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Progeny Mk1-B Launches Successful
We were very pleased with the launches that were carried out to perfection this past Tuesday. After the first Mk1-A launch campaign Lanalye, Simon and Drew sat down and really hashed out what a proper schedule should be for carrying out a Progeny launch. The timeline allowed everyone to know what they were supposed to be doing and when they were supposed to be doing it so things operated as smoothly as possible. There were not any huge snags in the Mk1-A launches but there was some minor confusion here and there, and that could lead to dangerous circumstances when playing around with high powered rockets!
Other than a slight weather delay for the first launch (our first but certainly not last launch delay we are sure) both the Mk1-B1 and Mk1-B2 flights went off perfectly with full recovery of both the payloads and the boosters. The second flight was most interesting as the booster actually collided with the payload after separation (you can see the video here) and was sent off on a lateral trajectory that carried it in an arc curving back towards the KSC. It landed southwest of the launch pad well short of the tracking station so no facilities were endangered but it was still a rather bizarre and unexpected event! Well, we suppose that’s experimental rocketry for you.
We also had a distinguished guest visiting us for the second Mk1-B launch. Jylivin Kerman, head of the Assembly’s committee on science and education, was both the first representative from the kerbal central government to visit us and our very first visitor to the KSC. She was allowed access to the launch control building during the launch so she could see the controllers in action. Afterwards she commented on the professionalism she witnessed and the overall thrill of seeing a rocket launch. She’ll be personally debriefed by the Presider upon her return, and we are very pleased she was able to witness our teams in action.
Engineering teams will now be spending the next week or so analyzing the multitudes of data recovered from both onboard telemetry computers, although their initial analysis has already green-lit a third Mk1-B launch next week. This will also be compared to the performance of the Mk1-A flights and the next steps for the Progenitor program will then be determined.
Minmus Transit Wows Astronomers
Our own Commander Valentina traveled with a group of astronomers nearly halfway around Kerbin to witness a rare celestial spectacle as Minmus transited across the face of the sun. The location was chosen so the transit could be monitored from sun up to sun down. Although the entire transit period would take longer than that, they at least got to see the transit begin and make observations as Minmus crossed onto the disk of the sun, using the thicker atmosphere on the horizon as a natural filter to make the transit visible, switching to filters later in the day.
Transits of Minmus are rare because of its 6 degree inclination, which tends to keep it above or below the sun whenever it passes between it and Kerbin. The next transit will occur on 11/30/16 and be visible over KSC for most of its duration. After that, it won’t be until the following year that two more transits occur, on 5/4/17 and 6/29/17.
Research & Development Looks Towards Future Applications
Head of R&D Wernher Von Kerman and his team of researchers have certainly not been idle in the weeks since the KSA began operations. Much of their early focus rested on closing out the KerBalloons project and testing the first prototype. That out of the way, while they await the next order to be fulfilled, they have returned focus to developing additional rocket payload instruments. Chief among these are pressure and temperature sensors, which are in high demand right now by kerbal meteorologists looking to get a better understanding of the atmospheric behavior since re-stabilizing after the asteroid impact. The temperature sensor is nearest to completion and will be tested on an airship excursion next week to sample areas in the region for comparison to readings taken during last month’s unusual heat wave. Lead Scientist Cheranne will be accompanying the 2-day expedition. Wernher says he expects both instruments to be flight-ready by the end of the month, to be flown on Progeny rockets.
Pressure and Temperature sensors
In additional R&D news, further development has been made on the fuel processing that will create the juice to power liquid rockets. Currently we are relying on solid fuel boosters with a set thrust rate and continuous burn. These rocket motors will continue to be used in various forms as our program develops but they must also be eventually superseded by their liquid fuel variants in order for us to truly achieve control over rocket flight. The necessary oxidizer that will combine with the liquid fuel to produce the explosive thrust has already been manufactured. Engineers from Umbra Space Industries are nearing completion of their LF/O (Liquid Fuel/Oxidizer) engine as well.
Celestial Snapshot of the Week
As usual many cool shots of the sky were taken this week. The Minmus transit stands in a class of its own, but it still factors into our favorite image from this week, which is a bit of a repeat from last week except taken during the day instead of night. Specialist Bob, who has been a bit of an understudy for Commander Val, took this photo with a bit of guidance from Val.
Minmus and Mun are now 2 degrees apart
From the Desk of Drew Kerman
Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuffWritten on 9/8/16
I made sure to go back and mention it in my first dispatch, but writing this today is the day I actually created my @DKerman_KSA account. It’s been something I’ve been thinking about doing for a while. I have a personal twitter account already but I don’t really use it much anymore and I wanted to create something KSP-related so that when I responded personally to things I saw in the KSA timeline people would have a good chance of realizing who it was. I also very much enjoyed the personal approach I took to the @KSA_MissionCtrl account during the hiatus and wanted to continue to have a way of communicating directly to fans. A lot of times in the past I wanted to reply to posts on twitter but doing so as @KSA_MissionCtrl just seemed awkward. I’ve tweeted as much of all this when I first started @DKerman_KSA but in case it’s all been buried by now, that was the reason for it.
Yea that second Mk1-B launch had a cool consequence of the booster bumping the payload after separation. I was afraid the game wouldn’t be able to replicate it for me to go back and video, but it did after several tries and I was able to capture some good footage. However I accidentally also captured the booster flying back and impacting the ground in a wide shot – I didn’t even realize it until I was pretty much done and rendered out. So rather than go through filming it all over again I just went back and changed things I had written previously about where the booster landed – because it didn’t come down in the same spot it did originally. I had to guesstimate it’s landing location and then composite over the damaged booster from the original landing:
Original landing on the left, adjusted landing on the right
I actually spent some time sourcing sound for this video, and it was as much of a pain in the ass as I thought it would be. I pulled the sound from a model rocket launch video on YouTube. The wind noise is from the Chatterer mod. Finding good sounds isn’t easy, so I will not be including them in all my videos. But at least once I would like people to hear how I think the rockets should sound.
Also, the clouds really happened on that day for the first launch. I wanted a weather hold to happen, and was prepared to muck around with the cloud positions to make it happen, but I didn’t have to. That was nice.
Dealing with a couple of issues that are holding things up and that’s always annoying. The good news is that it’s only holding up the creation and scheduling of content, not actually holding up my overall progression. It’s taken me a while to get a good look to the sun while Minmus was transiting and I’m still working on getting a few details right. Not sure how it will ultimately turn out but yes, I am writing this before the Minmus transit details you see posted above. I will have to come back and edit those in later. Such is the nature of having a month lead time to work things out. Another annoyance is CameraTools bouncing the camera up a few feet when a rocket is launched, which ruins the video I’m trying to take. I let it go with the Progeny Mk1-A videos but I want it fixed for the Mk1-B footage and future videos, so hopefully the CameraTools maintainer can release a bug fix. For now I just use KerbCam for the initial launch footage and then switch to the zoomed-in CameraTools view (two separate videos).
Here’s another issue that I didn’t notice and had to fix after the fact. Sometimes terrain textures get stretched and I failed to make note of this when taking the original image on the left so I had to go back to that day/time (yay HyperEdit) and position the camera close to the original location, take a screenshot and the composite in the booster and payload from the original image so the terrain would be proper. Need to keep a better eye on these things!
texture stretching on the left, fixed image on the right
Still, everything is going pretty well so far. KSP in general isn’t giving me a lot of issues with crashes or anything like that and the PC is humming along fine since I got the new secondary graphics card. I’m excited that KSP v1.2 is finally in experimentals, although realistically I probably won’t be able to switch over to it fully for about a month while all the mods play catch up. I will most likely end up running v1.1.3 and v1.2 side by side and use each for various things until I can merge everything over to v1.2 when enough mod support is in place.
Hey has anyone ever wondered how I managed my tweets? Well it’s nothing too complicated:
Yup, just text in a text editor! (No, I was not inspired by George RR Martin) All my tweets are stored in this one text file so I can search and easily read through them for editing purposes and making sure things are staying coherent and consistent. I use TweetDeck to schedule the tweets in advance and to check that the character length is good when using hyperlinks and images. I’ll let you see how I schedule them all next week.
