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Jan 27 2017

Operations Summary – Week of 1/23/17

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Progeny Mk3 Officially Announced

Details have at last dropped for the newest iteration of the Progeny rocket family, set to debut next month. You can find all the information in this press release.

High-Altitude KerBalloons Mostly Successful

We ran a most ambitious launch campaign for our KerBalloon Program this week when we dispatched the MSV Tongjess to sail to three separate locations over the span of a day in the south Kerblantic to launch two high-altitude balloon payloads and one low-altitude payload. Despite some weather troubles we eventually managed to launch and recover all three balloons, however one of the high-altitude units suffered a malfunction that caused the payload to return to the surface before reaching maximum altitude. The contracted agency for that mission understandably withheld full payment as a result. Upon review of the unit in the VAB engineers have come up with a theory as to what happened and we have passed the information on to KerBalloon to see what they think. Until this issue is resolved, our next high-altitude KerBalloon order is on hold. We still have 3 low-altitude units to deploy however.

Civvie Balloon Launch Under Consideration

Both the rovers that were involved in the landslide last week have been scrapped. This leaves us with 3 rovers, which is enough to carry all the equipment needed to launch a single balloon but not enough to carry extra fuel to extend their 160km range, which severely limits their sphere of operations around KSC. Before we go and purchase new UTVs however we are exploring the possibility of launching the balloons from the Civvie. How the units will be launched is still being discussed – there are complications with both over- and under-slung configurations. This might be the first use of the new radial decouplers we approved from Modular Rocket Systems earlier this month.

Cosmic Shooting Gallery

This week has seen quite a lot of news about asteroids either whizzing by us or slamming into the planet – be that just the atmosphere or the ground. Scientists are still caught up with the impact of RAK-186(C) to the north along the border of the Tundra. This location is ideal for asteroid impacts or even just entries that mostly burn up in the atmosphere as the icy white surface of the ground makes the dark rocks stand out. Scientists are gathering up relatively large pieces (several centimeters in size) of RAK-186(C) but are also on the hunt for meteorites that have no association with this asteroid and have just fallen around the area from other space debris. Of course once this operation wraps up another expedition is planned to the interior of the Lower Continent to where yet another, larger asteroid was to have fallen. MHG-908(D) most likely survived more intact, and if so would have had a decent effect on the local flora and fauna in the area when it struck the ground. Scientists are expecting a crater, and hope to get out there sometime next month to investigate. Three more asteroids are currently buzzing past us at various distances, including KYM-011(C) at the closest recorded distance to date of only 103.890km!

Astronomers are not sure what is behind the uptick in asteroid events but they suspect it to be one of two reasons. The first guess is that this is how things are pretty much all of the time but we’re just now starting to get an idea of the frequency of impacts and near-misses due to the greater diligence of the Asteroid Tracking Network in hunting down these rocks. The other possibility is that we are currently passing through a denser field of asteroids at this time. Even though Kerbin’s orbit is circular, the thousands of rocks that orbit Kerbol with us could clump up into uneven groups that travel on more elliptical paths together. With more time monitoring asteroids, we should be able to eventually figure out which theory is correct.

Celestial Snapshot of the Week

Val has been busy helping Bob with his recovery so there hasn’t been much time spent at the scope but she managed to still grab a few simple photos this week with just her camera, like this one of Mun and Minmus when they are passing by each other as Minmus is 5.7° from the ecliptic, very near to its maximum 6° inclination. The photo was taken at dawn.

From the Desk of Drew Kerman

Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff

Written on 1/8/17

Hells yea, I just did a game week in three real days. And a busy game week at that! If I can keep up this pace of 2-3 game days per real day I’ll be back to my month lead time as early as the end of next week and I can slow down to just one game day per real day so I can actually focus more on planning future projects and working on some new Flight Tracker features and stuff like that. Also, FAR looks like it will be updated around then so I can take the time to upgrade to KSP v1.2.2 from v1.1.3. For now though it’s pure catch-up mode still. I really don’t have much more to say right now. Just cruising along nicely. Here’s a little image editing comparison for you all though:

Untouched image

More clouds added

Just a simple layer merge of clouds rendered by Paint.NET so I would get a more broken cloud cover to suit the weather I wanted. I do a lot of subtle image editing to almost all the images I post. Maybe one of these days I’ll have to have a contest – Edited or Non-Edited and have people try to pick which is which 😛