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Ascension Program Announced
Head on over to the press release from earlier this week for all the details. Everyone has been working hard over this past year to get the program up and running despite numerous delays due to problems with the Progeny rockets. We had hoped to announce this program as far back as September but better late than never right? We still hope to be able to launch the first 1.25m rocket by the end of Q1 2018 although we admit even to ourselves this is an ambitious schedule. All KSA staff is dedicated to achieving it though if possible!
Progeny Continues to Work Towards Return to Flight
This week the VAB concluded work on the third-stage of the Mk5 Block I scheduled to launch no earlier than 12/12. Unlike all previous Mk5 third stages this one no longer has fins at the bottom as analysis of the last Block I flight showed they were no longer needed by the time the third stage flew on its own. The stage also includes shielded payload bay fairings and computer control unit to help protect against the possibility of heavier radiation at higher altitudes. The nose cone antenna is also sporting an extended range out to 1Mm. The next step in construction will be the second stage as the booster arrived late this week. We plan to test the new first stage booster towards the end of next week. If that goes well, final assembly and integration will begin the following week.
KerBalloon and Genesis Missions
We like to get in at least one of each per week and this week was no exception. Genesis went first with a short flight over KSC to test out some new camera equipment from CactEye Optics. The larger lens allowed us to zoom in to a field of just 5° while the regular view gave us a field of 60°, which is 2x greater than our current cameras mounted to the Civvies. There were some control issues with the camera platform that we want CactEye to address before we purchase some units but we can see these being of great use on the Deuce, which won’t have any fixed landing gear to obscure the view. Unfortunately due to numerous delays over the past week Genesis lost a second contract thanks to time constraints.
KerBalloon chartered a Maritime Service Vessel to the northern sea in order to launch a high-altitude balloon, which ascended from the northern-most location we have ever conducted a mission from. We tend to not like performing missions well out of contact from KSC but in this case we were able to relay communications and data through Kravass, which was a great test as it will serve as a future ground station for spacecraft in low-Kerbin orbit. Since we were so much further north, a camera was included in the payload to gather some images, which included a glimpse of northern aurora.
ATN Database Update
The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 1,220 asteroids and 29 updated with new observation data.
Celestial Snapshot of the Week
Bob only had to travel about 2km north of KSC, near the Monolith, to change his perspective enough that a planetary alignment happened to form a near-perfect triangle over top of the Skyspire peak in the mountains to the west. The three planets in the triangle are (clockwise from top) Urlum, Eve and Sarnus. Neidon is sitting up to the right
From the Desk of Drew Kerman
Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuffWritten on 11/23/17
Oof, rough week. A good friend is getting evicted and I had to lend a hand helping him get all his stuff moved. The Punisher dropped on Netflix and although I binged that in a day it still took up time. Had a bit of burn out too but that’s all past me now. Best part of this week though was finally getting my Saturn V Lego set, which I will be contently assembling over the next several days. I find it’s a nice activity to help wind down before bed.
Umbarg aerial
I forgot to talk about this last week, but Omega482 from the KSP forums graciously allowed me early access to one of his many awesome statics has has under development for Kerbal Konstructs and I was able to finally show how Umbarg allows KSC to use it to relay data and communications. As you can see the base of the static isn’t there, but that was just thanks to some compositing to remove it after carefully placing it and adjusting the time of day for favorable shadows. I will admit I was a bit surprised no one commented about it really given its not something that could be obviously built with stock parts. This is the same kind of tower that sits over Kravass (and Sheltered Rock, and Ockr).
More weather meddling
Found a new EVE property to play with – cloud speed. Turns out you can set all three axis for the direction in which the clouds move. I’m doing this the same way I do cloud position by generating 3 random numbers between 0-200 where 0 to 100 = 0 to 100 and 101 to 200 = -1 to -100. Turns out that depending on the combination of values I get some pretty cool results where the cloud rotation actually changes over time. Here’s a quick video to let you see what I mean – Kerbin itself is still spinning normally it’s just the clouds that are wobbling all over the place. So over the course of a Kerbin day the clouds could be moving west to east then by next sunrise be moving more southwest to northeast, then east to west or back to west to east – in short it gives me a much more dynamic range of “wind directions” over time. Still, depending on the values I can also end up with a near-consistent pattern over the course of 24hrs.
Doing my own Scatterer effects
Turns out zooming in on KSC from far away doesn’t look good with Scatterer at all due to some obvious outlining of the buildings. Thankfully the effect is a lot less obvious when I disable the atmospheric haze depth effect (postprocessing) via the configuration window so I just needed to make my own. A few minutes of fiddling with layer blending and coloring produced a near-similar effect.
 Original Scatterer image with obvious outlining |
 Postprocessing disabled, outlining still there but less obvious |
 Custom effect added to previous image, just a solid color layer with transparency and blend mode tweaked |
Stupid mistakes
I made a couple of dumb but thankfully not horribly obvious mistakes this past week I’m not too pleased about.
- I left the roof dish atop the Tracking Station in this photo, which is hard to see but it’s there if you look for it. The dish was taken down earlier to be moved to the ground. Thankfully I remembered to remove it from the photos of the KSC taken from the air (like the ones shown above). I at least was able to remove it from the photo on flickr. This photo also set me up for my next fail…
- The aircraft in this photo are swapped, as the previous photo showed the atmospheric scoop being on the Civvie to the right. Sure they could have been dollied around – but why?
- Also in that last photo Val isn’t in her usual flight suit. I knew this at the time but just then forgot to change it before taking the photo.
No one called me out on any of these but I’m still not happy with the continuity slips. Again, this is why having a large lead time is good, because it gives me more opportunity to review and catch mistakes like these with time left to also fix them.
