The Right Trousers

I've never used RCS to dock. I always zero out relative velocity, line up the ports, and have one ship ram the other at 0.5 m/s.

This won't be useful in established games until the jump drive only targets specific jump targets. When I activated the drive, I got a list of targets that went off the bottom of my screen. Bug report: The first time I clicked on the propulsion tab (I know it's not in there), I thought my computer froze. It was nearly unresponsive for about a minute. When I clicked onto the page under utilites that contains the jump drive, it took about 15 seconds to bring up the page. You have a resource problem somewhere. Ubuntu 64-bit, if it helps. Idea: It might be good to limit the drive to out-of-atmosphere use. Idea: It would be cool if the drive maintained the *relative shape and inclination* of the ship's orbit. I could set up the exact orbit I wanted for Eve (which takes a lot of dv) before jumping there from Minmus (which is easy). I'm not sure what to do about degenerate orbits like on grounded ships - maybe just hyperbolic with no velocity (i.e. dropping them) would be good. Then players could build bases by setting up a geosync satellite and jumping to it from the launchpad.

That actually explains everything. If you made "on the launchpad" mean "within a 15m-wide, VAB-height cylinder," would that make the achievement significantly easier? BTW, aside from getting frustrated about the meaning of the achievement when it was "obvious" to me that I'd done it, it was a really fun one. I'd welcome more like this. Is there a lithobraking achievement? It would be great to have one for each celestial body, and might be easy to implement.

An achievement pop-up ruined a Mun landing. Move them somewhere else? I got a command pod onto the helicopter pad in 8 seconds from launch, and didn't get an achievement. When does the mod start counting? The command pod was on its side, but was still. Does that not count as landing? The text says "Launch a Kerbal." Does that exclude command pods? Should the Kerbal have to go on EVA?

Thanks to OrtwinS, we have a transcription of KSP's main theme to play around with. Here's my arrangement: Kerbal Space Program main theme arrangement (Soundcloud) I haven't made sheet music for this, but the main theme chords are these on the beats: C, Cmaj7, Em7, Am7, Gm7, Bb9, Cmaj7, Am7, Gm7, Bb9, C+4, Am7, Bb6 or Gm7, ... My little interludes use these (not necessarily on beats): Cmaj7 9 +11 13, Cdim, Gm7, Db7 Lots of passing +4/+11s in the C chords (and +2 in the Em) make it sound spacey. Fun stuff. EDIT: Link to OrtwinS's transcription

Excellent. That's a good base to work from. At half notes, the chords under the main theme are C C C C Bb F C C Bb F C C Bb I've been experimenting and found this is quite nice: C C Em Am7 Gm7 F/Bb C Am7 Gm7 F/Bb C C Bb6 (i.e. Gm/Bb) The Em and Gm7 in particular sound regal to me. The second Am7-Gm7-F/Bb-C allows walking the base (playing octaves) around low-low-C, which sounds strong. I've been trying different rhythms. Swings and Latin rhythms sound cool, but are wrong for the piece's tone. (I might try a jazz arrangement anyway.) I think it really needs a march; something like the opening to the Superman theme. I'll bet a percussionist could come up with something nifty. For embellishments, passing F#s sound cool and spacey, blend well with any C turned into Cmaj7, Em or Am, and admit more dissonant transitions using major-minor scales and chords. Ascending and descending arpeggios that incorporate the tune seem to work well. Again, nice work. This is fun to play with.

Just now, on the first two pages in KSP Fan Works, there are four music threads. (Disclaimer: one of them is mine.) There have been plenty of others, and we have regular music producers. I think this justifies having a [Music] tag. How do we get one?

I think you're right about the tempo. I'm starting to think that three of my Soundcloud recordings (including this one) are too slow, but I didn't think so when I first uploaded them. Maybe I need to let them cool for a week before I share them. EDIT: Wait, you dance and sing? This place is full of such interesting people!

I'm glad you like it! (Wow, I don't think anyone's ever told me they tried the score before...) I used Lilypond, a scoring markup language. That's also part of the answer for "why 15/8?": for Lilypond to produce a MIDI with the right rhythm, it needs the scoring to be really precise. The other part is that I'm a purist... I'll try 5/4 with a swing, though. (I think the lead-in to measures 13 and 43 could remain 16th notes.) I've got another song I should try that on as well. If you don't mind, could you let me know whether you find the fingering suggestions helpful? Or whether you find different fingering in those spots more comfortable? We all have different hands... I don't usually put fingering in, but measures 9 and 11 in particular (and their corresponding measures at the end) gave me conniptions until I finally discovered that 4 crossing over 1 made them consistent - for me.

I've tried to capture the impatience and excitement of waiting for a transfer orbit in Kerbol's SOI to finish, SO AS I CAN GET THIS SCRAP BUCKET TO DUNA. Yrrrggl... I think the 15/8 meter (for most of it) does the trick. This is officially the hardest song I've ever written, and it's tons of fun to play until my fingers start to ache... Genre: Jazz. An Endless S.O.I. (PDF) A recording of me playing it: An Endless S.O.I. (Soundcloud) An Endless S.O.I. (MP3) MIDI (missing only the arpeggios): An Endless S.O.I. (MIDI) For those interested: Lilypond source (links to Github) More music by me Soundcloud Anybody know why Soundcloud is acting like an idiot? It gives me an "OH NOES" page every time I click on one of the Soundcloud links, but serves the page properly when I reload it.

The fast beat, instruments and general epicness remind me of Chrono Trigger's main theme. Nicely done.

OP updated with Soundcloud links. Thanks for pointing me there in my last post. I'm definitely checking out the jazz. I've loved piano jazz it ever since I discovered Vince Guaraldi (i.e. the musician behind the Peanuts cartoons music). He was taken from us far too early...

I was struggling to come up with a bridge for this song until I decided it was about Minmus, and remembered my first flyby. It is therefore a KSP Fan Work. I don't look at pictures of KSP planets until I visit them, preferring to let the difficulty flavor the experience. I remember my first visit to Minmus as being like getting socked in the head with a slice of lime wrapped around a solid rocket booster. Genre: Space Jazz. Over an Emerald Moon (PDF) A recording of me playing it: Over an Emerald Moon (Soundcloud) Over an Emerald Moon (MP3) I don't have a screenshot of my first flyby, so I'll shamelessly post someone else's: Lilypond source, for those interested: Lilypond source (links to Github) More music by me Soundcloud

No problem - I just wrote another one. It's like... the more stressful school gets, the more music I write. Cool. Running Lilypond on it should output a MIDI file. I didn't include license text in the music source, but feel free to do whatever you want with it. It'll probably take some work to put any life into the MIDI, though.

Never heard of Soundcloud before today, and... it is awesome. I'll try to find the time. Thanks for the kind words. Now that there are at least 3 composers here, we should lobby for a [Music] tag.