KSK

Welcome back! Embedded videos work just fine although I won't spam the thread by linking to your video (which I really enjoyed) again. I also just wanted to say that Build Fly Dream is still the definitive KSP video to my mind - and a constant muse for over four years of writing KSP fiction. Thank you. Thank you so much.

I'm guessing this was an autocorrect goof but I thought it was amusing. "So what are we supposed to use, sir? Harsh language?" "You bet your lily-white behind, Private. You're gonna head over there and talk the enemy to death."

I liked it! If I was being really picky, I'd say there are a couple of places where the writing is a little off-beat but then you come to a panel that just gets everything so right. Like the one I quoted above. That final "I suppose we just added 2 to them..." just really hit me. Yeah.. got a little dust in my eye over here.

I don't know why but that one panel really got to me: Not a badS - just a scared kerbal who needs a hand to hold in the dark. Well played @cratercracker

Well we don't have enough to go on to decide how they evolved or what they evolved from. We don't have a whole lot to work with when it comes to unpicking their biology either. So what do we know: Locomotion: Kerbals appear to walk much like humans, with due allowance made for physical proportions. So that suggests joints and so presumably some kind of underlying skeleton. Strength wise they're probably not too dissimilar to Terran lifeforms, since Kerbin's gravity seems to be approximately the same as Earth's, at least judged from the size and morphology of trees on Kerbin, which are fairly similar to Earth trees and so presumably evolved to cope with similar structural loads. Colour: @Snark has already debunked the photosynthesis thing, so where does the green colouration come from? There are a couple of possibilities I can think of. One - it's a residual photosynthetic pigment left over from an earlier, more plant-like evolutionary stage and retained because, although it's not much use for generating energy, it makes a useful sunblock, similar to melanin in humans. Two - it's a blood pigment - possibly something like chlorocruorin, although that doesn't really explain the uniformity of the green colouration, since chlorocruin changes colour depending on oxygenation level. One might expect green veined kerbals but not uniformly coloured kerbals. Metabolism. Kerbals are physically active (relatively), thinking creatures, implying a fairly large brain, or brain equivalent and a reasonably efficient metabolism to power that brain. So they're probably warm blooded. Life cycle: I reckon this is forum friendly but I'm going to spoiler it just in case: Internal organs and biochemistry: Simply not enough canon material to go on.

Done - and Whispers has been moved to the Completed Works wing.

The lines are probably a bit blurred by now but an after action report was typically a picture heavy work with dialogue added in film script format and very little other text. They were pretty popular for a while but I think have been kinda superseded by the graphic novel format. @cratercracker - not a problem, I'll add it once I'm at my desktop machine again - bit fiddly by phone. (Done)

Yes it's possible but - so far as I know - only in the Project Orion sense. As in 'light off a bunch of hydrogen bombs behind your gigantic spacecraft and use the bombs as your combined power supply and reaction mass.' Using a fusion reactor to power a spacecraft will remain science-fiction until we a) figure out how to build a working fusion reactor (this is a biggie) and b) figure out how to make that working reactor small enough to fit on a rocket (also non-trivial). I think there have been some proposals for fusion rockets that don't depend on maintaining the fusion reaction for any great length of time but I'm not sure of the technical details or whether they're at all plausible.

No worries - we'll still be waiting when you come back. Thanks for the heads-up though!

I can't really think of a tank of rocket fuel that I'd like to hard land on. Seems like I've got an enticing choice of being poisoned, flash fried, flash frozen, asploded or a happy fun combination of any of the above.

Pinched from the comments over at Ars Technica Elon's comments on the first FH flight are also candid. Quote: First of all, I should say that Falcon Heavy requires the simultaneous ignition of 27 orbital class engines. There's a lot that could go wrong there. And I encourage people to come down to the Cape and see the first Falcon Heavy mission. It's guaranteed to be exciting. But it's one of those things that's really difficult to test on the ground. We can fire the engines on the ground and try to simulate the dynamics of having 27 orbital booster engines and the airflow as it goes transonic. It's going to see heavy transonic buffeting. It's behavior at Max Q, there's a lot of risks associated with Falcon Heavy. Real good chance that that first vehicle doesn't make it to orbit. So I want to make sure to set expectations accordingly. I hope it makes it far enough away from the pad that it's not going to cause damage. I would consider that a win, honestly. And yeah. Major pucker factor is the only way to describe it. I think Falcon Heavy is going to be a great vehicle. There's just a lot that's impossible to test on the ground. And we'll do our best. And it ended up being way harder to do Falcon Heavy than we thought. Because at first it sounds really easy to just stick to first stages on as strap-on side boosters. But then everything changes. The loads change, the air dynamics totally change. You triple the vibration and acoustics. So you break the qualification levels and so much of the hardware. The amount of load you’re putting through that center core is crazy because you have two super powerful boosters also shoving that center core. So we had to redesign the whole center-core airframe on the Falcon 9 because it’s going to take so much load. And then you’ve got the separation systems... and, yeah, it just ended up being way way more difficult than we originally thought. We were pretty naive about that. But the next thing is that we're going to fully optimize it. It has about 2.5 times the payload capacity of the Falcon 9. We’re well over 100,000 lb to LEO payload capability. And then it has enough thrust performance to put us in a loop with Dragon 2 around the moon. And Dragon itself, the heat shield is designed with a huge amount of margin. So it has enough margin to handle a lunar reentry. But no question, whoever is on the first flight, brave. Emphasis added. I'm sure the comment about naivete will have caused some 'we told you so' eye-rolling at other companies but I think the lack of sugarcoating from Musk is refreshing. Likewise, there's something endearing about a CEO who will cheerfully admit to 'major pucker factor' like that. Or maybe that's just the six year old in me. On a more serious note, that last paragraph is interesting. Looks like FH is going to get some love, rather than being quickly passed over for the Small Falcon Booster / Raptor 9 / whatever they decide to call the recently announced vehicle. Edit: I think I may keep a copy of that second paragraph around somewhere for use in the more off-the-wall armchair rocket design discussions that seem to happen round this way.

Hah - I expect all those scary Mars bacteria put him off. The moon does seem more aligned with Blue Origin's - and possibly NASA's plans - which might be useful for finding new business. Plus any serious mission profile that uses on-orbit refuelling would be very interesting, to put it mildly. It also sounds very SpaceX somehow, as in, it would be potentially transformative for spaceflight, it's not a new concept in itself but it's not one that people have started bending serious metal for until now. Of course it'll probably also turn out to be Falcon Heavy levels of hard and be developed on about the same schedule. All the same though, my Buck Rogers brain is feeling mollified!

Hard to do Red Dragon without a propulsively landing Dragon. The rational part of my brain is trying hard to persuade me that this is a good thing. Trim the wild fancies for now, double-down on clearing that launch backlog and keep the money coming in, build a stepping stone to a fully fledged BFR... The rest of my brain is completely ignoring all that rationality and is definitely having one of these moments...

Taking an arrow to the knee - kerbal style. Oh - and уоц’ге шеlсоме.

Finished most happily and most handsomely - great job! Seriously - that ending just made me smile. Edit: Added (at long last) to the Fanworks Library - shelved in the Completed Works section under Fiction.

Cool. And 'faff' is a great word. Can be used as a verb, meaning to mess around aimlessly or ineffectually. As in: "Why am I faffing around 'researching' on the internet rather than working on the next chapter of First Flight." Or it can be used as a noun, nearest meaning I can think of is 'hassle'.

The Fan Works 'Show off your awesome KSP picture' thread must be pretty high up the list: 13,312 posts and 2,371,755 views.

My reaction would either be: 10n + 23592U → 14156Ba + 9236Kr + 3 10n Or conceivably: 21D + 63Li → 2 42He

Och it wisnae such a bad option. We got a braw wee lesson too. I think this is where serials can get unstuck because you've got to know what your story is about from the outset which can be tricky - although I take my hat off to the writers here that seem to manage it. With a novel you can (or at least I imagine you can), get the whole first draft down, read, review, pick out the big themes that have hopefully developed over the course of the story and then sharpen them up during revision. Hmmm, I think that KSP history book was largely what the first part of my story was about. It certainly concluded with an infodump (or a pretty good facsimile of one) but hopefully that dump was a contextualisation (that's a big word to be using this early in the morning) of various ideas that had been introduced up until that point, rather than a big indigestible mass of what. That was the idea anyhow.

Cutting and pasting is a bit of a faff but does this help? йцукенгшщзфывапролдьттимсччя Й Ц УКЕНГШЩЗФЫВАПРОЛДЬТЯЧСМИТЬ Thought I had these kicking around somewhere. Happy to do the conversions for you on subsequent chapters and PM them across.

Hmm, I'm not sure, or at least it hasn't happened to me and I doubt that's all attributable to painstaking care on my part. I'd have thought that serialized publication makes it less likely that your readers are less likely to pick up on the odd snafu, simply because they're (with the best will in the world) usually getting a bite sized piece of the story every week and quite often less frequently than that. Makes it hard to keep track of everything. But either way it's completely forgiveable. Mind you, the tried and tested KSK method of avoiding continuity censor is to place the real howlers at least two years apart. I'm not claiming its a good method.

*blinks* *opens mouth*... *closes mouth* Does this involve trashing Tokyo or dubious Dr Who villains at any point? Enquiring minds need to know.

Me too. It does look a bit busy but I think one reason for that might be that you're not just cussing in faux Cyrillic but using it for everything Val(?) is saying.

Okay then. As @Ten Key mentioned, we were talking about our different approaches to writing and he came out with this comment, which I think is a good summary. "Here, I think the difference in our writing style is our approach to world building. I tend to glue together what I want to happen and then go back and world build around it. I think you kind of have the opposite approach-- world build first and then find the story." It occurs to me - although I may be wildly off the mark here - that there's not so much of a difference between a character led story and a world building led story. IF they're going to carry the story then both characters and worlds need enough depth to be interesting and also to generate consequences. A character led story will be driven by how a character responds to circumstances and, ideally, having those responses be consistent and believable. Similarly, a world-building led story is driven by a consistent set of rules or concepts and how those concepts play off each other to generate consequences. Which is possibly why I enjoy world building. I find building a consistent world to be very satisfying in its own right and also a wonderful way of generating story ideas by taking one aspect of how the world works and following its implications. As an example, the fact that all kerbals in-game have the Kerman surname, title, or whatever you want to call it. Why? Well my take on it was that there is a second sentient species on Kerbal, the Kerm trees. And so Kerman was a contraction of an older title Kerm-an, denoting a kerbal that lives away from or outside of the Kerm. Following that particular piece of fridge logic led to a large swathe of history for the kerbals and most, if not all, of my First Flight story is concerned with revealing that history and following its consequences. The notion that the word Kerm-an could be swapped around to an-Kerm, which has the opposite meaning to Kerm-an, urned out to be quite important too. On a much, much smaller scale, I threw in a couple of other words of so-called Old Kerba, mainly as flavor text. Then, following a query from one reader, I thought it would fun to try and tie these words together a bit and give them some level of underlying grammar. That's definitely a work in progress that may or may not get finished, but I've figured out a few cases and how the present tense works. Which is kinda nice because now I have a consistent framework for throwing in the odd kerbal proverb (and having that framework makes them a lot easier to write!). For example: “Erbabar-beldaonerba ebda berot pilla" The literal translation is ‘words, possessed by those they rely on for words, are half-truths’. Or in modern Kerba - "the words of diplomats are but half-truths.” Now, I like that self-consistency of world building for it's own sake. But, my scraps of Old Kerba grammar had some interesting (well I thought they were interesting ) consequences. Firstly, following up another suggestion from @Ten Key it turned out that I could translate the word 'kerbal' and give it a meaning in Old-Kerba. Better yet that meaning turned out to be entirely consistent with the rest of the story, which was wonderful, if rather serendipitous. Secondly, I chose the word pilla deliberately. It means 'truths'. Corrupt it slightly (to allow for a certain amount of linguistic drift) and it becomes pillar. Which ties in rather nicely with my Council of Twelve Pillars - the ruling body on Kerbin. But thinking about this on the way to work this morning, it occurred to me that this gets a bit deeper. In my world, a common kerbal oath is 'Pillars preserve me', which would translate roughly to 'truths preserve me'. And that ties in very neatly with a previous notion that my kerbals take integrity in public life very seriously indeed (for good historical reasons which I won't go into ), as shown in a previous chapter in which a statement is being put on the public record: “By order of this Council, a petition so placed shall be deemed accurate and inviolable. Any false statement made therein, whether purposeful or inadvertent, does constitute a betrayal of these Twelve Pillars, punishable consecutively, to the fullest extent possible by law, in each of the Six Regionalities of Kerbin." So yeah, kerbals take the truth seriously, so 'truths preserve me' would seem to be an appropriate oath.

I find that really interesting in view of your earlier comment: To me, that's the essence of a good mystery novel and as others have said, I'm fine with mysteries, provided that the clues are there to find. I find Sherlock Holmes stories a little frustrating in that regard - I can never find the clues - so Holmes' brilliant deductions always have a slight air of '....and the butler did it' about them. Similarly, for your lone explorer example, that conclusion would be a great twist in the tale but I could see myself getting frustrated by the notion that the veracity of some of the information is suspect. If it's possible to puzzle out which information is suspect that would be fantastic but just leaving the question hanging - not so much. But yes, I think our differing opinions here are a reflection, or an extension, of our different approaches to writing. More on that in my next post, just in case anyone finds it interesting or useful!