KSK

I won’t be taking part in this myself but it certainly looks interesting. Good luck, have fun and I hope it all comes together! I did have a couple of thoughts about the original post though. First, I agree with @Spaceception - 10-20K words is a pretty big chunk of writing, especially if folks can’t find the time to commit to it on a regular basis. Smaller chunks would be more achievable and hopefully make the whole thing seem less daunting. Second - regarding point 4 of the plan (not the rules). I know it’s easier said than done but don’t worry about quality too much in the first draft. It’s going to need a lot of editing anyway to make it fit nicely with the other chapters and your other collaborator’s writing styles. And if you’re not that happy about what you’ve written - well I think that’s where this collaboration idea is going to to really shine. Rather than pass that unhappy chapter to another person to possibly get unhappy with it in turn - let the whole team at it. Let everyone contribute feedback, bounce some ideas around as a team and see what happens. That sort of mutual support could be a good way of encouraging everyone, maybe getting them past any writer’s block. Last - I understood the sentiment behind Rule 4 but it could also cut out an excellent source of ideas for generating conflict and tension within your story, which is usually a good thing. Again - why not bounce any political stuff around the whole team? If anyone doesn’t like it, it can always be dropped but if everyone’s cool with it - why not use it. Anyhow, this is just some ramblings from a guy who isn’t even on the team, so feel free to disagree or ignore.

I presume the pre-penultimate bullet point was a bit of a paraphrase... Interesting that 2nd stage reuse is firmly back on the agenda, although I remain politely skeptical until I hear it from Gwynne as well. If this has already happened, could some kind soul point me at a source.

*Raises a weary hand.* The Suggestions and Development Discussion subforum has long since outlived it’s original purpose. I don’t recall the last time I saw a developer on here, let alone the last time a suggestion was actually picked up. Mind you, this is a fantastic subforum for rehashing the arguments for and against multiplayer every four months or so. So there’s that.

You see, eventually your music the beat from your space drive will help put an end to war and poverty. It will align the planets and bring them into universal harmony, allowing meaningful contact with all forms of life, from extraterrestrial beings to common household pets. And... it's excellent for dancing.

Yeah you’re right. 2.1 kW per ton, not 2.1 tons per kW. My bad. So yes - what @tater said. As a comparison, the solar panels aboard Dragon apparently output about 5KW. Not sure how much they weigh but I’d be surprised if it was 3 tons, which would be the equivalent KRISPY weight (approximately).

That's a good list @steuben So far though, name and gender are about as far as I go when designing a character. Admittedly, I've only really written much about kerbals so far, so skin colour can be taken as read, eye colour I rarely seem to use, ditto hair colour. Ages, I'm quite careful to avoid, mostly because they could potentially provide fixed points to hang the rest of my timeline off - and risk bending it into odd or unrealistic shapes that don't really bear too much detailed scrutiny. As the old saying goes, it's better to keep your mouth shut and leave everyone wondering whether you're a fool, than to open your mouth and prove it beyond all doubt. One of my main characters, for example, started off as literally as a babe in arms at the start of the story and is just about getting the point where she's starting to get a bit of body modesty (in an entirely forum friendly way I hasten to add). How old does that make her? More to the point - does her age provide sufficient time to fit in a reasonably plausible timeframe for various other events in the story? To which the answer is - yes but don't think about it too much or, if you really insist on poking things with a stick, please just assume a bit of handwaving about kerbal lifespans will fix it. Personality and backstory - so far I've pretty much made those up as I go along. I've found the very occasional flashback sequence to be helpful to provide backstory but I suspect that's a tool that I could easily overuse, so I try to be careful with it.

Nice switch of perspective in the first section - certainly had me fooled. Also: You mean this is rocket surgery after all?

Quick bit of searching gets me approximately 16 tons per solar array for the ISS which presumably includes the Integrated Truss section and rotating joint needed to point the thing. For comparison the spacer sections of the Integrated Truss weigh in at approximately 2 tons each. So call it 14 tons per solar array and joint. So - back of an envelope calculation, that's 2.1 tons per kW for ISS solar arrays compared to 620kg per kW for KRUSTY. So, very roughly, KRUSTY has three times the power density, unless my arithmetic has gone askew somewhere. On the other hand, using those same numbers and assuming that a scaled up version of KRUSTY can be built and that it's power output scales linearly with it's mass (omigosh, my hands are sore with all this waving), you would need a 74 ton reactor to equal the ISS output. That's a lot of fissile material to strap on top of a rocket... Edit: I expect you could design a lighter version of the ISS arrays these days but even so I think KRUSTY would still have the edge in terms of power density.

Mmmm yes.

"It followed me home - can I keep it?" I think my brain is only just starting to recover from being hit by the jetlag truck. Because that gave me a weird flashback to these with attendant mental image of an animatronic toy staring at the rocket launch in consternation and exclaiming "Loud Sound!"

Again, you may be way ahead of me but may I suggest taking a look at @CatastrophicFailure's work? He does stuff with and without pictures and I commend them both to you. And yes - Tales of the Groundbound is a pretty cool read. Just realised that I skipped over a big part of @SaturnianBlue's post - regional culture. To be honest, I don't think it's something I do terribly well. For various (fairly compelling) in-universe reasons, my Kerbals are fairly homogenous, culturally speaking. Such local culture as there is tends to be a bit ad-hoc and it's definitely a part of First Flight that would benefit from an editing pass or two. Although I do have desert dwelling Kerbals with some fairly distinctive phrases... s'cuse me, that's the doorbell... Sorry about that folks - just the cliche police at the door. They let me off with a warning this time. Joking aside, I think part of the reason for that cultural homogeneity was fear of cliche. My Wernher, for example, is emphatically not a Von Kerman and has no particular accent of note. However, on reflection, I think I've gone a bit too far the other way - a bit more local culture would be good.

For naming stuff I borrowed a map from a (very) old forum thread and modified it a bit. Otherwise, my Kerbals tend to be fairly unimaginative when it comes to names: redfruit, for example, is indeed a red fruit and greenleaf is (wait for it...) a green leafy vegetable. Some of my town names are almost as exciting, for example 'place which we use to trade', 'place where we shelter from the sea', although they look a bit more exotic translated into Old Kerba (in-universe version of Latin). Having a smattering of grammar for an in-universe language is maybe a little over the top but I found it helpful to have that coherent framework for making up old fashioned proverbs and place names (or having an in-story etymology for one, historically important, place name) to add a little flavour text here and there. By a happy accident (as one astute reader spotted) Old Kerba also turned out to provide an appropriate in-universe etymology for 'kerbal'. Culture-wise, I think my starting point was to figure out a backstory for the ubiquitous 'kerman' moniker, which backstory eventually came together into the Kerbal history set out in my Echoes of Time chapter. Everything else either flowed from that or was made up as I went along.

You're welcome to read mine, although I'm pretty sure you've already appeared in the comments(?) Otherwise, the link is in my signature.

He who does not properly research his references has forgotten the face of his father. But... back on topic.

So which Beam does that guard?

Cyborg - living tissue and machinery as a composite entity. Sounds like they're sending living critters aboard a Dragon capsule. Although haven't they done that already?

It really depends how much you like sandboxes and how much effort you're prepared to put into learning the game, most probably with the help of third party content. To a lesser extent it depends how much time you want to sink into tracking down and installing mods. There is a 'game mode' (It's called Career Mode) of sorts but it's not particularly deep. Personally, I got many hours of enjoyment learning to play the game and master (actual mastery may vary ) rendezvous and docking, Mun landings, Interplanetary transfers etc. However it turns out that I don't like sandboxes as much as I thought I did and once I'd learned the game, I didn't really have the motivation to play it much. Likewise, I've never really had the motivation to try and cobble together the right collection of mods to add enough gameplay elements to rekindle my interest. But for all that, I would still thoroughly recommend KSP to anyone with more than a passing interest in spaceflight. Learning KSP gave me some of my best gaming moments ever, bar none. And playing KSP has given me much more understanding of real life space missions and meant that I get a lot more out of following them.

Bello! Bezo! Yep, that totally fits.

Sounds good. Looking forward to the out-takes reel.

If I remember rightly it's Take Two's standard EULA and Privacy Statement. I don't think there's a whole lot Squad can comment on without getting permission from their publisher - and I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon. I'm not going to rehash old comments on this thread but there are parts of the EULA that I think should be a PR disaster when applied to KSP. Whether they actually will be or not depends on how many people care about them - which I suspect is relatively few.

Just caught up after getting a couple of chapters behind. Was good to lose myself in the story for an hour. The football made a nice change of pace too!

Heh, my immediate thought was 'Munar Orbit Insertion' but I think you have it right.

If there is it's far, far beyond my programming competence. But yeah, what you're talking about is more or less how KCT worked. A spacecraft built out of newly unlocked parts would take ages to build compared to one using parts that you'd used (not necessarily recovered and reused, just included in a previous craft) before. Each part was on a diminishing return sliding scale. Swap 'time' for 'engineering points' and I think that's what you had in mind if I'm reading you correctly? And yes absolutely - test contracts would give you Engineering points. You could probably buy them with funds too for those Apollo-style 'waste everything but time' moments!

Outro by M83. Because this.

Oh man, that's good. And, can I just say a heartfelt thank you for the original version and for the huge inspiration it's been to me in my writing. Watching that first orbital flight still gives me goosebumps, the way you time everything so perfectly with the music. I've bought M83's Hurry Up We're Dreaming album (pretty much on the strength of your video) and I still can't listen to Outro without picturing that old tri-stack rocket soaring into the sky. Then my minds-eye camera switches to that enormous, implausible spacecraft sitting on the pad. The music builds, the camera swings down to focus on those Mainsails - I can practically hear the 'We have a Go for main engine start.' coming over the radio... And then it's lift-off! And then it all goes pear-shaped but we'll not worry about that. Thank you. Thank you for them both.