Mun Flight "Progress"

If there's ever a time I'd thought seriously about making gaming videos for Youtube, this is it ...

That seems to be what I'm doing more than gaming at the moment. Playing a game can pass the time but if you're watching someone like Sips of the Yogscast, then they draw you into the fun they're having in the game. With Sips, he's got a play through going of Skyrim at the moment where he has Uthgerd (female fighter type) tagging along as companion. All the way through, he's chatting to Uthgerd like he's chatting to the viewer.

They're quite amusing to watch and listen to.

What's occurred to me very early in the experimentation with the Kerbals and their suicide rockets is that making a video of these things would be absolutely hilarious. There's only so much you can do with screenshots :

Cue something about to go horribly wrong (again - and the Kerbals survived).

It's a merciless program, if you miss things out it'll let you know in hilarious ways. It's also consistent and very fair with how it makes your rockets blow up.

Anyway - progress. I'd been having problems with the early stages of the rocket making things go squish in the middle. The separator that links the space stage to the ascent stage was breaking very early. The screenie above was quickly followed by all those solid rocket boosters (the things on the outside) trying to harpoon the upper stage of the rocket. That was shortly before all of the bits on the ascent stage went their separate ways.

What I tried was peeking at the space stage :

That's it in the middle surrounded by solid rocket boosters. The game models mass and thrust, if your thrust is less than the weight, the rocket doesn't get off the ground. So there's all those boosters there to allow the test.

This one worked ! Although the space stage doesn't have the power to make orbit.

However ... those screenshots don't really do it justice. They don't capture the rocket wobbling all over the place like a video would. They don't have the audio of a commentator who can see things are in the process of going very horribly wrong.

I think I know what I need to fix. I have peeked at a wiki tutorial ... That one is a recreation of the Apollo 11 craft within the game. It's using a different stack separator and has stiffeners joining each stage together. I didn't think you could do that, I thought the stiffener pylons would stay attached after you wanted them separate.

I'm getting there on this one I think - I want to do it with a rocket I've put together though. What I don't want to do is blindly copy someone else's craft from a video or that Apollo 11 recreation.

And it gives me something else to natter about instead of this darn skin condition that still isn't going away ! It's stress related - I get stressed I attack it and make it worse. It's improving ... but sometimes I think it's forgotten what "normal" should be.

Oh - one more "It's gone horribly wrong, will they survive ?" screenie :

This is after I realised that my space stage wouldn't get to orbit. What I should have done is turn off the engine before hitting the "throw it away" button. What happened is that the engine kept firing, the whole thing started swinging like a pendulum and for 10000m or so, the pod with the Kerbals in stayed stubbornly attached to the explosive thingummy with lots of fuel left in.

That's where commentary would have been priceless ...

Oh and the game itself is discounted on Steam this weekend. If you're interested in rocket science or were a wannabe astronaut, this one is an essential.