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KSP Weekly: The Falcon

SQUAD

By SQUAD
in KSP1 The Daily Kerbal

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SQUAD

SQUAD

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Welcome to KSP Weekly! On this day, only 10 years ago, we witnessed the first ever private spacecraft launch into orbit. We are talking, of course, about SpaceX’s Falcon 1, an expendable launch system privately developed and manufactured from the ground up by Elon Musk’s company from 2006 – 2009.

The two-stage-to-orbit rocket used Liquid Oxygen and Rocket Propellant-1 for both stages, the first powered by a single Merlin engine and the second powered by a single Kestrel engine. The vehicle was launched a total of five times. Falcon 1 achieved orbit on its fourth attempt, on September 28, 2008, with a mass-simulator as a payload. On July 14, 2009, Falcon 1 made its final flight and successfully delivered the Malaysian RazakSAT satellite to orbit on SpaceX’s first commercial launch (fifth launch overall). Following its fifth launch, the Falcon 1 was retired and succeeded by Falcon 9.

According to SpaceX, the Falcon 1 was designed to minimize price-per-launch for low-Earth-orbit satellites, increase reliability, and optimize flight environment and time to launch. It was also used to verify components and structural design concepts that would be reused in the Falcon 9. SpaceX started with the idea that the smallest useful orbital rocket was the minimum viable product (with about 1000 lbs to orbit), instead of building something larger and more complicated, and then running out of money and going bankrupt. Unlike Falcon 9, the first stage was originally planned to return by parachute to a water landing and be recovered for reuse, but this capability was never demonstrated. The second stage was not designed to be reusable.

One of the keys to SpaceX’s success has been its ability to fail – and move on. Despite setbacks, the company was able to quickly learn from its mistakes, make adjustments, and try again. As a result, within 16 years, SpaceX has gone from conceptualizing privately funded, reusable rockets to launching the most powerful rocket we have seen in nearly half a century. Along the way, SpaceX became the only private company capable of returning a spacecraft from low Earth orbit, which it first accomplished in 2010. The company made history again in 2012 when its Dragon spacecraft became the first commercial spacecraft to deliver cargo to and from the International Space Station. The company also successfully achieved the historic first re-flight of an orbital class rocket in 2017, and the company now regularly launches flight-proven rockets. In 2018, SpaceX began launching Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful operational rocket by a factor of two.

Perhaps most importantly, SpaceX has helped to reignite the public’s interest in space. Witnessing their feats and ambitious goals come to fruition certainly has inspired countless people, youth in particular, to pursue math, engineering, aeronautics, and astronomy both academically and professionally. SpaceX has helped leverage efforts by NASA and JPL to enforce the idea that having a career in the space industry – even actually going to space – is as real, tangible, and achievable as any other job that requires focus and hard work.

[Development news start here]

It wasn’t that long ago since Update 1.5 was conceptualized and development began, always with the goal of pushing KSP forward and delivering a substantial new update that will improve the players’ experience. Whether it is with bug fixes, giving existing parts a revamp, or brand new features for both the base game and the expansion, this update has something for everyone. We are far from over with KSP and there’s still plenty to come, but we are now at a point in development where we are confident enough with the development of this update to share with you all that Kerbal Space Program 1.5: Dressed for Success comes out this October.

We improved the burn time indicator by recalculating based on dV and not acceleration. We’ve also added a staging indicator that shows which stages contain the dV needed to complete each part of the maneuver. This will show a red section at the end if there’s not enough dV in the current vessel to complete that maneuver. We’ll continue looking at ways to leverage this dV information going forward. In the extended mode of the burn time indicator two extra lines are shown, allowing you to adjust how much time you want to spend burning before and after the node during the maneuver as well as showing you a countdown for when you need to start burning fuel to do so.

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In other news, we continue with the parts revamp effort and this week it is time to put the Probodobodyne RoveMate Command Module in the spotlight. The artist reworked the geometry of the RoveMate, and created a new texture map using diffuse, normal and specular maps for this part. You can see a comparison between the old and new RoveMate in the image below.

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The RoveMate Command Module will now be available in 3 variants, each of them inspired by different real-life analogues, such as the Curiosity and the Sojourner rovers. Both the gold and silver variants received a new shader that makes their new tin foil shine and interact with light as other parts we’ve shown. However,  if you look closely you’ll notice that despite the obvious similarities, there are some neat differences in the details: the former has a tighter aluminum cloth appearance, while the latter receives a looser tin foil look. Check out these gifs to see the new White, Silver and Gold RoveMate variants in motion.

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Click here to see the high-res images

On top of all of the above-mentioned details, the orientation issue with this part has been corrected and a few new attachment nodes on the sides of this part were added. This will certainly help to expand the creative usage for this part.

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The team is also revisiting some relatively new parts included in the Making History Expansion. Such is the case of the FLOOYD Labs’ SM-18 Service Module, which received a modest makeover. For this part the team made a few corrections to the caps’ texture maps and included the shiny shader to the tin foil cap. Check out this gif to see how the new SM-18 Service Module looks in motion.

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Click here to see the high-res image 

The team also did some good ol’ bug fixing this week, too! You will be glad to hear that with Update 1.5 you will not experience that annoying NullReferenceException that some players got when saving a mission where the craft files used in vessel situations had been deleted. Kerbals will not explode when resuming a test mission either. Additionally, the normal texture maps of the mobile, Woomerang and Dessert launch pads have been fixed.

[KSP Vault]

This week in the KSP Vault…

Forum users kl0buk and Ferrdo_Kerman built one of the best-looking control panels for Kerbal Space Program we’ve encountered and opened this thread to share the development process of making them.

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To celebrate the end of the weekly challenges in the KSP subreddit, Matt Lowne made this video where he talks about his personal experience with the challenges and executes the very first one the subreddit presented.

We encountered this beautiful watercolor depiction of our favorite trio while navigating through the World Wide Web and we wanted to share it with you all. By LazyClock: 

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Have you seen cool KSP-related content that you consider worth highlighting? Share it with us and help us give content creators more exposure. :)

Remember that you can also share and download missions on Curse, KerbalX, the KSP Forum and the KSP Steam Workshop.

That’s it for this week. Be sure to join us on our official forums, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Stay tuned for more exciting and upcoming news and development updates!


Happy launchings!


*Information Source:

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CobaltWolf

CobaltWolf

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Posted

This new Rovemate pleases me.

I'm a bit confused though... you've been mentioning a new shader... is it actually reflective? Or is it still Blinnphong specular like the existing shaders (and 'new' shader just means using a different one from the existing pool)?

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Lupi

Lupi

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Posted

WHat a lively change to the RoveMate! it's always been sort of the black sheep, the ugly duckling of probe cores, what with the orientation issue. I'm glad to see that not only did you guys fix that, but you added more nodes! 

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qzgy

qzgy

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Posted

Hey some form of release date!

I am liking the new burn time indicator. Staging indicators, proper time to burn, and all that is quite nice. I'm not sure how helpful the percent before and after splitter is but eh I guess its nice to have customization. Hopefully by default its set at 50 percent.

I am not really a fan of the new rovemate bodies though. The attachment points and new default orientation are nice but the textures I think could use work. The default white I guess looks kinda ok, but the rivets for me are a bit too defined and the panel lines as well. I feel as if those should be made a bit subtler. The gold and silver though look kinda awful though. At least for me its as if someone took a block of aluminum or gold and kinda mashed it into the shape of a rovemate. The foil effects dont really help especially when its basically everywhere and not just localized to like the side of the actual body. It seems a bit wrong I guess to have foil like where you would put equipment, such as on the top of the rover.

IDK hopefully the new release is worth it.

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Shadowmage

Shadowmage

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55 minutes ago, CobaltWolf said:

I'm a bit confused though... you've been mentioning a new shader... is it actually reflective? Or is it still Blinnphong specular like the existing shaders

I too am extremely interested in what precisely the new shader does / how it works.  The preview images show some sort of environment reflections, which you wouldn't get out of a simple blinn-phong setup.  It was previously stated that it was a 'colored specular' shader, but that again would not result in any sort of actual reflections.

Notably, the shiny cap in this image really looks to have reflections enabled:

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The spinning rove-mate .gifs however, lead me to think it is just 'colored specular' as stated.  --

https://gfycat.com/CreepyCompleteBadger

 

@SQUAD  Care to elaborate a bit on the technical details of this new shader?

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Tyko

Tyko

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Posted
53 minutes ago, TheSaint said:

Like, I dunno, giving us a dV calculator in the VAB?

We can always hope!

Any chance Squad will be releasing a beta of 1.5? You guys used to do a pre-release and it gave us all a chance to help find bugs.

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Vexillar

Vexillar

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Posted

Good looking parts... I'm very happy to see the Rovemate being more made more user friendly as well as prettier.  It's scanning capabilites were useful, but the lack of attachment points and orientation made it rather awkward.

Moreover, it is great to see the first glimpses of enhancements to the gameplay, beyond shiny parts.  And the strapline for 1.5 has me very excited!

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JPLRepo

JPLRepo

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Posted
1 hour ago, qzgy said:

I am liking the new burn time indicator. Staging indicators, proper time to burn, and all that is quite nice. I'm not sure how helpful the percent before and after splitter is but eh I guess its nice to have customization. Hopefully by default its set at 50 percent.

Yes the default is 50%. being able to split the time is useful for inclination change burns or long burns.

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Tyko

Tyko

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43 minutes ago, JPLRepo said:

Yes the default is 50%. being able to split the time is useful for inclination change burns or long burns.

I was wondering if there'd be a way to split this across multiple orbits for long burns - if I set this for 25% does that mean 25% of the burn time is prior to the "center" and 75% would be after it?

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JPLRepo

JPLRepo

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4 minutes ago, Tyko said:

I was wondering if there'd be a way to split this across multiple orbits for long burns - if I set this for 25% does that mean 25% of the burn time is prior to the "center" and 75% would be after it?

Correct.
[Edit] 25% of the required DV. Some further info:
So the start burn time and percentage is related to the total DV related to the time it takes to produce that DV. So if the burn takes 3mins. But to burn say 25% actually takes 2mins because of my mass. the start burn time will take that into account.

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Lupi

Lupi

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Posted

Purely speculation, but i wager they're already looking into what everyone's not-so-subtly suggesting, but haven't decided on the best way to implement it yet, or at least, the best way to do so within this timeframe. So, we get the navball first, and maybe more in the future.

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nestor

nestor

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Posted
1 hour ago, Ultimate Steve said:

Yay, more in-game delta-v functionality! It would only be one more step from here for a proper readout...

Did we ever get any information on the new suit models and what is happening to them? I recall the lack of red stripes on the helmet was very controversial.

Expect an update on the suits in the following weeks.

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MOARdV

MOARdV

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Posted

I sincerely hope that however Squad implements the dV calculation, for the navball, it's getting tested with something other than the stock pre-built rockets.  dV calculations have been a pain point for Kerbal Engineer and MechJeb for *years*.  I would be (pleasantly) shocked if 1.5.0 had dV calculations that were able to handle the crazy gamut of designs that this community creates, especially since experimental / pre-release builds are no longer available to the general community.

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ThatGuyWithALongUsername

ThatGuyWithALongUsername

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Posted
3 hours ago, SQUAD said:
 

Welcome to KSP Weekly! On this day, only 10 years ago, we witnessed the first ever private spacecraft launch into orbit. We are talking, of course, about SpaceX’s Falcon 1, an expendable launch system privately developed and manufactured from the ground up by Elon Musk’s company from 2006 – 2009.

 

Small nitpick, Orbital Sciences' Pegasus was the first private spacecraft to orbit. Eventually, though, especially if BFR gets built, the Falcon 1 launch may become a more historic achievement, if it is not already.

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