The Kerbal Space Agency: To Be Continued...?

[Drew Kerman]

31 minutes ago, Beetlecat said:

I'd like to start playing with KOS soon, so once again Sounding Rockets + KSA will be a good guide.

AFCS is on github don’t forget if you want a reference or existing framework

[Beetlecat]

1 hour ago, Drew Kerman said:

AFCS is on github don’t forget if you want a reference or existing framework

Thank you for that reminder! That'll be a great place to start/aspire to.

[Drew Kerman]

Operations Summary – Week of 4/30/18

Images from the Week Gallery

Third Progeny Mk6 Launch Sees Continued Success

You can get all the nitty-gritty technical details in the flight analysis report published earlier today, but the TL;DR version is that we’ve once again gone up into space and returned an intact payload, further exploring the hazardous radiation region. The final launch in this campaign remains on track for next Tuesday and we’ve been able to move up the launch time to 12:38 UTC thanks to flying the same science instruments and being able to use the recovered and already-integrated payload to reduce build time.

First Civvie Flight of 2018

Now that the Deuce is in full service we won’t have many missions for the Civvie, however it remains useful for at least one purpose, which is to gather atmospheric samples like it did at the start of this week. This is done periodically over the grasslands to the west and northwest to measure and track the amounts of pollen in the air, which can be a potential health hazard for kerbs living on the surface. The sample areas are well within the range of the smaller aircraft and flying slow allows the air sampler to take better measurements and the scoops to not be damaged by high air flow.

KerBalloon Suffers Stormy Seas

In an attempt to reach Zone 60P-5X down in the southern sea to release a low-altitude KerBalloon the MSV Lymun encountered a severe storm, which is not uncommon in that region. Unfortunately the storm claimed the lives of three crew working the deck who were swept overboard by large waves. The KerBalloon crew remained belowdecks throughout the ordeal and Specialist Bill, who only recently began accompanying sea voyages after staying on dry land throughout 2017, became so seasick he still couldn’t stand up by the time the ship limped back to port later in the day. Needing engine repairs and a general inspection, the ship will not be ready to head out again until late next week at the earliest for another attempt. Bill made a full recovery after a day of rest back on land.

Extremis Completes Phase Two Calculations

We’ve already reported on what the Extremis program astrodynamicists were up to earlier this year and now they are able to move on to the next step as scheduled, which is to determine the fly-by routes taken by the Extremis probes. Originally there were supposed to only be three, but it may require 4 or 5 to get around to visiting all the planets – this is what the team now has to determine. Several routes, like a hop from Kerbin to Eve to Jool, were deliberately not plotted to any further planets so that a feasible route had a better chance of being plotted for an initial mission design before trying to reach more distant targets. We’ll have another update next week with the final results of the trajectory analysis.

Security Tightens Around Monolith as Research Continues

This past weekend saw some pilgrims attempting to approach the Monolith under cover of darkness. They were quickly spotted and apprehended, then released to return to Umbarg via the underground roadway. A story broke the next day on KNN that the pilgrims had been roughed up and threatened by KSC security – this has been denied and we can also confirm these are completely false allegations. Unfortunately there has been an ongoing battle among the news media, political and religious figures ever since the Presider bypassed the Assembly to ratify the laws that allowed surface operations to continue. Thankfully this has for the most part failed to have any affect on us worth reporting, until this past weekend.

Security around the Monolith has since been tightened even further, especially as experiments on the edifice have resumed, which is apparently what the various Monolithic followers find the most repulsive. Another attempt was made to try to access the inside of the Monolith via a high powered laser cutter, which was attempted late last year with a less-powerful version. Unfortunately the failed attempt also took down power to the entire KSC campus for several hours, thankfully not seriously impacting any operations. Interesting news that has come out since then however is that the teams studying the crystal formations over in Umbarg registered an energy output while the laser was firing, suggesting that the heat from the laser was converted to electricity and distributed to prevent the surface from taking any damage. Scientists are still studying the crystals for use as a potential means of energy storage.

ATN Database

The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 1,915 asteroids and 4 updated with new observation data.

Celestial Snapshot of the Week

Not much happening in the heavens lately but we are approaching opposition with Urlum and Sarnus, visible here rising shortly after sunset as fuel trucks prepare to tank up a Progeny Mk6 Block I rocket. We passed closest approach with Neidon earlier today, although “close” is a purely relative term when talking about a shortest distance of 399,918,562.432km!

From the Desk of Drew Kerman (Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff)

Spoiler

Written on 4/14/18

Everything is put putting right along. So far so good at being able to do a day’s KSA work in a real day. Pacing seems to be on track. So much fun to be launching rockets again!

Mk6 launch

Okay this time I nailed it completely on the first try, data logging and all, which is great because as complexity grows a botched launch is going to cause me more and more time to reset and try again. It may reach a point where if I botch up a launch for some unrelated technical reason I will have to come up with a problem to delay or destroy the vehicle in the story because I won’t be able to try again that day.

A third MSV was introduced now that I’ll be sending KerBalloon missions further afield and the ships I need may not always be available. I was going to have it be more of a last-minute thing because Lymun was damaged out at sea but then I realized they wouldn’t have been dependent on Lymun in the first place because they would have known ahead of time it wouldn’t be available.

I forgot I was going to be away from the computer during the actual launch thanks to the delay I wrote in, which I try not to do. Sometimes I guess I forget about the real world… *sigh*

Once again proof that it’s good I only keep one copy of the finance sheet available for any given month, because it would be a pain to go back and revise previous reports when I find an error or omission like I just did this week when I realized I wasn’t charging the Progenitor program for using UTV vehicles to transport the balloons for release – at least when releasing from land…. which actually makes me realize right now that I charged one launch UTV use when the balloon was released off the deck of the range vessel. D’oh!

So thanks to the fact that I use kOS to save the game as soon as the rocket enters space the boosters are still traveling as well within loaded distance thanks to PhysicsRangeExtender, which means after the launch I can reload the save and track the boosters down to see where they land without having to bother re-launching the rocket.

Alaba encounter

I found another bug in KSPTOT methinks, though the author has yet to respond to my latest forum posts. No worries, he gets around to things eventually. I’m just happy that I can continue to help improve the program even without launching things into orbit. So yea I always keep an eye on Alaba in the tracking station each day to make sure it doesn’t sneak a Mun intercept without me knowing, which is when I caught the most recent one. All observatories were facing away at the time, which is why it took a day for anyone to realize what had happened, since Alaba is only visible for about 1/4 of it’s orbit at this point in Kerbin’s travels about the sun. I’ve already got a workaround for the issue in case it’s not resolved by the next encounter.

Taking over Kerbalism?

Looks like I will finally be forced to take up maintenance of a mod if the author of Kerbalism does not return by the time I’m ready to update to v1.4.x. There’s already someone else taking up the torch but they’ve stripped out the mod’s communication system, which was the most realistic-focused one to be found at this time. Unlike other comm mods it more accurately models the current use and design of the Deep Space Network, requiring vessels to connect to Kerbin via a high-gain antenna and can only talk to or relay data between craft with short-gain antenna (like the Mars orbiters do). In addition it modeled bandwidth of a signal based on distance and power – the further away the probe got the lower the transmission rate became. Signals could also be interrupted by solar activity. I want to keep this in Kerbalism moving forward so I would need to manage my own fork. ShotugunNinja, the original mod author, never said he wasn’t coming back though so I’m hoping he returns and I don’t have to spend additional time on this.

VAB photos

had some integration shots in the gallery this week. They are fun to show off but a royal pain in the ass to make so I don’t do them a lot although over time these past few years I’ve worked up methods to get better at it. Basically I use Editor Extensions Redux to remove the offset limitations and move parts all over the VAB to create the initial layout. Then I park the camera and take several shots of various workers running around. There is a bug(?) that prevents workers off camera from leaving their stationary spots and moving around until the camera looks at them so eventually I have to pan away to get some more action around the vessel parts. If I move the camera I’m never getting it back to that same spot again but panning is okay, I use Floaty to overlay the original perspective so I can look back that same way for more shots. Then I use Action Groups Extended to hide the tool buttons and left-side menu so I can get a wider shot. After that it’s layering and compositing the various images to keep the workers I want and remove the ones I don’t. For cases like this photo where I want to specifically place a worker, I will take a shot of him elsewhere in the VAB at a similar camera perspective, cut him out and composite him into the scene.

 

[Drew Kerman]

Operations Summary – Week of 5/7/18

Images from the Week Gallery

Progenitor Program Wraps Launch Campaign with Successful Final Flight

The flight analysis from the last launch was posted earlier today, summarizing both the flight and its relation to previous launches at increasing azimuths while exploring the region of hazardous radiation above the planet. This last launch showed no increase in radiation levels and has allowed the team to decide how they want to continue with the Mk6 Block I and Block II to attempt to further define the shape of the radiation region. The current plan is to launch another Mk6 Block I northward at the end of this month to see if similar radiation readings can be obtained – lift off is scheduled for 5/29 @ 13:49 UTC. After that by mid-June we will have assembled two Block II rockets that will be used to attempt to punch through what we think is the thickest region above the equator.

This week’s launch was also nearly scrubbed by a coordinated effort from Monlithic followers that thankfully did not execute as planned. A lone kerbal was intercepted by KSC security when he ran out of the public viewing areas towards the launch pad screaming religious verse. The viewing areas are just over 600m away from the pad and running full tilt a kerbal in good shape could have reached the rocket inside of 5 minutes, which was how much time remained to launch when the runner left the viewing area. According to the leader that ran out, the plan was for around two dozen followers to storm the launch site to overwhelm the security forces trying to catch them all. Why this didn’t happen, the leader could not say – they either got cold feet, thought he was joking or thought they didn’t have enough kerbs as many could not make the launch after the timing was moved up. The leader was released later that day, as we have no real charges to bring up that would stick in court. Everyone involved has been black-listed from visiting KSC in the future and the security teams have been discussing whether to implement additional measures during launches.

Ascension Program Rough Timeline Published

Although we tried our best to stick to the original plan of launching the Ascension Mk1 by the end of this month, too much time was spent idle during the legal/political mess earlier this year. The delay isn’t too bad though, with the current launch date set for no earlier than 6/5, which is the soonest we can get the whole vessel assembled if no problems arise during integration. The stabilizer fins and control surfaces are set to arrive this coming week while the 1 ton test weight is finishing up manufacturing in Ockr to be shipped over to us so we can put in the instrumentation and batteries. A second launch will follow after the next rocket finishes construction by the end of June for lift off at the start of July. The plan for these early first flights remains the same as covered earlier.

Here is the rough timeline for kerbed space flight, which will fall under the Ascension program:

2018
Jun: capsule prototypes delivery
Jun-Jul: ground/atmospheric capsule testing (kerbed/unkerbed)
Aug: space capsule testing (unkerbed)
Oct: capsule production delivery
Oct-Dec: ground/atmospheric capsule testing/training (kerbed/unkerbed)
Jun-Dec: crew training

2019
Jan-Feb: Space capsule testing (unkerbed)
NET Mar: Kerbed sub-orbital flight
Jan-?: crew training
mid-2019: Kerbed orbital flight

Deuce Explores Polar Radiation

A two-day mission to the northern ice caps was conducted by Commander Valentina and Captain Jebediah this week, the second attempt after their first try had them turning back due to increasing levels of radiation being detected by their onboard instruments. After the Deuce returned to KSC for active operations last week it was fitted with temporary shielding to protect just the cockpit from radiation levels up to 0.5rad/hr – any more and too much additional structural work would have had to have been done. Thankfully the voyage through the hazardous radiation region did not record levels higher than 0.078rad/hr at 6km, and levels only as high as 0.067rad/hr at 3km. The high level at 6km remained constant for 19.635km while the high level at 3km remained constant for only 18.844km, which means at ground level the radiation increase should be even less for an even shorter amount of time. While we obviously wouldn’t suggest anyone camp out there (it takes ~37rads to start to show symptoms of radiation sickness) travel through the area is not an issue, which is great news for researchers planning polar expeditions. An airship mission dispatched earlier this year also confirmed a similar region at the southern ice caps, though it was not prepared to explore it fully. Both regions have colorful atmospheric aurora over them, which no one thinks is a coincidence.

Also this week saw a new blueprint published for the Deuce’s final design as well as an early render of the K-3X.

KerBalloon Loses Payload Due to Stormy Seas

On their second attempt at braving the notoriously rough southern seas to launch a low-altitude balloon for temperature measurements, the crew of the MSV Lymun were unable to dispatch the smaller recovery craft to fish out the payload before it took on too much water and sank. KerBalloon program managers are unable to afford new equipment to replace the reusable parts that were lost, but enough remains to continue operations. They are also looking at ways to mitigate loss in rougher waters, including adding flotation collars to the balloon casing and seeing if the Maritime Service Vessel itself can carry equipment that would enable it to lift the payload from the water without having to dispatch a smaller craft unable to handle rough seas.

Alaba’s Next Encounter Predicted

While the astronomers keeping tabs on Alaba are still working to figure out the software bug that caused them to miss the last encounter, they’ve manually worked around the issue to discover that the moonlet should next pass through Mun’s SOI on 5/15 @ 01:44 UTC.

Extremis Extends Phase Two Calculations

Check out this report to learn more about the completion of the initial run of 70+ trajectories and why more searching is needed for missions to run between late 2018 and early 2021. Thankfully a great route was found for late 2021 that will fly-by Eve, Jool and Plock, taking just under 3 years at a cost of 2.6km/s of delta-V.

ATN Database

The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 1,931 asteroids and 3 updated with new observation data.

From the Desk of Drew Kerman (Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff)

Spoiler

Written on 5/1/18

Rough last week and change. First off, Avengers Infinity War was coming and I had to of course do a marathon of all the previous movies leading up to it, so that was 2-3 per day for 6 days to get through them all. I saw Infinity War the Friday night it came out and yea, it was pretty great. On top of all that a vehicle accidentally rammed my building and so I lost most of a day or two while access was limited due to structural damage, and thus I couldn’t work on my PC and had to shack up with my aunt and grandma down the street. Long story short, I’ve only got 10 days lead time now so it’s time to grind and earn back those 11 days to return to a 3-week lead. Inevitably the KSA operational pace suffers as a result, although I try not to let it.

Custom contracts

I’ve mostly given up on letting the game give me contracts and have just started using old contracts as a basis for new contracts that I assign myself. The game’s contract system isn’t entirely useless though as I still like it for giving me ideas for contracts.

Mk6 launch

I suppose there was some slight unconscious bias in choosing 5 flights at 15° intervals knowing ahead of time what the shape of the radiation field around Kerbin actually looks like (you can see it in the Map view or in the Tracking Station using 0,1,2,3 on the numpad) but I did not calculate anything beforehand to determine that I would miss the field by the last launch. The plan just seemed to make sense regardless of what I already knew. If the last flight hadn’t missed the radiation field, the Progenitor program would be doing something completely different, like buying 2 more Mk6 Block I rockets to push all the way direct south.

So the system crash due to a write error was a real thing. For some reason kOS had a sharing issue with the telemetry log file, which meant it was trying to write to it while another program was using it. I don’t know what program that was because I didn’t have the file opened in any window I could see. After the second time it occurred I restarted my computer and then the entire launch went fine on that third try. I still kept the crash as a story point tho, and I could have actually done what I said was done to recover the rocket. I was ready to do it if it happened a third time.

I actually forgot to remove the code that detached the fairings during the flight itself, but since that doesn’t really make a huge difference in the outcome I didn’t bother re-flying after realizing it.

Yes, the launch viewing area really is just over 600m from the pad and yes a kerbal really could run that far under 5 minutes – although to be honest I did not think to fact check this when I first wrote the tweets.

Damn typos

I hate it when I miss these. Oh well.

 

[Drew Kerman]

Operations Summary – Week of 5/14/18

Images from the Week Gallery

KerBalloon Drop Partnership Renewal with Genesis

Last year KerBalloon and Genesis programs teamed up to use a Civvie to deploy balloons in flight, which was met with some success. After a few missions the team-up was dropped so a full review of the joint program could determine whether it would be worth pursuing again when the Deuce came into service and offered up an even better platform for deploying balloons off the roof rather than the belly. Despite the benefits of getting the balloon to the location to be deployed, the method gave no benefit to recovery crews that still had to travel the same distance to get the payload after it landed – especially over long ranges. Closer to home, some savings could be had when using UTVs but with KerBalloon deployments ranging much further from KSC nowadays this benefit is lost.

The teams are still holding out for the possibility of pursuing this partnership again when communication satellites are available to relay data from distant deployment locations the Deuce could fly to. Despite not collecting the payload afterwards, the loss of any reusable parts could be less than the cost of retrieving them, and the data would still be transmitted home via satellite relay.

Genesis Continues to Pursue Partnership with Progenitor

Now that the Deuce has been put into full service, Genesis and Progenitor programs can at last begin to move forward with a plan first concocted last year to mount a Progeny Mk1-B rocket atop the Deuce and fire it off at an altitude of around 7km ASL. We’re not talking significant gains in vehicle performance here, the whole project is merely a proof-of-concept for future aircraft that could fly in the upper-atmosphere and perform similar launches with heavier vehicles, perhaps a future version of the Progeny rocket.

We’ve had a nearly-completed Mk1-B rocket collecting dust in the VAB for months now and Lead Engineer Simon will have some of his engineers start to get it ready for flight. Maybe. The rocket will be flying when it is detached from the Deuce but it might not fire its engines. We first need to make sure that a clean and proper separation is achieved before igniting the rocket, which will be done via a camera on the roof of the aircraft. If separation looks good, the launch control team will send the rocket off. Right now the mission is scheduled for sometime in Mid-June.

Astronomers Nail Alaba Prediction

Identifying a bug in their orbital propagation software last month after noticing they missed an SOI transit by Alaba, astronomers came up with a workaround and were able to make another prediction on when the moonlet would next encounter Mun. Turns out they managed to get it right to within 10 seconds – maybe even better but they were unable to see the encounter itself due to Mun being in daylight at the time. The margin of error was determined based on the slight difference in the actual current orbit and the one they had planned to see post-encounter. It was very close. They’ve used the same technique to determine the next encounter is on 6/4 and if things remain accurate they will once again attempt to propagate forward through multiple encounters to see whether Alaba ends up being ejected or smashed into Kerbin or Mun.

KerBalloon Successfully Braves the Northern Sea

After a near-disastrous trip to the southern sea, this week’s mission from the KerBalloon team saw them trip over 1,200km into the northern sea to potentially face similar conditions when releasing and recovering a low-altitude balloon. They returned safe and sound to port today after 2.2 days at sea. Bill was a bit shaky on his legs still but says overall the trip has hardened him further and the big waves don’t bother him as much. Bob was planning to be out on the deck most of the time to help out but the crew refused to let him, although they did thank him for wanting to help.

ATN Database

The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 1,960 asteroids and 1 updated with new observation data.

Celestial Snapshot of the Week

Our favorite astronomical pun is the “Eve”ning star, seen here showing above the mountains to the west as the sky darkens. Duna is also starting to become visible towards the top of the image.

From the Desk of Drew Kerman (Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff)

Spoiler

Written on 5/4/18

Only 1 week behind and hoping to continue the catch-up over the next few days. I just finished reading Artemis by Andy Weir and I also have Chasing New Horizons loaded up on the iPad to read next. I’ve been doing a day of KSP work then a chapter or two of the book – it worked out well as a break between KSP sessions.

This week was pretty easy since it was mostly setup – although the setup covered a excrements ton of things. My process for keeping everything organized is insanely simple – I just write it all down. I literally have a plain text file in which I compose and date every tweet. They are all listed in chronological order. Below the most recent planned tweets are dates under which I have written what goes on at those dates – sometimes generally sometimes specifically. So I’m currently at May 18th. Lets say I decide to tweet something on May 18th that I know I’m going to have to follow up on later in the month. If I know what day then I’ll make a line somewhere below with the date and a note about what I’m supposed to follow up with that day. If not I have a general list of things that need to get done that month at the bottom of all the May dates with specific stuff I’ve noted so far. Pretty simple. I get an idea for a future story plot? I just note it below. Now I can mostly forget about it until I reach that point down in the text file, after progressing through however many days to get there. If I reach that point and realize I forgot to do some setup tweets beforehand, well that’s why I like having a 3-week lead time because that’s generally enough time to go back and add some relevant setup tweets before anything related to this upcoming event is published.

Now, I just need to keep seasonal allergies in check – went back on some over the counter meds after being laid up for almost two days when the pollen levels spiked. I don’t even know what I’m allergic too I just know what meds makes me feel better – it’s a thing I didn’t even have to deal with until a few years ago.

 

[Drew Kerman]

Operations Summary – Week of 5/21/18

Images from the Week Gallery

Progenitor and Ascension Readying to Head to Space

The next  launch is nearing and the Progeny Mk6 Block I rocket has finished its final inspection. It will launch from the north field where we sent up Progeny Mk2s on eastward trajectories back in 2016. Launch time remains 13:49 UTC this coming Tuesday. In addition, the parts have arrived to begin construction on the Progeny Mk6 Block II rockets set to go up in mid-June. We’ll have more concrete details like dates and times after the first Ascension Mk1 launch but we can say that no payload instruments other than the radiation sensor will be on the first launch as we’re still not sure the air brakes will be able to get it back safely from well beyond 500km apokee.

Speaking of which, the Ascension Mk1 is continuing to come together nicely in the VAB, next week the 1t test weight will get its comms, data recorders, batteries and science instruments installed for the flight. We’ll also be attaching the radial parachutes to the booster for our attempt at recovering the entire rocket for study. Launch time has been set – get ready for our first orbital attempt on 6/6 @ 20:17 UTC! Succeed or fail, parts are already being made for the following Mk1 that will go up sometime in early July.

Genesis Tests New Instruments

This week the Deuce flew two missions, starting with a survey flight out east for a contract during which a new camera was tested. Designed to be radially attached directly to a fuselage and streamlined against the airflow this “booster cam” as it is known will serve the purpose of allowing controllers to monitor payloads deployed off the roof of the aircraft. It will also be used for Ascension rockets to allow review of footage capturing the booster rockets falling away from the Mk1 Block II design or just monitoring the fins and control surfaces of the Block I.

Later in the week Jeb and Val flew another flight to test out the radially-attached mystery goo containment unit, which allows for the goo sample to be exposed directly to the atmosphere in flight. No issues were had during the mission, the unit properly opened and closed on command and remained firmly attached to the underbelly of the aircraft. The goo did not seem adversely affected by the flight up as high as 6km ASL.

KerBalloon Sends Up Two Probes

Also getting in on the mystery goo action was KerBalloon, which launched a probe carrying an inline goo containment unit, serving the same function as the radial instrument and allowing the sample onboard to be exposed or sealed on command. A smaller version is also available for use on future Progeny rockets. The goo came back from above the oxygen-rich layer of the atmosphere and scientists at first thought it was dead due to lack of oxygen but after a day back at sea level the goo slowly came out of some sort of stasis and seems to be healthy upon further study. Scientists are fascinated by this ability and wonder if it could even protect the goo while it is in space.

The second balloon release was an actual contract mission that took the crew out in UTVs for the first time in several months. They traversed the rough Highlands west of KSC to reach their release site and sent up a high-altitude balloon carrying material studies and meteorological instruments. The payload is currently being recovered for transport back to KSC and we’ll have a full report here later today upon their return.

Deep Space Network Milestones

Both ATN Central and the Arekibo Radio Observatory passed a critical milestone in their development this week. The Central observatory’s 10m telescope now has all 6 of its mirror segments complete, they will be shipped over to the site for installation starting next month. The Arekibo Radio Observatory has cleared through initial data testing of the comm lines that were installed both overland and undersea, 3 months of rigorous signal transmissions have come up with no major flaws. Both observatories remain on schedule to become fully operational next year. You can learn more about them and our DSN in this article.

Extremis Reconsiders Rejected Phase Two Trajectories

Head over to this news release for details, but the gist is that mission planners failed to take into account large radial/normal Δv components in the initial burn from Kerbin that inflated the total mission Δv cost. So some trajectories that didn’t make the cut for Phase Two because they used >3km/s of Δv could actually require less than that if the escape burn is performed from a more optimal orbit the vessel is launched into rather than the default 200km equatorial orbit used in the initial calculations.

ATN Database

The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 1,982 asteroids and 7 updated with new observation data.

Celestial Snapshot of the Week

We’ve previously featured an image from Commander Valentina taken of Vall eclipsing the sun over Laythe while both dropped shadows on Jool, but this time an opportunity was available to capture Tylo eclipsing the sun over Laythe while they both dropped some shade on Jool. Problem was this event, which occurred multiple times over the course of about 3 weeks, happened mainly during conjunction when Jool was near or behind the sun. Either that or no scopes were properly positioned to capture it. The last possible chance was seized by the Ockr Observatory and even then they barely missed it as sunrise was just minutes away.

From the Desk of Drew Kerman (Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff)

Spoiler

Written on 5/10/18

No notes on anything from this past week. Ops ran smooth, no problems with the aircraft flights. I even made a perfect landing in the Deuce finally! Still only at 2 weeks of lead time but doing my best to catch back up and make it 3.

Future storytelling

No spoilers, just a bit of rambling on how I see things working a few years down the line. The main issue I foresee is that missions out in space and to other planets won’t do well to be told in real-time via tweets like current atmospheric and sub-orbital missions are. Missions further outside the Kerbin system itself will also suffer from communication delays due to the distances involved. What I’m picturing right now are things like “crew diaries” where I post entries to the website that are told in first-person by the crew member and in this they talk about the mission and provide updates. It will be a more traditional storytelling technique similar to what some KSP role players are already doing on the forums and in YouTube series videos that act out events.

Current story arcs

In case you haven’t been paying attention, there’s actually a lot going on in the world besides what the KSA is doing directly. And you do have to pay attention because these arcs are advanced slowly with a tweet here and there and a mention here and there in the Ops Summaries. I’m just going to list a few examples off the top of my head:

• Monolithic stuff – major thread throughout the story so far, that will have far-reaching implications moving forward in several ways
• Monolith itself – crystal energy storage? What’s inside? Who left it here? What purpose was it designed for? Are there more? I have answers to these questions and more already but it’ll take years to get to them all
• Mystery goo – some interesting capabilities of the goo have already been revealed that could affect kerbals in the future
• Politics – right now still a backdrop, but could directly affect the KSA again in the future. Upcoming elections were mentioned for next year…

And more on the way… pay attention to what is said tomorrow! (the first tweet may not be obvious but is indeed a hint at future developments)

 

[Drew Kerman]

Operations Summary – Week of 5/28/18

Images from the Week Gallery

Progenitor Program Prepares for the Mk6 Block II

After this week’s final planned launch of the Mk6 Block I, it’s time for the program to finally return its focus to the Block II. Although it debuted alongside the Block I back in October of 2017 (then designated Mk5) the more-powerful Block II was put on the back burner after the Block I reached the height the Block II was supposed to fly to, negating any reason for it to to be used. Since successive flights of the Block I failed to make it high enough to pass completely through the hazardous radiation region, the Block II finally has a mission it can take on. While preparations are being made to launch two Block II’s in close succession sometime in the middle of this month, the loss of the last Block I and tight purse strings has led to a part shortage. If we lose the first Block II as well that will set things back a few weeks while new parts are ordered and integrated for the second rocket.

To help fund the Block II missions, a new organization has pledged money to us. The Interstellar Exploration Foundation is comprised of scientists whose families have deep pockets and has dedicated itself to helping companies involved with anything that could lead to kerbals one day traveling among the stars. Given that the threat of radiation to future astronauts is a serious concern, helping us explore a potential danger to just leaving the planet is well within their interest. We thank them for their support!

New Crew Welcomed Aboard

With an aerial survey flight this week, Captain Jebediah and Commander Valentina officially ended their tenure with the Genesis program. Today they, along with Specialists Bob and Bill (who also had their final KerBalloon mission this week), transferred over to the Ascension program to begin working on kerbed spaceflight. Because Jeb and Val had to stop over in Kravass to get back on the ground before nightfall, they were able to ferry over to KSC the new crew members that will take over their duties in the Genesis program. Aldeny and Tedman Kerman have accepted the position of Flight Officer, which means they are certified to fly aircraft within the atmosphere. While Aldy is committed to one day earning the rank of Captain to participate in space flight, Ted is currently more than happy to remain within Kerbin’s atmosphere testing and developing new fixed-wing aircraft with Genesis and C7.

We originally extended the job offer to Aldeny and Helta, but Helta declined, leading to us approaching Tedman next. Although we had hoped to diversify our new crew intake, Helta informed us she was more than happy to leave Val working as a role-model for young kerbettes with the space program while she continued to champion female pilots within the aviation community. It’s worth noting she didn’t turn us down because she had no interest in going to space.

Ascension Mk1 Works to Overcome Hurdles Prior to Flight

The first Mk1 rocket finished assembly this week. The rocket mostly came together as planned, the only real problem was mating the test weight to the fuel tank. Because the entire rocket is meant to be recovered for analysis purposes (all the high-res data will be stored in the test weight) the test weight won’t be leaving the fuel tank and the interstage decoupler seen in the blueprints was not included. This fact was not communicated to the test weight manufacturer and so some adjustments had to be made to mate it directly to the fuel tank.

Once the rocket was stacked, it was laid horizontal so the VAB technicians could access everything for final checkouts before it was loaded onto the carry vehicle in the same orientation. Problems arose here as well when it came to strutting the rocket down to the frame of the carry vehicle – the attach points created an uneven load on the treads that would have caused the vehicle to want to constantly steer off to the side. Adjustments were made and the rocket was successfully moved out to the launch pad earlier today.

However problems continued to plague the carry vehicle when the hydraulics failed during the lift to vertical. Thankfully fail safes locked the push rods in place and the platform did not collapse back down onto the bed. The cranes used to construct the service towers were moved back into position to help lower the rocket and the carry vehicle was able to return to the VAB. The crews will continue working over the weekend to assess the failure and repair the carry vehicle to hopefully try again on Monday. There is plenty of room in the VAB to raise the rocket there, so testing can be done before the move to the pad. Unfortunately not enough money was in the budget to build a scale model of the rocket to test the carry vehicle prior to this (hence the fail safes).

Once the rocket is out on the pad we still have to go through connecting it to the service towers, installing its engine support collar, ensuring fuel, power and comms are all in working order – there are still plenty of things that can go wrong but it’s hard not to have issues with such a complex operation like this. The teams are ready to work through issues and that’s what they’ll do.

Monolith News

This past weekend the team on the Monolith research project that has spent these last 10 months following the vein of crystals that headed in the general direction of Sheltered Rock & Ockr have announced they’ve reached a break. A fault line has sheared the vein vertically by just over a meter, which would have meant any energy sent along them would have not been able to reach any further. This could maybe explain why both caverns failed to receive deadly electrical discharges during The Incident while Umbarg and Kravass both experienced them. We say maybe because it is unknown yet whether these veins actually extend all the way to either cavern – the digging continues. This discovery has once again brought up speculation that the Monolith was trying to actively kill kerbals, but the discovery could also mean that the inability to fully discharge its energy across its entire crystal network led to more powerful than normal surges traveling back to hit Umbarg and Kravass. There is no evidence yet discovered that the energy was discharged at the break.

In additional news, a peaceful protest outside the Monolith visitation registration offices turned violent earlier this week, forcing a police response with tear gas to disperse the crowd. Several arrests were made but none of them claimed to be responsible for agitating the crowd. The office has remained closed since the end of last year when it was attacked by a still-unidentified group of kerbs that left some staff injured. The government refuses to open it until those responsible have been found however despite religious leaders claiming to be doing all they can to help no arrests have yet been made and the case remains cold. Whether or not the same mysterious group incited the riot is still not known and authorities remain frustrated.

ATN Database

The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 2,008 asteroids and 7 updated with new observation data.

Celestial Snapshot of the Week

We’ve had several close planetary encounters recently and the latest is Duna and Eve, captured here by the Kerman Observatory atop Kravass. Although they did come closer, no scopes were in place to witness it. Because Eve is on an inclined orbit, it doesn’t always approach Duna when they share the same elongation, or height above the horizon. Furthermore as an inner planet it doesn’t always get high enough in the sky to approach Duna’s position either. Duna’s moon Ike is visible but Eve’s moon Gilly was too far away to be included in this close-up image.

From the Desk of Drew Kerman (Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff)

Spoiler

Written on 5/17/18

Took a week to get this far but at least I didn’t lose any more time. GTA: Online had a stimulus package giving you money for just logging in every day the past week so I did and wasted a good amount of time on it with my buddy. I also got a bit burnt out and spent some time planning a road trip for this summer. I enjoy the logistics of planning things. Once me and an ex-girlfriend planned a 5-day Florida trip to Disney World, Sea World, Epcot, MGM Studios and Universal. Yea, 5 days. We had an itinerary for all the attractions we wanted to hit and when. I’ll tell you we did everything we planned for and it was by far one of the best vacations I’ve been on.

Progeny launch

This was a new experience because I wasn’t just taking the rocket straight from the VAB to the pad and launching it. In hindsight I probably could have created a launch site with Kerbal Konstructs – not actually placing any objects just defining a new launch site location. Instead I launched the rocket to the pad from the VAB then moved it with Vessel Mover over to the launch site. Then that kicked off the mission timer so I had to modify the persistence file to return the vehicle to a pre-launch state. Now I had to load into the flight scene for a vehicle already active which was a different state from just deployed, so my kOS code needing a bit of tweaking to operate properly at boot-up. Finally the launch base wanted to rotate veeeery slowly for some reason, so I had to engage timewarp while getting set up to launch so it would freeze.

Other than all that everything went fine. Well, except for the failure to recover the rocket. But that oversight with the altitude measurements was an honest mistake. I didn’t find it and leave it in there, although maybe I would have if I had. Also the inclination deviation was not planned, that’s just what happened. Despite the rotating launch pad I did send up the rocket at 44.69°

Deuce photos

Uuuughhhhggugghghggdhfwetrfdwhwegdf – taking inflight photos has become such a pain in the ass since AirPark stopped working properly in KSP v1.3 – it’s still not fixed in v1.4 either. Originally I could just place the plane in mid-air right from when the flight scene loads and just switch to the camera view and save a photo. Now I have to position the plane while allll the scenery and stupid-high level of detail terrain is loaded and it’s sloooooowww. Like, depending on the circumstances it can seriously take upwards of an hour just to setup and capture a single photo. I’m not kidding, because there are times I have to deal with excrements like this photo, which was from a camera mounted on the belly but for some reason the Infernal Robotics swivel part I was using couldn’t turn past 90°, so I actually had to rotate the entire plane to get the angle I wanted (and then had to spend more time fixing the rotation in the SPH later).

I went a bit low-effort on Jeb and Val’s photo because of all the trouble I went through getting the aircraft photos. I just didn’t have the time left to put more work into it. Originally I was going to have them side by side with Jeb hugging around Val’s waist and her with an arm up over his shoulder. Could have been possible with some compositing since they can’t actually touch like that in the game, I can only pose them individually. I was going to get some small facial motion out of them too with time warp but it decided not to work when I tried it so, love it.

New crew

Bringing in crew from the original flight instructors to replace Jeb and Val was always the plan, the original iteration of the KSA had such Flight Officers as well. I did have some second-thoughts tho and considered not having any new crew so I could relegate Genesis missions more into the background like I do KerBalloon missions. This would mean I’m not spending time flying around so much. Ultimately tho I decided I like flying too much and want to keep doing it.

Autopilot

I’ve been using the FAR stability controls to keep the wings level during flight but a wings-level 0° roll position doesn’t mean the aircraft’s heading will remain constant thanks to the planet turning underneath it. This rotation also means when traveling in a great circle path to a location the heading needs to constantly be updated. This last flight I actually looked into the stability settings and found I can set the hold point for roll. So by tweaking it to values like -0.175° I can have the plane hold a bank juuuust enough to turn at a rate that keeps pace with the changing heading to the waypoint. So yea I can mostly sit back and read on my iPad while the aircraft flies, which means long flights aren’t a complete time-sink now at least. I have two side monitors I wish I could do work on as well, but when KSP loses focus the right-click part access windows I have pinned freeze and no longer update so my 1-sec screen captures no longer have updated data for everything. Data logging from the game itself still runs fine but I’m not capturing all my data that way.

Welp, back to it…

 

[Drew Kerman]

Operations Summary – Week of 6/4/18

Images from the Week Gallery

Ascension Program First Flight Partially Successful

Officially, the flight of the first Ascension Mk1 earlier today will be marked as a failure since it did not achieve its primary goal of making orbit. At the same time though, it can be regarded as a success in other ways: all the new ground support equipment in use functioned as designed (although a few extra days were required to work out all the kinks) and the updated Automated Flight Control Software showed it was capable of not only controlling the rocket systems but for the first time using active guidance via control surfaces to maintain a given orientation during ascent – at least while there was still enough air left! Although the rocket’s return did not seem to go as smoothly as hoped, we are glad it at least survived enough to be recoverable. Once the teams can get at the treasure trove of onboard data we can start to learn more about what went wrong during the ascent and descent, such as why the operations code seemed to partially hang up. We will of course have a full flight analysis posted thereafter with all the details.

Looking ahead now to the next Ascension Mk1 launch in July, parts have already started to arrive and Lead Engineer Simon expects to begin assembly and integration by the middle of the month. Because we can’t get immediate access to this flight’s data to determine what may need to be adjusted for the next flight, we’re aiming more for mid-July as a launch target at this time. The engine for this second flight has already been built, but work on additional engines has been halted until we can confirm that today’s incident was due to the engine being worn from multiple test firings and not from some overlooked design flaw.

New Crew Oriented & Ready to Assist Genesis Program

Flight Officers Tedman and Aldeny have spent this past week getting acquainted with their new home here at the Kerbal Space Center and getting into a regular routine. This will be the first time both of them have lived above ground and the shorter day/night cycles take some getting used to as opposed to the controlled lighting environments below ground that run on a longer 16hr/day, 8hr/night. In case it wasn’t obvious, no one above ground actually sleeps every night cycle but the times that you do sleep can be different than the times people below ground are sleeping.

Now that the new crew members are in sync with the rest of the campus and know their way around next week they will begin assisting with Genesis operations in conjunction with C7 Aerospace. First order of business will be to get the Deuce ready to mount a rocket on its back for a carry test later this month. It’s also nearly time for another Civvie flight to gather pollen data – Lead Scientist Cheranne has been saying all week she would set a date for that but so far nothing. Genesis is also always working on new contract deals for the Deuce to fly. As always, updates on planned missions can be found via twitter.

KerBalloon Crew Carries On

Not to disrespect Specialists Bill and Bob but they were never really an integral part of the KerBalloon program – the whole crew worked together to achieve mission success. So although Bill and Bob no longer take part since finally embarking fully on their journey to become astronauts the KerBalloon crew have not had any issues carrying out missions in their absence. This week they took a foray via UTV out to the west shore desert to release a high-altitude balloon, which was successfully recovered and returned to KSC. Profit!

Alaba Sets Up for 9th Intercept

This past Monday our moonlet Alaba took a swing through Mun’s SOI, just as astronomers had predicted again accurately for the second time in a row. New observations showed that it was setup for yet another intercept this coming Saturday, so we’ll see if it continues to end up where astronomers predict. If so, and if another intercept isn’t imminent, they will attempt to chart out the next several intercepts to see once more how well their predictions hold up over time.

Help Us Name the K-3X

Little known fact: the Civve and the Deuce were both internally known as the K-3X project, but had nicknames chosen prior to their public debut. The K-3X designation translates to K followed by 3 numbers that refer to engine count and wingspan. So the Civvie can also be called the K-108 while the Deuce would be designated K-213. The number assigned to our latest K-3X will be 4## – the wingspan is still not confirmed as the original design couldn’t fit through our HAB doors and the concept of folding wings are still under review by the Air Safety Administration.

If anyone has a nickname we can use for our next aircraft, let us know! Here is the most recent design render if you need some visual inspiration.

ATN Database

The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 2,054 asteroids and 7 updated with new observation data.

From the Desk of Drew Kerman (Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff)

Spoiler

Written on 5/24/18

You know, I was this close – I was behind my 3-week lead by three days, and then the lead-up and launch of the Ascension Mk1 came around. OOOoof! Gawd, I had completely forgotten how much work I had to do to get things setup for the Progeny rockets back even as little as a few months ago for the Mk5 – the Mk6 was so similar I was able to reuse a lot of assets. Long story short, I’m back to where I started over the course of like 3 in-game days. Long story long… well ok here we go…

Going vertical

You maybe thought a photo like this of the rocket getting raised took me about 20-30 minutes to get setup and snapped. (Not counting all the work I had done previously on the carry vehicle, which I built weeks ago.) Yea no, it actually took me like 3-4 hours of total work to get right. First I tried to actually set it up that way in the game by using the robotic controls and lifting the platform and deploying the legs – oh my, physics had a field day with that. The whole thing wobbled so much I couldn’t keep it straight long enough to get a good line up with the engine collar, and the stabilizer legs visually clipped into the launch pad. So back to the SPH to just move everything into position beforehand, strut the excrements out of it, then move it back to the launch pad. Carry vehicle still wanted to jitter ever so slightly and so I tried time warping to settle it but every time I came out of warp the damn launch towers and engine clamp would jump a bit higher out of the ground. Darn it

Those are just the highlights of my troubles. In the end I still ended up with a slight misalignment of the engine to the clamp. Maybe you can’t see it but I can, dammit. The crew were relatively easy to composite in. I wasn’t going to bother at first because of how much time it took to get just the damn rocket photo but there are some running around the VAB without tools in their hands I can use, so I did.

Also if you didn’t notice then I’ll point out the orientation of the rocket isn’t the same as when it is seen attached to the towers in all subsequent photos. But it was too late to correct that oversight after I noticed it *le sigh*

Launch

Ok let’s start with all the assets. Needed new Ops Tracker images for the flight updates, needed a new ascent profile diagram, a new public viewing diagram of KSC, had to come up with a launch timeline taking into consideration the new rocket and its capabilities and properties – including the minutiae of how it was going to launch. But all was pretty minor compared to three main issues:

New code

Biggest deal was writing the new operations code that would fly the rocket. Okay writing it wasn’t so bad – testing it was a pain in the ass. Nevermind the fact that I can’t run-check my code outside of the game so I have to keep getting errors and restarting the flight to fix stupid syntax issues, there were several new things I was doing that introduced some tricky logic issues. One in particular hung me up so bad I had to ask for help on reddit. On the flipside, it turned out to be such an insidious logic error I figured it couldn’t have been discovered without flying the rocket so it was left in for the actual flight. It will be detailed in the flight analysis. This took me about a day and a half all told.

I’ve also given up making the code completely “realistic” in showing every behavior. The engine pressure check? Yea can’t actually do that so it’s just not there. Kicking things off just by using the STAGE command? Yep.

Launch photo

I like the stock ground smoke effects it’s just they are so ridiculously huge and I could never get anyone to really tell me how to tone them down nor did any fiddling of my own yield any decent results back when I was considering this issue for the Progeny rockets. Smokescreen works great for ground smoke but the only problem is that this rocket doesn’t have SRBs, so there won’t be any smoke once it leaves the pad. Try as I might, I couldn’t set the smoke emitter to detect enough of an air density change after lift-off to automatically disable the smoke during ascent. So for the photo I just had to have the Smokescreen window open and when I launched I manually disabled the emitter, hid everything and snapped the photo.

But that wasn’t my only problem. The way the rocket is mounted to the engine clamp in this photo? Yea, it doesn’t actually work like that. In fact if you do try to launch like that, the rocket will glitch out and go flying up a few meters into the air. The clamp is actually supposed to attach to the bottom of the engine and grab on to its shroud, but I didn’t want the rocket launching out of a shroud (fun fact, the Rokot does this since it used to be an ICBM). So I had to glitch the rocket out of the clamp, then reset it back atop with VesselMover and quick switch over to my KerbCam view to trigger its ignition sequence before very slight movement at its base put it off the clamp edge and in tipped over. Yes, the clamp itself is not actually visible in the launch photo so why bother? Well the smoke particles are physical objects and so I needed the clamp there for them to bounce off properly, not just the ground.

I also planned to do several launch photos with different smoke settings and composite them for more dynamic-looking ground smoke but then I realized I couldn’t reproduce that in a video so I didn’t bother.

Also, I found out that SmokeScreen has a particle limit per effect in addition to its global particle limit. By default its 1000 so if you have your global limit set to 8000 but the engine has only 4 effects, you’ll only see a max of 4000 particles by default. Here’s how you change that.

Launch issues

So the whole idea of the engine failure was spawned by this tweet, which was a follower asking how the engine bell was cooled and is yet another reason why I encourage people to interact with what’s going on and ask questions and poke holes! I hadn’t considered what the testing would do to the engine in the form of stress from heating and cooling not to mention just general vibration and whatnot. Ideally a new engine would have been used but as it was noted, the KSA wanted to fly sooner rather than later so they kept this engine to use for the first mission. It took me a few tries to figure out something I could do that would cause a similar effect in the game without screwing up the mission and my running code too badly. Basically I just dialed down the thrust limiter on the engine and then, since that would reduce fuel consumption, used TAC Fuel Balancer to dump the fuel so it would still get used up as if the engine were at full thrust.

Although I wrote in the launch abort as just a means to foreshadow that there were going to be issues with the engine during flight, in doing research for what changes I should make to my launch timeline I came across this article about a Falcon 9 flight that suffered a similar problem with tight constraints set to an engine. I thought that was pretty cool.

Small stuff

I’m not sure how to calculate the amount of gas I need for pressurization, so not sure how I’m going to handle that yet. Using nitrogen works now because it’s so dirt cheap I can get away without factoring it into launch costs. Eventually though I will want to switch to lighter helium, which would be more expensive, even for kerbals. I also don’t know the mass since I don’t know the amount, so if I don’t figure it out I’ll just make the whole tank part a bit lighter when switching to helium at some point. The reason I’ve bothered defining the pressurization gas is because both nitrogen and helium are actual gasses that can be mined and used for various aspects of the game in various mods, and picking between the two does have consequences given the difference in their properties.

I forgot when I actually flew the mission to account for the slight amount of fuel that would have been used up during the first launch attempt that was aborted. It’s rather insignificant, but still!

Also the alternator recharges the batteries but since I don’t have that tech yet, I just let it happen. But then, when working up the telemetry data I made note of the EC level reported at launch and just copied that over all the 100% records while the engine was burning, then subtracted that difference from the rest of the cells. So the alternator allowed the battery level to remain constant while the engine was on, then it drained again. I also had to remember as well to take into account the 40 minutes during which the rocket was no longer attached to the service towers and operating on its own power.

Finance juggling

Just another example of the crazy detail I go to – where did the weather balloons for this launch come from? Well the ones that Progenitor bought were sitting around as surplus so Ascension used them. But Progenitor wasn’t going to just let them take them for free, so I adjusted the program finance sheets to reflect that Progenitor’s last purchase of 5 balloons is now 3 and Ascension has expenses for 2 now. On the monthly expense sheet I didn’t change anything since in the overall finance scheme the expenditure is the same. If that made any sense maybe you want to be my accountant?

 

[Drew Kerman]

Operations Summary – Week of 6/11/18

Images from the Week Gallery

Preliminary Ascension Mk1 Report

This past week the test weight and the rocket engine were identified in scans of the sea floor and raised by the salvage ship to be returned to us at KSC. The fuel tank and its accompanying parts were nowhere to be found, at least in pieces large enough to be detected among the surface scatter at the bottom of the ocean. Upon setting eyes on the test weight it was pretty clear that the rocket had failed to deploy its parachutes successfully given the nose of the weight was almost completely caved inwards from impact. A look at the operations log showed that the AFCS crashed when attempting to deploy the parachutes and they were never used. The rocket crashed nose-first into the ocean at just over 300m/s but the test weight was built to handle impacts of over 500m/s with the instruments all huddled in the base. The fuel tanks would have still been pressurized on impact and thus exploded, but the engine would not have hit bell-first and we can therefore examine that part to determine why it failed during ascent. Video footage from the booster camera has turned out to be extremely poor for some reason and technicians are working to extract what still images they can from it. Full details on the flight will be published next week after further investigations.

The launch pad and accompanying service equipment also received an inspection this past week to determine if any damage occurred during launch. Nothing was found and now crews will spend the next two weeks refurbishing the equipment to ensure it functions just as well for the next launch in July.

Progeny Mk6 Block II Preps for Debut Flight

The date has been set! Our first attempt at launching the Progeny Mk6 Block II will be on 6/20 @ 16:03 UTC. The rocket was stacked vertical in the VAB today for the first time and will be monitored over the weekend to ensure all decouplers and adapters are handling the weight properly before being laid out horizontal on Monday for final checkouts. It will be rolled out to the pad on Tuesday and mounted to the launch base, which is also in the VAB right now being fortified to handle the greater mass of the Block II. Depending on whether we are able to successfully recover this rocket, the next launch could be as early as 6/26, but if we are forced to order new parts that date will be pushed back. Although getting to orbit with the Ascension Mk1 is exciting, everyone is just as pumped for this launch because the Progeny Mk6 Block II is actually the most complex of our current rockets.

Genesis & Progenitor Confirm Aerial Launch Attempt

Just over a year since it was first proposed, the two programs will finally pair up to attempt to launch a small Progeny Mk1-B rocket from the back of a Deuce next week. The first test will be a simple captive carry and release in which the aircraft, under the command of new Flight Officers Tedman and Aldeny, will carry the rocket aloft to see how high the aircraft can get. Once there, if all is going well, controllers on the ground will command the rocket to be released after the pilots take a dive and climb back upwards at an angle. The rocket will not ignite, but the parachute will deploy a short time later and land it for recovery near the KSC. After studying how the rocket behaves once it is released, the decision will be made whether to make another flight and this time fire off the rocket.

KerBalloon Brings Home the Funds

Genesis, Ascension and Progenitor are all still rather bogged down in R&D, running missions without much return and sometimes with no return. KerBalloon continues to provide actual sustainable income for the KSA thanks to its ability to keep mission costs down with tried and true technology. It had its own mis-steps in the beginning but has matured quickly thanks to its lower-tech. This past week saw two missions carried out although only one was originally planned. When an unusually strong storm formed out at sea a snap request by field researchers in conjunction with the Maritime Weather Service came in to deploy a high-altitude balloon before the system dissipated. Following that mission, the one that it bumped was carried out just today and is still in progress so expect a final update once UTV crews make it back to KSC.

Alaba Mun Encounter #9

This past weekend our moonlet Alaba took another swing through Mun’s SOI. Once again it was out of view from telescopes on the ground but shortly afterwards became visible for observations. Astronomers have determined their predictions this time were within 5 seconds of SOI entry as opposed to within 10 seconds for the previous encounter. Better! Since Alaba was not set to immediately re-enter Mun’s SOI they pushed out another 3-encounter prediction and came up with the dates 7/11, 7/29 & 8/18. After that it seems to enter into a stable period that lasts until at least May 2019, which was the furthest ahead they looked. This does seem to match with one of their earlier predictions that, although not quite correct, does show a similar stable period.

Did you know if you look back through Alaba’s history in the Ops Tracker you can see how its orbit migrates over time? We’ve also worked up a new visualization that shows this movement.

ATN Database

The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 2,080 asteroids and 5 updated with new observation data.

Celestial Snapshot of the Week

Commander Val was out stargazing with Specialist Bob and took a photo of the western sky, with KSC lit by an almost-full Mun. Sarnus is up top and working down we can see Urlum, Neidon and Eve.

From the Desk of Drew Kerman (Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff)

Spoiler

Written on 5/29/18

Good progress these past few days although this past week of operations wasn’t very hard since there were no crew missions or rocket launches to deal with. I will actually be away for a fireworks show most of this week so that’s another reason why it was pretty slow – but also it just had to be like this given where everything is at right now.

It occurs to me in glaring retrospect that I probably should have fortified the launch sticks of the Progeny launch base way back for the Mk5 or even the Mk4. It’s a bit silly that those skinny little things can handle the weight of the larger rockets. Obviously made of vibranium.

Ugh I’m really not in the mood for editing video, especially since there were complications in this launch that I would be obligated to show and there are also complications in dealing with the ground effect launch smoke that I would need to work around to make a video look good. There will definitely be a launch video for the Ascension Mk1, but maybe not until it makes it up into orbit.

Yea I really don’t feel like sitting here rambling about stuff. Must move on…

 

Edited June 16, 2018 by Drew Kerman

[Drew Kerman]

Operations Summary – Week of 6/18/18

Images from the Week Gallery

Progeny Mk6 Block II Debuts

Over half a year since it was first announced (then designated the Mk5), the more powerful version of the Mk6 has at last taken flight this past week. A lot of work went into modeling the rocket’s ascent based off data collected over the numerous Mk5 and Mk6 Block I flights this past year and for the first time engineers were relatively confident that the rocket would perform as expected. Their confidence was proven right as the longer rocket remained pointing downrange after launch thanks in part to the extra push from its radial boosters. The only real surprise was the recovery, since all of the simulations ran before the flight had the rocket either completely breaking up or traveling too fast to safely deploy its chutes. A lot of analysis will need to be done on this flight to determine how we want to proceed such as why the rocket became so unstable late into the flight, whether trying to broadside the atmosphere on purpose would help with recovery from higher altitudes and whether we can even support a mission higher than 1Mm due to battery power limitations. It’s estimated based on this flight’s performance that the Block II could reach out as far as 3.5Mm (1/3 the way to Mun) which would take almost three hours for it to return to Kerbin! We’re not going to put a kuudite RTG on a rocket that will come crashing back into the planet. Although recovery of the reusable parts from this last flight could allow us to launch the next rocket as early as next week, we are currently looking at no sooner than the beginning of July to take more time to consider these issues.

The highlight of the mission was definitely the achievement of passing through the region of hazardous radiation and back into a more “normal” environment in the space beyond. There will be more details in the flight analysis report but the Interstellar Exploration Foundation has already recognized the accomplishment and awarded us the full bounty of 25,000 funds, which will help us fly additional Block I and Block II missions to further explore and define the radiation conditions above the planet.

Ascension Prepares for Capsule Testing, Next Launch

Two capsule prototypes that arrived this week have been getting ready in the VAB to be dropped from low-altitude balloons next week to test their pressure systems, see how they behave in free fall and to test deployment of the new triple canopy parachute that will come out of a nose cone case. The chute casing will be slightly smaller than a normal nose cone that would cap off the capsule because over top of the chute will rest the Launch Escape System, which is still under development and will be tested with the final capsule design later this year. If the capsule recovery goes well over land the float collars will be installed for another test later in the week out at sea. All four of our astronaut trainees will be on hand to help with the testing although at this time none of them will be in the capsules, just a sandbag dummy.

In additional news, the flight analysis for the first Ascension Mk1 launch has finally been released. Several aspects of the flight needed some careful review to determine what happened and how we can address things for the next launch, now scheduled for 7/17 @ 16:36 UTC.

Damage Delays Airborne Rocket Testing

An unfortunate accident occurred in the HAB while the Progeny Mk1-B rocket was being mounted to the top of the Deuce aircraft so it could perform a captive carry and release test at the end of the week. Assessment of the damage to both the rocket and aircraft have turned up no major issues that will require parts to be replaced, but some minor repairs will be needed that will also need to be inspected closely afterwards. All told, Lead Engineer Simon has estimated at least a week, maybe more, before the rocket can again be mounted properly onto the Deuce. In the meantime, Aldeny and Tedman will have to flip a coin to see who gets to take out a Civvie for pollen gathering measurements next week.

Mystery Goo Remains Mysterious

A goo sample was flown last week on a high-altitude balloon up nearly 24km and returned in a state of suspended animation much like the goo that flew up to just 16km. This time however scientists knew it could come back to life and kept it closely monitored in the lab. While the bacteria making up the goo did show signs of activity after four days it never fully recovered to a healthy state and eventually truly died off. Scientists want to know if the longer exposure was the only reason this goo sample died while the other was able to recover and are planning a more thorough study to be conducted next week.

Extremis Opts Out of 2018-2019 Launch Window

The first mission for Extremis will now launch no earlier than September 2019 as trajectory analysis for routes that would lead probes past Urlum and Neidon (even separately) in addition to visiting some of the inner planets have come up unfeasible. The pace of progress towards orbital flight and our ability to get a probe on a path out of the system is also proceeding slower than originally planned so it’s likely even if we had a launch date for the next year we probably couldn’t make it all work in time. Astrodynamicists are now churning through flyby combinations for dates between September 2019 and 2020.

ATN Database

The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 2,116 asteroids and 6 updated with new observation data.

From the Desk of Drew Kerman (Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff)

Spoiler

Written on 6/8/18

Had to fight a bit with allergies and also overcoming the extra work required for the Block II launch which again pushed me into many new areas and required a ton of new assets. So I didn’t lose time but haven’t gained any time either, which isn’t that great because I will be gone almost all next week and unable to do any more work so I need to crunch out as much as I can before then because it’ll be right back to playing catch up when I get back. I’m starting to get a bit bummed out that I don’t have the spare time to work on new Ops Tracker features – I really want to get real-time telemetry streaming working but just keeping up with the day-to-day is tough especially when I have to try and bang out 2-3 days instead of just one so I can build up my lead time.

Lead time is important

I have numerous examples of why it’s important to maintain 2-3 weeks of lead time, at least, but the latest was this past week when I was writing tweets for the Block II launch and realized I never considered how many fuel trucks would be needed to handle the extra fuel in the rocket. A check of the truck’s fuel tanks in the game showed I was okay, but it made me think about the Ascension rocket as well for the first time. Checking that, I realized two trucks as depicted in one of the pre-launch photos would not have sufficed, so I added the tweet about making two trips to the launch pad. So it’s not just the fact that I can sit back for a few days and not have to worry about things not being tweeted, I can actively go back and edit improvements to things I’ve already written but not yet published. That’s generally how writing works so the ability to do that is crucial.

Feedback is also important

Another example of why I like people engaging with the KSA would be this tweet from former KSP developer Nova Silisko. I honestly hadn’t remembered to factor the Monolith into the upcoming launch because I knew it wasn’t going to do anything, but I had forgotten that no one else knew it wasn’t going to do anything. This is a case of me not staying inside the mind of the audience. Again my lead time allowed me to edit in some mentions about the Monolith in relation to the Ascension Mk1.

I’d also like to commend Nova for this tweet as well. It’s great to see that some followers have been able to pick up on some of the nuance that I’ve been trying to portray in regards to the Monolith. Yes, it caused a lot of death and destruction but was that really its purpose?

Block II launch

I did a good deal of in game testing prior to actually flying a real mission with this launch, because enough data would have been collected from previous flights that engineers could by now begin to model how a rocket of a similar design would behave. Back in the early days of the Progenitor program I was literally just putting them out on the launch pad, lighting them off to see what would happen, and then writing about it. It’s what I’m doing for Ascension rockets but for Progeny rockets I can start “modeling” flights more.

The launch almost featured another problem in the rocket being unstable in the early flight stage, but then I realized I had just forgotten to remove the fuel tanks automatically assigned to the radial booster nose cones from 3 out of the 4 on the rocket so it was literally unbalanced.

All of my testing did actually show the rocket being unrecoverable after re-entry, so I was actually really totally amazed with how things turned out during the actual mission! It’s great that the game can still offer up surprises like that.

I still hate doing videos. I don’t know if it’s just the way I have things setup but my capture always has tons of little stutters in it that I have to go in and edit out by hand. I had to remove 88 individual frames from the booster detachment video. Here is what it looks like in its raw unedited form.

 

[Drew Kerman]

Operations Summary – Week of 6/25/18

Images from the Week Gallery

Progeny Mk6 Block II Flight Analysis & Radiation Report

There was a lot of data to sift through in the lengthy first flight of the Mk6-II but the final analysis has revealed that all major flight issues can be resolved, the only real problem that remains is how we are going to support a mission that could last nearly 3 hours given the limited amount of battery capacity the rocket can carry. Software engineers are looking at hibernating the probe core, which is something Extremis program engineers have already begun researching so hopefully that will give Progenitor a leg up and let us send a second Block II up sooner rather than later.

You can also read this separate report on what the data from this latest flight has told us about hazardous radiation in space.

Ascension Capsule Testing, New Engine

This week saw the first major testing of our two prototype space capsules, which were lifted by low-altitude balloons and dropped to be recovered, testing out their parachutes and flotation collars over water. The capsules carried a test dummy, not actual kerbals, and the pressure systems were active during the flight to test out seals and environment controls. We will have a full report once testing is complete but for now you can get additional details via this timeline.

Although we know we can make orbit with the current lift stage carrying a light payload to low altitudes, the Ascension Mk1 will not be able to put heavier payloads into higher circular orbits efficiently all by itself. By the time that becomes necessary however we will have a new vacuum engine ready to use for a second stage, designed by Bluedog Design Bureau.

K-422 Design Finalized

Check out the final blueprint for the K-422, which has been in a bit of design limbo these past few months thanks to the Air Safety Administration needing to approve the new folding wing design and new engines having to be developed to account for the low ground clearance of the aircraft. Designed to carry large loads of cargo, the K-422 is the most direct challenger to the airship industry to date. It is not capable of hauling as much load but it can take what it can carry and deliver it faster and over longer distances. Parts will begin arriving in the Horizontal Assembly Building for construction to get underway next month for completion in September

Tedman Flies First Mission

With the Deuce mission to test air launching a rocket delayed, the only other mission slated for Genesis was a check of pollen levels using a Civvie, which is only piloted by one kerb. Tedman and Aldeny flipped a coin to decide who would go and Tedman won, carrying out the mission earlier this week. Both pilots certainly miss that they don’t get as much air time as they used to as flight instructors. The aircraft here at KSC are not personal vehicles and can only be taken out on official missions. Training flights are not in the budget, although there has been some argument for them to ensure that our pilots remain confident at the controls under any situation. Since Ted flew this mission, Aldy will get command of the Deuce during the rocket test flight.

Mystery Goo Studies Continue

A balloon launch this week for KerBalloon also carried aloft additional samples of mystery goo, half of which were exposed through the lower atmosphere but then sealed and pressurized for the remainder of the flight while the other half was left exposed all the way into the upper atmosphere. After returning to the lab the goo was further separated – some were placed near varying levels of kuudite ore while a control group was left alone as done in previous studies. The initial results show that the goo exposed to low levels of kuudite came out of stasis stronger than the control, but levels normally tolerated by the bacteria turned out to be damaging. Scientists are still trying to understand where this behavior to enter and leave a protective form of suspended animation came from, given that the goo was all found underground safely nestled in kuudite deposits.

Arekibo Construction Complete

After just over a year of construction, the 200m diameter dish of the Arekbo Radio Observatory and its accompanying support structures such as the huge suspended beam receiver have been completed. It’s now time for scientists attached to the project to move in and begin installing all the equipment necessary for the observatory to function, a process which is expected to take another 3 months, after which several more months of testing and calibration will bring the facility to a point where it can begin science operations at the start of next year. For more info on Arekibo and the rest of our developing Deep Space Network, see this article.

ATN Database

The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 2,159 asteroids and 6 updated with new observation data.

From the Desk of Drew Kerman (Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff)

Spoiler

Written on 6/18/18

I was really, really close to getting this all wrapped up over a week ago before leaving to do a fireworks show but I ran into some issues with the game that made me go “love it” and just start my time off from KSP early. Now I have this week before going away again most of next week and the following week. Thankfully I’m already up to the end of June so if I can just do a week of ops this week I won’t run out of lead time when I get back at the start of July – tho I will be dangerously low on lead time. Ugh. Seems like I can never catch up to where I want to be.

LES over nose chute

When I tweeted about how the nose cone chute was going to be installed under the launch escape system I realized I really had to go and make sure I could actually do that before I made it a thing that would suck to have to walk back on. Thankfully I managed to make it work, and if you’re interested here’s the patch I came up with. It ends up leaving a flat surface around the cone chute that isn’t very aerodynamic but the LES will be jettisoned high enough that this won’t really matter.

Orbital decay?

Someone picked up the orbital decay mod and now I’m wondering again if I want to include it in my save. The main problem is that there’s no way to model the decay in KSPTOT, which would make the mission planner rather useless since the spacecraft will never quite be where the planner thinks it will be. Unless I can get the two mods integrated, I would rather be able to do extensive mission planning with a tool that makes it easy to share the process with my audience through graphs and such. I think though it should be possible, since the orbital decay mod gives you an estimation of time left in orbit, and hopefully that rough calculation can be used by KSPTOT to get a better idea of where a vessel might be after several orbits. I had also previously decided not to do this because I didn’t like the thought of having to update the Ops Tracker database every single day with new orbital data so things stay current. However it’s now pretty easy to do this – I literally just copy/paste values directly out of the game into the database – I may be able to automate it even. The main problem would be the fact that the two asteroids in orbit should have been affected by decay all this time and haven’t – but I think I have good workarounds for that if needed. I’m going to continue to keep an eye on the mod – thankfully it’s a decision I’m still a ways off from having to make.

Capsule drops

Geez this game has to make what should be even simple excrements hard. So the way I had the KerBalloon attached to the capsule by struts was done by placing the nose cone atop the capsule, then the balloon atop the nose code node I put there for an LES. Then I translated the balloon higher and added the struts. Yea as soon as it went out to the launch pad the struts said “screw you!” and disappeared leaving the balloon to fall off. Okay. So I had to attach the balloon to the top of the capsule and then the nose cone to a node on the balloon and rotate/translate that into place.

Then getting the float collars to deploy, first I had to use VesselMover to get the capsule out over the water but when I went to put it down it moved at like 0.01m/s taking forever to reach the damn water. if I removed the float collar part VesselMover would put it on the ground as fast as normal. Figures. Then I also had trouble arming thin thing to deploy once it hit the water, and there was no manually deploy button….

K-422

At the time of this writing I’m still calling it the K-422 because no one has bothered to send in any naming suggestions. I think I’m just not going to bother doing that for any other vessel, since it does leave me in a kind of limbo when I go to write tweets or make graphics for future posts I’m not sure if I should still be calling it K-422 or if someone will have suggested a good name by that time. Like, if someone does I will have to go back and rewrite some tweets using the new name instead of the code name.

New props were really needed because the blades were too long – unfortunately I didn’t want to also make them way more powerful so the closest I could find was originally designed to be a pusher prop and so I’m still looking into whether flipping it around to face forward is having an impact on its performance. I will of course need to determine this before the blueprint goes live next week and I have to change things…

All in all though I’m really glad with how it turned out, and again this is why I enjoy taking things so slowly – the more time that passes the better my options get for doing things with this game. I mean, back in the original KSA run this was the best I could do for a C-130 analogue.

 

[Drew Kerman]

Operations Summary – Week of 7/2/18

Images from the Week Gallery

Progenitor Schedules Next Block I Flight

While we’re still working out the mission planning for the next Block II flight there is still a mission the Block I can fly that will help us potentially further understand the hazardous radiation region around the planet’s equator. Everyone is excited for our first night launch, scheduled now for 7/20 @ 20:51 UTC. More information on how this launch could help scientists explore the space near us can be found in this report.

Genesis Dubs K-422, Preps Deuce for Rocket Carry

The official nickname for the K-422 will be the “Dhumla”, pronounced “Dum-lar”. Not only does it sound like something big and hefty, it’s derived from ancient kerbskrit from a tale about the 4 rivers of life. Given that this aircraft is too big to fly without 4 engines, we found that to be a good enough analogy. The name was suggested by twitter user @Benj.

The Deuce and its Progeny Mk1-B rocket have both been repaired and this time mating was successful, allowing the mission to progress forwards once again, with the captive carry flight and release test scheduled to take off after second sunrise on Monday. Both Tedman and Aldeny are excited to finally fly a mission together and also push fixed-wing flight and rocket flight into new territory.

KerBalloon Goes the Distance

MSV Lymun departed earlier today and is still enroute to the release location over 2,000km away, the longest distance yet traveled for a balloon mission. Thankfully the route to get there is well-charted thanks to the undersea cables that had to be laid through those waters for the Arekibo Radio Observatory. We expect the ship back in port tomorrow and this link will go live with a mission report afterwards.

ATN Database & Finance Report

The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 2,190 asteroids and 7 updated with new observation data.

We’ve published our financial report for June, which came in at a nice profit thanks mainly to the Interstellar Exploration Foundation’s large grant for future exploration of the hazardous radiation region – but we still almost made a profit without them.

Celestial Snapshot of the Week

If an outer planet is seen rising at sunset and setting at sunrise, as Jool is doing here along with Mun, that’s how you know it is close to opposition, which is when the shortest distance separates us from the planet along this orbit. Depending on the eccentricity of the planet’s orbit, the distance at opposition can change over time. For Jool, the previous opposition was the furthest, with each successive one becoming closer as Jool itself starts to move inwards towards the sun and perikelion.

From the Desk of Drew Kerman (Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff)

Spoiler

Written on 6/23/18

It was a pretty meh week both IRL and KSP. Did not have the drive to work a lot, but also just came off a fireworks show which is more physically demanding than I’m used to on a daily basis these days. Two more shows in the coming weeks as well – after a show next week I will have Friday and Saturday to update/fix anything and prep to be gone the following week and when I return I will have maybe 2-3 days of lead time left. Ugh. But at least I don’t have to come up with some excuse to shut down the KSC or at least say it’s unable to tweet for a few days for some reason. So yea things are put-putting along but will remain moving, which is better than nothing!

CNQ-846(C) oopsie

I make an impact plot of the asteroid when it is first discovered by the ATN, but I don’t post them until the asteroid enters the SOI and I double-check the location. In this case the asteroid ended up coming down further westward than I initially calculated, so that was what I posted. Turns out that was a mistake and when I watched it hit in the game it was over the original impact point. I dug that image out of the recycle bin to post as well. Not sure what I messed up when I redid the impact plot after SOI entry but I will have to be sure to double-check my work doing that in the future.

On a related note I did consider having the event impact the KSC more seriously to free me up some lead time but turned out I didn’t really need it and Mun was really on the opposite side of Kerbin at the time creating a low tide.

New Dhumla engines

Turns out I did in fact need to switch to another engine since the pusher prop I had flipped around didn’t seem to be generating the power I needed. Further testing also revealed the aircraft really did need more powerful engines as well. Unfortunately my best choice still had pretty long blades but I managed to get it to work with ground clearance remaining – even if it’s not much.

I got two suggestions for a name in the end. The other was “Komet 767” but I like to save “K”ing things for use a little as possible and the suggester admitted the 767 had no real meaning. All numbers associated with a vehicle needs to reference in some way either the vehicle itself or its mission. Had I not received any good suggestions I was just going to nickname it the “Titan”, same as in GTA V’s version of the C-130. I’m glad I didn’t have to.

 

Edited July 7, 2018 by Drew Kerman

[Drew Kerman]

Operations Summary – Week of 7/9/18

Images from the Week Gallery

Rocket Air Launch Testing Commences

At long last the Deuce took to the skies twice this week under the command of Flight Officers Tedman and Aldeny with a Progeny Mk1-B mounted to its rear to begin testing the concept of air launching a rocket. The idea was first conceived over a year ago and stems from the simple fact that a rocket engine can become more efficient the higher up in the atmosphere it goes. The Mk1-B was chosen simply because it was surplus and thus cheap, also it was one of the most simple of Progeny rockets so not much could go wrong with igniting it while airborne. As it happens, it fits quite snugly on the back of the Deuce, so much so that initially there was some trouble mounting it flush.

The first mission was mainly to see how the Deuce reacted to having a rocket strapped to its back. After seeing absolutely no control issues during flight, the go-ahead was given to perform a release of the rocket while the aircraft flew level (as in, not climbing or descending, not perfectly horizontal). The decoupler is positioned at the top of the booster, just below the payload fairings, for a secure attachment that is also slightly ahead of the center of mass, which meant that upon release the rocket was kicked up and back. Once free of the aircraft, it flew stable on its own for a few seconds before drifting off heading and falling back towards the ground. The parachute was deployed to land it safely, taking into account the extra mass of the booster, which would normally have been detached after being used in ascent.

After data analysis confirmed a stable flight, a second mission was authorized to release the rocket at an increased pitch angle closer to where it would be during a normal ascent. The rocket itself cannot pitch upwards so the aircraft must instead. This release also went well, unfortunately weather today prevented a third flight that was to release the rocket to the angle it would use to ascend – around 85°. If the third release test goes as planned we could see the next flight actually launching the rocket after release!

Launch Calendar Fills Up

Speaking of launches, we have a couple exciting weeks ahead of us with the additional signing of two new contracts for the Progenitor Program. You can learn all the details of the missions by visiting the Ops Tracker and looking at the individual vessel pages for each craft but here is the current list of launch dates and times:

Ascension Mk1 Block I – 7/17/2018 @ 16:36:00 UTC
Progeny Mk6 Block I – 7/20/2018 @ 20:51:00 UTC
Progeny Mk6 Block I – 7/25/2018 @ 17:02:00 UTC
Progeny Mk6 Block I – 8/2/2018 @ 17:30:00 UTC

The Mk6 launches spread out further moving into August since we need to keep space open in the VAB to handle additional Ascension Mk1 builds, which could see several rockets coming together at once depending on how well the rocket does on its second attempt at making orbit. Remember the Ascension Mk1 is a lifter vehicle, which means we can assemble several to be ready even if we don’t have anything to put on top of them yet, as that would be designed separately.

Looking further ahead we are still unsure when we will see the next Block II launch of the Progeny Mk6.

ATN Database

The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 2,217 asteroids, 8 updated with new observation data.

Celestial Snapshot of the Week

Here is a still from the video of the first release test for the Progeny Mk1-B off the rear of the Deuce, with a late-phase Mun in the sky

From the Desk of Drew Kerman (Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff)

Spoiler

Written on 7/11/18

So, coming back from my 4th of July fireworks show with only like 3 days lead time wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be and I managed to maintain that lead and push it out a bit further before I became a bit burnt out and also it was hot as hell here earlier in the week as well so the PC was shut down for some of it. I’m going away again for a 3-day weekend to do a road trip with friends. You can see the route plan on Google Maps here. Yea it’s going to be a fun time, I’m taking my Nissan 370Z while two other friends with Dodge Chargers will be tagging along. I have today and tomorrow to do the weekend into Monday and I will have to hit the ground running hard again when I get back since I have two rocket launches next week.

Deuce carry mission 1

So, first of all I had to figure out how to attach the rocket to the aircraft so that when I released the rocket they were two properly separate functioning vessels. First I tried attaching the decoupler to the aircraft then merging the rocket and attaching it to the decoupler. The truss is the root part of the rocket so I had to attach that to the decoupler then translate/rotate the rocket into proper position. This however ended up leaving the larger piece of the decoupler on the rocket after it was detached. I couldn’t flip the decoupler over for its initial attachment so I had to attach it to the rocket, but then when I tried to merge it to the plane it wouldn’t attach via the decoupler. So finally I had to merge the aircraft with the rocket and attach that to the decoupler, then re-root to the aircraft cabin.

Second challenge was that I wanted to video the release but I also wanted the release I captured to be a genuine first try, not a recreation – this meant I had to fly with visual effects enabled, such as Scatterer and EVE. To make things workable I disabled the Scatterer water shaders and EVE volumetric clouds. While things were still running only about 60-70% normal speed it was doable. Unfortunately I still had to fly and capture the release twice because the first time I made the mistake of switching over to the rocket after release to see how it was doing, which I know screws up the VOID data logging – it starts logging data for the new active vessel. I need that log holding the plane data to recreate the flight path for aircraft in the Ops Tracker.

After the flight I was able to use a save file taken shortly before the release and manually set the pitch trim value in the file after some experimenting to hold the aircraft level after the save was loaded, which let me re-create the release very well. I wrote up a small kOS script to show me the rocket pitch after it was let go, which is where the values that were reported came from.

Also worth noting that this image had Scatterer water shaders disabled, but the atmospheric effects still made it look good from a distance.

Deuce carry mission 2

I tried flying this one again with VFX active and with volumetric clouds but unfortunately when I went to release I encountered this bug in Scatterer (fixed in a more recent version) and the lag was so bad also that doing the dive and climb maneuver and holding pitch with any accuracy was pretty much impossible. So again, this mission was flown twice, which always sucks for aircraft missions because they are flown in real time so that’s a good chunk of wasted time. I also forgot to save the game prior to release the first time as well.

The mission was flown twice but it was also the real deal that the release took two tries. I did not have a good first attempt at diving and climbing back up to a proper angle and altitude. Second attempt was better. I removed all graphic effects for the second flight so I would have a smooth gameplay experience and just re-positioned the aircraft using VesselMover after reloading the game with all the VFX for the release photo.

 

[Drew Kerman]

Operations Summary – Week of 7/16/18

Images from the Week Gallery

Ascension Mk1 Fails Orbit Again

It’s tough having to type that headline but if getting into orbit were easy everyone would be doing it! You can review the events of the launch in this report and Ascension team members are still giving the data collected during ascent a thorough analysis. Right now the focus is on the initial ascent from the launch pad to Max Q, during which time the rocket did not pitch over quite as far as it should have. This could be an issue with the rocket’s ability to turn over early in flight or simply not plugging in a large enough difference in first two points of the quadratic equation used to tell the rocket what pitch it should be at based on altitude.

Although extensive searching was done to find the rocket after it re-entered, no trace of it was found within the search area. Upon return the rocket would attempt to hold whatever heading it happened to be on, so it should have continued roughly along the trajectory it was following when we lost contact with it. What we really don’t know is how far it would travel given that it is also programmed to nose up to 15° of pitch once in the lower atmosphere to glide and help reduce speed and heating. If it crashed within the search area, it’s possible it went into one of the water bodies and sank with a damaged sonar transponder. If it managed to fly outside of the search area, we don’t have the resources to keep hunting for it – if it was further outside the search area and had a functioning radio beacon, we would have found it. Thankfully we have enough data from what was transmitted to us while in contact to use for planning our next attempt.

Make sure you check out the gallery above for our first images from space!

Progeny Mk6 Dazzles in Night Launch

Two rocket launches in one week? It was quite the workload but the teams got it done and just three days after the Ascension launch a Progeny Mk6 Block I went shooting up into the sky – at night! This offered up both a unique viewing experience for the record number of kerbs that attended as well as a unique scientific opportunity for exploring the hazardous radiation region. There have been theories bouncing around about various interactions between Kerbin and the sun and the existence of our planet’s magnetic field, but these rocket flights should help lend stronger credence to some of them depending on the results of the data collected, which is now being analyzed. We will be publishing a separate report with the results once they are available.

Capsule Testing Continues

Our astronaut cadre of Jeb, Val, Bill and Bob are still busy putting both capsule prototypes through their paces. This past week and part of next they will be working through various exercises that involve recovering the capsule and crew member from splashdown at sea. Starting in the calmer waters of the bay to the north of KSC they have since moved offshore into the open ocean and have gone through emergency crew extraction, capsule towing, and even dragging it onboard a Maritime Service Vessel’s aft wet ramp. The latest testing has seen an airship equipped with a hook and winch, assisted by a crew in the water, attach to the capsule and carry it back to shore, providing another recovery method besides MSV.

Once the capsules finish water exercises they’ll begin to undergo more rigorous drop tests in advance of a crewed drop and recovery.

Airborne Launch Suffers Further Delays

After Flight Officer Aldeny came down sick due to an averse reaction to his allergy medication, weather and mechanical issues stepped in to prevent the Deuce from flying this week and performing another carry and release test of the Progeny Mk1-B rocket in advance of an actual ascent firing. Thems the breaks – the team will of course regroup and make another attempt next week once the Deuce is repaired.

ATN Database

The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 2,254 asteroids and 7 updated with new observation data.

Celestial Snapshot of the Week

Mun photobombs again, this time rising during a sunset photo of the Progeny Mk6 Block I that launched this week. Here’s a question we posed once for our twitter followers – how do we know this is a sunset photo and not a sunrise?

From the Desk of Drew Kerman (Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff)

Spoiler

Written on 7/20/18

Yes I’m writing this day of. Yes I hate it, but so it goes. Juggling a lot right now and it probably wouldn’t be so bad if I hadn’t had some stupid issues with KSP and mods that honestly very nearly almost made me quit KSP. Seriously, I was contemplating what kind of story arc I could conceive that would put KSA on hold for several months to let me take a breath. I might still do it. Anyways, it’s all good for now.

Deuce flight

Something had to give this week thanks to two rocket launches and all the KSP mod problems I had, and the Deuce flight was the easiest to come up with decent excuses to push back continuously. I liked how Aldeny came down sick due to the allergy meds, I like that I was able to use an in-universe event (the realization that kerbs are allergic to tree pollen after living underground for so long, you can read more on that here if you missed it).

Ascension launch

This was stupid stressful and could have been a real pain in the ass if I hadn’t gotten it done in time to be published. The problem is that once I fly the mission and have to compile all the data and everything as a result of flying the mission, changing when it is flown becomes near impossible and I would have had to fly it all over again at another date and doubled my workload atop what I had already done. So making sure I could get everything set up in time was crucial and I managed to pull it off.

Flight still took two tries though thanks to another file-share error with one of my log files that crashed kOS (they don’t have an elegant way to handle it). Pretty sure now it’s my automatic backup service, so I make sure now to suspend it before launches. Had no problem the second flight or during the Progeny mission.

I didn’t plan to not make orbit, the rocket as designed and coded simply did not make orbit unfortunately. I really was trying but things definitely got a lot closer so next time should be the one.

I’m not going to reveal what happened to the rocket here. There’s a chance I can still use that later on.

Progeny Launch

First try! That’s always nice, not having to redo any of the flight for any reason – altho I came close to having to because I didn’t remember until the rocket was falling back to Kerbin that the airbrakes were still set to deploy only 25%. Thankfully that tweakable can be adjusted in flight.

There was some “modeling” i.e. me flying a couple of missions prior to the actual one where I tested whether the airbrakes could fully deploy on re-entry. Still, I’ve had mission results that have differed from tests before so I was honestly unsure how things would turn out.

People have asked how I get the Ascension launch towers to appear with the Progeny rocket and it’s not composite photos I actually have them there in flight. The process is pretty simple:

1. Make sure the game setting is disabled that automatically cleans up launch pad debris
2. Launch the Progeny rocket to the pad and save its location with the HyperEdit lander tool
3. Move it off to the side with VesselMover so the pad is clear
4. Go back to the Space Center and into the VAB and launch the Ascension rocket to the pad
5. Unclamp the rocket from the service towers and recover it
6. Load back to the Progeny rocket and use the lander tool to place it right back where it originally was on the launch pad, now next to the service towers

The only downside to this is every time the game reloads the flight scene, the launch towers pop up a bit and eventually are floating above the ground and I have to clear everything, go back and repeat the steps for a reset.

Night launch photo

So the main reason I don’t like night launches is that you’re not supposed to be able to see the smoke trail and SmokeScreen (or the game itself, really) doesn’t produce particles that are affected by ambient light conditions or lights in the scene, even. I could have just launched the rocket without any lights on it but that seemed like too much of a cop-out so I did end up compositing multiple images to create the final photo – one of the rocket launching with smoke and one without was the main technique, along with a bare background plate so when I merged them I could remove the smoke above the lights and replace it with a layer of black I blended in to still blot out the sky under the rocket plume, which was also a composite since I couldn’t get images of the rocket in the exact same spot when using smoke and when not. Also the flag doesn’t really have a light on it that was a composite of an image taken with the ambient light tool adjusted upwards to make the flag brighter.

Night launch video

This was even more tricky, but I managed to figure out a way to get it done with minimal hassle. I can’t turn off the smoke without pausing the game, and when pausing the game I normally can’t access the SmokeScreen menu to turn it off, but I found that if I leave the particle emitter editor window open I could close the main SmokeScreen menu (which doesn’t hide at F2) and it would still stay open. When it isn’t selected the border is black so since it also doesn’t hide on F2 I was able to place it all the way to the side of the screen where it is essentially invisible against the night sky. So I launch, waited for the rocket to ascend a bit, hit F2 and then paused the game, pulled out the editor, killed the smoke emitter, hid the editor on the side again, unpaused and hid the UI (if I had just paused and unpaused with the UI hidden both Kerbal Alarm Clock and Resource App would have stayed visible thanks to a bug).

Now when I went into my Sony Vegas video editor I simply cut out the part where I was adjusting the smoke emitter however I could not show/hide the UI and pause/unpause fast enough without the rocket moving, so I still had several dozen frames where the UI was visible. For this I cropped the video down to just the rocket and had a still image background plate to fill out the rest of the frame.

it still took me a couple of tries to get everything close to right, and some screaming and cursing – I’m still not 100% pleased with the result, I think the smoke trail goes too long and falls back oddly but I think the overall effect is still worthy of what I was going for.

Now I have to get ready to keep tabs on today’s launch…

 

[Drew Kerman]

Operations Summary – Week of 7/23/18

Images from the Week Gallery

Flight Analysis Posted for Both Recent Launches

Progeny Mk6 Block I Flight 6
Ascension Mk1 Block I Flight 2

With the Progeny flight being mostly routine other than some extreme testing of the air brakes the more interesting read would definitely be the Ascension analysis, which covers why the rocket failed to make orbit. It is a shame the guidance system seemed to lose roll control, because if the rocket had been able to continue to pitch over as planned it would likely have succeeded in making orbit. At the same time this makes us confident that we can get there on the next attempt, which also unfortunately won’t be until late September or early October.

Heat Wave Hits KSC

A thankfully rare event transpired this week when a high-pressure system became trapped over the region around KSC and proceeded to bake the surface over the course of several days before finally collapsing into a swarm of severe storms. Such an event happened before back in late 2016 and we were only able to work during the cooler night time hours. This event was a bit more severe and even at night we were unable to keep our facilities cool enough to allow for comfortable working conditions – especially the larger buildings like the VAB and HAB. The decision was made to pull back to Umbarg HQ underground. The headquarters is on partially staffed on a regular basis so there was extra office space but not enough for everyone from KSC so most worked remotely from temporary housing. We returned to the surface on Thursday and as of today everyone and everything is back up and running.

ATN Database

The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 2,266 asteroids and 6 updated with new observation data.

Celestial Snapshot of the Week

Oh look, more Mun! This time it is working its way out from in front of the sun after a Kerbolar eclipse as they both set behind the mountains to the west of KSC

From the Desk of Drew Kerman (Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff)

Spoiler

Written on 7/27/18

I really do think the Ascension flight analysis is pretty dope. I hope people enjoy reading that stuff. I really actually don’t know why the rocket rolled – like I said that was an honest effort to make orbit. I may have to post to the kOS reddit or forum thread about it.

Heat wave

Last time I put up a heat wave striking KSC, it was me actually baking in the heat of summer and unable to really use my PC comfortably. I had just moved into a new place and hadn’t gotten any A/C setup. This summer now I’m able to stay cool enough even in 90+°F that I can continue to work, but with a big new DLC dropping for GTA Online this week I knew I wasn’t going to have as much time to work on KSA operations so I needed things to slow way down for a bit.

Of course, I expected to get more work done than I did and it wasn’t because of GTA Online but mainly I was sleeping very erratically, even for me, and I think I was fighting off something. I don’t really ever get sick – I can’t recall the last time I had to take any sort of medication to fight off even a minor cold or infection – so when I am tired and want to sleep a lot I just do, and it’s probably due to my immune system needing the extra energy.

More crash annoyances

Still having some trouble with KSP not wanting to load my save files when all my regular mods are installed. I singled out KSP Interstellar Extended before as being an issue, but last week all I had to do was delete the folder and re-install it for things to work again. This week, despite changing absolutely nothing else about my KSP install, the game decided it just wasn’t going to work with KSPIE installed. So, love it. I just deleted it entirely. Good news is that I don’t really use it for anything yet since it features a lot of very advanced space tech. At the same time though its a pretty deep mod that ties into many game functions so it’s possible it could have an affect on current rocket launches somehow, I will need to keep an eye on things.

More annoying annoyances

As if dealing with the game causing trouble wasn’t enough, now it seems that TweetDeck is deciding not to give me access to all my twitter collections anymore. Randomly. So, twitter collections are where I can group various tweets into their own timeline and it’s how I compile mission logs and event sequences. They are a huge backbone in my storytelling. Normally, if I want to edit a collection to add/remove tweets I can select it from a list in TweetDeck to add it as a column, then I can drag & drop tweets into it. Now for some reason some of them are missing from that list, and I can’t figure out why the ones that are no longer available were removed. The collections themselves still exist, thankfully, but I can no longer edit them in TweetDeck. Now, it only took me about 15 minutes to write my own little javascript page using codebird, which lets me add tweets to the timelines, but it’s just a tad bit more time consuming to do this now, which doesn’t help things. Hopefully TweetDeck can get their excrements together, I sent in a bug submission but it’s not a support service that guarantees a reply to all submissions.

Yes it really is my birthday today. I turn 36, if anyone was curious. *twirls finger in air* yipeeeee

 

Edited July 28, 2018 by Drew Kerman

[Drew Kerman]

Operations Summary – Week of 7/30/18

Images from the Week Gallery

Progenitor Suffers First Mission Failure for the Mk6 Block I

Well, it’s been a good run of success for the Progeny Mk6 Block I but all good things must come to an end and this week’s launch, which carried mystery goo samples up into space, did not return successfully. Although the Mk6-I has failed to return safely to Kerbin on previous flights, this was the first one where a safe return was a mission critical item so the samples could be studied. The investigation into why the rocket broke apart during re-entry has only just begun and given its forensic nature in having to examine both the data and recovered parts it may take up to 2 weeks if not longer before we hear any results. The two current main focuses of the analysis are the air brakes and the goo containment units. The air brakes were logged as being deployed just prior to the rocket breaking up. Although they deployed at pressures that were less than the last flight, we can’t rule out a mechanical malfunction that could have deployed them improperly, or failed to deploy all at the same time. The goo containment units are suspect mainly because they are the only new parts on the rocket that have not been flown before. It’s possible one or both units could have failed to cycle closed properly, allowing re-entry heat to burn them up from the inside and ruining the structural rigidity of the rocket during a time when Gee forces are at their greatest. Until we have answers, the next launch of the Mk6-I, which is set to carry more samples into space in similar containers, has been scrubbed.

Genesis & Progenitor Move Closer to Airborne Rocket Launch

After 2 weeks of delays thanks to weather and mechanical issues, Flight Officers Tedman and Aldeny were finally able to take the Deuce back up carrying a Progeny Mk1-B rocket not once, but twice this week. The first release test saw them pitch the aircraft up even farther than before to try and get the rocket as close as possible to vertical on jettison. Unfortunately the results were not what everyone was expecting, as the effectiveness of the decoupler in pushing away the rocket has reduced the more the aircraft noses up. It’s not for loss of speed either, but more likely due to the rocket already being in a more stable orientation upon release and less likely to nose up because of it.

The second release test had them pull the nose up even further. This required both pilots to keep a careful watch on the instruments during the climb to ensure the aircraft did not enter into a dangerous stall, which meant the rocket itself (usually released by the copilot) had to decide when it was time to hop off. The flight computer used for the Mk1-B is rudimentary compared to the inline core used by later Progeny rockets and so a rough script had to be written to monitor the aircraft’s pitch, speed and altitude. Everything worked out fine however and the rocket was able to reach 81° of pitch after separation – which is still short of the 85° being aimed for but close to the 80° the Mk1-B was launched at from the ground during its flights back in 2016.

One final test flight next week before actually firing the engine will be a full dress rehearsal so we can confirm the rocket will behave the same way it did the previous test, it will be running the same code that will be used for release and ignition (minus the ignition actually happening), and it will also gather a lot more data than previous tests now that we have a better idea of what we want to know is going on while the rocket is floating free of the aircraft.

Ascension Capsule Testing Concludes Initial Crew Training Exercises

Since the start of July the four astronauts (Bill, Bob, Val and Jeb) have been working with the Ascension program to put our two capsule prototypes through their paces. This was mainly to get the astronauts accustomed to working within the restrictive confines of the capsule and also to ensure that all operations involving them and the capsules could be carried out properly. This included simply getting into and out of the capsules while on the ground, followed by getting in and out while floating in the waters off the coast of KSC. Exercises then moved on to scenarios for both land and sea where the capsule had returned damaged or improperly landed, some cases with the astronauts simulating being injured or completely incapacitated. Testing was done for how the capsule might be recovered from both land and sea using trucks, boats and airships. Crews from all three of our contracted Maritime Service Vessels participated in various exercises as well to work out any problems with recovery operations.

This month will now include a series of meetings to review the various merits and debate the issues for both capsules, as well as additional operational training for the astronauts within the capsules. By the end of the month we should have a final decision on which capsule will be chosen to carry a kerbal into space aboard an Ascension rocket – though not necessarily the Mk1.

More Science from the North Polar Region

Our KerBalloon crew was able to work with other science organizations to put together a mission up to the northern polar region – not all the way to the north pole but close enough to gather some new science data. While the rest of the expedition focused on installing new seismic sensors and other ground-level monitoring equipment over the Tundra and Ice Caps, the crew released a high-altitude balloon that drifted across both biomes and was recovered a day later. It carried a slew of instruments and even a sample of mystery goo. Lead Scientist Cheranne and her fellow researchers are already working through the data, which also gathered more information on the higher radiation levels experienced near that area.

ATN Database

The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 2,290 asteroids and 8 updated with new observation data.

Celestial Snapshot of the Week

Funny enough, Mun did actually manage to slip itself into another one of our photos this week, but that’s getting old so here’s a photo of the Progeny Mk6 Block I waiting for launch on the pad as Duna and Eve still shine overhead while the sky begins to brighten with the coming dawn.

From the Desk of Drew Kerman (Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff)

Spoiler

Written on 8/1/18

Two days out from Friday! Whoo! Progress in the battle to gain more lead time. There are already things that have been posted I wish I could go back and change as the story further out ahead comes into clearer focus. I don’t like to outline details of future events. I have the broad strokes laid out and dated in my upcoming timeline notes but I don’t like to work out the details until I get there. This means of course that I could want to do something that would require me to alter other things leading up to that thing. The further ahead of the current time I am, the more I’m able to go back and make things lead up properly to the event I’m working on now. Anyways, I’ve belabored this point before – it is what it is I’m doing the best I can. Moving on!

Tweetdeck collection issue

Yea so I’m definitely sure now that TweetDeck’s problem is for some reason it has a maximum limit on how many collections it can list for you to select from, since the more new ones I add the more old ones disappear from the listings. This is likely due to the fact that accounts used to be limited to only a certain number of collections until several months or maybe a year ago. I don’t know when but at some point twitter either removed the restriction or increased the allowed number of collections per account. I haven’t gotten any errors yet creating new collections so if there’s a new upper limit I’ve not yet reached it (I was getting around it earlier by just creating the collections under my @DKerman_KSA account since ultimately the end user doesn’t see what account the collection is from when it is displayed on the website). Hopefully TweetDeck catches on soon, but in the meantime I do have my script to use to keep adding tweets to collections as needed, it’s just a bit hacky and adds additional time to the whole process.

Dhumla cargo space

If anyone was wondering what I did to get the exact dimensions for the interior of the Dhumla included in the latest blueprint revision, I used Kronal Vessel Viewer. I mean, it’s obvious that’s what I used to get all the blueprint images but I actually took two screenshots of the Dhumla fuselage and one of them included a stock 1m truss. Then I used Paint.NET to measure the length of the truss in pixels. After that I just had to take pixel measurements of the spaces within the fuselage to get their dimensions in meters. Oh yes, and keeping everything in orthographic perspective is of course key.

Average asteroid perikees

Lest you thought I was spewing out made up numbers to look cool (you didn’t actually think that did you? C’mon!) here is the spreadsheet that includes all the asteroid passes recorded. It was a relatively simple if slightly time-consuming matter of just paging through all 383 asteroid plot photos that have been posted since November 2016 and inputting their perikee heights. There were about 5-6 that didn’t have actual perikee heights since they were discovered late and I only made note of their Munar Distance – but that’s still quite accurate in the grand scale of things. Note that I have them grouped by the month they passed Kerbin at perikee, not the month they were first discovered or entered the SOI.

Progeny flight

The mass of the two goo containers turned out to be only a few grams difference from the truss, batteries and payload fairings that normally go there. This was not by design! Just a happy coincidence of the tweakscale patch that was written by whomever to scale down the inline containers.

No I’m not going to tell you here why the rocket broke up. I know why, it’s not like the mysterious roll over of the Ascension rocket that I really don’t know. I didn’t plan for it to happen, but it happened so I’m going with it. I may reveal the reason at some point if I feel it won’t spoil anything too much for anyone. I like being able to reveal operations details here but I still want to respect the story. Truth is in some cases when accidents happen you just don’t know for sure what went wrong and I think you could all use a bit of that still.

There was a pretty interesting interaction with a follower in the final 2 minutes leading up to the launch, where he tried to get me to abort because of an inbound ICBM. I think that was a bit much and not really fitting well to the storyline (where on Kerbin would such a thing come from??) but I went with it. I’m still not sure if my interpretation of his motives was accurate or not, haven’t heard from him since. Maybe he didn’t actually think I was going to respond so fast and then had to scramble for a response. Events like these are fun tho, and I always encourage followers to interact with the account as if they too are part of the universe.

Also managed to figure out how to manually edit the save file to put the damn launch towers back into the ground if they start floating upwards after reloading the scene a few times, saving me from having to redo that whole process of putting the launch base out on the pad with the towers there as well.

Deuce flights

Both flights went off fairly smoothly. The first one I had to reload the save file I made shortly before the release maneuver since I forgot to also run the pitch script that showed me how high the rocket nosed up the first time I flew the entire mission. The second mission I had to actually pause and leave literally a minute after takeoff when I realized I forgot I had to be somewhere. Of course I couldn’t remember before taking off. But was able to resume no problem later. Then I also realized I forgot to hack together the script that was going to release the rocket and had to do that while flying. It’s funny how I tweet about the pilots going to briefings and excrements but do I ever do that for myself?? Not as often as I should.

 

[TheKSPBeginner]

thingy

[Drew Kerman]

*gets email notification* Ooh someone replied to my thread!

On 8/4/2018 at 11:51 AM, TheKSPBeginner said:

thingy

Eff Eff Ess (really? They filter swear acronyms?? C'mon)

KSA Operations Suspended Due to Monolith Interference

Images from the Week Gallery

Earlier this week on Tuesday just after 13:53 local time the Monolith woke up. Everyone at KSC immediately knew this as a massive electromagnetic (EM) pulse surged through all active electronics on campus and the nearby Support Village and shorted them out – in some cases in a shower of sparks and electrical arcs. Minor fires were started in some areas and brought under control as personnel began to evacuate over the causeway bridge to prepare to head for Umbarg. This evacuation plan was set in place after the first time the Monolith sent out such a discharge. Several injuries were reported from burns but no deaths occurred.

Not all staff could be immediately moved off site as we had a Deuce aircraft in the air for its Progeny Mk1-B carry/release mission. Unable to contact them, we had to hope they would be able to fly back and land safely on their own and had what emergency crew we could spare ready near the runway. Aboard the aircraft, after losing radio contact Flight Officers Aldeny and Tedman first considered diverting to Kravass, but because the mission carried little fuel in order to make the climb to altitude easier, they did not have enough to go that far. Next they flew over Umbarg to see if they could contact anyone, but some boats in the bay and an airship on approach reported they too had lost contact with the city. Finally they flew back to KSC to see if the space center had received any visible damage. Seeing none, Aldy took the Deuce in closer to get a better look at the condition of the runway in preparation for a landing on the next pass, however at this time the plane’s electrical systems shorted out. Thankfully the Deuce is still largely mechanical driven from its engines to its control surfaces and even the landing gear have a manual pump. The engines did run rough and Aldy put her down as fast as possible, fearing they would cut out. The aircraft made a safe landing at 14:09 and the crew was evacuated on the runway.

The fact that the aircraft lost electrical systems some time after the initial EM pulse was why we sent back a team to check on the KSC as soon as we considered it safe – at least as safe as we could guess given we had no idea what the Monolith was actually doing. Could it explode? Release some kind of deadly radiation? We commend the volunteers who returned to the surface to take readings and assess the situation. When they returned the report was both good and bad. The good news is that there appears to be no harmful levels of detectable toxins or radiation in the area. The bad news is that what we initially thought was just a pulse is actually an EM field stretching out to nearly 10km (roughly twice the distance to the Umbarg tunnel mouth) in every direction – the surface crew followed the shore line north and did not have a means to check distance over the water but it’s safe to assume it extends that way too.

The energy generated by the field is more than enough to immediately fry any active electronics within it, which poses some serious problems for us to continue operations at KSC. The two main questions we are looking to answer right now are why the field exists and how long it will persist. Note that in asking why the field exists we mean what is the Monolith doing that is causing the field? Everyone already agrees the incident was triggered by the recent attempt to drill a hole up into the Monolith from underneath through the crystal structure found to form a base beneath the impenetrable facade seen above ground. In the meantime we will be working on the logistics of how to continue what KSA operations we can without the ability to use the Kerbal Space Center.

In addition to the effects the Monolith had on KSC, it once again made use of the crystalline network discovered running through the ground to Kravass and Umbarg. Unlike the first event which was a massive discharge, this time they actually drew energy and sucked both caverns dry of electricity. With no power making it out of the keothermal stations, utility crews quickly got to work inspecting the main power conduits leading from both plants and discovered the crystals had grown into them. It’s likely the Monolith could have been leaching very small amounts of power for months, building up energy. Activating and maintaining the field would require a lot of power, and when reserves ran low it was forced to draw a very not so inconspicuous amount.

It took nearly two days to perform the unprecedented task of taking all keothermal generators offline, cutting out and replacing the crystal-infused conduit section, and bringing all the generators back online. For quite some time now kerbs have been pressuring the power authorities to rebuild the poorly designed infrastructure, but it wasn’t poorly built and the stance of “if it ain’t broke…” kept redesign plans at bay. This event could finally make those in charge rethink their position, because taking an entire power plant offline to fix a single conduit is not a very efficient repair job. With the crystals removed, additional time will be needed to gradually bring power back to various areas to monitor for any additional drain points. As of right now the EM field does not appear to be affected by the loss of the crystals it was using to gain energy.

This report will also serve as our Ops Summary for this week.

ATN Database

The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 2,310 asteroids and 2 updated with new observation data.

From the Desk of Drew Kerman (Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff)

Spoiler

Written on 8/3/18

BREAK TIME!!!

So, I’ve known this has been coming for months. Some of you may have as well if you’ve been reading about the troubles I’ve been having keeping up with things lately but even before that, like last year I dropped some hints of bigger things to come when I triggered the Monolith for the first time. Well, here we are – but not quite as I originally envisioned. That’s not unexpected though, because although I can do lots of plotting on where I want the story to go ultimately it is also affected by events in real life as well as what happens in the game.

So yea, I always planned for there to be something big to go down around this time of the year since for months I’ve been planning an epic 4-week cross country road trip to undertake from Sept to Oct. It’s just that I wasn’t sure where the KSA would be at the time. I had hoped by now the Ascension Mk1 would have made it to orbit, but that didn’t happen so there was a delay in the ordering of additional Mk1 rockets to be constructed and I couldn’t go with my original plot idea – which I’m still going to hold partly in reserve. What I can say, because I’m no longer doing it, was that it was going to destroy the VAB and damage the HAB. The VAB destruction would serve the purpose of not only halting operations but also overcome the problem I noticed and mentioned in a Desk Notes very early on, which is the Tier 2 VAB is not located in the same spot as the original Tier 1 building. So I couldn’t say that they VAB got “expanded” when it was eventually upgraded because the whole structure will have shifted position significantly. So having reason to rebuild it from the foundations up would solve that. However now I don’t need to destroy the VAB to upgrade to a bigger building but I’m not going to say how. That’ll come along in time.

I did want to have operations go on a bit longer through the month of August, but this week I got offered work for a fireworks show over in the Maldives for almost the entire second-half of August and 2 days into September. I’m leaving for my road trip on Sept 8th so that gives me very few days over the next month to work on pushing out my lead time two months in order to be able to let things run while I am not home. I really need the work for extra money so the road trip doesn’t completely clean me out – I know, hard to feel bad for me spending half a month on a tropical island.

In addition to being gone most of this month and all of September, in order to continue to keep my bank account padded since I’m not doing much other work these days I’m likely going to accept an extended fireworks show overseas for New Years, which can begin work as early as the day after Thanksgiving. So after coming home from my road trip I’ll have just under 2 months to work more on KSA ops before being gone all of December. However this doesn’t necessarily mean KSA operations themselves will continue to be suspended for the remainder of the year. But they could.

The main reason KSA ops might be down for the remainder of the year is I’m really frustrated with how far behind I’ve fallen in keeping up with version updates to KSP as well as adding new features to the Ops Tracker and even the website could use a bit of TLC. I’m putting all my time into just keeping ahead of daily operations I have no time for anything else. And yes, I do spend time doing other things as well because as much as I try I just can’t do just KSA ops all day every day. So a big requirement of getting operations back on track will be how much I can get done working through my issues queue for the Ops Tracker as well as getting a KSP v1.4.5 install up and running looking the same as my current v1.3.1 install – which now seems to want to crash a lot when I try to play with all my mods installed. I will look at the log, see what the last mod was doing before the crash, remove that mod and the game will run fine until it somehow finds a way to crash with a different mod after I’ve done nothing else to it. Darn it.

So yea, that’s the whole story right now. Circumstances have forced me into this position but again, that’s just the way it is. Yes, it’s a bummer that the KSA might not reach orbit this year like it was originally planned way back in January (among other things) but just like the real space programs you have to plan for the best and work with what you end up getting. Commercial crew from Boeing just got pushed back even later into 2019, and who knows if SpaceX will really be able to keep to its original timeline for crewed Dragon flights, which has already seen some delays (moonshot 2018 anyone?). Let’s not get started on the Just Wait Space Telescope The important thing is the KSA project itself will continue to endure so eventually the goals sought after during this year will be achieved.

 

Edited August 10, 2018 by Drew Kerman

[Drew Kerman]

(Originally posted to the website on 8/21) It has now been two weeks since the Monolith became active again, and since our original report a great deal has transpired. If you’ve not been able to keep up with the twitter feed, here is a recap:

The same day we released the first report, just as everyone in both Kravass and Umbarg were getting settled back in and enjoying having full power once more, everything went dark again. Well – almost. A small portion of both cavern systems stayed lit, which told the utility crews almost exactly where to look in order to find the additional crystal growths. Once again everyone had to wait for a full power shutdown, conduit replacement, and restart. The power returned and remained stable for two more days before new crystal veins had attached themselves elsewhere to suck up energy again. Because the power authorities charge flat rates, installing monitoring equipment was never a high priority and discovering a vein hooking into the system before it begins to pull massive amounts of power just isn’t possible. Tired of dealing with the constant shut downs, a new plan was formulated.

Excavations had already been performed underground, drifting along one of the main crystal veins growing from the base of the Monolith. This was along the one leading towards Sheltered Rock and Ockr to determine why it didn’t reach the caverns there (turns out it might, but a fault line broke the connection before it branched). However the two leading off towards Umbarg and Kravass have now been exposed from the surface near the caverns after days of digging to allow explosives to be lowered down and detonated. The energy-absorbing nature of the crystals took in the majority of the blast, leaving them with only minor damage and forcing work crews to manually dismantle the rest.

With repeated attempts to draw power denied and the connection eventually completely severed, over the past couple of days the EM field surrounding the Monolith has shrunken considerably from its original 10km and now is currently holding stable at just 2.5km. This is still wide enough to encompass all the buildings in KSC, unfortunately. Even more unfortunate is that a potential reason for the EM field’s strong existence was because the Monolith was quickly growing new crystal to plug up the drill hole bored by the research team. With the field size largely reduced, the same effect has been observed for the crystal growth. While it was originally discovered to be closing at a rate that could see it healed in about 2 weeks, its now healing at a rate that could take up to 3 months if the field remains constant. The connection between the field size and healing rate is what leads scientists to strongly believe the field is a result of the growth rather than a purely defensive mechanism.

The theory that the field was a direct attack at our drilling attempts had always bothered scientists, since we don’t need electrical systems to drill. We could rig up a mechanical setup that would have to be cranked by hand, but if it was designed for several kerbs to operate together, a decent amount of drilling could be done. With it’s original healing rate, its doubtful any progress could have been made manually. The reduced rate of healing shows promise but we have to consider the fact that the crystal has shown the ability to absorb energy, as evidenced by the attempt to blow some of it up. Drilling produces heat, and that could be enough to give the Monolith the energy needed to still heal faster than we could drill. Having nothing better to do, researchers say they are going to try.

We will continue to monitor the field while the power authorities maintain vigilance on the crystal veins to ensure they do not reconnect. There was some debate as to whether an auxiliary conduit could be built so a limited amount of power could be directed towards the Monolith and speed up the healing process. However we are told it was decided that there would be no way to guarantee the Monolith would connect to that conduit and only that conduit if the crystals were allowed to grow again.

The thought of being in operational limbo for as much as three months is not very exciting to contemplate, but at this point all we can do is hope the field collapses further so KSC is no longer affected. We have no doubt the Monolith can create a weaker field and heal even more slowly, although why it would have any reason to want to do that we couldn’t say, so we don’t expect it will unless it has to. We’ll continue to work on ways to continue pushing forward where we can and keep an eye on the status of the field from KSA headquarters here in Umbarg.

Edited September 4, 2018 by Drew Kerman

[Drew Kerman]

(Originally posted to the website on 9/13) Today we cap off our second year of operations! Sadly we're not quite in as exciting a position as we were at this time last year. I said back then it was too early for any reflection but enough time has passed now that the goals we were aiming for from the beginning are finally starting to look a bit too optimistic. Such is the reality of any difficult endeavor however - you can only plan for the best and work with what you get. We certainly did aim to reach orbit by this point but delays to operations, such as the legal injunction earlier this year and the currently ongoing Monolith activity, did not give us the time we needed to accomplish such a difficult task.

Despite the hardships progress is being made, even if it is not as fast as we would have liked. The biggest scientific achievement this year would undoubtedly be the discovery of the radiation belt that exists above the planet. This was made possible mainly through direct observations taken by our Progeny Mk6 rocket on over half a dozen sub-orbital flights.

Although we have proven how beneficial going into space can be for the scientific community, staying in space to really begin to get kerbs excited for the future of our civilization is still very much a work in progress. While we remain focused on 2019 as the year the first astronaut will head for the heavens, we've all come to realize just how much work yet lies ahead of us. One major step will soon be taken though, as next week we will announce the final design of our first space capsule!

The immediate future is looking pretty shaky thanks to the activities of the Monolith but we don't expect it to hold us back in the long term. This next year aims to hold as many exciting events and opportunities as the two years prior and lead to many more in the years to come. I continue to be inspired by all the hard work and dedication the Kerbal Space Agency employees have shown, as well as faith. Faith not in some unseen and unknown entity but in the steady progress of success over failure and the ultimate purpose of journeying among the stars for the betterment of all kerbalkind.

- Drew Kerman
Founder & Operations Director

Desk Notes (Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff)

Spoiler

Written on 9/7/18

It is the eve of my departure on an epic 4-week cross country road trip and I'm happy to say that I've managed to progress the KSA up to the point of my return in Oct, although just barely. How this will affect operations once I get back remains to be seen but it will definitely be a slow return as I put more effort into the Ops Tracker and pushing out my lead time than into active flight/rocket operations. It will all continue to move forward though and that's the important thing.

The upgrade to 1.4.5 is complete and wasn't nearly as bad as I feared it would be although it did take 3 whole days of installing and testing to ensure all my essential mods were compatible - at least with the current level of gameplay I was at. I can load all my current vessels and that's what counts. I had also put time into installing and tweaking KS3P so that I could remove dependency on DX9 with the SweetFX post-effects I've been using since 0.25. Turns out though that KS3P doesn't work with DX11+ and therefore I still can't make use of Textures Unlimited. Dammit. Oh well, maybe the KS3P dev will return at some point or someone else will be able to upgrade it.

That new 'roid NXP actually really did sneak up on me. I don't know, I have a pretty rote process for managing my asteroids but lately I've been discovering that I've been screwing up a lot of the process involved somehow - it is extremely frustrating but probably a sign of how hard I'm pushing myself sometimes since I get to the point where I end up making mistakes. So yea, it ended up in orbit around Kerbin without me even witnessing it behind the scenes (as in, watching it happen as an 'undiscovered' asteroid not yet in the ATN catalog).

Right then, I need to finish getting ready to leave early tomorrow. Hope you all enjoy what little is in store for the coming month and hopefully things will begin to pick back up again soon((ish)(TM))

Update 10/5/18: I am back safe and sound from my epic 4wk cross country road trip. This means KSA can get back to business without any delay from health or financial issues. Will still be a while before things are back in full swing

 

[Drew Kerman]

Although there hasn't been activity here for a while the KSA is alive and well, now prepping to resume full operations and hoping to make 2019 a solid year of operations. We've also opened up the option for the public to donate money in support. Full details:

While I did not create a comprehensive report such as this after summarizing the years of 2016/17, this past year has been full of so many red fields atop the monthly sheets I felt it was necessary to explain to anyone who reads our public reports that the Kerbal Space Agency is not currently in serious financial trouble. First, if you have not yet seen it, our end of year summary for 2018 is available here. I will admit, this is not a pretty picture! We are now almost a quarter of the way into our third year of operations and as the Total Net Income field shows we have lost 171,094 funds from our original capital. This is not unexpected, given that we are trying to create an entirely new industry – the commercial support remains nascent at best as we attempt to adapt our current technologies to be able to carry out missions clients want today while at the same time working to advance our technology to meet their needs in the years to come as both air and space become more accessible. Lots of profits is not something we will see much of in the near future.

Still, we managed marginal yearly profits our first two years in operation so what happened? Thankfully, a large portion of our losses stemmed from external events that were entirely out of our control. Being shut down and unable to conduct operations twice in one year easily amounted to tens of thousands of lost funds. We were unable to accrue any income at all in March thanks to the legal injunction. Even with our limited operations during the Monolith EM field, when you average out our income for all months we still managed 37k per month. Now also take into consideration the expensive infrastructure improvements to KSC, which do not happen often: the runway and the new Administration Complex. The Monolith EM field also incurred significant expense when working to complete the Dhumla in an off-site facility. Remove all these factors and our loss for the year was only around 43k instead of nearly 430k! That’s almost breaking even if we had been able to put in only an average month’s work in March. The entire time of lost operations has also held back our ability to satisfy greater contracts since we could not develop increasingly capable technologies without conducting missions to test them.

Also worrisome may be the fact that we spent 78k more in overall expenses this year over last year. But a full review of all our expenses has shown this was mainly due to continuing to push forwards in our advancements to space and fixed-wing flight, not because we wasted it on needless activities and disastrous missions. It’s a hard lesson for many people to grasp, but you have to spend lots of money to make money and our spending was on-point this past year to put us in a good position, with the possibility of 3rd party satellites being lofted into space on the Progeny Mk6 or placed into orbit by the Ascension Mk1. The Dhumla is also our first serious contender against the airship cargo industry and C7 Aerospace has already lined up several very interested customers should the aircraft flight trials pan out. This could be the year all our various investments really finally pay off!

Or – maybe it won’t be. Maybe we have yet another year of financial struggle ahead of us, thanks to external strife or poor mission execution and vehicle engineering. It’s worth noting that our published financials are for just our operational budget – which I like to say means you won’t ever know how much we spend on toilet paper until we need it on a mission. If this budget were to run fully into the red that doesn’t mean the KSA would go bankrupt, but we would be seriously crippled in our ability to create more income. Thus, I have spoken with our Operations Director and gotten approval to open up two avenues through which the public can donate funds to the KSA. They both accept payments in Universal Specie Denomination and the current exchange rate is 1USD = 1000Funds. On the left you have an option for regular monthly donations, on the right is an easy option for a one-time donation (no account needed, PayPal accepted) that does not charge us a cut.

Perhaps the generosity of donors will help get us through any hard times ahead, perhaps not. Nonetheless, we have turned away offers in the past and would now like to give anyone the chance to help support us if they so wish. Anyone who makes a donation will get recognized in our monthly financial reports, where we will also disclose any earnings made through donations. We all here at KSA are thankful for any help that is given.

Mortimer Kerman
Head of Finances

Desk Note from Drew Kerman:

Spoiler

Let me make one thing perfectly clear if it wasn't clear enough in the financial review - lack of donations will not kill this project. At least, not completely. It should be no surprise that this all takes up a copious amount of time daily, which means I have less time to spend earning money otherwise. Thankfully I'm in a very good place right now and am self-sufficient with my current job coaching gymnastics. It doesn't quite leave me with a whole lot of money at the end of the month however so saving up for things I want is a slow process, which I like to speed along by supplementing it with pyrotechnical work. But that work takes me away from my desk completely for days or weeks at a time and thus impacts my ability to keep up and continue with KSA activities. If I can work up a decent amount of income through regular donations, that means less time spent away on firework displays - instead of shipping out for a month or more on the holidays I can still do well with only a few days. The basic idea is that the more income I have the less chance there is that I have to take more time away from working on the KSA, and fewer dormant periods will exist. Again, lack of money can't kill the KSA - I can always come up with some excuse for putting things on hold and coming back later - but I'd rather not have to do that very often. So, we'll see what happens.

Why now? I feel like I’m in a good place finally in proving both to myself and you, the audience, that this is a sustainable and entertaining project worthy of monetary donations. I really didn’t want to receive donations from the start and reward people with the collapse of this endeavor. It’s not going to bring in as much as YouTube or Twitch content creation but from the very start I wanted to do something different that could still possibly support me fully or at least partially financially the way streamers and video creators do. I also want to state I have no plans to ever monetize my YouTube channel.

I originally planned to use Paypal for donations but they do take a cut out of them and also I didn't want to deal with setting up a business account or whatever. I found Ko-Fi through the KSPTOT author who set up an account for himself. Yea, I agree it's a pain that you have to clickclickclickclickclick to get a donation value you want - I don't know how they didn't think that was counter-productive. I also can't change the per-coffee amount or remove the whole coffee thing without paying up $6/mo but that membership model is how they offset the transaction fees and don't take a cut from donations. It is what it is.

As always, thanks for reading and whether you choose to donate or not I still appreciate support by means of feedback, comments and engagement here, on twitter, the forums, YouTube, etc.

Here's looking to an awesome 2019!!

 

[Drew Kerman]

Operations Summary – Week of 1/14/19

Images from the Week Gallery

Progeny Mk6-I Mission Ends with “Near Success”

The first launch of the new calendar year took to the skies earlier this week. It was a re-flight of the Mystery Goo containment units that took place last July, which ended with the rocket breaking up on re-entry. This time we know the rocket did succeed in making it down through the atmosphere to the point of parachute deployment, and the data we have is consistent with a good chute popping out to slow the rocket, but the rocket itself failed to be recovered. The splashdown point was ~80km away from where we thought it would come down and it took the recovery vessel over an hour to reach it. There’s no obvious reason why the rocket shouldn’t have still been floating on the surface and we will refrain from speculation and await the official report sometime next week. Although the mission is technically a failure because the Goo samples failed to be returned, everyone is happy at least to see the rocket survived past the point of the last flight. Unless any evidence turns up to blame the new payload instruments, this shouldn’t affect the next launch carrying the Science Jr. material study labs, which is currently planned for early February.

This was also the first flight to use our updated Automated Flight Control System software. The AFCS saw a significant refactor late last year to adhere to stricter communications and file management protocols. The software is now more capable of handling commands sent from Mission Control, manages its local storage space better and better handles more frequent comm dropouts between KSC – something that will be required when it starts happening more than just once as an orbital craft travels in and out of contact around Kerbin.

Ascension Mk1 Readies for Third Flight

Everything came together well this week to prep the Ascension Mk1 rocket for flight. Last week the engine was test fired on the stand to ensure it was ready before being integrated with the fuel tank it will push up into space. The test weight carrying batteries and flight systems arrived just today to begin its integration and cap off the rocket. It will be laid horizontal at the start of next week for final checks before being loaded up onto the carry vehicle and taken out to the launch pad. We can’t forecast weather out that far yet but everyone is hoping for good conditions and an on-time launch.

Capsule Sea Trials Conclude

With the delay of the Progeny Mk6-I due to weather, sea trials for the Mk1 capsule got off to an early start this week with a parachute drop test on Tuesday from 16km into the waters just offshore from KSC. The capsule was fitted with a float collar that automatically inflated after splashdown to allow the recovery boat to hook on and drag it aboard. Unlike previous tests, the capsule floated just fine. After the Mk6-I launch MSV Hoodall stuck around to perform more water exercises with the astronauts boarding the capsule on deck before being placed in the water and removed under various conditions: partial deflation, injuries, etc. This all took place out in the bay north of KSC for calmer conditions on the first day before moving farther out to sea for rougher waters the following day. Working out the best ways to extricate the crew from the capsule turned out to be more difficult than expected but trial and error prevailed over the course of the exercises. Some notes on the hatch design have been recorded and thankfully no one ever came close to drowning.

ATN Database

The latest update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 3,031 asteroids and 0 updated with new observation data.

From the Desk of Drew Kerman (Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff)

Spoiler

Written on 11/30/18

Still staying ahead, getting a week of ops done in less than a week of real days. I might finally have the pacing nailed down, and this month’s 3 launches are only so jammed up because of the backlog created by the operation suspension that closed out 2018. So after this month things will calm down even more. Ascension launches will take more time to prep than Progeny, which on average usually took about 2 weeks. Actually no, now that I think about it Ascension launches will take about the same time since there are 4 more boosters already practically built and just waiting for engines and payloads. Okay well if they had to be built from the beginning it would take 3-4 weeks between launches. So I guess things will remain about the same as January through March/April depending on how missions pan out.

Speaking of missions panning out, causing this last one to fail was mainly a plot decision that came after I realized the vertical ascent was caused by the rocket striking the launch base on lift off – something I had seen in earlier KSP versions when getting things setup but never during an actual launch. I will have to tweak some things to ensure this doesn’t continue to happen but I think one factor was I hadn’t installed the new KJR by Lisias correctly and it wasn’t working, so the rocket was a bit noodle-ey. Stiffer joints are back now and it should fly like it used to again. Other than that though the launch went off great under KSP v1.5.1

Since I switched back to using RemoteTech after Kerbalism cut out its signaling sub-system, the game now requires me to properly handle loss of communication with KSC. Before I could just pretend that after KSC contact was lost the data that was still being written to the KSC archive was really being written to local disk. Now it actually has to be that way or kOS will throw an error that will crash the program. Still, I’m glad I had to be forced to go back and finally code the boot system the way I actually wanted to in the very beginning, complete with a “command line” interface no less!

 

[Drew Kerman]

Operations Summary – Week of 1/21/19

Click for Image Gallery

Ascension Program’s Pivot Towards Kerbed Flight Sees Success on First Mission

This week saw the first launch of an Ascension Mk1 Block I rocket in 2019. The third launch in total, this was also the first flight towards a new mission goal to put kerbals into space on sub-orbital flights rather than attempt to achieve orbit with probes. Well, as a first priority anyways. Ascension was always meant to carry astronauts into space eventually but it was planned to happen later this year rather than sooner. This week’s launch was an important step in allowing us to test new technologies that will be essential in allowing kerbals to operate in space and return safely. The reaction control system, comprised of 10 cold gas thrusters spaced around the payload test weight to control roll, pitch and yaw, had some minor issues at the start but otherwise performed as designed to properly orient the payload along various vectors relative to the trajectory. The heat shield, made of an ablative material to burn away during re-entry and keep the payload relativity cool, survived landing intact thanks to the low-mounted radial chutes flipping the payload over to land nose-first as planned.

Most notably on this mission however was our use of the Launch Vehicle Designer, a recent addition to the KSP Trajectory Optimization Tool. Everyone on the Ascension team is eager to compare the actual telemetry data with the projected data that can be exported from the LVD. We already know from the way the launch turned out the rocket was unable to meet the ascent profile it was programmed for, but seeing how the data deviates can still be very useful in helping the developer to improve the software and us to plan future launches.

Full details on the RCS, heat shield and LVD usage will come with the flight analysis, expected sometime in early February. This will also as always include information on where the Ascension program will go for its next mission.

Dhumla Takes First Steps Towards Flight

This week the Dhumla completed an assembly process that has taken over half a year, although this was in part due to the latest Monolith incident. It was finally rolled out of the HAB today and underwent the first two ground trials that will lead to flight hopefully before the end of the month. The first trial consisted of merely ensuring all the engines were assembled into the aircraft properly (they were tested individually prior to installation) and could be controlled properly from the cockpit. During this time data was gathered on engine status such as fuel flow, thrust output, manifold pressure, RPM, exhaust temperature, and hundreds of more parameters. After review of the data the aircraft was cleared for its second trial later in the day which consisted of the crew learning how best to handle it on the ground, taxiing around. Another data review is scheduled for Monday ahead of a third trial that would take the aircraft just short of the point of flight.

In additional news from the Genesis program, the Deuce flew a science mission that once again blew away a number of previous records. The aircraft still has yet to turn a profit after its long and costly development but these long-haul missions are what it was built for and the continued success should start to bring more interest and thus contract opportunities.

Progenitor Moves Forward with Next Mk6-I Launch

This week the flight analysis for last week’s mission was published. We can still only speculate on why the payload could not be recovered but the investigation could find no reason to postpone or alter the follow-up mission that would carry additional material samples into space. The launch has been scheduled for 2/7 @ 17:11 UTC.

ATN Database

The latest update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 3,068 asteroids and 1 updated with new observation data.

From the Desk of Drew Kerman (Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff)

Spoiler

Written on 12/10/18

Ooof, first deficit in a while, taking 9 real days to do 7 KSA days. That’s not good but like I said this 3 launches in 3 weeks deal isn’t how I plan to do things for the rest of the year so just gotta push through, get out of January and start pacing things out again.

Ascension mission

So yea it was only because I’m so far ahead in lead time I was able to completely redo the mission design and no longer attempt for orbit while also going back to tweets I wrote in December and changing things so that there would have been a reasonable amount of time to redesign the mission. Without lead time had I been doing this in January I would have just been forced to proceed as planned and go for another orbit knowing it would fail but having to write as if I thought it would succeed. I’m glad I didn’t have to waste time doing that. Yay lead time!

That said, the redesign led to a lot of work, because now I had to build a new payload and also match that mass to what the capsule would be so I had to essentially also plan out what my ideal capsule mission would be like so I could replicate that with the NRAP test weight. This meant learning the ins and outs of the Kerbalism life support and mission planning system, making sure everything was compatible and working properly. Furthermore I needed to create my own thruster parts out of the ones that came with the MandatoryRCS pack, using the cold gas resource defined by Archtagon Aerospace.

A lot of work also went into the ascent profile using the LVD, not only did I have to work out a good profile but I had to figure out how to use the LVD – thankfully it was mostly built upon Mission Architect and after stumbling over a bit of understanding with how it processed events differently I got the hang of it pretty quick. But the properties I wanted to optimize, hitting a certain pitch by a certain altitude, were not able to be optimized by the program itself yet (it can now in the latest release) so I had to do a lot of fiddling with values manually.

Oh geez and then I spent a good 2hrs hunting down RCS issues including an issue with the test weight not giving me access to the full SAS capabilities. Turns out even though you can use a tweakable slider in the VAB to set the SAS Level to 3, whatever is defined in the part config file is as high as it’ll go and there was no defined value for the test weight (which originally came out before SAS levels were introduced to the game). The other problem was with RCS enabled the kOS steering manager was unable to actually point the payload in the proper direction – it would keep missing the hold point and oscillating back and forth wildly. I thought my thrusters were just too badly placed or too low-powered. Turns out it was the fact that the test weight has a ridiculous amount of reaction wheel torque that was wildly-overcompensating for movements despite having MandatoryRCS installed (but not compiled for KSP v1.5.1 so I guess wasn’t working properly). When I completely disabled all torque wheels the kOS code was able to point properly.

Getting ready to write the launch for the Wednesday I remembered – “hey dummy this is a day you actually have to do work IRL” which sucks because I would definitely want to be at my computer during this launch. So it was delayed to Thursday, tho I think I may have delayed it anyways because I liked the technical issue that I came up with of having more empty area in the tank to pressurize.

It took me 6 tries to do everything properly – as usual syntax and logic errors were the main culprits and I need to work out a better and faster way of run-checking my code before I waste time setting up for a launch and going through with a mission and spending like 40min total to have the payload returning and the program crash because I didn’t check to make sure the variable I defined for the parachutes was the variable I used to reference the parachutes. ARGH! So yea it basically took an entire day just to run the mission properly. One logic error did provide for some interesting storytelling in the RCS not cutting out after 10s. I’ll explain the in-universe reason for that happening in the flight analysis. The computer crash at the end of the flight also really happened, on the sixth attempt, and at that point I was just like – “love it”.

Also every time I reset to the VAB all the surface attached parts on the test weight sunk to the middle and had to be replaced.

Of course those six attempts were merely to fly the actual mission. I then had to design two variants of the rocket because I couldn’t stand how it actually looked with the heat shield shroud. Ugh. Peh. Yick. So I made a second one that had the heat shield clipped into the decoupler. This is the one seen in all the launch and prelaunch photos. But clipping the heat shield like this meant that when the decoupler fired, even with a force of 0 the capsule was thrown away violently and I wanted to have it push gently away with the RCS system. So a third rocket was built with the heat shield close to but not clipping into the decoupler. I then edited this rocket into the save file my kOS created as soon as the actual rocket entered space and that’s what was used to film the separation. So yea I didn’t refly the whole ascent but still got to capture what the actual rocket would have seen. In the future, since I’ll need to do this with the capsule too, I’ll just edit the attachment node lower.

Oh but the work wasn’t over yet! In addition to doing all my other post launch work (flight database, website mission post, writing the tweets, cleaning up the kOS log, taking photos, etc etc) I had to massage the telemetry data because I only realized after this launch that I had forgot to patch in EC consumption for the radio antenna when adding RemoteTech support to the test weight. So I had to go back and edit the telemetry data of the two previous launches as well. There’s more but I’m looking back up at this giant wall of text and I think you all get the picture.

I’m actually pretty happy this week of operations only took 9 real days considering everything that happened!!!!!

Deuce mission

The main purpose of this flight was to stress-test KSP v1.5.1 and it came through wonderfully. I fly aircraft missions in real time so that was a solid 4.5 hours of actual time spent on that first leg to the Badlands and up to Ockr. Not a single issue, game ran smooth as butter the whole time. Sweet! Thankfully I can use FAR‘s flight assistance to hold wings level and even slightly banked to follow a great circle path and now AFBW has very fine trim controls so staying level is way easier. Even though I still don’t use a full autopilot I was mostly able to fly the mission while catching up on my magazine reading on my iPad.

Dhumla testing

So yea, first off I will admit the propeller placement is really really close to the ground, but I was able to raise them up a bit without breaking through the top of the wings and deviating more obviously from already-published images.

Good lord I still hate KSP wheel physics with a passion. Look at this excrements. That’s after adding fuel all at once with TAC Fuel Balancer. I’m not doing anything with any controls its just oscillating on its own. This is with the spring/damper settings on automatic, no less. I don’t even. Stiffening things up made it better and I can actually taxi this aircraft around without it thinking its a low-rider with a hydraulic suspension.

The turnabout technique is totally a real thing and I was actually working it out during the testing. Best result was to slow to 1m/s, turn the wheel all the way over, and engage reverse thrust (I have buttons on my X55 throttle for this). Throttle up to ~15% and then halfway through the turn cut throttle to idle. 3/4 of the way through the turn toggle off reverse thrust and then steer out with the nose wheel back to straight. I actually don’t need to use reverse thrust to turn the Deuce, it is small enough to swing around at the end of runways just with normal steering.

The engines I’m using are from KAX, and the sounds for them are… pretty sucky to be honest. So I dug into the Airplane Plus folder and checked out the sounds it used for the Hercules engines. Much better! I used the actual startup and running sounds for the herc engines that come with that pack but also added in another engine’s startup sound for a bit more cough and rumble.

Finally, I got around to installing the newer aviation lights into all my aircraft (they were using the original models by BigNose). Busy week and a half, indeed!!

 

[Drew Kerman]

First Kerbed Mission Announced!

Yea I've been too busy to update this thread with ops reports every week, but in case anyone though the KSA project had gone quiet - not even close! Hype time!

The time has come at last, after nearly three years of rocketry the KSA is ready to send a kerbal into space! So much effort has gone towards this achievement, starting with the Progenitor program to learn how to build and operate rockets followed by the Ascension program to scale up what we knew to a size that could carry a crewed capsule. We had hoped it would be able to orbit a kerbal but unfortunately the Mk1 only turned out to be powerful enough for sub-orbital flight, although the Mk2 promises orbital capability. The Mk1 has undergone extensive flight testing and once deemed to be a usable launch vehicle carried an uncrewed capsule successfully to space and back twice. Now set for its 7th mission later this month, we are feeling confident in placing one of our astronauts aboard for the flight. The selection process was carried out in June:

 

And the honor goes to Specialist Bob! He will be the first kerbal in space when his rocket launches on 7/18 @ 19:21 UTC. Be sure to follow @KSA_MissionCtrl for all the latest updates!

Click for Bob's crew page

Click for the vessel page

[Drew Kerman]

Launch operations have begun! Specialist Bill (foreground) stands ready as backup crew while Specialist Bob boards the crew shuttle to the launch pad, where the rocket awaits for him to board before it is raised vertical for launch prep. This is the 7th flight of the Ascension Mk1 after extensive testing was done over the last year to ensure it is safe and ready to carry a kerbal up into space for the first time in our history! Click here for live updates