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Genesis Takes on Most Demanding Contract Yet
Previous science flights flown by the Civvie have had to adhere to a general area, which was marked by a radio beacon dropped by the client via airship ahead of the mission. Commander Valentina and Captain Jebediah have both flown through and around these areas in various fashions to collect the data required, but this past week Tarsier Space Technology asked if we could go a step further. They requested that data be collected around the target area within 4-5km of the center, from 1km to 4.5km (Civvie’s service ceiling). To attempt this, we equipped the Civvie’s radio beacon receiver to emit pings as Val flew within the proper range, with decreasing intervals as she drew close and increasing intervals as she flew away. Using this, she was able to successfully fly within the required constraints. You can read the details of the flight in the mission report. Whether more contracts will require this is unknown, but it’s nice to know we can do it.
This week also saw the announcement that the Deuce is being redesigned to account for the pitch instability found during the recent flight trials.
KerBalloon Continues High-Altitude Data Gathering
Demand remains popular for our high-altitude KerBalloons as three launches were carried out this past week. The first was off to the west past the mountains and although 3-days of supplies were taken to wait out good weather, conditions turned out to be fine on the first day. When the payload landed however it got caught up high on a steep slope. Unlike last time this happened, frequent updrafts in the area prevented airships from lowering crew to the location. Specialist Bill had to return with a crew and proper climbing gear the following day and has vowed to keep the gear with them on future missions. The second and third launches were at sea from the Maritime Service Vessel Lymun and were more routine, with the weather again cooperating very well. Everyone is looking forwards to what will hopefully be a nice weekend!
Research & Development Focused on New Science Instruments
Head of R&D Wernher von Kerman this week revealed that they are working on a new dedicated accelerometer instrument that can also be used on the surface to detect seismic vibrations. Currently we have a small sensor built into the rocket’s avionics core but a dedicated instrument would give us much more accurate readings. No timeline has been revealed but we expect it will take a few weeks at least to transform this well-known tech into something suitable for the high-demands of rocket flight.
R&D have also reminded us they are hard at work determining the science suite that will be built into the Extremis probes. Right now there are no constraints because mission planners are still working out Δv requirements, so ideas are running wild as to what sort of science would be best performed during the various flybys and deep space travel. It is important that the chosen instruments remain generalized though because we want to outfit each probe similarly so one could replace another in the event of a launch failure.
ATN Database Update
The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 902 asteroids, 16 updates and no new alerts issued.
Celestial Snapshot of the Week
If the night sky in this photo seems a bit washed out compared to others we’ve posted, it’s because this is what it looks like to the naked eye. We commonly use either more sensitive light-capturing optics or longer exposures for a more vibrant look to the stars and nebulae above.
From the Desk of Drew Kerman
Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuffWritten on 8/5/17
Will be all caught up again tomorrow to my 3-week lead. This was very tough given all the Mk5 material I have had to produce. Since I will inevitably fall behind again later this month when I leave for 4 days to view the solar eclipse, I’ve already decided that I will only ever do 2 days of KSA ops in a single real day before turning my attention to other things like the Flight Tracker rewrite and kOS coding. Crunching through things just to regain my lead time has not been enjoyable at all. Good news though is that my new A/C unit is working great after figuring out how best to configure things to make it most efficient at cooling my modest 120ft2 office. It can’t actually make my room much colder than outside, but if I get it running in the morning when I know it will be hot later, it doesn’t warm up as much and I always have a cool breeze on me.
Deuce redesign
I’m very happy with how the Deuce is turning out with iterative design changes. I’ve read tutorials and watched videos on how to design with FAR tools like the derivatives window but I’m not a very studious person and I can’t really remember things until I actually do them. So these changes being made to the Deuce represent the actual learning curve I’m going through. The first test flight had a serious yaw problem and I saw the red numbers in the derivatives window and I figured out how to fix them for the second & third test flights. Red numbers in the pitch were still there and I knew they were there but I didn’t really understand how they would affect the aircraft until I flew it and realized yea those numbers too would have to be fixed. I don’t want the C7 engineers to be coming to these conclusions from raw calculations though, which is why I liked how Jeb was able to determine the aircraft was unstable once pitch was dampened when at first C7 was concluding it was him being too hard on the controls.
Mk4 launch #4
This past week was the second to last Mk4 launch and it went great from a technical standpoint, the Flight Tracker followed all the events properly. Funny how it was the 4th Mk4 launch on August 4th – I didn’t even realize that until the day of. I kind of wish I could have added a bit more suspense by saying stuff like how most of KSC was evacuated in case the Monolith did something else but I had to play into the fact that there was now a gag order on Monolith news so KSA wouldn’t have been able to mention it that way.
Flying the DME arc
So since Civvie flights have begun to get a bit routine and boring (to write about anyways, I still love flying them) and I don’t yet have anything else going on that allows me to relegate them to the background, I decided to add a new challenge of flying a certain distance from the target area. This was actually done with Waypoint Manager, which gives you the distance to the center. It was still a challenge, but it was doable to turn towards the target until the distance slowed its change, then level out and turn back in when you started to get too far away. This is a technique I practiced with actual DME equipment in Flight Simulator, which you can learn more about in this blog post of my flying exploits.
Stop giving me high-altitude crew observations!!
The tweet this past week about Mortimer declining high-altitude crew observation contracts was a joke based on the game actually still serving me these contracts, despite the fact that I keep declining them or waiting until they expire. There is even a field in the game’s contract module that keeps track of whether you look at and then ignore a contract, so how can the game not take a damn hint??
