soundnfury

TestLite 0.2 now available. Main changes: More reasonable UI (still PAW-based, but now human-readable). Extra Telemetry: option to instrument an engine to get more du out of it. Useful for development test flights of new engines. Doubles dataRate, trebles cost. Extra Preflight Check: option to carefully check out an engine before launch; useful for manned flights, crucial probe launches etc. Reduces failures (within burn time) by 25%, doubles cost.

For a while now, the RealismOverhaul group have been getting frustrated with TestFlight — it's complicated and (at least according to some) hurts performance. It also has bugs, particularly in techTransfer handling. So I've created TestLite, a ruthlessly simplified replacement. It only deals with engines (because those are the only type of failure RO ever used), and it doesn't have the massive extensibility and configurability of TF. But it's much simpler, and hopefully should be easier to evolve for RO's needs (already it has a feature TF doesn't, "Deterministic Mode", where all engines fail at exactly rated burn time plus 5 seconds, selectable through difficulty options). It's still quite rough around the edges (in particular, rather than a friendly UI it just dumps a lot of internal variables as KSPField()s into the right-click menu), but it seems to be working. https://github.com/ec429/TestLite

I've just finished work on the X-class: HTP/Kerosene engines based on the Bristol Siddeley Gamma. An interesting quirk of the Gamma is that it only has one-axis gimbal: Gamma chambers were clustered in opposed pairs to give roll-and-pitch control (Gamma 2 upper stage) or three-axis control (Gamma 8 booster). So here's a procedural Black Arrow I've been experimenting with: I've found, sadly, that neither stock SAS nor RemoteTech can figure out how to control the upper stage; smarter avionics will be required. The Z-class throttleable hypergolic engine (LMDE) is also in for the next version.

Yep, LR87 is already in for the next version (T-class, along with the E-class LR91), and Proton's closed-cycle hypergolics are on the roadmap as the P-class. (It took me a while to get round to them, as I don't tend to use big hypergolic stages when I play.)

I'm already planning to use C for something else ("CH4", for methane expanders á la RL10-CH₄), but I do intend to add an LMDE-alike class. I'm struggling to pick a letter for it, though: the only ones not spoken for are I (which I'd like to save for Ion just in case), O, W, X and Z. Currently I'm leaning towards Z, for no particularly explicable reason.

There are some interesting cases of this that I'd particularly like to cover, primarily the peroxide/kerosene engines of the brief British space programme. Realism Overhaul supports the Gamma engines, but to do an SPE family for them I'd really need some idea of what subsequent developments would have looked like. If anyone has useful sources or can suggest realistic numbers for peroxide engine performance with 1970s, ’80s, ’90s... technology, please get in touch. (Or, for that matter, if you can find/make me a part model for a single Gamma engine. RO only has them in clusters with skirts, which aren't all that suitable for proc vehicles as they fix your diameter.)

Announcing the 0.1.0 alpha release of Simple Procedural Engines. Aerobees too small for you? F-1 slightly too big? Agena more thrust than you need? Then have we got solutions for you! S. P. Engine allows you to create procedural engines from several real-world-inspired families, by setting the thrust and ignition count within the supported range. After tooling a design, you can follow its upgrade path as you unlock further techs, saving many many funds as compared to a brand new design. S. P. Engine is built for use with the Realism Overhaul suite of mods, and in particular has a hard requirement for RealFuels. (That's why I'm releasing for 1.3.1 rather than something more recent; the various Realism mods are still back there.) Currently supported engine families (with mnemonics): A: (Aggregat) Ethanol/LOx booster. B: (Bees) Small aniline/furfuryl/nitric acid sustainer. D: (Delta) Pressure-fed hydrazine/nitric acid upper stage. F: (F-1) Huge kerosene/LOx booster. G: (aGena) Pump-fed hydrazine/nitric acid upper stage. J: (J-2) Large hydrolox upper stage (and later aerospike sustainer). K: Kerosene/LOx booster up to about 1MN thrust. (Like LR79, H-1 and Merlin1.) L: (Lr105) Kerosene/LOx sustainer. Matches nicely with K-class to make Atlas-style stage-and-a-half. M: (M-1) Massive hydrolox upper stage (later also sea-level). Q: Small, throttleable hydrolox upper stage engine. (Like throttling RL10s developed for Lunex.) R: (Rl10) Small hydrolox upper stage engine. S: Small staged-combustion kerosene/LOx upper stage. (Like S1.5400/11D33/RD-58 family.) Several more are planned. Read this far? Download S.P.Engine 0.1.0 and give it a try!

Snowbird Space Agency Two Years From Orbit After attaining orbit, while the sounding-rocket grind continued for a while, it was now interspersed with attempts to launch practical satellites, making use of the new Chief 3 launch vehicle with RD-103 booster and Pale 3x2 second stage. However, though the lower engine count on the second stage meant TestFlight struck less often, I experienced a number of failures owing to guidance problems — such as Chief 31 pitching over too slowly for its colossal TWR and finding the gravity losses too great to make orbit, or Chief 33 losing control of the upper stage as aerodynamic forces were too strong. The cure for the latter ultimately proved to be the use of small solid motors to obtain definite separation of the stages. Another important threshold was passed on March 14th, 1952 when the second launchpad was ready to accommodate rockets up to 60t GLOM. The Chief 3a LV was the first to make use of this, with a slightly haphazard-looking clustered-tankage design to elide the need for new tooling. This launch vehicle was responsible for placing, among others, my first polar satellite Lübeck 2 and the atmospheric analysis Lübeck 4b into orbit. Meanwhile, several competitors had sent brave crews into space on suborbital hops; I responded with one of my own, the Chief Guardant mission, in which Grigory Fekhlachev reached 152km in his conical cockpit before using a Pale braking stage, and then stub wings, to soften his return to Earth's atmosphere, and making the final landing under a parachute. Improved light-weight probes, developed in July, featured in the Rostock series of satellites. These however did not meet with a great deal of success: two were lost in launch failures, while the lunar probes Rostock 3, 5 and 6 all had rather poor accuracy, the best being Rostock 6's 25Mm periselene. Thus the only one to be truly successful was Rostock 4, a prototype Doppler navigation satellite. This was followed up by a number of navigational test satellites, beginning with Kiel 1, which had the ability to refine their orbits after apogee kick. The next such, Kiel 2, made its 960km circular orbit despite a partial failure of its upper stage. The abovementioned lunar probes, and the controllable Munich 1 which (on 27th May 1953) ultimately succeeded in their mission, launched on variants of Chief 4, whose double RD-103 engine allowed heavier payloads. Upgrades within this family included the use of level III tankage, and in the Chief 4b, a new upper stage, Gules 0, whose AJ10-37 engine finally gave me gimbal. The Gules also found use on the Chief 3c and 3d, launching for instance the prototype weather satellite Spence 1, and (with the payload-less Chief 313 launch) demonstrating a sun-synchronous orbit. Munich 1 (whose success paid for an upgrade to the R&D Facility) was to prove the swansong of the Chief family, as the new S-3 engine provided the basis for the new Bend launch vehicle family, first launched on the 9th of April 1953, when the first Bend Gules X1 launched Munich 2 towards its final destination, a high-speed impact with Mare Imbrium four days later. The first stage of Bend used new 2.4m tooling, which is expected to find consistent use for many years to come. After a third impactor, a more capable probe, Munich 4, was sent to orbit the Moon and collect data on its radiation environment and gravitational field; it entered elliptical lunar orbit on the 7th of June. Another application of spaceflight, the communications satellite, had a somewhat inauspicious start, as Duisburg 1 was lost when its kick stage failed to ignite. Fortunately the backup article, Duisburg 1a, successfully reached 6,400×881km orbit on July 3rd. Meanwhile my attempt to launch a second lunar orbiter, this time with a TV camera to return pictures of the lunar farside, was experiencing difficulties: first Munich 5 had attitude control problems during TLI (an inadequately constrained center of mass interfered with the spin stabilisation), then Munich 5a was lost to an engine failure on the Bend booster. Success finally came with Munich 5b. All of my lunar missions, incidentally, used approximately polar parking orbits, placed approximately 45° (or 225°) ahead of the Moon's position at launch. Another success was the Kleve series of film-return satellites. Kleve 1 photographed all biomes from polar orbit before making my first orbital-speed re-entry in August (though W Industries, at least, beat us, having pulled off the same feat back in January); though the follow-up Kleve 2, with an improved camera, suffered a booster failure and did not make orbit. My attempts to launch a constellation of operational navsats, the Bremerhaven series, ran into difficulties as the necessary orbit, 1050km polar, was pushing — and possibly outside — the envelope of Bend Gules 1. The first attempt, back in May, had come up a few tens of kilometers short, while Bremerhaven 1a's booster underperformed. Fortunately a round of engine upgrades — Bend 2 and Gules 1 — arrived in October 1953, placing Bremerhaven 1b in the target orbit on their maiden flight. Four more Bremerhavens will be needed to complete the constellation; I will launch them as VAB time permits. Bend 2 also flew Kleve 3, which collected higher-resolution photographs and ion mass spectrometry from polar orbit and once again demonstrated re-entry. Early weather satellites, Spence 2a and Spence 3, were launched in September and October, using a Pale kick stage to reduce their inclination as the target (48° to 58°) is not directly reachable from Kodiak without overflying the western coast of North America (the range limit of about 130° azimuth yields around 63° inclination). At the conclusion of this two-year period, then, Snowbird Space Agency is in reasonably good shape: two new engines (the LR105 "Chevron" and RD-0105 "Argent") are awaiting their first test flights, practical satellites are being launched with a decent cadence, and some exciting new exploration missions appear to be just about within my grasp. I may not have won races and made headlines so far, but now that the importance of sounding rockets is declining, I believe I have a chance to catch up.

Snowbird Space Agency The first 300 days Alaska's bid for space dominance got off to an unpromising start, as my first sounding-rocket launch, Pale 00, reached just 452 metres owing to an engine failure mere seconds after launch. Frustrations continued with fin cans ripping and a rocket that ran out of puff at 96.2km, but finally launch number four, Pale 11, made 141.6km, not just clearing the Kármán line but getting space science as well. Of course, this being the 27th of January, five other programs had already beaten me to the Kármán line; but no matter, I didn't expect any different. Meanwhile my pilots were already getting bored (they have short attention spans, you know) so I built the Sejant general-aviation and photo-reconnaissance aeroplane, and flew around Kodiak Island a few times collecting atmospheric science. The sounding rockets were going wrong again, as my first two-stage design Pale 2 kept suffering ignition failures of the upper stage. I surmised that this was due to excessive aerodynamic pressure at staging time, and went to a twin-engined first stage which, on Pale 31, successfully sent 60 SoundingRocketPayload to over 180km. At last I was able to start grinding sounding rocket contracts for funds. The first tech node to unlock was Post-War Rocketry Testing on March 13th, giving me access to the XASR-1 — a more reliable, higher-performing version of the Aerobee — as well as the RD-101 ethanol/LOx booster engine. (I did actually fly one RD-100, Chief 00, which I started building before the tech unlock in order to get a little test data sooner.) This led to Chief 10, my first launch of a heavy two-stage sounding rocket, which reached a record altitude of over 1,200km. That same day (May 7th), the mixed-powerplant interceptor Passant was the first Alaskan aeroplane to break the sound barrier, with Yuliya Rokossovskaya in the hot seat. Once again I was far behind the leaders, though, the Marshall Space Agency having sent a person supersonic back in early February (though not, I suspect, in wing-borne flight). Another important tech came on the 12th of July: Early Materials Science gave me Tank-II, allowing much-improved per-stage delta V. The test flight of the resulting 'Chief 2' LV, still in sounding-rocket guise, blew past 5,000km altitude. All I still needed was Avionics Prototypes, which came on the 10th of September, allowing a controllable upper stage that made orbital launches (just!) possible. The very first orbital shot of the Snowbird Space Agency was Chief 21, launched on the 19th of October, 1951. To everyone's surprise, the rocket performed flawlessly (praise be to merciful Agathorn!) and the kick stage and its payload, Lübeck 1, entered 620×163km/63.2° orbit. Of course, the payload, being a sounding-rocket core, ran down its batteries after a mere half-hour, but never mind that: I had a satellite. Sadly, I later discovered that the Chinese had beaten me to it (news always takes a long time to trickle out of there...) by 95 days. At time of writing it's not known how the other competitors stacked up. All in all, Snowbird has a good foundation to build on: I have been teching up fast, and a 60-ton launch pad will be ready by early next year. I may not have collected any firsts yet, but there are plenty still to get and plenty of time to pull ahead. (And a special No-Prize to anyone who can figure out my naming convention for rockets!)

To celebrate / showcase the newly released RP-1 (for KSP 1.3.1; hey, don't judge us!), I'm running a Race Into Space game with some folks from the RO IRC and Discord. An extra quirk is that we're all flying from different launch sites, with a random draw order (I came next-to-last, but fortunately no-one grabbed the one I wanted). Our players are, in alphabetical order (and with links to logos for those who have provided one): Eagle, flying from Brownsville, Texas. @Norcalplanner, flying for KABOOM out of Cape Canaveral, Florida. @pap1723, flying for the Marshall Space Agency from Omelek Island (Kwajalein Atoll) in the Marshall Islands. scanistar, launching from the Chinese spaceport of Wenchang, Hainan. @shadowofneptune, flying for the Agência Espacial Ibérica out of São Tomé, colony of Salazarian Portugal. @soundnfury, flying for the Snowbird Space Agency out of Kodiak, Alaska. @vallin, flying for ISRO from Satish Dhawan, India. @wrobz, launching W Industries rockets from Kourou in French Guiana. We will be posting updates in this thread, and some of us will also be running Encyclopædia Kerbonautica instances to provide full launch libraries. (Mine is at http://jttlov.no-ip.org:8084/.) I believe also some players are planning to stream / record video of their campaigns. You can also keep an eye on where everyone's game is at the RIS server.

Part IV: Most complicated lunar landing ever It's here at last! With a lander parked ready at the propellant depot in lunar orbit, and fuel tanks everywhere topped up, I ran the lunar landing mission, with docking after docking after docking... it felt like Operation Black Buck. But it worked! Read the full write-up on my website with 113 screenshots. Also, something I didn't post before is the ongoing record of the lunar programme as a whole, including vehicle test flights and even the earliest draft plans and conops for the A-class flyby. While I'm planning to run more of these missions, they'll mostly be much the same with nothing new, so I'm not sure I'll bother continuing posting write-ups here — at least, not unless I do something interesting like go to Mars. So this is probably the end of this series of mission reports; I hope you enjoyed this look at a capsule-less alternate history.

All done in GIMP, mainly through the heavy use of layers. E.g. each spacecraft and each arrow on there is its own layer, so I can move it, copy and paste it, etc. Two tricks I use for the pixel art are: (1) draw complex objects at about 150% of the desired size and then use the resize tool to scale them down, and (2) use a low-opacity brush to darken or lighten the edges of shapes to imply curvature. I should also note that the style of these CONOPS diagrams was inspired by this image from the Eyes Turned Skywards alternate-history timeline.

Part III: Again with the complicated lunar orbit As planned, another lunar orbital mission, this time adding an extra launch to ship some life-support supplies to the propellant depot. Two days in LLO, a return with positive margins, and a landing at the Cape: everything worked as it was supposed to. Read the full write-up on my website with 86 screenshots. I have a design for a lander, and the prototype is currently stacking in my VAB for a test flight. Hopefully it won't be too much longer before I am ready to run the lander mission and wrap up this series.

BTW, for if you ever start over or if anyone else is planning to run something similar, you may be interested in a mod of mine, Race Into Space, built for just this sort of asynchronous multiplayer. It tracks when each player achieved various milestones (defined in terms of CC contracts), and gives extra funds rewards to whoever got them first.

Sequel: Most complicated lunar orbit ever With the help of a propellant depot in LLO (yes, that means yet another rendezvous…), I stretched my architecture to perform a crewed lunar orbit mission. Initially it went smoothly, but on the way home the oxygen tank gauges were reading worryingly close to empty. Read the full write-up on my website with 60 screenshots. This series will continue; I plan to do at least one more orbital mission before moving on to the obvious finale Most complicated lunar landing ever.

In one of my RSS/RO/RP-1 campaigns, I ended up launching a spaceplane before any manned capsules (because reasons), and decided it would be fun to role-play a world where ballistic re-entry is considered unsafe for humans. This does of course make BLEO (Beyond Low Earth Orbit) missions rather awkward, as you can't use the atmosphere to slow you down on the way back. But, with a massively over-complicated multi-launch architecture, I managed to perform a manned lunar fly-by with nary a heat-shield in sight (and all LVs under 275t GLOM). The full write-up, with 65 screenshots, is here on my website.

Version 0.1.4, now available at https://github.com/ec429/ksp_ris/releases/tag/v0.1.4, rebuilt for KSP 1.3.1 and with configs for the Developmental branch of RP-0 (also known as "RP-1").

It appears ribbons in custom ribbon packs can't supersede other ribbons. Is this intentional?

Further information for those interested: The mod and its forum thread. A writeup of my playthrough. @NathanKell is streaming his playthrough on Twitch and uploading the videos to YouTube. Running 'scoreboard' of the game on the multiplayer server.

As those of you who watch @NathanKell's Twitch streams may already be aware, I recently developed an asynchronous multiplayer mod, Race Into Space. The idea is that everyone in the game syncs with the server every now and then, to say "my game is at $date" and "I achieved $milestone on $date". Then, when everyone's game is past the first date on which a milestone was achieved, the server now knows who got it first, and they get some extra funds in their game (and bragging rights, which are of course far more important). One person (usually whoever organised the game) has to run the server, which is a Python program using Twisted and Nevow, and needs to be network-visible (so e.g. if behind a router/NAT you will need to port forward). The other players just connect to that server from within KSP. They can also view the game state by pointing a web browser at the server. Apart from needing a common set of contracts, the players can have completely different mods installed, although for the sake of balance and fairness you will usually want to agree on a list of allowed mods. Currently it's in beta testing, and it only has configs for RP-0 (the RSS career mod). If someone wants to write configs for other contract packs, pull requests welcome. It still has a few rough edges, like a total lack of access control on the server, but it seems to be working so far. The source code is at https://github.com/ec429/ksp_ris, and releases can be downloaded from https://github.com/ec429/ksp_ris/releases. Network details (rule 6 compliance): The Race Into Space client KSP addon communicates over the network. It will only communicate with the server specified by the user in the in-game UI (which defaults to localhost), and its communication consists of reports on the current game state, which are only sent when manually triggered by the user (by pressing the SYNC button), requests for the corresponding state of other players (triggered by the Join, Refresh and SYNC buttons), and messages used to Join or Leave a game on the server. The full protocol is described in the file 'protocol' in the top level of the source repository, which can be found on github.

New addition: Improved astrogation capabilities with three new consoles, each more capable than the last: Escape Astrogation ('esc') Close-Approach Astrogation ('clo') Fly-By Astrogation ('fba') These can be used to plan interplanetary transfer manoeuvres, or precisely targeted trans-lunar injections. This is made possible by KONRAD's new abilities to patch conics across SOI boundaries, and find closest approaches to target bodies.

AFAIK the plan is to do a few satellite launches into desired orbits (which will require a bit more precision than our BlueSky 2A is capable of with its high-terminal-acceleration kick stage; we will probably have to develop the controllable probe core), mop up all the low orbit science, research the next tier of rocket motors, and start shooting for lunar flybys / impactors. Presumably the people who like planes will be doing something aerodynamic in the meantime. IMHO the hard part is the 'herding cats' to get enough people all committed to doing something at an agreed-upon time. That's why I keep pinging NK, because he's good at that and I'm not. But I think he's currently busy trying to make RO a thing in 1.2.x, and presumably also having a life outside of KSP.

I believe so: GFL is Not Dead! We just went on hiatus for a while because we lacked sufficiently good guidance algorithms for the next big objective, lunar probes. But now I've taught KONRAD how to do it, so if we can wake @NathanKell from his dread sleep at R'lyeh, we should be go for relaunch… Ia! Ia! NathanKell fhtagn!

New addition: Astrogation console ('mnv'). Right now it serves exactly one purpose — aiming and timing Trans-Lunar Insertion burns for primitive moon probes — but plans are afoot to add SOI patching and make it useful for interplanetary transfers too. (But first I'll need to make the Difficult Orbital Mechanics™ code cope with hyperbolic orbits, eek.) It definitely works for the moon probes though: using it, I got lunar impact three times in a row with an unguided spin-stabilised kick stage. I've attempted to explain in the README how to use it, but it might be a bit confusing, so do let me know your experiences attempting to use it. --- Also added a while ago (back in April in fact) was the Ascent console ('asc'). Using a similar simulation engine to retro, it determines what your altitude and vertical speed will be when you reach orbital velocity, helping you insert into that beautifully circular 185km orbit. Again, usage instructions in the README. --- Note that both mnv and asc, like retro and boost, require an accurate JSON Booster file.

alpha11 released - adds support for IPIs (Inter-Processor Interrupts) allowing multiple KPU processors on a vessel to work together. Yeah, the readme should cover everything. There's also a bit of a language tutorial upthread, for those not fluent in BNF syntax descriptions.