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Shutdown Update
Our legal team continues to wrangle with the laws that need amending, making double-sure this time to not leave any room open for alternate interpretation. We could pay them more to hurry things up but having not really made any money at all this past month we’d rather just sit back and wait for them to do their jobs and also not rush them into making mistakes that could cost us down the line with more legal issues. They have told us the first draft is nearly complete and they hope to submit it for review before the Assembly sometime next week. Meanwhile we are continuing to do what work we can from our headquarters in Umbarg, which celebrated its first year of operations this week.
Extremis Wraps Up Phase Two for 2018-2019
The astrodynamics team have completed re-calculating 29 of the 68 trajectories for Phase Two of mission planning, reaching this point sooner than anticipated. Unlike Phase One, where searching for the best route from planet to planet was done 50 times, Phase Two is running the planet combos through 500 iterations. So far none have taken more than 24 hours to complete, with 2-3 being done in a day’s time at most for some combinations of routes. The majority of best results were found well beyond 50 runs, which is a good sign that the search algorithm is really exploring the bounds set on it, which include a 10-year max mission time and coming no closer than 2/3 of Moho’s orbit to the sun – further away than the original constraint, which was 1/2 of Moho’s orbit. Despite this change, almost half of the results after 500 runs matched the results from 50 runs, greater assurance that an optimal route has been found. Only one planet combination returned a Not Feasible result. Some results were a bit worse in terms of delta-v required but came with a shortened mission time while others came up with lower delta-v requirements but longer mission times – a few were worse or better overall. Planners are sure now they can hit their May/June target for wrapping up Phase Two planning.
ATN Database
The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 1,725 asteroids and 4 updated with new observation data.
Celestial Snapshot of the Week
One of our staff checking up on KSC took this photo of Eve & Urlum at appulse. So close together it’s easy to see how much brighter Eve is, which isn’t surprising given that at this time Urlum is 235,671Mm further distant. A bit of light from the gibbous Mun lets us see the unlit buildings. Our staffer described the whole scene as “eerie”.
From the Desk of Drew Kerman
Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuffWritten on 3/12/17
Breezed through this week, not a whole lot going on. Coming up on two weeks of lead time so should be on track to resume normal ops in April.
Mystery Goo
I’m curious as to whether anyone saw this coming with the tweets about the discovery of the bacteria. I can’t remember where the inspiration for this came from but it wasn’t me – I maybe read it somewhere on the forums but the idea of mystery goo having an origin story instead of just being a random science experiment from the start of the game was always something I liked. The Goo will continue to have its own role – anyone who was here for the first KSA iteration knows that it can be a bit of a character.
Admin Complex
I destroyed the original admin building and showed it destroyed because I thought the new one looked considerably different. I don’t know why I thought this, although I remember checking what it looked like beforehand. So yea, no clue why I remembered something different but no big deal, it fits well that the original building could be remade with new materials given that surface construction is still an evolving field. Again since I for some reason imagined something a bit more grandiose than just the addition of a block building I had to add that there was underground space otherwise really I wouldn’t consider this to be a significant upgrade that could handle enough additional personnel to support program operations.
KSP Expansion
By the time you all read this the new KSP expansion will have been out a while now. As usual, I expect it to be 2-3 months at least before I’m able to upgrade to the latest and greatest, but in the meantime there’s really nothing about the new update that I would benefit from so no rush really.
