KSK

Ahh - the loneliness of the long distance miner! Glad you had the pics uploaded already.

A good read but very dark. I'm adding this to the library in the Unfinished Works section for now. Please let me know if there's a second part coming up - I'm never quite sure with some of your writing!

That does indeed suck. I was about to post something cheerful about the pictures being back up but.... yeah. Hope you didn't lose anything essential along with the KSP stuff.

Which is a fair point but if I may ask - how long did it take you to get to the point where you can navigate to any planet regardless of eccentricity or inclination? More importantly - was it fun while it lasted? I would argue that it's OK for a game to stop somewhere. I would also argue that there's plenty to do once you've reached that point. Can you land a rover on a given planet? How about build a base there? A base that's more than just an oversized lander? A floating base on Laythe? Write your name in flags across Eeloo? Sure, this is pure Lego - building for building's sake. None of it has any real point gameplay-wise - but does that matter? I guess the answer is - it will for some folks and it won't for others. Edit: I should also say that I don't get as much time to play (as opposed to write about or comment on ) KSP as I might like. I have loads of places left to visit, without resorting to my slightly contrived goals above. So I'm probably coming at this from a slightly different perspective than you.

Unless you have any self-imposed restrictions or roleplaying reasons to pick one over the other, I'd say Minmus. Easier landing and easier science. If you pick the right landing spots, you can visit two to three biomes in a single landing (with patience) just by going on EVA, picking up a sample and an EVA report from each one. If you have enough fuel for multiple landings you could probably sample all the biomes in a single mission.

I always land on 'the Mun' (with umlaut added) in the same way that Armstrong landed on 'the Moon'. I like the idea of mun being the generic kerbal word for natural satellite though. Oh - and I definitely go into Munar orbit, perform a trans-Munar injection burn etc. etc.

I'm voting for option 2. KSP definitely deserves its current reputation and given that that reputation seems to be almost universally positive, I think it's hard to argue for option 1. As folks have pointed out, it's a little rough around the edges in places but I'm confident that those rough edges will be smoothed away in time. KSP isn't a finished product after all. And purely as an aside, I like the fact that KSP doesn't have achievements. Others may beg to differ of course but I don't think my first ever Mun landing was at all spoiled by not having an 'Achievement Unlocked - Mun Landing!' style message pop up. Quite the opposite in fact - shutting down that engine, watching the lander drop those last couple of metres onto the Mun (without breaking) and then taking Jeb out on EVA and watch him bounce around in low gravity - I didn't need a pop-up to tell me that was an achievement.

Fantastic - this is still one of my favourite stories on here. I love your imagining of kerbal society, the way you use bits of their language here and there and generally the way they feel so darn alien.

Okay, I'm going to be crazy and go with an in-game shot here.

Cheers Jake! Next chapter and the one after that are both about half done. The rest of the current chapter - needs to be started. Was at a conference last week (in San Francisco curiously enough) , so evening and weekend time has been limited lately. I did manage to get a fair bit done on the flight over though.

Fun stuff! New tech, more Munar infrastructure, building paranoia over the Jool mission and a little romance to lighten the atmosphere. And as always, no amount of Right Stuff can fend off space sickness.

My take on it is a little different but yeah, pretty much this. My tentative retrofitted backstory has Jeb befriending Wernher in college, realising the potential of Wernher's prototype LV-1 rocket engine and then going a little over the top trying to sell his wild ideas of kerballed spaceflight. Frustrated at the lack of response from a generally conservative faculty, he and the rest of the Kerbin Interplanetary Society drop out of college to try and go it alone. The junkyard business was set up as a means to an end - it's a way of acquiring parts and raising cash. Other KIS members took part time jobs to pay the bills and keep themselves in food and other basics, None of the KIS have any piloting background, which is the main reason (along with simplicity) they settled on the booster plus capsule concept for spaceflight. Building a crew capable sub-orbital rocket was (unsurprisingly) a lot harder and took a lot longer than they anticipated and the Kerbal 1 was pretty much their last throw of the dice. By that time, only the hardcore believers of the KIS were left and they were generally regarded as 'those crazy rocket guys', narrowly managing to avoid blowing themselves up. Then came Jeb, Bill and Bob's first flight aboard the Kerbal 1. Bill had the great presence of mind to bring a camera along and take some photos from high altitude. Kerbin's Space Age had begun...

Ahh. I may have been getting mixed up with precession - prod a gyroscope along one axis and get a force along an orthogonal axis (I think). But yes - conservation of angular momentum. Thanks for the correction.

Naively, I would have thought that putting the reaction wheel as far from the centre of mass as possible (for greatest turning moment) would be best but I'm not sure how that works in practice. So building them into your payload (which you'll probably want to do anyway ) should work well. Apologies for the delayed reply (probably too late now) but yes - the design I posted earlier does work fine with 2xFLT400 tanks replacing the FLT800s. Plus your rocket gets a nice stripey paint job!

Uhh - I invoke 'Loading Screen Hint #234 - Retreating to a safe distance...' On the other hand - bucket seat plus warp drive plus gigawatt class reactor to power it = the ultimate in high speed, everything to the metal, suici...engineering minimalism. So umm yeah. If you ask yourself 'What would Oggy do?', it would probably be something more or less like that. With headbutts. Go for it!

Hmm, it's maybe not quite what you're looking for but I just keep an eye on my periapsis during the ascent. Once it hits 65-68km, kill the engines, separate the final lifter stage and do a quick burn with your ship engines to lift your periapsis above 70km. Your final stage won't be on a suborbital trajectory but it will be in a decaying orbit. Switch to it and fly it around Kerbin until it deorbits, or just abandon it, secure in the knowledge that it would have deorbited in time.

With apologies to Monty Python: "Help, help - I'm being obsessed!"

Oh, and this is public service announcement from Xackylvania State Television. "The Kerb Kerman show is compul.... clean family viewing. Any references whatsoever to Oggy's sepratron will be frowned upon most severely by his awesomeness, the mighty, the watcher over us all, Xacktar. All hail his name."

Nothing - and I mean nothing, says love like a giant heart shaped rocket!

Caution - post may contain traces of smug. In the living room, we've got a framed copy of the July 1969 Time magazine cover (no prizes for guessing what that's about) on one wall and a framed copy of XKCD's UpGoerFive on another. Current (shared) bedtime reading is an audiobook version of Gene Kranz's Failure is not an option. I've been a gamer for as long as she's known me. So yeah - a little KSP addiction isn't causing any problems. To be honest, I think my wife would be more surprised if I wasn't addicted.

Not a problem I'd go for the biggest tanks you can manage, so I'm guessing the FLT400s? I'm honestly not sure how well my design will work with those but I'll test it tomorrow. It might require a bit more strutting. I don't use FAR and actually I think it will make my design more viable - you may even get away with shortening the second stage tanks a little. The fins are standard - no tweakables applied. Last point - if you're using this to put a probe in orbit, you may need to add another reaction wheel or two to beef up the available torque.

OK, here goes with the promised design, although it's a bit redundant now. LV-T30s on the first stage, LV-T45s on the second, LV909 on the third. Small SRBs to get it off the pad. Otherwise just uses FLT800 tanks, FLT400 tanks and a wee bit of strutting to hold the stages together. Flies OK, although you need to be a bit careful with the gravity turn. As soon as you lose the SRBs you'll start to decelerate but it'll pick up again at around 70 m/s. First stage should get you to about 10km up, second stage will probably get you to orbit with care, or not far off it. I still needed about 250m/s delta-V out of the third stage to hit orbit but my ascent profile probably wasn't optimal. Third stage in above kerbostationary orbit, using cupola module and Mk 1 lander can as approximate mass dummy payload. Apoapsis value didn't get captured but you can hopefully tell from the velocity that we're comfortably past stationary orbit. With fuel left to spare for plane changes and fiddling with orbital parameters. Or probably a one-way trip to Munar orbit!

Beautiful work - that felt like an epic journey. I think Tablets 14 and 15 were my favourites! Yep - like that. I know it was pretty much the point but I did like the way you kept the style of the first three lines going so well for the rest of the piece.

Decided to do an orbital rendezvous mission early on in my current career mode game, forgetting that this is much easier with RCS! Managed the rendezvous anyway, to within 30m just using good timing on the second launch, the navball and the main engine. Doubt I'll be docking without RCS any time soon but nailing the rendezvous was satisfying.

It does look like you're overbuilding things. I don't know how heavy your payload is but for comparison, I have a basic stock comsat (because roleplaying ) that's basically an OKTO plus antenna, with Round-8 tank and an LV-1 on the back for propulsion. It's quite possible to get that to kerbostationary orbit using the big Rockomax SRB as a first stage and then an FLT-400 + LV909 second stage. All nice low tech parts! Couple of other points. From your tech tree screenshot it looks like you've unlocked the Stayputnik, so you might not need to include the command pod. Getting a synchronous orbit will be still be difficult without RCS, or a small engine to make fine adjustments though. For polar orbits, it's far easier to just launch straight into the orbit. you do need a little more delta-V for that but its only around 200-250m/s extra, which is much less than you'll need to make the required plane change from an equatorial orbit. If you post the mass of your two satellites, I could have a go at designing a suitable launch vehicle if you'd like.