Forgotten Space Program

[cubinator]

4 minutes ago, KAL 9000 said:

Any updates?

Patience! Update it will, in time.

[Mister Dilsby]

4 hours ago, KAL 9000 said:

Any updates?

I think I`d trust someone who has been writing as long as the Monk has to post an update when he has an update. After all this is someone who's taken the time to go back and write a story about a savefile he'd forgotten, which most of us would have left in that state. It's not like this is a new author who's made one or two intriguing posts, promised much, and then gone silent.

[Just Jim]

4 hours ago, KAL 9000 said:

Any updates?

On 8/18/2016 at 2:54 PM, Cydonian Monk said:

And then there'll be nothing for two weeks as I'm going on vacation over the two weeks around American Labor[ious] Day. Regular postings will resume somewhere in September.

I do believe he's left for his vacation... 

Edited August 24, 2016 by Just Jim

[KAL 9000]

Oh.

[Cydonian Monk]

Just now, Just Jim said:

I do believe he's left for his vacation... 

Not quite yet, just getting ready for it. Soon though. Very soon. Like, Friday soon. Probably one more update before then. 

[Alpha_Mike_741]

I really love your story , you know what ? my only space station , The skyGate has modules both launched and planned named after Forgotten Space Program  characters

 

Thomlock : life support module D: complete

Mcfred (First part launched) : Station core , resource storage , aka jack of all trades module

Agake : Science module . Planned

Gletrix ; currently don't remember , actually this one's also planned . and i'm launching anything BUT a station module these days

[Cydonian Monk]

2 hours ago, Alpha_Mike_741 said:

I really love your story ,

Thank you.

Quote

you know what ? my only space station , The skyGate has modules both launched and planned named after Forgotten Space Program  characters

 (edit: really don't know what else to say there.)

Edited August 24, 2016 by Cydonian Monk

[Andem]

5 hours ago, Kuzzter said:

It's not like this is a new author who's made one or two intriguing posts, promised much, and then gone silent.

 I'm working on it, sheesh! 

[Cydonian Monk]

Sulphur Descending

The Sulphur 5 LDAV was lined up for its descent burn almost before Gletrix had radioed up about her successful landing. Thomlock had already drawn up several potential targets, and once they knew exactly where their surface rendezvous was they chose the closest and dialed it in. The actual target was a spot just to the East of Gletrix and the Aluminium, but were expecting to fall short (as the projection software didn't take parachutes into account). Thomlock was hoping for a ridge between the ocean and the small lake. Really he was hoping for anything that involved solid land.

The burn took place a short time after the Sun rose over the limb of Laythe. A simple burn, conducted at only 1.5th throttle, it was more than enough to forever doom them to Laythe's embrace. Once complete the orbital stage and its poodle engine were discarded and expected to disintegrate entirely in Laythe's atmosphere. Thomlock gave the craft a short push to the left with the RCS, just to make sure the soon-to-be-molten orbital stage didn't fly back to hit them. No reason to risk it.

It turned out to be a move they hadn't needed to make, as the orbital stage was several kilometers away before when reached the atmosphere.

After such a long time in the void and despite a comparatively short adjustment at the Edge of Infinity, the smack from the atmosphere was just that - a smack that hit their entire body. Unlike the Aluminium, the LDAV wasn't intended to be aerodynamic during its descent. Quite the opposite. And, being somewhat non-symmetrical, the buffeting from the still thin air was rougher than one would expect. It was all Thomlock could do to keep the craft from spinning about its axis.

The air at first whistled by and then became an ever-present roar. Occasionally a tremor would rumble through the entire craft, causing things to rattle that had never had the gumption to rattle before. Not really any worse than the other entries and reentries the crew had experienced, and overall shorter. There was less of a transition between the wispy upper atmosphere and the soup of Laythe's thicker air than on Kerbin, meaning the G-forces built up a bit faster and came in thumps rather than gradually.

Jeb sounded like he was enjoying every minute of it.

Thomlock was still a bit apprehensive about the whole thing, including the kludge of a heatshield Wernher had pieced together. Even in the thin upper atmosphere the air seemed to whistle through it, and when he glanced back through the canopy Thomlock could see streams of plasma leaking through its cracks. Near as he could tell the super-heated streams were missing all the critical systems, which he supposed was all that really mattered.

Meanwhile the orbital stage was burning up in fits and explosions some safe distance above them. They had transferred as much fuel and monoprop as they could into the craft back at the Jumble, bringing only what they thought they would need for the descent. Still, what fuels had remained were now burning brightly in the dark sky above. Their two streaks were putting on quite the light show for anyone that might be watching.

There was no happy outcome in the event of a failure during descent, as any abort during at landing would strand Gletrix on the surface. The lander itself carried enough food and other supplies to hold out for a few munths, but a hard landing that disabled the ascent engines would result in all four (no, five) of them being stranded on the surface with no hope of rescue. 

The LDAV design had been well tested before they set out, so all they could really do was relax and hope for the best. Hope for the best as the craft seemingly tried to tear itself apart around them.

As it happened, the best was what they got. The flames subsided, the clouds slipped above their windows, and the sandy surface of the moon splayed out below. They were through the storm of fire, and they weren't coming down over water. A second check of the map showed they would land just where expected - on a ridge between the Sagan Sea and some small inward lake. A number of larger bodies of water were visible as giant blue holes in a purplish horizon. Giant blue holes that would need names. All in good time.

Once they were through the clouds Thomlock armed the parachutes. He could only hope they had properly guessed the atmospheric density, as too low and the chutes wouldn't catch, too heavy and they might fall short of their target. If they were lucky they wouldn't need to use the ascent engines for a short burn at landing. Anything more than 10 meters per second though and Thomlock had already decided he'd fire them. Better to be a bit short on the ascent (which was well over-engineered already) than a bit short on the landing. 

The first set of drogues fired off in a loud bang, stopping their freefall and pulling everyone uncomfortably into their seats. The other chutes followed in short order and soon the sky was full of silk.

When the chutes had all deployed they were still falling at a brisk 14 m/s. Not much chance of it getting better the closer they got to the ground, so Thomlock armed the decouplers, set off the charges, and ditched the heat shields. They fell to their destructive demise on the dunes below.

The ascent engines were now free, and so he brought them online and gave them a quick test fire. A short burst was all it took to bring them down to a safe speed, just the slightest of nudgings. He cut the engines and waited until they were just above the dunes before firing them up again. A small cloud of sand was kicked up and what debris had survived from the heat shields was propelled across the surface. Thankfully they had fallen short of Gletrix and the Aluminium, as their descent would have no doubt hurled heavy and dangerous debris at its thin aircraft hull.

Thomlock throttled the engines enough to bring them down to a safe 5 m/s at touchdown. The landing legs creaked under the new found stress, the craft slid a bit down the side of the dune as the legs bit into the sands, and then all went still. By then the parachutes had blown free and disappeared to whatever land it is parachutes disappear to.

The Sulphur 5 was down. They had landed safely on Laythe.

Now the real party could begin.

 

Navigation: Next Page

Edited December 4, 2016 by Cydonian Monk

[DMSP]

This is incredible. Just incredible.

Congrats. You did it!

[TheGuyNamedAlan]

This story is beautiful. Ever since i am a youtuber, i would like to request to make a movie out of it. i think it would be amazing. I cannot guarantee the full completion of the movie cause i got quite a lot of other stuff to do. i would just ask for permission. that's all. :DD

[Mister Dilsby]

Whoo party on Laythe! So, is the entry fire streak part of Scatterer or another mod, or is it an effect you added? I admit I shopped in such a streak whenever I wanted kerbal on the ground to see a craft entering atmosphere, but would be cooler still to have it in-game

[Andem]

2 hours ago, Kuzzter said:

Whoo party on Laythe! So, is the entry fire streak part of Scatterer or another mod, or is it an effect you added? I admit I shopped in such a streak whenever I wanted kerbal on the ground to see a craft entering atmosphere, but would be cooler still to have it in-game

SSearch for "Reentry Particle Effect" in the add-ons section. 

[Cydonian Monk]

2 hours ago, Kuzzter said:

So, is the entry fire streak part of Scatterer or another mod, or is it an effect you added? 

 

24 minutes ago, Andem said:

SSearch for "Reentry Particle Effect" in the add-ons section. 

Yep. Believe it or not that's a stock effect that is disabled by default.

 

4 hours ago, TheGuyNamedAlan said:

This story is beautiful. Ever since i am a youtuber, i would like to request to make a movie out of it. i think it would be amazing. 

Thank you, but at this time I'll have to politely refuse.  There are millions of stories in the endless sky, surely there's one untold that would be better illuminated.

[Commander Zoom]

I really, really want your *VE settings and/or textures, whenever you get around to posting them.

[The Error]

Yaaaay! Happy landings indeed.

[Cydonian Monk]

2 hours ago, Commander Zoom said:

I really, really want your *VE settings and/or textures, whenever you get around to posting them.

I just took a look at my settings, and they're almost all exactly the same as what ships with EVE these days. One big change I make is to increase the detail scale of the cloud layers, so no repeating textures are visible. I also tweak the layer colors a bit. The rest is thanks to Scatterer, which is using its default settings minus the godrays (which are slightly broken).

The config in use while I was taking the photos shown here doesn't include the haze layer or the handful of volcanic plumes (mostly because I haven't fixed my Laythe volcano layer since the texture flipping update). Fair warning: the config I'm using kills map view, which will lag for several seconds while trying to paint everything.

I'll drop my clouds config file into a public Dropbox folder and place a link here before I run off on vacation.

[Cydonian Monk]

11 hours ago, Commander Zoom said:

I really, really want your *VE settings and/or textures, whenever you get around to posting them.

Here ya go: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/75518158/KSP-Mods/BoulderCo/Atmosphere/clouds.cfg

Again it's the "stock" EVE textures, and every texture I'm using should be in the most recent pre-release version up on GitHub. [At least I don't think I've changed the textures - I'm on my MacBook now and I can't see the contents of the dds files to confirm (at least not without performing some virtual machine gymnastics).] There are a couple of cases where I'm not using the cubemaps (Jool), but for most cases the new cubemaps work fine for me.

[TheGuyNamedAlan]

19 hours ago, Cydonian Monk said:

.

 

Thank you, but at this time I'll have to politely refuse.  There are millions of stories in the endless sky, surely there's one untold that would be better illuminated.

No worries. Hope to see the rest of the story :DD

[DMSP]

Pumped for Laythe ground ops.

By the way, @Cydonian Monk, I made three more variations of the Aluminium X4-C. They all look like the classic Aluminium, except that one replaces the fuel tank behind the cockpit with a crew cabin, and the other two have Whiplashes and Panthers, respectively.

I hit past 1,200 m/s with the Whiplash version.

Photos soon.

[Sharpy]

This probably was asked, but... 38 pages.

How did you make it so that all craft from the old save became unowned, untracked space junk?

[Cydonian Monk]

On September 11, 2016 at 10:36 AM, DMSP said:

Pumped for Laythe ground ops.

I am too. Wish I had unlocked wheels when I launched this mess so I could've send a rover. Though after some recent experiences I suspect that would have resulted in a glitchfest. It was a bit amusing (if frustrating) watching things slide around.

On September 11, 2016 at 10:36 AM, DMSP said:

By the way, @Cydonian Monk, I made three more variations of the Aluminium X4-C..... I hit past 1,200 m/s with the Whiplash version.

Cool. I'm not sure I've unlocked Whiplashes yet, but there might be an Al X-4D that uses them when I do. 

 

5 hours ago, Sharpy said:

This probably was asked, but... 38 pages.

How did you make it so that all craft from the old save became unowned, untracked space junk?

A text efitor. Once I had everything in one file I did a search and replace for the "type = ..." entries of each of the ship types that were becomimg debris. Ex: "type = Rover" would be replaced by "type = Debris".

FWIW I use Notepad++ as a text editor on Windows and vim on Unix. This save file has reached the size where it's starting to cause weird navigation issues with Notepad++, and simply can't be edited by the default aps in Windows/OS-X. I might have to use vim from here on out for any fixes.

 

 

An update: I'm back from my vacation, which was rather nice (if hot and humid and at times head-cold-y). Got to visit with quite a few old friends, some for the first time in two decades. Also worked in some space junk with a quick trip to Wallops Island (while headed back from an Island I won't bother naming since I just know our lovely forum software will censor it out), and the Udvar Hazy Center, which is always a nice spot.

Otherwise, some things are really squirrelly back East, but the folks involved seem to be handling it as well as possible.

Of course I come back from vacation to see KSP v1.2 is just around the corner and that KasperVld is leaving.... Apparently we can never get good news without bad news to balance it out. I should have the next mission update sometime this week. 

[The solid fuel chemist]

 Oh dear. I think I see where the stories going. RIP cydonian monks computer. 

[Thedrelle]

Just caught up from the beginning. I have been reading through this on my lunch breaks for the past 3 months. I have to say this is inspired. and inspiring. It's been making me want to play KSP a LOT. (not that I need encouragement there.) and thanks to it, I have been working my way to a larger, more robust Duna mission I am starting in a No Rever Career playthrough. 

looking forward to what happens next!

[Cydonian Monk]

On 9/16/2016 at 11:58 AM, Thedrelle said:

Just caught up from the beginning. I have been reading through this on my lunch breaks for the past 3 months. I have to say this is inspired. and inspiring. It's been making me want to play KSP a LOT....

looking forward to what happens next!

Thank you.  I remember when I would spend all of my spare time reading through the older mission reports on this forum, and it still feels a bit strange to hear that folks are doing the same to read through what I've posted. 

More soon!

 

Some thoughts: Structurally, storywise, everything that I've posted to date would constitute what I've been thinking of as Volume 1. "Now the real party could begin" just _feels_ like a good place to end. (Or pause.) Mission accomplished, target achieved, key story points revealed, name said, roll credits, etc. The story isn't over, far from it, but the pieces have been placed, the clocks have run their course, and that first game is on the record sheet.

I don't really track things in terms of Chapters, at least not that make sense to you or the story (a "Chapter" to me ends when the text file I'm writing in gets too big to scroll through easilly), but that first Volume ended up as 8 chapters of roughly 10k words each. I'm not sure of the exact word count of Volume 1, but it's well over 85k, placing this first part of the Forgotten Space Program into the double-length novel category. (But still shorter than Ad Lunam, which clocked in at a very-wordy 106,816 words.)

Many more words to go.

We'll get back to the crew at Laythe and push onwards Into the Unknown in this next Volume. I have a pretty good idea of where I'm going (Great Powers save my computer.....), but as always there'll be surprises thrown at us by the game and by real life. And that Volume starts soon[ish]. Sunday, most likely [or not]. KSP v1.2 is looking really nice......  

Edited September 28, 2016 by Cydonian Monk