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Genesis Program Goes Belly-Up Again
While on final approach to Runway 09 during this week’s mission, Captian Jeb dipped too low on his approach and found himself flying right into the last ridge before the KSC floodplain. His attempts to pull up and over did not succeed and the Civvie struck the ground wheels-first, bounced into the air, stalled and fell nose-first into the ground, flipping onto its back. This is a general description of the crash, a more detailed report will be released once the investigation into the incident is completed later this month by C7 Aerospace Division. Captain Jeb was securely fastened and walked away with only a minor head injury. The Civvie Prototype is currently stripped down in the HAB undergoing tests to see what damage was done to its airframe and whether it will need to be scrapped or can be repaired to flight-worthy status. The Production model remains under construction and ended the week with all main fuselage and control parts attached. Now will come several days of internal wiring and cabling to connect all these new parts together and make ready for the addition of the engine and lighting system prior to the landing gear. It remains on schedule for trials later this month.
Kerbin Picks Up a Second Moonlet
An accidental discovery has led the ATN to recognize a second asteroid in orbit around Kerbin. Its trajectory clearly shows it was captured by Mun in much the same way Meeny was captured late last year. The main difference is that we did not see this capture happen, and it’s still a question whether it can be determined when the capture occurred. The asteroid has been given an ATN designation of DGG-266(B) and the Kerbin Astronomical Society has put a call out to the public to send in suggestions for its official name. You can read more about the new moonlet, including how it was accidentally discovered, in this press release.
Progenitor Program Remains on Track
Work has begun in earnest in the VAB to begin readying the three Progeny Mk3 rockets that will be fired off at the end of this month, with launch dates to be announced at the end of next week when the Mk3 boosters arrive. Until then the payloads and MK1 boosters are being readied for final integration. Our Lead Engineer, Simon, has informed us that everything is proceeding on schedule. The launch base has already been completed and will be moved out to the launch pad sometime next week. There has been discussion of using clamps like the ones seen in the VAB and used for the Mk3 booster test, but for the present we still prefer a launch base that we can pick up and move around relatively easier. Flight Director Lanalye and her team of launch controllers have also been busy working out the new launch timeline for the Mk3, which needs to take into account a brand new set of range protocols now that we will be launching over the water, as well as new recovery protocols as we will be working with the Maritime Service to collect the payload as it floats down.
Links from the Week
We closed out our books for January, you can find our updated finance report here, with totals now at the top and individual sheets for programs and vessels.
Also the weekly Asteroid Tracking Network database update can be found here.
We now have surface tracks in the Operations Tracker, and you can see the path of all our Civvie flights to date using this link and selecting them in the layer control in the top-right (Give it a little while to load all that data!) Each individual mission report now has a link to the track for that mission, if available, as well as on the Civvie vessel page.
Celestial Snapshot of the Week
In ancient times, the sight of a sun rising while blocked out by Mun no doubt terrified our ancestors – the fiery red sky and the ominous black hole could be seen as a horribly portend of things to come. Thankfully nowadays we know better, but it certainly doesn’t make the event any less spectacular, as demonstrated by this week’s top celestial snapshot.
From the Desk of Drew Kerman
Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuffWritten on 1/15/17
Okay so this week was a bit rougher thanks to some IRL stuff, but so it goes. The Civvie crash was a completely unintentional outcome of the last mission – that approach was reaaally feeling good! Damn that hill! But on the flipside it gives me an excuse not to fly for a while, which is one of the most time-consuming things to do since I can’t timewarp since the plane has no autopilot or even trim tabs – and I’m not going to wave my hands for the sake of saving a few minutes. Besides, I like actually flying. I still hope by the end of next week or so to be back to a full month of lead time.
Flight Tracker Update Plans
A big change to the Flight Tracker recently that happened behind the scenes is the switch from using Mean Anomaly to True Anomaly for calculating orbital trajectories. I probably should have done it from the beginning but it involved slightly more math and since I hate math I shied away from it. Luckily it didn’t hurt much in the long-run as the changeover was still relatively simple, but not without issues. Everything seems to be purring along fine again tho and it will also make things easier when entering new orbital data from KSP into the database.
Speaking of the database, a recent event has caused me to reconsider taking the time to implement a web interface for modifying my database tables. I currently use Microsoft Access but for a recent update on Meeny, the craft page was failing to show recent data. I had to re-export the database through MSAccess to get the fields to show up for the SQL fetch, even though they appeared to be there just fine in the MSAccess application. I have no idea how to tell if MSAccess saves things properly or why records show up in MSAccess but not when fetched by SQL for the page. So I’m going to just dump MSAccess & do a direct edit through a web interface, once I have the time to implement it after I catch up to my month lead.
After that, the next major public-facing feature will be the ability to track aircraft flights in real-time via the surface map in the Flight Tracker and also see the paths of previous flights, for which I did indeed record lat/lng data.
VAB Drop Shadows
Came up with a new technique for shadowing objects placed on tables in the VAB. Since the game only casts shadows on other objects or the floor, not the props scattered along the VAB sides, in the past I had to fudge the shadows myself. But now I realize I can take a photo, keep the camera orientation the same while moving the camera down so I can select a flat white object like a rover body, and move that up under the photo target, snap another image and then combine the two to erase the rover body. An example of the rover body in use:
Alright, on to the next week!
