GreeningGalaxy

Wrong. Accelerando.

-- November 2015: Ack! I forgot I still had this open. Flavor text requests haven't been responded to in a while, and this service is pretty much on hold at the moment due to my constant preoccupation with that "real life" thing. December looks pretty good, though, so if you still have something you want me to look at, poke me at the end of the month. Sorry for going dark on you all. -- I've noticed a number of very nice mods lately which, despite adding great content, are lacking when it comes to in-game descriptions and documentation for their new additions. This is completely understandable, of course - Maybe English is not the native language of the modder, or maybe they just don't like writing sentences nearly as much as they like writing code. As I said, I don't hold anyone in lower esteem for not writing descriptions for their mod parts, but I do think that mods with complete and in-character descriptions fit into the game a lot better than ones that do not. As such, I'm hereby offering my services as your on-call flavor text writer. Do you have a mod full of fancy new parts, planets, and features, but not know where to start on the documentation? I can help! Things I'll write: -In-game part descriptions -In-game planet descriptions -Science blurbs for planets -Explanations of mod features (for forum threads, in-game manuals, et al.) -Tutorials and other documentation for using those features -Pretty much anything else, within reason, that involves KSP and English. Things I won't write: -Code (I don't know a lot about programming; if you're a modder, you're pretty much guaranteed to be better at code than I am) -Comments on code (I probably won't be able to read your code and tell what it does, so it would be pointless for me to try to do this) -Stuff in languages besides English, or translations of other languages (I only speak English, unfortunately. ) If you're desperate, I'm willing to feed whatever you give me through Google Translate and convert the results into grammatically-correct and sensical English as best I can, but I kinda doubt that that's going to end well. -Your term papers, birthday cards, business emails, or other things not related to KSP How to Request: 1) PM me. That's the most reliable way. 2) Post in this thread. I might take longer to see it, but if you want it to be public for whatever reason, that works. 3) Find me on IRC. I'm on #KSPOfficial on EsperNet rather a lot these days, so you'll probably be able to find me there if you want to talk in real-time about something. In-game descriptions, particularly part descriptions, are mainly there to tell the player how to use the thing in question. In addition to that, the best descriptions are often written 'in-character,' or at least, 'in-universe,' often written in the tone of someone who lives in the Kerbal universe explaining it to you. In the case of the stock parts' descriptions written by Squad, these are usually rather humorous. I can write your documentation in whatever style or character you need. I'm probably best at the more humorous and in-character ones, but I can also cut to the chase and write simple, out-of-character documentation to maximize clarity. In general, I'll need the following from you before I can write anything good: 1) A good idea of what I'm writing about. If the mod is already released, great - just link me to it and tell me what you want documented, and I'll play around with it and get right back to you. If your mod is in some stage of earlier development, give me what you can - videos, screenshots, unfinished models, sketches, or even textual descriptions - I'll do my best with whatever you can give me. For tutorials, it would probably be best if you gave me a functional copy of your mod to mess with, but I can still try to make do with whatever. However, I can't guarantee that you'll get what you're looking for if you don't give me much information to work with. 2) The tone you're looking for. If you don't specify, I'll just give your parts and planets stock-similar in-character descriptions, and tutorials in simple out-of-character terms. If that's what you're after, great; if not, you'll need to let me know. 3) How soon you want it done. I don't imagine that this kind of thing will have very many rush jobs, but we can also talk about prioritizing your project over others if yours has any particular deadlines attached to it. Expedient delivery is not something that I can necessarily guarantee, but if business is as slow as I expect it to be, this shouldn't be a problem. FAQ: Can I get a sample of your writing? Yes, you can check the bottom of this post, under "contributed projects," for everything I've written for projects so far. Content for each mod will be included in spoiler tags for your perusal. Those spoilers will be long; you've been warned. Your writing sucks! I can totally do better! Great! I never claimed to be better at it than you or anyone else. I just happen to really like doing it, particularly in this context, which is why I'm offering my services. If you think you can do better, you probably can, and you don't need me at all. What's this, you just want to write the descriptions for mods and not have to bother with the code/models/other hard work? That's not helpful, you're just selfish! If writing the descriptions is the fun part for you, then it sounds like you enjoy writing as much as I do, and therefore probably don't have any need for my services. What's the most you're willing to do for one project? I won't set a hard limit on that at the moment. For part and planet descriptions, I'll probably be able to do as many as you can give me - they're only a few sentences each anyway. If you have a very big documentation project that needs a lot of writing - well, first of all, I'd be flattered if you wanted little old me to handle that - then we might run into problems depending on how much time I can devote away from my real-world life to work on it. Since most mod projects involve a lot of modelling, texturing, and coding, and not a lot of flavor-text writing, I don't expect to see very many insurmountably-large goals tossed my way. Tutorials and other in-depth documentation will take the longest, since they'll necessarily involve some actual gameplay, so just be aware of that before you ask me to make you a whole MechJeb manual from the beginning. I'm not saying I won't do that, just that it could take me a considerable amount of time. What are you currently working on? Nothing at the moment. There will be a "pending jobs" list at the bottom of this post for that. What projects have your written for so far? Check the bottom of this post for a list! Do I need to credit you if I use your writing in my mod? Nope! While I do appreciate contributor's credit, I don't require it. It might annoy me a little if you keep our interaction totally secret and claim to have written the stuff you got from me yourself, but I won't raise a fuss. I do reserve the right to add your mod and everything I've written for it to my "contributed projects" list, though. Pending Jobs: Contributed Projects: >>>Bacon Labs--

I'm not really excited for there to be weapons in the stock game, particularly given the fact that there's nothing much to shoot besides yourself. That said, I've installed BDA and I play with it all the time, because explosions are fun, but I also never really find a use for the weapons on serious long-distance missions. Weapons are best left to mods, if you ask me, but that doesn't mean mods can't do them very well, as BDA testifies.

I made this adorable little compact station and put it in polar orbit over the Mun. Yes, it was flown up in one launch, but the rocket it took to put it there was far from insane, so I don't feel too ashamed of myself. notable features: -Folding survey scanner arms and docking pylons using IR, allowing it to fit within a ~5-meter fairing. -Space for 7 kerbals -A variety of science gear, although mainly just what's useful in sandbox (KSPI magnetometers and gamma ray spectrometers, the four 'original' sensors, and survey/narrow band scanners) -2 KIS containers, holding KAS pipe endpoints, harpoons, grappling hooks, tools, and over 40 packs of explosives -4 KAS winches -Docking space for 8 small craft (using small docking ports), 2 large craft (using standard docking ports), and one expansion module (using a large docking port) -Small propulsion system with approximately 500 m/s of total delta-V (probably enough to deorbit or get onto a kerbin flyby, should that ever become necessary) -Well-balanced RCS thrusters -Lights for nighttime docking -Large solar panels and backup RTGs for power -Full RPM external camera system -Cupola for nice views.

For certain values of "fly," yes. The user below me routinely edits their part/etc. configs to change details they don't like/make amusing alternative versions of parts.

I am absolutely terrible at finding flat landing sites. This is a bit of a problem, because the things I land are often tall and thin, with narrow bases and high centers of gravity. This is mainly why I always go to Minmus. Other things I can't do: -Build a spaceplane right on the first try -Spend less than an hour designing a spaceplane -Build interplanetary ships with less than twice the delta-V they need for their missions -Persuade myself to go to Duna -Aerocapture with DRE/new stock reentry heat Most of these are not so much "lack of skill" as "unwillingness to bother" but let's be real, those are about the same.

Today, Agaphe Kerman forgot her fears and embraced her return to oblivion: She then bounced off the ground and returned to KSC unharmed, but her colleagues say she hasn't been the same since. There's something a little more... BadS about her now.

No, they wouldn't, they would make it far easier to detect you. The heatsinks would all be very close to you when they first appeared on the enemy's scopes (which you can bet they would, being as hot as they are), and no matter how fast you fired them, they'd stick around close to you when viewed from a long distance away. Worse still, after watching multiple launches, your enemy would be able to put together a great picture of exactly how fast your supposedly-stealthy ship is moving, and how much speed it's getting from each heatsink shot, thus revealing your mass and ship class. Plus, heatsinks are necessarily pretty heavy, which is going to make your ship either low in delta-V and acceleration or absolutely gigantic. Or both. Doubt it. Ice may seem cold, but it's still not as cold as the cosmic background by a longshot, and once you start melting it from one side, the other side is going to glow bright enough to see on an infrared telescope of the kind your enemy will be carrying. Ice isn't a superb conductor of heat, but it's also not that great an insulator, at least not enough for these purposes. Ice also makes terrible, terrible armor because it has horrid flex strength and is very heavy, but I guess it could be sort of useful against interplanetary dust if you're planning on staying out a while.

To be a total killjoy, those aren't really on the realism level KSP has. If you want sci-fi engines, I'd recommend KSP Interstellar, which adds a huge variety of different modular engines and other technologies, all of which are very powerful and (for the most part) plausible. There are a few low-thrust 'glowing' types of engines (plasma thrusters) but they don't have the idle glow you specified and are a lot more like ion drives than anything else. Most of the engines in the mod are the 'roaring' kinds of rockets, which are what the really powerful engines we'll develop in the future will be like. Anyway, preaching over. If you want engines like that, the best place is probably the B9 Aerospace HX engines, but you may note that a) B9 is not update for 1.0.x yet and it's huuuuuuuge, and adds tons of parts beyond those. If you don't mind rolling back/delaying your upgrade from 0.90, it may suit you with its options for giant soft-sci-fi-looking ships. Presumably, the 1.0.x update is in the works for that. If you're into the shiny sci-fi look, OPT may appeal to you. It focuses mostly on spaceplanes, but it also has a sci-fi-ish "dark drive" with a fancy glowy effect. Once again, it's not quite what you specified, but it's in the same sort of zone. Lastly, if you are interested in the 'roaring rockets' kind of sci-fi drive but don't like how crazy complex KSP Interstellar can be, I've heard great things about Karbonite+. Unlike the other mods I've mentioned here, I've never actually tried it, but I do know that it includes a very nice looking 'torch drive' with a lot of power behind it. I hope at least some of this helps!

I enroll in NaNoWriMo, thus completing the triad of NaN. somehow, this results in hills. probably. one of them is mine, but I'm not saying which.

Someone linked a Youtube version on IRC. I got about halfway through before I had to pick up the remaining bits of my sanity and abscond. that movie is something else

And of course, it wouldn't be a meme if I didn't over-reuse it.

Decoys don't really work, because they're too easy to tell apart from real ships. By looking at your exhaust during burns, the enemy can tell your exact thrust power, exhaust velocity, thrust, and therefore mass. Not only does this allow them to track you with precision even if you're invisible between burns, but it also can tip them off to whether a given radiation source is a real warship or a silvered balloon. You won't be able to make reliable fake fusion torches, either, because the real ones emit very distinctive spectral lines which will be impossible to simulate without using real fusion. There are too many details like that that will allow your enemy to pick you out of a crowd of decoys. If your decoys are convincing enough to pass off as capable warships, it means that they essentially are warships, and you might as well mount weapons on them and use them as such.

You're right that high Isp means very high engine power. However, it's not true that only burning far from the enemy, near the sun, etc. will help you. If you're running a big fusion torch, you're going to be visible from the next star system over, and you'll be putting out a lot of very distinctive wavelengths of light that will be identifiable even if you're right in front of the sun. Also, if you are right in front of the sun, be aware that you're going to show up as a great big black dot. Even if you manage to shield all your running heat in one direction (dubiously possible, but also admittedly not theoretically illegal), there's no way you'll do that with your exhaust too - for one, the hot part of your exhaust will extend many kilometers behind your ship, and it's also going to be emitting some gamma rays and stuff that you can't contain. So if you're trying to do a high-speed flyby of a primitive civilization's planet, and you aren't planning on stopping or using your engine at all once you get close, you might get away with just putting a little shield between you and them. However, you might wonder what you'd hope to gain from doing that in the first place, and it would be very easy for a civilization with spacecraft to spot you just by being where you don't expect them to be, or by being in too many places for you to safely radiate your heat. So I stand by what I said - reducing your observability and making it less likely for your enemy to spot you is possible, but the success of these tactics is more likely to reflect badly on your enemy than well on you - they're not the kind of thing that should be expected to work with any degree of reliability on a vigilant and well-established enemy, and it certainly won't be possible to hide once the enemy knows what you look like and has an idea of where you are (both of which will be revealed as soon as you fire your engine).

Some comments about disguise: - Disguising yourself as an innocuous freighter is fine, as long as you don't mind being an innocuous freighter. Sure, a freighter with a gun is slightly better in combat than no ship at all, but you're going to blow your cover in a big hurry if you try to linger around sensitive tactical zones or get on a good trajectory to start shooting at anything. - Disguising yourself as an asteroid is even worse, because while innocuous freighters are generally expected to follow innocuous flight paths, they're at least expected to move and radiate heat. Asteroids are expected to do neither, so you're going to raise some alarms when the enemy notices that you're radiating a tiny bit more than you should for an asteroid. Getting up and moving is a dead giveaway, no matter how slowly you do it. Sure, you could count on your enemy not paying attention to every last asteroid out there, but that's not a very safe assumption assuming advanced sensing technology. This goes doubly so if you've already tried the asteroid ploy on this enemy before. - I suppose disguising yourself as an enemy warship (or, hell, flying a captured enemy warship) could work just fine, assuming you know all their secret codes. This might just take the form of hacking into your enemy's robotic warships without them knowing until it's too late, which is less proper stealth and more electronic warfare. Still, we'll take our small victories. And to reiterate regarding thermodynamics: -There's still no way to conceal your waste heat. It doesn't matter how big your radiator is, it doesn't matter how your engine works, and it doesn't matter how big a heat sink you have - you're still going to glow, and if you don't glow enough, you're going to cook and glow. Trying to make a multi-megawatt or -gigawatt reactor invisible to a high-tech infrared telescope in the same solar system as you is like trying to hide a megaphone with the siren button taped down on the top floor of a university library - no matter how many layers of blankets and insulation you wrap around it, it's going to get heard or seen, and almost certainly both. And the megaphone won't melt if it's prevented from emitting its sound for all to hear. -This also goes for directional radiators. Directional radiators are terribly inefficient compared to regular ones, but inefficient radiators aren't illegal - the real problem is that the backside of your reflector will always be warmer than the cosmic background, which is what the enemy will be seeing you against. You can try to buy time by assuming that the enemy's telescopes aren't good enough to see you through 2000 layers of near-perfectly-reflective unobtainium-mylar, but you still have the problem that adding another 9 to the end of your reflection efficiency only means that your enemy has to increase their telescope sensitivity by just a little bit to keep seeing you. Don't let this stop you from having desperate people try something like this in your sci-fi, but don't treat it like it's always going to work or is remotely practical. -Running dark is not useful if you're planning on changing your trajectory at any point, and it's right out if you have people in your ship. There may be situations in which supercooled sensor buoys or kinetic projectiles could go unnoticed for long enough to be useful, but those are going to be infrequent. TL;DR - stealth in space, where 'stealth' refers to "being able to reliably hide oneself from an enemy at an unknown location", is still impossible. This doesn't mean that surprising your enemy is impossible, or that there aren't things you can do to make yourself less likely to get spotted - just that you shouldn't count on not being seen, because someone who's looking for you has everything in their favor for finding you.

We've got a track record for pulling through. Yes, turbulent times are ahead. Our current behavior is not sustainable by any means, and we're going to learn that the rough way, but I think we're persistent enough that the chances of us all being wiped out are pretty low. Most apocalypse scenarios are exceedingly unlikely in the first place, and we're already so excited about them as a society that we'll probably be able to prevent and prepare for them. I could be wrong, but at least no one will be around to judge me if I am, right?

Gotcha! I spy (with my kerbal eye): A broken joint.

Surprise. *sad party whistle* Accelerando.

/mode +b for disabling emoticons in a post. That's very illegal, you know.

No. my computer keeps needing watts. how do I make it need less watts?

You sit still and stare at the wall while the glaciers slowly crunch down your house. I aim a laser pointer out my window. What's the worst that could happen?

You become an astronaut by profession, but every flight you're assigned to ends up getting cancelled for unrelated reasons. Eventually you resort to building very large model rockets, and end up getting fined for launching something exceedingly large without notifying air traffic control first. I wish for glasses that allow me to see arbitrary wavelengths of light.