. Scan and match filter sets…execute alignment on HOTSPOT data…cross correlate…run. A grid appeared over the map with the upper left square greyed out. An analysis program started automatically in a separate window, rows of numbers flickering past as the computer matched the section of image, line by line, against its database of spectral signatures. The analysis window blanked out and the next grid square turned grey. Aldsen watched the screen for a moment then swung around to face the pair of monitors behind him. Rubber squeaked underfoot as he rolled his chair over the nest of cable runners stretched across the floor. He tapped a key, paging through the list of jobs running on the laboratory computers, scratching the back of his neck thoughtfully. Hmph – so much for that. Three by three it is then. Disc drives chunked and whirred and both screens filled up with new sections of map. —————— The computer bleeped softly behind him. Aldsen glanced at the clock on his office wall, sighed, and regarded the thick black sludge in the bottom of his mug with some trepidation. Probably just as well Lodan isn’t here. Idly, he swung back and forth on his chair, trying to muster the enthusiasm to start another set of satellite images. We really need to figure out a better way of doing this. Some way of normalising the cleaned images without washing out the Blight signatures. He yawned. Not tonight’s problem. A stippled patch of dark green woodland filled the middle of the screen, set amidst a chequerboard of fields that lapped against the beginnings of a range of foothills to the north. A Grove occupied the space on either side of the woodland and a gleaming hair-thread wound down from the hills, skirting the eastern Grove before disappearing off the southern edge of the map. Aldsen smiled at the lushly coloured image. Not a speck of Blight in sight. Looks like those folks got lucky. He picked up his mug and was halfway to his feet when an oddly shaped field caught his eye. Strange. If it wasn’t for the colour I’d swear that was an overlap. He sat down again, mug forgotten, peering closely at the screen. Position is consistent too. I wonder. He retrieved a creased and well-thumbed atlas from under his desk and flipped through it rapidly. Not far from Barkton – thought I recognised the image codes. One square to the north… He typed in a number and waited for the computer to fetch the new image. The screen refreshed and Aldsen leaned forward intently. And there it is. Kinda hilly - not anywhere I’d pick for a Grove but it seems to be doing alright. At the right sort of distance for that field to be an overlap too. Aldsen typed in a command and a grid drew itself over the map. Another command and a scale bar appeared along the bottom of the screen. He tapped the screen thoughtfully, working out the distances in his head. Something about the first map nagged at him, something not quite right. Frowning he flicked back to the previous image and pulled up the grid and scale bar again. Hang on a second…. those two Groves. They’re far too close together… and there’s no scrap of…. Aldsen’s eyebrows rose. His fingers flew over the keyboard; the map flickered, replaced by a HOTSPOT infrared map. He stared at it in disbelief, possible overlap utterly forgotten. That can’t be right. That vegetation is thriving - and it’s all well established. Maybe that Grove isn’t so new after all. The keyboard clattered. Date stamp is correct. Okay lets step this back. Six month intervals should do it to start with. Aldsen drummed his fingers on his desk impatiently. Definitely need a faster computer. Okay, here we go...both Groves still there. Back another six months… Aldsen fumbled for his desk phone with suddenly nerveless fingers. “Lodan.” “Director? You’re working late.” Lodan stifled a yawn. “Time and the Council wait for no kerbal,” he said. “So once again I spend the evening trying to distill Geneney’s latest report into something memorandum sized. At least the executive summary was straightforward: Pioneer 4, first Munar landing attempt, launch date two weeks from today. Anyway - what can I do for you at this unreasonable hour?” “Could you come down to my office, Director? This is a matter best discussed face to face I think and I think it will also be a matter for another memo to the Council.” —————— Lodan stared at the screen. “You’re quite sure about this?” “Positive, Director. The images are date stamped and the dates match with the system logs. I’ve cross-referenced them against the HOTSPOT data and that checks out too. Somehow, somebody has planted a new Grove without triggering a Blight incursion.” “Whereabouts are the Groves?” asked Lodan quietly. “Nowhere special as far as I can tell,” said Aldsen. “From the image codes they’re somewhere north of Barkton but I haven’t checked exactly where yet.” “Barkton,” muttered Lodan. “Barkton, unexpected Kerm behaviour…” The colour drained out of his face. “Jonton.” “Jonton?” “A Keeper. His Grove is north of Barkton and…” Lodan stood up, pacing back and forth in agitation. “We’ll need an investigatory team - I’ll call the Berelgan first thing in the morning.” He flashed Aldsen a quick glance. “We will need a second memo for the Council - they’ll want somebody on the team I have no doubt.” Aldsen stared at his Director, forehead wrinkled in puzzlement. “But this is good isn’t it?” he said slowly. “If this - Jonton - has found what the Berelgan have been looking for: a way of close-planting Kerm? No need for a colonisation program - not yet at any rate…” He stopped at look on Lodan’s face. “Jonton is a…unique case,” said Lodan. “and I fear for any kerbal volunteering to follow his example.” He shook his head. “The risks would make volunteering for the colonisation program look safe by comparison. No - this is but a first small step - it cannot be the key to the Kerm crisis - it simply cannot!” Lodan gathered himself with an effort. “You’d better come back to my office - there are files you need to see. Files in my personal safe.” He eyed Aldsen’s long-forgotten mug with distaste. “And I think we’re going to need some proper coffee too. It's going to be a long night.” << Chapter 54: Chapter 56>>

Hey folks, Well, as it was foretold, so it came to pass. The forum migration appears to have broken the links on this thread and as of the last developer update, repairing them automatically looks to be off the table. I have a couple of chapters left to write in Part 3 of my First Flight story and I'm hoping to have them done by Christmas. After that, I'll be fixing up the links on this thread. It'll probably take a while so thanks in advance for your patience. Cheers, KSK.

No - but I see no reason why roleplayed forum-goers shouldn't have to abide by the same rules as 'real' forum-goers. In other words it doesn't matter if you're posting as you or as some character you're playing - the same standards of conduct should apply in each case. No need to ban roleplaying outright. I say 'real' because a lot of people with have some kind of online persona in any case, whether they formally announce it as a roleplayed character or not.

[quote name='Ravens_cry']Hi! I love this story and registered just to comment. I just have a potential correction. "Duna appeared as a blurred reddish-orange disc which exhibited phases like those of the Mün." I don't think it would do that. While Mars, erm, Duna, does show different phases, it's not like the Moon does and does not go through the full cycle. The inner planets, in this case Eve and Moho, do, because they're closer to the their star than Kerbin.[/QUOTE] Noted and fixed - thanks! Welcome to the thread. Thanks also to Narwhalz and Daelkyr for weighing in on the RTG vs solar question. Technically, I suppose you could take a mini-RTG for heating purposes and emergency power but after going to the trouble of tying a lump of plutonium onto your spacecraft, I'm thinking you might as well do the job properly. So I'm leaning towards RTG for Hope 1 and 2. Daelkyr does raise an interesting point though - there might well be a backlash against the possibility (however remote) of scattering plutonium over another planet, especially if you were then touting it for possible colonisation. Alternatively, there could be quite a nice little story about Probodyne being forced to gimp the lander by using batteries only, thus getting little or no scientific data. Hmm, lots of potential here - I like it!

Oh yeahhhhh! Now *that* we did not see coming! Glory to Arstotka, Comrade! Grinning like a loon right now. Everyone else on the platform seems to be giving me a wide berth.