Now That's A Good Song

You know a song is good when you get it suck in your head as a ear worm through, and during, the "active" parts of a gastro bug -- and you don't hate it afterwards.

"Do you want to build a snowman" from Frozen. Last night. All night.

Zing

Being a separatist is like being a Maple Leafs fan: the only people left doing it are old men lost with dreams of glory from the past, and young people who don't know any better.

Mission Report: DMap2 "Macroscope"

And so here we are with mission 2.

"Macroscope" atop a "Javelin" IPL.

The objectives for "Macroscope" are pretty straight forward:

• Flight test the "Javelin" IPL
• Test a more immediately optimal polar orbit
• Conduct a high-res scan of Kerbin
• Conduct a biome scan of Kerbin

The "Javelin" lifter was better than the first one.  I discarded the fully-fueled transfer stage rather than use it, to simulate the amount of delta-v that the orbiter alone would have.  I still had to use half of the orbiter's fuel to circularize (for 220km x 145km values of "circular") and in that elongated orbit, we began scanning.

The goal about a more immediately optimal polar orbit: DMap1 goes behind Kerbin once per orbit.  This starves the solar panels.  Now S.C.A.N. doesn't use any electricity right now, but I like to play fair.  So we launched at dawn, which put our orbit in view of the sun throughout the entire orbit.  At some point in the year as Kerbin moves around the sun we will go into shadow, but I'm betting that the mapping mission will be complete before then.

Revised Orbit

One interesting thing that this map shows at this point is that the high-res scanner doesn't work near the orbital periapsis of 145Km. So I raised the periapsis up to 219Km -- making this probably the most circular orbit I've ever manually flown -- and the scanning of the southern hemisphere almost immediately improved.

Mapping with the high-resolution scanner is slower, but after 7 days and 10 hours, we had more than 92% of the surface covered, resulting in this map:

That looks like more than 92% to me

I've inspected all the dark spots -- as you can see, most of them are over the water, and the rest are very small ones that don't look like they are in interesting locations.

"Macroscope" is also flying the "multispectral" scanner, which is the biome/anomoly mapper.  So at this point I shut down the high-res scanner and started the "multispectral" scanner in its place.

Oooh -- Extended Multispectral

This scanner seems to have a wider footprint, so if DMap1 is any guide, the prediction was for more or less full coverage in less than another week -- a prediction which was hilariously overkill.  Again less than two days to get the biome map:

...and the slope map:

...and a beautiful composite map showing the anomalies:

So while I could probably continue on in order to try to pick out the missing data, I think at this point this mission can be classified as almost a complete success.

Lessons learned:

• The revised "Javelin" may not be sufficient for interplanetary missions.
• The flight path for polar orbit was better executed this time.
• The high-res scanner is slow, and doesn't seem to work below 170km.
• The biome scanner is about as fast as the low-res scanner.
• Both scanners can be operated at the same time.

The next mission will be a polar mapper to either the Mun (because it is closer) or to Minmus (because it is easier to get a polar insertion around Minmus because it is out-of-plane with Kerbin).

I will probably also upgrade to 23.5, and I might add MechJeb to assist with the interplanetary navigation.  Or I might try to find another interplanetary navigation plugin -- I would like to fly these missions myself, but sometimes you need robotic help...

Flying Again: DMap1

So I decided to get back into KSP.  Well I've been trying to get back into KSP for a while, but I just have not been having the time to sit in front of the computer to actually play.  I have managed to find some time here and there again, so we're flying again.

This time I've downloaded 0.23, and ended up adding a few mods:

• SCANsat -- because having something to do when you reach your objective adds a point to the fun of getting there
• EnhancedNavBall -- I've been thinking that my terrible flying skills aside, landing would be easier with some of the information on this Enhanced Navball.  Landing attempts are quite some ways away as of yet, but I've added this mod now to help.
• Aviation-Lights -- because if I am going to spend hours looking at these things I want them to be pretty.
• Docking Port Alignmnet -- I have not decided if I want to do docking, but this seems a useful add-on.
• Kerbal Alarm Clock
• Engineer-Redux -- all the info from MechJeb (and more!) without the autopilot and autoguide functions.  If I'm going to crash these things, I am going to crash these things.

For our first flight, I present DMap1.  It has the following objectives:

• Flight-test an early design of the interplanetary lifter.  This probe is only orbiting Kerbin, but we might as well flight-test the lifter to see what kind of delta-v we have once we make our orbit.  
• Enter a polar orbit for mapping purposes.
• Gain familiarity with the mapping mod by performing a low-res scan of Kerbin.

Flying Again

The flight-test of the interplanetary lifter (which doesn't have a snappy code-name, sorry) didn't go particularly well -- we had to finish the circularization from initial launch on the transfer stage, which wasn't intended. And that didn't go well because we had a staging accident after the circularization burn started, which pushed our apoapsis out to 7Mm before we could roll the orbiter off the staged, firing transfer stage.

So lessons learned:

• Insufficient lift in the IPL launch stage(s); and
• I still can't fly worth a damn.

Fortunately the orbiter is a fuel tank with a tiny motor strapped to the back, so there's plenty of delta-v available to fix things.  After some flying around, we got into a suitable orbit:

DMap1 on orbit

...and after less than three days of mission time, we had a low-res scan of 99% of the planet's surface.  That's clearly not terrible.

Mission 1: Success

The eventual goal is to send probes to nearby planets -- Eve, Duna, and Dres -- and possibly their moons and also planets and moons further out.  From the maps generated, we'll pick some landing targets and send some ground landers and maybe some rovers.  And maybe I'll get into flying actual Kerbils, although for some reason I don't like killing the little guys so I tend to do everything robotically.

DMap2 "Macroscope" (because missions should have snappy code names), launched from a "Javelin" IPL, is in progress as I write this.

Review: Ghost Rider - Spirit Of Vengance

Watched on TV on Bravo, so probably horribly chopped, but since it is a Marvel movie that wouldn't make much of a noticeable difference. Would have like to have seen Keith Ledger's Joker do some of the "I'm crazy" scenes because Nicholas Cage can't sell that kind of crazy. Frankly I don't understand why the fire is blue at the end. Another fine movie, only because you cue it up on the PVR knowing in advance it is a bad movie and you are willing to take the ride.

Let's Complain About The Weather Network

(or, because it's Family Day and I have nothing better to do.)

So we moved to Bell Fibe in January (there's a post on that coming up, I just can't finish it properly) and one of the changes we've noticed is to The Weather Network.

We have Autism in the family, so we watch a fair bit of Weather Network.  The kids like it, it is soothing, and it is better than some of the other things the kids want to watch to death.

First: the HD network for Ottawa is Toronto.  Why no HD for Ottawa?  Dunno.  So we have to watch SD Weather Network.  And while this is still an improvement over SD Weather Network On Rogers, it is still pretty terrible when compared to the shiny HD channels.

Second, the format of this Weather Network channel is terrible.  Instead of providing you with a local forecast and then a long-range forecast, you get much less information duplicated four or five times.  Yes, instead of telling us what the long-range outlook for next weekend is, The Weather Network thinks we'd all rather know what the current conditions for Ottawa, Vanier, Gatineau, Aylmer, and Ottawa CDA (whatever the hell that is) is.  And what each short-range forecast is.  And what each precipitation forecast is.

Critical Information Differentiation

Guess what -- most of the time, it's within the margin of error for the Ottawa forecast.  The most I've seen is a deviation of one degree C.  And precipitation is always the same.  So: less information, provided even less usefully.  Frankly I don't think the fine people of Vanier will revolt if they don't get a special mention every time the local forecast is on.  I think they would be like the fine people of Kanata, and just approximate from the Ottawa forecast.

Thirdly, every time the local forecast is on, we get a faint voice over detailing the local forecast for some part of Atlantic Canada.  Every. Damn. Time.  It is just audible enough to be annoying, and just irrelevant enough to be... well, annoying.

So I don't know if there's a programming difference between Rogers 21 and Bell Fibe 505, or if there was some kind of programming change at the same time we switched providers, but frankly I miss the old channel.

Review: Robocop (IMAX)

Loud, frankly -- this was the same theatre as we saw >>The Hobbit Part II in, and although it wasn't 3D, it was IMAX, and it was so loud that I could not tolerate it while the credits were running. Screenwise we sat about 2/3 of the way up the hill in the middle so the screen wasn't excessively big the way it was last time.

The movie itself was OK. Violence was a little on the gratuitous side, and the inevitable inexhaustable ammunition clips syndrome. The human element of Robocop wasn't really played out and the movie was a little vague as to exactly what happened in the end.

Just about everything else can be explained away with "Hey, it's Robocop, what do you want?"

Verdict: OK. Won't buy the DVD.