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Kerbfleet: A Jool Odyssey-CHAPTER 22 pg 2: Yet >another< narrative device!


Mister Dilsby

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  On 7/7/2016 at 1:50 PM, Geschosskopf said:

@Kuzzter, how far did you get?  Last time I tossed something into Jool, it blew at about 500m IIRC.

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It seemed to hit zero, then bounce up to 250m before exploding. I had actually cut the 'chute by then, as it was taking forever to fall and I had to let my wife use the computer. Very happy with the design--everything worked great, and I had enough battery power to transmit all the data. I even got a second reading in on the atmosphere scanner! 

Moons were visible through the star field at the bottom. Very glad only the probe was destroyed and not the whole planet, or the savefile! I was watching pressure almost all the way down, reading topped out at around 1500kPa. 

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  On 7/7/2016 at 1:57 PM, Kuzzter said:

It seemed to hit zero, then bounce up to 250m before exploding.

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Yeah, I just went back and checked my old OPTC pics and the last thing I dropped on Jool exploded at 241m, not 500m.  But it never reached 0.

 

  On 7/7/2016 at 1:57 PM, Kuzzter said:

Moons were visible through the star field at the bottom. Very glad only the probe was destroyed and not the whole planet, or the savefile! I was watching pressure almost all the way down, reading topped out at around 1500kPa. 

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I couldn't see through Jool, but that might have been the camera angle, which was always slightly above the ship.

Interesting.  1000kPa ~ 1atm so that's about 15atm at Jool's center.  That seems surprisingly low.  Here on Earth, you get that at only 150m underwater.

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  On 7/7/2016 at 1:57 PM, Kuzzter said:

bounce up to 250m

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I believe that the "surface" is at -250 meters and you were just falling down to that altitude. I think...

And, we arrive at Jool!

You know you're doing something right if you can have one of the most viewed threads and go through ten chapters without getting to Jool.

:D

 

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  On 7/7/2016 at 2:11 PM, Geschosskopf said:

Interesting.  1000kPa ~ 1atm so that's about 15atm at Jool's center.  That seems surprisingly low.  Here on Earth, you get that at only 150m underwater.

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Yeah, I wondered if the barometer was actually in MPa but nope, the wiki confirms only 15atm at the 'surface'. No wonder things can survive all the way down there.

Personally I'd rather see Jool have a liquid metallic hydrogen surface, or whatever Juno discovers is really down there on Jupiter. Then put a truly ridiculous pressure on that surface and make anything that touches it freeze, then explode in flames, then freeze again. That can then become the basis of my next great Kerbfleet graphic novel, Jool: Order NOPE!

  On 7/7/2016 at 2:17 PM, Ultimate Steve said:

You know you're doing something right if you can have one of the most viewed threads and go through ten chapters without getting to Jool. :D

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I had actually bet my business partner one kerbuck that I could string you all along for at least thirty more chapters, but got sick of waiting and finally made the intercept :)

  On 7/7/2016 at 2:27 PM, Gojira1000 said:

You made me sad for a probe core. Have some rep.

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Waah. :( 

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  On 7/7/2016 at 6:35 PM, FlyingPete said:

"It's full of stars!"

Where's the next diver headed, I wonder? and what will Kerbulan Space Command make of Intrepid launching a 'missile' into Jool?

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They're probably thinking the Intrepid crew were attempting to ignite Jool into a second sun... :0.0:

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  On 7/7/2016 at 6:35 PM, FlyingPete said:

Where's the next diver headed, I wonder? and what will Kerbulan Space Command make of Intrepid launching a 'missile' into Jool?

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Indeed! If the rest of Despair's crew follows Evil Val's orders, they're not going to interfere until Intrepid fires off at least a few more 'missiles'. Still, one has to wonder what this looks like to them given their scans of the ship on Minmus...

  On 7/7/2016 at 8:04 PM, Angel-125 said:

No need to mourn the loss of JoolDiver, it died doing what it was designed to do. Well done, JoolDiver! :)

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Quite true. And if probes have an afterlife, it's in the data they upload back to the 'source'. 

  On 7/8/2016 at 12:53 PM, superstrijder15 said:

Note that in one of my space atlases the 'surface'of jupiter is at 1atm, and, if i remember correctly, that the surface of jool isn't the surface, but set to destroy anything because glitches occured when people went to low.

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Just looking it up now--apparently the 'surface' of Jupiter is defined to be the point at which pressure is 1 atm, because otherwise it would have none... or so people thought/think. I really wonder what the boundary between the gaseous atmosphere and the 'metallic liquid hydrogen' or whatever actually looks like!

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  On 7/8/2016 at 1:25 PM, Kuzzter said:

Just looking it up now--apparently the 'surface' of Jupiter is defined to be the point at which pressure is 1 atm, because otherwise it would have none... or so people thought/think. I really wonder what the boundary between the gaseous atmosphere and the 'metallic liquid hydrogen' or whatever actually looks like!

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Well, the metallic state is something that happens at very high pressures rather deep in the planet. Besides, I'm not sure how well defined the border is.

One could define the surface as the border between gaseous and liquid hydrogen, but it doesn't exist at such temperatures - it's in supercritical fluid state. Maybe it could be useful to define it as some level where density reaches some level comparable to density of liquid hydrogen (at critical point? some extrapolation option?) or some pressure associated with this (critical pressure? extrapolating boiling pressure past the critical point?), but again it's very arbitrary. Just a little less arbitrary than just taking 1 atm.

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  On 7/8/2016 at 1:25 PM, Kuzzter said:

Just looking it up now--apparently the 'surface' of Jupiter is defined to be the point at which pressure is 1 atm, because otherwise it would have none... or so people thought/think. I really wonder what the boundary between the gaseous atmosphere and the 'metallic liquid hydrogen' or whatever actually looks like!

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I don't think this is the whole story...

KSC's altimeter was originally based on real ones that work off pressure.  The pressure at sea level on Kerbin is 1.0 atm by definition so the altimeter shows 0 there, and then it reports higher altitudes in Above Sea Level (ASL) format.  But this has nothing to do with the surface, which can be at any height.  I mean, when on the runway at KSC, you're at like 76m altitude.  So basically, OT1H, there is no link between what the altimeter says and where the surface actually is.  It's based on pressure.  1atm = 0 meters ASL.

But OTOH, we have to use this same pressure-calibrated altimeter at every other planet, even those without atmospheres where this type of altimeter wouldn't work at all.  Thus, in the game, every planet has to have a "sea level" arbitrarily defined, which the altimeter uses to display your altitude.

However, OTGH, because the altimeter works on airless planets, the altimeter doesn't really use actual in-game, measured atmospheric pressure to define "sea level".  A planet's "sea level" is an independent, arbitrary value found somewhere in the stats of the planet, and the altimeter goes to that instead of the actual outside pressure (which can, of course, be zero).  Which means that on planets that DO have atmospheres, there is no correlation between measured atmospheric pressure and the displayed ASL altitude.

This is why you get 15 atm of pressure near the zero altitude point of Jool.  In the workings of the game, the 2 numbers actually have nothing to do with each other.  The altitude is based on some number in the planet's stats and the measured pressure is based on the atmosphere's pressure curve, which is found in another part of the planet's stats.

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  On 7/8/2016 at 3:33 PM, Geschosskopf said:

I don't think this is the whole story... [excellent explanation snipped]

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Oh yes, of course, but I was talking about Jupiter, not Jool--pointing out that the reason the 'surface' pressure of Jupiter is 1 atm is only because the position of the Jupiter's 'surface' is arbitrarily (and syllogistically) defined as being that place where the pressure is 1 atm.  

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