KSK

And the game is on! Some nice worldbuilding and character building too. Looking forward to the next chapter.

“Listen all y’all, it’s a sabotage.” - The Beastie Kerbs Enjoyed that chapter! Gene’s flight control team have got the argot down cold and I liked Jeb’s investigation too. And jumping back a post or two, I did like the reworked ‘End of the Line’ lyrics. Very much. Lastly - about the suggestions and commentary. You’re more than welcome - and if the suggestions get too endless just tell me to butt out! Your story, your rules, and it’s always much easier to be the guy in the peanut gallery throwing out suggestions than the person in the Trench doing the writing.

Abort/Retry/Fail

Nice! I’m getting a ‘Tales of the Ketty Jay’ vibe here which is a good thing.

Yep - I'd definitely call that a net gain. Awww man. You couldn't make that a dollars to donuts bet could you? Mmmmm - donuts.

Love it! Move over "Rapid Unplanned Disassembly" - we've got a new euphemism for a new age!

It worked for Project Mercury so why not. Oh yeaaahhhh. "Copy that, Dragon. We see you on the mains. Welcome home."

It's almost as if nobody's heard of leggings.

They're awesome if you're playing the 1812 Overture though.

Well 'my' Jeb has a fondness for meatcake hash and ketchup. So I guess the sauce he loves is ketchup. The Goo is ketchup? It's a novel theory, I'll give you that much.

That STS historical mission is crazy hard though. A space plane carrying seven crew and that much cargo - with no RAPIERs and only two SRBs? What the heck, Platoon! I cheated in the end. Three Vectors and a ridiculously oversized drop tank nearly did it but I had to use Tweakscale to bulk out the twin Kickbacks a little. Even then I just barely had enough delta-V left for a handful of small maneuvers plus the de-orbit burn.

Still can't find a Jeb tribute but I've found Bob (Crippen) and Bill (Anders)! Hey - turns out that their Bill was first around the Mun (sorry Moon) too and they've given their Bob a BadS flag.

All that needs is a giant elastic band strung between the tailplanes of that jet. Climb to 30,000 ft, wind up the elastic band and ping that sucker (Big Falcon Sucker) right into orbit. It's foolproof I tell you - foolproof!

Glad you enjoyed it and thanks for the ‘likes’ along the way! Seeing a new reader picking up First Flight and sticking with it is always a treat. If you’re looking for another Kerbal story to read and haven’t already read it, I can highly recommend @JakeGrey‘s sequel to First Flight, The Next Frontier. I can’t link to it directly as it’s not forum friendly (for reasons of language and general themes rather than anything terribly explicit) but it’s not hard to find. Outside of that, if you haven’t read @CatastrophicFailure‘s collected works then do it. Do it now. And after that (if you’re still scratching that Kerbal fanfic itch) then you might want to take a peek at the stickied Fanworks Library thread. It’s gathering dust of late but the links should still all work.

Not sure I agree with that. Particularly when we're talking about a game for which community content is quite so important and which is published by a company with a stated goal of increasing player-base monetisation. Every player that quits over this is one less potential modder, one less potential Mission builder, one less potential evangelist for an increasingly elderly game, possibly one less purchaser of future DLC. Over the longer term, that's going to hurt Squad /TTI much more than yet another nasty review. Especially since the signal to noise ratio for most online reviews is so abysmally low anyway that gamers posting single-issue bad reviews is just another source of noise to filter out. TL: DR Talk (posting a review) is cheap, action (quitting the game in protest) less so.

Nasty....whaguggle... cough you've got there.

I have no idea what it is but I know I'm not messing with it. That stuff is both alive and ungodly tough. You can fire the stuff into space, expose it to hard vacuum and unfiltered sunlight, send it through whatever analogue Kerbin has to the van Allen belts, and then bake it in its canister during re-entry. And it still swims away if you open the canister after splashdown. The only comfort we can take from this is that it does swim away rather than engulfing the kerbonauts in an act of well-deserved revenge.

According to Mirriam-Webster, cactuses, cacti or just cactus (one sheep, many sheep; one cactus, many cactus) are acceptable plurals. In-universe, it would more likely be cactusa, or possibly cacta, if somebody was showing off by using the Old Kerba plural form. Given that Joenie is still quite young and therefore likely to use the same plural that she's been taught for most other nouns, I'm going with cactuses.

No - they've started researching a component that's critical for their Mars aspirations but no more than a nice-to-have for their satellite launching business or even lunar business, should any lunar business actually materialise. Unless their Sabatier reactors will let them manufacture methane more cheaply than they can buy it (which seems unlikely in the short to medium term), then they don't need them to get BFR flying to LEO, GEO or cis-lunar (not cis-munar - darn my muscle memory ) space. In other words, their ISRU research is (for the moment) utterly superfluous to their business model. The only reason they're doing it is because it's an honest-to-goodness space exploration technology which they might need at some point in the future if a whole other bunch of things come together. And the fact that they're investing in that sort of stuff makes me very excited.

Not going to repost the image but I'm getting goosebumps here - I think that news by @tater may even beat the Falcon Heavy launch. Why? Because this might be the point where SpaceX really start to live up to their name. Don't get me wrong - I like me a Falcon launch and booster recovery as much as the next space geek but there's more to space exploration than boosters. So seeing that they're working on space technologies other than boosters is... well see above.

I live in Scotland, so most of my travelling has been in the UK and Europe with occasional forays across the pond and further afield. Quite a few of our family holidays were abroad: France, Spain and Greece mainly. Beach holidays for the most part although we tended to go self-catering and a little off the beaten track. Mixing with the locals a little rather than spending the week shacked up in a hotel somewhere. As a student I spent one summer on a train tour of Europe, so saw bits of the Netherlands, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and probably a couple of other countries in passing. My wife and I are very fond of Scandinavia. Laid back, friendly and weather we can relate to, coming from Scotland. Iceland was a blast - any holiday where you get to climb two volcanoes, one of them still hot enough to be smoking at the top - is a good holiday. We've been to the US a few times. Visiting friends in DC, a week in New York and upstate New York, a couple of weeks driving around New England. Stayed at one bed and breakfast and found that, as European liberals, we were pretty much the most left-wing folks around the breakfast table. Went to the next place on the itinerary and we were clearly the right-wingers around that particular table. Mind you, this was an off-the-grid, built-by-the-proprietor, llamas-at-the-window kind of place, so no surprise it was a wee bit hippie. I only mention this because the politics were never overt and didn't actually matter one jot - the folks in both places were just as friendly as could be. I've been to California and Texas on business. Didn't get to see much but did take some time out to visit the Alamo. Was fortunate enough to be there when Travis's Letter was on display, for those that are interested in such things. There's so much more of the US I'd like to see. Further afield, we've been to Cairo. A holiday chiefly notable for seeing the Pyramids, the Grand Mosque and my wife coming down with a bad case of dysentery. Luckily, the owner of the hostel we were staying at couldn't have been more helpful. I'll always remember the couple of evenings I spent with him, playing backgammon and putting the world to rights. Keeping my wife hydrated was obviously a thing, so we got free reign of the fridge, all drinks paid for on the honor system, since it wasn't a big enough place to have a permanent reception. Then there was Thailand. A crazy, beautiful, out-of-this-world place. From sleeping on a raft on the Kwai, to posing for a selfie with a police officer who took a fancy to my friend's cheap-and-sparkly sunglasses, to bartering with street artists, to visiting temples, to riding on elephants, to the thrills (and thankfully not spills) of a taxi ride in downtown Bangkok, that was one heck of a trip!

Visitors will present their passports and forms ID-10T on arrival. Or... Identity ---> Idtentity ---> Id10t ---> Idiot. On a serious note, that was a wonderful chapter. Evocative descriptions of a rather cyberpunk Kermangrad - outwardly down-at-heel with cutting edge technology buried just beneath the surface. Rather like Edgas in fact - unassuming and slightly shabby on the outside but with steel enough to face down the Union's finest on the inside. Then a well done bit of byplay between her and Katya and then the *sniff* big reunion which, in true Kraken style was a rather bittersweet happy ending and all the more powerful for it. And finally... “where on STДLIЙS PIMPLҰ, ШЯIЙKLЄD PФSTЄЯIФЯ is that big stupid Dome?!” Welcome back, Val - we've missed you! Edit. And if nobody's made the 'Unter' joke somewhere on a Boring Company Twitter feed, it needs to be done already.

That’s fine when you’ve only got one BFR at a time going to Mars. With multiple ships you need to be careful not to cross the streams. Because crossing the streams is bad.

Perfect! I know you’re not much into splitting chapters up but maybe just this once...? *hopeful look* Because that way I could ‘like’ them both.

You can pry my 5.25-inch floppy discs out of my cold, dead hands...