KSK

*Reads chapter* *Gets to final section* Oh... crap.

It’s not the link I was thinking of but it’s actually a bit more recent with some notes on base building and population. Looks rather interesting all in all. The title is pure clickbait though - baby Kerbals could grow in their momma’s pouch, marsupial style, be grown in vats, or spawn from asexual worker castes - we shall never know. And your comment about Kerbal exotica, reminds me of a scene in one of my favourite KSP fics, where Kerbals make contact with humans and - in time honoured fashion - learn the local language by decoding TV broadcasts beforehand. Poor Bob gets very confused by some of the, ahem... ‘late night cable’ programming. Sadly the fic in question was deemed to be forum unsuitable but it’s not hard to find elsewhere. Edit. I should also add that the fic in question was entirely safe for work!

My pleasure and I'd be curious to know what you make of the story if you did decide to give it a go! I think they could fit in more than ancient background info but I agree that historical lore should all take place before the game starts, with the players free to tell their own stories after that. That's a fair point about being put off by too much detail about the kerbals too - and yes, I'm not at all sure any official lore would fit with Circus canon! From what I've read, population growth is planned to be a thing in KSP2. Build a base and its population will grow over time, presumably subject to available habitation space and maybe food supplies. Having different biology choices would be good, although I suspect that the mechanics of population growth will be abstracted away. @CatastrophicFailure - you know, I'm not at all sure I do mention the Kraken anywhere. There's possibly a couple of allusions to it somewhere of the "good night, sleep tight, don't let the Kraken bite" nursery rhyme variety but that's about it. Maybe it lies sleeping at the bottom of one of the seven smoking hells that occasionally get invoked in times of stress.

According to @JakeGrey it’s a spatial anomaly out by Jool. It’s tendancy to fling out any incoming probes at implausible velocities led the Kerbals to discover warp travel. Yeah - fic-mixing would be tricky!

Why, thank you! I'd be honoured if they did want to but so far.... (runs away to check email), they haven't been in touch. Mind you, they credited Shaun Esau on their trailer credits, so you never know, although I don't think it's terribly likely. Crediting Shaun also gives me some confidence that they'd do the decent thing and credit me, if they did decide to use any First Flight lore in KSP2. More generally though, some kind of in-game lore is one of my big hopes for KSP2, which probably won't come as a surprise to anyone. (Fanfic writer would like more in-game writing shocker. ) I do think it shows the kind of attention to detail that makes a game look cared about and it doesn't have to be terribly obtrusive for those that aren't much bothered about such things. BattleTech is a nice example - you can play the game right through without ever reading one bit of lore, but it's all there if you want to, tucked away behind various hyperlinks. A more extreme example is probably Subnautica - the amount of background detail that the devs have put into the various marine plants and beasties is incredible and really makes the exploration side of the game shine. And again - it's all mostly optional. We're going to be building an interstellar civilization in KSP2 - wouldn't it be nice to know a little bit about it? I can honestly say that I'd be happy with any sort of in-game lore. Alternate Universe (AU) is a well established style of fanfic, so whatever the official word on the kerbals and Kerbin ends up being, it wouldn't spoil First Flight for me. But, if they do include lore, I would dearly love it to be easily moddable - for obvious reasons I think. And while I really appreciate @EnderKid2s vote of confidence, there are plenty of other writers on this forum who've created great settings for KSP. @Geschosskopf's Travelling Circus, @Just Jim's Emikoverse, @CatastrophicFailure's Krakenverse, @Kuzzter's Kerbfleet - the list goes on, and my apologies to the many fine writers I've missed out. I don't know if any of them would actually be interested in modding in their work but if any one of them did, it would surely add a whole new depth to the KSP experience.

No problem - add a Sun/Kerbol toggle in the game settings. It could go right under the ‘level of micro transactions’ slider and the ‘clear all mods’ button.

Yep. I live just west of Edinburgh and tend to think of myself as Scottish these days with all the political shenanigans happening at the moment. But that's not a topic for these forums. Back on topic, depending on context, 'cheers' can mean goodbye or thanks. It can also be used as a toast, usually in a casual 'I'll drink to that' kind of context. The kind of toast you'd use when raising a glass to a friend in a bar, rather than the kind of toast you'd use at a wedding.

Cheers. It also occurs to me that it could make a depressingly good Rod from God kinetic weapon. Dense, inert, and with extreme temperature resistance. Perfect for punching through atmospheres without losing any mass to ablation on the way down.

You're very welcome - and honestly? It's posts like yours that make it a pleasure. Hope you enjoy the forthcoming chapters and that the ending (when it comes) caps it all off in fine style for you. Although I can categorically state that it will not end in Jeb escaping from Duna in a 'lightened' rocketship which makes creative use of a tarpaulin. Seriously though, being compared to The Martian and Tolkien? Crikey - that's high praise indeed - thank you very much. Edit. I should also apologise for the late reply to your very kind post. All I can say that I was feeling a bit salty yesterday re. the KSP2 announcement and wanted to wait until I was in a more cheerful frame of mind.

Exactly! This is very much the sort of thing I had in mind when I commented about the game hanging together in an interesting way or just being KSP1 with some extra shinies bolted on and a longer tech tree.

Both fair. I retract the ballparking comment. I never did teach myself to like long time warp flights. I made it Duna, Eve and Moho without them. Went to Jool once, warping all the way and found it unsatisfying. Your mileage clearly varied.

Please read my earlier post as to why I think interstellar flight is a bad idea. And I really don’t care what modders may or may not add to the game over time. Depends if you’re okay with warping through months at a time and ignoring everything else in your game for that time. I never was myself but others may reasonably differ. Also that 1 year journey is making a lot of extremely generous assumptions.

Sadly it appears that we’re getting actual interstellar flight. I can’t disagree with you about multiplayer but it’s not a selling point for me personally. And yeah, trailer culture doesn’t reflect actual gameplay - no arguments there either. On the other hand - and again this is a purely personal opinion, it would be nice if the Kerbals played a bigger part in the game than they currently do and continuing the tired old trailer culture memes doesn’t give me a lot of hope that they will.

You’re missing my point. As I said in my original post, interstellar travel was a personal warning flag. I think it’s a bad idea because it either involves sci-fi technology (not consistent with the rest of the game) or journey times that are completely out of scale with the rest of the game. Not to mention that anything you do to mitigate the travel time for interstellar flight tends to trivialise interplanetary flight.

I hate to be a downer - and I appreciate the link - but that actually makes it worse. Without some kind of FTL mechanism, we're doing interstellar flights at sub-light speeds. Even assuming that we can get to a respectable fraction of c using one of the advanced engines (which, incidentally has the side effect of making travel around the Kerbol system rather trivial) and even assuming that we're playing in a scaled-down KSP1 like universe - interstellar journeys are going to take a long time. Some very rough and ready figures. Assume a 4 light year journey (comparable to a trip to Alpha Centauri from Earth). Assume we can compress that to a 4 light month journey because of Universe scaling. An Orion style nuclear pulse drive will get you to about 0.035c. Lets be generous and scale that up to 0.35c, for gameplay balance and to allow for the fact that there may be more efficient engines than Orion. That's still a 1 year journey. Not allowing for acceleration or braking. And making so many generous assumptions that it kind of makes a mockery of the 'rooted in science' thing. I wasn't overwhelmed by this comment either: "There is a population of Kerbals locally in any colony that you build, and that population does increase organically. And as that population increases, the colony's abilities increase as well. But not it's not the sort of situation where if you don't tend to the colony, it collapses or something bad happens." To me, this smacks of 'we don't include life support because it makes things too hard'. Which is undeniably a popular view on this forum but personally it's not one I subscribe to. Anyhow - we don't have anywhere near enough information for this to be an informed debate, so I'll stop here. As I said, I want my pessimism to be unfounded - we'll just have to wait and see.

As we've seen in the last couple of chapters, there are worse things than Krakens and they cannot be vanquished... Hopefully that's not a metaphor for Ten Key's sorely missed absence.

I'm ambiguous about this. Definitely one where I'm going to read the reviews first, maybe watch a video or two before plunking down any money. The trailer is... a very good trailer. It sells the sizzle as the old marketing saying goes. But until I get an idea of whether the game is all going to hang together in an interesting way, or just be KSP1 with some extra shinies bolted on and a longer tech tree, I'm holding off buying my Hype Train ticket. Plus points. Looks like the graphics are getting a big overhaul. We get bases and things to do (possibly) with our space programs. Kerbolar system confirmed as canon </snark> Personal warning flags. Interstellar travel. Too sci-fi for KSP in my opinion. Would have preferred an expanded Kerbol system. Likewise, the more esoteric high-thrust, high-ISP engines. Multiplayer. Bluntly, I suspect that multiplayer will involve a competitive element. Which, in my experience, tends to be a route to endless player bickering about 'balance' and the single player game being mucked around with in the name of multiplayer balance. Not a great match for a sandbox style single player mode. Lol-kerbals still up front and present. In the trailer I was fine with that Mun lander tipping over as a wee bit of fanservice to KSP1. But then, at the end we see a large, advanced off-Kerbin base.... and yet another 'hilarious' rocket crashing incident. I know this is a long established meme but it's also a threadbare and tattered meme, which looks increasingly stupid the more advanced the Kerbal's are supposed to be getting. What's next - chucklesome planet cracking antics as Jeb flies a prototype FTL ship into Duna? I hope I'm wrong about all of the above. I want to be wrong about all of the above. But, like I said - personal warning flags.

Trying to rationally explain why an impossible substance behaves the way it does sounds like an exercise in futility. However taking the existence of such a material as a given and then figuring out what other properties it should have, could put some interesting limitations on a story, or open up some new and self-consistent possibilities for it. For example, that ultra high melting point material. If we assume that that is down to implausibly strong atomic bonds then the material should also have a rather impressive tensile strength. So it’s probably good for constructing space elevators at one extreme and monofilaments that can cut through almost anything at the other. A super strong atomic bond might also make the material incredibly inert since (simplistically) there’s nothing else it could react with that would result in a stronger bond. However, this stuff will probably have the significant drawback of being extremely hard to work with with. Chemical processing probably won’t work and it takes extreme conditions to melt it. Plus it’s going to be dense and tough (those super strong bonds again), making it hell on any non-unobtainium cutting tools. Given all of that, how the heck do you do any machining or manufacturing with this stuff? This can also be a useful reducto ad absurdium exercise. Take your unobtainium, figure out its properties and decide whether you actually want it in your story or not.

Just spotted the Big News. Definitely got mixed feelings about it.

I cannot tell a lie - I still fire up that particular video now and then. Although I have a sneaking feeling that the in-story Fire in the Sky owe their name more to a certain Deep Purple track.

Hey folks, Just a quick update - the next chapter is about two-thirds done and should (touch wood) be ready for editing by next week, depending on how much time I get this weekend. And a continued thanks to @LordOfTheNorth for the liketorrent - good to see you still motoring through the story!

*facepalm* I forgot to include Raptor. Which is only one of the most advanced rocket engines ever built and the only complete US full-flow staged combustion engine to have been fired. There's an achievement right there I believe, whether you subscribe to my view of an achievement or Zoo's. Assuming that Starhopper makes its 200m hop and that Starship v1 makes its intended flight, then Raptor becomes the only full flow staged combustion engine to get off the test stand. I'll not get into any disputes as to whether the first Starhopper hop counts as 'getting off the test stand' - I suspect reasonable opinions may differ there. And yeah, you could certainly make the argument for the different iterations of Merlin to be different engines. If nothing else, Merlin 1a was ablatively cooled if I recall rightly, which would set it apart from the regeneratively cooled 1c.

@ZooNamedGames I'm not going to bother re-quoting your post but here are my replies to your points, in order. 1. You're drawing some awfully big conclusions from very little data here. A couple of points in reply. 1. Are you sure you want to start throwing shade at anyone's budgetary competence in an SLS/Orion thread? 2. Personally, I would regard a start-up company that's been going for 17 years - and has managed to break into a very conservative market with very high barriers to entry - as a success. 2. Ahh - the vapourware argument. Product X is totally going to be outclassed by Product Y, despite the fact that we know almost nothing about Product Y. Not convincing. Personal opinion - you're taking a very selective view of what constitutes an achievement here. Counterview. I look at SpaceX and I see a success for the reasons pointed out above. I see a company that's managed to turn a very conservative industry's opinions around on the topic of reusable launch vehicles. I see a company that's developed four distinct rocket engines of varying sizes and capability (Draco, SuperDraco, Kestrel and Merlin), three complete launch vehicles (F1, F9 and FH), and two spaceworthy capsules, plus all the support and manufacturing infrastructure that goes with them. Not to mention the fact that their workhorse launch vehicle has been through a steady program of continuous upgrades since inception, such that the current version has double the payload capacity to LEO of the first version. # Granted, rockets and capsules are not new. But just because they're a solved problem in many respects, that doesn't make them an easy problem. 3. If you want to count them like that sure. But those 1.5 active vehicles are the end product of several generations of, now-deprecated, vehicles. 4. Don't see your point here. Regardless of any arguments over what constitutes a promise, I don't see how you can use promise breaking as a criticism of one party whilst admitting that it's something the other party has done as well. 5. I'm sorry but this is hysterical, irrational twaddle based on nothing more than a personal dislike. 6. No, it literally wasn't. No question that NASA took the risk in funding SpaceX and took another risk by awarding them the COTS contract (a risk that was mitigated to some extent by not being a cost-plus contract and being very milestone dependent). No question either that NASA have been a hugely significant and prestigious partner and customer for SpaceX. But NASA did not found the company, grow the company, go out and find all the many other customers that SpaceX have served, design the hardware, build the hardware, deliver on NASA's milestones etc. A technology startup doesn't tend to get very far without investment but all the investment in the world won't make a blind bit of difference if that company can't deliver on its business model. 7. Well one reason is the one that @tater pointed out. There is a real risk (so far as SpaceX are concerned) that sooner or later, Falcon 9 will face serious competition from the likes of New Glenn. So SpaceX could simply be responding to that perceived risk. The other reason is that SpaceX ain't going to Mars on a Falcon 9. Starship is a means to an end - but to make that means affordable, there has to be at least a somewhat possible business case for it. And the only reasonable business case is that it's going to be better than Falcon 9, for whatever definition of 'better' fits into their strategy. 8. Well for openers we haven't established any such thing (about reusability) You believe it to be true but haven't produced any facts or figures to back up that belief. For seconds, SpaceX has made a number of missteps and has had a number of failures. Neither of which appear to have broken its momentum. Finally, even assuming that Starship is a complete fairy tale and never gets off the ground (commercially speaking), they (SpaceX) will have to compete using Falcon 9 which, on current form, is hardly a disaster. And if New Glenn starts flying, makes Falcon completely obsolete, and puts SpaceX out of business - well that's life for any company that can't rely on a steady infusion of tax dollars. 9. Until those other ventures cease to be afloat, this is a non argument. Newsflash - companies aren't guaranteed to be successful or stay successful. Business leaders aren't guaranteed to make perfect decisions either. Besides - Tesla and SpaceX are in completely different markets and an inability (real or otherwise) to make a success on one says very little about an ability to make a success of the other. 10. Agreed. To be honest I don't have much time for the idiots at either end of that argument, either the ones that you complain about, or the ones that continually play down SpaceX's achievements and insist that they'd be nothing without NASA.

It wouldn’t make a lot of difference to Elite Dangerous depending on how you implement your mass-locking. Incidentally, Elite Dangerous includes pseudo Newtonian flight (Flight Assist Off mode) in which your maximum speed is restricted but Newton’s 1st law still applies. I rarely used it myself but as I recall, learning to do without Flight Assist was pretty much essential for the serious PvPer. As a final point, I don’t see how your solution solves the jousting in space problem and from a gameplay perspective, I think limited RCS fuel would be a terrible idea for most space sims. In most space sims, flying through space is a means to an end, rather than the main point of the game. Having to be too careful about maneuvers would place an undue emphasis on the flying. Make it optional and some players might enjoy it occasionally, make it compulsory and it would be tedious and frustrating. Using Elite Dangerous as an example, plenty of players complained about the level of flying currently required (docking with spinning space stations etc) and players fall foul of the relatively lenient rules around spacecraft fuel as it is, to the extent that one group of players (the Fuel Rats) specialise in rescuing stranded players who ran out of gas. I can imagine the uproar if limited RCS fuel was introduced and it wouldn’t be pretty.

It's been a long while since I read the books but I do remember a particularly unpleasant interrogation technique that relied on a kind of necromantic EEG and resulted in complete personality destruction rather than mere death. Now, I knows that the average Circus recruit don't have a lot between his or her hairy lugholes but I'm thinking the Scientists might be a mite aggrieved to find nothing at all to debrief. On the other hand, a slightly toned down version of that technique might be just the ticket for debriefs without dissections - with the added bonus that it'll finally stop the KSC janitorial staff from moaning about mopping pureed brains off the floor of Debriefing Rooms 1 through 5. Not that the moaning gets them anywhere of course, but the constant background noise is irritating.