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KSC Completes Shutdown, Operations Ceased
We had to share the unfortunate news earlier this week that the Kerbal Space Center would have to temporarily cease all operations after it was served a court order. In the days that followed we moved most of our onsite staff over to our headquarters in Umbarg, many taking up temporary residence with other employees that live in the caverns there. We don’t have enough room for everyone though so a portion of our workforce are telecommuting from their home caverns in Ockr, Sheltered Rock or Kravass. Everything at KSC was shut down by the end of today, with any parts and vehicles still under construction properly storaged. Everyone is of course frustrated by having to do this, but at the same time we are all committed to making the best of a bad situation and continuing to push forward however we can – our crew especially are driven to use this “time off” from their normal missions to get a head start working on their spaceflight training.
Progenitor Program Confirms Flawless Mk6 Flight
The flight analysis for the latest launch was released earlier this week and data has confirmed the rocket performed perfectly during ascent although the lack of recovery was unfortunate. While a new launch date had been set, that has obviously been postponed. The good news though is that USI will still be cranking out the parts we need, so by the time we are ready to return to launching we should be able to assemble and launch the remainder of the 3 Mk6 rockets in relatively quick succession.
ATN Database
The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 1,602 asteroids and 6 updated with new observation data.
Celestial Snapshot of the Week
It’s very hard to resist a shot of Mun and Minmus hanging out together. We’ve taken a number of these over the past year and change but new variances to their appearance always give reason to snap another. Here, both in a gibbous phase they set towards a bed of clouds, with Minmus about to be occulted by Mun.
From the Desk of Drew Kerman
Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuffWritten on 2/22/17
I’ve been working hard to prevent this from happening the past two weeks but it’s finally just reached the point of being too much. IRL stress from the “day job” led to a little bit of depression even – thank goodness for the Olympics being an easy escape route to keep my mind off stupid crap and remain inspired. The good news is that even though I had to pull the emergency chute and cut out the majority of KSA’s operations things are now on the mend, and the work situation has already improved with the potential to continue to do so and remain stable. I still have a feasible recovery plan in my back pocket if something catastrophic occurs and I’m forced to just completely stop everything but that will hopefully not come to pass ever.
So yea, with the main fear of falling too far behind gone now that the work situation has stabilized far sooner than I hoped it would, I’ll be using this time to finally rebuild my 3-week lead and roll back into active operations with better pacing and the goal of maintaining it. This means that it will indeed be at least 3 weeks until full ops resume, most likely closer to 5 weeks or so. However don’t let the IRL need to scale back operations make you think that I didn’t plan this very carefully – the act of the Monolithic followers filing this injunction is just another salvo in the ongoing plot line that will continue to see further developments many years into the future, developments which will have a great impact on KSA operations and provide the drive behind numerous mission concepts. Let’s just say I’ve thought about some of the non-scientific things that I would like to do in the game and asked myself “why would the kerbals do that?”, then came up with the reason(s) and worked out how to get there. Strap in for the ride people!
