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Progeny Mk5 Block I Booster Test Successful
This week we finally held the static fire test for the new first stage booster that is designed to push the rocket off the pad at 4Gs to keep the nose from lifting and tipping the rocket over, then gradually reducing thrust as it climbs to keep dynamic pressure from building up too much. Measurements taken during the test show that the booster performed within the required parameters and we have cleared the last hurdle for the next Block I launch, which has now been scheduled for 12/14 @ 17:30 UTC. This will still be a bit of a crunch to get assembled but the VAB crew has had a good break this past month and it itching to get their hands dirty again. It also gives us two full days in the event that weather or technical problems hold up the launch before our scheduled end of yearly operations on the 15th. However we have already gotten approval from all staff involved to continue launch attempts throughout the following weekend if necessary.
Genesis & KerBalloon Missions
Over the weekend an unusually strong storm blew off the ocean over Kravass and the Field Research Team managed to quickly throw together a mission for Commander Valentina to fly north and intercept the storm as it dissipated over land to gather pressure readings to see how strong it still was by that time. Although Val flew north as planned, the storm had either veered off the projected course or weakened much faster than predicted as weather was not as rough and stormy as expected over the target location. Due to poor weather conditions back at KSC, Val was diverted to land at Kravass, where she ended up spending the week practicing approaches to its challenging airport, working with flight instructors on multi-crew practices, and enjoying her status as a minor celebrity being that Kravass is her home cavern. She flew back to KSC at the end of the week.
KerBalloon took Specialists Bill and Bob out to the eastern- and northern-most city of Ockr to release two high-altitude balloons for studying the temperature and pressures over the ocean even further to the east. The secondary goal of the mission was to test data relay from Ockr, as it will serve as the future hub for all Deep Space Network communications coming from the various ground stations other than KSC. Although the instruments could have fit on one balloon payload, two were used to gather additional data on upper-level wind currents by seeing how the balloons separated over the course of their flight. Unfortunately they ended up being carried too far further east to be seen by the Ockr radio tower due to the fact that the mountains east of Ockr are almost as high as those above the city.
Extremis Program Trajectory Calculations in Final Stretch
This week the Extremis team finished the 250 trajectory plots found to be potentially feasible for the 2019-2020 launch window and have begun the final phase one work of looking for good routes through 2020 into 2021, which they expect to complete by the end of operations on the 15th. We’ll have a detailed report on the phase one plotting once it is finished. A new addition to the trajectory analysis is the ability to now set a constraint for how close the spacecraft is allowed to approach the central body – in this case the sun. We don’t want our probes to die of overheating during their mission! We’ve set our constraint to half the distance of Moho’s closest approach to the sun. Even though a good portion of the phase one calculations did not use this constraint, phase two will allow us to account for this.
Alaba Makes Second Planned Mun SOI Pass
New orbital data has been posted for our moonlet Alaba after it was observed passing through Mun’s sphere of influence for the second time since its was discovered. So far the current orbit compared to the propagation work done based on its original discovery orbit is showing only minor deviations and we will see how well we have predicted its next encounter in late Jan 2018. We are still looking into a problem with our trajectory analysis software which is preventing us from seeing at this time how far off these minor deviations are throwing the final prediction of a crash into Mun in 2021.
ATN Database Update
The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 1,265 asteroids and 27 updated with new observation data.
Celestial Snapshot of the Week
It was quite the gathering of planets earlier this week at dawn when we went to get the Progeny Mk5 Block I test booster mounted on the launch pad. Seen here above the dawn are Moho, Duna, Sarnus, Urlum and Neidon. A crescent Minmus is visible further towards the top of the image.
From the Desk of Drew Kerman
Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuffWritten on 11/28/17
Could have had this all done yesterday but got a bit burnt out. Still, to be on a Tuesday after last Friday being only a day behind on ops is pretty damn good considering this week was no slouch in terms of operations with two long-ass Civvie flights and a relative crapload of images from one of them, with 28 images overall for the week. Hot damn. I even got in a pretty hefty Git commit for the Ops Tracker, getting everything setup to begin actually showing data on the vessel pages.
2.5hrs for 9 inflight photos
The images from the Civvie flight on Monday took 2.5hrs to capture – and that does not include the time it took to get them setup, just the time needed to load the game, load the flight, snap the photo, perform any edits necessary, and move on to the next. Not to mention I had to make some weather changes which required a restart of the game to take effect. I have a pretty beefy machine but I still jack the game graphics way up to a higher level of terrain detail and ground scatter distance rendering so that loading into the flight scene takes a good while and FPS while in the flight scene is very low. It was doubly-time-consuming for the two photos of KGA because the terrain scatter spawns in and around the airport statics, so I have to take a photo without ground scatter, restart the game and take another with ground scatter, then layer them and edit out the trees on the airport and on the approach paths. So yea, you don’t see a lot of inflight photos because they really do take up a lot of time, but in this case flying over new areas of Kerbin I really wanted to include them.
Photo edits
Speaking of editing photos, here are a few examples of what I need to do sometimes:
- This photo has a prop spinner visible but I had to add that myself with a solid-color layer blended into the image because when EVE cloud shadowing falls over the propeller in the game the texture is likewise affected and becomes dark with the shadows passing over it.
- This photo has the dish removed from the roof of the tracking station. Thankfully this is an easy thing to do as long as I can take the photo with Camera Tools because after I take the photo I just move the camera straight forward through to the other side of the Tracking Station and grab another photo. Because the sky is so far away this doesn’t really alter the perspective of the clouds in the background. Then I just layer the two and erase the dish
- This photo of all the parked aircraft at KGA isn’t lit like this in the game. I took a photo with and without ground scatter first just to make sure I could remove any that showed up over the statics, then I took a third photo where I jacked up the ambient lighting using Ambient Light Adjustment. Then I gave that photo a yellowish hue with color adjustment and used a soft erasure to expose the lighted areas.
Pretty much every photo I post has some sort of light to heavy editing done on it for various reasons, which is why I use photo count per week to get an idea of what my workload was like.
Magic boulders
So there’s a magic boulder crashing into Kerbin soon. Not quite sure still how I want to handle this. I need to be very careful because I do want to have these glowing space rocks be an important resource waaay down the line for some sort of futuristic technology but I don’t know what yet exactly and I don’t want to write myself into a corner. That’s all I’m going to say about that – just want it known that yes, these will play an important role further down the line
Ok it could have been just one balloon…
I honestly did not think of the fact that I really could have launched only one balloon instead of two until I was working on the mission report – but whatever I’ve never had a photo of two balloons launching at once.
