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Injunction Upheld by High Court, Return to Surface Operations Further Delayed
We had our appeal case heard in the High Court this week at Sheltered Rock, the current government seat. Unfortunately the judges voted unanimously that the injunction filed against surface operations was legal and now our only other option is to amend the laws that the Monolithic followers turned against us to close the loopholes they found. Normally this process would take months due to the crawl of bureaucracy but we’ve already begun to lock in majority support among the Assembly members and the Presider has already pledged his support to sign the amendments into law. It is a fortunate time for us, as Monolithic followers do not fully control the Assembly during this term, but the battle will still be hard-won as a few Assembly members also have strong ties to the airship industry, which has seen competition for the first time ever via our partnership with C7 Aerospace to build better cargo-hauler aircraft. We hope to negotiate the political and legal hurdles with as much haste as possible in order to return to KSC within the next few weeks.
Space Rocks Rain Down
Kerbin is currently being pummeled with small to large asteroids on a regular basis over these past few centuries since the near-extinction event caused by the kilometers-wide rock. These asteroids only range in size from a few meters to a few dozen, smaller than 100m and nowhere near 1km or more but they can still pack a serious wallop depending on their mass. Because nearly all infrastructure is deep underground surface impacts rarely affect anything but this past week two significant impacts occurred.
The first happened over the past weekend when a rock slammed into the ground between another impact site under active study and the base camp conducting the research. Luckily 50km separated the two and the asteroid, which had not been seen coming, hit almost right in the middle, sparing both sites any considerable debris fallout and fortunately claiming no lives among the research team.
The second impact was one we saw coming well beforehand, but updated observations days before impact showed it would strike almost 400km further east than planned, lowering concerns of any large waves inundating Umbarg or KSC. Unfortunately for some reason the updated impact location was in error and the asteroid ended up striking at the original location. Again, fortunately nothing disastrous resulted from the event – this time at least. The Asteroid Tracking Network is still investigating how they got the updated impact location so wrong.
ATN Database
The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 1,674 asteroids and 4 updated with new observation data.
Celestial Snapshot of the Week
Looking east as the sun sets and Mun rises from a weather camera atop the 160m-tall Umbarg communications tower, which is itself atop a 380m hill, the shadow of which you can see falling across the water
From the Desk of Drew Kerman
Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuffWritten on 3/3/17
Making good progress. I think that despite the KSC shutdown things are still moving pretty well and anyone following should still be entertained. It’s not like I’ve been trying to come up with “filler” to use for the lack of KSC operations – both asteroid events this past week were actual game events! I of course track all asteroids so when one that has not yet been discovered by the ATN slams into a significant part of Kerbin I can use that, which is what did in fact happen. And the mistake of the asteroid impact location could be seen as me “spicing up” the story but those were the coordinates I got when I used a different set of data from KSPTOT. I’ve notified the author to see why there was such a huge discrepancy between the data I used, which was stored in the program, versus the data that was used for the original impact location, which was taken from the game itself.
So yea, like I’ve said before sometimes this stuff just writes itself, which is one of the cooler things IMO. I’m also liking the ability to explore Kerbal politics and religion a bit more deeply. However I’m still keeping everything very high-level and abstract because I personally hate politics nor do I partake in religion and have no desire to really get into the nitty-gritty of things in this regard.
