Rendezvous

Map Creation

Conguration Files

Kerbin Geographic & Scientic

Rendezvous

Rendezvous: The Extreme Challenge. Page 2 Generating beautiful maps from your data points. Page 5 Adding to the game play: Conguration le editing. Page 7
July 2012 Vol. I, Edition. 2

Contents
A Word from the Editor Your how to guide: Low orbit rendevous Your how to guide: Generating maps with QuikGrid Mission Preparation and Debrieng: Editing the KSP conguration les 1 2 5 7

A Word from the Editor

Welcome to the second edition of the KGSS Journal - where science meets KSP. Members of the KGSS enjoy injecting real science themes into their space program and this journal can help you invent missions, craft and mission objectives outside of the mainstream ights most people y. This edition has a very handy article written largely by Kosmo-not on how to rendezvous with craft in low Kerbin orbit - without mods. Simple maths is all that is needed and this maths has been done for you. It is so simple it is hard to believe so if you nd rendezvous by mod a difcult task - try rendezvous by maths - its even easier. Part two of map making guide is in this edition and completes the guide on how to generate your own 2D or 3D surface maps. If anyone has discovered some nice *free* map making tools for PC and/or MAC then please let me know and Ill advertise this to the KSP world. Rich and Zephram Kerman have an in-depth article on how you can tweak KSP les for a bit of fun and frivolity, including pitfalls to avoid, what you should and should not tweak and how you can modify crew and ship characteristics. If you enjoy reading the KGSS Journal and wish to see more quality articles in the future, please make a comment on the KSP forums. If more people comment on the journals then were more likely to keep this project going. togfox

Acknowledgments
This journal would not have been possible without the hard work of Rich, togfox and Zephram Kerman, to nd us at www.kerbalspaceprogram.com please follow the link below to the forum thread. KGSS @ Kerbal Space Program Forums

Contributing
If you would like to be a part of future editions, please send your proposal to togfox via forum private message using the following link. togfox @ Kerbal Space Program Forums

Copyright Notice
Copyright KGSS 2012 all rights reserved. All articles published with original authors permission. This KGSS journal is not endorsed by SQUAD and all rights are retained by SQUAD.

Your how to guide: Low orbit rendevous

Kosmo-not and togfox www.kerbalspaceprogram.com

Difculty KSP version Time Mods

Intermediate 0.15.2 2 hours None

distance to target. You can get this distance by hovering your mouse over the target diamond in your map view. For the purposes of this tutorial, launch will be timed to insert into a parking orbit of 80km, ending up a little behind the station. After achieving a circular 80km, we wait to catch up to the point of intercept burn initialization. The question is: how do we know when to do our intercept burn? KSP v0.15.2 does not support craft docking with each other but that doesnt stop us practicing low orbit rendezvous. If youve ever tried to intercept a satellite in orbit youll know it is quite a challenge to get two orbits in sync and takes much patience, even with mods and add-ons. In March of this year, Kosmo-not provided a simple means of achieving an orbit rendezvous without mods and without plug-ins. Straight forward maths, presented in the easiest table ever, can get you to where you need to be. Printed here, with Kosmo-nots permission and some minor edits, is his original post. He describes how he enters an 80km parking orbit before attempting to intercept a space station orbiting at 100km. togfox Im going to be jumping right into orbital rendezvous. There are two important things to know before getting started: orbital plane change maneuver and circularizing orbit. I wont be covering how to do these two tasks, so you will have to look those up on your own.

The math is not hard to understand. We start out with both craft at the same point, and work backwards to the intercept burn point. We know how much time it takes to go from the burn point to intercept, and can determine the position of the target at that time. We can then solve for the relative distance between the two objects.

Lets pretend we have a space station sitting in a circular orbit of 100km. Our plan is, of course, to rendezvous with it. All of the tutorials I have seen on rendezvous involve a lot of guessing. This is because we have very basic instruments to guide us. But, there is one piece of information that we have that can tell us almost exactly when to initiate our intercept burn: 2

Attached is a table I made with the distance to target you have to wait for (any distance further than 100km, and you wont see it due to the visibility limit). In the case of this tutorial, the distance we need it 50.4km (680km row, 700km column. Kerbins radius is 600km). When we come within 100km range, the target diamond will appear and we watch the range until 50.4km is achieved. Then we burn prograde, raising our apoapsis to 100km to match our target.

You then just need to wait half an orbit. We watch as the space station passes overhead and then approaches from behind. Burn at apoapsis to complete the rendezvous maneuver. That wasnt so bad, was it? The table is also the same for Mun orbits from 480km to 600km (Muns radius is 200km). Kosmonot

Editors note: The same table can be used to move from a higher orbit to a lower orbit by burning retrograde and by using plug-ins like the Rendezvous feature in mechjeb, you can do transfers greater than 100km as the plug-in tells you distances between craft - you dont have to rely on visible sight. :)

Acknowledgments
Kosmo-nots guide on rendezvous, Kerbal Space Program Forums

Kosmo-nots rendezvous table, Kerbal Space Program Forums Photography by togfox

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=14780.0

Your how to guide: Generating maps with QuikGrid

togfox www.kerbalspaceprogram.com Difculty Time Other

Intermediate 1 hour QuikGrid

In the previous edition of the KGSS journal, I de100, 2000, 2000 scribed how surface data points can be collected using select the EDIT menu, then view data point the crxTelemetry mod. If you followed the instructions options. You can turn marks on or off or make carefully, youll have a .csv le with three columns: the marks large or small. If you need some (large) .csv les for Kerbin, the Longitude Latitude Mun and Minmus, check out the KGSS thread for Altitude links to these les. With this data, you now have enough information To nish, here are some more useful command for to plot a 2D topographic contour map or a 3D map of viewing your maps: any geographic feature you like. Follow these steps Left click and Page Up allow you to zoom into and see how easy it is: your map and Page Down lets you zoom out Download The arrow keys allow you to move around your Quikgrid from http://www. galiander.ca/quikgrid/ (sorry - no Mac vermap whilst you are zoomed in sion). The HOME key resets your zoom level Install and launch QuikGrid. Alt 2 and Alt 3 switch between 2d and 3d mode Select FILE then Input Scattered data points. (also available on the VIEW menu Select Input metric data points. When in 3d mode, use the bottom and right Select your .csv le. scrollbars to change your viewing angle and there you have your 2D map. There are some When in 2d mode, right click any map location settings you can use to tweak your map: to see its co-ordinates. Use this to plot your next select the EDIT menu, then number of grid landing site. NOTE: For some reason, quik grid lines. This increases your map resolution but displays lat/long co-ordinates in the reverse ortakes longer to draw a map der to KSP. You need to read the Quikgrid Y select the EDIT menu, then grid generation opvalue rst, then the X value. The Z value is the tions. I use the values, from top to bottom: 1, altitude at that point

Figure 1: 2D Map of Minmus generated using Quikgrid

Acknowledgments
Photography by togfox 5

Above

The three heavenly bodies of the Kerbol solar system - togfox

Left

Zepher class rocket enjoying the kerbolrise - Zephram Kerman

Mission Preparation and Debrieng: Editing the KSP conguration les

Rich and Zephram Kerman www.kerbalspaceprogram.com Difculty KSP version Time

Intermediate 0.15.2 1 hour

KSP has been built in a fashion which facilitates modication by developers within the community. One small facet of the modication opportunities available, is the editing of KSPs conguration les, of which there are four types: Settings le (.cfg): This denes the running characteristics of the game, such as terrain detail and sound volume of the user interface. This can be found in the top level directory of the KSP game folder. The persistence and the quick save les (.sfs): These store the current state of the game world, and can be located in the saves folder. The ship les (.craft): These keep all of your feats of engineering safe and can be found in the Ships folder, which is neatly divided into those which were built in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) and those which were built in the Space Plane Hanger (SPH). The part les (also a .cfg): These les contain the parameters for the vehicle parts you have installed, such as mass and drag. Naturally, these conguration les can be found the in the parts folder. This article aims to present some of the tools needed for editing these les, and then to demonstrate some of the reasons for doing so.

as WordPad, which modies all the line endings from the Linux markers, which is all KSP understood at the time, to the Windows markers, resulting in KSP becoming confused. While this x solves the problem of editing the les locally, if you take part in collaborative efforts across multiple operating systems, you can end up with conguration les which contain a mixture of different line endings. Files such as this will still fail to load correctly in KSP.

Figure 2: Desired editing features in notepad++ The editing software feature which is required to avoid this issue, is the ability to display line endings as shown in gure 2, which is an example of a persistence le with Windows line endings. With this visible, it is easy to see if their usage is consistent throughout the entire le. The endings will appear as CR or LF for Mac and Linux systems respectively. The second issue that people run into, is failing to match their curly braces. To help avoid this situation, it is useful to have your editing software perform parenthesis matching, this is demonstrated in gure 2 by the red bar in the margin. Finally, there are some issues to be aware of when editing the persistence le while KSP is running. The game loads the le when you enter the environment with the VAB and the SPH, and writes to the le when you exit to the main menu. Therefore, if you wish to make any changes they must be made, and saved outside of this region, so the game does not overwrite them. 7

The Tools
There are several pitfalls which can be encountered when editing these les, but the majority of them can be avoided by the use of the appropriate tools. The useful features of these applications will be highlighted, this way you can make your own decisions about which editing tool to use. However, for the purposes of this article we will be using notepad++. The number one issue that people encounter when editing these les, is caused by the different characters used to signify the end of a line in each of the Linux, Mac and Windows operating systems. This issue was partially xed somewhere between KSP version 0.14.4 and 0.15.2 as the Mac and Windows versions now contain conguration les with the appropriate line endings. Before this x, there were problems when saving the les with a program such

Figure 3: Runway markers help with night landings. The markers are just debris, perfectly positioned by editing their names, latitudes and longitudes.

So what can we do with this?

There are plenty of useful tricks which can be applied to these les to improve the KSP game play, just some of these is what we will describe next.

Changing the Names of the Crew

Fancy yourself as the next Jeb? Lets start with an easy modication, simply open persistent.sfs, nd the name of the crew member which you wish to rename, and replace it with your own. We show this in the example below by changing the value of the name tag to togfox. KSP will automatically capitalise all names. name = i n n e r marker s i t = SPLASHED CREW { landed = False name = t o g f o x landedAt = } splashed = True Runway Markers ... Trying to land on the runway at night is difcult, as l a t = 0.04 there are no landing lights. In order to improve this ( This should match t h e l a t i t u d e o f your situation, it is possible to strategically place debris, as reference object . ) shown in gure 3. This can be done by editing debris lon = 74.4 parts into position off the end of the runway: ( This should be a s h o r t d i s t a n c e from First, nd three bits of debris. (You might have your r e f e r e n c e o b j e c t , a c c o r d i n g t o your own p r e f e r e n c e . ) to crash intentionally if youve never crashed before.) In the photos I used Toshs hstwCart, a l t = 0 . 0 8

but anything will do. You can also start with three intact vessels. Next, taxi a working spaceplane to the east end of the runway (towards the water) and park it there. This temporary vessel will serve as your reference point for latitude and longitude. Hit Esc, and go to the space center. (Do not end ight.) Make a backup copy of your persistent.sfs le. Its ok to put it in the /saves/default/ directory, as long as it has a different name. I usually use Copy of persistent.sfs" since thats the default. Now open persistent.sfs with notepad++ or whatever you prefer. (Do not use WordPad.) Use ctrl-F to nd the rst debris you plan to edit, and change the following lines to look like this:

 (Optionally) remove any unwanted parts from the debris vessel (like a command pod or MechJeb, if present), replace parts, etc. Do ctrl-C to copy the changes youve made into the clipboard. Now nd the second debris item. Do ctrl-V to paste the changes. Rename it "middle marker". lon = -74.3 (This is a little bit further east.) Find the last debris item, and paste those changes again. Rename it "outer marker". lon = -74.1 (This will put it a fair distance from the others. Its a good spot to point your plane during the initial approach.) Save and exit the editor. Go to the tracking station and select your temporary spaceplane. When it loads, hopefully you will see those three marker debris out there in the water, in a perfect line. Wait for twilight or dark, when the debris labels turn white, then take off and enjoy the help!

ing. If you want to copy this into a new persistence le simply nd the vessel name and copy the entire VESSEL entry. This consists of the VESSEL tag and the surrounding curly brackets. Once this has been copied, paste it at the bottom of your new persistence le.

Modifying Ship Parts

To modify a part, in this example a fuelTankSmall: Copy the directory of the part, /KSP/Parts/ fuelTankSmall, and give it a new name, i.e. /fuelTankSmall2 Within this new directory, open part.cfg with your favourite editor and modify the following lines: name = fuelTankSmall t i t l e = FLT250 Fuel Tank d e s c r i p t i o n = The T250 tank . . . fuel = 250.0 to look something like the following: name = fuelTankAwesome t i t l e = FLT3000 Fuel Tank d e s c r i p t i o n = The T3000 tank was borrowed from an i n t e r dimensional a l i e n , and as such i t has seemingly magical p r o p e r t i e s o f s t o r a g e . fuel = 3000.0 which essentially increases the amount of fuel the tank can hold. Finally, save and exit the editing software to complete the changes.

Removing Debris from the Environment

Sometimes the game will slow down to unbearable levels, one of the ways to alleviate the lag is to remove some of the debris. This can be done without affecting any of your current ights by opening persistent.sfs, and removing all the VESSEL entries which have debris appended to their name: VESSEL { pid = 0 name = Drag V I I I Debris s i t = LANDED ...

What does it all mean?

Copying Ships Across Save Files

For reference, the authors have attempted to put together a glossary of conguration le syntax in the During your time playing KSP, you will complete form of table 4, which can be found on the nal page some historic missions, such as your rst Mun land- of this article.

Acknowledgments
Unistruts post on editing persisent.sfs for fun, prot and lag reduction, Kerbal Space Program Forums Photography by Zerphram Kerman

Figure 4: Glossary of conguration le syntax Tag PART PART PART PART PART PART Keyword uid parent position rotation srfN attN mass temp state qty allowFlow state badS name ToD SMA ECC INC EPH REF stg met landed sit pid Description Instance number for the part. Reference object. X, Y, Z location of the part in reference to the vessels root. Orientation of the part. Radial attachment. Attachment to the top/bottom, and the number of parts attaching here. Current mass, including any contents. Temperature, similar to hit points. Specic to part type. Amount of contents (fuel, etc.), this is a oat.Other part-specic variables can be stored here, such as MechJebs modes and settings. True|False, Boolean logic to enable or disable fuel ow from this tank. 0 means dead, 1 means available and 3 means the Kerbal is in ight. Personality trait. Name of the crew member Time of day. Semi Major Axis. Eccentricity Inclination. Ephemeris. Sphere of inuence: 1 = Kerbin, 2 = Mun, 3 = Minmus The currently active stage. Mission Time Elapsed for this vessel. Usually blank, but can be KSC or runway depending on your location. Can have the values: SPLASHED, LANDED, ORBITING and ESCAPING. Vessel serial number

PART PART PART PART PART CREW CREW CREW CREW ORBIT ORBIT ORBIT ORBIT ORBIT VESSEL VESSEL VESSEL VESSEL VESSEL

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