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K2-X Hot Fires Show Good Data
Engineers are seeing what they expected to see in the test results coming out of the various hot fires that have been performed this past week, with more to come next week if the data continues to look good after careful review Monday and Tuesday. You can review all the tweets from the firings in this timeline.
The K2-X has been through its own detailed qualification phase over the past year in NovaPunch’s underground facility as part of the design competition to allow us to select an engine for the Ascension program, however these firings are the first time the engine has been hooked up to actual flight hardware and controlled by the actual flight software that it will be used with. A lot of these tests are repeated events from what has been done before but just with all the extra complexity of flight hardware included. So far, things have been proceeding extremely smoothly thanks to the very simple and straightforward design of the engine itself along with our past experience with the Progenitor program’s LF/O rockets, even if they are on a smaller scale.
Next week will close out integrated systems testing and by the end of the month we will be able to make the decision as to whether we have flight-ready hardware on our hands!
Future Progeny Launches Announced
As excited as we are for the upcoming Ascension Mk1 debut flight we still have plenty of unfinished business with the Progenitor program to keep us busy. Three more rockets remain to be built, with one nearing completion and a second getting started. The dates and times for the next three Progeny Mk6 Block I launches, assuming no scheduling delays or flight anomalies, are as follows:
4/26 @ 17:58 UTC
5/2 @ 18:18 UTC
5/8 @ 18:38 UTC
These launches will hopefully provide us enough data to better answer the question of what type of hazardous radiation field exists over the planet. If not, they should at least point us in a better direction to take with future launches to ultimately find out. Whether the radiation discovered over the polar regions (south pole was confirmed last month) will tie into the radiation field(s) being researched by these rocket flights remains to be seen. Ultimately we would rely on orbital probes to completely map radiation zones around the planet but for now poking around like this is the best we can do.
Deuce Set for Engine Testing
Confirmation late today out of Sheltered Rock is the latest Deuce aircraft is set to take to the skies next week after Captain Jebediah and Commander Valentina performed a series of ground check outs to ensure all systems are functioning properly. This aircraft features the newly-designed Pegasus rotary engines built specifically for aircraft flight, as opposed to the airship engines we were using before. The main difference, other than increased power, is that these engines are capable of operating under higher G loads without suffering fuel starvation due to drain back in the lines, which almost took down Jeb on a test flight earlier this year.
If all goes well, our two pilots will fly the Deuce back to KSC for it to begin active operations, while the original prototype is flown to Kravass to be disassembled for transport underground to the Air History Museum and reassembled as an exhibit alongside the original Civvie.
ATN Database
The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 1,857 asteroids and 6 updated with new observation data.
Celestial Snapshot of the Week
Both Minmus and Sarnus wander about the sky on inclined orbits, so passing near each other is a relatively rare event, especially close enough that you can get a decent look at Sarnus in the same frame. The Kerman Observatory atop Kravass was able to capture this shot just before dawn. Sarnus’s moons Slate (left) and Tekto (right) are both visible, with Eeloo also in sight but mostly obscured by the rings.
From the Desk of Drew Kerman
Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuffWritten on 4/1/18
Hahahahaha OMG I just realized I’ve been copy-pasting this section of Ops Summary for so long that I never actually changed the year in the date from 17 to 18 until now. Why does no one else see these things? Why doesn’t anyone tell me? IS ANYONE READING THIS?!? HELLOOOO???? 😜😉 I’ve left it alone in previous desk notes even though I could go back and fix it – let’s see if anyone else notices before this.
I also screwed up this past week by leaving an ATN database report not fully edited down so all the other undiscovered asteroids were visible for pretty much the entire week. But nobody said anything. So maybe no one saw it? I don’t know. I know people read stuff but I don’t get a whole lot of interaction. I’m still not sure how I feel about that. I mean, I’m doing this regardless of whether anybody really reads this – I’m doing this for me and it’ll be fun to read up on again in a couple years like I do every now and then for my Sims character. Still, I do very much like when people ask questions about things or try to poke holes in what I’m doing. It can really make me think about things better or give me ideas. Speak up!
Update 4/13: there was a good deal of discussion today on this tweet here. It’s a bit annoying when people ask questions about things I thought I made pretty clear in previous tweets and updates but alas I must remember that not everyone follows everything and not always do I do a good job communicating things. But again, I generally don’t realize things like that unless people come to me confused! So yea, twitter is my favorite platform to interact with people on but responses to my reddit and forum updates are enjoyable as well.
Update 4/19: Here is another great example, that not only made me have to elaborate on something I didn’t really think about, but even gave me an idea for a future event! I’ll reference this in my desk notes once it happens
Less asteroids? More asteroids?
The game spawns them, not me, so if there’s a lull or uptick in the rate of asteroids, especially the ones swinging past Kerbin, that’s not really me doing it for sake of story or whatever. Like, March didn’t happen to have a crapton of asteroids just because operations were suspended and I needed stuff to tweet about. I wish there hadn’t been so many I could have pushed my lead time out faster! I did do one thing, which was decrease the max spawn count from 4 to 3 – which has made a difference although I can’t say for sure yet whether the effects are just long or short term. I made this change back at the start of the year and still had a lot in March. I don’t fully understand the spawn system and some days I end up with a lot of new ‘roids and other days it’s a few or none. I am considering ways of weaving NKOs into the overall story I have planned but not sure yet if I really want or need to.
Engine testing
So, I was going to make this the first testing of the K2-X engine ever until I did some research and read this document on engine testing to get ideas on what I should be talking about during the tests. Yea, I knew there was a lot of stuff involved but holy shit is there a lot of stuff involved. No way this could be the first test and then I just fly it off like a month or so later. I mean, sure the document I read was based upon years of past experience in rocket engine development, which is something my kerbals don’t have yet, but going from first test to first flight in 1-2 months seemed a bit much. Hence, the added backstory above about previous testing done beforehand, with this being the first “integrated” test. Legit? I feel like it is.
Unfortunately this engine has no emissive texture, so it doesn’t glow hot when its firing. I couldn’t find any reason the engine bell shouldn’t be glowing red hot so I added the effect in post after snapping the image of it firing. I also had to capture a ton of screens to find some that didn’t have the smoke particles clipping into each other or into the ground. Of course, the addition of the emissive post-effect wasn’t something I could easily achieve in video (well, maybe but I didn’t want to take the time to figure out how), which is why the camera angle is different and not really showing the engine bell at all.
How’d I do the smoke? Well the original plan was to just use the physics ability of Smokescreen particles which is another reason I designed the flame bucket so well. But then I realized this engine wouldn’t produce any smoke on its own (and in fact the engine particle effects do not include smoke) so instead I just clipped a 0.675m sounding rocket booster into the flame bucket and had it firing off with the plume removed and the smoke particles edited to grow larger as they are spouted out. I think it looked great.
I did write a kOS script to run the engines for the specified times and throttle settings to get accurate fuel usages to plug into the financial spreadsheet. The script was based off the AFCS so I could do data logging to graph stuff out but it wasn’t really an operational script that would be used in a future launch so I’m not sharing it.
Ascension blueprint edits
I forgot to change the price and mass of the K2-X engine before I calculated the specs that went into the Block I and Block II blueprints of the Ascension Mk1. The changes are due to the fact that by default the engine is able to be gimbaled, which is something I removed in order to have the design be more simple. The actuators and hydraulics can take up a good deal of mass – I couldn’t find any good specs to use for reference but I figured 200kg should be more than enough – the original engine weighs 1.2t and this one weighs just 1t. I also completely screwed up the dry mass of the Block II by forgetting to remove all the fuel before I made note of it. DUH. Thankfully this was all realized before I actually have reason to use them all over the place.
