Mijna

But then there's no excuse not to sit in your lap...

I get obsessed with the math of it all, often through the use of mods. Current obsession is a satellite relay network for the Jool system in remote tech (playing Laythe space program). One central satellite around Jool that points to a satellite at the L4 points of each of the moons (5 directional dishes). The L4 satellite (2 directional dishes) pointing back at the planet such that the 3 equatorial omni comms (1 directional 1 omni) are always in its view. That way the only down time is when the Jool satellite swoops down below the planet. But how much up-time is there in that system? Well first how do you find the function for the ellipse made by an orbit? What is the lowest point in that orbit that the Laythe L4 location can see? what is the area of the curve cut out going from that point on the ellipse to the same height on the other side? What is the overall area of the ellipse and period of the orbit? So how long is its downtime compared to its uptime? (I got around 99.998% uptime) It’s got geometry, integrals, Kepler, pi. Oh, so much math.

Oh my goodness I am loving Bob Fitch's videos. Working through Alexandria over lunch is perfect. There have been so many recommendations it will be months to get through them all...

I have gotten into the habit of watching kerbal videos over lunch and found a few really good channels. I am curious to hear about other channels and why people like them. Scott Manley: I enjoy the progressive stories and the acceptance of mistakes. I abuse the revert launch button, perhaps too much. Danny2462: These are fun for indulging the "because I can" factor of the game. I don't have near the creativity and am often sitting thinking "but why?" Maccollo: Not many videos but they are beautiful and intricate in a way I wish I could do. I find myself watching the grand tour, Duna and Venus videos over and over. So who do you like and why?

As a fun little side note from another Tech person. I work in COBOL which is a horrible old wordy language. But there is one clever trick for converting stored dates of format YYYYMMDD into american display dates of MMDDYYYY and that is to multiply it by 10000.00001. Since COBOL uses fixed length numbers for math and the date is 8 digits long the multiply by 10000 gives you a number formatted MMDD0000 and the multiply by .00001 gives you 0000YYYY and when you add them you get MMDDYYYY. So one multiply statement flips it around for you. Couldn't do that to get to DDMMYYYY so obviously MMDDYYYY is superior....

I have been playing with the laythe version for a while and noticed a few issues. There were fixes previously posted for rotating ksc and moving remote tech. But I have also noticed that high/low boundaries are at kerbin altitudes, not laythe. The game also seems to think that ksc is on the opposite side of the planet since my recovery for right by the launch site is 10% and the starting survey contracts were so far away. The last is that solar panels work as efficiently as they normally do at kerbin instead of the 4% they should be. Are there configuration fixes for those three issues similar to the rotation and remote tech fixes?