KSK

Or Scottish.

Yeah - I'd say that it's al-gone wrong for them. Nice chapter though!

Certainly do - love the hat! Looks like he's (I think it's a male kermol?) heading off for a day in the fields, or possibly sap-tapping. Good solid boots, nice traditional poncho, but shortened a bit for practicality, whereas the evening or leisurewear version would be more bathrobe length. I'm thinking I might add a separate fan-art section to the chapter listing on page 1. And I'm totally stoked that there's enough material that I can be seriously considering that!

Yeah, possibly Xenon as well, but my example system at the start of this thread didn't include that. The answer to question 2 defines rather than depends on the system being decided. As I said, the idea is these questions provide a framework to define the resource system. Once we figure that out, we can get back to wrangling over the fine details. Just an idea anyhow.

In the spirit of moving this discussion on, I was thinking about how to describe any given resources implementation, and whether that could be reduced down to a single set of questions. Once we've answered those questions (or gotten some sort of consensus about those answers at any rate), we could maybe return to the fine details, such as names, densities, real or fake chemistry etc. Here's my attempt at that set of questions - comments welcome. 1. Number and types of output Resource? 2. Number of input materials? 3. Celestial bodies where materials can be found? 3. Are the input materials depletable? 4. Are the input materials prospectable? 5. Processing step required?* 6. Storage step required? 7. Ship based Resource production or Base based Resource production?** * We can take it as read that a harvesting step is required. ** Somewhat arbitrary in stock KSP, since 'Bases' are generally ships anyway. This is more a rough idea of the weight of infrastructure required and whether it should be feasible to pack it onto any ship at all. So by way of example, referring back to my previous post, the answers for my scheme could be: 1. Three - Liquid Fuel, Oxidiser, Monopropellant. 2. Any, including asteroids. 3. No. 4. Yes. 5. Yes. 6. Yes. 7. Base based.

This thread should be moved to the Space Lounge - it certainly has no place in the Science forum.

A Lunar mission you say? Ripping idea! Would have to be piloted by Dan of course. More seriously, the UK is a pretty big player in space, but mostly in satellites and other behind the scenes stuff such as SpaceWire. (http://www.spacewire.esa.int/content/Home/HomeIntro.php). Crewed spaceflight, not so much.

Apparently carbonaceous asteroids contain significant amounts of water, which may be bound up in hydrates or other minerals (http://www.galleries.com/rocks/asteroids.htm) and also significant quantities of organic molecules (http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Asteroids_Structure_and_composition_of_asteroids). If that's correct then heating up raw asteroid should drive off the water. Electrolysing that to produce oxygen and then, literally, burning whatever is left after heating, should produce CO2. Once you have water and CO2, you're good for lots of useful chemistry. Potentially anyway.

Uhh, not quite. What I described was a scheme for taking two harvestable materials and converting them into in-game resources via a system of black box parts. The chemistry, if you wanted to include it at all, would be entirely hidden. All the player needs to know is that if he/she harvests material x and dumps it into module y then Resource z comes out. Gameplay wise it's merely a slightly more elaborate version of, for example, the kethane mod. One could call the harvestable materials anything at all; aqua and karbonite, Jeb's coffee and snackium - it wouldn't make any difference to stock gameplay. It's certainly not any sort of 'chemistry minigame' However, using real world materials does give you the added bonus of a complete, self consistent chemistry framework that could be used to either build an expanded Stock resource system, if Squad saw fit (unlikely, since as you note, they scrapped their previous scheme for not being fun) or, more likely, implemented by mod. That mod would then hook neatly into a slew of other realism mods.

I respectfully disagree. Partly for the same reasons that Cpt Kipard brought up - using proper chemistry (or at least real-world analogous chemistry rather than Kethane/Karbonite style alchemy), won't make a lot of difference to the stock game but will make a considerable difference to the mods and modders. So if you can use real world chemistry, why bother inventing a bunch of made up resources. And partly because I don't see anything terribly complicated in the system I proposed (although others may of course beg to differ), where two resources and a bit of abstraction can give you a reasonable stock ISRU system that is internally consistent enough (because it's based on real chemistry), that it can be expanded with mods if people see fit. Sure, you probably could make up an entirely self-consistent fictional system of "game resources" but why bother when there's a real life version already there. Disclaimer - I'm a chemist by training, but the actual chemistry behind ISRU is pretty straightforward. The practicalities of building and deploying sufficiently portable, rugged and repairable equipment to do the chemistry is most definitely not straightforward. Fortunately, it's precisely those practicalities that can, and should, be abstracted away in-game.

Totally depends on what monopropellant we're assumed to be using. Manufacturing hydrazine in-situ is going to be difficult without a source of nitrogen. Manufacturing hydrogen peroxide from oxygen and hydrogen is possible but difficult in practice. So I would say that including monopropellant as a Resource that can be manufactured off-Kerbin can be justified. Whether you'd want to make the Resources system that complicated is another question.

Well it's not a case of dropping a lump of coal into a bucket of water and making rocket fuel. But, starting from carbon dioxide, the chemistry is pretty well understood, and practical on a commercial scale. I chose carbon as a resource rather than CO2 just to keep it general. Making it work in space is, as you rightly say, a different matter but for gameplay purposes we just have to assume it can be made to work.

Count me in on the 'no alchemy' camp. I appreciate the simplicity of a single resource system, but personally I'm not a big fan. Thinking about it though, I think we could get by on two resources - water and carbon - that would let us have a simplified version of real life ISRU proposals, that could also be expanded out with realism mods if desired. Resources and raw materials At the moment we have four refuelable resources: liquid fuel, oxidiser, monopropellant, xenon. I'm going to deliberately ignore xenon - that needs to be shipped from Kerbin. I don't think this will be a big deal - ion engines are mainly used for probes, and it's not difficult to include to include enough onboard xenon on a probe. Monopropellant is an interesting one that could go either way, as I'll come on to. The ISRU scheme is fairly simple: Water gives you hydrogen and oxygen. Oxygen gives you (wait for it...) oxidiser. Hydrogen + carbon gives you liquid fuel (feasible but most of the chemistry is abstracted out for game-play purposes). Water could also give you monopropellant in the form of hydrogen peroxide, although in real life, the chemistry isn't easy to scale up. Alternatively, monopropellant could simply be shipped from Kerbin. Hydrogen could give you LV-N propellant if Squad get around to redoing nuclear engines. For added realism mods, water and oxygen can be used to resupply life support systems. The above scheme gives you hydrogen and methane for hydrolox or methane engines respectively. Monopropellant from Kerbin could potentially be a source of nitrogen, opening up more advanced ISRU options, including hand-wavy stuff such as producing fertilisers off-world for growing food. Raw material locations Water could plausibly be found almost anywhere in the Kerbol system. Icy asteroids, Duna's ice caps, in liquid form on Laythe, as ice on the other Joolian moons or Eeloo, in the bottom of deep craters or at the poles on the Mun. If we're treating Minmus as an ice world, then Minmus too. Carbon is a bit more limited. Sources might include carbonaceous asteroids, atmospheric CO2 on Duna or Laythe, frozen CO2 on Minmus, the Duna ice caps, the Joolian moons and Eeloo. The obvious places for a full ISRU base are therefore Minmus, Duna and Laythe, since all three bodies could plausibly have both carbon and water available. Gameplay wise, that's quite a nice player progression too, Kerbin System to basic interplanetary to advanced interplanetary missions. Asteroids are the other obvious place, although to manufacture everything would require an icy and a carbonaceous asteroid reasonably close together. Full ISRU bases would be capable of producing liquid fuel, oxidiser, monoprop (if included), hydrogen (if Squad decide to change nuclear engines to run on hydrogen), methane (if needed for mods). If hydrogen becomes a fuel, then anywhere that water is available becomes a potential refueling spot for nuclear powered vessels. Equipment I suggest a largely abstracted system of Extraction Modules, Processing Modules and a single Universal Storage module. Extraction modules acquire the relevant raw material, processing modules turn it into one or more Resources, and the Storage module holds the finished Resources. Other variations are possible of course - separate Storage modules for each resource, or combining Processing and Storage into single modules. A full ISRU base, capable of manufacturing all Resources could be set up in five Modules. One Universal Storage Module, one Water Extraction Module, one Carbon extraction module, one Fuel Processor for turning carbon and water into liquid fuel (plus methane if required) and one Oxidiser Processor for turning water into oxidiser, monopropellant (if we're including it) and optionally, hydrogen. For a little more complexity, the single Carbon extraction module could be replaced (as appropriate to the base location) with an Atmospheric CO2 Extractor and/or a Solid Carbon Extractor.

RemoteTech newbie here. I like building space infrastructure anyway, so I'm enjoying having a purpose to that infrastructure, but I don't think RT should be made stock. Very few objectives in KSP absolutely require you to build something as a pre-requisite for building something else. I can't imagine new players going to Mun, Minmus or beyond with Tier 0 parts, but experienced players can if they wish. Progressing through the tech tree just makes that easier, and opens up some new options along the way. RemoteTech clashes badly with the 'if you're good enough you can do it from the start' philosophy - even launching a simple Mun probe requires a lot of non-obvious and/or complicated (for new players at least) stuff first. Edit. Or in other words, even Career mode is pretty freeform at the moment. RemoteTech takes a lot of that way and forces players into doing uncrewed flights in a particular way. Great if you like doing things the RemoteTech way, not so great otherwise.

Nice start! This is really going back to the very beginning. I agree with GamerMitch's comments. Spaces between lines of dialogue makes the story easier to read. Your punctuation is good though - it took me ages to start putting commas in the right place, i.e. "What are we doing today, Bob?" and not "What are we doing today Bob." Synonyms for "smelled" would work, or alternatively, having one of the characters smelling the barbecue makes the sentence less passive: "The three walked outside and into the backyard. They lived in a small suburban neighborhood. Jeb could smell barbecue smoke drifting over the fence." These are minor points though - I'm looking forward to chapter II as well.

Ahh - I think I might have the wrong end of the stick then - sorry! Completely agree with that part - and as it happens I'm playing with RemoteTech installed, so your example is particularly relevant. What I meant, was the idea that a probe could be deliberately put into hibernation for long journeys to save that enabling power for later (for example if you did mess up with your energy requirements) simply by switching it's battery or batteries off, and then reactivating them when required. This seems OK to me from a gameplay perspective, in that a player can salvage a bad probe design by handling power management themselves. Incidentally, disconnected batteries certainly shouldn't be chargeable in transit. If you reawaken your probe at it's destination and then (for example) run out of power on the dark side of a planet before you can execute your orbit insertion burn and switch the probe back off again (to bring it back around to the sun facing side and recharge the batteries a bit), then tough. My understanding though was that folks were arguing that switching off the batteries would make a dead probe, which would then be incapable of being switched back on because it wouldn't be able to even receive the 'switch on' signal. Hence the player should have to include a reserve battery on the probe to simulate some kind of reserve power supply. My, somewhat grumpy, counterargument was that a reserve battery could just as easily be handwaved away as a built in part of the probe core, rather than something the player should explicity need to remember to stick on.

It might be. I don't know. But either way, this notion that simplified = dumbed down, gets really old. Especially when we're talking about a game in which building a rocket booster is a matter of clipping an 'engine' part onto a 'fuel tank' part. In which case, getting bent of shape over an abstracted away backup battery seems more than a bit silly quite frankly. There's a fine balance between 'enough detail to be interesting and challenging' and 'so much detail that the player is loaded down with largely pointless parts. KSP does a pretty good job of striking that balance, and there's certainly no shortage of mods for adding extra detail if you like such things. There may even be a mod for adding star trackers, propellant line heaters, thermal protection blankets and sundry other subsystems to your probes, because, you know - for realism. But I doubt it. Likewise, there might be a game out there that does dive into the minutiae of building spacecraft. KSP has never been that game though, and thankfully, probably never will.

Nice work! I particularly liked your depiction of Jeb as a tired, war-weary Commodore, and his conversation with ABEL was very well done. Looking forward to more of this!

Thanks - that's a better analogy than mine. In real life, building a probe that can be put into sleep mode but deliberately designing it not to be woken up again would be stupid. In KSP, I would argue that a 'sleep mode' should just be handled transparently by the probe core, in the same way that other essential systems (e.g. star trackers or other navigational equipment) presumably are. Having the option to put my probes into sleep mode by switching off the battery for long distance flights, adds a certain amount of realism. Having to explicitly stick a 'backup power supply' onto the side of the probe core would just be irritating, the more so in a game where most of the technological complexity of spaceflight is handled abstractly anyway.

Or perhaps the probe core has a built in reserve battery to handle that exact scenario? A little like having a battery on your PC motherboard to keep the clock running even when the computer is switched off. Switching off the battery (as in the battery component you added in the VAB), merely powers down the rest of the probe systems. Being able to deliberately shut a probe down to the point where it can't be restarted is neither particularly realistic, nor adds anything to the game other than a pointless irritation.

Hey folks, It seems that we've added an extra digit to our page count. One hundred thousand views, 100K views, 0.1 megaviews - it doesn't much matter which way you write it, that's a big number. Thank you all, newcomers and old-hands alike. Thank you for all your overwhelmingly supportive and encouraging comments. Thank you for the shout-outs on other threads and other forums. Thank you for all the on-thread discussions and entertaining detours! Most of all, thank you for your patience. I posted the original First Flight short story back in June 2013. The fact that some of you have been following the adventures of Jeb, Jonton, Ademone, Lodan and all the rest, for nearly a year and half is... well I count myself very fortunate indeed. And we've still got a way to go yet. Speaking of which - I have a chapter to get back to. KSK.

Yup - if doing something makes the game too easy - stop doing it! There are also plenty of mods out there to give you more stuff to do, make it harder and make it take more time. Purely as an example, I've got a career game running at the moment using Kerbal Construction Time* and RemoteTech. I'm about 120 days in, Bob has just returned from the first Munar orbit mission (following on from Bill's free-return flyby), and I've finally got some comms infrastructure in LKO, so that I can launch un-crewed rescue ships for those stranded kerbal contracts. Next up - a couple of part test missions, Mun/Minmus relay satellites into Kerbin polar orbit, first Munar landing, and building out my commsat network to the Mun and Minmus to support future missions. Hopefully by the time I get to Minmus, I'll have the tech to put a basic spacestation into LKO for carrying out science contracts, and by then I'd best start thinking about another couple of relay satellites to support my first Duna probe missions. By then, I'll be juggling interplanetary probe missions with crewed exploration of the Mun and Minmus, and resupply missions to my spacestation (because roleplaying). And I'll only be about 2/3 of the way through the tech tree at best, I would think. *ships take time to build, tech tree nodes take time to research, both can be accelerated by upgrading the R&D facilities, the VAB and/or the Spaceplane Hanger. Plus a couple of quality of life improvements such as auto recovery of rocket stages, provided that they're equipped with enough parachutes.

Ahh OK. That makes sense and sounds like it should work. My reasoning was largely personal, cloaked in a thin veneer of gameplay considerations. I would like earlier access to docking ports so that I can run Gemini style docking and rendezvous missions if I'm feeling a bit historical, or so that I can build and crew a primitive space station whilst I'm working my way up to Mun/Minmus craft. The Clamp-o-tron Jr is tailor made for the Mk1 Pod, but at the moment it comes quite far the tech tree, and I'm normally flying with Mk1-2 pods by then. Some more options for early LKO missions basically, beyond a quick science grab.

Nice. Looks like we'd need enough initial science to start progressing quite a few branches simultaneously. Almost everything is going to need propulsion, planes will then need wings, cockpits (although possibly not for extremely low tech planes ) and probably landing gear. Rockets are going to need tanks, pods (for crewed stuff) and some kind of guidance, whether that be reaction wheels or aerosurfaces. About docking ports. I was wondering if we could prune that branch and then split the ports between the Cockpits and Pods branch and the Structural Parts branch? At the same point you unlock a pod, you unlock the appropriate size port to go with it. Clampotron Srs are then found somewhere in the Structural Parts branch. One thing I've just spotted that I do like very much, is the ability to have early wheeled vehicles! If I want a science cart to drive around the KSC biomes right at the start - I can do it. If I want to roleplay a bit and have some recovery vehicles for my first crewed flights (assuming that I drop them somewhere near KSC ) - I can do that too.

Or just time warp from the main Space Centre view. Or the Tracking Station.