Cydonian Monk

Today? Nothing major, just put Sputnik into its mostly-correct Earth orbit in RSS/RO using some cleaned up kOS launch scripts.

Unstable rotation of an object that was rotated around a non-primary intermediate axis. AKA: The t-handle experiment. Edit: Of course I didn't see it for the first time ever in KSP, but the first time I saw it happen in KSP I was positively giddy.

This entire mission profile was an absurd abomination, but I'm enjoying your approach to it and look forward to the landing! Beat me to it.

28 Days Earlier A finger reached out of the darkness towards a small, sickly-green backlit button. Soft chirping sounds ping-ponged their way from the intercom, tones that announced the Captain was about to speak. Hallock leaned forward from the shadows of the "Memory of Tomorrow's" cockpit and into the red glow of Duna, pulling himself closer to the microphone. "We're here." Seconds passed before a response, another soft chirp, this time in the pattern the Queen had chosen. The line was held open and silent, as was her style, the only sound an occasional pop of static as an interstellar particle released its energy into their ship. Finally she spoke. "Munths. We've been _here_ for munths, slowly limping into our frozen graves. Have we found our doom? What inconspicuous event has caused us to arrive at a place where we were and yet were not before?" Sarcasm. It was sarcasm. Sieta had never been one for direct questions, but he had to admit she was right. The transit from Kerbin had used every bit of fuel they could steal. Fully stocked, the ship alone lacked the potential needed to safely burn for Duna. Their fault for stealing it before it was complete. The tin cans of propellant they had lifted from a supply depot in Kerbin orbit had been discarded as they emptied, one now drifting forever in interplanetary space. Even then they were left with barely enough to complete the Duna capture, had they done it conventionally. Gravity assists from Ike to drop their orbit over a series of munths was the only option left. That, or drift past Duna and out into the airless cold depths of nowhere. He ignored her sarcasm, and sifted through the list of contacts their cobbled-together computer system had built. "Baile Speir", the station they had raided back at Kerbin, had provided a bounty of mysteriously still working electronics. They had taken all they could manage and put them to work. Sieta insisted these now formed a "cycle-proof computer", though he had no idea what she was talking about. Still, the faint list of contacts was proof enough that it worked, even if they occasionally had to punch programs in by hand. Sieta spent her days listening to the background static as it scratched its way free of their radios. Occasionally she caught the spasms of existence as Cycles came and went, recording some on makeshift physical media. Impromtu records they had crafted out of bits of film and insulation. Some days she was completely lost in her trance, listening to the Cycles scream over and over and over. Hallock was now convinced she was a victim of Space Madness. And perhaps the only way to become the Queen of Space was to give in to one's own darker whispers. The list of objects in the Duna system was substantial. Most were in the usual equatorials, but there were a few comms and mapping satellites at higher inclinations, some of which still worked. A handful of things resembled stations or maybe fuel depots, and there were a few larger and suspiciously positioned ships in orbits halfway to Ike. And lots and lots of space junk. Hard to say what worked and what didn't, what were rocks and what had been built by the hands of kerbals. Only way to know for sure was to go take a look. Their first priority was fuel. If forced to he could take the "Rock Spear", the small asteroid-grabber which formed the very tip of the Memory, and use it to investigate a target before moving the entire ship. Once the tanks of the Memory were full, then they could set about robbing these orbiting zombies of their useful parts. Maybe even find a few long lost kerbals, or more likely their corpses, scattered about hither and yon. Or maybe worse. Was it possible for kerbals to die, but not die? Are there undead spacekerbs? Here, at Duna? The old pulp stories thought so. More than any other planet, Duna played host to hordes of meandering mindless dusters. There couldn't be any truth to those tales, could there? No. Hallock shook his head. No. Nonsense. He had piracy to focus on, not silly daydreams of ridiculous old ghost stories. There were good odds the larger flares they'd spotted in lower orbits were used in the past for crewed expeditions to the surface and back. If they were going to find fuel anywhere, it would be at one of those. A quick glance at the math caused him to grimace. Hundreds of meters per second to drop into an intercepting orbit. Another thirty or maybe fifty to make the actual rendezvous. They would be cutting it close, very close, really eating into their reserves. And they could very well end up stuck in low Duna orbit, but they had to start somewhere. He keyed the intercom again. "Sieta," he paused, corrected himself. "Queen Sieta, have you gained access to any of these satellites?" Silence. A chirp. A few more seconds of silence. "They sing to me. Soft beeps, sharp shrills. Sweet whispers in the dusky night sky." Yep, she was in one of her states. Mad as a hatter. More days than not she was now lost to this insanity. And he had nothing to do but play along. "Good. I'm marking two targets in a lower orbit. I think we'll find what we need there. Would you see if they'll, uh, sing to you? Mayhaps tell us how full they are?" "I will sing to them. They will sing their song or they will BURN." Yes, he realized, then and there, Space Madness was the absolute prerequisite for becoming a Queen. -- Ghosts and Stuff Their first target was one of the brightest objects in low Duna orbit. In Hallock's experience visual magnitude was a good indication of size, so, they had a better than even chance of success. The burn hadn't been as severe as he first thought, a mere 110 m/s to drop to intercept, and another 115 m/s to match velocities. The initial separation was a kilometer and a half, but that was brought down with a short burn part way through the transit. The rest of the rendezvous Hallock was sure he could manage using RCS. They came in slightly underneath the target, approaching out of the Sun. Blind their victims until it was too late. Hallock was more than a bit surprised when the Memory's computer lit up with a connection alert: close-approach and docking guidance from their target, which was identifying itself as "5-020 Seconee 1". This name meant absolutely nothing to him. He was hoping the navigation data was an automated process, but he also wasn't about to try to hail them either. No reason to give up the element of surprise, assuming they still had it at all. It was quickly apparent he had chosen correctly. As they drifted alongside, he could make out not only a storage tank for refueling, but also some landers and a shuttle in addition to a small habitation area on the station. Even if there was no fuel to be found, he could strip the rest of the craft for desperately needed spare parts. He made one last quick course adjustment for the Memory, then went down to the airlock to suit up. Their closest approach would be in the dark on the shadowed side of Duna, as was only fitting and proper. He grabbed his shovel, some miscellaneous tools, and a spare drill, and made his way into the soon to be inky black void. He drifted slowly at first, then moved quickly once the darkness had taken them. The lights were on in one of the docked shuttles, otherwise he would have been forced to find his way by memory and guesswork. As he neared he decelerated quickly, grabbed hold of the side of the station, and spun his way onto a set of grabs. He was near one of the windows of the habitation section, the outer skin of the station dimly lit from the cockpit of the shuttle below. It was as dark inside as it was out, no obvious signs of life. He waited a few moments, nothing moved. No lights. He climbed downwards towards the shuttles, peeking in every window he crossed. The same story each time. Nobody home, nothing on. In all there were two landers, a small shuttle, a science station, the (hopefully full) fuel depot, and a space tug docked at the very pinacle. Loot, and lots of it. Just one problem. No open docking ports. He drifted silently back to the Memory and let some ideas run through his head. As it currently stood, the Memory of Tomorrow had two open docking rings. The problem is both were too close to the power armatures and the solar arrays for him to safely dock anything. The science station would fit nicely between the Rock Spear and the Memory's main habitat, and maybe the small shuttle would too, but the rest would need to be secured somewhere else. Could he move the two docking rings? They had a plentiful supply of foam sealant, and he was pretty sure he could weld the inside hatch of the docking rings in place. If he could get them free without causing too much damage, he could even put one of them in place over the hab modules airlock. It would limit their access in and out of the ship, but if he did this right it wouldn't matter in the long run. The most difficult part would be convincing Sieta to move her court into the Rock Spear until he was done with the cutting and the welding. First order of business was to set up a station keeping orbit. No reason to let their quarry drift away from them. This was a task the Memory's primitive computer was more than capable of handling, especially with the telemetry data fed to them from the Seconee. Once he had both that and his royal diplomacy out of the way, he got to the hard work. Permanently closing the inside of the old docking port was easy. They were designed to seal from the inside, so it was just a simple matter of welding them permanently in place. That task took close to an hour, fully suited minus the EVA pack, just in case he did something very wrong and punched through the hull. Once the welds were complete, he fully vented the habitat and moved back outside. Moving the ring itself proved to be much simpler than he expected. He just released a few bolts with the PGT, the drill, and it floated away on its own. The ring that is. He stuffed the bolts into a suit pocket, then maneuvered the bulky mechanism towards its new home. Getting the ring secured into place presented a new issue. Where it had previously been secured using bolts driven into pre-tapped holes in the outer shell of the hab module, the new location had no such support. He could of course drill his own holes and attach nuts to the other end of the bolts. The downside to that plan was it required him to breach both the outer and inner layers of the hab module's pressure vessel. He could seal the bolts holes with foam, of course, but it just seemed slightly risky. The only other alternative was to weld the docking ring directly to the outer shell of the ship. He wasn't entirely certain that would provide enough strength to keep docked ships from ripping the ring and the outer skin of the Memory away, so he decided to avoid such a weak construction. And the last thing he wanted was for a docked ship to break free and tumble along their side while under thrust. In the end he drove bolts the entire way through the hull, secured from the inside, the outer ring welded down, and everything sealed completely with foam. This seemingly simple task took the better part of a day to complete, but in the end he had moved the docking ring and had a fully working hatch inside of it. Unfortunately he had another of these to move and reattach. -- Two days after the initial rendezvous and the work was done. Nobody had tried to contact them from the station, and surely any living kerbals would have noticed a pirate ship hovering off their port bow for the last couple days. Something was nagging him about the whole situation. Who had been here in the past? Had they gone back to Kerbin? Were they still here somewhere? Were they trapped on the surface of Duna? Were they dead? What if they were dead, but not dead, laying in wait on this dimly lit graveyard of a station? He could really use some backup right about now, an extra hand, but Sieta had to stay with the Memory. He couldn't trust her with so much as a stick to use for a weapon anyway. He locked his helmet seal and started the depressurization cycle on the airlock. Then checked his helmet seal again. Still locked. The cycle completed and the door opened. He nearly jumped out of his suit when he caught his own reflection in his faceplate. He blinked and it was gone. Were reflections supposed to do that? It was dark outside, but it was usually dark. Hallock double checked that he had what he needed, a drill, some equipment to bypass the station's locks, his EVA pack, and his shovel. One last check of the helmet seal and he shoved off into the void. The situation at Seconee was unchanged. Shuttle lit up like the Sun, darkness everywhere else. He checked the windows once more, this time shining his lights inside, seeing only his own reflection looking back. Empty darkness, cold and alone. If there was anyone here they were hiding exceedingly well. He decided it was best to enter at the point furthest from the fuel depot. The lander there looked roughly the same age as the station itself. Simple, just enough room for two kerbals and their gear on the inside. He was surprised when the outer airlock's controls lit up, still working after however many years. He was not surprised when it refused to let him enter. Thankfully this model of airlock, as all do, had a physical bypass. A small handle which could be rotated to vent the air and release the lock. He inserted a forked tool into his drill, put it to the bypass handle, and started it spinning. The airlock controls had shown an atmosphere, which was draining slowly as the handle rotated. His mind inserted a slow "hisssssss" sound, there was no way he could hear it through his suit. Not over the low-frequency "whirrrr" of the drill. The PGT. The whatever. He felt a small tug as the bypass handle hit its limit and the drill tried to torque him around. The controls showed the airlock fully vented, but the low hiss sound was still there. There inside his head. He checked his helmet seal again, just to be sure, and pushed the outer door inwards. Small pieces of debris drifted into the void as he moved inside. The door closed with a deep "tong" sound, the automatic latch locking it in place. Inside was dark aside from the red glow of the controls near the interior hatch. They showed error codes and refused to auto cycle the airlock, angry over his forced entry. He spent minutes poking at them with his mittened hands before he successfully cleared the errors and started a manual repress. The hiss returned in force, growing louder as a new atmosphere filled the room. With a loud clack the red glow changed to green. Equal pressure on both sides of the interior hatch. He gave the door handle a spin with his free hand, holding on to the grabs with his other, and pushed in to the lander. More darkness. More silence. The pressure inside was less than that of his suit, but still within the safety margin. He decided to keep his suit on anyway, hanging up only his jetpack. What kind of pirate would take off his armor during a boarding action? More dust and debris were meandering about inside, their trajectories elucidated by his helmet lights. A disassembled EVA suit was secured near the hatch, its helmet rocking back and forth slowly. The lander's controls were dark, its computer shut down. Suddenly his helmet lights flickered and went out. Cold crawled it way up his spine. "Lah". A whisper as soft as an explosion. He spun around, making sure he was still alone. No one. He quickly glanced through the window. A ghost, an old kerbal with white hair and wrinkled skin, looking back at him with fear in its eyes. His reflection. He shook these demons from his head and regained some composure. What sort of space pirate was afraid of ghosts? This was just his mind losing a battle with itself, and he was in control, not the other way around. He found the light switch and flicked it on, flicked it off, flicked it back on. Nothing happened. A thump from his fist and one light briefly blinked to life before fading back to darkness. He opened the overhead hatch and was immediately blinded by the light from the shuttlecraft. The inside was clean, very clean, very white, and very new. Almost too new. The fit and finish were better than anything he had seen in his life. No loose parts, no rushed patches, no stains, no sticky notes stuck anywhere. Like something out of a science fiction film. And still no kerbals. "Keh". There it was again, the chill, that whisper. Forget it. Just your imagination, inserting sounds into a perfectly silent environment. Hallucinations. Not hallucinations. Just nerves, starved of input, firing off on their own. Gentle reminders of sounds lost. The brain forcing an issue, demanding to know why the nerves have left their posts. The nerves protesting as best they can. The next hatch was closed, but only loosely. Not secured. He pulled it towards him and drifted into the unlit space. A tube, round, small, no obstructions along its walls, passing through the lander's fuel tank. At the other end another hatch, also closed but also unsecured. He drifted into this new lander's cockpit, pulling the hatch below him closed and locking it. The light from the shuttle grew dim and went out completely as the hatch slipped shut. Darkness. Darker than before, his eyes having been blinded by the light. Flashes as random particles collided with his retinas. Nerves, firing in the absence of noise. Lights where there were none. Sounds where there were none. Sensory deprivation at its peak. He blinked, fumbled for his helmet lights, only to find they had been on. He was now in complete darkness. "Weh". He jumped again. That was no mild hallucination, something was talking to him. He turned his lights back on, moved, and suddenly a kerbal in an EVA suit was floating centimeters away from him! A scream! He pushed back violently, quickly, moving back down, back towards the lower hatch. His attacker crumpled into itself, drifted away, empty. The kerbal was his own reflection. His mind, twisting his senses inward upon themselves. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Quickly. His heart. Did kerbals have hearts? He clearly did, and his was racing. Crawling one step further up his throat with every beat. Sounds, blood, echoing through his body and into his empty ears. Thump. The fearless space pirate reached out carefully toward the suit, tapping at it, pulling his hand back quickly as it started to spin. The helmet came loose, tumbled about. Empty. Just like this ship. Just like his sanity. He reached for his own helmet seal. Still locked. Only two more modules to go. He could do this. He had to do this. What was wrong with him? Nothing. This was perfectly normal. He'd been confined for a year in close quarters with a munatic, a completely crazy kerbal who had convinced herself she was a queen. And not just any queen, but The Queen. He hadn't fought through decades of solitude on the Mün just to finally lose his mind here. No. No. No. He was in control. This lander's controls were just as dead as those in the first. He could attend to them later, once the ship was cleared. This was just an empty ship. This was just an empty station. There were not hordes of dead kerbals waiting behind the next door to kill him. There were no such things as zombies. No such things as ghosts. He pressed on into the next module, opening both hatches, one in, one out. More darkness greeted him. This was just a regular old habitation module. Four bunks, four lockers, one airlock, two hatches. The tried and true hitchhiker. It was dark, and thin shafts of sunlight streamed in through the windows as the ship orbited underneath him. There was considerably more debris here. Dust, cloth fibers, scraps of papers, broken bits of pencil, a boot. One of the bunks had broken free and was drifting about aimlessly. He glanced through a window just in time to see Ike slipping in front of the Sun. The ship descended into total darkness. His sanity fled further away. "Keh". Something pushed against his legs! He kicked reflexively, spun around, and kicked some more. He was fumbling with his lights when it hit him in the gut, strongly, and sent him spinning towards the window. His helmet slammed into the bulkhead, ringing in the violence, but he caught himself. He reached behind his back for the shovel, braced for another attack, ready to respond in kind. The third attack never came. His lights were back on. He wasn't sure how they had gone. The helmet was still latched, he had made sure of that, and turned to face his attacker. Nothing. Just the loose bunk, now drifting about with more force. It left a cloud of dust and debris in its wake, more scattering with each soft impact. He looked to the window once more, watched the distant and growing formlessness that was Ike. A green speck flickered in his vision, moving across the impossible darkness. The darkness was his mind, the speck his fleeting sanity. His attacker was his own mind. He took a few deep breaths, slowed his heart, and moved upwards once again. A short tunnel connected the habitat to the lab, various controls for the station's power systems crammed into its walls. The computers here had all failed in some cycle long past, but the physical control systems still worked. The docking radar still worked. Not much else. The lack of lights and power was due to a long series of tripped breakers. Climate control, life systems, access controls, and the docking aids had remained online, but ancillary systems such as flight control, lighting, and the general purpose electrical bus had failed over the long years. He carefully worked through them, holding his breath as each system powered back up and showed as green on the board. The last two breakers were for the lights in this control tunnel and the power systems in the science lab. He flipped them both simultaneously. The hatch to the lab was painted a rich, bright red. A yellow note was stuck to it. He reached out and pulled it close enough to read. "Do Not Open." Do not open? Not a chance. This was it. With the computers down, the only way he would know for sure that the fuel depot still had fuel was to read its gauges. He hadn't seen any on the outside, meaning they had to be in the docking ports. And those were only one accessible through the lab. The lab he apparently wasn't supposed to open. What could be in there that would stop him anyway? These "ghosts" hadn't done anything except run up his heart rate, and that was just his mind giving in to sensory deprivation. If there were space zombies surely he would have heard them by now, or would have spotted them through the windows. And besides, zombies are slow. If they even exist. No, this entire misadventure was just pure nonsense. A manifestation of an undercooked mind. This note wasn't going to stop him. It was probably a joke of some sort, left by the previous crew to mess with their replacements. He was the Space Pirate Captain Hallock. Nothing could stand in his way. Freedom lay on the other side of that door. The freedom to make his own decisions, to be what he was meant to be, to go his own direction. If he backed down now, he was as good as dead. Fear is the domain of the weak, and weak he was not. He was the Captain. He was in control. He unsealed the hatch, pushed on it, and followed it in. Even before he was through he could hear a new noise. A soft sound, not quite bubbling, not really crackling, but nothing his mind could connect to. It was just wrong sounding. This was interrupted by a growing hiss, a low rumble, and then a world-ending roar. Arms of smoke leapt forth, ghosts in the dust and haze. Visions of kerbals long gone, their arms reaching down from their heavenly graves to pull into their trap. Screeches, screams, tearing through his ears! There was no silence! No silence here! No redemption for one so lost as he! He reflexively raised his shovel, swinging at these spectres, driving away his demons. The swipes and thrusts caused him to tumble, to drift further into the mist. Each parry brought him closer to his doom, each riposte further from his mind. He was spinning now, his motions becoming more agitated and disorientation took over. The blade of his shovel made contact, scratching here, smashing there, each time setting him tumbling a different direction. One particularly strong swing hit something important. The lights flickered, started strobing, ghosts flashed in front of his eyes for one instant, only to be replaced with another the next. There was a loud pop at some distant end of his universe. A flash of orange, some small cloud going up in a blaze. Fire! The glow was gone nearly as fast as it had appeared, just a thin blue halo remaining. Then another cloud lit up bright, burned quickly, faded to blue. Hallock reached out with his shovel towards a wall to slow his tumble, bisecting a ghost in the process. Another hazy arm reached towards him as he drifted back. He waved it away. This was serious, no time for this flailing about nonsense. How best to deal with fire on an unknown space station? He couldn't let it burn into the fuel. He needed that fuel. Vent the atmosphere? Probably. He could open the airlock in the hab module if he could prop the pressure hatches open. The not-really-bubbling sound had been growing louder. The strobing lights continued, which he recognized as some sort of fire alert. Terrible design. Another bubble of flame billowed from orange to blue and disappeared. Was there a vent in here? He looked around briskly while bracing himself against a rack of science equipment, spotting no obvious doors into the vacuum. A sudden bright flash caught his attention an instant before a large projectile came hurtling towards him. He raised his shovel to block it, and the blade flew violently back into the glass of his faceplate. "TON"! His helmet rang and his suit slammed into the lower hatch, tumbling yet again. His body was still inside, but his mind was on the edge of chaos. Whispers, louder than artillery! That cold shivering embrace again! A fire ballooned out of control at the other end of the lab, burping forth from the source of this mortal threat. The strobing lights flashed their last, his world descended once more into darkness, illuminated only by orange and blue spheres. Droplets of fire rained from the heavens, falling down towards him. Towards the station. Only one thing to do. He sealed the red hatch and pushed off into the burning maelstrom. He had to extinguish its source or he would burn with it. "Or they will BURN." Flames licked at his arms as he sailed into certain death. And that was when he saw it. Small, round, green. Lit only by the flames it belched forth. It stopped as he approached, the lab now in total darkness. He slapped at his helmet and the lights flashed back to life. It was right in front of him! Right there! Grinning! And then the mystery goo sang to him. He screamed. The darkness screamed back. This was no mere salvage, no wayward vessel abandoned by its gods. He had come here expecting to take what he needed with no opposition, to do as he fancied. And yet these craft were no simple husks, no empty tins. Inside each were the souls of those who had built them, those who had piloted them, and the scars of whatever darkness had claimed them. Where one, so went the other. He had come expecting to brush that darkness aside, to win over these spoils. The darkness had won. The goo smiled at him, cooed softly, then cocked its head to the side questioningly. It didn't have a head, not exactly, but he understood what it was trying to say. He lowered his shovel and the goo shifted slightly, ejecting a small cloud and moving towards him. It landed with all the gloopy grace one would expect from an amorphous green blob, attaching itself to his upper arm and sliding up to his helmet. In such close contact he could now hear that the not-quite-bubbling sound was more of a cute gurgling. It let out a sharp squawk before belching forth another sphere of fire, followed by yet more soft cooing. He held up his shovel to look at the goo in the blade's reflection. It seemed happy, perched there on his shoulder, and wasn't obviously trying to get through his suit. He pulled at his helmet latch anyway. Best to be safe. He poked at the goo with a mittened finger, trying to push it slightly to the side, and it laughed playfully at him. It wasn't dissolving his suit away either. It would seem Hallock had found himself a pet. Outside Ike finished its eclipse, and sunlight came streaming into the lab. The darkness withdrew, and the lights came back on. Dimly, at first, but then brighter. Dark scorches marred the walls by a rack of mystery goo canisters, undoubtedly where his new pet had originated. The last of the globes of fire extinguished themselves. The deathly silence abated. The ghosts applauded in the background. Maybe now he could get back to work. -- Navigation: Next Post

I've played the snot out of BASPM, and really like it. A well researched game with a somewhat painful UI. It's an older game now, maybe 5 years old? Really wish it was more amenable to mods or user-added missions. The late parts of the game are very empty. Perfect example of a game that could've been improved with some community access. The "Tiger Teams" nonsense they added is hot garbage though, and breaks mission game flow in a bad way. I know some of that was inherited from BARIS, but that doesn't mean it's a good mechanism. It's occasionally on sale on Steam but hasn't been updated in years. I've played Mars Horizon (both months ago with the prelaunch demo and here recently after release), probably 30 hours or so in total. While the UI looks nice, is reasonably well organized, and the game as a whole has great artwork, I absolutely despise the math minigame. I also get the distinct impression the game designer has a poor working knowledge of space exploration, and at times lacks even the most basic concept of orbital mechanics. Neither of those directly affect the game, but they do detract from the feel it. Lots of things in it just feel _off_. (Ex: As USSR you've unlocked Buran as a launch vehicle, but can't use it as a payload. So you end up doing silly things like launching a Vostok capsule in the cargo bay and then do the mission from the Vostok.) Don't get me wrong though - it's a decent enough game for the money, and reasonably entertaining. I have to turn off the screen warping "failure" animations in the accessibility menu every time I launch the game though, because the game refuses to remember the setting and the animations themselves give me a migraine (which is the first time in my life anything like that has bothered me). Neither of these games are anything like KSP though. I've really never understood seeing those comparisons in reviews of them. Or maybe some folks see the campaign side of KSP as something more than a poorly bolted-on mess? KSP is only barely functional as a strategy/resource game while being a great builder and flight/space simulator. Those other two games are legit strategy resource management sims with zero flight simulator bits.

I'm not even sure it's possible in the game environment, given you'd need to predict orbits far enough in advance to give the player sufficient warning to do something about it. Maybe in a full stock system that's using on-rails orbits for the CBs, but Principia would throw that right out. Instantaneous detection of occultation is somewhat simple though - walk through the set of CBs and cast a line between your position, the current reference body, and any other CBs, within a certain error margin. RemoteTech has some code like this in RTUtils.cs function CBhit(). https://github.com/RemoteTechnologiesGroup/RemoteTech/blob/develop/src/RemoteTech/RTUtil.cs#L548 None of that is particularly useful without some prediction model though. And if somebody did write one, I'm doubtful it would be of much use for the player as in a stock+ system, these CB occultation events are either very common (Ike vs Duna, Mun vs Everything), or so rare they're pretty much impossible to catch. Not much gameplay value. Random events are probably better, plenty of background stars to occlude. Or perhaps a combination of random events and an instantaneous check for those players who are willing to put in the work and find such events on their own. Ex: Player observes an occultation event (ex: Gilly vs Eve), runs the experiment, plugin checks ray cast for intercept between current target and vessel, any intercept resulting in extra science. Still may not be worth it in terms of usage by players vs effort put into making it work. Anyway, thanks for picking this mod up again.

Wow. I used this mod fairly extensively back in the day, but I have zero memory of the Occultation Processor gizmo even existing. But sure enough - it's mentioned in the old release thread. Originally, these processors were a low/med/high type of setting, which returned improved amounts of science at the new levels. At least that's how it's described in the original Dev thread, and that agrees somewhat more with my memory. That whole new split of the processor cameras seems to have come from practically nowhere when Ducky published the "release" version of the mod. Or at least I didn't see any prior discussion of it in a quick scan of the dev thread. Probably inspired by the fancy new asteroid sentinel stuff that had just been added to the stock game. Based on a quick reading of the original source code, it seems to have at least attempted to do exactly what it says on the tin: generate a random time and celestial body. This provided you a 60 second window during which you had to point the camera at the specified target and run the experiment. Generating code is in CactEyeVars.cs while the processor code is in CactEyeProcessors.cs. Repo here: https://github.com/duckytopia/CactEye Given that I don't even remember this part, I'm not sure if it ever worked. I have no idea how this timing information would have been delivered to the player at the time it was implemented, but I admit I didn't dig into the GUI code. (These days you could abuse the messaging system and even tie into KAC.) That said, I like the idea behind this experiment - ex: taking a picture of Laythe as it occults Jool, perhaps for atmosphere spectral analysis or an attempt to determine true size, spot mountains and terrain, etc - but I hate the random number and time concept. I wonder if this couldn't be changed to generate _actual_ occultations based on telescope position, celestial body positions, _lots of math_, etc. Either way this experiment involves quite a lot of set up and work for the player. You have to aim the telescope at a specific CB at a specific time to catch the event, and remember to run the experiment too. Aiming this scope wasn't the easiest thing in the universe. If the player can pull it off the reward should be a decent chunk of science, especially with wherever this part lives in the tech tree. Hopefully some of that helps.

I do think we'll see quite a bit of KIS/KAS obsoleted by being duplicated. But since I've long considered both mods to be absolutely essential to gameplay, I'm not in the least bit disappointed. Same thoughts apply to Procedural Fairings, which have now been in the base game so long I can hardly remember the years I played without them. Personally I'll still use both KIS and KAS for as long as they continue to work. Hopefully we'll see things like the drill and wrench be adapted to use the stock inventory system.

DiRT version 1.10.0.0 is now available on GitHub: https://github.com/cydonian-monk/KSP-DiRT/releases/tag/1.10.0.0 Change Log: - Recompile against KSP v1.10.0. - That's it. Strictly speaking this update really isn't needed, and DiRT from 1.8.0 seems to work just fine in KSP 1.9.x and 1.10.x (at least on PC). I really just wanted to bump the version file and push out a clean rebuild. If anyone needs a version of this built specifically against KSP v1.9.x (unlikely), let me know and I'll set you up with one. Cheers, and good health.

You mean like this?

Not Yet Forgotten 2020-11-23 Houston, Texas, USA Pandemics are peculiar things. Some time during the summer of 2019 I broke apart my home PC, put it in storage, and dismantled the el-cheapo computer desk it once sat on. I almost sent the whole lot of it off to the recyclers and/or the rubbish heap back in February of this year. Then along came March.... It didn't take long for my office to switch to work from home, which we're still doing and plan to be for at least the remainder of the year. I've become rather accustomed over the years to working on three large monitors while hacking at binary rocks in the software mines, so attempting to do any legitimate coding on my 13" MacBook went stale after about 12 minutes. While I indeed _had_ sent a bunch of old hardware and electronics off to the recyclers, I thankfully kept the old gaming PC. At first I set up camp in a disused corner of my bedroom, but quickly moved back to the livingroom, a location which provides the added benefit of using my TV as a (somewhat large) third monitor. I also kept most of the parts of my rickety old computer desk, for reasons I stil can't fathom. Some time back when this whole mess started I used some scrap lumber to build a hutch / platform thing to raise my monitors up and give me some space to store work papers and the like. I accidentally built this right, because I included a 2 inch overhang on the sides, which I've discovered is tremendously useful for clamping things to. And let's all be honest here - at this point who doesn't have three cameras, four spotlights, and a microphone attached to booms or snake-arms which are then clamped to a desk or some other flat surface somewhere in their home? It was only natural that I'd be pulled back into this game at some point, that point being a couple weeks ago. In the interim I had entirely skipped KSP versions 1.7, 1.8, and 1.9 and remember being thoroughly frustrated with 1.6. While KSP v1.10.1 isn't perfect (hello resource transfers!), I think it's quite possibly the best version of the game we've seen since v1.0.5. It certainly runs better on my PC than everything released since v1.4.5. -- And yet none of what I've written above is why you are here reading about this Forgotten Space Program. You want to know how well this save works in v1.10.1, right? And probably what happened on Duna? And whether or not the Jumble of Parts and the Jool Jester and their groups of wayward kerbals ever made it back to Kerbin, yes? You're in luck. After I went through the usual rounds of tracking down mods, getting RSS set up (on v1.8), and then experimenting a tiny bit with JNSQ, I set out on what I thought would be the arduous task of restoring the Forgotten save. Turns out that took all of about 5 minutes. In the end almost all of the old and now long-unsupported parts mods this saves uses work just fine. And in one case the mod parts work _again_ after having been broken by a KSP Unity update, oh, maybe four or five years ago. There are a couple new parts with broken old-style Unity textures, but they at least fail in ways that look good enough. The only, and I mean only, headaches I encountered were some broken SpaceY parts which are now fixed thanks to a ModuleManager config (available over on one of those two threads), and a whole slew of missing struts and fuel ports from the obsoleted versions of Kerbal Inventory System. I, uh, "fixed" those KIS parts by copying them back from an older release and editing configs, just as I've done with hundreds of other parts from long forgotten or rebuilt mods such as AIES, CactEye, and even the original Squad parts. (Don't try this at home.) Those KIS parts don't "work" anymore, as the modules they needed from the KIS and/or KAS plugin no longer exist, but this hack at least allows those ships to load. I'll have some brave kerbal go EVA and "fix" them using the new KIS replacement parts. I still haven't updated some things like my custom suit textures, and very likely won't except in perhaps one or two cases. Those changes can be explained away through story easily enough. And I do rather like the new suit picker in the base game, so if I do re-add any suit textures I'll almost certainly use that mechanism instead of using TextureReplacer or DiRT. And there's also something weird going on with the sandstorms on Duna and something very very weird going on with Jool, both of which I'll take a look at here in the next few days. As they say, the proof is in the blood pudding. Here's a few screenshots of Forgotten things from around the Forgotten neighborhood in KSP v1.10.1. -- There are some interesting side effects that have crept into the save since it was started in KSP v1.0.5 (or the v0.17 Demo, depending on how you count). One of the regular things I encounter are craft which lack any of the newer "control" modules in their definitions in the persistence file. By this I mean things such as the modules used by the CommNet for communication. In older, post-CommNet versions of the game, this would leave the craft completely uncontrollable, which is the behaviour I would expect. Now I've discovered that as long as they have a probe core (and a "ModuleCommand" module in that probe core's instance) I can control them without a radio link. It's as though these craft have no concept of radio.... Another are the various jet engines scattered across the wastes of the Kerbol system. In every instance, all of these old engines are "running" and animated as though they are at full-throttle, yet are entirely non-functional. This isn't anything new as I had to edit the craft in the "Alone on Duna" post to remove this effect, but it certainly hasn't subsided with v1.10.1. Not really surprising or a big deal given these ships were in most cases launched in the pre-1.0 old jet engine days, but it still amuses me. One of the more frustrating things I've encountered isn't even KSP's fault. For years I've kept my saves and GameData folders on my DropBox (using symlinks), both for backup reasons and because I played KSP simultaneously on both MacOS and Windows. Something in Dropbox and/or Windows has changed recently, and Dropbox now grabs exclusive control over files until it can sync them, preventing KSP from writing to them again. And boy howdy does KSP like to save the persistence file often! For most normal and sane save games this wouldn't be an issue, but the persistence file for Forgotten is currently around 50MBs. Some times it takes Dropbox a while to get around to uploading it. So for now I've moved the Forgotten save file back to my SSD and out of Dropbox. I'll lose the file versioning Dropbox provided, but at least it works again without having to wait for slow poke Dropbox to catch up. -- So what now? First up I'll work through the rest of the Duna story with Captain Hallock. I still have the screenshots from all of that, unedited as of yet, and I do need to do some post-effects on a few of them. Once complete, the business at Duna will bring Volume 2 of the Forgotten Space Program to a close, aside from a quick Epilogue. After that I have some decisions to make. Some months back while working on what was going to be the final post in this thread, I hammered out the basic structure of what might have happened in the third and final volume of Forgotten. It's important to realize that while I've always had a general direction of where I wanted this to go, I mostly let the game drive there and have adapted based on what results it gave me. So for example, had Thomlock died in some freak launch accident, that would've been the end of him and I would've needed to change his parts of the story. I'm not 100% sure how to proceed with the next Volume. I had originally considered playing the lot of it in KSP2 with the crews of the Jumble of Parts and the Jool Jester arriving back "home" to find a vastly changed Kerbin. Unfortunately I'm increasingly skeptical that KSP2 will exist in my life time in some form beyond nice screen shots and the occasional video from the dev team(s). And even if it does show up on its new schedule, that means it'll still be 18 to 24 months before it phase changes from vapor to liquid. So for now we're still Forgotten in the good old world of KSP1, for better or worse. I have to admit the 50MB save file and its accumulated cruft does at times bother me. It's not that it's slow, it's more that at times it's VERY slow. VERY slow only serves to add frustration. And it's large enough that, for whatever reason, it drives KSP's memory usage perilously close to its ~24-26GB functional limit on my PC. Out-of-memory crashes also add frustration. And right now, especially right now, anything that adds frustration is the enemy of Good Enough. So we'll see. I still want to poke around a bit in JNSQ and RSS/RO and play with some of the neat new mods that have been released in the years that I've not been actively playing Kerbal Space Program. I figure v1.11.1 might just be released by the time I get all of the Duna story posted, so until I'm caught up with that I probably won't do anything in the Forgotten save itself beyond some house keeping and making sure I'm not missing something. But know this - as 2020 draws to a close, we're moving ever so closer to being Remembered. And being Remembered is always a good thing. (Especially if you've been dismembered....) Hope all is well with all of you. Cheers,

Almost never, because signatures don't display on mobile.

I think it's possible, but what we define as smooth is up to interpretation. The recommended mods? I'm assuming we're talking about Procedural Parts, fairings, etc. from the list up in the first post of this thread, and not whatever RP-0 might recommend. Most of them, very probably, will work perfectly well. Most of the RO recommendeds/requireds are really just plugins, and while some of them may be math heavy, they don't hit performance all that much. (Principia might be an exception, but you can tune it fairly well to work on less performant systems.... Just don't expect to ever see orbital predictions for more than a couple months out.) Where you'll likely have issues are mods with fancy shaders or higher-resolution/larger textures. Avoiding scatterer and EVE is a good place to start, but anything with reflections might also be an issue. Best way to find out is to download the core pieces of RSS/RO and see if it works (or use CKAN of that's your preferred method). With your specs I'd recommend trying the 4k RSS textures to start, and if those don't work well for you fall back to the 2k ones. (You do have to use one of the RSS texture packs, otherwise the planets will not load correctly.) Only after you've got RSS/RO working would I bother with RP0 and any other mods. FWIW, I used to run RSS/RO/RP-0 on a 13" laptop with some rather abysmal specs. It's an interesting enough challenge and experience that it's worth taking a bit of a performance hit.

I feel like this is an almost impossible question for the mod devs or any of the rest of us to answer, but I can provide you an anecdote of my recent experiences. My system is a 3.6GHz i7-4790 with an NVidia GTX 770, 32GBs of RAM, and a mix of nice SSDs. I'm running Windows 10 and KSP v1.8.1 with RSS/RO/RP-0 using the 16k RSS textures, Principia, Scatterer, RSSVE (or whatever the current cloud/etc pack is named), FAR, the usual bevy of mods such as all of Near Future, RaiderNick's stuff, the RO ships/capsules/etc, a handful of other parts mods and who really knows what else. Most of the KSP graphics settings are all at their highest aside from aero effects, which have never worked well for me. Usually the game is running at 2048x1152 in borderless-windowed mode on a dual-monitor setup (total desktop area of 4096x1152). It takes something that feels like ten minutes for the game to start and for modules to be managed, but once running I have no issues that aren't common to everybody else. I have minimal framerate loss at launch, the time scale firmly in the "yellow" range, but that's increasingly true for bone-stock KSP too. The only real issue I've encountered is memory usage. Either the game or Unity or Windows or something gets to be very unhappy when KSP goes over 24GB and... it just goes away. No "crash" in the typical sense, just... gets OOM'd and disappears. As a result I had to stop using a few resource-intensive parts and texture mods (which shall remain nameless because it's not their fault) and scale back my aspirations of Using All The Mods. I found a happy middle ground that works quite well. My gameplay is pretty smooth, both with basic RSS/RO/RP0 and all the added parts mods. I'm not sure I'd recommend much less than what I'm using though, aside from possibly a slightly older GPU in exchange for lower-res textures. I _think_ a basic RSS/RO/RP0 setup might be ok on 8GB. 16GB should definitely be enough for most cases. Your mileage will vary.

Absolutely fantastic film. I go back and rewatch that every half decade or so. A film that was way before its time and yet impossible to move anywhere else. Was an absolute favorite in my groups of high schools and college friends. Had a tiny bit more punch back in the previous century, especially when cybernoir was still a living genre.

Allegedly they had to read the books that had been published so far and then guess who would sit on the Iron Throne at then end of it all based on just those books. Not the entire ending. If that is true, then it means they voluntarily ignored the individual who fits that description through most of the last half of the series.

Way worse. GoT started to come unravelled in the fifth season, and got progressively worse from then on out... until the last season when they just kind of forgot about quality and basic character motivations. And, oh, the "winner" of the whole thing was a semi-major character they completely left out of one of those later seasons. Rise of Skywalker, with its weird unexplained resurrection at the start of it, is in some ways _almost_ closer to the Song of Ice and Fire books GoT was based on. (In that not everybody who dies stays dead.) I still don't like it, or what they did to Ben and Jerry, er, Rey, but it was nowhere near as "wut" as the GoT endings.

I've tried many times to get through the 6th one (Chapterhouse). I can't tell you what happened in the 5th (Heretics) except for the very end. The 4th (Slugs for the Slug God) was just lots of slug boy and his good pal ghola potato. An interesting book in many ways, just... slooooow.

I'm honestly not sure which ending I was more disappointed in: "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" trilogy or the "Game of Thrones" TV series.

I'm bullish on this new Dune movie, but I've always liked the universe. The casting of Jason Momoa as Duncan gives me hope that the series _might just_ continue on to the parts where his character is interesting. Or at least maybe it's planned to do so. And Max von Sydow will remain the best [male] Kynes on film (for now). (FWIW I have no issue with the change made to Kynes... at least not until I see the film.) Casting for the David Lynch Dune was generally great, and despite its issues it's still one of my favourites. I might be one of the few, but I've always thought the whole "weirding modules" thing was a nice addition and/or change.

Disgusting. I wonder if they'll keep any of the source material this time. Though to be completely honest, if they ditch the last half of the third book and come up with something... else... but keep the first 5/6ths of the story, I won't consider that too much of a loss. I love the first two books in that series, hate how it ended.

I enjoyed it as it is. A nice trimmed down escort story from the Battle of the Atlantic. Modern naval warfare is difficult to make into an action movie, but this did a good job with both action and tension. Nothing really over the top (ie: this isn't that horrid Midway movie), but there are some CGI bits that I didn't care for. I'm a tiny bit disappointed they dropped much of the captain's character struggles from the book. "The Good Shepherd" touches heavily on the themes of self doubt and spiritual devotion in the face of violence. Hard to convey things like that in film though, unless you do some "captain's log" type of narration, so I'm ok with it. Pity this didn't get a real theatrical release. Good war movie.

And here I thought fan threads were prohibited..... The answer to the question, as just about anyone who lives in Houston will agree, is BOTH. I really need both and use both. My A/C has hardly stopped since some time in May, and my ceiling fans are on during the day. I also use little accent fans when needed. It gets really bloody hot now that I'm working from home during the days.

Until mid-March my gaming PC had been mostly disassembled and packed away in the closet. I _almost_ sent it to the recyclers in February. Glad I didn't, because I'd be going mad if I had to work from home for three+ months on just my MacBook. Didn't take long to get it set back up, but I had to fix a few things first. Still doesn't have much disk space on the OS drive (only a 100GB SSD), and Windows updates keep breaking the symlinks I use to keep data on the storage drive (a 2TB disk of some sort), but it does what I need it to do. So aside from my usual strategy games (CK2, EU4, HOI4, Stellaris) and a few city builders (Ostriv, Foundation, Soviet Republic) I've mostly been doing a heavily-modded Skyrim Special Edition playthrough. If you enjoy(ed) Skyrim and you've not used the Inigo mod you owe it to yourself to try it out. Bloody fantastic. For the most part my modlist is the same as Gopher's (search for him on YouTube, his modlist is in the video descriptions of his latest videos), minus the ENBs but plus the "Great Cities" line of mods.

Looks like he's still on the old YouTubes...: https://www.youtube.com/user/MatoroIgnika