KSK

...and the Espresso Machine of Doom? I like the updated signature file by the way - you inspired me to spruce mine up a bit too.

Cheap (relatively speaking) and light apparently. I'm not sure how expensive the original PICA material was but PICA-X, the SpaceX version is about 10 times cheaper. Source. It's an old article but an interesting one. I thought this paragraph was particularly prescient: "Many of Lindenmoyer’s NASA colleagues remain skeptical—even some who have visited SpaceX. “There’s quality control in development, and then there’s quality control in production,” says one agency senior manager who asked not to be named. “The history of launch vehicle development suggests that design issues might crop up in the first or second launch, but it’s the process problems that start to show up on the sixth, the seventh, and the eighth launch.” Noting that so far Musk’s team has launched only two Falcon 9s, this skeptic asks, “How does he ever get to a rate—you know, he’s talking about flying a dozen, two dozen times a year? And as they fly their vehicle, how long before they have a major accident? And are they able to sustain a major accident and still be a viable company?” Emphasis added. Yes, yes they did show up. And happily yes, yes they are still a viable company.

Poor ARL. That was well written.

No worries Plecy. Next chapter is chugging along. Had friends over from the States this weekend, so didn't get a lot of writing time and I'll be looking after the godchildren for most of the coming weekend, so that'll probably slow things down a bit too. Trying to get at least some writing time in every night though, just to keep things moving.

It's a close run thing though. I don't think HTP is quite monomethylhydrazine levels of nasty but it's not exactly safe or easy to handle either. Also SpaceX would need to build the pad infrastructure for handling HTP as well as their other hypergolics and as well as RP1 and LOX. I doubt it's going to happen, given that this is the company that deliberately uses the same propellant combo on both stages of their workhorse booster in the interests of keeping costs down. Again, I think @Rakaydos has the right answer here.

I'm guessing 'probably not' at least without a lot of reinforcement and the associated mass penalty. It doesn't take much to bust up a rocket stage - remember the early 'landing over water' test flights with F9? The booster would land, topple over and break up.

Fair enough, although I have to say that the landing module that @Rakaydos mentioned is plenty Kerbal enough for me.

There's a thread here where you can request that threads be locked or moved. I'll add it to the Library once it's been moved. 2010 has now been shelved in the Completed Works section under Humour. Right under your 2001 work in fact. My apologies - I have no idea how I caught that but not 2010. I swear, sometimes my logic would baffle a protocol droid. Edit - A Tale of Many Burns has been shelved under Fiction in the Works in Progress section.

Afraid so. I'd have thought that the extra fuel required to get those solid rockets into orbit in the first place will negate any fuel you save by using them for the descent burn. SRBs are heavy. Landing the second stage on parachutes would involve the same problems that landing the first stage on parachutes did. Packing enough parachute to slow that stage down to a survivable landing speed is not trivial. Precision landings by parachute are not easy either.

Jobs had his Reality Distortion Field, Musk has an +5 Iridescent Cloud of Pure Rep Creation. "Fans create it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. You must feel the Rep around you; here, between you, me, space, the rocket, everywhere, yes. Powers his rockets it does, makes them fly straight it does." – DefinitelyNotYoda.

Personally I'm busting for the next version of MS Word. Down with the minimalist white on white UI - I demand SKEUMORPHISM WITH EVERYTHING!

I get rep for four thousand carefully crafted words written over the course of several weeks. I get more rep for a one-liner that happens to tickle enough funny-bones or for half a paragraph of opinion that happens to gibe with other people's thoughts. For sure it's nice to be popular for whatever reason and I don't wish to detract from the high net rep individuals out there but, given that there are so many possible reasons for awarding rep, it seems odd to get hung up on it as a way of keeping score or as an achievement in its own right.

It's great isn't it! That stage of the KSP experience was fantastic - figuring out how everything worked, finally nailing that Mun landing, figuring out better rendezvous techniques, going interplanetary... I loved all of that, my first Mun landing, bringing Jeb down the ladder, then jumping around in that sweet low gravity - that was one of my best gaming experiences bar none. Don't get me wrong - I may not have much to say about the game right now but I remember the early days and they were awesome! Glad they're working for you too!

I'll throw some added confusion into the mix then. I'd like to see both of yours and @Falkenherz's ideas included. I love the idea of starting from a humble beginning and struggling to get to space before gradually progressing through to all that near future colonisation of space stuff. That's what I hoped Career mode would be all about. I think (although please feel free to disagree) that both wish lists stem from a common cause - there's not actually very much to do in Career mode as it stands - or rather there's not much to do that's unique to Career mode and which builds on or adds to the sandbox experience. After a couple of playthroughs, getting to orbit with early tech parts is a solved problem and, as the saying goes, once you're in orbit you're halfway to anywhere. There are other piloting challenges to master of course - rendezvous, docking, powered descents etc. but once you've mastered getting to orbit with 1.25m parts - which you do very early on if you're going to get anywhere in Career mode, then a sizeable chunk of the rocket building and design challenge is done - and there's not a lot to replace it. End result - not much replayability or depth at either end of the career game. The good news is that done well, the extra management aspects proposed by @Falkenherz should help make the early 'struggle for space' game more engaging and challenging too. At least they would in my opinion. So in principle I think Squad could cater to both of you, although that looks like a challenge for the next expansion or possibly a KSP2 if that's ever greenlit.

It's on there now, filed under Fiction with a mental 'must catch up with this' note added. Sorry - I don't plan to, although I'll happily link to anybody else's list if they care to start one. It's not that the artwork folks don't deserve recognition too but between my own story and stopping this list from accumulating more than an inch or so of forum dust between updates, I don't really have the time to start another project.

This forum tutorial goes into some of the maths and links to a handy online calculator for planning interplanetary transfers. For gameplay, I've found the calculator is very useful as it lets you work out transfer windows by date rather than using phase angles

Not for certain but SpaceX have returned quite a bit of cargo from the ISS and I haven't seen any 'OMG SpaceX trashed our delicate science experiments' articles in the media, so I'm guessing splashdown would be passenger-tolerable.

Well I don't know how TakeTwo are structured as a business, so I can't say where that money is going. I would hope that a good chunk of it is being kept in reserve somehow to keep the company afloat if their next few releases end up losing money. That's not terribly unusual in any creative industries - the big successes covering the costs of the... less successful products. We also know that some of the money has been spent in buying up a certain small developer that we all know, and I would hope that this is merely one example of TakeTwo using their mighty GTA cash cow to diversify into more speculative or niche games. But again - I simply don't know. Regarding KSP, that's a difficult question. I bought the game back in 2013 - honestly can't remember exactly when, so I may or may not be eligible for free DLC but that's not important. I think it's fair to say that KSP hasn't turned out the way I hoped it would but I liked the demo and I figured that even if all the full game (such as it was at the time) offered was a few more parts - which I knew it did from reading up on it - then it was worth the money. It was. I haven't played the game for ages but I feel I got my money's worth. On a very personal note, KSP inspired me to start writing, which is not something I thought I'd ever take up, so for that alone I'll always have fond memories of it. If I'd only heard about KSP when it was officially released then things might have been different. I would certainly have taken a closer look at it before plunking down my money. If in doubt I would say buy a game for what it is when you buy it. No game is perfect - the question is, are the good bits worth the money and are they good enough that you can overlook the bad bits? In my case I probably would have bought the full price version of KSP - the core gameplay probably would have been enough to make up for its other deficiencies - as I see them. If you're buying a game for what it might become then you're always taking a risk and have to be comfortable taking that risk. Whatever your personal view of developers, there are all sorts of reasons - not all of them reprehensible - why game development doesn't go according to plan and why you might not get what you hoped for. Not sure how much that answers your question? Anyway - here endeth the wall of text.

I stand corrected - thanks. The total is probably a little less than that - the linked article from that table I cited says that "It was announced during in the release the game had shipped 75 million units." (whatever that means), so I'm not sure we can assume that all 80 million copies shipped sold at full price but whatever - your point still stands. Interestingly, that same article says that 75 percent of sales were physical copies rather than digital, so there's still some pretty hefty distribution costs involved.

Ahh man - is that the Space Cruiser with Moonbase kit, where the spaceship has a buggy stowed in the back? I always wanted that one! Taking a detour down memory lane... Edit. And I still have my yellow castle plus a handful of the original soldiers to go with it. Built it again quite recently for nostalgia's sake and it... wasn't as epic as I remembered. Still a darn fine kit though. #TheyDontMakeThemLikeThatAnymore

You didn't see my last car.

1. Older games - about 100-200K apparently (source) with a couple of outliers in the single digit millions. For modern games you can (approximately) scale that up by a factor of 10. So yes - your numbers look about right. 2. Rather depressingly, that doesn't seem to be the case. If you read the article I linked to, that programmer got paid £3000, for his eight months work. In today's money, using the same calculator that I used previously, that comes to about £5,600. I really hope that he's an outlier because that's... not generous. 3. Programming may have gotten easier (I'm not a programmer so I'm not qualified to say) but the size of modern games programs and all the project management, bug hunting etc. that goes with that larger codebase, has increased enormously. Do better tools and easier programming make up for that? I have no idea. Besides, coding may have gotten easier but graphics, sound design, level design and all the other 'gameplay' factors that go into a really successful game - they haven't gotten any easier at all. To use your example, one experienced person may well be able to knock out a Civ1 clone in a couple of weeks. They'd be hard pressed to knock out a CivVI clone though. And that's for a clone. Imagine that Civ (any version) hadn't been written and our experienced person was designing and writing it from scratch. That would take substantially more than two weeks - because coding is only part of the job. 4. You're right - my apologies. Here - have some numbers. Now lets have a look at them. GTA V. A very popular, AAA game. Apparently it made £80 million of sales. Actually it seems to be a bit of an outlier for AAA games - £30-40 million of sales seems to be more typical, but lets roll with that. I'm going with costs in UK sterling too, rather than dollars, just to err on the side of generosity. Compare that with my earlier R-Type example. No idea how many copies it sold - but lets go for 200,000, as the high end of my estimate for point 1. So, 200,000 copies at £10 per copy - £2 million in total sales. So, with my totally accurate and thoroughly researched back of the envelope calculation, I figure that a top flight, modern AAA game makes about 40 times as much as a top-flight game from 1988. Not even a hundred times as much, let alone 'far more than 100 times bigger'. 5. Of course - and be happy that it can, otherwise mass market computer games probably wouldn't be a thing at all. Oh - and first you're (correctly) pointing out server costs for modern game distribution and then claiming zero cost compared to old style box copies. Which is it? Really? When you were young, you didn't have football stickers, bubblegum cards, Top Trumps (or other collectable card games), the latest and greatest collectable Japanese plastic toy sensation (with attendant cartoon series for added marketing) or anything like that? Selling collectable junk to kids has been a staple of the toy industry at least since I was a kid. That doesn't excuse it of course but in my opinion it makes your outrage about selling DLC to kids look just a little bit shallow.

Hmmm - why evil? I've read plenty of good books written in first-person perspective. The Martian for one. Thanks! I'm just under 2000 words into the next chapter after a solid day of writing today, so hopefully you won't be left hanging for too long.

I'm just going to throw this in as a counterargument. --------- The year is 1988. 8-bit microcomputers are the standard gaming platforms of the day, In the UK, the ZX Spectrum was the budget computer of choice - if you had a bit more money to spend, you'd go for the Commodore 64, if you were lucky, you'd have a BBC Micro. Memory was measured in small tens of kilobytes, programs were mostly loaded from cassette tapes, or from 5 1/4 inch floppy discs - if you were very lucky and your computer could handle a disc drive. Oh - and we walked to school uphill both ways - and liked it that way. This is what an AAA game looked like back then. It cost £10.00 (OK, £9.99 but cut me some slack here). It was produced by one person. According to this website, ten quid in 1988 money is worth £18.75 today. Now it's been a while since I bought a modern AAA game (actually I don't remember the last time I did) but taking Mass Effect: Andromeda as an example, the internet tells me I could expect to pay £50.00 for it at release. Does that seem fair? Now I don't know the details of how ME:A was produced. I have no idea how many developer-hours it took to make, what its marketing budget was or anything. But I'm prepared to bet it was substantially more than eight months worth of one person's time. I'm also prepared to bet that it's got substantially more content than 8 levels worth of side-scrolling shoot-em-up action. Computer games have moved on a lot in 30 years. The cost of making computer games has moved on a lot too. Comparatively speaking, computer game prices haven't moved on much at all - and I'm talking about the first day, get it without a discount, prices, not the 'no way am I paying for this, I'll wait for a Steam discount' price. Somewhere in there is a big financial gap that has to be met somehow - assuming that you do actually want these companies to stay in business and carry on entertaining you. DLC in its various incarnations, is just one of those ways. But, even assuming I'm horribly misguided, or just plain wrong and DLC really is a cunning conspiracy for eeeeevil publishers to screw money out of poor, long suffering - but dumb - gamers, then I respectfully suggest that the best solution is 'not be dumb'. The average gamer could start by selling off the AAA grade chips that a lot of them seem to carry on both shoulders - that should raise enough for a game or two - whether that's at £10.00 a pop or £50.00 a pop. Then again, maybe not - it would be a high supply, low demand market after all.

Yup - great job with the photography @Johnny Wishbone!