GreeningGalaxy

4059.1: The SKP Foundation constructs Containment Sites worldwide and keeps various items of insanity-causing powers locked in them. Most breaches of Kontainment are caught quickly, but one particularly nasty outbreak of SKP-217 (a mysterious virus that converts kerbals' flesh into rocket parts) fails to be rekontained after an incident involving an ornery molten salt reactor and a very powerful carbon dioxide laser. Within a month, an XK-class End-Of-The-World scenario is in full swing, and most of the Kerbal population has been converted to evil rocket cyborg kerbals. trochee fixation, anyone? In a surprise display, the Global Occult Koalition tries to salvage the situation with six strategically-placed keostationary railguns, but it's already too late- the SKP-217-infected kerbals have already launched into orbit and overtaken the keostationary satellite ring. The remaining living Kerbals on the SKP Foundation's orbiting facilities manage to escape to a large inertial-fusion-powered transit vehicle still untouched by the cyborg kerbals, board it, and start burning for Laythe. There, perhaps, they can find a way to salvage the kerbal race.

Declared persona non grata for having an IRC nick different from your forum name.

Jumping. Say apple. aaaaaapple.

If you recall how that book ended.

Banned from the sailing club for letting go at the wrong time.

10/10 I love a good extradimensional Swiss Army knife.

Ms. Greening Galaxy issued a statement today saying that she views the posting of random flags and political colors in this thread as an insipid display of unoriginal one-up-manship. "It just doesn't make a lot of sense," Greening said to reporters. "First, we're talking about airplanes, and someone decides to light the engine of one on fire. Fair enough, it's all in good fun. But the next thing you see isn't the fire department, an emergency ejection, or a large body of water, it's the flag of Uzbekistan, with a caption saying something about how Uzbekistan is taking the opportunity to invade. And the next inevitable proceeding is for someone to post the Soviet Union, and then for someone to make a stab at Communism and its associated red color. It's just boring." This statement was taken as an affront by many of the thread's leading posters, some claiming, "arguing over which nation is better isn't really a political debate if they're not nations you actually live in, or if the only reason you're mentioning the nation at all is because you think the name sounds cool. It's just fun, man, chill out." Others have complained against such ideas, saying that "the constant recurrence of nation flags on the thread is annoying for the same reasons as politics, and should so be disallowed in kind. We're just trying to have fun finding things to pretend to attack each other with, not start a World War 3 simulation." While the Forum Moderation has clearly been monitoring these events as they unfold, its constituents could not be reached for comment. This has been The Kerbal Report. Stay tuned for more updates as the situation unfolds.

34. Turn on more lights. Working in the dark is hard. 35. Try plugging it into a different USB port. If you have an eSATA port, use that, because computers will never be ornery will anything plugged into an eSATA port. What do you mean, of course magic smoke can be refilled! Why do you think they sell magic smoke refilling kits? That is, of course, a fake. The only way to really get your magic smoke back is to chase it down right after it escapes, lasso it, and slap it with a slide rule until it agrees to get back inside the chip. Better hurry before it gets too far, too, because most software has terrible support for smokeless components.

Your bionicles arrive in the GreeningUniverse. Soon, however, they notice that the distant galaxies do not appear to be getting any closer, despite being strongly blueshifted. No amount of power the bionicles put into their Alcubierre bubble seems to make them go anywhere, and all attempts to use teleportation cause them to materialize in seemingly the exact same position as before, although the targeting computer registers a displacement of millions of light years. The bionicles are trapped in intergalactic space. I trim the fingernail on my left thumb, removing the bionicles and the scalar field treadmill containing them from my universe-body. I place the cosmo-nail clipping in jar, where it becomes a black sphere of infinite space containing the bionicles at its center. Eh, I've seen better paperweights. I reduce the sphere's strong nuclear force constant for a moment, dissociating the bionicles into hydrogen gas, then raise the gravitational constant by three orders of magnitude, forming the hydrogen into a tiny star-forming nebula only a few meters across. Much better. My micro-nebula in a jar.

32. Overvolt it till it works. May require periodic refilling of magic smoke.

Before I can make a fiery reentry over Kerbin, I reify myself a super nice inertial-fusion-powered KSPI ship through manipulation of the quantum vacuum virtual plasma. I recline in the super cool all-glass cockpit and sip some nebula tea as I burn for Jool to claim a hill on Pol. My ship.

Minmus has notably cooler hills than the one I left. You can keep that lame grassy hill on a planet that's really hard to take off from, I'll be over here skiing down the salts of Minmus in tiny awesome gravity.

Since collisions of that nature are not currently modeled by the game, Minmus falls through Kerbol on a very low hyperbolic trajectory and flies out of the Kerbol system. I ride it out, watching the sun dwindle in the distance. My hyperbolic Minmus.

HAL 9000 and 9 other characters

*coughs* Memes on the bridge!

4033: approximately four fifths of the Kerbal population boards Nuclear Salt-Water Rocket-propelled craft and leaves the Kerbol system in order to escape the return of KIONICLE.

I'm sorry, sir; although I am technically in your soup, sir, this is because you have spilled your soup on the floor and I was required to tread in it in order to arrive here, sir. It seems you are very intoxicated, sir, and I would suggest that you call a taxi and find your way home. Waiter, my soup is emitting significant Cherenkov radiation and is reaching prompt criticality due to the neutron-reflective bowl! I didn't order the nuclear salt-water soup, waiter!

Really big hands.

Then we would have a quality exchange on this thread instead of dwelling on meta-possibilities. What if soccer balls were edible?

The robots fail to make hills or to go back in time. On the first count, the gravity in your former-hillverse is too strong for rock to act any more solid than honey, and even the best robots can't build hills out of honey. The best you can do is tiny, millimeter-high rock droplets that look vaguely hill-like. Could be good enough, I suppose. On the second count, the Novikov self-consistency principle stops you from creating a paradox, because paradoxes are impossible. Meanwhile, I still have a hill.

9. Make the wingspan longer until your takeoff speed is low enough. They say this can greatly increase your drag and make it impossible to fly very fast, but who cares about that if you can get in the air? 10. Edit the cfg so that the engine has a 45-degree gimbal range. Now you can mount your engines as far off-center as you want! 11. Write a graphing calculator program to do the calculations for you. 12. Put on more eyeliner. 13. Put zipties on all the loose wires. ALLLLLLLL of them. 14. Have a snack and try again in ten minutes. 15. Play some Europa Report soundtrack. 16. Try using graph paper instead of college-ruled. 17. Drink some water and take a bathroom break. 18. Discard all the data that can be reasonably considered "outliers", "suspiciously obtained", or "loitering with the intent to cause mischief" until you get the right answer. Note: your professor may yell at you for this, but this is normal and can be disregarded as long as you record an elaborate story for each discarded data point in your report. 19. Ask someone on IRC. 20. Grow houseplants. Fact: all projects are 100% more likely to succeed if planned within ten meters of a houseplant. 21. Listen to World of Goo music.

keyboard abuse.

Then it would get very very cold. Geothermal power could sustain us for a limited time, but since the earth's core relies on orbital stresses to remain hot, it would cool down over time and eventually stop being a usable power source. Nuclear power wouldn't be viable either, because the process of mining and refining uranium takes far more energy than the actual uranium puts out. Long before we ran out of energy, though, the biosphere would freeze and collapse, and no one would survive for very long even if they had a geothermal-powered hydroponic greenhouse to grow all their food since disease and cold would eventually claim them. Keeping a breeding population alive would probably be impossible unless you had time to construct some kind of really intense underground facility, which could last for a bunch of generations, but probably wouldn't keep humanity alive long enough to get anything significant done. The only real option, obviously, would be to build a big spacecraft, fly back into the solar system, and set up colonies on Mars and the asteroids while we work on building starships. (yeah, right.) What if I dropped a kerbal into Jool?

When you weren't looking, I raised the gravitational constant of your hillverse (and increased the speed of all orbiting bodies in kind) causing all of your hills to flatten out and planets to become more spherical. Your suddenly hill-devoid universe.

5. Add a bigger nuclear reactor until your ship is powerful enough to go where you want. 6. Fire a high-energy laser at it. If it still doesn't work, use a bigger laser. Lasers are best known as "the solution looking for a problem" and can therefore overcome literally any obstacle in any situation ever.