Skyhawk Recovery

[Shantelle Wenske]

Therewas a path through some trees in a riparian area above Santa Rosa Creek that had played a profoundly mystical role in my recovery that I had to say goodbye to. On the appointed day, my very much-loved friends, Gary Pace and Margaret Howe, came to help Samantha drive me home. We loaded me up and I began my return to this world.

It was an overcast day. The world seemed to me full of beauty and mystery. I knew it was the same world, but there were some things I just had not noticed as

deeply my first time around. It all seemed strange and wonderful. We stopped in Cloverdale for coffee, picked up 128 and dropped into Anderson Valley. At Peachland Road, I needed a break, so we pulled in and started up the road. We found a little turnout to stop for a rest. Very, very slowly, I extricated myself from the car. We propped me up next to the van and I could see the length of the valley rolling away.

I was going to walk, as horribly slowly as that might be. I was absolute about the fact that I was going to walk into my damn house. It was slow. It was horrible. But eventually I got up the ramp. Once at the door of the mudroom, I let them put me into the chair.

Thank you to all of you who have supported my family through this, and continue to hold us in the cocoon of your love. Some of you have no idea how much you have meant. Just having the courage to be yourself and live your life has carried me through some dark times. Thank you for that.

Okay, everyone, I will see you around. Whatever Great Power it is that decides these things has apparently deigned we are not done with each other. Hopefully next time I write something like this I will tell you that I am walking well and even dancing, driving my car and perhaps chopping my own vegetables.

Hi everyone - CessnaSkyhawk here! I've been promising Kerbalism support for the Skyhawk Science System for quite a while, but never really expanded on it, at least until now that is... I feel comfortable enough about the amount and quality of work done to release an initial alpha for testing. Similarly to the original SSS release, these alpha releases are NOT recommended for actual gameplay as they are incomplate and may have bees. Instead, there available for people who are either interested to see what I'm working on or who would like to help playtest and find bugs/errors/balance issues for me. I'm not going into a huge depth about all the features right now, as theres a lot, but here's the general gist of what's set right now

They'd certainly help, but as mentioned in the main post, I would not recommend using it in careers you actually care about - it's still got a lot of bugs and unfinished parts, and is still liable to have save-breaking changes

At 6:01 on the dot, the solid fuel booster ignites and the rocket lifts off the pad on a column of fire. Slowly at first, then faster and ever faster, tilting slightly to the east. In mere seconds it is gone, high in the sky, speeding toward the distant harbor facilities. Only a huge cloud of smoke remains, drifting slowly towards the mission control building and dispersing in the early morning breeze.

According to Gene Kerman from mission control, the mission was a resounding success from an engineering standpoint. SR-1 proved to be aerodynamically stable, reached a peak altitude of 6408 m above sea level and a top speed of 591 m/s, and finally splashed down into the ocean as planned after traveling 38.5 km eastward from the launch facility in only one minute and 47 seconds.

The scientific mission, however, was less successful. The plan was to gather detailed telemetry data in flight and send it back by radio, and to recover a mysterious experiment only referred to as the "sounding rocket payload" after splashdown in the ocean.

But the first part of the plan was not only hampered by severe technical limitations (according to an anonymous engineer at KSC, "the puny internal antenna built into the ESRAC would need more than an hour to transmit it all, and slapping on a more powerful external antenna does no good because of them darned interferences"), but the telemetry report failed to transmit any useful data at all because there was no onboard means to store the gathered data and queue it up for transmission.

And the second part of the ambitious scientific plan vanished in a huge plume of water as the SR-1 slammed into the ocean at well over 200m/s and was completely destroyed in the process ("told 'em to put a parachute on it if they want to recover anything, but there is nary a single one of those anywhere to be found around here", the same anonymous engineer was heard to mutter).

Technical background: I'm running master@HEAD directly checked out from Github for both SSS and SkyhawkKerbalism , in JNSQ, with BDB and Modular Launch Pads (and a lot of other mods that will be involved later but don't have much impact that early in the game).

The telemetry report because it is impossible to transmit the 100 kB of data generated within the 1:47 flight time over the builtin antenna with a max rate of 127 Bytes (sic!) per second. And adding an external antenna does not help either because Kerbalism calculates the total data rate of multiple antennas on a craft as the geometric mean of the individual data rates. Suggestion: Either give the internal antenna of the ESRAC a data rate comparable to the early Communotrons (i.e. something around 2kB/s), or drop it altogether and give the player the opportunity to choose a suitable external antenna (the "Communotron 16-S" available at the starting node should work fine with its 2.2kB/s data rate).

And the "Sounding Rocket Payload" that takes a minute to run, has to run in flight, and has to be recovered (at least I think it has to be recovered from the description) is plain evil when the first parachute available is at least three nodes down the tech tree (or maybe I'm just dumb, but I honestly don't see any way to construct a rocket with first node tech that both flies for a minute and comes down slow enough to even partially survive landing or splashdown). Suggestion: Either drop this experiment from the ESRAC core, or make it a part upgrade available after unlocking the first parachute (or make a 'chute available in the starting node).

And finally, is it intended that both experiments are always present, or should the ESRAC have one configurable experiment slot (like the Stayputnik in standard Kerbalism) where you can choose one of the experiments?

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