KONRAD Telemachus interface

[soundnfury]

KONRAD is Yet Another Telemachus Frontend.  It's a curses program, so each console is a character-cell display in an 80x24 terminal.  (It's aimed at Linux, but ought to work on other OSes - no guarantees though.)

It can be found here, on GitHub.  It's designed to be useful for co-operative "mission control" streams like Real Space Program or Go For Launch.

Here are screenshots of the current consoles, taken during an Atlas-Agena launch (in Realism Overhaul):

Spoiler

The Flight Director console has a scoreboard of the most important information.

 

The Trajectory console, for guidance and orbital status.  Can also be used to send MechJeb commands if run with --mj (not shown here).

The Booster Dynamics console indicates how much oomph the rocket has left.  Requires a JSON Booster specification.

 

Obviously you will need Telemachus in order to use this.  You will also need Python and curses, and a terminal emulator.

An adjunct to KONRAD is the JSON Booster file format, used for describing a space vehicle in sufficient detail for the Booster Dynamics console to give up-to-date delta-V readings.  It's fairly simple (some examples are included in the repository), but does currently have to be created by hand.  It's not too hard to do: just take your vehicle apart into stages, count up the propellants in each, empty them out, and read the dry weight and engine (vacuum) Isp.  For parallel-staged designs a little more cleverness is required; the included MercuryAtlas example shows how to do it.  Basically, you have to guess (or measure in simulations!) how much of your fuel will be left when you stage your boosters away, and that's how much you record as being in the core stage.  If you try and use asparagus staging it'll just completely fail to work; it can currently only reliably cope with at most one 'horizontal' staging event per 'vertical' staging event.  (I have some ideas for dealing with this, but won't bother unless it turns out people actually want to do that kind of thing.)

[soundnfury]

KONRAD has now gained a new console, Retrograde Guidance.  This incorporates a highly sophisticated* simulation engine to provide all the information you need to guide a lander in to a soft touchdown on an airless world.  See the readme for an explanation of how to interpret its dizzying array of numbers.

*Actual sophistication not guaranteed; may include forward-step integrator and trapezium rule.  Requires an accurate ground elevation map; consult SCANsat to obtain this.  Warranty void if used to land on Tylo.

The Retrograde Guidance console during a lunar landing in RSS.

[NathanKell]

Love it!

@Dman979 @CliftonM @Mad Rocket Scientist @ZooNamedGames and other RSP guys, you also might be interested here.

[ZooNamedGames]

Wow, this is amazing. I'm so glad you did this!!

We at the RSP will definately put this to good use.  

[stibbons]

This is lovely. Could look great running on a raspberry pi and custom display setup.

[Dman979]

I wonder, would this work on a Mac?

Also, what are Python and curses, and that terminal emulator you mentioned?

Edited March 30, 2016 by Dman979

[Guest]

10 hours ago, NathanKell said:

Love it!

@Dman979 @CliftonM @Mad Rocket Scientist @ZooNamedGames and other RSP guys, you also might be interested here.

Thanks for the ping!  It's awesome!

[soundnfury]

On 30/03/2016 at 2:45 PM, Dman979 said:

I wonder, would this work on a Mac?

It should do, assuming you mean OS X, which is basically a Unix.

On 30/03/2016 at 2:45 PM, Dman979 said:

Also, what are Python and curses, and that terminal emulator you mentioned?

Python is a programming language, which is interpreted (not compiled), so the interpreter must be installed on the target machine.  curses is a library for terminal control, used for building text-based character-cell user interfaces; Python has a curses wrapper library as part of the standard distribution.  A terminal emulator is a program running under a graphical environment which emulates a text-based video display terminal; popular examples include xterm and rxvt under Linux, or "Terminal" under OS X.

[EDIT] A dependency I forgot to mention before is the Python websocket-client package, which can be obtained via `pip install websocket-client`.  On Debian, `apt-get install python-websocket`.

Edited April 1, 2016 by soundnfury
More deps.

[soundnfury]

Latest addition: Retro console now has 'Touchdown point' lat/long, for precision targeted landings (an advanced topic which the landing tutorial does not cover).  Using this, I managed to land a Surveyor-type probe on the Moon at latitude 20.000°S (approached from a polar orbit; I didn't bother trying to target a specific longitude as well, as that was essentially selected by my orbital LAN).

[soundnfury]

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.

[soundnfury]

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.