KSK

Not to be grouchy but there is a whole section of the forum (The Spacecraft Exchange) devoted to exactly this sort of stuff - and a whole lot more besides.

Ahhhh - that's what I was missing! Sleep - check. Vitamins - check. Exercise - working on it. purpleivan creations... ...check! Remember folks - for healthy, balanced Internet viewing, make purpleivan one of your five-a-day.

You might be right. I have no idea (and likely never will) about any of the background to the deal, so I wouldn't like to speculate. However if on the one hand you have this (emphasis added): and on the other hand you have this (emphasis added): Then something's got to give somewhere.

It's easy to be generous with other people's money and, more importantly, time. Art for art's sake is a noble sentiment but it doesn't help pay the rent. And presumably cared enough about us to sell the rights in that game to Take 2? Not that I have a problem with that decision personally - it was Squad's game to do with as they saw fit. I just don't quite follow your reasoning.

Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Also - the power of Plot compels it. And folks - could we keep the freelance proofreading off-thread please? Typos are just a fact of writing - especially those annoying out-of-context ones that the spellchecker doesn't pick up and that your eye just skips over because you've read and revised that bit of text so many times now that your brain sees what should be there rather than what is actually there. If any of them seriously grate, just drop Jim a PM and I'm sure he'll correct them.

Dayum, that's a backlog and a half. I knew they had plenty of work queued up but I didn't know they had that much. A lot of ISS resupply too - what happened to Orbital?

I cannot tell a lie - I laughed at Wernher the Snowhuman. Now if we could just find somebody who happens to be a dab hand with TextureReplacer we could have... Wernher the SnowKerbal! And on a serious note, cool - and creepy - backstory!

Not me. Good find though @KerbMav - thanks! @AviosAdku, @Just Jim, I'm not sure it's Fire in the Sky's sort of song (although they have been know to pen the odd ballad too ) - but I can totally see one of the Pioneer crews singing it, or something very like it, over on the far side of the Mün. I think this is more Fire in the Sky's sort of thing. Music and verse structure borrowed from another track previously linked to on this thread. The Kerm, or so they say, were the start of Kerbalkind And we've used them, tamed them, feared them, since time long out of mind Now the Kerm are running out of room. My friends - it's time to do or die. Hear our thunder 'cross the land! See our fire in the sky! Now Jeb and Bill and Bob were first; back aboard the Kerbal 1. When like all the 'kerbs that followed them, they climbed towards the sun. And they knew they might not make it - for it's never hard to die... But they lifted off that launchpad; rode their fire in the sky!

As are the R7 series, PSV series, many of the Long March series, and arguably the Ariane V. Not to mention the Atlas and especially the Delta boosters, both of which come with moar boosters if you need to launch moar payload. This is not a uniquely kerbal or SpaceX concept. In fact it's pretty much a standard for launch vehicle design. Here - have a bucket to catch all that cold water.

I think I joined the forum to add my 2p worth to the 'Thanks KSP team' thread. That was late April 2013. I soon got interested in possible backstories for the kerbals and their space program so quickly gravitated to the Fan Works section. One of my earliest posts was a page or so of worldbuilding notes, followed by a short story which expanded on a couple of lines from those notes. That short story morphed into the prologue for a rather longer story which I've been working on ever since. I also enjoy reading other fan works. When I'm not in the fan works forum, I'm usually haunting the Science and Spaceflight forum, or occasionally the Lounge.

Sooo - is a tardigrade burn one that was too late to have the desired effect?

Huh - just goes to show you should always double check these things. I too thought that SpaceX chose not to patent their stuff on the basis that patents are published and they didn't see any point in letting their competitors see exactly what they were up to. However, they do have one: US 7503511, granted in 2009 for 'A pintle injector tip with active cooling.' Inventor (you'll be astonishd to hear) one Thomas J Mueller. Mind, that's from a very quick and dirty patent search for anything owned by a company with 'Space' and 'Exploration' in its name. Conceivably, SpaceX IP might be hived off into a holding company that we know nothing about. More speculatively, since I'm not so familiar with US patent legislation, SpaceX might be limited as to what they can patent for ITAR and/or national security reasons. Regarding the government buying up SpaceX IP and making it public domain. Even if there was any IP to buy, I'm not sure if or why they would. I don't think any SpaceX technologies were developed under an academic grant of any kind, so Bayh-Dole presumably won't be a factor. I'm unsure what provisions there are for compulsory licensing in US patent law but given that SpaceX do have at least one, very large, competitor, I can't immediately see any justification for a compulsory license anyway. I'm not sure how the contracts with NASA were set up in respect of IP but I'd be surprised if NASA get to own any IP developed under those contracts. I'm arguing (weakly) by analogy here but @HebaruSan's comment could just as well have applied to ULA back in the day but I haven't heard of any ULA owned IP being forcibly shared with other launch providers. Although whether anyone would hear about that apart from the launch providers, is a good question. In reality though, I suspect a lot of SpaceX's succes comes from company culture and deliberate design decisions prioritising commonality of components and cost, rather than absolute bleeding edge performance. Not the kind of stuff that you could realistically patent anyway but stuff that's also rather hard to copy, especially if you're a large established company with your own way of doing things. So I'm thinking that ULA will indeed have to re-invent their reuse from scratch. I'm sure they can do it if they put their mind to it - I can't imagine that SpaceX have a monopoly on innovation and talented engineers - it's just that they've had rather more incentive. Well ULA have plenty of incentive now.

Man would you just look at that swell! I'm thinking the crush cores might have taken a beating there too. That was a seriously impressive landing!

Thanks. That's really good of you to say. Without wishing to get too luvvie on everyone, I do try and get 'into' the characters when I'm writing, so yeah - that wasn't an easy chapter to write either. Glad (if that's the right word) it came out as hoped. First draft of the next chapter is about a quarter done and picks up from where the last one finished.

Caves are good. Lots of possibilities, lots interesting things to find. I'm wondering what Jabe will find...

It completely defeats me how anyone could abandon those.

Nice chapter! Good mix of technical detail and those journal entries felt very fluid and natural.

Thanks! I think Patbro's part was the hardest to write - although not as hard as the task he volunteered for. Now, in reply to your wondering...

Oooh - there are so many good ones to choose from Only Slightly Bent would be an obvious choice, although Screw Loose (along with a bunch of other stuff I imagine) might work or possibly So Much for Subtlety. Lasting Damage is probably a bit direct. In fact calling it that would have Very Little Gravitas Indeed. I'll stop now - I love Culture ship names though.

Nope. The savings on the refurbished booster don't make up for not getting paid for getting the payload on orbit. Looks like that's a good payload sep though - job done!

OK, I vote they try for a couple of donuts with the next sea landing. Looks like they pulled off a beauty of a bootlegger turn with this one - now we demand MOAR STUNTS!

Yeah - just shows how much their control systems have improved! That sounds like a lot of their first few landing attempts - only without the final explosion.

Thought they'd ploughed that one! That spray from the side of the drone ship and then the camera feed cutting out. Not quite dead centre but they still made it - and more importantly a good orbit for the second stage!

Pass me those hydrospanners and fire up the hype-r-drive!

Agree that this thread has made for some interesting reading. With regards to @RatchetinSpace's last comment, that only pushes the problem back a step. OK, I enter that parking orbit, select my landing site, with due attention paid to prevailing weather conditions, execute my de-orbit burn... and just as I hit atmosphere, the weather changes. I'm right back to being bitten by the RNG again. More generally, I think that making the weather sufficiently dynamic to present the challenges that folks are clearly looking for, whilst making it predictable enough to not just be a random point of mission failure (which may be realistic but isn't fun - at least not to my mind) is going to be a really difficult balance to strike. And then you get back to @Gaarst's point, which I think is an excellent one. The rest of the stock game just isn't well set up to deal with the subtleties of mission planning and execution that weather would entail. Apart from anything else, contracts are incredibly formulaic at the moment: get your advance, execute the mission, if you meet the deadline you get paid, if you miss it you get punished. Leaving aside any appeals to the real world and whether hard deadlines make much sense for most of the contracts we undertake in KSP, if being able to meet deadlines is going to become affected by forces outside my control, then I want some fuzziness on those deadlines to compensate. Some kind of sliding scale of reduced payoff maybe, tapering off to an outright mission fail if I overshoot the deadline by too much.