Kerbal Space Agency twitter fiction - 14 Month Update

[flamerboy67664]

Gremln, see month two update

Thanks sir, and sorry for using Wernher.

Cheers, flamerboy67664/SpaceEagle

[Drew Kerman]

0.90 A Go

I had to take over 2 weeks off from the game after Xmas due to work out of the country, and I just got back this past weekend during the @KSA_MissionCtrl "upgrades". There was nothing special about that event on twitter, I scheduled it back at the beginning of Dec just as a means to easily jump ahead a few days to help push out my lead time. But it actually happened to coincide with me getting 0.90 up and running from Sunday to Tuesday. For the most part it was a painless transition from 0.25. It took me almost three days because I had to catch up on all the forum threads for the mods I was updating, some of which had several pages worth of posts to go through. This is just so I'm aware of any known issues going in. I only installed the mods needed to run my current save, there are several more (mostly part packs) I have yet to get caught up on and install if I want to build a new ship.

The only thing that tripped me up moving over to 0.90 was a Remote Tech issue with the latest 1.6.0 version, but some simple testing revealed they had just changed the name of the property in the SFS file that defines the cone angle of a dish from RTDishRadians to RTDishCosAngle. A simple Find/Replace All and everything was just peachy. To make completely sure all systems were functional I loaded up my Mun III craft file in the VAB. I needed to reset the properties of the Smart Parts sensors since they had a big update for 0.90 but other than that the craft seemed fine. I did a straight-up/straight-down launch and recovery and everything went off perfect, all staging events, triggered action groups, and chute deployments. Switching around to various satellites in orbit I haven't noticed any artifacts or exploding craft.

Recognized by the ESA

I've had the pleasure of being retweeted/mentioned before by the @B612Foundation/@SentinelMission and the Canadian Space Agency @csa_asc, but I was pleasantly surprised when the European Space Agency took notice of a reply I made to one of their tweets showcasing a new piece of software they developed to display orbital data of their spacecraft, giving an example of my own flight tracking software:

That attention netted me 16 retweets, 28 favorites, 47,241 impressions and almost 100 additional followers. Now if I can only get the attention of @NASA....

I've tried some other opportunistic tweets as well with hashtags for publicity-sake, but not with much success so far. The two I did were #2014In5Words and #RuinADateInFiveWords. The idea is that anyone searching for the hashtag has a chance of seeing my tweet and maybe being all like "Oooh what's this?" - but neither hashtag generated any additional followers. I'll still keep an eye out for more I can reasonably participate in, and I'm always watching @csa_asc, @esa and @NASA tweets for any I can respond to with something related.

I might break 1000 followers by next month, although the rate of new followers has flat-lined just this past week.

And for the record, I do hope to do something similar in the future (actually showing orbital tracks on a map)

Turning down the science gains

I've tweaked my science gains down to only 5%. The general idea is that I don't want to be able to gather all the needed science simply by visiting biomes, but also make use of alternative science gathering like space telescopes, space stations, habitats, etc. I currently have enough science to purchase a new tech node in the tree but I still haven't really decided what I want to get.

Sticking to the story

A couple more twitter agencies have popped up in the last month, as usual you can get the full list here. Despite the group email list I established with pretty much all the active ones, there hasn't been a lot of planning going on related to the storyline some of us are trying to collectively adhere to. I can't really complain though, because I'm certainly not going to force people to play the game the way I do. Everyone else is pretty much coming around and tweeting whenever they have the time and making up things as they go. I'm doing mostly the same thing except my stuff is already at least a month into the future, so it can be tough to keep things in synch. Ultimately I've decided that my initial feelings on this whole enterprise of collective twitter accounts sharing the same universe was correct - do-able, but not on a tightly-coupled basis. So I'm generally letting everyone do pretty much what they want when they want and only ever directly acknowledging the events that fit into my own story.

Bringing old tweets back to life

Back in May I wrote about how twitter's profile changes forced me to work around the new tweet formatting in order to get the type of tweets I use for my mission dispatches. Well, the downside to that is when I scroll back through KSA's twitter history, I can only go so far before twitter refuses to load anything older than 2 months or so. Some of my story arcs extend well beyond 2 months (I just tested a Kethane drill in Dec but was tweeting about Kethane R&D as far back as July, if not earlier) so recreating those old tweets isn't possible since the font used by twitter isn't free. Thankfully, I realized I can just use my twitter archive to find the tweet in question, copy the text from the archive page and the time from the actual tweet it links to, and paste them over a tweet copied from my @dsimkora timeline.

More videos coming

I've said I didn't want to spend too much time with videos but I've made a couple more for Jan/Feb that I'm very pleased with and to be honest once I had the idea for them I couldn't not do them. I'm hoping for some good reactions from the community towards two in particular. The one I'm most excited about drops at the end of this month (hint)

Until next month...

The current operational date of the KSA as of this writing is 09:00 UTC on 2/19/15 and 2 astronauts are about to embark on another attempt of a historic mission...

[Drew Kerman]

Good lord it's been a year. A lot has happened, but I'm still enjoying this adventure I've set my kerbals on, so at least there is that.

Slowly drowning

I've done a poor job with pacing lately, taken on too much in the game to manage within the span of a single real world day. For this reason, it's been a month since my last update yet the game has only progressed half a month. I have to fly a lot of things in real time (EVAs and atmospheric flights, mainly) and even if I don't, after doing the flying and operations I need to write things up for twitter, upload images, edit images, create images (blueprints), then compile mission reports, update craft databases, update roster databases, make quick videos, write some kOS code, write some ASP/HTML code.... oh and then of course remember to eat, sleep and go do the work that actually makes me money

Mainly it's this upcoming Mun III mission that's been the killer. On the plus-side, the reason it's become so involved is hopefully going to really pull in people over this next month. But still, it's been a lot of work and afterwards I need to launch the second Minmus comsat as well as get Eeloo I on its way, hopefully. Bottom line is that the current KSA date is the start of March 6th and that real world date is fast approaching. I really hope I don't need to do this, but I do have various plots I can fall back on if I need to cease active operations and build myself back up some more lead time. And by "cease active operations" I mean the account will still tweet daily, days will still pass, it's just the Agency won't be doing a whole lot of stuff on a day-to-day basis due to one of several things I could choose to make happen.

Another major problem is that the game breaks. A lot. It's just a fact of life given that it's not a feature-complete product and with all the mods I use there are bound to be conflicts. Too, the mods themselves are developed as hobby projects and thus are generally released in a buggy state. Again, this is expected and I'm not complaining, but a lot of my time over the past month has been sucked into figuring out why things aren't working. So far I'm proud to say that, since 0.23, nothing has come up I haven't been able to fix or work around to maintain the continuity of both my story and save file. Regardless, it remains that part of the reason my lead time has been cut down so much is due to the inherent buginess of the game.

4-digits on the follower count!

So the end of January rolled around and my follower count was waffling around 985 - I could see it going up and down by a few almost daily. It was really getting annoying to be that close to 1,000 and not be able to push through. So I finally got the idea to reach out to the New Horizons twitter account with my Eeloo mission as a comparison for dwarf planet exploration. It worked. I shot past 1,000 in no time. Some more ESA recognition and Squad also help boost me up safely into the 1k zone. This is a milestone I did not seriously expect to reach in just a year's time. This community is pretty awesome, and I continue to be amazed at the willingness of the real-world agencies and scientists to play along.

Craft/Roster Database Improvements

I spent some time re-working some things about the crew and craft databases this past month. The most noticeable change is to the Flight Tracker - this link points to Duna I's information but now you can hop to any active vessel via a side menu. Originally it listed every body, but I realized I couldn't show how many vessels were in orbit around that body and it was annoying to open them all to see if anything was there. The trickiest part was to create a tree structure in a non-relational database but I got it designed well enough to allow me to easily add new moons and planets to the list. I can also tell it when to show what craft in what SOI, which means I can "set it and forget it" ahead of time and it will sort things appropriately without me having to go back and edit it. The improvements to the crew roster are less visible - the most notable is that now ribbons can supersede each other. So when an astronaut arrives within the SOI of a planet the SOI ribbon will show up in his roster, but if he actually enters orbit that ribbon will not be displayed and instead the orbit ribbon will show up. Again, all this is set ahead of time and happens automatically.

The biggest change, however, was the addition of Ascent Data to the craft window. Coupled with the page's ability to auto-refresh, I can have it do so at intervals like 15s and display new craft data during ascent. If you happen to be looking at the page at the same time as the launch itself, you will see it auto-update with new data in "real time". If you come to the Flight Tracker after the craft has made orbit, you can always manually page back through the launch ascent. Honestly, I'm a bit underwhelmed at the feature now that I've seen it in action. It would be way cooler to actually see the numbers changing every second, but I'm interested to see what other people think.

A quick look at some image editing

I use SweetFX to darken and saturate the game for better visuals, but it does have the effect of making things a little too dark during night time. So lately I've been pausing the game and taking two screenshots, one with SweetFX on and another with it toggled off. Then I bring them into Paint.NET and composite them. Generally this brings out the night sky a lot better, but I also use it to lighten up the ground too on some occasions. Here are a few examples:

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I try not to edit images as rule mainly because it takes time, but then again sometimes it's worth it.

I'm wasting time

I think there was more I wanted to talk about but honestly I don't really have the time to do it. It's the KSA's (operational) birthday today and there's a lot of stuff I want to get done...

[Drew Kerman]

The End...

Well, I suppose at some point all good things must come to an end.

Of course I'm talking about the fact that my generous lead time has dwindled down to nothing. Why? What did you think I was talking about? ;P

Seriously though, the Mun III mission literally took me twice as long in real days as it did in game days to carry out. My first mission save file is 1/15/15 and my last is 2/17/15. That was rough - it's the closest I've come to getting burnt out playing KSP in a long time. The only thing that kept me going was that I really liked where the story was headed and figured most people would enjoy it too. Yes, the "separation indecent" was a completely emergent story element - it was not planned. For shats sake I didn't spend days on those friggin Mission Architect mission plans to have to just toss them out the dammed window! But I did. At first I thought the stage decouple was an accidental staging by me, so I reloaded the game. Then it happened again and I realized why and I was like... ohhhhhh....

But as I said, it really added some spice to an otherwise routine service mission - even if it was the first to be done in orbit around Mun. So to start taking advantage of things I made a post to reddit in the form of a "breaking news"-type thing. I honestly didn't expect it to gain as much traction as it did, and I really hoped reddit would stay gripped to the story as things progressed. Sadly, reddit has a pretty short attention span 15 real days took its toll and by the time I actually got around to rescuing and returning the astronauts it was as if a collective "meh" was issued forth, heh. Even my latest blueprint, that was tied to the mission, had a mediocre showing. Oh well. It may also have been because all that stupid stock areodynamic stuff was taking over the reddit at the time. Again, short attention spans.

Overall I'm pleased with how the Mun III mission turned out.

On the other hand...

It's true my lead time has tanked. I'm at 2 weeks right now and I'll be out of the country on business and thus away from KSP from the end of this week to the end of the month. So, a little over two weeks. Which means I have to make sure I have things scheduled to at least 4/1 and I'm currently at 3/29. So I'm close. But it still remains the fact that when I get back I'm going to have a few days, at best.

I've done two things to hopefully get me back on track. First there is just better pacing overall. Real-world missions can take days just to deploy a satellite after it's been inserted into orbit. I can take advantage of that and stop trying to get things done as soon as possible. Duna I is over Ike taking science readings but I only allow myself to switch to the craft once per in-game day to get some new science, so it's taking a while to gather all the data that is possible. Second is to stop doing anything on weekends. There will be an in-universe reason given for this, and one that I can rescind at a later date if I want to. But for now these two restrictions will make it easier for me to progress through day-to-day things.

If worse comes to worse, I have fall-back options as I mentioned last month. It'll keep the account active yet give me time to recoup some lead easily. I don't want to do that if I don't have to though.

Flight Tracker updates coming

So last month I added the Active Vessels list and ascent streaming to the Flight Tracker, and while I'm away from the game later this month I'll have the opportunity to do a bit more. First and foremost is I've had a couple requests now into the code behind the tracker, so I'm going to get it all cleaned up and posted up in a Git repository for people to be able to download, use and send me pull requests for new features. I myself will be adding two things to the Flight Tracker this month: Filters and Inactive craft. The first will let you show only a single type of craft in the vessels list on the right of the tracker, and the second will let you switch between viewing active vessels (default) and inactive ones (that have either been destroyed or recovered). Not sure at this time if I can allow the inactive vessels list to include all past vessels, as some don't conform to the latest iteration of the Flight Tracker code.

Oh, I also this month allowed the flight tracker (and crew rosters) to load in the browser rather than as a pop-up window - although that is still an option.

Slimming down for x86-only v1.0

Rats, Squad has gone and discontinued the x64 build of KSP starting with v1.0. This sucks, because it was an excellent way to load all my mods for building new craft. I never played the game with it and it's a shame so many people had to make a big deal about trying. But whatever, end result is in v1.0 I need to squeeze a ton of part mods into the x86 version of the game. yes, it's possible. You start with Active Texture Management on extreme compression settings. You then completely nuke all graphical settings in the game. Remove all Flags and Agencies and anything with images from mod folders. Take all the /Spaces folders and put them outside of /GameData - those suckers can take up a lot of space. Do the same with all sounds. Maybe use Texture Replacer to load cheap low-res textures in place of the default planetary ones. Toggle on OpenGL. In the end you get a version of the game that's barely functional, looks absolutely horrible, but can still build craft in the VAB/SPH and load up a huge amount of part mods at once. So, win. In case it wasn't clear, I switch back to a totally awesome and hi-res version to actual play with.

How To: VAB integration photos

The most common question I get when I share a photo like the one above is "how?!?". The answer is simple: image compositing. The implementation is a bit more complex, but not so bad once you get the hang of it. For tools, I use Paint.NET as my image editor, and floaty as my composite comparison tool.

For starters, you need to make sure you have your camera all the way at the bottom of the VAB. Use the Shift+mouse wheel to move the camera vertically down to the ground, until the view tilts up or down and stops. This is very important. Because of the way the mouse wheel moves the camera it is extremely difficult to find your way back to the same camera view height when loading new vessels. By having the camera as far down as it will go you have a consistent starting point - zooming and rotating from this point you can always find your way back to your original viewpoint.

Plan the entire scene before you start. I don't sketch anything but if you think that will help you do a rough sketch of where things should appear. I just visualize and go. This will help you choose the initial angle of the picture to make sure you can fit everything in without having to do too much overlapping (and thus delicate erasing when compositing later). It also helps prevent you from having to go back and redo a bunch of image captures when you realize that one rocket piece just won't fit in the frame fully like you wanted. The more pre-planning you can do the more time you'll save in the end.

Once you have things planned, two important considerations to make - shadows and transparency. Shadows are hard to draw yourself in post, so you want to use the game's shadows as much as possible. But this largely applies to shadows on the ground. You can't naturally have the game shadow other parts as they won't actually be in the same scene. Example: in the image above I have the boosters off to the side because neither the upright rocket or the stage being lifted cast shadows on them. I would have had to have added them myself. Transparency is the see-through elements of the part, and if you place them over another rocket section that wasn't in the same scene you need to manually erase that part of the layer to show what's beneath. Example: again the boosters in the image above are well off to the side so they will not be behind the launch clamps and their intricate support lattice, which I would have had to manually erase the interior of to show anything behind it.

Also, lighting: it changes near the walls and with the truck that drives around the inside of the VAB. The lights along the walls flicker slightly, and this can affect your compositing if you have two images in the same area under a light that is at different intensity between the two captures. The truck driving around inside the VAB has headlights that illuminate kerbals, the ground, the walls and any rocket parts in their way. I like capturing the truck driving around for some shots, but I have to be careful to note where the headlights are pointing - are they being directed towards a rocket part that isn't loaded in this scene? That's not good.

To get all sorts of rocket parts by themselves if you're breaking down an already-built craft, simply use the root tool. It won't work for all parts (radially-attached ones mainly) but it'll get you what you want the majority of the time and let you delete the rest.

Moving the parts around the VAB takes some practice. Use shift+click to always ensure you're grabbing the whole thing you want to move, and then use a combination of dragging the parts and rotating the camera to get them where you want. Zooming all the way out helps. Basically when you're looking from either side of the VAB you can slide to/from the door moving the mouse left/right and raise/lower moving the mouse up/down. From a viewpoint in the front or back of the VAB you can slide to/from the walls moving the mouse left/right and raise/lower moving the mouse up/down. View angles in between sort of combine all these movements in various ways. It takes some getting used to but trust me you can place something anywhere on the floor of the VAB.

Once you're positioning things and taking the screenshots, use floaty to ensure everything is lined up properly and things you don't want to overlap don't overlap. Setting up floaty takes a little work, you need to drag the initial image onto floaty to load it, then drag the window itself and the edges of floaty to size it to your screen (annoying there's no function to do this automatically). Set the transparency with +/- and right-click to enable click-through. Take the camera all the way down to the floor and you can rotate/zoom as needed to get back to your original viewpoint. Use the large markings on the floor first, then use the support beams along the walls to get a sharp image, then use the oil smudges on the floor to really fine-tune the alignment. Swap the reference image you're using as needed to make sure things are being put where you want them relative to other things - just use the Alt-tab menu to select floaty and drag a new image onto it, then re-enable click-through.

When capturing images don't just capture the craft pieces - capture the workers and the vehicles in the background in various poses and actions to give you options later when putting it all together. Example: in the above image I made sure to get enough bare floor space to erase anyone from standing beneath the stage being lifted on the hoist. In other photos I have scientist kerbals staring upwards in awe at a large rocket segment, or I at least make sure one is standing nearby a piece of rocket like he's assessing it with his notepad. Kerbs are running around and looking busy, but none are actually running into/through each other. Nor are they running through rocket pieces. All have their shadows properly cast by the game.

Getting rid of the 4 gizmo icons and staging icons? Simple. I try to remember to do this after taking my initial viewpoint screen capture. First switch to Actions mode, that will remove the gizmo menu from the screen and give you a blank space to composite later. Then just make sure you have a part that doesn't use any staging and get a screen cap to have empty space on the right you can use to cover up any large staging lists for other shots. If you are using the Action Groups Extended mod, you can actually increase the usable space of your image. Toggling that mod on will remove the sidebar from the left of the screen entirely, just move the AGX windows off to the right and you can composite the left side of the screen over the normal VAB build menu to show what is normally underneath it.

Be creative, there's a lot you can do if you plan things right ahead of time. Example: the hoist in the above image. Most people would think I attached the clamps upside down. That doesn't work - the red clamp heads will rotate but the supports themselves will always stay rooted in the ground. So okay then I attached the clamps normally and rotated the heads upside down, then flipped the supports in Paint.NET. A good thought, but can you imagine how tedious it would be to remove the VAB floor so you could see the background sky between the support structure?? Instead what I did was get a blank shot without the craft there at all (when I took images of the vertical rocket, for example). Then I got a shot of the hoisted stage with the clamps on upside down. Then I raised the entire stage upwards out of view (did this with the mouse wheel so the craft moved up but the camera did not) so just the support structure was showing. Now I could just put all three images atop each other in the proper order and simply erase the supports underneath the red clamps and not worry about any transparency issues. I also get proper shadows on the ground.

The final stage of loading all the images into Paint.NET layers is where the real work begins. I like to just dump them all in at once, unselect them all from view and then go through and show them one-by-one to get a sense of what elements are in what layer, outright deleting any I find don't fit well (of the multiple shots I generally take of one piece of craft). Once pruned, I decide what layer goes best atop another - the least amount of erasing you need to do the better. Using the Selection tool (S) if you press the key twice you'll get lasso selection to really control what to select. Use Ctrl+A to select the entire screen and then in the menu bar at the top select Subtract so that any areas you lasso become unselected. This way you can select the entire image, lasso any segments you want to keep, and easily Delete the rest, then move in with the Eraser tool for any fine tuning. I find if you need to erase part of a layer to show something underneath, you should actually uncheck to hide the layer itself, but keep it selected in the layer menu - this way you can now see what you want to reveal and "trace" over it with the eraser tool, actually erasing on the hidden layer above. Make sure to erase in short strokes, not long ones because that means when you screw up and accidentally erase too much the Undo tool doesn't screw you.

When you're done just crop out all the extra menu stuff, flatten the layers and save as an image. I haven't spent much time on what compositing actually is, but there's plenty of information on the web about the concept of layering images and cutting out what you don't want, adding/removing elements of a picture, etc. It takes practice, and the more you do the better you'll get at it.

Moving on...

Needless to say this next month will be interesting. Not sure at all where I'm going to be at the start of April. I feel like if I were to hit some sort of big wall - the game consistently crashing, some weird error on my Flight Tracker upgrades I can't figure out - it's going to kill off any desire to play KSP. I'm actually quite near a breaking point but as I've been continually making good progress overall on the things I'm working on I've mostly been okay. But if April comes around and I have a good shot at a decent lead time I might still just throw a story curve to let myself take a break from KSP for a while. It would kinda be nice to do anything else for a while... but then again I'll be away from the game for over two weeks this month doing something different so we'll just see what happens...

and yes I did just cheer myself up by click-baiting the lot of you with the thread title and opening of this entry. Mwaahahaha. Thanks for doing your part keeping me going

Edited April 7, 2015 by Gaiiden

[Drew Kerman]

Bye Gremln, Hi TweetDeck

Rats, no real reaction to my last update. Was hoping to scare a few people. Oh well. I actually did accidentally scare people on twitter into thinking I was quitting though, because I recently switched over from Gremln to TweetDeck, which now lets me schedule tweets at any minute of the day (wasn't always available in the past) for free and posts them way more reliably than Gremln ever did. However I'm still keeping hold of my paid Gremln account for now just in case I run up against a wall for scheduling via TweetDeck. So far there doesn't seem to be any restrictions on the number of scheduled posts per day or total, but I haven't been able to work up to a month lead time yet. Anyways, back to the story of scaring people - I have a deadman switch in case something happens to me. I'd hate for the account to just go silent and leave people wondering, so a few days ahead of my last scheduled tweets I have scheduled some tweets to pop up if they are not pushed ahead that let people know I'm gone. When I switched over to start using TweetDeck I let all my Gremln scheduled tweets run out but forgot to delete the deadman tweets I had scheduled over there. Luckily I caught it fast in the morning but still not before a few people noticed and were like "wha?? No!!" - so, sorry about that!

Still Waiting on 1.0

I'm kinda nervous about 1.0 - it might actually cause me a good deal of grief upgrading due to the relative enormity of the overhaul being made to the game. Right now I predict it will take me upwards of a month to finally upgrade after it comes out and after all the mods catch up and after I can finally find some time to do it. A major issue for me is Valentina. I've been hinting at a female kerbal kadet since last October, and this was before Squad announced female kerbals so I was originally planning to use the TextureReplacer skins for females. Thankfully I never released a photo so when Squad announced they were doing females I realized I could easily jump to the proper female model without any continuity problems. But there's still the problem of me having a female astronaut now who's graduated but not actually available for me to use myself since 1.0 isn't out. Thankfully the community manager Kasper was kind enough to supply me with a photo of her for graduation day, and I set up an accident for her earlier to account for needing a separate photo. Also thankfully it will be a month or two at least before there are any missions for her to actually fly. So it could all still work out.

Flight Tracker GitHubbed

I got two separate requests to have my flight tracker code placed on GitHub for referencing and forking, so here it is. It would indeed be nice to see if anyone does anything with it. I'm still looking to add the features I talked about last entry - turns out my business trip (which was to

) was absolutely nuts and left me no time to do anything but work and sleep. But getting the craft menu filterable and able to show inactive craft is something that's really bugging me and I'll get to it soon.

Staying Ahead... Barely

It's Wed and I'm working on posts for this Friday. That's way too close. Even with the "free" weekends now it's been hard maintaining a lead, never mind extending it. At this rate as soon as I hit a month I'm just going to have to maintain that because getting there will come real close to burning me out. But after that I should be able to do a day's worth of stuff and keep it steady.

Really wish I had more time to say more or that I had more to say - but I will say that I'm still coming up with a lot of cool new things and ideas to do which keeps me going.

[Drew Kerman]

Been a while...

Hi there, haven't had a good reason to update this since April after I decided to take a break in May. I ran out of lead time and was working too hard to get it back so I decided to let things go for a while and focus on other things. One of them was playing Dragon Age: Inquisition, which I had carried over the story I had been working on since Dragon Age: Origins. However the more I played the less interested I became in working through some one else's story and I wanted to get back to creating mine. Still, it took me almost 4 months to decide to come back to KSP and only because I realized that v1.1 would be just as bad an upgrade as v1 which meant if I didn't go for v1 it would be at least a month or two after v1.1 dropped that all mods would be updated and I would be able to get back to playing. That was just too long to coast.

Still, the Agency was not idle during my "break", and I had plenty of interesting little side projects to keep things moving along, like Desson's small scale rocket launches. There were also a lot of celestial events taking place and I really got into "astrophotography" in capturing images of occultations, appulses, eclipses, transits... needless to say I wasn't slacking off entirely from the game and even bumped my follower count up another 1k over this time. Everyone seemed to stay really engaged and I think the audit storyline worked out pretty well. I didn't really plan it out much, because I didn't know how long I would have to drag it out for, I just had the initial idea of the KSA being audited and having a corrupt accountant - I also wanted to move in Mortimer, who is a canon character in the KSP universe as of v1.0. I'm pleased with how it all played out.

Transition to 1.0.4 from 0.90

I knew it was going to be rough, and it was, but nothing that was insurmountable. The save file conversion went off with only a few minor issues - if anyone wonders I simply create a new save file and then run a diff check between it and my old save file to see what settings need to be changed/updated in the default SCENARIO modules. Getting down to the individual VESSEL structures can get a bit trickier as there can be new names for parts that you have to change, and I didn't catch the fact that I was using an old heat shield with an AblativeShield resource instead of the new Ablative resource. Of all things it caused Distant Object Enhancement to whack out and throw a ton of NREs, that was a tricky one to chase down. Then I had to start adding back in all my mods pretty much one at a time so I could check through the KSP.log file for ERR, WRN and EXC events to make sure everything was playing nicely - of course it wasn't so I had to run all the major ones down and figure out which ones I could just ignore. Next was the tech tree, which got revamped with 1.0 and there were some nodes with parts in them I should have unlocked already so I had to gift myself some science to put that all back in order. Finally I had to update all my batch files for loading parts as some folders and parts and model references and all that stuff had changed here and there. I'm still dealing with issues here and there but they're minor and not stopping me from playing. One big thing I noticed is I may finally have the dreaded input lag issue with my joystick that I've heard people mention but never seen in my installs. I haven't really looked into it yet since I'm not flying any launches for a while but that's yet another thing that'll take time to track down... but I'm on v1.0.4 after about two weeks of work. I've only had to completely rebuild two craft so far...

Memory was a whole other issue. Some mods ate up more than they used to in 0.90 and so I had to put KSP on an even more extreme weight loss program and make double sure I wasn't loading any unneeded textures like agency logos or flags, moved out all the sounds because I just play to my own music all the time anyways, and stuck to my old habits of only loading the parts I need. I barely deal with any crashes and have about 600-800MB of overhead depending on what I'm doing, which is more than enough for stable play over a decent period of time. I can even load in more part mods that I had under 0.90 and have 300-400MB overhead once I enter the VAB in my build mode with everything loaded. So yea, happy to see I don't need x64 yet - although it will be a welcome upgrade in v1.1 (hopefully) as the measures needed to keep things running under x86 are a bit time-consuming even after the huge upfront cost in getting it all set up.

Calendaring Scheduled Tweets

I mention previously that I switched entirely over to TweetDeck, but one of the things I missed most about Gremln was being able to see my scheduled tweets in a calendar format rather than a list like it's shown in TweetDeck. Besides the things that are set for certain times because that's when they happen in the game, I like to schedule the rest of my tweets in a fashion that doesn't hold to any sort of pattern and fills out the day and week with content across all times. I even try to plan game events for certain times based on how the previous couple of days have been scheduled. Thankfully GCal has a perfect input format to copy/paste my TweetDeck tweets into easily. For a better idea of what I mean here's an example of last week:

It literally takes me 10 seconds to add a new event. As you can see everything is fairly spread out across all times throughout the week, and I do my best not to clump things around the same time every day to form what I feel is a more natural pacing. Getting to see the gaps between tweets gives me a good relative sense for the "beat" of the stream I'm outputting to twitter and helps to ensure I don't always swamp people with tweets.

Science Returns Reduced (Again)

One of the cool new features I found in v1 was via the Alt+F12 debug menu's R&D section. When you're in the R&D building you can ask it to produce the total amount of achievable science in the game, which it calculates from all the experiment modules you have loaded. This is something I've always wanted (there have been mods but they've not been very complete in their analysis for one reason or another) because one of the big problems I see people having is maxing out the tech tree so early they're like "now what?" - literally that's what I see them post on reddit. So I ran the numbers for my install and it turns out I can achieve 6,399,714 total points of science. Wow. To put that in perspective, I only need 69,160 points to completely unlock the remaining nodes I have in the Community Tech Tree. I had my science gains pulled way down to 5% but that would still give me over 5x as much science as I would need to completely unlock the tree! So I went and turned it down some more to 2.5% - I could go lower because there's sure to be more mods with more science to collect in the future, and some experiments you can redo and some produce continuous science over time, but that might make things a little too much of a grind.

Sunrise/Sunset Times

A new thing I started doing is calculating the times the sun will rise and set over KSC. I realized it can be a lot more immersive to reference things like "third sunrise" and also allow me to be more general in declaring when things will happen. It also helps when I show images that occur at night or in the day people can look back at the time table and be like - oh yea, it actually is day/nite right now! For the purposes of the times, sunrise is when the stars disappear from the sky and sunset is when they come back. The exact timing is always off by a second or so because the day/night cycle is 43,301.6s and it's that blasted 0.6s that can throw things off after a time, so I always check after a few days to recalibrate. I considered dropping the seconds entirely but it makes it a lot easier to notice the precession of time as the days go on. Even though they show up at the same time every morning, I'll get 2-3 people favoriting them quite often, so I guess people like it.

ATN Database Goes Public

Another decision I made was to make the ATN database that has been announced every Monday a real thing. I mean, it's always been a real thing because that's how I keep track of all the asteroids but I wanted it to be public. Rather than just release the data of name/type/encounter/etc I also wanted to add orbital properties so people could see which goes out the farthest, which takes the longest to complete an orbit, etc. The database was already past 1,000 rocks so I knew I would have to tackle it piecemeal and update only a handful of asteroids each week while I was adding new ones. The main problem was getting the orbital properties, since the game didn't provide them in consistent formats - a close periapsis to the sun would show up in Km, and a further one in Mm. I wanted the same numerical precision for all the asteroid data, and for that I had KSPTOT's Mission Architect which could easily import the orbital data and give me a plot with the information I wanted. Problem - I have a save file with 500 asteroids and I need to select the one I want from a list that is not alphabetized (it's ordered in the same way the SFS file has them ordered). Thankfully the KSPTOT author Arrowstar was quick to implement a feature I requested to have Mission Architect be able to load data from whatever was the current Active Vessel in the game. Without this I doubt I would have bothered putting in the insane extra effort it would have taken to make the ATN database actually interesting enough to post each week.

Flight Tracker Upgrades

The flight tracker has seen a few tweaks over the past months, mainly very small bug and usability things I can't really remember to be honest. One major thing I started doing though was making sure the main system overview got updated once a week, and enabled people to page back to previous weeks and see the movements of the planets over time. Over the next week or so I plan to add support for maneuver nodes in the dynamic map view, a clock to the sidebar that shows the current KSC time as well as the next scheduled launch, and I finally figured out why the dynamic map wasn't loading in a separate window thanks to some help from another web developer doing KSP stuff, so I can finally make the flags view dynamic as well.

I also plan to use the Sketchfab KSP exporter to make the static craft images 3D ones, though I've had issues exporting models with lots of mods and I'm not sure how I'll work it into the pop-up description text just yet.

Staying Ahead

Well as of Sunday I had pushed the game out a week ahead of the current day, but now it's Tuesday and I haven't gotten time to really play so I'm back to only 5 days ahead, and will be gone two days this week so that's more lost time - plenty of issues still popping up that take time and effort to overcome, chasing down bugs, weird game effects, I can't even begin to get into all that. Then there's life's own curveballs like having your PC's motherboard die and being offline for a week because of it. I have more backup storylines I can put into effect if I need time off due to forced circumstances but hopefully those can remain in my back pocket for a good while.

Crap it took me how long to write all this?? I have work to do!!!

[Drew Kerman]

Moving forward, all new entries will be posted on the official KSA website