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KSA Operations Resume
Great to be back and kick off a new calendar year for the Kerbal Space Agency! This year should be very exciting as we plan to reach space with our Progeny Mk4 or Mk5 rocket and move onwards and upwards with our to-be-announced orbital program, which will begin its development phase this month. Unfortunately the week got off to a slower start than anticipated thanks to a delay of parts shipment from Kravass City, which suffered a major storm and grounded all airships on the day our delivery was due to depart. Although the storm passed by the end of the day, it hit us next so airship arrivals were cancelled. We hope to receive the parts by Monday to get started on the Progeny Mk3, Civvie Production Model and testing the new high-altitude KerBalloons.
Genesis Program Sees Income Growth
Now that the Civvie Prototype has been certified fully flight-capable we can start accepting contracts, and now that a physical observer (the pilot) is along for the ride we can do more than simple scientific readings. Several companies have already signed with us or expressed interest in receiving science data and/or dictated aerial reports of the areas sent to be investigated. Unfortunately due to the Civvie being a single-seat plane the crew reports are not very detailed or thorough, but they are at least acceptable. While the Genesis Program is still quite a ways from turning a profit, it’s starting to work more towards that direction at least. The one flight we got off the ground before weather closed in saw Valentina nail the first observation contract, and two more already await Jeb next week.
More Facility Work Suspends Operations
Seems a bit silly to come back for a few days and then go away again, but that’s what we’re going to have to do next week while additional work is done around campus to fix more building issues we’ve identified in the weeks since the last “patch job”. One of the new leaks that sprung up caused quite a foamy reaction in the chemical labs back in November. There’s also some structural concern in the VAB that needs to be inspected. We’re still planning to replace all our buildings entirely with new versions sometime in the future, but not all at once and only when we’ve determined all the current issues have been ironed out so that we have a solid foundation upon which to design our replacement facilities. Although it would have been nicer to just have another break on the end of the holiday break, the contractor refused to begin work earlier than later this month.
We will recap the events of next week with the following week’s recap.
Link & Image Highlights
Several links and images tweeted this week we feel deserve a mention here in case you missed them:
 2016 Asteroid Tracking Network Census |
 In One Orbit of Kerbin… |
Twitter Moments – relive or discover some of the most notable events in KSA history
ATN Timeline – always be up-to-date on the latest news of any asteroids in the Kerbol system
Celestial Snapshot of the Week
Val managed to catch Slate transiting across Sarnus and casting its shadow, although it was a near miss since sunrise is right behind Sarnus clearing the horizon and Slate was almost past when it rose. She would have had to wait a little over 8 days to try again.
Also visible are Eeloo to the right and Tekto to the left
From the Desk of Drew Kerman
Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuffWritten on 12/17/16
It’s taken me 15 days to do a week’s worth of work. That’s… not good. But there is some hope because a lot of the time was spent doing stuff I should have done before restarting the KSA and now that it’s finished I don’t have to spend time on it anymore. I also had to deal with patching up my new living space to deal with the cold of winter moving in. Another thing I don’t have to spend time on once its done, which I think it pretty much is. I’m toasty right now writing this. Still, I’m way behind in lead time and that’s why the KSA is forced to take an ops break this month, especially given that I’ll be out of the country and away from KSP access for the better part of a week or so after xmas.
Program pages
The Programs pages was the huge project that took me like 3-4 days to nail down design and implementation and then an additional 2-3 days to get the hang of using properly and getting everything filled in. I was looking at the website for a similar role-play that actually took inspiration from my role-play, the Kerbal Aerospace Institute. They had a detailed page for their missions and craft with patches and ribbons and it reminded me that I had always wanted to do something similar – and I should have done something back before I started but thankfully it wasn’t too late to go back and collect and organize the data I need to build these pages as if they’ve been a part of the site from Day One.
Along the way doing this has made me feel even better organized in how I want to progress things, as I made myself sit down and think about future vessels that will be appearing for the different programs, as well as what are the goals these programs are chasing after. There’s also now even tighter integration between the site and the Flight Tracker/Crew Roster since I link to astronauts assigned to the program on their pages and the Flight Tracker sports Program/Vessel/Mission patches for vehicles that link back to their respective program pages. Even the finances sheet got an improvement – I moved the totals up to the header for each column, which now that I think about it makes a lot more sense. It’ll debut in the Jan finance report, I won’t go back and change the earlier reports because they’ll all be included in the Jan report anyways.
The downside is of course maintaining these pages has increased my daily workload depending on what events transpired that day. Hopefully I can streamline things a bit better as I get more experience working these new features into the role-play but I’m still lagging for it at the moment.
Switching to screencaps instead of video for long flights
I have a lot of space on my SSD but still, after an hour or so of flying my video capture files can equal 50GB or more in total size. I don’t really need 30FPS when I’m looking back for specific points in the flight, so instead I’m doing 1s image captures of the screen. The Civvie flight this week came out to 5,061 PNG images (8.85GB) which I then used a program to stitch together in batches of 1500 to create 4 mpeg videos (1.94GB) which were then combined and converted into a single DivX movie file of 2.01GB. That was for a movie 1h24m long. By comparison a regular capture 1h7m long would make a DivX file 2.12GB in size. So the end gains are minimal, but the size on disk during recording is much smaller, which is what I’m really after.
How non-rechargable batteries work
All batteries in the game are rechargeable, but I don’t have the KSA in possession of that technology yet, all our batteries are used once and then tossed. Now, for a solid fuel rocket and KerBalloon this isn’t a problem because they have no generators or alternators aboard to supply power, so they just run out of juice and stay out of juice. The Civvie however is a different issue due to its engine alternator supplying power. So to work around this I installed 20 of the 21 battery parts as normal using symmetry and then drained all their EC in the editor and shut off control to them so they wouldn’t receive any power. Then I used Module Manager to create a copy of that battery, same weight and cost, but able to contain the EC of all the batteries, then added one of those to the aircraft and disabled its electrical use. Now inflight I pin open the Part Access Window for the battery and whenever I need to send science data I begin the transmission and then enable the battery’s electric charge use, then cut it off immediately after the transmission clears, so the battery is drained but no alternator charge is applied, however it still takes advantage of the alternator while it is being drained. I know, genius.
Better terrain scatter settings
I was finally able to learn the cfg settings in Kopernicus to tweak in order to increase the distance at which terrain scatter renders. It also depends I’ve found on the terrain settings you can increase in the main KSP settings.cfg file, but the results are spectacular and are visible in this album of the Civvie flight this past week. It knocks my FPS down to 15, but never seems to go further no matter how much I increase the settings. So that’s good cause 15FPS is pretty much the low-end of tolerable for moving the aircraft around to setup for shots. The frame culling is good though and looking straight up at the sky returns me to >30 FPS because no static objects are in view.
I also improved performance a lot by going into the KSPRC config files and getting rid of all the seafloor scatter that was rendering beneath the ocean where I couldn’t see it anyways.
Genesis profit splits & crew report payout splits
I almost realized too late that anything being paid to the Genesis program should be cut 50/50 with C7 Aerospace just like expenses are. I think they would quickly become dissatisfied with our partnership if we were hogging all the income! Thankfully the first bit of Civvie income came in December so it wasn’t published before I changed it.
I’ve also nerfed by 50% the payouts for crew reports until I get a 2+ kerbed aircraft in the air, because how good of a report can you really make when you’re trying to fly the airplane?
Science intakes per mission
Now that I have my programs broken up and even have separate finance sheets for them to make it easier to update the income/expense totals on the program/vessel pages, science data intake income will now be reported on a per-mission basis instead of monthly so I can properly attach the profits to the proper program individually.
Crap you’re still here reading this? Thanks! But I don’t know why I’m still here writing this. I have a shit ton of catching up to do…!!
