KSK

Interesting question. I was curious enough to have a quick look along my bookshelves, real and virtual, and found a reasonably even split between books where a protagonist is married (although in the case of George R R Martin, I'd qualify that with 'sometimes not for very long'), books where a protagonist is single and, books which occupy the space in between in various ways. For example, a protagonist might not be married but may have a significant other, be hoping that another main character be their significant other, or be in a long term relationship. I'm using protagonist here as a more general term than hero and for context, my bookshelves are pretty solidly non-fiction or speculative fiction. I'd expect married characters to feature more prominently in other genres. Where a protagonist was married I also found quite a range of relevancies (for want of a better word) to that marriage. Sometimes it, was a defining feature of the characters and a major plot driver - Charles Strauss's Laundry Files books for example. Sometimes the protagonists were married but the marriage didn't really feature very heavily in the plot - Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels for example. Sometimes a protagonist was married - and that told you something about their character - but you never met their spouse and their spouse never featured in the story. Sometimes, as you might expect, a book would feature more than one of the above - Terry Pratchett's 'Guards' books spring to mind. I'm wondering if that might be an answer of sorts. Unless a character's marriage has a significant impact on the story, or on them as a character, then its quite easy for it to be overlooked entirely. Anecdotally, that fits with my own experience as a writer. One of my protagonists was married and that was a major part of their story arc. Other protagonists in the same book might have been married or might not. I honestly don't know because that side of their lives just never came up. Of course there are all sorts of reasons in-story for a character to be single. Some of them have already been mentioned but sometimes the character is just too much of a jerk or too self-centered or too socially inept to make it likely that they'll find a partner. I have a hard time imagining Kvothe in Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind, getting married for example.

Ugh. The starship troopers in the film did not come across well from the book. In the book they were deployed by drop pod from orbit, wore powered armour, had proper communication and other battlefield awareness gear and were armed with everything from flamethrowers to tactical nuclear rockets as required. They were essentially badS sci-fi paratroopers, sent in to do what infantry does best: take ground, hold it and deprive the enemy of it. Because sometimes turning said ground into radioactive glass from orbit doesn't really further your strategic goals. In the film... yeah what you said.

Again, it totally depends on your setting. Taking an example from the top of my head, as you already pointed out, a magnetic shield could effectively protect a sci-fi spacecraft against plasma weaponry. However that assumes that the spacecraft can generate a strong enough magnetic field to sufficiently deflect an incoming plasma bolt. Complete protection would also require the shielding to be active over the entire ship and to be continually active. Neither of those needs to hold true when you consider that magnetic shielding would also require power and that the spacecraft might simply not be capable of generating enough energy to power the shields as well as the engines, weapons, life support and other ship systems simultaneously. So you could choose to go for a Star Wars type solution where the magnetics shields are angled or set to defend against incoming fire from the most likely directions. "Set deflectors on double front! Rear turrets - watch for enemy fighters!" At which point battles become quite tactical. Being able to attack from multiple directions becomes especially important. Predicting the enemy's attack patterns to set your shields accordingly, becomes a real consideration. Lots of good story telling scope there. And it may well be that plasma weapons are completely ineffective against fast moving craft because your setting is using movie style, relatively slow moving, plasma projectiles. That's fine. Use something else for picking off the fighters and make your plasma cannons the big capital ship killers. Or forget about plasma cannons. Take a leaf out of the Homeworld playbook and have plasma bombs or missiles equipped with plasma warheads, both of which can be deployed from fighters if need be. The warhead could be an antimatter containment unit which is set to deliberately fail when some predetermined condition is met. At which point the antimatter annihilates and turns the rest of the warhead into a cloud of plasma. TL: DR. Plasma weapons are only useless if you, as the writer, choose to make them useless.

I'm wondering - perhaps we, or rather @Spacescifi could approach this from another angle. A lot of his(?) questions are difficult to answer because we don't get a lot of context and so we don't get a clear idea of what he wants his fictional spaceships to do and therefore what limitations need to be overcome when thinking about the kind of technologies that would be required, or whether his suggested technologies would be effective. If we could start with an outline of that context and the sci-fi setting he's developing then maybe folks could help figure out some suitable technologies that would work within that setting? We wouldn't need anything super detailed but an idea of: How populated the setting is and so how much space-based infrastructure would be reasonable to use; Where most of the action is likely to take place - for example does it mostly take place on a handful of planets or are the main characters doing a lot of hopping between star systems; How long a space journey would ideally take; What the spacecraft need to do - explore, move cargo, fight, all of the above; Whether the setting includes FTL communication; would be helpful. Rather than yet another thread on the merits (or otherwise) of a particular spaceship drive or other piece of technology, why not give us the big picture, so we can help figure out how that big picture might work. Given the background of the folks on this forum, I suspect we could go quite far down the rabbit hole of spacecraft design if asked to.

Fifteen minutes in and loving it so far! Excellent choice of music for the soundtrack, I'm enjoying the evolution of the KSA spacecraft from Shuttle clone to much more @Just Jim like craft and I couldn't help but grin at the 'Send a Probe' line. We are kerbal. If in doubt - launch! And then the naming. Even though any readers of Jim's story will know exactly what's coming, it still sends a shiver down your spine. And we're just getting started!

In no particular order: Science fiction is a broad church. Sometimes the technology in a given story is either present day technology or a plausible, not too far-future extrapolation from it. Sometimes the technology is obviously fictional but remains consistent to an internal logic and set of constraints. Sometimes the technology is just pure rule of cool. In all cases, it may be a significant plot point, it may just be window dressing for the story, or it may be something in between. Science fiction is not necessarily space fiction, still less space war fiction. The job of the science-fiction writer is to tell a good story. If they end up being an inspiration to real-world researchers in the process, then that's a bonus. Besides, I would argue that a significant part of that inspiration arises from researchers reading about an obviously (at the time) rule-of-cool fictional technology which then spurs them to try and figure out how to turn fiction into reality. Sometimes the inspiration from science fiction is more abstract. I recently listened to a very good podcast (the Washington Post's Moonrise) which, amongst other things, explored the role of science fiction on the Apollo Program. In a nutshell, the popularity of science fiction helped to shape public perception of what was or could be possible, turning a Moon landing from an outright impossibility (and therefore waste of time) into something that would be incredibly hard but also possible. Remember that Kennedy's 'before this decade is out' speech happened in the very earliest days of manned spaceflight. Gagarin had only just flown, Shepard had just made his suborbital hop. To aim at a Moon landing from there required a huge leap of faith and science fiction helped to shape the backdrop against which that leap was made. Science fiction writers don't necessarily have any military experience, are not necessarily versed in military theory or, indeed, are not necessarily scientists. Of course the obvious counter to that statement is the old advice of 'write what you know'. If you're writing about future warfare then it would probably help if you do know something military tactics and/or strategy. Likewise if a particular aspect of real-world science or technology is crucial to your story, it's probably a good idea if you know enough about it (or can research enough about it) to sound plausible. Defeating lasers with mirrors is an old trope that doesn't bear up too well in real life. Even high quality mirrors are not 100% reflective, so they will absorb some of the incoming laser energy. If the laser is powerful enough to damage the target, that small percentage of absorbed energy will be enough to damage the protective mirror to the point where it's much less reflective and therefore much less effective as a laser countermeasure. Returning to the original question: A plasma projectile may or may not be as effective as a laser in terms of raw damage output but there are other considerations that may come into play. Weapon cost. High powered lasers are expensive, require a lot of precision equipment and, depending on the lasing medium being used, are not necessarily very efficient. For a space weapon grade laser that might mean a relatively fragile weapon with significant heat dissipation requirements. Plasma weaponry may or may not suffer from those disadvantages. It's very setting dependent but I could well imagine, or be persuaded in the context of a sci-fi story, that there are tactical advantages to using plasma weaponry over lasers: Damage mode. A plasma projectile, assuming that the 'plasma' is actually plasma and not just a name for some other concept, is basically a blob of charged particles. How they interact with spacecraft armour may be very different to how a laser beam interacts with that armour. Consider the somewhat analogous case of radiation shielding - the materials that you want in your shield are heavily dependent on the type of radiation you're trying to block. A plasma projectile (compared to a laser) might be just the thing for quickly wrecking large areas of relatively fragile spacecraft components such as radiators. It's the difference between cutting a hole in a window with a glass cutter and just lobbing a brick through the window. Secondary weapon effects, aka the classic Star Wars ion cannon. Realistic threat? Who knows. But the very presence of plasma weaponry might force spacecraft designers to add additional shielding or make other performance limiting design changes to their spacecraft, making those spacecraft less combat-effective than would otherwise be possible. Incidentally, I always imagined plasma weapons as a rather more high tech version of these: https://www.stevespanglerscience.com/lab/experiments/dry-ice-smoke-ring-launcher/

And on a completely different note, seeing as this is thread for writers to talk about writing, I thought this might be of interest to some folks. http://www.timclarepoet.co.uk/the-100-day-writing-challenge/ Essentially it's a series of short writing exercises, one per day, each of them lasting about 20 minutes. That tends to be 10 minutes of listening followed by 10 minutes of writing. The exercises themselves start off quite gently, building up to some free-writing sessions and now (at Day 28), things are just starting to get a wee bit more technical. I'm not sure I completely buy into the theory behind the various exercises but I have found them a nice easy way of getting back into the writing groove after taking a few weeks off after finishing First Flight. Your mileage may vary but, at 20 minutes a day, the Challenge is not exactly a time sink if you want to give it a go, even if you eventually decide it's not really for you.

Ahh - I hadn't considered that. Might be best to ask one of them - they're an understanding bunch. If they turn out not to be happy with you running an alt, then please do restart the story as Sirius! If that helps?

Hey Sirius! Welcome back - glad to hear there's a new fic in progress! I'd say it's totally up to you how you want to play it, whether that's restarting it on your @SiriusRocketry account or continuing it on your alt account. I'm sure it will most definitely not be a lost cause either way! If you do choose to continue with it on your alt account, please could you PM me the link (appreciate you might not want to link it in public), so that I can catch up.

Absolutely - I'd be delighted if anyone wanted to! Probably easiest for them to just add a post to this thread since it's already stickied, rather than having to ask a moderator to sticky a new, very similar, thread.

Yeah, looks like the curved engine design has been dropped, at least if the current graphics on their website are anything to go by. As you say, the final design will probably be different again.

My hot take - starting your tweet with a swipe at the media is lame. Perhaps if your big milestones came less than 18 months apart, the space journos might pay a little more attention.

The graphic looks like an old SABRE graphic lifted from the former Reaction Engines site. I don't recall the reason for the curvature and unfortunately the Reaction Engines site has gone a lot more corporate and is full of techno-teasers whereas before it had quite a lot of solid information about the SABRE concept. When I was writing about an airbreathing rocket engine for my KSP fiction, the old website is where I got all the technical details from. As for the Fenris engine, the Wired article is fairly lightweight so it's hard to tell what Mountain Aerospace have actually got here but, as noted by their critics in the article, just sucking the air in through the front is avoiding most of the hard problems in building an airbreathing rocket engine. I wish them the best of luck though and it's quite possible that the Fenris engine will deliver - it's just hard to tell that from the long-on-hype-but-short-on-detail Wired article. Oh - and personal peeve. It's fazed goddammit. Things can be in or out of phase. To be unafraid of the odds stacked against you is to be unfazed.

And I'm deeply honoured in return by your final thought. You're very welcome - it's moments like that when you know you've made a difference! I'm also sincerely glad that the last few chapters did not disappoint. In the end I found it quite difficult to pull all the various plot threads together in a sensible way and I was always very aware of the big time-skip between the last two chapters and the even bigger skip between the last chapter and the epilogue. I still think that was the right way to do it but one could also reasonably argue that those two time skips glossed over quite a lot of stuff! Anyhow - enough introspection! I shall take the flowery sentiment with gratitude.

Cheers folks. KSC Archives has been added to the Works in Progress shelf. And yeah, @SiriusRocketry, there's an impressive amount of fan writing on the forum that covers so many different takes on the kerbals and their adventures. And I have to admit that I reread quite a lot of it when I was updating the Library. But I figured this was a suitable time to draw a line under it.

If Mercury to Pluto in a month or two isn’t ‘torchship performance’, it’s close enough in my book.

I like it. The first few steps along your timeline feel fairly plausible including (unfortunately ) your notes on the 2050s. The worldbuilding for your mid-27th century Solar system is very interesting too. I like the way you have the Hegemony on the one hand, with all the tensions that they cause and then, on the other hand, Europa is effectively fenced off as a planetary scale national park. It shows both the best and the worst of humanity very well.

Take me apart, take me apart. What a way to roam. If you have to take me apart to get there, I'd rather stay at home?

*twitches gently* Another dried frog pill? Why yes, that would be most agreeable if you'd be so kind. Joking aside, @JakeGrey wrote this rather good snippet that would tie nicely into the end of First Flight. Which isn't too surprising since it inspired much of Joenie's story arc. Right now though, I think it's unlikely that either Jake or myself (assuming that Jake was cool with that) are going to build on that snippet - I know that I'm not ready to dive back into another KSP novel. So for now, a big thank you to @KerBlitz Kerman for the kind words and sound advice. And on a completely non-KSP related note, have a very early sneak peek at the next work in progress. As in, so early that I'm just noodling around with it and such niceties as actual characters and internal consistencies are a Problem for Another Day. It's almost certainly just going to be a short story since I don't have a plot in mind so much as a single, hopefully cool, scene to build up to.

Why would you presume that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_starship The smaller a black hole is, the faster it evaporates by Hawking radiation. As it evaporates it loses mass, therefore getting smaller and evaporating faster, leading to a runaway effect that eventually results in it exploding as per @K^2's post. To avoid that explosion, you keep shovelling material in to replace the lost mass. Using a black hole to drive a starship relies on somehow converting that Hawking radiation to energy and thrust. Which is clearly a Non-Trivial Engineering Problem but in theory it may be possible and this thread is concerned with theoretical spacecraft. As per the linked article, there's a sweet spot where the black hole is big enough to have a useful lifetime but small enough to produce enough power and also small enough to be feasibly (for generous values of feasible) manufactured. Apparently that sweet spot is around 600 thousand tons. For comparison, the mass of the earth is around 13 billion trillion tons, so it's immediately clear that the gravity field produced by a black hole starship is going to be insignificant compared to Earth's gravity. It's also clear that, again as per @K^2's post, a black hole starship is easily capable of moving thousands of tons of cargo because those thousands of tons are a rounding error compared to the mass of the ship's drive. A black hole massive enough to create a 0.5g gravity field would be useless as a propulsion system because it wouldn't evaporate fast enough to produce the required thrust. Edit: This is my highly simplified understanding based on a ten minute internet search. Corrections by @K^2 are welcome!

In our solar system there is water ice on Mercury (permanently shadowed craters), Mars, Ceres, and several of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. There is evidence of water on the moon, although its unclear how much of it is ice (useful) or, for example, hydrated minerals (not so useful). And that's with a relatively hot yellow star. Red dwarf stars are cooler and so the frost line of any planetary system around them might be expected to be closer in to the star, hence most or all of those planets are likely to comprise ice and other volatiles. Red dwarfs are also the most common star type in the Milky Way galaxy. I know you've commented on Elite Dangerous in other threads - I'm not sure if you've got it or played it but if you have, the procedural generation system that Frontier used to create their multitudinous star systems is apparently quite scientifically accurate in that it takes our current understanding of planetary formation into account. And you really don't have to play E: D for long to figure out that red dwarf systems with orbiting icy bodies are pretty much ten to the credit. I don't think that finding a source of water in space is going to be particularly difficult. Put another way, if your fictional setting relies on icy bodies for refueling then having lots of them conveniently available isn't so unrealistic that your reader's suspension of disbelief will be broken. Harvesting that water of course is another matter but, as you're fond of saying, that's an engineering problem. But it's an engineering problem that would be solvable right now in the 21st century, so I don't see it being any big deal for any sci-fi setting, whether it uses next-to-present, NASA 2.0 level tech or space opera rule-of-cool tech. On a more meta level, any inhabited star systems in your fictional setting (especially if 'inhabited' means space stations or other artificial environments) will plausibly have at least one or two suitable icy bodies for propellant harvesting, simply because that availability of propellant would have been enormously useful and possibly essential to the original colonisation effort. If you're out exploring new systems then, at a pinch, you could have your exploration vessel make use of Kuiper Belt or even Oort cloud bodies for refuelling, although that's likely to be something of an emergency measure since they're necessarily pretty far out from the star and finding them is probably going to be more difficult (smaller bodies, big volume of space to search in). More plausibly, the first thing your exploration vessel does when arriving in-system is to scan for icy bodies and, if it can't find any (unlikely but possible), flag up that system as unsuitable for development and jump out again.

Man, kerbal babies sure seem to be messier than Terrin ones! I feel for Tina trying to dress the wee octopus - been there, done that with various nieces and nephews, only without the benefit of the head stroking trick. Oh - and magic trees indeed. Who would write about something like that. The Kraken though... that we do not speak of.

Looking forward to this too! Excellent trailer as well - really does the job of stoking excitement for the real thing!

Hiya, First page of the thread, third post or so (works in progress) and you're fourth in the list of Fiction works. Glad to hear there's more Kerny on the way and I totally understand the 'when work settles down' bit - been there, done that! Hiya, Love the animation but, as mentioned, the Library is really for written works. Not that I've got anything against fan art etc. - quite the opposite in fact - but my own fan works are in writing so writing is what I wanted to showcase in this thread. Thanks for the link though! KSK.

Hey folks, I've finally gotten around to updating and revamping the Library and it now includes all the fan fiction, parodies, lyrics, poetry, short stories and other written works that I can find in the main Fanworks forum, from the beginning to date. Links have been updated and fixed throughout. I've also included a handful of links to the Mission Reports sub-forum, mostly by request, but I do not plan to add any more. Partly because the Mission Reports forum is a pretty big moving target to chase, but mostly because its threads are all... well Mission Reports, and aren't mixed in with a bunch of other works. Hence, indexing isn't as useful or necessary. If anyone has any other threads they'd like to see included - or deleted - from the Library, please do let me know by the 30th June. As a friendly reminder, threads for inclusion should include at least some writing. Graphic novels, illustrated stories etc are fine but please don't send links to fan art, videos, etc. After the 30th of June, I'll be closing this thread and not posting any further updates. Cheers, KSK.