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Partial First Success for Progenitor Program
The Progenitor program kicked off with the launch of two Mk1-As this week after they were assembled and tested earlier in the week and throughout the previous week. The first launch did not go completely as planned since the payload impacted too fast to survive the landing. We are still investigating the cause of the event but obviously the parachute is our prime suspect and was recovered with what remained of the payload. The booster also survived landing with a damaged-beyond-repair engine bell and all three fins reduced to splinters. Because we couldn’t recover the avionics unit only basic telemetry data was collected via low-gain transmission to the tracking station to save battery power during flight. The second launch however saw a successful payload recovery after re-checking the chute earlier in the day to ensure no obvious defects were missed during integration. The booster once again survived impact, but is no longer usable. Still, it and the previous one will provide useful data in impact tolerances. The recovered avionics unit will reveal much more detail about the second flight, which was launched without spin-stabilization. We can also re-use all recovered parts except the parachute, which needs to remain unpacked for analysis and will be unusable afterwards. Next week will see engineers and R&D focusing on this week’s launch data so expect news throughout the week. While the analysis is ongoing, two Mk1-Bs will be constructed for similar flight trials the following week.
Ballooning High with KerBalloons
We just released a report earlier today that covers the mission success of the first KerBalloon test flight, which carried a payload up to a record-setting 16.5km. We’re looking forward to more flights with KerBalloons and are eagerly awaiting the next shipment.
Celestial Sky Shows Dazzle
With the majority of kerbals still underground, we are in a great position to let kerbs experience the wonders of the night and day sky without leaving the comfort of their subterranean dwellings – although we of course encourage any and all to do so! Seeing solar eclipses and munar eclipses and planetary alignments with your own eyes is very much more rewarding in our opinion. Val is our resident hobbyist astrophotographer and has a pretty decent scope set up on the launch control roof, but so far she prefers to take much larger sky photos. We’ll continue to keep the public informed about celestial events.
New Records Set
If you haven’t done so already, be sure to visit our Records & Achievements page to check out some new records the Agency has set this past week, including greatest G-load, fastest speed and highest altitude. We’re only just getting started here! If there’s a record you want to see us track, let us know in the comments here or directly via twitter.
From the Desk of Drew Kerman
Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuffWritten 8/13/16
This game week was pretty rough because I’m still ironing out issues with KSP v1.1.3 that are popping up now that I’ve started actually playing the game. Yea, it takes me a few weeks to just get the game ready to play, and then I have to work through more issues that only show up during play. Such is modding. The most annoying issue so far is the craft’s tendency to want to “bounce” when it loads, which trips the state of the vessel over from Prelaunch to Launched and starts the mission timer clock and can fire off contract stuff. Right now it seems to work when I revert the launch after the initial load from the VAB, but if I timewarp it bounces when warp is cancelled. I tried looking into it but narrowing down the mod was inconclusive. If it continues to annoy me I’ll take the time to dig into it again but the reload workaround is good enough for now, I just don’t load up the craft to the launchpad until a few minutes before launch so I don’t need to timewarp.
On top of game issues, there are issues with getting all the support material set up. This is mainly in regards to the Flight Tracker since I’m scheduling things in advance before I can reset the “in game clock” that tells it what day KSA operations begin (a few weeks from now – writing this in mid-August). So technically right now I’m in negative UT and the Flight Tracker can’t handle that so I need to workaround that until Sept 13th when I reach positive UT. I’m also really happy I took the time to document all my database fields, because remembering how to set things up would have been a nightmare otherwise. So TL;DR I’m already lagging in my bid to get a month’s lead time in place prior to Sept 13th.
Finally, let’s discuss image editing, because there was a lot of it this week. You already saw the VAB images and I already have a good explanation for how I do those here (scroll down the post). You can also find out info for my blueprint designs… uhm… I wrote about it somewhere… if I can’t hunt it down I’ll do another quickie in a later weekly update.
Anyways, the images I want to talk about are the two eclipses linked above. The solar eclipse is a composite of three images – mainly the eclipse (which is an in-game effect from Scatterer) and an earlier dawn photo that had darker mountains on the horizon so I used those. But I also measured the rate at which the visible planets were moving and positioned them appropriately since the game didn’t show them when the sky darkened. The munar eclipse was simply a bit of layering, using an additive filter and also some RGB curve tweaking to get the desired “blood mun” effect, although I didn’t use the word “blood” because I haven’t decided if kerbals have red blood or not yet. I’m not really as pleased with the full eclipse photo, but I think it passes pretty good. While I can see the phase of the eclipse thanks to Environmental Visual Enhancements (so the eclipse photo over KSC is where the Mun was during the total eclipse, visible because I disabled EVE body shadows for that shot), Mun does not actually turn red so I had to do that myself.
Oh and yes, the KerBalloon path was completely made up. I will be evolving a weather model for Kerbin as things progress, but I’m really hoping the Kerbal Weather Systems mod will see the light of day at some point, although I fear their focus on such a hardcore simulation will be a bit too much to handle. Although backstory itself provides a good reason as to why meteorology is a new field of science for kerbals, the reality is I’m trying to delay weather insights as much as possible to reduce any consistency issues if I ever am able to transition to using the weather mod.
It’s also been really oppressively hot again this week. I’m writing that in actually because I’d rather not have to make up lost time to not being able to work at my PC because of the heat and just have the KSA have problems too.
Also Win10 anniversary update borked my PC and cost me a few hours work. I suspect it sneakily (but unsurprisingly) re-enabled my graphics card automatic driver updates without telling me, which caused the problems since rolling back to older drivers fixed things. I have a generation gap in my two AMD gfx cards so any newer drivers will kill the older card. Not updating cards for another year so will have to remain vigilant…
