The Outer Planets Traveling Circus Episode 28: Superheroes (The End)

[Geschosskopf]

EPISODE 11: Everything I Do Gohn Be Funky

Spoiler

 

EDITOR's NOTE:  Well, it's been a while here.  First, 2 weeks ago, my vidcard died.  It was an Nvidia GeForce GTX 590, in its day the greatest thing going.  It served me well for about 4 years.  I drink to its shade.  So about a week later, I had a new GTX 980 in its place.  But before I could get it sorted out, I had to spend all last week in a fire code inspector class, so I've only just now gotten to where things can progress.  It took a fair amount of tweaking settings to make KSP run reliably with anything like a decent framerate although of course things like Fallout 4 worked perfectly immediately.  And the new vidcard does not at all like IE, MS Office, and such things and I haven't yet figured out how to work around that.  So I'm posting this with the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Chrome browser.  Anyway, on with the show....

When we left the OPTC, the Boffins had just finished bashing together the ships of the 2nd Sarnus Expedition.  So now they had to tidy up a few loose ends with SE-1 and then get SE-2 up in space.  The first order of business was to move the SCANsat over to Slate, which has extremely interesting topography.  It also turned out to have an anomaly, but visiting that will have to wait a while.

This completed the 3 big moons and there was plenty of fuel left in the tank so, at the insistence of the Scientists, the SCANsat now went to check out Orvok.  Orvok turned out to have a huge dark spot covering most of one of its hemi-ellipsoids which was full of ore.  Perhaps an eroded crater?

Orvok also had an anomaly and it just so happened that the Sarnus System Science Probe was parked in orbit after having flown by all the moons.  With nothing better to do with it, the Scientists begged and pleaded to investigate the anomaly with it, which proved more of a challenge than anticipated but worked.  It appeared to be a monolith similar to those known from Kerbin, Mun, and Minmus.  The Scientists got all excited and added close-up investigation of this object to the to-do list of HOPELESS.  But the local terrain won't be fun to land on.  Orvok looks pretty smooth from orbit but is actually quite jagged up close.

The SCANsat then went to Hale where it will probably take it several years to completely map that moonlet, due to an orbital velocity of about 5m/s.   EPIKFAIL had meanwhile awarded the OPTC a large pile of money for orbiting Slate and going suborbital and landing on Orvok.  That pretty much completes the work of the 1st Sarnus Expedition.

Attention then shifted back to Kerbin and making final preparations for the 2nd Sarnus Expedition.  In all the long, gruelling history of kerbal spaceflight, it had never been found necessary to waste any time training astronauts.  After all, they're illiterate, so what's the point?  Training for their relatively menial duties had always been accomplished by making them watch instructional videos while en route.  That would not work for SE-2, however, because the crew would be in deep freeze the whole time.  Therefore, the Scientists had been hard at work devising methods of pumping the require info directly into frozen brains, or at least freezing everything except the brain.  Experiments carried out on condemned felons had shown much promise but the process wasn't entirely reliable.  Therefore, the OPTC decided that, given the expense and duration of the mission, it would be best to give at least those Kerbals chosen for leadership roles a bit of practical experience up front.  They accomplished this with training flights to Mun and Minmus.

This being accomplished, it was time to get SE-2 up into its parking orbit.  As you all have already seen all the ships in the last 2 R&D episodes, I'll only show one actual launch picture here, which I think is one of the silliest.

But mere rockets, no matter how silly, not make for entertainment, so I'll divert from my usual practice of mostly ignoring Kerbals and spend some time introducing the crew of the 2nd Sarnus Expedition.  The 9 astronauts are divided into 3 teams of 3 for various jobs.  The high-ranking astronauts were obtained from prisons, the rest from routine sweeps through the slums.

Mission:  explore Orvok and Hale.  Sanny had previously pillaged all the biomes of Minmus but that had been years ago so she took a training trip to Mun.  Lizula had previously flown to the Pyramids.  HOPELESS is considered the flagship because its got a roving commission so might be able to go to the other places if need be.

Mission:  set up primary refueling base on Eeloo and conduct rover-based explorations of Eeloo.  All were recently pressganged so Truiki went on both training trips and Munmy on 1.  But their job isn't that demanding, mostly watching drills run.

Mission:  Establish a base and conduct aerial exploration of Tekto.  Prior to the recent training missions, Gergas had been the only Kerbal to set foot on Mun, many years ago.  The others were shanghaied a few days ago.

Soon they were all herded aboard the CRACKHEAD-COPROLITE mothershp, frozen, and blasted into orbit.  Preliminary telemetry indicates their direct-brain injection training is going well.

I hope they're comfortable because the trip out will take about 8.5 years.  The 1st Urlum Expedition will arrive before they do.

8 years is actually rather longer than expected.  The Scientists had designed their equipment on a trip of 5-6 years.  It has some redundancy, of course, but nobody had ever studied the effects of being frozen for more than a few weeks; everything was extrapolated the results from that.  This wasn't seen as a problem, however, given the proverbial toughness of Kerbals.  Nobody seemed any more stupid when thawed out than before, and there had been a few cases of personality improvement.  But also a few downgrades.  Still, all seemed within norms of the population as a whole so this was considered close enough for government work.

Sadly, this data will prove insufficient to work out all the bugs in the system.  8.5 years hence when the Kerbals thaw out, they will all have issues.....

So yeah,  "everything's gohn be funky".  Some will have profound spiritual experiences, some will go mad, others will suffer "deficits" (as we say in the roadside brain surgery business).  All will be forever changed.  And then they'll have to interact with each other without direct supervision, way out there in the Outer Planets.  What could possibly go wrong?

But we'll have to visit Urlum before we find out.  Stay tuned.

 

 

Edited February 1, 2016 by Geschosskopf
add spoiler

[Mister Dilsby]

Psych issues! Brilliant! But then again, I'd support any plan involving d10s. Will you be informing the readers which 'deficit' each kerb gets, or will we have to guess based on dialogue and context--you know, just like we do when we talk to strangers online.  

[Geschosskopf]

4 hours ago, Kuzzter said:

Psych issues! Brilliant! But then again, I'd support any plan involving d10s. Will you be informing the readers which 'deficit' each kerb gets, or will we have to guess based on dialogue and context--you know, just like we do when we talk to strangers online.  

Well, I was going to leave that to for my 2 or 3 readers to figure out.  However, as Kerbals tend to be rather exaggerated caricatures, I'm sure all their psych issues will be overt, at least after a while.  When they first wake up, the Kerbals will be too hung over to show many differences.  But with any luck, the d10s of Destiny will give us some badly incompatible types on the same team, plus there are a few disorders that pose grave threats to their team's missions.  I predict some violence and the ship returning with empty seats.

The other day I tried to figure out the signal delay between Kerbin and Sarnus.  IIRC, it was about an hour in each direction so Mission Control will be powerless to intervene,  The Travelling Circus has always before relied on chemical indoctrination to instill good order and discipline in its astronauts but that requires that the Kerbals be awake breathing the spiked air and eating their spiked rations for the duration of the trip, something that's not going to happen with the Kerbals on ice.  So for this trip, a heavy dose of direct brain-injection mental indoctrination is being used instead, mixed in with their training curriculum.  No doubt this new and largely untested system is malfunctioning in subtle ways, or the Scientists just didn't understand its operating parameters well enough to account for all the variables.  Either way, as we speak it's contributing to the development of various psychoses.

But othewise, things are going well for the Travelling Circus.  They just got a contract to map 20 Sarnusteroids with a SENTINE, paying a bit over $4 million.  So this plus the Slate landing contract plus all the milestones have already got SE-2 about 3/4 paid off already.  The Emperor is happy for the time being

 

[Cydonian Monk]

Ah, I'd been wondering where Elite had run off to after I rescued her last year.... Also explains why everybody's credit cards were maxed out. Hmm. I would've been tempted to send the carjacker on a mission _without_ a rover, just to see if they found one on the way out. Y'know, in a ditch on the side of the road or something. 

[Geschosskopf]

10 hours ago, Cydonian Monk said:

Ah, I'd been wondering where Elite had run off to after I rescued her last year.... Also explains why everybody's credit cards were maxed out. Hmm. I would've been tempted to send the carjacker on a mission _without_ a rover, just to see if they found one on the way out. Y'know, in a ditch on the side of the road or something. 

I was wondering if anybody was going to notice the names Elite and Midi.  Yup, those are naturally generated random names :).  No matter what other issues the D10s of Destiny cause, Elite is necessarily going to have an ego problem and Midi is always going to be listening to her kPod (with adhesive pads stuck to her mastoids, Kerbals not having ears).  And everybody's backgrounds will likely play parts in their decision-making.....

In your universe, the odds of finding an abandoned rover seem quite high.  Back before Mun got procedural terrain in like 0.21, it was good rover country and I was in the habit of sending them there.  So after the change, I abandoned quite a few rovers there until I lost the habit of sending them.  Did you do the same thing?  However, even if I had that old junk still lying around, nobody in my games has ever been to Sarnus so it's unlikely they'll find anything there.

 

 

[Cydonian Monk]

 

31 minutes ago, Geschosskopf said:

In your universe, the odds of finding an abandoned rover seem quite high.  Back before Mun got procedural terrain in like 0.21, it was good rover country and I was in the habit of sending them there.

I have at least 6 abandoned rovers on the Mün, all but one from before the Mün Pox. There was another one, but a sudden onset of crater caused it to fall nearly a kilometer. One of those I drove from an equatorial location to the crashed anomaly near the South Pole. No way I'd try that now. 

I was thinking one of the other ships might have had a rover which got mysteriously hijacked while enroute to the edge of the soalr system....

 

29 minutes ago, Geschosskopf said:

I was wondering if anybody was going to notice the names Elite and Midi.  Yup, those are naturally generated random names :).

The random name generator for female kerbals is far more fun than for male kerbals. Elite, Tetris, Mardi etc., all trump Bobfred and the MacBillys. 

[Geschosskopf]

1 hour ago, Cydonian Monk said:

I was thinking one of the other ships might have had a rover which got mysteriously hijacked while enroute to the edge of the soalr system....

Well, there's a rover on Eeloo, its spare twin waiting in orbit should need arise, and both bases currently en route (for Eeloo and Tekto) are actually giant rovers,  So there are possibilities....

[Geschosskopf]

EPISODE 12: Wait on Time

Spoiler

 

So with the 2nd Sarnus Expedition outbound from Kerbin, there wasn't a lot to do for many years.  The most exciting thing was the aforementoned SENTINEL contract to find Sarnusteroids.

After a year or so, things looked like this (Y7 D293).  NE-1 was about to pass Urlum's orbit, UE-1 was looking like it was getting reasonably close to its destination (although still years away), and SE-2 was passing Duna's orbit.  Speaking of Duna, it was now nearly time for the long-forgotten GT-1 Duna 3 Double probe finally to come home.

 

A year passed.  Winter changed into Spring, Spring changed into Summer, Summer changed back into Winter, and Winter gave Spring and Summer a miss and went straight on into Autumn... until one day... the GT-1 Duna 3 Double was nearly home.(Y8 D241).

 

https://flic.kr/p/CLefHn

 

The probe came into a retrograde orbit to help itself slow down, but this made for a bit of extra heat during reentry, causing the retractable solar panels to burn off.  Still the service bay containing the probe core, some batteries, and an SAS unit survived intact and is now on display in the Outer Planets Trading Company's Museum of Marvelous Technology.  EPIKFAIL also chipped in with some cash rewards, which were used to polish off the reentry soot.  This probe had spent about 5 years in space, most of it orbiting Duna and had earned over $2 million for the OPTC.

 

https://flic.kr/p/DHBXcM

 

More time passed and eventually the Sarnus SENTINEL had reached its Ap out between Jool and Sarnus.  It performed some maneuvers to raise its Pe, shedding its lower transfer stage in the process.  After all, it's been a while since we had any gratuitous explosions here.

 

https://flic.kr/p/Da8CDM

 

Meanwhile, SE-2 had done all its mid-course tweaks so there was now nothing remaining on the agenda until the arrival of UE-1 at Urlum in another year or so.  Here's the status as of Y11 D96.

 

https://flic.kr/p/DFiDBq

 

As you can see, the Neidon probe has by now crossed Urlum's orbit while the 1st Urlum Expedition is about to.  SE-2 is about to cross Sarnus' orbit but will then spend several years hanging out essentially motionless waiting for the ringed giant to catch up.  All except for the Eeloo station, TOEJAM, which thanks to a Rhino-powered transfer stage will be arriving several years before the rest of the flotilla.

 

Tune in next time for exploring the Urlum system.

 

 

Edited February 9, 2016 by Geschosskopf
add spoiler

[CAKE99]

Some of the images aren't working, it shows the link instead of the image.

[Geschosskopf]

5 minutes ago, CAKE99 said:

Some of the images aren't working, it shows the link instead of the image.

Yeah, I know.  I have no idea why.  I did the same thing for them as the others and even redid them several times to no avail.  I blame Flickr.  But OTOH, at least the links work so you can still see the pics.

But hey, over 2000 views now.  Yay!  Most of my threads never get that many.  Thanks to the readers!

Edited February 2, 2016 by Geschosskopf

[Mikki]

Your missionreport gave me the final kick to download Kopernicus and OPM, i somehow managed anything in stockgame and this is a true new challenge... It is mere fun to read and and a interesting ... view into your subcontiousness. "Crackhead", "Epikfail".... Omg Good to see you are still alive and breathing, and firefighting is good for you i think .

[Geschosskopf]

8 hours ago, Mikki said:

Your missionreport gave me the final kick to download Kopernicus and OPM, i somehow managed anything in stockgame and this is a true new challenge... It is mere fun to read and and a interesting ... view into your subcontiousness. "Crackhead", "Epikfail".... Omg Good to see you are still alive and breathing, and firefighting is good for you i think .

Thanks

When you get OPM, be sure to consider also getting some of other mods recommended on the OPM page.  I"m using several of them:

• @MrHappyFace's Better TimeWarp is pretty much required to warp ahead years of gametime in a reasonable amount of real time
• @Sigma88's OPM Tilt to put Urlum on its side.  UE-1 is about to find out about this the hard way because I designed and launched those ships prior to installing this mod, so they're not equipped for any major plane change that might now be required 
• Sigma88's Binary for OPM's new Plock/Karon system, just in case I ever go there.  But this trip is so long that it probably requires its own game (unless you have improbable engines) so I'll wait until 1.1 at least for this.
• @MOARdV's Distant Object Enhancement so planets show up as points of light which I can mouse over.  Really helps put the sheer scale of OPM in perspective when you look back at Kerbin from there.

Anyway, by all means get OPM.  It's nice to have new places to go and this mod seems to be one of the best that offers new planets.  I'm sure you'll fall in love with the Sarnus system at least.  I recommend concentrating on that and maybe Urlum to start with.  Development of OPM seems to be working from inside towards outside so any major changes will likely happen at Neidon and especially Plock (as New Horizons data comes in).  Given how long it takes to get just to Sarnus, and how much there is to do there, by the time you're ready to move on, perhaps construction of the further planets will be about done.

[Sigma88]

19 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

EPISODE 12: Wait on Time

Tune in next time for exploring the Urlum system.

I've just found out of this (thanks for the ping btw)

now I can't wait for the next episode to see what you do at Urlum

[Geschosskopf]

1 hour ago, Sigma88 said:

I've just found out of this (thanks for the ping btw)

now I can't wait for the next episode to see what you do at Urlum

Thanks for the props and the mods.

Correct me if I'm wrong but it appears that just as the planets of OPM start out nearly in conjunction and very amenable to visiting early on in a new game, you put Urlum so the plane of its moons and such is more or less edge-on to Kerbin near the start of a game.  At least it looked that way when I took a quick peek just now to see if the mod was working.  So I don't anticipate a major plane change being required for UE-1, but things will likely be different for any subsequent expeditions launched in the next few decades.  Thus, one of the tasks of UE-1 is to determine how much dV it might need to do a 90^ plane change from theoretical highly elliptical and/or large-diameter post-capture orbits. There's the potential to need not only major inclination changes, but also major LAN adjustment, depending on when you get there.

[Sigma88]

1 hour ago, Geschosskopf said:

Thanks for the props and the mods.

Correct me if I'm wrong but it appears that just as the planets of OPM start out nearly in conjunction and very amenable to visiting early on in a new game, you put Urlum so the plane of its moons and such is more or less edge-on to Kerbin near the start of a game.  At least it looked that way when I took a quick peek just now to see if the mod was working.  So I don't anticipate a major plane change being required for UE-1, but things will likely be different for any subsequent expeditions launched in the next few decades.  Thus, one of the tasks of UE-1 is to determine how much dV it might need to do a 90^ plane change from theoretical highly elliptical and/or large-diameter post-capture orbits. There's the potential to need not only major inclination changes, but also major LAN adjustment, depending on when you get there.

I usually do my aerobreaks over the pole, so that the resulting orbit is as close to the moons orbits as possible  I've never used highly eccentric orbits so my final orbit is almost always on the correct plane.

No idea how much dV you'll need to planechange sorry

the reason why the system has that orientation is linked to a Kopernicus limitation:

In order to have the rings vertical, that is the only orientation that works, because I need to set their rotation to zero, and that's the starting position

anyways, the orientation of the system is pretty similar to uranus orientation right now (some years ago actually) so that's an added bonus

Edited February 2, 2016 by Sigma88

[Geschosskopf]

16 minutes ago, Sigma88 said:

I usually do my aerobreaks over the pole, so that the resulting orbit is as close to the moons orbits as possible  I've never used highly eccentric orbits so my final orbit is almost always on the correct plane.

Yeah, I guess the main post-capture maneuver is more about LAN than inclination because you can fix inclination pretty much coming in above or below the planet.  Consider this pic...

Let's say the Green plane (#1) is the ecliptic, the orbital plane of all the planets including Urlum.  The yellow plane (#2) is the plane of Urlum's moons.  Your ship therefore travels to Urlum in the green plane and can capture above or below Urlum to get its inclination up.  But this will put it in the blue plane (#3), which can be at any arbitrary angle to the yellow plane.

Near the start of a game, the blue and yellow planes are close to parallel so not much else is needed.  Once in a highly inclined orbit, it's not much work to match the yellow plane.  But the pic above shows the situation if arrive 1/4 of Urlum's year after the start of the game (however many decades or centuries that is).  Then, even though you can get the inclination for free by going under or over Urlum, you've still got a 90^ LAN change to do.  Or you could stay in the green plane and do a 90^ plane change.  Either is going to be a bother.

[Sigma88]

8 minutes ago, Geschosskopf said:

Yeah, I guess the main post-capture maneuver is more about LAN than inclination because you can fix inclination pretty much coming in above or below the planet.  Consider this pic...

Let's say the Green plane (#1) is the ecliptic, the orbital plane of all the planets including Urlum.  The yellow plane (#2) is the plane of Urlum's moons.  Your ship therefore travels to Urlum in the green plane and can capture above or below Urlum to get its inclination up.  But this will put it in the blue plane (#3), which can be at any arbitrary angle to the yellow plane.

Near the start of a game, the blue and yellow planes are close to parallel so not much else is needed.  Once in a highly inclined orbit, it's not much work to match the yellow plane.  But the pic above shows the situation if arrive 1/4 of Urlum's year after the start of the game (however many decades or centuries that is).  Then, even though you can get the inclination for free by going under or over Urlum, you've still got a 90^ LAN change to do.  Or you could stay in the green plane and do a 90^ plane change.  Either is going to be a bother.

yeah, that was my point, I never wait that much to send stuff to urlum, mainly because I just do it for testing purposes

anyways, once you get captured around urlum with an extremely eccentrical orbit, it should be relatively cheap to match planes

[Geschosskopf]

On 2/2/2016 at 0:29 PM, Sigma88 said:

yeah, that was my point, I never wait that much to send stuff to urlum, mainly because I just do it for testing purposes

anyways, once you get captured around urlum with an extremely eccentrical orbit, it should be relatively cheap to match planes

But, if you want to send probes out at the earliest opportunity to see what's out there and get an idea of how much dV it takes to capture, maneuver amongst the moons, etc., and wait for them to get there, then send out a crewed mission later, and wait for it to get there, a couple of decades at least will have elapsed since the start of the game, and the plane of Urlum's moons will have become somewhat meaningful.  And if that 1st crewed mission is a flags-and-footprints thing, then it will be a few decades later before anything more lasting arrives, by which time the angle to the plane of the moons can't be ignored.

[Sigma88]

12 minutes ago, Geschosskopf said:

But, if you want to send probes out at the earliest opportunity to see what's out there and get an idea of how much dV it takes to capture, maneuver amongst the moons, etc., and wait for them to get there, then send out a crewed mission later, and wait for it to get there, a couple of decades at least will have elapsed since the start of the game, and the plane of Urlum's moons will have become somewhat meaningful.  And if that 1st crewed mission is a flags-and-footprints thing, then it will be a few decades later before anything more lasting arrives, by which time the angle to the plane of the moons can't be ignored.

sure

what I meant is that I have no idea of how much dV that manouvre would require

[Geschosskopf]

EPISODE 13: Mama Told Me Not to Come

Spoiler

 

So another year came and went while the Boffins and Scientists of Mission Control went on a long vacation, and then it was time for the 1st Urlum Expedition, launched 10 years previously, to arrive.  First of the 3 ships to enter Urlum's SOI was the carrier for the communications relays.

As can be seen in the left pic above, @Sigma88's "OPM Tilt" mod is in effect so the whole Urlum system is inclined 90^ to the rest of the solar system, like the real Uranus.  Thus, the first real, practical, gameplay bit of research done was to note that when leaving Kerbin during Year 1 or at any rate soon in a new game, ships will arrive only about 10^ or so out of the plane of the moons, which is no big deal.  The 2nd bit of research was to note that at this point in time, the moons are orbiting down on the far side of Urlum and up on the near side, so to capture going the same direction as the moons ships need to go over the top of Urlum.

If you consider the bright hemisphere in the left pic to be the north pole, then Urlum's moons are all in retrograde orbits.  But OTOH, they're prograde if you consider the dark hemisphere to be the north pole.  And that is the main difficulty of operating in the Urlum system.  The map view doesn't really like working at the angles involved here, it's VERY easy to forget which way you've rotated the map view, and difficult to decide which side to approach a moon from to end up in a (local equivalent of) prograde orbit around it.  On top of this, Urlum's narrow rings look like how orbits appear on the map view, and are visible there just the same as in the ship view, so sometimes it's hard to tell if you're looking at the map or out the window.  All in all, the Urlum system is a rather confusing place in which to maneuver.

In the right pic above, you can see Urlum's faint system of thin rings and also the moons Polta (upper left) and Priax (lower right).  These moons are in the same orbit so getting from one to the other is kinda like rescuing multiple stranded Kerbals all in about 100km orbits.

But the Urlum Relay Carrier didn't care about any of this.  As with all other satellites in the relay network, it was intended to put its commsats in elliptical orbits 90^ to the plane of the system's moons, so the commsats could see over them.  Thus, instead of adjusting to go vertical compared to everything else in the solar system, this ship just stayed in the same plane it got there in and achieved the same result.  The relay satellites easily reached 140Mm orbits with periods of about 50 days.

So then, per the habit and custom of the Travelling Circus, the commsat carrier vehicle deorbited itself to see what would happen.  Urlum is quite benign as gas giants go.  Starting from a 200km orbit and aiming to impact 1/4 of the circumference away, the ship made it through the flames without damage and even began burning its remaining fuel in an attempt to land on the surface.  Sadly, the actual collider surface is at an altitude of 250m so the ship hit it while still moving about 30m/s.  But at least no Kraken time-dilation strangeness as was the case at Sarnus.  Areobraking (I did NOT say "aerocapturing") at Urlum seems to be quite doable, too.

About 100 days later, the Urlum Science Probe arrived.Its first order of business was to determine the dV required for arriving at Urlum 90^ out of plane with the moons, which might happen decades or centuries hence.  Hopefully by then this info won't matter because surely the Kerbals will have warp drive, but it was a question that needed answering.

Therefore, the probe burned 450m/s to capture into a highly elliptical orbit, then created a for-scientific-purposes-only node at its high Ap to do a 90^ plane change.  This turned out to be 800m/s.  Therefore, worst case, matching planes with Urlum's moons (assuming you have OPM Tilt) will cost an extra 1200-1300m/s, but if you don't have warp drive by the time this becomes necessary, your Scientists should be sent to the gulags.

The Urlum Science Probe then erased this hypothetical node and burned some more while still near its Pe to get lower its Ap down to near the orbit of Polta and Priax.  Soon thereafter, it intercepted Polta and, due to the aforesaid difficulties in figuring out which way is up in the Urlum system, got into a retrograde orbit there.  This complicated getting to Priax next, but that's such a nothing of a trip that the dV cost appears to have been negligible.

Polta is an interesting place, like a cross between Val and Mun.  The probe got to see it up close.

Then it was time to have a look at Priax.  This turned out to be a rather Hellish place.  It's a heavily cratered, rather oblong thing with the tallest mountains in my experience.  Due to the assymetrical shape of the moon, the lowest safe circular orbit is about 45km and this just barely scrapes over some of the higher points.

Capturing at Priax finally exhausted the probe's transfer stage so we get to see another gratuitous explosion

 

The Urlum Science Probe then moved on to Wal.  But just as it got there, about 1100 my time, the fire alarm went off and kept going off the rest of the day.  8 calls between then and 1600, on my day off!  2 grass fires, 2 times for the hospital filling with smoke, 2 rather serious medical calls, a wreck, and a person trapped in an elevator.  I probably walked 5 miles, did a lot of heavy lifting, and missed lunch.  Then I had to go to a Mardi Gras party (on an empty stomach).  So consider yourselves lucky I'm still functional enough to write this after all that

Tune in next time for......   Hell, I don't even remember what's next on the agenda.

 

 

Edited February 15, 2016 by Geschosskopf
add spoiler

[Sigma88]

4 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

EPISODE 13: Mama Told Me Not to Come

Nice report, it's a shame that you didn't get to explore Wal.. it's my favourite in the system

 

btw, to find the north pole of urlum: look directly at a pole, if you see the planet rotate counterclockwise, that's the north pole.

since you can't actually see Urlum rotate, consider that all moons are in a prograde orbit (they revolve around urlum in the same direction urlum rotates)

for a limitation in ksp code, I had to set the rotation of urlum and its moons to zero (sideral rotation relative to the skybox)

this gives the impression that all the moons have a retrograde rotatation (opposite to their orbital motion) when in fact they are completely still

Fun fact:

Supposing Urlum was rotating around a horizontal axis (which can not be implemented for technical reasons, but let's suppose it was) the rotation would still be neither prograde nor retrograde

hence the changed description for Urlum in the tracking station

Edited February 9, 2016 by Sigma88

[Geschosskopf]

4 hours ago, Sigma88 said:

Nice report, it's a shame that you didn't get to explore Wal.. it's my favourite in the system

Yeah, it definitely looks cool from a distance.  But that'll have to wait until I get the chance to play again.

4 hours ago, Sigma88 said:

btw, to find the north pole of urlum: look directly at a pole, if you see the planet rotate counterclockwise, that's the north pole.

since you can't actually see Urlum rotate, consider that all moons are in a prograde orbit (they revolve around urlum in the same direction urlum rotates)

for a limitation in ksp code, I had to set the rotation of urlum and its moons to zero (sideral rotation relative to the skybox)

this gives the impression that all the moons have a retrograde rotatation (opposite to their orbital motion) when in fact they are completely still

Fun fact:

Supposing Urlum was rotating around a horizontal axis (which can not be implemented for technical reasons, but let's suppose it was) the rotation would still be neither prograde nor retrograde

hence the changed description for Urlum in the tracking station

Well, whatever voodoo that you do to make it work, it's pretty cool to have everything sideways at Urlum.  And I agree, calling the moons' orbits prograde or retrograde in this case is totally arbitrary.  Naturally, in the map view you tend to look at the system from the side the light's shining on, so early in a game that makes the moons look retrograde.  But 1/2 an Urlum year later, they'd look to be going prograde from the lighted side.

All in all, your mod makes Urlum a totally new experience where all a player's habits for routine maneuvers amongst moons have to be rethought.  Then combine this with the game's limitations on camera movement and things can get pretty confusing.  I'm sure that with experience things will become easier but I'm also sure nothing will ever be totally routine in that system, which is cool .  I'm glad I installed the tilt mod.

 

[Sigma88]

1 hour ago, Geschosskopf said:

Well, whatever voodoo that you do to make it work, it's pretty cool to have everything sideways at Urlum.  And I agree, calling the moons' orbits prograde or retrograde in this case is totally arbitrary.

This picture may help in explaining what I was aiming for

Urlum's position at kerbal year 1 day 1 should be more or less between 2007 and 2028

the red line shows how the planet should rotate (if ksp allowed it)

the uranus moons replicated in OPM are supposed to have a prograde orbit, so I made them orbit in the same direction the red line indicates.

whan I meant with

6 hours ago, Sigma88 said:

this gives the impression that all the moons have a retrograde rotatation (opposite to their orbital motion) when in fact they are completely still

is that the rotation (not revolution) looks like it is retrograde:

if you focus on on moon and timewarp it will look like the rotation of the moon goes in the opposite direction when compared to the revolution around urlum.

but actually the moons do not have a rotation, if you compare them to the skybox you will see that they only revolve around urlum but don't have any rotation

 

anyways, thank you for visiting the system, I really enjoy reading mission reports, and very rarely have I seen some of my mods used in stuff like this.

I've also put a link to this page in my thread, so maybe I can get you some audience

Edited February 9, 2016 by Sigma88

[Geschosskopf]

16 minutes ago, Sigma88 said:

is that the rotation (not revolution) looks like it is retrograde:

Ah, I understand now.  I hadn't noticed that effect but will now look for it.

BTW, from watching NASA's "map view" stream during the New Horizons flyby, it appeared that Pluto's system is sideways, too.  Any thoughts of adding that to the tilt mod, or will that not work when combined with the binary mod?

[Sigma88]

22 minutes ago, Geschosskopf said:

Ah, I understand now.  I hadn't noticed that effect but will now look for it.

BTW, from watching NASA's "map view" stream during the New Horizons flyby, it appeared that Pluto's system is sideways, too.  Any thoughts of adding that to the tilt mod, or will that not work when combined with the binary mod?

It could work but that is not my decision to make

Capt just needs to change the inclination of Karen in order to match charon's

But I don't think he will do that because other than their weird mass ratio pluto-charon have another interesting feature

They are mutually tidally locked. Sadly in ksp high inclinations and tidal locking don't go together very well, that's why Karen has such a low inclination in OPM

And the same goes for my PluronKhato binary