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Daily Operations Begin
It hasn’t been a full week but it sure feels like it was, what with all the things to do to get this complex operating smoothly. The department heads (Simon, Wernher, Cheranne and Mortimer) were all running about their respective facilities making sure everything was where it needed to be and everyone had what they needed to have to do their jobs. Drew spent most of the week off site finalizing some last-minute business deals with suppliers from the underground cities and Lanalye wasn’t even around since she was attending an ASA conference to talk about new safety protocols for unkerbed spaceflight and its effect on air traffic.
The crew were all busy settling in to their new homes in the astronaut complex section of the administrative campus and getting into a daily workout routine, which included runs along the runways and climbs up and down the internal VAB scaffolding – Simon made sure they were all careful as there are no guardrails or safety nets up there. They will shortly begin to be lectured by many of the scientists and engineers to become better acquainted with the nature of their jobs – no one really knows how to be an astronaut yet!
The KSC itself is in fine shape overall, although the contractors seem to have cut a few corners (literally, in the dimensions of some rooms it seems) in the name of budget and time (and don’t get us started on the HAB door!!). After centuries of building homes into solid rock, constructing our own dwellings on the surface was a new challenge for today’s engineers. Even though much of surface building techniques were preserved, the actual practice has shown that experience is an important factor. What’s broken can be patched up however, and over time the KSC will continue to be upgraded as surface building techniques advance.
Progenitor Project Underway
Simon and Wernher have been dying to get their first rocket program up and running – the Progenitor Program has been in development for almost a year now in conjunction with Umbra Space Industries, the first company to focus solely on products geared towards space exploration – we expect many more will soon follow. The plans were supposed to have been approved by the end of last month but delays in various parts of the project meant that things weren’t quite ready to kick off with the start of KSC operations. However the final approval came through this week and Simon has already gotten his crew to assemble the first Mk1-A rocket. It will need at least a day to undergo integration tests to ensure it was pieced together properly and barring any problems on that front we could be looking at our first launch by Thursday – as they would like to also assemble a second rocket over Tue/Wed (moving forward assembly & testing will go a bit quicker after the crew has the process nailed down from the first one). Everyone’s excited – it will either fly up into the sky or explode spectacularly on the ground – one way or another it’ll be awesome!
From the Desk of Drew Kerman
Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuffWritten on 8/3/16
Hello! Great to be back to playing KSP at long last after calling it “quits” late last year. I honestly did not think it would take me this long to recover but unsurprisingly my aspirations got the better of me – it was mostly getting all the “cool stuff” working with the flight tracker, which is hilarious because most of the “cool stuff” I can’t even use for a few months or years as I work to get the Agency back to even close to where it was when I last left off. But still – it’s there, it’s done, it’s ready and looking forward to using it just gives me even more incentive.
Coming back to this, I’m excited to have a lot more of a well-considered infrastructure in place to base everything on from the very start. The backstory of Kerbin and the kerbals is fully fleshed out to fit with the current state of affairs at the the start of the program (and even a direction I want to head in story-wise in relation to The Monolith). This website, the flight tracker and the crew roster are all integrated and ready to provide a complete Agency experience, with YouTube, flickr, imgur and instagram also helping out in various aspects. Of course the main focus remains on twitter but everything is much more tightly integrated with it now.
Moving forward I’ll be using this space of the weekly ops review to take a closer look at things from the past week from an out of character (OOC) perspective and/or comment on personal issues that are related to my work with the KSA program. On that note, I’m going to come out and say right now that I do plan to setup a Patreon and Paypal donations, but that won’t be for a few months as I want to get things really rolling first. I’m not going to stop doing this if I don’t get donations, because this is something I enjoy doing, but if anything disrupts the perfect life balance I have right now (seriously, I’m a lucky son of a bitch to have all the free time I have to do this) I would of course be forced to stop if I actually needed substantial alternate income that could only be provided by a “real job”. So having donation avenues open and established will be a possible fallback option.
And just to remind you all that I pride the authenticity of my tweets – yes, I made sure that when the tracking station bounced an echo off Mun it was above the horizon at that time 🙂 (although further editing weeks after I scheduled that tweet but before it was published I realized I initially used kilometers instead of meters for the travel distance. Oops! Editing is important…)
Looking forward greatly to this new adventure, and if you want additional personal views on KSA activities as well as my interests in science, gaming and space go ahead and follow @DKerman_KSA 🙂
