THE BARTDON PAPERS - "Cancel all previous directives."

[UnusualAttitude]

7 hours ago, MatterBeam said:

Yes! We're back!

This time face-to-face with a giant asteroid, with none of that flags-and-footprints nonsense. Straight up nuclear reactors.

Although... vacuum toilets?! That's just one accident away from, eh, a de-pooppressurization event.

Yeah, let's just hope that they were designed by Froemone, and not Karanda... And maybe worth the risk if you consider the alternative: pooping in a bag for a year. 

6 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

I don't think any of them have ever shed a tear for what they've done to other species in their own self-interest, so Camwise should have a clean conscience, as should humanity in general.  We're way down on the scale of this planet's worst biologically induced ecological disasters.  Green plants hold that dubious honor and doubtless will keep it until the sun goes red giant and destroys Earth.

Being the progressive kerbalist soul he is (at least in his rational moments), I'm sure Camwise would love to debate the idea that, as the only known intelligent life-form native to the  Sol System, Kerbals have greater responsibility and should seek to rise above their instinctive behaviours for the betterment of nature as a whole. Or something. But, section 2.2b and all that... 

7 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

Somehow, I see this and the chapter heading morphing into "l'enfant terrible".  Will Camwise get a Napolean complex? 

Mmmh... foreshadowing. Love it. 

Well, he is only three feet tall, but I gather this is the average height for a Kerbal. Having said that, Napoleon himself was actually of average height for his time.

This would be disastrous indeed, because he is now a skilled engineer in possession of a multi-megawatt nuclear reactor and half a million tonnes of potential reaction mass that could be turned into kinetic energy. What were you thinking, Resource Companies....?!

[Geschosskopf]

9 hours ago, UnusualAttitude said:

This would be disastrous indeed, because he is now a skilled engineer in possession of a multi-megawatt nuclear reactor and half a million tonnes of potential reaction mass that could be turned into kinetic energy. What were you thinking, Resource Companies....?!

Well, if not Camwise, it would be somebody else with that power.  Which is why the Circus puts so much effort into its indoctrination routines  

[HamnavoePer]

After a long Hiatus, I am back, After having somewhat forgotten about KSP over the past months, i am back and about to binge read all of Camwise since i was last here

 

EDIT: Ok, why did I even bother typing ^ lot...

Edited October 28, 2017 by HamnavoePer

[UnusualAttitude]

9 hours ago, HamnavoePer said:

After a long Hiatus, I am back, After having somewhat forgotten about KSP over the past months, i am back and about to binge read all of Camwise since i was last here

 

EDIT: Ok, why did I even bother typing ^ lot...

Hey, it's cool to see you're still around, Per. Happy bingeing, although I'm afraid I wasn't very productive this summer, so you will catch up pretty quick. Still, take regular breaks ! 

[HamnavoePer]

19 minutes ago, UnusualAttitude said:

Hey, it's cool to see you're still around, Per. Happy bingeing, although I'm afraid I wasn't very productive this summer, so you will catch up pretty quick. Still, take regular breaks ! 

Yeahhhhh.... My binge lasted on the small side of 20 mins. As ong as Cam still keeps coming occasionally I'm happy

[UnusualAttitude]

27 minutes ago, HamnavoePer said:

Yeahhhhh.... My binge lasted on the small side of 20 mins. As ong as Cam still keeps coming occasionally I'm happy

Look on the bright side,  I am still more productive than George R R Martin. 

[HamnavoePer]

Just now, UnusualAttitude said:

Look on the bright side,  I am still more productive than George R R Martin. 

True, True

[greenTurtle1134]

1 hour ago, UnusualAttitude said:

Look on the bright side,  I am still more productive than George R R Martin. 

And more merciful. You've had, what, one betrayal and painful death so far?

[HamnavoePer]

Just now, greenTurtle1134 said:

And more merciful. You've had, what, one betrayal and painful death so far?

Yeah... We need MOAR people being betrayed and killed and we need PAIN

[UnusualAttitude]

12 minutes ago, greenTurtle1134 said:

And more merciful. You've had, what, one betrayal and painful death so far?

11 minutes ago, HamnavoePer said:

Yeah... We need MOAR people being betrayed and killed and we need PAIN

Yes, but just remember that this is a career save and, unlike Mr Martin,  I have to buy my characters with hard-earned funds. Those little green dudes are getting expensive due to the size of my roster... 

One could also argue that the Resource Companies' total body count far exceeds anything the most bloodthirsty Targaryan or Lannister could achieve, if you take into account many years of their repressive policies applied on a global scale.

Also, this story is far from over.... 

[HamnavoePer]

18 hours ago, UnusualAttitude said:

Also, this story is far from over.... 

Good, Good, JUST MAKE SURE THERE'S PAIN

 

EDIT: Oh, hi @Geschosskopf. 

Edited October 29, 2017 by HamnavoePer

[Garibaldi2257]

2 hours ago, UnusualAttitude said:

Yes, but just remember that this is a career save and, unlike Mr Martin,  I have to buy my characters with hard-earned funds. Those little green dudes are getting expensive due to the size of my roster... 

One could also argue that the Resource Companies' total body count far exceeds anything the most bloodthirsty Targaryan or Lannister could achieve, if you take into account many years of their repressive policies applied on a global scale.

Also, this story is far from over.... 

You could use Custom Barn Kit and change the kerbal hiring cost to a fixed rate.

[linuxgurugamer]

On 10/28/2017 at 7:42 PM, Garibaldi2257 said:

You could use Custom Barn Kit and change the kerbal hiring cost to a fixed rate.

Or use the TRP Hire mod to make the hiring of the kerbals more reasonable

[Garibaldi2257]

8 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

Or use the TRP Hire mod to make the hiring of the kerbals more reasonable

I didn't know about that one. haven't been playing much recently

[linuxgurugamer]

Update coming out tonight for it

[UnusualAttitude]

Hey there.

Contrary to appearances, I have been working on this at least a couple of nights each week since the last post. And boy, some of the stuff I've been doing has taken a real long time.

Like the Board's new probe fleet trying to brute force its way to the Ice Giants and the Kuiper Belt in 2-4 years with sun-diving oberth transfers on gridded ions and nukes. Mmmh, delta-vee... but just look at that burn time...

The bad news is that with such transfers, orbital insertion around Uranus and Pluto will require more than 40 km/sec. 

The other bad news is that there is no good news.

However, once I'm through these burns, and once I've counted the additional white hairs in my beard since I started them, I should have enough material to write several new episodes of the Logs. In the meantime, a small addition will be published shortly. I should really have included it in the previous episode, come to think of it.

And, who knows, maybe as a Christmas or New Year gift, we might finally get around to finding out what the hell happened to your favourite character on this show... 

[UnusualAttitude]

YEAR 14, DAY 254. CAMWISE.

...and so, we toiled.

I worked for days to get the mining rig set up on the asteroid's surface, smashing all previous records for time spent on EVA. With assistance from Jenbles who sat comfortably in the relative safety of L'Orphelin's cockpit, I spent hour after hour crawling through the black dust of the asteroid's surface.

Most of these spacewalks were carried out untethered, and were risky. You might have thought that the presence of the asteroid's solid surface would make things easier...

Nope.

In fact it was a hazard that added far more problems than it solved. Its negligible gravity field wasn't helpful in any meaningful way. Y13-HO3's crust was covered in loose material that I had to avoid disturbing, unless I wanted to work surround by clouds of dust and grit that wouldn't settle for several hours.

Because there was no pull towards the body's centre, the rocky outcrops I worked around appeared to me more like vertical walls than rough but largely horizontal surfaces. My inner ear, by now well attuned to floating in the void, was constantly tricked into telling me that I was about to fall from the top of a sheer cliff. I returned from every single sortie with my space suit covered in jet black grime, absolutely filthy.

I secured mounts for our equipment and pipes in the crumbling, grainy regolith.

I connected the long power lines that formed a web across half of the rock's sunward hemisphere.

I made sure that the mining rig and the reactor were properly attached and would not budge when the laser was eventually switched on, melting into the innards of our new home.

And when all of this was accomplished, I collapsed, exhausted, at L'Orphelin's engineering station and flicked the master switch that turned on the massive nuke. I was almost too tired to care or worry whether it would work or not. Or whether the bulge in the asteroid's surface that we had put in between the rig and our ship would be sufficient to block the radiation.

Radiators deployed. Control rods slowly retracted. Kastria's new disasterpiece, crafted with help from alien robots, began to warm up and the dosimeters in our crew cabin remained silent. Running at a mere fraction of its maximum output, the monstrous reactor was already providing enough power to run our life support systems and charge our batteries. Switching on the drilling rig wouldn't even make it break sweat.

Our power source was officially up and running. It was time to report back to Prosperity and tell Commander Astrice that she could make her merry way back to Lunar orbit, and leave us to our work. From there, no doubt, Prosperity would be sent on another mining expedition. Delivering another crew to another Near Earth rock. Abandoning more of her children in deep space.

From the Resource Company's point of view, we had already served our purpose. We had set up the ISRU equipment, and in a few month's time, a solar tug would wing its way across the few million kilometres that separated us from Earth to collect our harvest of water.

Y13-HO3 was a quasi-satellite of Earth, meaning that it was in a 1 to 1 orbital resonance with our home planet, but its trajectory was more eccentric. For half of the year, we would drift sunwards and ahead of Earth's path around Sol, before lagging behind and returning to approximately the same position after one complete revolution.

This meant that unless the Board authorised Prosperity to perform a costly – and unlikely – high energy trajectory rather than wait for a transfer window, there would only be one chance each year to hitch a ride home. Until we delivered the goods, such a waste of precious reaction mass was unlikely to occur. We could therefore look forward to at least twelve months living on our tiny island in space, in an artificial cave dug out by a nuclear-powered laser beam.

Prosperity would return to our asteroid eventually, of this I had no doubt. Whether Jenbles and I would still be alive – or sane – by that time was something that remained to be seen.

Edited December 7, 2017 by UnusualAttitude

[Geschosskopf]

7 hours ago, UnusualAttitude said:

The bad news is that with such transfers, orbital insertion around Uranus and Pluto will require more than 40 km/sec. 

Egad!  So 4.5hrs to burn 26km/sec, meaning about 8 hours for the capture burns?!?!?!?!?  Is that even possible before you leave Pluto's SOI?  I remember the 1st time I tried the original version of the Near Future VASIMR with a get-there-fast trip to Moho that required a 6600m/s capture burn.  The SOI was nowhere near wide enough at the TWR that ship had.  It was wide enough to take a chunk off that number and put the ship into an orbit rather like Moho's, so that an orbit or 2 later when they met up again, I could finish the job.  But Pluto's got a really huge orbital period so that won't do you much good.

 

7 hours ago, UnusualAttitude said:

And, who knows, maybe as a Christmas or New Year gift, we might finally get around to finding out what the hell happened to your favourite character on this show... 

That would be nice.  There are too many MIAs of importance  

 

7 hours ago, UnusualAttitude said:

Prosperity would return to our asteroid eventually, of this I had no doubt. Whether Jenbles and I would still be alive – or sane – by that time is something that remained to be seen.

Does Camwise at least have free NetFliks ?

 

[UnusualAttitude]

7 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

Egad!  So 4.5hrs to burn 26km/sec, meaning about 8 hours for the capture burns?!?!?!?!?  Is that even possible before you leave Pluto's SOI?  I remember the 1st time I tried the original version of the Near Future VASIMR with a get-there-fast trip to Moho that required a 6600m/s capture burn.  The SOI was nowhere near wide enough at the TWR that ship had.  It was wide enough to take a chunk off that number and put the ship into an orbit rather like Moho's, so that an orbit or 2 later when they met up again, I could finish the job.  But Pluto's got a really huge orbital period so that won't do you much good.

4.5 hours was just the time to node in this case. The actual burn was more than nine hours, so a 40 km/s burn would take the best part of a day.

The Ice Giants have massive Hill Spheres due to their distance from Sol, but you're probably correct to assume that such a burn wouldn't fit into Pluto's SOI. That doesn't really matter though, as we can start the burn well before we encounter our target. With such a transfer, you're basically screaming in on a perpendicular course at tens of kms per sec, so it's the equivalent of a 90 degree handbrake turn to match the body's velocity. At such speed with ion thrusters it isn't possible to gain anything from burning close to the target anyway.

Indeed, DSP's dual-stage gridded thruster (courtesy of the Near Future mod) is still overpowered by at least a factor of x1,000 in terms of thrust (with a hypothetical advanced ion thruster and a multi-megawatt reactor you might get a few Newtons, not 5,5 kN..!) so in reality such a probe would have to start matching the target's trajectory several months out. I'm not gonna lose any sleep over this and I may end up simply hyper-editing the probes into orbit and dumping the corresponding fuel to avoid locking up my computer for a day unnecessarily...

7 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

Does Camwise at least have free NetFliks ?

Unfortunately not. He has only his pain and loss, and the ghosts of his departed loved ones to haunt him in the darkness, until a violent death eventually liberates him from this living hell. But when you put it like that, it does sound like something you might find on NetFliks....

Edited December 6, 2017 by UnusualAttitude

[Geschosskopf]

1 hour ago, UnusualAttitude said:

4.5 hours was just the time to node in this case. The actual burn was more than nine hours, so a 40 km/s burn would take the best part of a day.

Oh yeah, I see that now.  For some reason, I get those numbers mixed up all the time in my own games.  OK, double EGAD!

 

1 hour ago, UnusualAttitude said:

The Ice Giants have massive Hill Spheres due to their distance from Sol, but you're probably correct to assume that such a burn wouldn't fit into Pluto's SOI. That doesn't really matter though, as we can start the burn well before we encounter our target. With such a transfer, you're basically screaming in on a perpendicular course at tens of kms per sec, so it's the equivalent of a 90 degree handbrake turn to match the body's velocity. At such speed with ion thrusters it isn't possible to gain anything from burning close to the target anyway.

Yeah, you'd definitely have to start braking long before you got to Pluto's SOI.  But that brings up the issue of hitting the target at all.  I guess your transfer trajectory is asymptotically as close to being a straight line as possible so slowing down significantly prior to reaching Pluto shouldn't make a noticeable change in where in space  your paths cross.  However, it would affect the timing, so maybe Pluto won't meet you there if you had an intercept plotted from when you left Earth.  But I suppose the early braking node could also have a few clicks of windage to lead the target a bit more.

 

1 hour ago, UnusualAttitude said:

Indeed, DSP's dual-stage gridded thruster (courtesy of the Near Future mod) is still overpowered by at least a factor of x1,000 in terms of thrust (with a hypothetical advanced ion thruster and a multi-megawatt reactor you might get a few Newtons, not 5,5 kN..!) so in reality such a probe would have to start matching the target's trajectory several months out. I'm not gonna lose any sleep over this and I may end up simply hyper-editing the probes into orbit and dumping the corresponding fuel to avoid locking up my computer for a day unnecessarily...

Yeah, the game is not really built to deal with even the highly OP electric propulsion it does have, let alone anything remotely realistic.  It's not only the sheer boredom involved with the long burns, it's the lack of a navigational interface designed for continuous vs. discrete thrust.  This is why I very rarely use such engines.  I long for the day when there's a mod or stock feature that A) lets you set up continuous thrust trajectories and B) will then perform them quietly in the background while you focus on something more entertaining    There have been a few attempts at Part A of this but I don't think any of them are being maintained these days, and AFAIK part B has never been attempted.

As regards HyperEdit, I don't recommend using it to change orbits these days.  Instead, use the stock cheat for that.  I recently had a problem where using HyperEdit to put a ship in orbit around another planet caused the ship to be treated as "landed", which caused all sorts of inconvenience.

 

1 hour ago, UnusualAttitude said:

Unfortunately not. He has only his pain and loss, and the ghosts of his departed loved ones to haunt him in the darkness, until a violent death eventually liberates him from this living hell. But when you put it like that, it does sound like something you might find on NetFliks....

So, does that mean Jembles has NetFliks beamed in from corporate HQ, but Camwise can't watch it?

 

[MatterBeam]

@Geschosskopf

I've been thinking about the problem of long continuous burns in KSP and I've thought of two things we could try:

Use a reference ship. This reference ship is composed of three parts: engine, drone core, propellant tank. You set the mass of the components so that you have the same mass ratio and acceleration as your full sized craft. Switch on the infinite electricity cheat, switch BetterTimeWarp to x50 or more, and start your burn. The reference ship should behave like the main ship, but with only three parts, you can comfortably achieve 50 times physics acceleration or better. A 20 hour burn becomes 24 minutes of real time...

Once the burn is completed, use HyperEdit to place the ship on a Rendezvous with the reference ship.

Or, use Hyperedit 'kicking'. Use the velocity modifier to add, for example, 10m/s at a time, then time warp until you spend an equal amount of time as the ship would have taken to produce 10m/s. For example, if you acceleration is only 0.001g, you would take 17 minutes. Add 10m/s to prograde, time warp 17 minutes, and repeat. This approximates a continuous burn...

What do you think?

Edited December 6, 2017 by MatterBeam

[NotAgain]

Hey, @UnusualAttitude, where's the CM for the Opulence from?

[HamnavoePer]

Ohh, This intrigues me, I am STOKED for the next instalment

[Geschosskopf]

1 hour ago, MatterBeam said:

What do you think?

Hoooo......  I had to read that several times to wrap my head around it to the point of understanding both concepts.  I'm not used to thinking in those terms     But anyway,, I guess those would work.

There's also the option I always forget----KOS.  You can use this both to solve highly complex navigational issues and to execute the resulting burns.  Although I'm not sure if KOS does background execution, I suspect it could both plot and perform a continuous burn if given a set of starting conditions and a target.  I've only barely messed with KOS myself, but I used it successfully to pilot a ship using the USI Alcubierre warp drive.  Contrary to popular prejudice, this is not a "magic bullet" panacea for all your spaceflight problems, it instead has all of the same problems as before, only in different format.  The only real difference is reduced travel time.  But anyway, the game is even less equipped to deal with this sort of navigational problem than it is for continuous burns, so I needed to do it myself.  KOS was up to the job, so I figure it can handle this sort of thing.  

But there's still the question of background processing.

[UnusualAttitude]

6 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

I long for the day when there's a mod or stock feature that A) lets you set up continuous thrust trajectories and B) will then perform them quietly in the background while you focus on something more entertaining

This. 

4 hours ago, MatterBeam said:

Use a reference ship. This reference ship is composed of three parts: engine, drone core, propellant tank. You set the mass of the components so that you have the same mass ratio and acceleration as your full sized craft. Switch on the infinite electricity cheat, switch BetterTimeWarp to x50 or more, and start your burn. The reference ship should behave like the main ship, but with only three parts, you can comfortably achieve 50 times physics acceleration or better. A 20 hour burn becomes 24 minutes of real time...

Once the burn is completed, use HyperEdit to place the ship on a Rendezvous with the reference ship.

Or, use Hyperedit 'kicking'. Use the velocity modifier to add, for example, 10m/s at a time, then time warp until you spend an equal amount of time as the ship would have taken to produce 10m/s. For example, if you acceleration is only 0.001g, you would take 17 minutes. Add 10m/s to prograde, time warp 17 minutes, and repeat. This approximates a continuous burn...

Very interesting ideas. Both of which I could have used to reduce the real-time duration of the sun-diving oberth maneuvers (although I couldn't get BetterTimeWarp to work in this version for some reason). In the end, I simply entered the burns into the Remote Tech computer, left it at x4 and went out to ride my bike. This must be one of the rare upsides to Remote Tech..!

And, as Geschosskopf mentions... thrusting in the background. There may come a time in the Camwise Logs where this will have to be a thing.

3 hours ago, NotAgain said:

Hey, @UnusualAttitude, where's the CM for the Opulence from?

It's the 3.75m 6-seat command module from the SSTULabs mod, based on the Orion capsule. SSTU is full of awesomeness, particularly for Real Solar System, and a real life-saver in terms of part count. You might want to consider it for your RSS save: it has Soviet-styled modules, station modules and engines based on real-life equivalents. It even has a Shuttle fuselage as a single component.