KSK

Yeah - the plutonium pixies get grumpy if they're not fed and start casting counter-enchantments. Sorry - I'm guessing that was an unintended autocorrect but it just tickled me!

Hope nobody minds if I jump in here? Short of starting an 'Eeloo is no Goddess: Remastered' thread with everything in the right order, I'm not sure what you can do to move chapters around once they're posted. Editing them is no problem but getting people to read the edited chapters out of sequence might be harder. One thing that might help though (and I shamelessly borrowed this from another writer on the forum) is to give your chapters names - and then update the thread title to include the chapter's name when you post it. It just helps to alert readers that there's new stuff to read. Interesting comments from @Alpha 360 too. I've been trying to find the right word to describe Eeloo is no Goddess - 'haunting' is the best one I have so far. Not sure I'd go as far as 'degenerate' although I think I can see where that came from. About POV changes mid chapter. Personally I don't find it disorienting and it's something I do fairly consistently in my own writing. If I could make a small suggestion, you could maybe try putting in section breaks (a row of six dashes between paragraphs or something) just to make it obvious that 'here be a POV change'. As always though - your story, your rules. I am but the reader here.

Absolutely! Everyone needs to start somewhere and fan-fiction is a great way to start! Consider the old aphorism 'write what you know' - fan fiction is the very essence of that. More than that though - I don't see why anybody looks down on a starting out artist of any type for starting with other works that inspire them and using them as a springboard to develop their own style and talent. Consider that weekend garage band for example. It might well start as a bunch of friends thrashing out covers of their favourite songs in their spare time. Sometimes that's all it ever is. But sometimes the covers get better. Sometimes they develop into something new, distinctive and even wonderful. And without those covers to start with, you can bet that you'd never get to hear the wonder. Why should writing be any different? And for anyone out there that says 'but it's just fan fiction' (which can hide a whole range of snide and unpleasant subtexts) I'd point them at this article. http://www.chrisbrecheen.com/2014/08/no-apologies-defense-of-why-speculative.html Read it but mentally replace every instance of 'speculative fiction' with 'fan fiction' and Mr Brecheen makes the case more eloquently than I ever could. Take pride in your fan fiction! Enjoy it! And as @Just Jim said - learn from it too.

Yeah - at the end of the day, if there's something in the expansion that really grabs me, I'll buy it for the grabby part and any qualms about the rest will be conveniently forgotten. I'm not seeing it right now but I'm certainly not ruling anything out either. It just means I'll be reading the reviews, maybe taking in a few Lets Play videos before deciding whether to buy the expansion, rather than pre-ordering or buying it unseen.

Well it's a fairly big 'all'. Writing a mission editor that's simple enough for everyone to use, even if they don't have any programming experience, whilst being flexible enough to create interesting missions, strikes me as a pretty big deal. The historic missions also look like they're going to come with a slew of new parts too, so there's lots of work going into those. Personally, I'm a bit torn about both of them. I'm prepared to be pleasantly surprised but neither the historical missions nor the Missions really appeal to me - they're just not how I play (or played) the game. With that said, if the new parts fit nicely with the current stock parts then I'll probably be buying the expansion for those alone. However, if the new parts really only look decent with themselves then I'll be much less interested. Likewise I'd hope to see the Career tech tree expanded and updated to accommodate the new parts - if they're just some shiny new toys to build Missions around, I'll be less interested. The Mission Builder - hmmmm. On the one hand, I can appreciate the amount of work and developer time going into it and have no problems with paying for that work and time. On the other hand - it's a Mission Builder. The smaller, meaner part of me thinks its a bit cheeky charging people for the tools that they'll be using to make new content for you. Other folks may quite reasonably disagree with that small, mean part of me though - like I said, I'm kinda torn about it myself.

Nuh uh. No waaay are we 'shipping Cthulu and the Kraken. That way lies bad things... terrible things... things of which we were not meant to. Nooooooo. Please. Nooooooooo. Excellent picture. I especially like the way that the seam in the probe core casing looks like a happy smile at that angle.

Yep - that makes sense - thanks. I'd favour the curated collection of Lego bricks approach myself over a truly random generation system. Easier to make interesting planets and would (or at least could) use existing planet packs as 'bricks'.

I'm maybe missing something but I didn't see anything in that link to suggest that the NERVAs were ditched after burning through all their fission fuel. It just(?) looked like they were staging the NERVA cores for the usual reason - to get around that pesky rocket equation.

I have no idea how trivial it is to smelt uranium on Earth, let alone on an asteroid. It's not so much the smelting through as the enrichment, processing to a form suitable for fabricating fuel elements and then fabricating those fuel elements that's likely to be the problem. Definitely a decades out project.

Couldn't you make that exact same argument against mods? Especially planet pack mods? It doesn't seem to have been a problem for those. Personally, I think that random planets - or a curated pool of planets which can be shuffled to produce random solar systems would be a great idea. It would be even better if it was combined with some sort of 'fog of discovery' mechanic where you start off with the bare bones orbital data about a given planet (so you can plot a course to it) but have no idea about surface features, atmosphere etc. Keep the current Kerbol system in as a reference system so that contiguous gameplay is there for those that need or want it and then give players the option of starting a new game in that reference system or in a randomly generated system.

I assume that the velocity we see is the total velocity, i.e. the vector sum of F9's horizontal and vertical velocity. So a lot of the velocity after the burn will still be vertical velocity. Similarly the boostback burn only affects horizontal velocity (I presume), to arrest and possibly slightly reverse that velocity. From the video, speed at MECO is 5877 km/hour or 1.63 Km/s. I'm not sure how much delta-V the boostback burn does impart but I think your estimate is probably a bit high. A 1.5 km/s burn would be nearly enough to stop the whole stage dead in mid air!

I would totally watch Conan the Librarian. "Conan - what is best in life?" "Da smell of old leather. A well organized index file. And da happiness of a book returned on time." Although I must say that Mr. Tsoukermanos had me right up to the (air quotes) "head-sucking quasi-sapient foliage". Heck - even the grand conspiracy to make rockets out of an old pipe extruder at a secret underground lair sounded more plausible than that.

I'd like to see those sources. Not in a snarky way but just out of personal curiosity. I did a fair bit of reading up on NTRs as research for my First Flight novel and found some pretty interesting stuff, including this NASA overview report of Project Rover. Section II is about the basics of nuclear thermal propulsion and the very first paragraph states that: "The advantage of a nuclear rocket is that it can achieve more than twice the specific impulse of the best chemical rockets. lor a Mars mission, a 5000 MW engine would burn less than an hour to provide the necessary velocity for the mission. The major disadvantage of a nuclear engine is that its exhaust is radioactive, and hence it probably is useful only as an upper-stage engine, operating outside the earth's atmosphere. But the simplicity of design, and the fact that it can start, stop, and restart make it an attractive alternative to conventional chemical rocket engines. In addition, the nuclear engine can be started by using only energy generated by the system itself." Fuel element erosion was certainly a problem to be solved (and if I recall correctly, was solved, to an acceptable extent) which would ultimately limit the endurance of an NTR but a number of Rover test reactors were fired on numerous occasions, stopped, and restarted. Throttling was also demonstrated - reactors would be run at low power for a certain amount of time, then ramped up to full power. So turning a NERVA off was a solved problem (I think) at the end of Project Rover, so not an insurmountable problem for modern NTRs one would hope. Basically they used control drums - think a cylinder of neutron absorbing material which is partially coated with a neutron reflecting material. The more of that coating is facing towards the fuel elements, the faster your nuclear reaction goes because you're reflecting all the stray neutrons from the fission reaction right back into the reactor. Conversely, turning the drum so that no reflector is facing the fuel elements, will damp the reaction down. Not to mention that the propellant (for hydrogen containing propellants anyway) is a moderator and has a significant effect on reactor power. In one of the later test designs they could basically stably control the reactor power by varying propellant flow and only had to use the control drums for fine tuning. Building an NTR that can run on anything is a hard problem. Designing a fuel element coating that can protect against hot reducing propellants (such as hydrogen) or hot oxidising propellants (such as water) isn't too bad but (or so I remember reading) designing a coating that can deal with both is tough. I suppose you could have two sets of channels through the reactor, each with an appropriate coating for the different propellant types but then you'd likely run into all sorts of thermal problems, not to mention those other interactions that @DDE mentioned. I doubt it's impossible but I can certainly imagine it being challenging, to put it mildly.

Well the less said about the article the better. Nuclear thermal rockets - great idea in principle, especially if propellants other than hydrogen are considered. As @shynung pointed out, they'll run quite nicely on tap water, with an ISP comparable to hydrolox engines. Make your NTR a bimodal design, optimize it to use water as a propellant, apply liberal amounts of handwaving and you've got a nice interplanetary craft that's comparatively easy to refuel* elsewhere in the solar system and can use the reactor as a power source whilst in transit. The big problem with NTR at the moment is political rather than technical. Launching chunks of enriched nukular fuel into orbit seems unlikely to be acceptable to the general public for the foreseeable future. Worse still, if you want a reactor that's light enough to consider launching into space in the first place, it's going to need fairly highly enriched fuel. See this Wikipedia table of critical masses for various pure isotopes - and that's assuming a spherical mass, which is the most efficient shape possible - and which NTRs are unlikely to be using. *compared to a ship using hydrogen as a propellant.

It depends what frequency your laser is operating at, what your target is made of and, critically, what sort of power densities the laser can put out Power density depends how focused the beam is and how much energy you can put into the target in a given time. A tightly focused, fast pulse laser (delivering picosecond or shorter pulses) can give you gigawatts or terawatts of power on target - for the duration of that pulse. The power density will largely determine the interaction between the laser and the target. For moderate power densities, you might expect to see thermal ablation - basically the target gets hot enough to boil away but is also losing heat fast enough (by conduction to the rest of the target as well as the heat carried away by the vaporised material) that boil is all it does. However, for higher power densities, you might expect to see photoablation where the target material is ionised and then - literally - blows itself apart due to electrostatic repulsion. So I have no trouble imagining that a big sci fi grade pulsed laser could make a sizeable crater in something.

I'm definitely cliche no. 2 (can't remember the last time I actually played KSP) and I'm not quite a 10 (my story isn't really a mission report) but I'm close enough to it for government work.

That second one is lovely - you got the colours on the truthy spacecraft just right. Guess the harmonic crystals were properly tuned up or sumfin.

Nah - it'll still be a train. A heavy metal train... Loaded like a freight trainFlyin like an airplaneFeelin like a space brainOne more time tonight... I'm on the Hype Train. Bottoms up.I'm on the Hype Train. Fill my cup.I'm on the Hype Train. Ready to crash and burn.I never learn.I'm on the Hype Train.I love that stuff.I'm on the Hype Train.I can never get enough.Riding the Hype Train.Never to return...

And so you should be, referring to Him as 'His Pastyness'. Such a title is reserved for the deity of all that is savoury and pastry encased, the great Cor'Nishpasty (may His shortening never grow too short.) Sorry - I couldn't resist either.

I'm thinking that yer Grand-paw was a mighty spinner of tales, may they do ya fine.

Uh-oh. I got a bad feeling about this... Also (*facepalm*) I just figured out what the B4D A55 gene was all about. Well played.

Or NASA would have wound up trying to develop, build and fly two expensive, high performance, highly experimental aircraft/spacecraft, instead of one. Dry mass of the Orbiter was around 80 tons. That's a lot of mass overhead for your 25 tons of cargo and it's not even factoring in propellant mass. Even being generous and assuming an 80 tons dry mass including cargo, to get that up to the staging altitude and speeds being bandied around on this thread would require a booster plane with the carrying capacity of a C5 Galaxy and the performance of an SR-71. And all that to throw an unfueled spaceplane over the Karman line if you're lucky.

Caution - may contain traces of blasphemy (as I imagine you've already figured out.) Depends how you feel about replacing the Great White Throne (Revelation 20:11) with a great dark throne. The rest of the imagery from Revelation 20:11-12 was just too apt though (perhaps unsurprisingly) especially after the ending to Whispers.

Ahhh - they don't write them like that any more. And it just had to be 'A Kind of Magic' that popped up next on YouTube. *wipes corner of eye*. They don't make 'em like Flash Gordon anymore either. Although that's probably because they've learned from experience.

"This unprecedented dwarf star - is no cause for alarm..."