|
KerBalloon Disaster Injures/Kills Crews
An unfortunate incident occurred during our last attempt to launch a low-altitude KerBalloon that resulted in the death of one crew member, serious injury to astronaut Bob Kerman and minor injuries to two additional crew, as well as the loss of one or two of our five UTVs. You can read the whole report of the landslide that caused the emergency here in this press release. We hope Bob will recover soon, and our condolences go out to the family of Thomeny Kerman, whose memorial service was held earlier this week. His body will be sent back to family in Sheltered Rock. Salvage operations have succeeded in returning both UTVs to KSC for us to look over and see what can be retained/rebuilt.
Civvie Science Flights Continue
The Genesis Program sees continued income roll in from its science flights, which have collected data from all 6 of the major biomes in the region around KSC (Water, Shore, Grasslands, Highlands, Deserts, Mountains). In addition several contracts have been satisfied to the delight of our clients, as both Val and Jeb record low-altitude aerial reports over areas around KSC. For more details on the mission that was carried out this week check the mission report. Profit for the program is still a ways off, especially since the Production model of the Civvie is being built. Also Jeb had a pretty hard landing that almost pancaked the airplane and the gear needed to be replaced. We plan to have both Jeb and Val log much more flying time in the Production model to improve their skills.
Progeny Mk3 Booster Static Test
We had a successful ignition and firing of the new lower-stage booster for the Progeny Mk3, which was given to us for testing since Umbra Space Industries did not have the facilities to handle something that big. Our initial review of the test data shows all parameters within tolerances and we have sent the data on to USI for them to do an independent review and verify the results. Once they do, we will be receiving our full order for 3 Progeny Mk3 rockets and plan to have a similar launch campaign as the Progeny Mk2.1, with further plans beyond that for as many as 2 additional Mk3 launches. You can review the report for the static firing test.
New Heights Reached with KerBalloons
Once again the KerBalloon Program beats out the Progeny Program in achieving the highest altitude record over Kerbin after the first test of the new high-altitude balloon resulted in an apokee of 24.990km. Although a great achievement, it’s important to note that this is not even halfway to space. Still, we are happy that the balloon performed as designed and KerBalloon will be providing us with additional units once we test the remaining two to ensure there are no serious problems they need to address. The next two high-altitude launches will take place at sea next week, and the recovery of the probe out of the water will be an important final test after we lost a low-altitude balloon unit last year under unknown circumstances.
Celestial Snapshot of the Week
The transit of Moho across Kerbol was an amazing event witnessed on both sides of Kerbin. We worked with astronomers to make sure the entire transit was captured and timed from start to finish. The total time was 8h27m23s. During that time Moho traveled from 0.57402°N to 0.15439°N latitude over Kerbol and was an average distance of 7,361,225km from Kerbin. There is predicted to be a second, shorter Moho transit later this year on Oct 15th but before then astronomers are even more excited for the upcoming Eve transit on Feb 22nd.
The small speck of Moho moving across the disk of Kerbol. Images were taken every hour after the start of the transit at 09:31:58 UTC
In other celestial news, it turns out that predictions made earlier this month by astronomers regarding the future trajectory of Meeny have turned out to be wrong.
From the Desk of Drew Kerman
Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuffWritten on 1/5/17
Back from a week in Dubai and working to catch up. I only have two weeks of lead time currently and that’s annoying. The good news is before I left I really felt like I was cruising along well in moving through the daily KSA operations. The bad news is that I was so busy over in Dubai I didn’t really get any time at all to seriously sit down and work on KSA stuff I wanted to while I was away from my PC and thus KSP – such as plot stuff, character development ideas, future Program planning, etc. I mean I knew I was going to be busy working but it was worse than I thought it would be unfortunately. But no sense boring you with the details, you can easily look up “Dubai 2017 fireworks” on YouTube if you want to check it out – note I could have gone out at the start of November to work on this so my week of work pales in comparison to what other people were doing! Anyways, lots of stuff to cover from this week…
I was really excited to work on this and it came out so awesome if I do say so myself. So yes, with Distant Object Enhancement (or maybe stock I don’t know, DOE at least makes it easier to find planets in the sky) you can actually see Moho if you zoom in using Camera Tools. But that’s not enough since the sun is a glaring blob of brightness and the planet is lost in all that. So you need to have Kopernicus in order to tweak the appearance of the sun using the following MM config:
@Body[Sun]
{
%Template
{
removeCoronas = True
}
%ScaledVersion
{
%Light
{
%sunLensFlareColor = 0, 0, 0, 0
}
%Material
{
%rimBlend = 0
%rimPower = 0
}
}
}
You also have to make sure Scatterer is removed if you have it, and having Environmental Visual Enhancements helps too on its own. In addition, Ambient Light Adjustment does change the apparent brightness of the sun’s surface, which can be useful for getting a good exposure. Now the transit started when the sun was not up over KSC but what I could do was lower the camera position with CameraTools until I was clipping into the ocean, which let me see through the planet and made the sun visible. So from just being at KSC I was able to zoom in and take a photo every hour. After taking all the images I layered them atop each other in Paint.NET to align them all and then marked Moho’s position on a separate layer that was then merged with the sun image I wanted to use for a backdrop. I used a sepia filter for the final result after reviewing several actual transit photos. So yes, this is the actual path and progress of Moho – I didn’t do any fancy math or orbital projection to determine where it would be on the sun’s disk and painted it there. Looking forward to the Eve transit next month!
Flash Photography
Tried my hand at simulating a flash used to photograph a night scene in this example with Jeb walking outside. I think it came out pretty well, with the brightness reflected off the ground to the building but not farther. It was just some layering combined with Ambient Light Adjustment to make a light exposure image and a dark natural exposure image then blending the two. I might use more than two levels of light exposure next time because I think the building wall is too evenly lit compared with the light on the ground and it should have probably been darker.
Meeny Orbits
So the fact that Meeny isn’t behaving as predicted isn’t an accident. KSP’s orbits are fixed so long as the vessel is not loaded into a flight scene – once you load a vessel and active physics takes over the precision is lessened and small teeny tiny orbital changes creep in, messing up any long-term predictions made using tools like KSP Trajectory Optimization Tool (Mission Architect). But again, I planned that by actively loading Meeny once a week and capturing new orbital data. Still not sure if I want to completely predict Meeny’s future or not.
Better Accessibility for Images
It was brought to my attention that the plots I was showing for Civvie flights were terrible for people with colorblindness. So moving forward I will be correcting this with the help of Coblis, which lets me drop an image onto its page and see how it will look for various symptoms of colorblindness.
New Mission Dispatch Format
I was posting mission dispatches by pasting the link to tweets in the page, which thanks to a WP plugin would format it into a tweet. This was a bit of a pain because I had to grab and paste each individual tweet link, which was tedious as hell (but still better than in the original KSA run where I had to take screenshots of tweets and edit them into individual images!). However I found that a full-page embed of a timeline of tweets looks really really good, and that’s just a simple single link paste, with an additional line of custom parameters to remove the header and footer. Yay time saving!
Overland Distance Determination
For the finance sheet I track how much fuel the UTVs use when traveling to a launch site to loft a KerBalloon, which means I need to know how many kilometers they travel to get there and back, and also track the flight of the balloon over ground. For the distance of balloon travel I use a fixed average, but the distance to the launch site and back changes each mission. I just figured out a stupid easy way to get this value – use HyperEdit to get a vessel in place at the location, then use VesselMover in conjunction with Persistent Trails. VesselMover lets me move the vessel around and I can track its distance with Persistent Trails, so I just move it over land along a plausible route back to KSC and note the travel distance.
Bob vs. Bill – Who to Injure?
The solution to this was pretty basic – I did a search for “Bill” and “Bob” in my text file containing all tweets and see who came up the least and thus needed some more attention. Unfortunately for Bob that attention came in the form of grievous injury but such is the life of a daring astronaut!
Idle Fuel Use
An annoying thing about operating the Civvie is that when the throttle is at 0 there is no fuel flow, yet the engine operates. I will have to see if this behavior persists once I finally upgrade to v1.2.2 (still waiting on FAR) and notify the Advanced Jet Engine folks if this is the case, as I believe they would be best suited to implementing idle fuel draw. For now though I just make sure not to fully close the throttle so there’s always fuel flow being registered to the engine the entire time its in operation.
