Forgotten Space Program

[lajoswinkler]

Very nice screenshots and the story as well. 99 years... oh deer.

[DMSP]

@Cydonian Monk, I have a few questions. First off, What mods are you using for visual enhancements? I see Scatterer, but what else? EVE? What do you use for the Skybox?

Also, what mods are you using for the Potassium 1 and 2 crafts? I know KOS but also some science mods, and obviously Tantares. What else? Would there be a way I could get a craft file?

And finally (sorry for the longer post), would it be possible to get the last Aluminum aircraft that was used to launch to Potassium 2 (I think it was the Aluminum X4B or something)? And in a stock version, like the Titanium you posted?

Thank you. Keep writing these awesome stories and I will always be right here to read them.

[Cydonian Monk]

2 minutes ago, DMSP said:

@Cydonian Monk, I have a few questions. First off, What mods are you using for visual enhancements? I see Scatterer, but what else? EVE? What do you use for the Skybox?

The mods are mostly listed in the OP, and I think all of the Visual Ones are. Scatterer, as noted. Also using EVE, Engine Lighting, Real Plume, Reentry Effects, PlanetShine, Distant Object Enhancement, probably a couple others too. The Skybox is, I think, the old Raerdon skybox just toned down a bit. I'll have to double check at some point. Cloud textures are mostly those that come with EVE, but I've tweaked a few here and there. Jool textures are a mix of a base texture I created from Jupiter sources and the EVE Jool cloud textures (not sure how much of that actually shows). Suit textures are Squad textures that I reworked way back in 0.21 or 0.22.

2 minutes ago, DMSP said:

Also, what mods are you using for the Potassium 1 and 2 crafts? I know KOS but also some science mods, and obviously Tantares. What else? Would there be a way I could get a craft file?

Aside from kOS and Remote Tech antennas, the Potassium tugs themselves are stock. The things they're pushing are a mix of everything listed in the OP. The science experiments are mostly DMagic and SCANsat, perhaps a couple others. At one point I was adding craft files to a Dropbox link, but those are all for v1.0.5 and will definitely (kinda) not work in 1.1.3. I'll look into getting that set up again later.

2 minutes ago, DMSP said:

Would it be possible to get the last Aluminum aircraft that was used to launch to Potassium 2...? And in a stock version, like the Titanium you posted?

I'll look into it. The Aluminium X-4B needs updated.... landing gear specifically. Not sure what all I've got on it that's not stock, obviously most of the stuff on the trunk. As an aircraft it's relatively easy to build, but also easy to snap a few screenshots and toss it up on KerbalX once reworked.

[AviosAdku]

Yet another great instalment, I particularly liked it with the short burst on the engines to check them, reminded me of a video I once saw taken on a space shuttle mid-deck during a short burn.

On a brief nitpick, I'm no expert in this field (and I wouldn't be surprised if there are ones on the forum) but wouldn't the term for the shutdown reactors be "Scrammed"? No offense, if you know more than me I apologise for my ignorance.

[NotAgain]

1 hour ago, AkuAerospace said:

On a brief nitpick, I'm no expert in this field (and I wouldn't be surprised if there are ones on the forum) but wouldn't the term for the shutdown reactors be "Scrammed"? No offense, if you know more than me I apologise for my ignorance.

I believe that scramming a reactor is an emergency shutdown procedure (I may be wrong).

[AviosAdku]

22 minutes ago, NotAgain said:

I believe that scramming a reactor is an emergency shutdown procedure (I may be wrong).

Well, I'm not 100% on the article but it describes it as part of a routine shutdown as well (to make absolutely sure it shuts down), I don't have time to do any in depth research though.

[Cydonian Monk]

So here's my thinking on the reactor nomenclature: A solid-core NTR uses the propellent as its heat sink - instead of water as we do for power generation purposes. It's a bad deal to keep a small pool of [plasmatic] liquid fuel superheated, and you don't want that heat to build up in the reactor mechanism itself, so when the engine burns are complete, the reactors are indeed shut down in a hurry. Thus SCRAMmed would be appropriate, regardless of the true etymology of the term.

Scrubbing, the term I used, could of course be used for canceling a reaction, or for canceling anything [quickly]. Though I can't guarantee it's in use in the nuclear community at all, in my mind a reaction that has been deliberately and intentionally stopped/reduced has been "scrubbed," regardless of how fast it was done. (Don't know where I picked it up, I blame college.) Also, I used it as a deliberate synonym as SCRAM has become more associated with emergency actions. (We'd be having this same conversation both ways, I suppose.)

 

Now it's my reactor design itself that might be a bit on the odd or dangerous side..... It's the fission you want to stop, and quickly, so I see a design with a moveable control mass (as normal, to absorb the neutrons and various other bits they need to absorb to maintain criticality), and a radioactive core that can be split to bring the mass back below critical. (The core would then be a "ring" into which a "rod" is inserted to achieve or balance criticality along with the control mass.... Whether the ring or the rod is the moveable element is up for debate.) 

Mechanically this is probably a bad thing, as 1) more moving parts in an already complex thing, and 2) the fuel in a solid-core NTR will be eroded by its very use (well, any radioactive core will be), as will everything in the reactor, so having 1/2 to 2/3 of the radioactive mass attached to a moveable piece means that moveable piece may break free at some point. NTRs place nuclear reactors into their worst possible environment and then proceed to abuse them some more, so my extra complexities are idealistic at best and malpractice or kerbslaughter at worst. 

Edited July 11, 2016 by Cydonian Monk
Edit: Cleaned up overloaded nomenclature....

[AviosAdku]

Understood, thanks for the explanation.

[Railgunner2160]

@Cydonian Monk I don't think your ideas are too far fetched, current reactors use movable control rods made of Neutron Poisoning Materials. One possible solution for your concepts is instead of movable control rods you use movable fuel rods instead. When you wish to make the reactor "safe" between burns such as the period of travel between planets you retract the fuel rods into a mass of Neutron Poisoning Materials. Thus the fuel rods that make up the reactor are the only major moving parts aside from the fuel pumps needed to circulate the hydrogen fuel. Such a design has the benefit of the rods being protected during a impact event by the very material the regulates the rate of fission in the nuclear material, the risk of the fuel rods being damaged when retracted could conceivably make such a design safer during journeys between planets since most of the risk occurs during burns when the rods are extended during a active burn relying on the NTR's casing as shielding from any impacts....

[kunok]

The last posts have more level than lots of the threads of the science subforum

[AviosAdku]

You should have seen the reaction to Kerbfleet: a Jool Odyssey's interlude (the part over Eve just after the crossover).

[Cydonian Monk]

Your Robots Are Watching Ignoring You

As predicted, the Potassium 2 reestablished ship-to-ship communications with the Jumble of Parts shortly after passing Bop's orbit. One last check of the ship's systems showed the originally intended capture burn was still programmed in and ready to go. So Macfred had Thomlock tweak it to place the K-2 into a bit less of an orbit than originally intended, so as to save ∆v for the smaller probes.

The invasion plan of Jool was expected to proceed like this: This K-2 would enter into an eccentric orbit with its periapsis roughly at Laythe while its apoapsis was outside Tylo's orbit. The four mapsats / science probes and one of the communications satellites would be delivered into their required transfer orbits at periapsis. The two science satellites for Laythe and the remaining communications satellite would be deployed at apoapsis.

This revised schedule all assumed the Potassium tug and its stack arrived successfully in the Joolian system. As luck would have it the tug's eight NTRs activated right on schedule:

Six minutes and forty seconds later and the K-2 was safely parked. The crew aboard the Jumble of Parts spent most of the subsequent minutes evaluating the health of the spacecraft and its suckling young probes. Checking to see if the probes and the Aluminum X-4B aircraft were working as intended. Testing the integrity of all of their flight computers. Making sure nothing untoward had been reported during the long drift through the endless dark. 

And of course verifying the whole mess had enough remaining fuel to deliver the probes and capture into Laythe orbit.

Once all the checks were complete and found to be satisfactory, Macfred gave the go-ahead to deploy the first probe: Calcium 6 Pol, bound for (you guessed it) the tiny speck of a moon, Pol. A quick flick of the wrist on the controls and the decoupler sprang the tiny robot free of the larger K-2 stack. A spin of the K-2 kicked it away, after which control was switched to the Ca-6. 

And then nothing happened.

"It's strange," Macfred was saying mostly to the flight recorder and not to anyone in particular, "As soon as it came free that was it. No contact. The antenna is deployed, and even if it wasn't it's just meters away from the K-2. It has electricity. Its low-power ship-to-ship should be working. Just, nothing's there." He thought for a long moment. "Hang on." 

After a bit of digging around inside the Jumble of Parts' computer he found the answers he needed. Somewhere, somehow, some magic switch had to be flipped that set the remote control system to "local control" and blocked attempts at linking back to [the still silent] Kerbin. In doing that he managed to break the SAS on the remote craft, which also required a bit more equipment hacking. ("Does nothing work on this accursed ship?")

A short time later and positive control was established with the Calcium 6 Pol by way of relay through the K-2, as was originally expected/intended. Had that not worked out, their only other option was to fly a kerbal out to reprogram everything by hand. Certainly possible but not terribly desirable when one is rationing their fuel.

(Spoiler: Ghosts and Things and the occasional bugs in KSP mods....)

Spoiler

 

While story-wise the probes are unable to talk to mission control and Kerbin, for practicality's sake I have to keep a link open so I can do things in Remote Tech. There are (at least) two control points in this universe - Kerbin/KSC and Kelgee Station, as Kelgee has more than 6 kerbals aboard and the required electronics. (At times other control points pop up as sufficiently-large crews show up to investigate.) Both KSC and Kelgee were in the same network as the K-2 and its probes. Either of them should have worked. Neither did.

A positive link was present using three different paths: KSC-NeonHeavy-Argon-Potassium1, KSC-NeonHeavy-Argon-Potassium2-Scandium1, and KSC-NeonHeavy-Argon-Potassium2-Scandium2. (Both Sc-1 and Sc-2 are still moored to the K-2, but the links were active and working.) All nodes in this control link were listed as active, the K-2 had a green "RemoteTech" time delay box with a signal delay of 276 seconds, and I was able to send instructions to the K-2.

To the Ca-6? Not so much. Red text all the way. No matter what I tried, even linking the Ca-6's ship-to-ship 50Mm dish to the K-1 or the K-2 (using the "Force Antennas" cheat in RemoteTech), nothing would let it show as connected. Nothing. The network pathfinding simply refused to work. So I disabled RemoteTech and pressed on with the initial deployments and reenabled it once everything was in its intended transfer orbit.

That crisis averted, next the SAS, RCS, and other core action groups stopped responding. This may or may not be a bug with any of the mods I have installed.... To cut that very gory, ugly, and miserably long story short, I quicksaved, hacked the probes in the quicksave to enable the action groups I needed, then quickloaded with SAS magically enabled. 

Yay? Yay.

 

With that done, the details of the transfer to Pol were wired to the Ca-6's flight computer. Time until burn: 30 minutes. (Which would take place while theJumble of Parts and its crew were in the dark on the far side of Laythe.) Macfred next deployed the first of the Scandium communications satellites and the remaining probes for the outer moons, as the sooner that was done the better. Again, all four were kicked away from the K-2 by a bit of rotation.

All six of the Calcium probes would enter into polar orbits over their chosen moons, and would do nothing but map the surface until the team was content with the data they had retrieved. Once the mapping and other science tasks are complete, their science instruments will be shut down and all six will turn into communications relays (assuming their RTGs still have enough energy to power said comms relays). At least that's the plan.

The Scandium 1, the first of their three main trunk commsats, was scheduled to boost out to a very high Jool orbit (reaching its apoapsis around the start of the new year), where it would perform a plane-change burn to enter into a 25 degree orbit. (As inclined against Laythe.) Afterwards it would drop down in between Tylo and Vall's orbits and complete its capture burn there. As it was somewhat close to Tylo there was (and still is) some concern that the Scandium 1 might be perturbed by the giant moon, but near-term projections show its desired orbit to be stable.

The subsequent capture burns also had to be dialed into the four science probes, as most of them would be well out of range until the K-3 arrived with the last of their communications satellites. In some cases it would be more than two munths before the crew was even aware of the success or failure of the eight robots. Very much autonomous exploration. A bit nerve-wracking, to be honest.

The initial deployment and transfer burns all took place on day 403 of year 99. These burns were very routine, and almost all of them looked something like this:

The one exception being the Bop-bound probe, Calcium 5 Bop, which went out a bit sideways:

This produced lots of interesting lines in an already line-art-heavy system:

A few more burns occurred to place the various probes on their proper intercepts, resulting in yet more lines:

By the time those lines had shown their forms, the K-2 was at the top of its orbit. Three things would happen here: The K-2 would burn to bring its periapsis down to Laythe's orbit and a Laythe intercept, the Scandium 2 communications satellite would be released into its high-orbit transfer, and the two science satellite for Laythe would be deployed.

The K-2 went first, on day 407 of year 99:

Resulting in a close-approach to Laythe with a periapsis of some 82km. Not too shabby, if Thomlock didn't say so himself. Multiple times. Gloating about it, one might say. Loudly.

With the happy intercept all plotted out, the Calcium 1 Laythe and Calcium 2 Laythe were deployed and instructed to conduct their plane-change maneuvers. This would ensure their intercepts were high enough to enter into polar orbits, and spread out so that they were separated by at least 30 degrees. All bought very efficiently by piggy-backing on the Potassium 2.

The Scandium 2 was also released while the stack was at apoapsis. A considerable burn boosted it upwards into a 250Mm transfer orbit, at the top of which it would circularize and (hopefully) provide (spotty) coverage to the two outer moons. [This was a late change on my part, as I had originally intended to use Laythe to boost the satellite's orbit, but decided there would already be too much going on at the same time with K-2 and the two science probes capturing.]

All this discharging and tumbling about produced ever more lines:

MIRV, baby. MIRV. Commence the robotic bombardment of everywhere!

A few days later and the first of these robot invaders was arriving at Laythe. As luck would have it, the Potassium 2 was leading the vanguard, more than eager to meet up with and exterminate embrace its kerbal downpressors compatriots. As extreme and completely blind luck would have it, the K-2 was entering into an orbit that agreed (mostly) with the inclination of the K-1, meaning it would be able to save considerable fuel to conduct the rendezvous. Sometimes things work in our favour.  

It captured in the dark, as is only fitting and proper.

The second of the two Calcium probes was also entering into its mission orbit, sweeping high over Laythe's poles with radar and cameras and death lasers and magnetometers and other such niceties. (Its twin had taken the low road, and was now somewhere in Scotland awaiting the outcome of its Laythe Admission Referendum. It was no doubt saddened by the knowledge that it would never see its true love again.)

And that was everything up to Day 412 of Year 99. The lineup for the rest of the year looks like this, most (if not all) of which we'll cover in the next update:

The invasion of Jool is at hand. A cold, soulless, mechanical hand.

 

--

Lines, lines, everywhere there's lines.....

Spoiler

 

Navigation: Next Post

Edited December 4, 2016 by Cydonian Monk

[AviosAdku]

Impressive, quite the juggling game and a few hilarious lines (of commentary), notably:

2 hours ago, Cydonian Monk said:

Commence the robotic bombardment of everywhere!

one of my favourites in this one.

[Cydonian Monk]

2 hours ago, AkuAerospace said:

Impressive, quite the juggling game and a few hilarious lines (of commentary)

Thanks! The juggling got a bit weird at times, and had it not been for Kerbal Alarm Clock more than a couple of those probes would be somewhere else right now.

[DMSP]

What is that purple line (planet?) traveling near Jool right now? It's a mod, but what mod?

[kerbalkommander]

it all looks so PRETTY! loving the series, keep up the good work! (and try to make sure no-one else gets hit with shovels)

[Cydonian Monk]

4 hours ago, DMSP said:

What is that purple line (planet?) traveling near Jool right now? It's a mod, but what mod?

No mod, that's the post-Jool orbit of the Potassium 3, assuming it doesn't finish its capture burn. 

[DMSP]

1 hour ago, Cydonian Monk said:

No mod, that's the post-Jool orbit of the Potassium 3, assuming it doesn't finish its capture burn. 

Ah ok! Silly me!

[Geschosskopf]

On 7/13/2016 at 11:00 PM, Cydonian Monk said:

(Spoiler: Ghosts and Things and the occasional bugs in KSP mods....)

I see your spacecraft have a Sonic Screwdriver in the emergency equipment rack next to the fire axe

 

On 7/13/2016 at 11:00 PM, Cydonian Monk said:

MIRV, baby. MIRV. Commence the robotic bombardment of everywhere!

Pop the slimy green sporebags!

 

On 7/13/2016 at 11:00 PM, Cydonian Monk said:

And that was everything up to Day 412 of Year 99. The lineup for the rest of the year looks like this, most (if not all) of which we'll cover in the next update:

Looks like you've got busy schedule.  I hope none of those burns are more than 1 or 2 minutes  

This raises a question....  While motherships have the awesomeness factor going for them, when they eventually give birth at the target and convert into flotillas, their spawn all necessarily have to do their things in very cramped time intervals.  Whereas if each of these probes had gone to Jool individually, their arrivals and thus maneuvers would have been spread days to months apart, so burn times wouldn't be the issue they seem to be for you here.  So why not start them all separately?

[Cydonian Monk]

 

2 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

This raises a question....  While motherships have the awesomeness factor going for them, when they eventually give birth at the target and convert into flotillas, their spawn all necessarily have to do their things in very cramped time intervals.  Whereas if each of these probes had gone to Jool individually, their arrivals and thus maneuvers would have been spread days to months apart, so burn times wouldn't be the issue they seem to be for you here.  So why not start them all separately?

It's a valid question.

In the case of this set of probes, only a couple burns were within minutes of the others, and that was manageable. Had I sent all of the probes alone, none of them would have had radio contact at Jool unless the commsat was sent first... a logistics issue that has a solution, yes, but is also solved by the tug/carrier approach. (Or by not using RemoteTech, which is sorta what I did, but only due to a bug.)

There's also the reuse element, where these tugs will see several trips to and from Jool over the years. Individual probes would need transfer drives of their own, etc., and the extra drives may or may not be reuseable or cheaper. Or lower mass. I'm not sure, as I designed the mission around interchangeable reusable tugs for shoving payloads out to Jool with a minimal cost for return to Kerbin.

I'm sure there's a mass/cost analyisis in this somewhere I could perform to see if the tug/carrier approach really was cheaper. Kind of like the moon lander math for direct ascent vs LOR. If the mass of the direct ascent is more than the mass of the lunar lander + orbiter for the same mission profile, then you don't choose direct ascent.

Probably a better way to do this is to use some sort of weird cycler orbit where the tug doesn't capture at Jool; or even a post-transfer swingback, like such: Stage 1 tug burns to place payload into Jool intercept orbit; Payload is jettisoned and stage 1 tug uses Mün flyby and a "detransfer" burn to return to Kerbin/Mün orbit; Payload has a disposable stage 2 for capture at Jool (most likely with a giant heat shield so craft can both aerocapture and maneuver).

Personally, I'd rather have the three sets of transfer/capture burns for the tugs vs fifteen or sixteen such burns had I sent all of these pieces individually.

[Wildcat111]

I saw Kerbin and Duna in the second last update!

Edited July 15, 2016 by Wildcat111

[cubinator]

@Cydonian Monk I had the same problem with Remote Tech on a Mun probe. It had a long-range dish, pointed at Kerbin, it said it had two targets in range, all ok, but it insisted that there was no signal and I couldn't complete the contract for testing an engine on suborbital flight because it was stuck in orbit.

Edited July 15, 2016 by cubinator

[Cydonian Monk]

11 minutes ago, cubinator said:

@Cydonian Monk I had the same problem with Remote Tech on a Mun probe. It had a long-range dish, pointed at Kerbin, it said it had two targets in range, all ok, but it insisted that there was no signal and I couldn't complete the contract for testing an engine on suborbital flight because it was stuck in orbit.

It's a weird bug. At first I thought it might have been because I'm using Additive/Root as the distance method, but apparently it wasn't. Then the question of whether the link failed due to "Active Vessel" end points (which was some hairy-looking code last time I read it), but I ruled that out too by setting direct connections between the probe and the K-2/commsats.

I'm still not sure quite what it was, especially since it started working later in the mission when I turned RemoteTech back on. If it crops up again I'll probably start trying to debug it. Clearly a pathfinding bug of some sort, especially as it works for the antennas settings menu but not the control path. (Maybe I've got a circular network path set up somewhere that it gets lost in.... I do have somewhere close to 500 active RT nodes, more than half of which are orbiting Kerbin.)

[cubinator]

16 minutes ago, Cydonian Monk said:

It's a weird bug. At first I thought it might have been because I'm using Additive/Root as the distance method, but apparently it wasn't. Then the question of whether the link failed due to "Active Vessel" end points (which was some hairy-looking code last time I read it), but I ruled that out too by setting direct connections between the probe and the K-2/commsats.

I'm still not sure quite what it was, especially since it started working later in the mission when I turned RemoteTech back on. If it crops up again I'll probably start trying to debug it. Clearly a pathfinding bug of some sort, especially as it works for the antennas settings menu but not the control path. (Maybe I've got a circular network path set up somewhere that it gets lost in.... I do have somewhere close to 500 active RT nodes, more than half of which are orbiting Kerbin.)

I can assert that it's not necessarily caused by a circular path; My Mun probe was the only thing using RT at the time, and it was pointed at Kerbin from plenty far enough to cover the whole planet. Still, no signal. It started after my orbital insertion, so it can't have been caused by the SOI transition. It was also in a high elliptical orbit that allowed it to see Kerbin the whole orbit.

[Geschosskopf]

16 hours ago, Cydonian Monk said:

Had I sent all of the probes alone, none of them would have had radio contact at Jool unless the commsat was sent first..

Well, even with RT, you're sending out commsats.  These would be in the midst of the swarm on the way out so could be put to work immediately upon launch

 

16 hours ago, Cydonian Monk said:

There's also the reuse element, where these tugs will see several trips to and from Jool over the years.

Such optimism.  Aren't these tugs already Forgotten more than once?   But yeah, I design stuff with the future in mind myself, even though I know that the next update will wipe it out of existence.

 

16 hours ago, Cydonian Monk said:

Probably a better way to do this is to use some sort of weird cycler orbit where the tug doesn't capture at Jool; 

Or have the tug capture into an elliptical orbit and release probes individually over multiple orbits, or at different places on the same orbit if a chance encounter comes up.