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Progenitor Preps for Mk7 Development & Next Mk6 Launch
This week kicked off with the announcement of the Progeny Mk7 detailing the numerous design features that will make up the new rocket. Now that everything is locked in, engineers can get to work building the plans for it, which they hope to have completed no later than April with the goal of launching the Mk7 around the third quarter of this year. We already have awarded a contract for the new vacuum engine, which will be announced next week.
The next launch of the Progeny Mk6 Block I is proceeding on schedule for the start of March and Lead Scientist Cheranne has had a better than expected reception from religious leaders for her idea of installing a heavy-duty A/C unit in the Monolith temple. The idea is that if we chill the internal temperature well below zero the Monolith will not attempt to create a storm because it will think not enough heat energy exists in the surrounding air. Pilgrims visiting the site during the last launch were not happy about the storms either, and since they already agreed to keep the temple vacant during launch operations, having it horribly cold inside won’t be a big issue. Now the race is on to get it all installed in time for the next launch attempt.
Dhumla Aces Flight Trials
This week saw two separate flight trials for the new Dhumla heavy-lift aircraft. The first test flight was simply to test a new system of ballast weights to shift the center of mass backwards towards the center of lift for more control at low speeds during landing. The weights were installed in the vertical strake leading up off the top of the fuselage to the tail, which also raised the center of mass almost above the center of lift. This could have caused some roll-over instability but thankfully it was not enough of a shift to bring out any such problems. Although the crew still had some issues landing, this has mainly been attributed to poor simulations they’ve been using for practice, which are now getting better as we feed them more accurate actual flight data.
Still, maintenance crews gave the vehicle’s undercarriage a good look-over before the aircraft was allowed to fly again. The most recent trial took place just a little while ago and put the aircraft through a battery of tests such as stalls, G-loading, engine-out flying and attempting to break the altitude record set by Jeb & Val in the Deuce last year. Overall the aircraft performed extremely well, however although it did set a new altitude record, shortly after doing so the pressurization system suffered a failure and forced an emergency descent. The flight crew returned to KSC safely and C7/Genesis ground crews and engineers will be examining the aircraft closely over the coming week or so to determine what the problem was in addition to all their already-planned post-test checks.
Ascension Capsule Certified, Launch Attempt Scheduled
The review board has declared the Ascension Mk1 capsule fit to carry a kerbal into space! Obviously although they are basing their decision on the current capsule that has undergone testing since late last year, that is not the one which will carry the first astronaut. It has been used and abused too much to safely carry a kerbal but can still serve as a test object and will be launched into space unkerbed as a final pathfinder mission. This is currently scheduled to take place the week after the next Progenitor launch, assuming all goes well with that and a pad abort test of the Launch Escape System. You can have a look at all the components that will make up the capsule payload to sit atop the Ascension Mk1 lifter in this tweet.
Also, if you’d like to recap the history of the Mk1 capsule design and its testing process, check out this timeline.
ATN Database
The latest update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 3,189 asteroids and 7 updated with new observation data. Here are the 29 asteroids that were discovered this past week:
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From the Desk of Drew Kerman
Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuffWritten on 2/15/19
It’s been just shy of one month since writing my last Desk Notes. Despite this tweet I sent out, things haven’t been all that great in making a fairly large life transition, that has the potential to only get larger soon as well. Even though I was out of my old place and into my new place in a matter of days thankfully, it’s still taking more time that I would like to admit to adjust and come to grips with what has happened. Still, I have managed to slowly get back on the horse and thankfully the 3-week lead time I had let me do it at an easy pace without adding any more stress. I’m holding at a week lead time right now and plan to push it out again soon.
I’ve also started playing No Man’s Sky with a friend. When it first came out, I planned to play it in my spare time and even had a blog setup to document my wanderings, but the initial reaction turned me off. Even now, even though the game itself is vastly improved the multiplayer aspects seem very tacked on and playing the game I can see how it was meant to be a single-player experience and the multiplayer just makes things a bit awkward. But still, we’re having a good time exploring and I did use it as escapism pretty hard for about a week straight. But the binge is over and now I’m back to mainly KSP, only logging on to NMS when my friend is around.
So the Dhumla is indeed a pretty great aircraft – the only thing I still can’t get the hang of is the landing. I’m crashing the aircraft after making what should be a perfect approach and smooth touchdown. Those damn wheels just luuuv to bounce all over the place. Whatever – to be honest I really don’t care that much. It takes off fine, which means all my setup prior to that remains intact and it flies fine, which means I can carry out the mission no problem. Landing? Eh, it smacks into the runway and I just reset to the HAB then manually enter the kerbal’s mission time and experience and before I revert I can still save the flight tracks and log data and I’ve recorded the current fuel levels, etc etc – so really landing isn’t all that important. I’ll still work at it tho.
I also need to do some more experimenting with Kerbalism to understand how it works better because it actually did almost kill off the flight crew on the latest flight test. I started getting WARNING: OXYGEN LOW just after breaking the old altitude record and then messages saying the kerbals were beginning to suffocate. So I quick did a fast descent to 4km but it wasn’t until like 5 minutes later that Kerbalism was like “okay, everyone is breathing fine now” – WTF? So yea, do remember that not every dire situation that is tweeted is something I made up, but actually triggered by an event in the game!
Finally, it looks like the script I wrote up to manually add tweets to twitter collections is for some reason no longer working. I guess twitter updated its API or something. RRRRGH I don’t have time for this shit. Tweetdeck is supposed to allow me to add tweets to collections easily but ever since twitter allowed accounts to create seemingly infinite amounts of collections sometime last year Tweetdeck has failed to account for this and only lets me see a finite list of collections to add tweets to. And the ability to send support requests to Tweetdeck is nonexistent. *sigh* So in the off-chance anyone happened to notice the twitter collections featured on the website program pages are a bit out of date, that would be why… I’m hoping the script just starts working again in the next few days before I take the time to go figure out why it’s broken…
