GeneCash

02-JAN-1959, the Soviet Luna 1 impactor missed the Moon and inadvertently became the first spacecraft to go into solar orbit. Sounds like my first time at KSP too... They shoulda used MechJeb!

All I can say is I'd fly either one in a heartbeat, but given my druthers, I'd rather fly on a SpaceX Dragon. I'm not picky, and I'll sweep floors for a spaceflight! Anyway, the true loss with the Shuttle is NASA stuck with the Model-T design, instead of learning from it and designing a second generation vehicle with lessons learned from the first. They could have had a 100% reusable flyback booster and improvements in the heatshield, which would have addressed both issues that killed astronauts. I have a Shuttle tile, and that sucka is FRAGILE. Unfortunately, Congress keeps NASA's budget in a constant flux, and there's no stability in which to plan and build large technological systems. Look at what's happened with Constellation/SLS/Orion/Ares/whatever-its-called-this-fiscal-quarter.

So the ISS guys have complained they want fries with that, but NASA says "no deep fryers in the dorms!!" and it's hard to do zero-gee on Earth, so the boffins went the other way and tried cooking in heavy gravity in a centrifuge. "Lioumbas and Karapantsios fixed a deep-fryer containing potato sticks in half a litre of hot oil onto the end of the 8m-long arms of the Large Diameter Centrifuge at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands" They found out it cooks faster and crispier, and they think that fries cooked in weightlessness would end up being nasty. They went up to 9G, but found 3G was, um, the sweet spot. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131219-can-astronauts-cook-fries/all The whole time I was reading this, I was thinking of Jeb with a big chef's hat and a spatula... and Bill standing behind him with a plate.

I heard Proton is launching a comsat using a "supersynchronous transfer orbit" (SSTO) and I had never heard of such a thing, so I used a little Google-fu and found http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19950021383_1995121383.pdf which is apparently the first time someone ever did this. This is interesting, and it reads like a Scott Manley mission. So they're launching this comsat on an Atlas IIA. Unfortunately, the normal ÃŽâ€V to GSO is over 1,750m/s, and would eat up all the satellite stationkeeping propellant doing the plane change. That would be bad. Instead, they push apogee to 130,000km with the plane change there, plus they do 2 apogee burns and 2 perigee burns, which drops the ÃŽâ€V to 1,473m/s. That's nice, but it caused other problems: * First, the transfer orbit was far longer than ever before (11-14 days) so they had to deal with battery life on the satellite so it'd live that long. * Second, they had to get 2 Earth attitude sensor passes per orbit, except they couldn't use the sensor below 25,000km. * Third, they'd never used the sensor over 100,000km before, and didn't know if it'd handle that small of an Earth disk or if it'd be accurate enough. * They'd also never used the telemetry/command links that far out either. Plus, at various satellite attitudes, the antennae couldn't see the Earth at this altitude, so there was long outages, and they had to design the satellite so if things crapped out during an outage, it would survive to the next telemetry/command pass, AND there's only one ground station with the proper antenna to communicate with the satellite and all the burns have to be seen from that station to be commanded. (and you thought Remote-Tech was a b*tch!) * Then, at this altitude, orbit determination is more difficult and you have to be a lot more precise. Those magic orbit numbers from MechJeb don't come for free! * As if this isn't enough, they have to avoid certain launch times to avoid long battery-draining eclipses. * They have to calculate Lunar effects since they're 1/3rd of the way to the Moon, and they have to avoid yet more launch times so the Moon doesn't drop the perigee into the ocean. * The satellite has to end up in GSO at 322.5° East without hitting any other comsat on the way in. WHEW. DAMN. It's interesting that the launch got favorable winds which resulted in saving 45lbs of propellant, and they retargeted the launch orbit inclination in real-time from 26.9° to 25.7° to take advantage of it - and you thought Eve launches had to deal with razor-thin margins! It's also interesting that they give the range/azimuth/elevation data graphs and explain how they did orbit determination. They found out that tracking SSTO wasn't that much harder than GTO. They did have to upgrade their computer to do the trajectory firing solutions to a VAX 4000/90, and still had to make burn calculation runs of over an hour. They computed errors and margins down to 54 grams of propellant, and the final orbit had an eccentricity of 2.5x10e-4 Very impressive for 1994...

Yup, I just finished this myself for the first time. The trick is to burn *behind* the Mun as a sort of anti-gravity-assist so it drops you back to Kerbin, by immediately putting a maneuver node right in front of you and stretching the "radial out" (blue/fins-out/dot-in-middle) until you get a Kerbin perigee inside the atmosphere (less than 69km). That's the only burn I had to do, and I ended up with a little less than a pound of fuel left, out of the about 5-3/4 you start with, a Kerbin perigee of 50km and a Mun perigee of about 35km. Then ya just wait and wait and wait. I think I did 3 aerobraking passes until I finally landed. Thank god (or Harvester, same person!) for time warp! One thing I discovered that I didn't know... a perigee marker does not show up until you have a perigee above the surface. I was watching the Kerbin perigee, wondering why I didn't have a Mun one, until it suddenly popped up. I never noticed that before.

So I figure I'll get a head start on my Halloween costume next year, there's a lot of cool inspiring pictures floating around. I hope this is the right place to ask... it's not really a game question. However, when I Google for orange jumpsuits, all I get are political sites about Guantanamo, and when I Google for white jumpsuits, I get women's fancy dress clothing. Anybody got a good source? http://www.nationaltextile.us/inc/sdetail/98/496 isn't bad for $16... but it's orange/black only.

Greetings.... I'm running KSP on Debian and I'd like to record game sessions. I've tried a couple things like recordmydesktop, kazam, and istanbul, but they have problems recording the sound too. What do other Linux blokes here use?

No, you can't ignore them if they don't interest you. They're annoying. They break the feel of the game. They pop up and get in your face. The last thing I want in the final 10 seconds of a Mun landing is some goddamned popup. They're a reason I have not played career mode because I hate the "YUO WUN 'LANDING'!! U GETS DECOUPLERZ!!" mechanism. If I wanted achievements, I'd go play call of duty or some such crap. Guess what, I'm not. I'm playing something more highbrow, where I want to get as far away as possible from the fact I'm playing a game. Edit: and another reason I don't like achievements is I can't get them, so they sit there and bug me. I'm not Ray Narvaez Jr.

I think the *snerk* this caused is going to require surgery to fix...

I'm watching ATV4 undock from ISS right now. Wheee! http://spotthestation.nasa.gov/sightings/view.cfm?country=United_States&region=Florida&city=Orlando says I get to see 2 ATV4 sightings and 2 ISS sightings tomorrow night starting just after 7pm. What a nice Halloween treat!

So folks have noticed that when a spacecraft does a flyby of Earth to pick up speed in a slingshot maneuver, it gets slightly more speed than it "should" - they don't know if it's tracking errors or what, but they're giving Juno the hairy eyeball to see if it does the same thing. It's on the order of mm/sec, but it's a pretty big discrepancy with the accuracy they work at. Great writeup by the BBC at http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131009-spacecraft-tests-sling-theory/all

So I noticed that some of the YouTube videos had shadows! And I don't! That's not right. This is a big issue for trying to land as it makes it really difficult to judge height. It also makes EVAs harder, at least for me. Now this is for people running Linux on Ivy Bridge, so I hope I can help both you guys out there. DISCLAIMER: I'm running 64-bit Debian Testing (Jessie) on a Core i7 CPU. This may help other folks that don't have the exact same setup, like people using 32-bit or Ubuntu, etc. but I can't make any guarantees. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. It's only changing 1 byte, but hand-editing an executable is life on the edge. This is a nasty hack and I'm a bit surprised that such a simple fix worked. Your mileage may vary. Stunts performed by professional driver on closed course. THE ISSUE: I'm assuming you can run KSP fine, you just don't get shadows. The problem is the Intel graphics hardware is blacklisted by Unity3D, so in your Player.log file you end up seeing this line: GL: disabling shadows on Intel 9xx (buggy) As far as I can tell, you can't make Mesa/OpenGL lie about the graphics cards, so what I do is edit the KSP.x86_64 binary to no longer match the "Intel" name. I tried the "hexedit" mode in emacs, and that corrupted the file, so I used a program called "wxHexEditor", from the wxhexeditor package (do "apt-get install wxhexeditor") THE FIX: Go to where ever you have KSP installed and copy your binary to a backup: ~/KSP_linux # cp KSP.x86_64 KSP.x86_64.old Edit your binary: ~/KSP_linux # wxHexEditor KSP.x86_64 & Click the spyglass search icon, and click the "search as text" setting, then type "intel" as the search string. You should hit an area mentioning graphics card brand names like Nvidia, Radeon, ATI, and Intel. There should be an "Intel" string. Ignore the one in all uppercase. Click the right hand part of the screen and change this to "Intxl" or something else that won't match. 0e8e180: 61be 993f 3baa b83f 2f73 7973 2f64 6576 a..?;..?/sys/dev 0e8e190: 6963 6573 2f00 7063 6900 2573 2f25 7300 ices/.pci.%s/%s. 0e8e1a0: 2f63 6c61 7373 0030 7830 3300 2f64 6576 /class.0x03./dev 0e8e1b0: 6963 6500 2f76 656e 646f 7200 2f72 6573 ice./vendor./res 0e8e1c0: 6f75 7263 6500 5369 5300 436f 6d70 6174 ource.SiS.Compat 0e8e1d0: 6962 6c65 2056 4741 0036 3330 2f37 3330 ible VGA.630/730 0e8e1e0: 004e 5649 4449 4100 4e76 6964 6961 0052 .NVIDIA.Nvidia.R 0e8e1f0: 4144 454f 4e00 5261 6465 6f6e 0049 4e54 ADEON.Radeon.INT 0e8e200: 454c 0049 6e74 656c 0025 692e 2569 2e25 EL.Intel.%i.%i.% <---- this one here 0e8e210: 6920 4e56 4944 4941 2025 692e 2569 0025 i NVIDIA %i.%i.% 0e8e220: 7320 5261 6465 6f6e 2048 4420 2569 2025 s Radeon HD %i % 0e8e230: 2a00 4154 4920 5261 6465 6f6e 2037 3030 *.ATI Radeon 700 0e8e240: 3020 4f70 656e 474c 2045 6e67 696e 6500 0 OpenGL Engine. 0e8e250: 4154 4920 5261 6465 6f6e 2037 3530 3020 ATI Radeon 7500 0e8e260: 4f70 656e 474c 2045 6e67 696e 6500 5333 OpenGL Engine.S3 0e8e270: 2000 474c 5f45 5854 5f74 6578 7475 7265 .GL_EXT_texture Click the save icon, exit wxHexEditor, and you should be done. TESTING: Now in the loading screen where Jeb is standing on the Mun, you should see an immediate difference. There should be a long shadow behind Jeb and a shadow behind the rock on the left side of the screen. If you go to the launch pad and load up a rocket, it should cast a shadow. In the loading screen with the 3 Kerbals on EVA, you should now see shadows inside the helmets. If you get "segmentation fault" then you corrupted your binary. Restore it from the copy and try again. You can check the binaries to see if your hex-editor did something bad: ~/KSP_linux # xxd KSP.x86_64. >KSP.x86_64.dump ~/KSP_linux # xxd KSP.x86_64.old >KSP.x86_64.old.dump ~/KSP_linux # diff *.dump 953889c953889 < 0e8e200: 454c 0049 6e74 786c 0025 692e 2569 2e25 EL.Intxl.%i.%i.% --- > 0e8e200: 454c 0049 6e74 656c 0025 692e 2569 2e25 EL.Intel.%i.%i.% If you get any other output, then yeah, it did... OTHER ISSUES: I started off without rocks, trees, and other terrain features. To enable these, go to the graphics settings and set "Fallback part shaders" to false, and enable "SM3 Terrain Shaders" and "Terrain Scatters (WIP)" - this is probably already known, but I went for a while without knowing it myself.