rbandrews

Today I:

- Went to EPO and spent about seventy bucks. I needed some parts for something I'm doing to the quadcopter, putting lights on it. Got 12V voltage regulators (Radio Shack supposedly sells them but they were out), LEDs (I actually already had these but I found better ones), perfboard, wires (better wires for this purpose than what I already had), stuff to make connectors, and some random odds and ends. I forgot to get a switch, which is a little annoying.

The goal here is to have red lights on the back arms of the copter and white lights on the front arms. This way I can see how it's facing in the dark, so I can fly it later in the evening, so I can fly it more often. One of the sort of annoying things about flying something like this is that it's easy to lose track of how it's oriented, since it's square and spends most of its time hovering in place.

- Cleaned my room. Cleaned off my desk, cleaned the work table, put things in boxes and in the closet. I hadn't done this since, oh, October sometime? And in that time I've built several small projects, one big project, added a tool (the cutter), spent two weeks sick, et cetera. My desk was actually buried. Like, the level of crap covered up the bottom of the monitor.

- Put the Commando 23 set on a keyboard. This was a group buy for some keycaps that I got in on a while back, and last week they were delivered. They were the final straw for junk piled on my desk. They look pretty all right on a keyboard though.

My transmitter module came on Friday, so today I went to the field behind my office to fly. Mike, my friend who ran the class for building them, came too.

Hovering inside is more or less easy. Holding a constant altitude is tough, the throttle is really sensitive, making it pretty much like every other RC helicopter I've ever flown.

Flying outside is a bit harder. I don't have to care as much how high I am, so it's easier in that respect, but then there's wind. Holding it steady in the wind (even a fairly light breeze) isn't easy. I did figure out how to recover from an imminent crash: cut the throttle, so I start falling, then gun it right before I hit the ground to soften the landing. I saved the thing from being carried away by the wind a few times by doing that.

We found out that there's an RC hobby place about 15 minutes from work, and although they don't have replacement rotors, they do have tools, servos, radio stuff, batteries, et cetera. I bought some tiny screws and a hot air gun (for something else I'm building).

I also found that some (expensive, carbon fiber) propellers can be had from Amazon for about $16. This is more expensive than the $4 / set prop sets from the Chinese site Hobbyking, but they also don't take three weeks to be shipped.

Why do I care about props all of a sudden? Because, naturally, I managed to flip it over (I blame the wind) and break a prop in half. So, it'll be Wednesday before I can fly it again.

...is love, sweet love.

Well, no.

If you take an average sea creature and measure the elements it's made of, you find that it (like everything else) is mostly carbon. But there are also some larger elements in trace amounts, that are in a higher concentration in the creature than in the surrounding environment.

The element that is most over-concentrated like this happens to be phosphorus. Phosphorus is the limiting factor of life: given a source of extra phosphorus, life could find everything else it needs to exist in plenty.

So I would say, what the world needs now is phosphorus. That's the only thing there's just too little of.

On the 13th or so, I started coughing, a lot. I coughed up white stuff, then yellow stuff, then brown stuff. Then I stopped coughing up stuff, but I didn't feel any better: I still had a fever, I was dizzy and light-headed, and I couldn't eat anything. And I kept feeling like this. I took off the entire week before I was supposed to go on vacation, then stayed in bed the entire time I was on vacation. My fever stopped a few days ago, but I've still been light-headed and crappy. I alternate between lying in bed reading and sitting up watching Parks and Recreation on Netflix.

So I have had a kind of shitty christmas. I spent all day either in bed or on the couch, watching the Doctor Who special and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I ate a couple of ginger snaps and Cassie's leftovers from going to the Cleburne Cafeteria. Finally got Cassie to go on christmas day, and I couldn't ever go with her!

Hopefully I'll start to feel better now. I can do stuff I had planned to do over the past two weeks, like mailing out christmas presents.

Silk Soymilk "Seasonal Nog" is not only not terrible, it's actually good.

I had low expectations, I'll admit...

I've been playing on the "career mode" where you start with a few simple parts and have to do experiments in space to get science points to research more. So, last night I tried to make a rocket out of very basic parts to get to Minmus.

I got there, and got into orbit, but when it was time to go home I didn't have enough delta-v. I was able to escape Minmus but my Kerbin perigee was still about 1200 km.

I know that stage separators push the stages apart with some force, so I aimed myself right and separated my last stage. That got me down to 900 km.

Then it hit me: I still had one source of propulsion left. I had Jeb go on EVA, wedged him up against the capsule and fired his jetpack. One full load of jetpack fuel.

That did it, the last 30 m/s or so of delta V I needed.

So, at one point in the history of my glorious space program, yes, I had an astronaut get out and push.

Look at this. It may be my new wallpaper.

Jeb, with his shiny new-model lander, on the plateaus of Minmus, with a crescent Kerbin behind.

Minmus is Kerbin's outer moon, much smaller and with lower gravity. This same lander can actually land on the Mun unassisted, but it needs a refuel to get home. I should be able to return from Minmus easily though, since it takes so much less fuel to land there.

I am far too keyed-up to sleep right now, so I'll make a post and try to pack some things, then go to bed.

BGG.con was pretty awesome. I am definitely coming back next year, and I think it'll probably replace Origins for me.

The good:

- It's in Texas, so I get to drive, and no plane tickets, no packing, no flight departures determining my schedule. Basically I block out an entire day for air travel, and driving here is a simple four hours.

- No kids. It's hard to explain, but it makes it better. It's a subtle difference. Their policy is no one under 18 without an escort, and no one under 12 period. I saw a couple babies in carriers but that doesn't really count and they weren't obnoxious anyway. It's the pre-teens that usually make Origins annoying.

- Serious games. Origins has a lot of nice crunchy Euro games too, don't get me wrong, but there's also a lot of Ameritrash. BGG.con is all about the Euro games, the new stuff from Essen, the big strategy games. You won't find any gamers who don't want to play a nice 1-2 hour game, because that's why they're here.

- The library. This is amazing, and it puts the Origins Board Room to shame. There's, basically, every game there. They have them all. I wish I had been able to get a panoramic picture of it. And I mean they have everything, rare stuff, old stuff, new stuff, everything. It really makes for a hell of a party when you can sit around talking with gamers about games, and then decide to play one and you can be certain it's right there, available.

- The people. Origins has a good crowd too, of course. I haven't seen Rachel and Mark in forever and that sucks. But aside from Joe Cochran and his group of friends (who are all really fun to play with) the crowd in general is good. Even if you know no one, you can wander the main hall looking for a "players needed" flag, introduce yourself to someone nice, and sit down and play a game. I played so many new things that way. You can be confident that, whoever you sit down with, they're also a crunchy-Euro-game fan.

The bad:

- The location is not so awesome. It's not walkable at all, there's nothing around to go to. Origins is in the middle of a nice downtown area; here you're pretty much limited to the hotel restaurant, which is a hotel restaurant. There's a free shuttle to other places but it takes a couple hours so I never went; there's no equivalent to "let's run down and grab food to go from North Market."

The neutral:

- The dealers room. It's smaller. A lot smaller. Not the awe-inspiring majesty of the Origins dealers room at all. But, on the other hand, practically everything I would want was there: all the big strategy game companies are there, what you're missing is a lot of fluffy stuff. So I'm kind of okay with that. I mean, I should be, I spent a lot of money there (and not all of it on myself).

Anyway, I had a hell of a good time. I played more games this weekend than I think I have in the entire last year. It's definitely not a "show up and go to panels" con, or a "show up and play in tournaments" con, or a "show up and buy things" con. It's about playing. All. The. Games.

And now, of course, I'm exhausted, and I think I caught a cold, and I may have to drive through an ice storm tomorrow to get home.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Cricket lander.

This is what I was talking about before: three modules, an orbiter, a descent stage, and a command module. Launched in two parts (the bottom descent stage on one booster, the orbiter and command module on another). A little intricate docking dance in low Kerbin orbit to arrange them (orbiter docked to the bottom of the lander, command module on top like you see here), then fly them to the Mun.

What went right: it did actually work, obviously. The launches went off perfectly, the rendezvous was easy, the landing was perfect (more on that later).

What went wrong: The thing is absolutely a beast to handle in space. The orbiter is an enormous fuel tank with a not-rigid-enough connection to the lander. The lander has its mass spread out in those four tanks, so it really does not want to rotate. If you throttle up the orbiter enough, it actually rips the entire spacecraft apart. Docking was slow and frustrating, and I ran dry of RCS fuel long before I landed. So it works but it's tricky to fly. It was not designed with Wookiees in mind.

The landing was perfect though, thanks to a Youtube tutorial I watched. It changed the way I do that in a small but important way:

I used to make a deorbit burn that would have me intersecting with the ground, so that when I landed, my velocity vector would be pointing diagonally forward and down. I'd need to kill that velocity before I landed, but in such a way that I killed the forward velocity first, so that I was heading straight down over where I wanted to land. And, I had to do this while picking a nice flat landing spot. Lots of things that had to be done all at once that were very touchy, and if I didn't do them right I'd either crash or end up hovering over a hill.

The new way is much easier: make the deorbit burn not quite enough to actually hit the ground. Then, you'll fly low over the landing area totally horizontally (maybe 5 km up, going about 600 m/s). When you pass over a good spot, kill all your forward velocity. You don't need to worry about the downward velocity because you don't have much. Then just slowly descend, throttling the engines to make sure that you land softly. Much easier.

Edit: And I just brought it back to Kerbin, and landed within sight of the space center where I launched. Landing in a particular place is the next thing I want to get good at, so I can build up bases and such.

Kerbin has two moons. One, the Mun, I've landed on multiple times and while I'm still trying to perfect it, it's not super challenging. The other is much farther out, in a slanted and eccentric orbit, and is called Minmus. I just landed Jeb and his pals there.

I had a plan for a nice lander. I built a few and tossed them at the Mun; they look like this. The idea is that my old lander designs tended to fall over on landing, because they were too narrow. This thing, which I've been calling the Cricket, can land on very slanted ground and not fall down. The problem is that rockets carrying them are top-heavy and wobbly, and it's hard to launch one (although the lander handles well once it's in space). So, after trying for two hours yesterday, I eventually decided to throw up the lander on one rocket, the ascent stage center part on another, and an orbital maneuvering rocket on a third (not visible here, it's still in orbit). This Minmus lander was to be the ascent stage, but I decided to go ahead and throw it at Minmus without a lander to get a closer look, sort of a flyby. Then, once I got there, I had plenty of fuel left so I decided to land. Then I realized that that lander is total overkill because Minmus has such low gravity.