Commander Zoom

"I'm floating in a most peculiar way..."

For I am a jealous tree, and you shalt have no other crops before Me.

Still one of my favorite threads, and an inspiration, just as you've said Brotoro is to you (and me also).

Now this is a magnificent first post. Congratulations, and welcome!

Great thread so far.

I am a loyal fan.

Tre Kerman, brave kerbonaut, steps off the ladder and onto the dusty orange-red soil of Duna. Letting go of the last rung, he turns to face the alien vista. Though he is not alone, he has the honor of being first to make the descent - standing, as it were, in the footsteps of greats like the legendary Jeb Kerman. He opens his mouth to say something appropriate for the occasion... and his phone rings. "Hello? Yeah, it's Tre. Yeah. Yeah. No. Look, I'm kind of busy right now. I'm on Duna. Duna. Next planet out from Kerbin, the red one? Yeah. Yeah, I'm command pilot for the First Duna Expedition. That's what I've been doing for the last two months. That's why I haven't been by to see you. Right. I sound funny 'cause I've got my phone up against my space helmet. No, I can't take it off. There's no air here. Yeah. No... no, I can't pick up your dry-cleaning. 'Cause I'm a couple of million miles away right now. I won't be back for almost a year. That's right. Because that's just how transfer windows work. No, not power windows, transfer... No. Look, I'll get someone at the Space Center to take care of that for you, all right? I have to get back to the mission now. Yes. Yes, I promise. I will. Okay. I'm hanging up now. Goodbye, Saul." With a sigh, he puts the phone away and looks around again, the historic moment now past. "... I guess that's it, then." *** I met Tre Chipman through City of Heroes, a superhero MMORPG. He was best known there for his character Ascendant, "a guy with the powers of Superman and the luck of Peter Parker." His one-sided phone conversations with his less-than-competent agent/manager/uncle Saul were famous on the Virtue server and even got an official nod from the game's devs in a line of NPC dialogue. After eight years, and despite truly heroic efforts on the part of the community to keep it open, CoH was shut down near the end of 2012. Seven months later, there was more bad news: not only had we lost our game, we'd lost one of our own. Taken from us, by a sudden illness, much too young. Tre's writing, both humorous and dramatic, and his overall attitude were an inspiration to me during my years playing CoH. I regret that I didn't know him longer or better. I never knew he had a Twitter, or got to meet and talk with him in person; but I'm informed by those who did that he was as warm and friendly (and clever and funny) in real life as he was in-game. I especially regret not learning until after he was gone that he had started playing KSP. This personal tribute began taking shape within weeks of the announcement. It's taken six months and a couple of versions to get all the pieces in place, to do it right, but I was determined to get it done by year's end. And so, late yesterday (Boxing Day), in my own space program... Tre Kerman finally and officially became the first kerbal on Duna. /e salute TRE CHIPMAN 1969 - 2013

Love the Darkstar refs. May I suggest a little retroactive tweaking of NAMOR through persistence file editing, so that it has the fuel loadout you wanted?

Speaking for myself, it's because I want my clouds to look like weather systems - storms, fronts, trade winds, etc - rather than random noise (which is fine for clouds from the ground, but not so much for orbit and beyond). Tell me there are ways to, essentially, simulate weather at a planetary scale (but low resolution) on the fly that don't completely kill performance, and I might be interested.

Personally, I wouldn't want to go into cryosleep in an external pod, vulnerable to micrometeors and radiation and whatnot. (But then, I'm not a kerbal.) I understand the desire to model the pods themselves, but I think it would make more sense to have a module (like the Hitchhiker, as someone else said) in which the pods are internal / assumed.

I like and support the OP. That is all.

I confess that I, too, was expecting 80-100% return from being able to process samples in-situ.

What you're saying is, you'd like to get at/change the list of phonemes from which the program assembles kerbal names, right?

May I suggest using Texture Replacer instead? It's working fine for me.

Sounds good to me too. Of course, the devil is in the details (and the execution)...

For what it's worth, without actually looking at the files, I imagine you could probably dig into the part.cfg to have it give you a bigger bonus. Not a perfect fix, but...

I agree that this would be nice. As it stands, I've all but abandoned use of the shielded ports because I almost always want to launch them with something already docked.

hnnng want

agreed, but may I suggest making it look like it was stenciled on, perhaps after the fact? Great part, thanks!

Who's awesome? Ferram is awesome.

Ask a Goblin Engineer, and be sure to specify the "and back" part; they may look at you funny.

Thanks for the quick update!

MechJeb, as someone else already noted. And if anyone else out there was still using Subassembly Loader, .23 finally broke it. (Time to finish migrating all of my old subassemblies over to the new stock system.)

Some people are going to want to play out the whole process of moving stuff around, while others would much rather abstract or automate it. We see that now, with refueling - some build stations and ship all the fuel in from Kerbin, some go the extra step and install, drill for, refine and move kethane around... and some, I think, would be just as happy if off-screen tankers handled all the business of keeping their depots topped up for them. (There's a app mod for that on the SpacePort, in fact, to say nothing of just using HyperEdit.) Again, it's the "all things to all people" problem - how can we (or SQUAD) accommodate the segment that genuinely loves all the grindy, tedious detail of setting up their empire and keeping it running without alienating those who don't want to be bothered with such things?

Challenge has to be carefully balanced in educational material, so that the slower learners (and there always are some) don't get frustrated and simply give up. A good community (and/or instructors) can help somewhat - consider all the "I just can't do (docking, etc)" threads, and the answers they get, often followed by success stories - but cannot be assumed. And to the OP: this is a great thread topic, IMO.