|
Ascension Mk1 Fails Orbit Again
It’s tough having to type that headline but if getting into orbit were easy everyone would be doing it! You can review the events of the launch in this report and Ascension team members are still giving the data collected during ascent a thorough analysis. Right now the focus is on the initial ascent from the launch pad to Max Q, during which time the rocket did not pitch over quite as far as it should have. This could be an issue with the rocket’s ability to turn over early in flight or simply not plugging in a large enough difference in first two points of the quadratic equation used to tell the rocket what pitch it should be at based on altitude.
Although extensive searching was done to find the rocket after it re-entered, no trace of it was found within the search area. Upon return the rocket would attempt to hold whatever heading it happened to be on, so it should have continued roughly along the trajectory it was following when we lost contact with it. What we really don’t know is how far it would travel given that it is also programmed to nose up to 15° of pitch once in the lower atmosphere to glide and help reduce speed and heating. If it crashed within the search area, it’s possible it went into one of the water bodies and sank with a damaged sonar transponder. If it managed to fly outside of the search area, we don’t have the resources to keep hunting for it – if it was further outside the search area and had a functioning radio beacon, we would have found it. Thankfully we have enough data from what was transmitted to us while in contact to use for planning our next attempt.
Make sure you check out the gallery above for our first images from space! If you want to know what took us so long to get some, give this report a read.
Progeny Mk6 Dazzles in Night Launch
Two rocket launches in one week? It was quite the workload but the teams got it done and just three days after the Ascension launch a Progeny Mk6 Block I went shooting up into the sky – at night! This offered up both a unique viewing experience for the record number of kerbs that attended as well as a unique scientific opportunity for exploring the hazardous radiation region. There have been theories bouncing around about various interactions between Kerbin and the sun and the existence of our planet’s magnetic field, but these rocket flights should help lend stronger credence to some of them depending on the results of the data collected, which is now being analyzed. We will be publishing a separate report with the results once they are available.
Capsule Testing Continues
Our astronaut cadre of Jebediah, Valentina, Bill and Bob are still busy putting both capsule prototypes through their paces. This past week and part of next they will be working through various exercises that involve recovering the capsule and crew member from splashdown at sea. Starting in the calmer waters of the bay to the north of KSC they have since moved offshore into the open ocean and have gone through emergency crew extraction, capsule towing, and even dragging it onboard a Maritime Service Vessel’s aft wet ramp. The latest testing has seen an airship equipped with a hook and winch, assisted by a crew in the water, attach to the capsule and carry it back to shore, providing another recovery method besides MSV.
Once the capsules finish water exercises they’ll begin to undergo more rigorous drop tests in advance of a crewed drop and recovery.
Airborne Launch Suffers Further Delays
After Flight Officer Aldeny came down sick due to an averse reaction to his allergy medication, weather and mechanical issues stepped in to prevent the Deuce from flying this week and performing another carry and release test of the Progeny Mk1-B rocket in advance of an actual ascent firing. Thems the breaks – the team will of course regroup and make another attempt next week once the Deuce is repaired.
ATN Database
The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 2,254 asteroids and 7 updated with new observation data.
Celestial Snapshot of the Week
Mun photobombs again, this time rising during a sunset photo of the Progeny Mk6 Block I that launched this week. Here’s a question we posed once for our twitter followers – how do we know this is a sunset photo and not a sunrise?
From the Desk of Drew Kerman
Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuffWritten on 7/20/18
Yes I’m writing this day of. Yes I hate it, but so it goes. Juggling a lot right now and it probably wouldn’t be so bad if I hadn’t had some stupid issues with KSP and mods that honestly very nearly almost made me quit KSP. Seriously, I was contemplating what kind of story arc I could conceive that would put KSA on hold for several months to let me take a breath. I might still do it. Anyways, it’s all good for now.
Deuce flight
Something had to give this week thanks to two rocket launches and all the KSP mod problems I had, and the Deuce flight was the easiest to come up with decent excuses to push back continuously. I liked how Aldeny came down sick due to the allergy meds, I like that I was able to use an in-universe event (the realization that kerbs are allergic to tree pollen after living underground for so long, you can read more on that here if you missed it).
Ascension launch
This was stupid stressful and could have been a real pain in the ass if I hadn’t gotten it done in time to be published. The problem is that once I fly the mission and have to compile all the data and everything as a result of flying the mission, changing when it is flown becomes near impossible and I would have had to fly it all over again at another date and doubled my workload atop what I had already done. So making sure I could get everything set up in time was crucial and I managed to pull it off.
Flight still took two tries though thanks to another file-share error with one of my log files that crashed kOS (they don’t have an elegant way to handle it). Pretty sure now it’s my automatic backup service, so I make sure now to suspend it before launches. Had no problem the second flight or during the Progeny mission.
I didn’t plan to not make orbit, the rocket as designed and coded simply did not make orbit unfortunately. I really was trying but things definitely got a lot closer so next time should be the one.
I’m not going to reveal what happened to the rocket here. There’s a chance I can still use that later on.
Progeny Launch
First try! That’s always nice, not having to redo any of the flight for any reason – altho I came close to having to because I didn’t remember until the rocket was falling back to Kerbin that the airbrakes were still set to deploy only 25%. Thankfully that tweakable can be adjusted in flight.
There was some “modeling” i.e. me flying a couple of missions prior to the actual one where I tested whether the airbrakes could fully deploy on re-entry. Still, I’ve had mission results that have differed from tests before so I was honestly unsure how things would turn out.
People have asked how I get the Ascension launch towers to appear with the Progeny rocket and it’s not composite photos I actually have them there in flight. The process is pretty simple:
- Make sure the game setting is disabled that automatically cleans up launch pad debris
- Launch the Progeny rocket to the pad and save its location with the HyperEdit lander tool
- Move it off to the side with VesselMover so the pad is clear
- Go back to the Space Center and into the VAB and launch the Ascension rocket to the pad
- Unclamp the rocket from the service towers and recover it
- Load back to the Progeny rocket and use the lander tool to place it right back where it originally was on the launch pad, now next to the service towers
The only downside to this is every time the game reloads the flight scene, the launch towers pop up a bit and eventually are floating above the ground and I have to clear everything, go back and repeat the steps for a reset.
Night launch photo
So the main reason I don’t like night launches is that you’re not supposed to be able to see the smoke trail and SmokeScreen (or the game itself, really) doesn’t produce particles that are affected by ambient light conditions or lights in the scene, even. I could have just launched the rocket without any lights on it but that seemed like too much of a cop-out so I did end up compositing multiple images to create the final photo – one of the rocket launching with smoke and one without was the main technique, along with a bare background plate so when I merged them I could remove the smoke above the lights and replace it with a layer of black I blended in to still blot out the sky under the rocket plume, which was also a composite since I couldn’t get images of the rocket in the exact same spot when using smoke and when not. Also the flag doesn’t really have a light on it that was a composite of an image taken with the ambient light tool adjusted upwards to make the flag brighter.
Night launch video
This was even more tricky, but I managed to figure out a way to get it done with minimal hassle. I can’t turn off the smoke without pausing the game, and when pausing the game I normally can’t access the SmokeScreen menu to turn it off, but I found that if I leave the particle emitter editor window open I could close the main SmokeScreen menu (which doesn’t hide at F2) and it would still stay open. When it isn’t selected the border is black so since it also doesn’t hide on F2 I was able to place it all the way to the side of the screen where it is essentially invisible against the night sky. So I launch, waited for the rocket to ascend a bit, hit F2 and then paused the game, pulled out the editor, killed the smoke emitter, hid the editor on the side again, unpaused and hid the UI (if I had just paused and unpaused with the UI hidden both Kerbal Alarm Clock and Resource App would have stayed visible thanks to a bug).
Now when I went into my Sony Vegas video editor I simply cut out the part where I was adjusting the smoke emitter however I could not show/hide the UI and pause/unpause fast enough without the rocket moving, so I still had several dozen frames where the UI was visible. For this I cropped the video down to just the rocket and had a still image background plate to fill out the rest of the frame.
it still took me a couple of tries to get everything close to right, and some screaming and cursing – I’m still not 100% pleased with the result, I think the smoke trail goes too long and falls back oddly but I think the overall effect is still worthy of what I was going for.
Now I have to get ready to keep tabs on today’s launch…
