steuben

Chapter 7 Walt Kerman stood at the launch pad. He watched the technicians doing the last minute checks on the rocket. It didn’t look like exactly like a rocket. Sure it had the long narrow shape, fins at the bottom, and a pointed nose. But, the set of fins at the top broke the lines. “They add authority when she’s coming back,” one of the engineers had said. “They’ll help her shed speed during maneuvers in the middle and lower atmosphere.” “Maneuvers; more like tumbling out of control,” he thought after watching from inside the simulator. Then there was the reporting name for the design series, Basket. “You package up the passengers like eggs and they get home safe,” the design engineer had said. “And you carry eggs in a basket, right? Besides using ‘Carton’ as a name sounds like something out of a Saturday morning serial.” He watched the techs leave the ship like a receding wave. Three of them remained, anonymous in their yellow hazmat suits. Walt flipped up his helmet and sealed his suit. The three pulled a hose off the truck that had driven up. The driver sat nervously in the cab. The hose was attached to the rocket and the truck. There was a small red cloud that quickly dissipated, as a pump was turned on. He shuddered. He heard that that stuff would dissolve a kerbal to his bones, and maybe beyond. They unhooked the hose in another small red cloud. The hose was put back on the truck and it drove off. Another truck drove up. The techs opened up the hoods of their suits. They hooked up another hose to the rocket. Walt undid the seals on his suit. The smell of kerosene began to seep in. He flipped back the hood of his suit as the techs fueled the rocket. He looked towards the kerbonaut complex. An open jeep with four kerbals drove towards the launchpad. Walt frowned. The two passengers on this flight were kerbals of wealth and influence. All the kerbals slated for the several first passenger flights were. But, how many would tolerate even the short run in the jeep? These two were adventurers, the ones who told those slightly fantastic stories at parties. Discomfort was part of the adventure. Should it be? He would have to talk to Mortimer about upgrading some of the facilities. “Hey Walt,” one of the passengers, Calley, called as he walked over after getting out of the jeep. “See you at the Plant in an hour.” “Sure thing, Calley,” Walt said back. The Fuel Plant was the favoured . Jebediah waved with his helmet as he walked by. He was whistling “The Air Force Song.” “There goes our pilot,” Calley said. He clapped Walt on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. Succeed or fail, it’ll be a heck of ride.” He dashed off to the waiting crew. Walt walked back to his jeep. He sat down. He rested his chin on his hands on the steering wheel; watching the last of the preparations. He knew it would fly true. It was different having passengers. Crews knew the risk. They saw it every day. They accepted that the risk would go bad someday. Walt worried about the day it went bad with passengers along for the ride.

The simple way is don't turn on the vector. But it may not do what you want. You want the vector and the thud to have their own fuel tanks?

Inner speech... I think I've only heard the sound of the voice of any of my characters a few times. But, I do know what they say and how they say it... even when they aren't talking in any normal, or abnormal, sense of the word.

The solid fuel chemist, I'll comment on year 312 here rather than in its thread. technical - break it up into paragraphs. You'll want to start a new one when ever the speaker changes. And usually when you go from speaking to description/action and vice versa. It is easy to get lost when it is a big block of text. - run it through your word processor of choice. There was one homonym that I saw, there might be a few others. And it will catch any other spelling and/or grammar mistakes that you might have, including some missed capitals. - consistency of C-K exchange, you missed one. style - you're placing the hooks correctly at the end of each chapter. - when the hail is chewing through the ship, in chapter 2, you may want to shorten the sentences. It will help speed up the action. Except for maybe two sections, the first is when Jeb is talking with Val, and the other is when the lander gets ripped away.

I don't think the demo likes mods. Another way is to hack up the parts. This section of the engine's cfg files is where you'll want to work. atmosphereCurve { key = 0 315 key = 1 80 key = 3 0.001 } Multiply each of those numbers by an arbitrarily large number say one million. It won't give you infinite fuel. But one million times better mileage is pretty close.

I'm working on a challenge idea, to [REDACTED] to [REDACTED] and back but with the constraint of [REDACTED]. But how to score it? Right now I'm toying with scoring with mass fraction from LKO to destination and back to Kerbin Surface. So (mass returned to Kerbin surface) / (mass of the initial ship +fuel in LKO), with 1 being a perfect score. Though given my trial run I'll probably scale it up by a factor of 1000. I'm getting some small numbers. One slight variant that I'm think of is (mass returned to Kerbin surface) / (total mass from Kerbin surface). Simple, no fuss, no muss scoring. I had toyed with idea of straight number of kerbals multiplier. But, since hauling around kerbals is cheap, it is an easy way to crank up the score. So perhaps a multiplier of (capacity for kerbals)/(number of kerbals)? Still a bit easy to run up but not as easy. Comments/suggestions?

Thanks for the work. I think my multi-kp monsters are eating KVV for lunch. But, it may also be the machine that I'm on, x86 vs. x64. I'll try it on my other machine when I get a chance, and update accordingly.

You can either paste the link directly or click on the link icon beneath italics. But, you may want to break what you have written, in Year 312, apart into separate paragraphs.

I'm going to add a fourth one to Champ's list. - the right end is pointed to space. the navball is completely blue?

hyperedit is good in the tool kit as well. I've also used KVV.

Maybe not so much a reality check as a san check. *rolls die* ... right I've got to use the ones with a positive number of sides. Anyways, I'm guessing 2312 by Robinson, not sure how it will translate into the Kerbal-verse but I guess it will depend on what themes you take. You will need to do some heavy up front lifting for this one. Tvtropes and webcomics might be a good overview. You can skip over the graphics stuff, but the rest should be looked at. The general parent So you want to... is a good set of references as well. Now for the heavy lifting part. Since you want to do a twice a week update you will have to do some a lot of planning. 0. Figure out your elevator pitch. 1. Figure out your setting, characters, etc. 1.i. figure out how hard on the Kerb-Moh scale of hardness you will be. 2. Figure out your plot. 3. Figure out how many chapters you want. 4. Figure out how big each chapter will be. 4.i. Know how big a chapter you can write. 4.ii. Know how long it takes you to write it 5. write a summary of each chapter. Notes: - the order of steps 1 and 2 can be swapped - you may cycle between steps 3 and 4 a couple of times Additional comments 1. always keep a buffer 2. you can warm-up and develop your characters, settings, background colour with little vignettes. My "Tales From the Swan", taged "cygnustales", are an example. They are little bits of omake story and scene from the 'verse of video work that I'm slowly building. 3. don't set the number of chapters or the size of the chapters in stone. As you go along you may realize that it might be better to split this chapter into two, or I need more space to finish this one up. 4. If you plan it all out you are less likely to have plot holes and fridge logic moments, and will be able to put in decent amounts of foreshadowing, call backs, Chekhov weaponry, and a couple of red herrings

A nuke and rebuild is a pretty heavy option. You may have to just restripe the permissions on the folder to get the access back. If you're using windows... not sure about anything else.

Chapter 6 Khenry leaned on his cane in mission control. His leg, shattered in the same accident that had killed Encal, was slowly healing. “This is Flight Control,” he said into his headset. “All stations report: go, no go.” The room went quiet. “Range, go.” “Recovery, go.” “Tracking, go.” “Chase, go.” Valentina, in a plane circling the KSC. Her voice made tinny by the narrow radio channel “Capsule, go.” Jebediah, in the capsule. “Telemetry, go.” “Science, go.” Khenry looked up into the VIP area. “Director, all stations report go. I recommend launch.” Direc nodded. “All stations,” Khenry said. “We are go for launch. Resume countdown at T minus thirty seconds.” The chatter at the various stations resumed. The checks and activities were down. “T minus twenty seconds,” came over the speakers in the control room. The activity slowed to a halt. Everyone waited for one button to be pressed. “T minus ten seconds.” Khenry knew he would never be going up in the regular program. “T minus five seconds” "Umbilical release," Khenry said. "Umbilical away," the range officer said. “Clamps release,” “Clamps away,“ “T minus three.” “Primary motors start”, Khenry said. “Primary motors on,” Jebediah said. His voice now made tinny by the radio channel, instead of the landline. “T minus two.” “Ignitors on,” Khenry said. “Ignitors active,” the range officer said. “T minus one.” “T minus zero.” “Throttle full,” Khenry and Jebediah said together. The rocket lifted off from a silent white cloud of steam and smoke; a cloud with a yellow glowing heart. One second later the crushing roar of the engines rolled through. Khenry watched the rocket fly up into the sky; a silver spec that trailed a white thread of cloud. “Booster burn out in three,” Jebediah said. “Booster burn out.” A sound like a metallic chunk followed by a new roar came through the radio. “Booster separated. Central engine throttle at seventy-five percent. Gus promised me flight in the stamp. I owe him a bottle. He’s delivered on this one.” “You ain’t seen nothing yet, Jeb,” Khenry said. “I’ve seen the specs for the newer stuff.” “Chase, reporting op-ceil,” Valentina’s came over the speakers. “See you on the brown side, Jeb.” “Someday, I’ll see you on the blue side, Jeb,” Khenry said. His mike had not been cued.

looking for direction or general critique?

A nice piece of shorthand ruined by kernel physiology. Any suggestions?

The correct installation is, as with most mods, just dump the KVV folder in gamedata. If the mac structure follows the win structure. But, yeah it doesn't work with 1.2.x I'm poking at workaround over here if you're interested in following along.

Okay, so I'm cutting new ground here. Dang. On trying it, it looks like 1.13 doesn't like some of 1.2 parts, at least judging by the fact that it stalls on launch: fairings, heat shields, maybe others. It looks like I will have hack up the whole set of parts to get it work. Fun times

Three of the other 14 are posted around. I've got 16 written on paper. Which are in various states of editing and thought. But, yeah I should insert a forward and back link in them. The high-g test felt off, but I don't know if it just a difference in personal styles. I'll have to chew on it relative to the other chapters. Additional: i think that if you recast that section using short sentences, and then have a long one at the end it might work better.

I'm playing with indirect speech with this one. Don't know if I've gotten it. I'm going for anonymous voices in the crowd.

Chapter 15 Walt stood in the wings of the lecture theater. The flash bulbs twinkled from the crowd like crystal snow on a munlit night. This was the second media session for the kerbalnauts just returned from Minmus. The first one was in the hanger with them fresh from the recovery plane, still in their suits, two days ago. Walt looked at the tables on the stage. The three kerbalnauts were at the opposite end to him, followed by Gus, Direc, and finally Wernher. Wernher was a problem. He interviewed terribly. He could not give a simple answer, could not see the point of them, and generally was an insufferable genius. He wondered who would have their feathers ruffled this time. The cameras stopped flashing and the questions started. Walt made note of who asked what. It would be useful if information had to come from an unnamed source, or through leaked documents. To know who to talk to would give it the best angle. The question came up he knew was going to come up, was Minmus really made of mint ice cream. Walt looked over at the sound technician. She had already muted Wernher’s microphone. One of the kerbalnauts was answering the question. Based on the sample she had in the cabin, it was probably just ice. But the folks in the lab will know for sure. Maybe, it’s apple sorbet came the suggestion out of the crowd, accompanied by laughter. The questions continued. They were a mix of popular and technical. Wernher was allowed to answer a couple of questions, including the one that had been coming up recently about a space kraken. The question came up of where the next destination would be. Duna was the most likely destination. But, it would mean changing how craft are designed and flown. So, it maybe a while before they would be traveling there. Then, came an unexpected question. “The program was replacing the magic of the universe with mundane facts. First the Munites of Kells. Next the Minions of Kerne. Soon the Dunians of Kurroughs and the Even jungles Kuttner. Every teeming world replaced with a barren empty surface. Will the program leave any wonder in its wake?” The room seemed to hold its breath. Then, Wernher began to laugh. The sound technician looked at Walt, her hand over the mute button. Walt shrugged his shoulders. “And he stood on the ridge crest,” Wernher said. ”He looked down not on the edge of the world, but another valley, another river, another plain. In the distance another ridge rose to the sky. He realized the legends were not tools of control. They were artifacts of fearful ignorance. “He looked back down the way he came, towards home and all he knew. He looked down into the other valley. Were there kerbals there? Did they know what was beyond the ridges? He looked at the ridge in the distance. Did another valley lie beyond it? Or was would there be something beyond imagination? “He stood and considered his next step; then he took it.” Wernher paused for a moment. “I’ve always wondered which direction he went,” he continued. “The author ended the story there. Did he go into the new valley and beyond? Did he go home to tell of what he saw? Or did he follow the ridge to see what else could be known? “That is what science, and the Kerbal Space Program, is. For every fairy castle it knocks down, for every legend disproven, for every mystery solved science creates two more. “If your authors are any good they will be able to take what we have learned and create stories that are just as, if not more so, fantastic.” Walt looked at Wernher. He looked at the crowd. He could hear the soft whirs of the tape recorders. It had been a perfect answer. He hoped for them every time. They were talked about at the conventions. He despaired of it happening again, at least with Wernher. They could not be engineered, rehearsed, or forced. There in lied their elusive beauty.

One of the visual mods that I like to have doesn't work with 1.2.x, KVV in this case. Since one of the rules of the mod dev section is "Don't poke the bears", and I know it is being worked on, I'm chasing the obvious work around. Which brings up this question, will 1.2.x parts load and display correctly in the VAB/SPH? I don't care if they don't work after I push the launch button... mmm, launch button :O~~~ Before I invest too much time on it though, has anybody tried? and succeed or failed?

To pull this thread out of the dustiness of time, and at some risk of necromancy... I hacked up the Mk2 Clamp-O-Tron by adding this line. node_stack_connect01 = 0.0, 0.0, -0.825, 0.0, 0.0, -1.0, 1 It places a node at rough the same point as the deployed docking port. Now, it does have the side effect of having to undock twice. I think it may have something to do with the distance between the two docking ports when it attaches to the mode. But for what I'm using it for, it shall suffice.

Yes, the black works better.

Kerbal Monopoly Kerbal Life Kerbal the Flamethrowa. The kids love that one.

It would be similar for this. For all the related wing parts I suspect you have to remove the module ModuleLiftingSurface section.