Discord Channel Lore and Design Miscellany Dumps
This is a placeholder for some better formatted lore pages, this is just a paste of all the crap I've said about Mesbin and Whirligig World over the past year or so. Sadly many of the original images have disappeared.
See also:
and now from discord:
04/26/2018
I had a funny idea for part of the backstory of the Mesbin Space Probe Company
so it's been generations since anyone has ever had to know what an airplane is. and it was not considered high priority information to save during the starship crash, given that Mesbin was after all airless. so very little is known about airplanes and for the most part no one cares. trains, tunnels, and groundcars are the way to get around, and that's fine and accepted. Flying machines are the domain of the space probe company though. but no one really considers them valid vehicles for people-moving. But then say you're a school child and you're trying to pass notes in class you're sat next to your friend at first and you can just hand them notes. This is fine until the teacher moves you apart. You still need to fill the void with communication so this time you ball up your paper and toss it a few desks over. Fine, but it arrives all crumpled up and the funny doodles you drew don't look as cool
NovaSilisko: reinvent the airplane with paper toys?
so you figure out that if you just fold the paper lengthwise a few times, you can throw it pretty far without it getting
yeah
that's basically it
but I will continue the story anyway
...without it getting so ugly and crumpled.
One day in your Kerbin studies class you hear about airplanes. This captures your imagination at just the right moment, because eventually note darts are enough to get you moved all the way to different corners of the room. now you can't throw your darts far enough! Not under Mesbin gravity, for sure! You and your best friend are inseparable though. you have to figure out how to pass notes at a distance. so one night you stay up late trying to make a paper airplane. it takes a few nights of experimentation but you finally get one that will fly far enough. It's a convoluted mess and requires cutting and gluing
NovaSilisko: wait but they already know about airplanes from school in general
just "oh they used to fly in the air but we don't have use for such things now"
they wouldn't have taught how airplanes work or anything. nothing more than a stock photo and a sentence or two. After class, you show your friends your new invention, and they think it's cool and want to see more, and figure out how to build them. but kerbal children, like human children, are not good at following instructions, so the convoluted mess is difficult to replicate
NovaSilisko: you're making me wish i could get the RC plane parts i've been wanting
over the next few weeks you build better designs that fly further, straighter, and with simpler directions. you hear in the news that the MSPC is starting to seriously consider exploring the atmospheric moon of Kerbmun. you find it mildly interesting as any child who follows the Space Probe Company does. the next day something clicks in your mind
"we could use note planes on Kerbmun"
You try to find books about airplanes or note planes in the library. there is very, very little about it. Some works of fiction which depict airplane travel, but very little in the way of technical details. you realize you're pretty much the only one who knows about this kind of thing, and you make it your goal to find someone who matters at the Mesbin Space Probe Company and tell them about note planes.
By happy coincidence, your best friend's mother's dog's brother's owner's husband is the administrator of MSPC.
Eventually you realize, as your ego expands, that you are the expert on note planes.
NovaSilisko: dog's brother's owner's
The scientists and engineers, they just don't see what you're talking about
they can't imagine what use this could be. it's just a toy. But you decide to prove your worth. You build a robotic plane and show up at the MSPC again with a serious proposal a few months later. The administrator was in a good mood and lets you demonstrate the robotic note plane from the top of the Vehicle Assembly Chamber under pressure.
you manage to glide it all the way to a specific spot on the ground. the plane breaks, but now you finally have the administrator's attention.
and so in true Kerbal fashion, you're put in charge of a team of engineers with a budget that makes your allowance seem like mulch to try and develop a steerable landing vehicle for Kerbmun
...
"You" are Charlene "Charlie" Kerman, a 7th grade student who has just founded C7 Aerospace. (The Mesbin version, not the Kerbin version.)
SnailsAttack: "does Mesbin have a magnetosphere?"
probably, yeah
Sept/17/2018
Statmun is made out of heavy metals including uranium
the uranium on the surface is at a low concentration that is mostly safe
but the interior is hot uranium ore with iron and other heavy metals
the surface is a mix of metal dust and a few exposed solid metal surfaces
Sept/28/2018 (shortly after changing Mesbin to its current density and rotation period)
now that's a proper whirligig!
tidal forces are pushing Mesbin's moons outwards fairly rapidly and slowing Mesbin itself down. Graymun was further out at some point in the past, but interactions with Kerbmun shrunk its orbit, giving it more time low down. When Mesbin was formed, Derbin was probably around where Kerbmun is now, which begs the question--where the hell did Kerbmun come from? 😛
Maybe Kerbmun was a captured object
maybe Kerbmun and Graymun were Kerbin/Mun analogues that got captured and put into similar orbits.
Ah hah
Mesbin spent a lot of time as a synestia
Some time after it and Derbin's formation it was hit by a massive impactor that turned it into a synestia
the scale of the Mesbin synestia would be off the charts!
in the above diagram, the Planet represents the final Mesbin if it were spherical. that planet would be 3 earths wide.
GrandProtectorDark: "What is that"
synestia is part of modern research into giant impact hypothesis moon formation. instead of Theia forming a ring around protoearth during the collision, the two would merge into this mantle-atmosphere-disk called a synestia. it is at orbital velocity, so it's a ring. it's gaseous, so it's an atmosphere. it's most of the planet's rock, so it's a mantle.
people who can't tell that there's no hole there call it a doughnut
after the synestia cooled down and three moons were formed (Kerbmun, Graymun, and what would become Statmun), Mesbin was spinning at 100% of orbital velocity. It had an atmosphere disk of hydrogen and helium, a smooth transition between co-rotating atmosphere and orbiting atmosphere.
the atmosphere disk leaked out into space, slowly depleting the atmospheric envelope of Mesbin until all that was left was a thin haze concentrated in a polar basin. Mesbin was still spinning at nearly orbital velocity, and slowly Kerbmun, Derbin, and to some extent even Graymun slowed down the rotation to where it is today, exchanging mesbin's rotational velocity for it's satellite's orbital altitudes.
At one point, proto-statmun was a fairly large satellite orbiting within the atmosphere disk when the atmosphere disk went away, its orbit became unstable and it decayed into a low orbit and was torn apart. the rings eventually deorbited (and are long lost due to tectonic activity)
but a chunk of the extremely dense metallic core remains in a stable syncronous orbit, apparently static in the sky. To be clear, Statmun is not held together by gravity. It is below its roche limit now. It was formed from a moon which was already extremely dense and iron rich, formed out of the dense lower parts of the original synestia. it is dense
but it's largely held together by being a big monolithic chunk of iron.
GrandProtectorDark: Interesting. How does Underground kerbal society work?
I have yet to flesh it out extensively
the basics is they live in structurally reinforced caves for the most part.
digging tunnels requires material to be cycled through huge vertical lifting airlocks to be dumped out onto the surface safely, so digging tends to be very expensive and mostly limited to tunnels linking cave networks. caves don't have habitable atmospheres either. They may have high pressure hydrogen/helium atmospheres, they may be in vacuum, they may have toxic gasses, etc.
oxygen is in no short supply as there's plenty of the stuff in the rocks that make up the crust, and while dry at the surface the crust and mantle hold significant stores of water.
Mesbin is tectonically very active, requiring a lot of structure to hold caves open in the long term. some time I need to add volcanoes
I have an idea how to do that easily enough...
anyway
Mesbin has a lot of volatile elements but it is limited in Phosphorus and Sulfur, bottleneck elements for life. By pure volume there's still plenty of the stuff, but it's in trace enough amounts that they're very expensive as a result, colonies are slow to grow and dead kerbals are recycled.
Power comes largely from geothermal, but nuclear is not unheard of.
food is algae for the most part.
the genetic records for various other food species were lost in the crash of the U.S.C. Manifest Destiny, and actual seeds survive only for a few "potatoes" and other efficient foods, although a sweet fruit survives--it's expensive to grow so it's considered a delicacy. Flavoring is largely artificial, and there are lots of recipes.
the initial colonization was practically miraculous
the starship had practically suicide-burned its way onto the surface--quite by accident as it was intended to stay in orbit as a space station (around Kerbmun!)
it crashed down hard in the middle latitudes and the propulsion section was completely trashed. Many of the crew died as well, but over half survived.
At first, the crew worked hard to get a livable base up and running, and they had to make a decision. The shuttlecraft were damaged, but not totalled. They were calculated to have enough delta-v to get to orbit from the equator, but not return.
and certainly they couldn't make it to Kerbmun.
There was a decision to be made. They could use their resources and remaining parts in a risky attempt at colonizing Kerbmun--using starship parts to augment the kerbmun shuttles to make it to Kerbmun with a vastly limited colony or they could disassemble everything and set up on Mesbin. Kerbals are known for their risk taking.
the colonists all gathered together and voted.
Things were tense
spirits were low
as willing as Kerbals are to take risks and get messy, these hundreds of grieving Kerbals all cooped up for weeks in a tin can under crushing gravity did not feel like reaching for kerbmun was possible
Remaining on Mesbin won by a landslide.
Working under the high gravity was deemed unfavorable, so the colonists decided to move the base closer to the equator. It meant that gathering materials, supplies, and equipment from the wreck would take much longer, but living conditions would be easier, and it would be much harder to move the base after it was finished.
They set up an ISRU chain to harvest water and oxygen from the dirt--the drills and converters still survived--and started building.
the base was above the surface, but covered in regolith. It consisted of reasonably comfortable living conditions for all 320 kerbals, an ISRU system to generate water and air, and a solar-powered algae greenhouse, and a rudimentary manufacturing facility.
The first decade or so was fairly stagnant. Anything useful was recovered from the starship, and that included the bottleneck elements in the bodies of the dead crew. That was not a fun job to handle. Despite a year having passed before that had to begin, the bodies were mostly intact.
exploration of the surrounding areas commenced, and eventually usable construction materials were fabricated, and the colony began to expand. a supply chain to generate more building materials was prioritized eventually, the first cave was colonized. A wall was built at the entrance and a large airlock served as the gate. The spelunking team verirfied the cave's relative stability, and struts were erected where neccesary. Slowly, refineries pumped into half of the cave; the other half was walled and airlocked out to be filled when the first half was finished and developed.
Eventually the cave was made habitable. the caves were then colonized, with new homes built and with so much new free space, things like recreation centers, a swimming pool, and other luxury amenities could be built. On year 18 or so, the birth of the first child on the colony was approved, and the colony began to grow. industrialization was slow. Technology was either something recovered from the starship wreck or it was a very low tech alternative. The colony had started out pseudo-communist, which worked fine at the small scale, but slowly transformed into a socialist democratic capitalist society.
As more caves were colonized and people spread out, the colony split (peacefully) into individual nation states--cooperating but no longer monolithic.
Those with more eccentric beliefs were eventually able to leave the allied colonies and form their own cults, sometimes with violence or at least disagreement about the reallocation of resources. Bottleneck elements were rare enough that there was a steep emigration tax--anyone who left had to either come up with the elements or the money to pay for them. If they couldn't pay, they couldn't leave--of course people did anyway through violence in some cases.
The first generation had toyed with starting up a space program as things started to improve, but it was determined to be impossible. The money, resources, and tech wasn't there.
the second generation didn't really care as much about Kerbmun and space flight. While the first generation was full of people who regretted not trying to go to Kerbmun, people who lived a large part of their lives on an interstellar space ship, people who were involved with the space program for their whole adult lives, the second generation found Mesbin to be their home. The second and third generations are widely regarded to be the Mole Generations those who lived soley underground. The original base had been deconstructed, with a small monument dedicating the site as Kerbalkinds' first home in the stars. Surface exploration was limited during that time, and attention was focused on exploring caves and expanding the society.
The fourth generation was around the time when aboveground observatories began being built. These were artificially "natural" parks built aboveground to resemble the planet Kerbin, with glass domes utilizing frosted blue glass to replicate the sky. They were connected to the cave cities. Developing above-ground structures began as well, and surface walks became common both for exploration and to a limited extent as a tourist destination.
Mesbin astronomy really took off around this point.
The actual original records of the Mesbin star system based upon data collected from Kerbin was not among the data saved, and indeed astronomy in general was not a popular subject, mostly a footnote in physics education.
education, incidentally, was based upon a mix of the surviving computer records and books written by some of the scientists on the original crew. None of the surviving crew members had been historians, so history of Kerbin was not known accurately and detailed, with differing accounts between the various authors being debated for a long time. What little was known on astronomy in the Kaywell system came from observations taken during the time of the original base. There were no telescopes, but the planets had been studied enough that some of the basics were known. Shol, and Tyepolbynar was known, as well as a note of two visible satellites. Graymun, Kerbmun, Derbin, and Derminmus were known. Valyr, Egad, and Reander were known as well. Strangely enough, even though it was well within their capability to detect this, the "planetary" nature of Gememma, then known as Rodocer, was not known. It was presumed to be a red giant star, not a red dwarf companion of Kaywell.
The astronomical revolution involved observatories being built all around Mesbin. Surface exploration also yielded the discovery of Statmun, which was called "a great reddish floating mountain some dozens of kilometers high. I can scarcely believe my eyes." Observatories charted the planets and moons and speaking of which
I have to go to the Cline Observatory now. [Ed note: I volunteer there on fridays]
We'll see if I continue this when I come back home...
GPD: Interesting read. I hope this gets all noted down in one way or another in the mod itself
SnailsAttack: ^ yeah I wanna see the final version of the mesbin civilization lore on the mod page
GPD: Better. In the KSPedia.
[ed note: this is what you'll have to settle for for now]
Sept/29/2018
Observatories on Mesbin have a special problem
with a period of 28 minutes, doing astronomy with telescopes requires a clock drive and/or some kind of motorization another interesting property being that equatorial telescopes can see further north and south than east and west! too tired to continue in more detail. Tomorrow morning I think I shall tell you of the formation of the Mesbin Space Probe Company.
Technological development on Mesbin by the sixth generation was finally beginning to approach what they once had. Manufacturing tolerances were made smaller and smaller, and computers using transistors were being developed once more. Meanwhile, the many cavernous cities of Mesbin faced a transportation problem. digging tunnels between the farthest cities was risky and very expensive. Surface rovers and railways functioned well enough, but surface habitation proved just as risky in the long term due to meteors, which often struck the surface at tremendous speeds. Meanwhile, tensions were brewing between the nation of Mesomesbin (on the equator) and the Coalition of Southern States (in the "temperate" regions of the southern hemisphere)
they had very different political, moral, and religious beliefs, and between their borders was thought to be an untapped immense supply of bottleneck elements. Whoever reached the deposits first would be capable of expanding faster and further than any other nation.
The CSS found the deposits first.
A war erupted, the first in Mesbin history.
Mesbal warfare was quite different to what you'd expect on Kerbin or Earth.
Troops would cross the terrain between caves in armored rovers, and would then demolish the airlock of a cave. By this point there was a lot of redundancy in airlocks, so this was not an immediate kill. If the colony was expecting a battle, they would have tanks stationed outside ready to try and thwart the invasion. Mesomesbin lost the war, and when the treaty was drawn up, the deposits of bottleneck elements were all within the CSS border.
GPD: "Meep?"
SnailsAttack: "heh heh kerbals fighting"
One of the most important technologies developed during the war was the rocket. the moment the technology fell into public hands, Kerbals remembered why they loved them so much in the first place. Many an inventor tried their hand at building flying machines with the solid propelled rockets, and many a test pilot died for the cause.
One inventor, Hubert Alfonso Kermanov II, claimed to have hit Statmun with a rocket.
Some early experimenters managed to send rockets into low orbit, before the practice was made illegal due to the threat of having speeding shrapnel endangering the lives of surface explorers.
Rocket research was taking off nonetheless, and eventually the Parliment of Mesomesbin created a bill to establish an official astronautical space research agency, creating the Mesomesbin Space Probe Council. It was composed of some of the leading experts in astronomy, engineering, and rocket development. Its stated purpose was "To develop the continued exploration of space beyond Mesbin, to determine the resources which may be found in space, and to investigate the possibility of life in the Kaywell Solar System."
That middle purpose was intended to be the real moneymaker--it specifically referred to the bottleneck elements.
ROLL CALL
- Hubert Alfonso Kermanov II: The head of rocket development.
- Bailey Kerman: The PR head.
- Billybobdin "Bean Counter" Kerman: Accounting.
- Annie Lan Mesman: Operations and Engineering.
- Lamhab Of Brendelbury: Mission Control Director.
- Mandrake and Rutherford: The conjoined twin heads of Astronomy and discoverers of the planets which bear their name.
Sept 29 2018
Kerbals under various gravities
[Ed note: This comes from a brief testing period in which I made Mesbin more like Mesklin, but this made the game too hard so I scrapped that redesign. Mesbin does not go up to 33 G.]
Sept/30/2018
OH MY GOD
statmun actually has negative gravity at the ends
I guess that makes sense
its held together by tensile strength anyway
Oct/19/2018
SnailsAttack: "How are Statmun and Mesbin tidally locked to eachother? Is there some weird effect that'd cause that or what?"
A Mesbin satellite around the mass of Pluto or so, made mostly of silicate rock, finds itself in an unstable resonance that gets it flung down below the roche limit
it forms a huge ring system.
the molten inner core of dense iron and other heavy elements remains together, and forms Statmun, which is almost 100% metallic.
Statmun is above mesbin-stationary orbit at this point
Mesbin's rotation is slowed down over time largely by the effects of Kerbmun, Graymun, and Derbin--the effect of Statmun on Mesbin is utterly minuscule
SnailsAttack: "right so thats why i'm wondering how it found itself in geostationary orbit"
Hold on.
I'm realizing the way I thought it would work is wrong
but I can save it
hold on.
Statmun's orbit is still above geostationary at this point.
Eventually Statmun's orbit gets locked in a fairly weak resonance with Graymun
which, at that time, happens to be in the same weak resonance with Mesbin's rotation.
Graymun's orbit eventually becomes decoupled from Mesbin as Mesbin's shape equalizes from slightly triaxial to a smooth oblate shape (or perhaps it was only "triaxial" due to a lot of continent mass in one place)
but Statmun is close enough to Mesbin that it is tidally locked to specific features on the surface. Over time these features shift and move, and over those timescales the actual position of Statmun along the orbit is chaotic but essentially Statmun gains a weak tidal effect over Mesbin's surface that is enough for Statmun to grab onto and hold itself in place.
Geostationary orbit without a tidal lock is unstable due to tides, as if you go to a lower orbit, tidal drag will drag you down, and if you go to a higher orbit, tidal drag will push you away. Statmun maintains a delicate balance that is only possible due to Mesbin's shape and the unique proximity to the surface in this example of geostationary altitude. It turns out that modelling gravity as point sources at least (no oblateness for Mesbin or tidal simulations) Statmun's orbit is stable in the long term
I suspect that it really goes between only NEAR tidal locks over longer timescales, with the moon slowly drifting across the surface one way or another (noticeable over a month or so--how about that, a mountain and a calendar all in one!), and we just caught it in a lucky transitional period where it is very close to 1:1
then again, Mesbin is probably a slightly triaxial shape--something I have been vaguely considering modelling in-game--all the time. More of a hyperhaumea than a minimesklin. If Mesbin IS slightly triaxial, orbital resonances with the spin of the planet may be the only stable regions
the tidal instability of geostationary would fade away compared to the short term orbital instability of a triaxial shape move off of geostationary and you'll be in an unstable orbit that will tend to perturb you back to the stable island. and in fact
this should be true even of tiny non-triaxial-ellipsoid deformations the continents and mountains of Mesbin may be enough to slightly destabilize orbits that aren't in resonance for low altitudes at least
enough that it would only affect the very low orbits of Statmun's domain, without really affecting Graymun and higher
...
SO
TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION
HAVING PUZZLED THAT ALL OUT
Zaffre: Or... it's there because gameplay.
SnailsAttack: [to me] jfc what school did you go to??
Oh Zaffre, you know that is never enough for me.
Zaffre: "Passion a research, snails."
I didn't go to any special school. Yeah, passion and research just about does it. Anyway.
STATMUN HISTORY 1: (Mesbin still retains a very thick atmosphere while Statmun forms, Mesbin's gravity is smooth and it retains the atmosphere disk)
- Proto-statmun gets torn apart into rings, which latter fall into the planet.
- Statmun is formed from the still-molten core of proto-statmun, at a low elliptical orbit.
- Its orbit is unstable due to its elliptical orbit and close approach with Graymun, but it intersects Mesbin's atmosphere-disk and aerobrakes into a lower circular orbit a little ways above the geostationary orbit. (the atmosphere disk is in orbit around Mesbin, so Statmun isn't dragged into a collision with Mesbin)
- Its orbit is unstable over geological timescales until it locks in a weak resonance with Graymun, which is coincidentally the same resonance that Graymun has with Mesbin.
- It is held in geostationary by Graymun, until Graymun's orbit is decoupled from Mesbin's rotation by hand waves tidal mechanics with the other moons.
- Mesbin loses most of its atmosphere disk to space and continents can form.
- Continents cause large enough gravitational disturbances to make low orbits aside from geostationary orbit unstable.
- Statmun remains in the stable 1:1 island.
OR STATMUN HISTORY 2: (Mesbin has lost its atmosphere by the time Statmun forms)
- Proto-statmun gets torn apart into rings, which latter fall into the planet.
- Statmun is formed from the still-molten core of proto-statmun, at a very low circular orbit.
- Its orbit is unstable over geological timescales due to perturbations from the other moons and from Mesbin's continents.
- Now in geostationary orbit, Statmun is held in place due to the fact that 1:1 resonance is an island of stability in an ocean of instability caused by gravitational disturbances from Mesbin's continents.
Oct/23/2018
if I did my job correctly (and I don't think I did), then you'd feel no slope on Mesbin's surface unless it was due to an actual slope on the heightmap or noise. That is, Mesbin should be in hydrostatic equilibrium, where the centrifugal force and gravitational force balance out and the apparent gravity is perpindicular to the surface.
However, the hydrostatic equilibrium shape for an object like Mesbin in KSP, where the mass is all concentrated in the core, is not an oblate spheroid. It is probably lens shaped, but since I don't have any way of actually computing the exact shape I need, I just assume it's an oblate spheroid anyway. It might be closer to level with principia since I make the gravitational field oblate with principia.
In game, even if I get the surface perpindicular to the apparent gravity correctly, Kerbals would still seem to stand and walk as if it's sloping, because the game doesn't understand how to walk. It's also why if you built an o'neill cylinder, Kerbals would try to walk on their heads.
Oct/24/2018
Space Engine seems to think that an eclipse seen from Ollym by Lowel of Kaywell would look f[redacted]g awesome
Adstriduum: "You make your systems in Space Engine?"
I model my atmospheres in Space Engine before using the OhioBob calculator so I get accurate temperature and greenhouse effects. Space Engine's greenhouse calculator is the only one I could find, because calculating greenhouse effect is hella difficult.
And I am totally gonna have a companion Space Engine system for Whirligig World when I finish it. currently it's hacked together and not quite accurate.
Oct/25/2018
@PART[GooExperiment]:FOR[aWhirligigWorld]
{
%title = CavernGoo™ Containment Unit
%description = Cavern goo was discovered during a spelunking expedition into a newly discovered cave. The cave was closed off from the surface and held a thick hydrogen-helium atmosphere. The cave had deep vertical shafts which lead down to mesbothermal vents, and had pools of liquid water all around. On closer inspection, the liquid water turned out to be a living organism. The explorers rejoiced that they had discovered a new life form native to Mesbin! It quickly became a delicacy, and while some scientists argue that eating mystery goo is highly moraly questionable due to the probability of the mysterious cave goo being sentient, others argue that it makes a delicious sauce. Anyway, mystery goo seems to react wildly to different stimuli, so perhaps it can tell us something about various alien environments.
}
yes.: "Quality worldbuilding."
Oct/28/2018
note: the scale is correct here
the orbit isn't.
Oct/29/2018
Derbin could be a really cool steampunk setting actually if it's alive.
you'd have habitable plateaus and altiplanos and mountains with hot, toxic death down below, and so effectively have continents and islands separated by seas of atmosphere. Which of course means you'd sail in AIRSHIPS!
which actually makes me want to make it have a denser (higher molecular weight) atmosphere so airships are easier.
[Ed note: Derbin is not quite this in the current version, but in another world...]
" I eventually intend to have "astrophotographs" of all of the planets, essentially crummy telescopic views that aren't technically spoilers."
Nov/02/2018
SnailsAttack: " is/was mesbin recently geologically active or does the kaywall system just not have that many large asteroids because mesbin seems like it should be absolutely littered with colossal impact site"
It's very geologically active.
volcanoes, tectonics, etc. The craters are only as pristine as they appear because all of them are recent and there's no aerodynamic erosion.
11/02/2018
for going interplanetary, starting as high as possible is the ideal.
BUT
without refueling or anything, it's best to start from a low orbit.
starting from Mesbin's surface, your parking orbit before going interplanetary should be as low as possible for maximum use of oberth effect.
now the implications for mining and refueling are different, though. Starting from the fuel station, being in a high orbit is ideal.
At a certain point, it then becomes more efficient to almost de-orbit and then burn at periapsis. Probably around halfway to Derbin is when that method becomes economical.
it turns out that you can't really effectively gravity assist off of the planet you're leaving from alone, BUT Derbin is heavy and distant enough that it can be useful as a gravity assist particularly in braking from interplanetary velocity.
but note that interplanetary delta-v is often dwarfed by mesbin's escape velocity.
SnailsAttack: "oh yeah derbin is going to be really important in capturing into mesbin’s orbit once I start heading further out"
slowing down into lower orbits can be done with kerbmun gravity assists and kerbmun aerobraking
you might be able to gravity assist down to graymun and slowly change the orbit to reach down to the station, but there's no way of reducing your orbit to below that of a graymun transfer orbit. Statmun is far too small to meaningfully change your orbit. Even Graymun is so small that it would take dozens of assists to move! (The SOI is barely as high as the surface is from the core!)
Having a fuel station around Kerbmun may be useful for interplanetary missions.
In my mind I always imagined an arcitecture like uh
Launch the interplanetary rocket unmanned
dock it to the fuel station.
then launch the SSTO crew shuttle to the fuel station.
crew moves to interplanetary rocketship, and does mission.
Interplanetary rocketship flies home to fuel station
crew flies down on SSTO crew shuttle. Interplanetary rocket is refueled or scrapped or whatever.
But now maybe instead of returning to the initial fuel station, you return it to a station in Kerbmun orbit, after aerobraking there. Dock to the station, take a Crew Orbital Shuttle down to the low orbit station, transfer crew to SSTO crew shuttle.
If the interplanetary rocket is reused, then it must be flown up to on orbital shuttle.
delta-v is so tight in low Mesbin orbit that a two-stop approach may be warranted.
I kind of want to add another small asteroid to Mesbin just as a solid ground to put a fuel station on, something between Graymun and Kerbmun. [Ed note: This is the reasoning behind the creation of Thresomin and Troymin]
SnailsAttack: "huh"
"yeah a kerbmun station could be useful but it has almost 1.1 surface gees
"not sure i wanna dip down into another gravity well
"or try to refuel it
"it does have aerobraking potential though
"i'm not sure if mesbin would fare well with another asteroid
"might get a bit crowded
"i kinda like having to hop around between planets through its absurd gravity well kerbmun could have its gravity lowered maybe but that'd negate some of the potential it has for gravity assists"
Adstriduum: "I always get disorientated by how fast the moons orbit i look at graymun and think 'why is it moving so fast?'"
a high altitude Kerbmun Station is good actually, Snails. better than low alt
SnailsAttack: "Just not sure how to get fuel out to it"
You bring an asteroid there :p
or heck, why not make a futuristic In-Situ Mining SSTO that does what the KSP tries not to have to do and just brings fuel up to the station on a spaceplane. refine fuel on the surface, set up a basic "Kerbmun Space Port" and have that spaceport launch fuel into Kerbmun orbit
Snails: "How"
requires more delta-v than launching fuel into Mesbin orbit, but way, way, way less than bringing it in from elsewhere in the system. I'll leave that up to you but it is possible Not like a space center you can launch from to be clear
Snails: "no clue how i can make that economical but alright"
It'd be a big investment, but in theory it pays for itself if you use it properly.
GM. So I've been thinking about Gameplay things
GM. I think I have discovered a possible need for one or even two additional small bodies orbiting Mesbin.
GM. The asteroid moonlets are flawed--you can't garuantee they have a good amount of ore in them. and it's annoying and expensive to just hunt around until you find them
GM. although that arguably warrants like, a moonlet explorer space probe which just surveys a bunch of E-type moonlets to find ones with plenty of ore.
GM. Statmun can have no ore--it's solid metal! And while originally I didn't want Statmun to have ore for gameplay reasons anyway, I am kind of wishing it could. :v
GM. I think having several fuel stations going outward for interplanetary missions may be useful. And you can't rely on asteroids.
GM. Even disregarding the unreliability, ARM asteroids also have limited ore reserves. (And seem to be quite buggy currently anyway)
GM. So I think I might add two new satellites of conventional rocky composition, very small ones with negligible gravity and mediocre science points, more or less for the express purpose of being locations for fuel bases.
GM. What do you think?
NS. could put rocky lumps of different colors to statmun and put ore in them
NS. but
NS. statmun is REALLY hard to get to
GM. AFAIK you can't have resource maps
NS. way more than i ever thought
NS. oh dammit
GM. what do you mean?
GM. it's not that hard.
NS. okay hard to stay on :v
GM. yeah
GM. that's true
GM. but getting to the poles is fairly trivial
GM. so what do you think of the new moons idea.
NS. oh yeah
NS. i think that could work
GM. given that you are against additional bodies in general
NS. unless you wann do a higher density of asteroids i guess
GM. nah that gets annoying.
NS. or, i dunno, move derbin close enough that derminmus becomes an easier early game target. but that might be a bit risky
GM. I wish I could configure the damn asteroids. It's so annoying that there is virtually no modding capability for asteroids. They have so much potential if they're moddable! the best I can do is define orbits and size distributions, i.e., have belts with only E types. I might do that for Mesbin, tilt the asteroids in favor of heavier sizes. gonna do that now actually. [Ed note: you get your wish eventually]
NS. ...
NS. you could
NS. put some below statmun
NS. like
NS. just above the terrain
GM. Oh hey that'd be cool.
NS. i know they'd deorbit. but that would be kind of entertaining
GM. I can't go below the fake atmosphere because I'm pretty sure KSP would clean them up. but I can try it. put rare asteroids just above the mountains going up to the atmosphere edge, and another less rare group below Statmun. it would be an amazing navigational hazard.
NS. like i said though, with them being so low, below stationary, they would realistically deorbit. maybe that happens already really.
GM. yep. the ring is not stable over long timescales anyway. I also kind of want to make Statmun trojans.
NS. one of Mesbin Space Center's early jobs was radar tracking of deorbiting asteroids. sometimes one dips low enough to get bumped into a very low orbit by statmun.
GM. Mesbinsyncronous Orbits are stable, so there'd be a scattering of asteroids in MSO, with a clustering of stuff in Statmun's trojan points because those are the orbits that never eventually wander into Statmun.
NS. and the occasional mountain-scraper.
GM. Fan theory: The first mesbinite-made object to achieve orbit was a chunk of a radio tower that was hit by a class-E Mesbosyncronous Mountain Scraper. wait no.
GM. Canon: ^^
...
GM. If Statmun is Aetheris Mons then the other mesbostationary rocks are the foothills.
NS. tfw you can look at stuff in stationary orbit with binocs
GM. you can do that on earth if you have radio-powered binoculars 😛
GM. radio-powered
GM. totally the correct terminology
GM. I never really tried it, but with Distant Object Enhancements and tracking a bunch of asteroids, the sky would be so f[redacted]g cool to watch. [Ed note. I did eventually try it. With stock-sized asteroids it was pretty meh]
GM. I think diffuse rings are so much cooler than normal rings for a homeworld. they're not an inevitable navigation hazard, you can steer through them. each moonlet is on a stable orbit over geopolitical timescales. they won't totally f[redacted]k up the night sky or drastically increase the seasonal temperature swings.
NS. yeah, and plus in habitable regions rings like saturn's are less likely
GM. solar tides, right.
NS. and temperature, and solar wind, I would think.
GM. I'm skeptical that solar wind is that big a deal for all but the finest dust. What about temperature? I mean sure icy rings are not plausible...
NS. no ice. It would be darker material.
GM. I'd assume rock anyway. The rings would be as dark as the moon.
GM. But the moon is BRIGHT at night. And rings are waaaaay larger in the sky.
GM. Versus moonlets, which are just lovely bright "planets" [Ed note: planets in the wandering star sense]
GM. There'd be a catalog of all the moonlets. Maybe the largest of them would be considered moons of their own. Damn, what if they all had names, and dedicated amateur astronomers like you and I would memorize the characteristics of enough of them to be able to point the bright ones out when they're up. :v
NS. can you manually define asteroids?
GM. Yeah.
NS. Oh man, you should do that then. A few manually defined ones. And name them.
GM. That could be fun actually.
NS. i imagine statmun being discovered very early on. before anyone really realized the others were there.
GM. it was discovered by Mesbin explorers, who thought it was a mouintain. Then they got closer.
GM. then they got closer and they saw it detach from the horizon
GM. and they were like "wait what the f[redacted]k?"
NS. yessss. i love that idea to bits.
GM. But because they had no astronomical education--back then almost no one did except for navigators who only knew practical things--they kept calling it a mountain--Aetheris Mons, the Sky Mountain. In fact mesbographers still mark it down as a mountain, despite astronomers recognizing it as a moon. Technically statmun is part of Mesbin, but only as much so as the other moons are--being formed from the Mesbin Synestia. Astronomers and Mesbographers have often had long "discussions" on the subject of the moonhood or mountainhood of Statmun.
NS. It's a moontain.
GM. Astronomers conceded that if Statmun were to be found to have originated from Mesbin after the dissipation of the synestia, somehow, then it could be considered a mountain.
NS. -Tedrik Kerman, who was then thrown out.
NS. (just a randomass kerman name.)
GM. your face is a randomass kerman name
NS. Randomass Kerman.
...
GM. max inclination of 10 degrees for the rare mountainscrapers to make them more terrifying
NS. oh holy lord.
GM. plus chance that if they generate a periapsis too low, they'll end up missing the equatorial bulge!
NS. you know, this is a situation where you actually COULD use things to just blow up the asteroids. they're going so slowly it would significantly alter all the trajectories of the debris
GM. Hey come up with 8 names for Mesbin moonlets go
NS. fart butt
GM. NO STOP
GM. GOnna stop your right there.
GM. Bad.
GM. Bart Futt.
Nov/03/2018
(at Snails) THERE WILL BE NO EASY MODE
yes.: "Kerbmun Space Program is easy mode. Even then, plane-based SSTOs are pretty much impossible because of the pitifully low Oxygen content. Not that it would matter much."
actually KSP doesn't simulate that... yet and Kerbmun currently has 1 atmosphere of pressure I eventually want to create a mod which turns intake air into an atmospheric resource and have air intakes become resource harvesters.
GrandProtectorDark: "Isn't that what stock is already doing?"
no.
It's just oxygen = true
the oxygen is tied directly to the pressure
on Kerbin, oxygen is, we assume, 0.2 atm partial pressure, same as earth
on a planet with 0.6 atm, it's 0.12.
i can't make a 100% O2 atmosphere and have it affect the jets
i.e., have an atmosphere where wings barely work but jets work fine.
GPD: "No, I mean, aren't air intakes already resource harvesters?"
not really
well they are resource intakes but it's specifically an intakeAir thing
it can't be configured to harvest from the environment.
GPD: "What do you mean? In what way to you mean it different than Intake ATM?"
currently, intakes just say "right, here's the atmospheric pressure. Is there oxygen? Great. I can work, tell me what the atmospheric pressure is and I'll generate IntakeAir"
I want to make intakes that say "right, let me just suck up this atmosphere. Ooh! There's IntakeAir in this atmosphere, I can collect that! How much can I take up? Let me just read the percentage here... 0.2 atmosphere. Nominal!"
Nov/04/2018
So I am also going to add two new proper celestial body satellites which have been discovered to be somewhat useful or even neccessary.
Proximinmus and Troymun [ed note: Thresomin and Troymin]
I don't really have much details on em. Troymun will be a Kerbmun trojan.
actually they've been renamed
Proximin and Troymin
anyway Proximin will be between Statmun and Graymun.
ALTHOUGH
I am wondering if a station slightly ABOVE graymun instead of slightly BELOW it would be more useful
SnailsAttack: "slightly above maybe to get a good refueling station further out"
The idea with Troymin is that it's much easier to get propellant to Kerbmun orbit from Troymin than it is to get it there from Kerbmun's surface--so it enables, without having to add a satellite of Kerbmun itself, Kerbmun to become a stopping point when returning from interplanetary travel.
SnailsAttack: "tbh i dunno if the mesbin system needs 2 more moons. maybe a really neat one as a kerbmun Trojan but it doesn’t need much more."
I have been wanting to add more satellites to Mesbin against my best interests
BUT
I've found a legitimate reason for them
Snails: "its position would make it a fun challenge to bring mined fuel to kerbmun"
Troymin.
Nov/11/2018
SnailsAttack: (quoting an old old old old KSP Forum thread by NovaSilisko)"[Mandrake & Rutherford: Possibly the strangest pair of planets this side of the galaxy, Mandrake and Rutherford are two brilliant blue gas planets orbiting one another, named for their siamese twin discoverer(s), Mandrake & Rutherford Kerman. How they formed is unknown, as is how long this configuration will last. Better hurry up!] looks like someone's borrowing ideas"
Adstriduum: "nova and greg are friends so i don't believe that there is a problem with that."
Nov/13/2018
(at Snails) no stop playing Kerbmun it's for losers and it's not ready yet :v
Snails, later:
"What's up ya ovoid f[redacted]k"
"and Graymun"
11/15/2018
[Ed note: "canonically" speaking, Mesbin has quite an awful lot of moonlets waiting to be discovered. Here's what less than a hundredth of them looks like]
Adstriduum: "Quite a bit of rocks there Greg :D"
SnailsAttack: "Good luck staying in orbit."
[ed note: later...]
Dec/08/2018
[Ed note: Mandrake and Rutherford (a really crappy drawing of them by my standards anyway. by me.) BradleyTheRadley from the KerbalCulture subreddit drew this (non-canon) variant:]
NovaSilisko's first solar system concepts included twin binary ice giants Mandrake and Rutherford. The thing Adstriduum is quoting above is Nova's original description
It's funny though because while he did remember M & R as planets, he totally forgot the siamese twin thing was his idea and not mine.
WW's M&R are very different from the original concept in terms of stated mass and radius values.
[Ed note: in which I discover that my plan to have a "mineable money" mechanic in the form of Vital Elements, things like sulfur and phosphorus which are neccessary for Kerbal/human life but rare on Mesbin, is unrealistic.]
Decided not to do the 2.5m tank at all
because upon calculating how much funds a full tank would be
910 funds per five kilograms of the stuff.
actually
I'm starting to reconsider the whole thing
because like
even one full tank would like
crash the economy
let me do a quick calculation
so like
when you consume phosphorus it doesn't get turned into something else, it just leaves you
but on Mesbin everything is recycled
so 17258400 servings per container really means 17258400/3=5,752,800 new Kerbals
Whirligig World Pronounciation Guide.
Notes: Names generally have some logic to them, though not necessarily a good logic. Asteroids have numbers in front representing the order they were discovered in, just like real asteroids. Wers and Vizea are both number 1 despite Vizea being a moon for complicated observational reasons detailed in its in-game description box. Some names were designed with advice from a video by Stoneworks World Building titled Creating Place Names Artistically.
Kaywell: Kay-Well. Named by my mother on vacation before I actually started work on Whirligig World. I asked her, "what's a good name for a Star?" and this was her response. Kaywell specifically refers to Kaywell's Star, a star discovered by "ancient" Kerbal astronomer Kaywell Kerman.
Shol: Shawl.
2 Wolda: Wole-dah.
Tyepolbynar: Tie eh poll buy nar. People seem to hate this name in particular, so an alternative is Typobal (Typo Ball). It was named as an intentionally long but pleasing (to me) sounding planet. Sometimes I feel the need to pronounce it with a british accent and call it Tie That Pol'd Bynar. This is entirely optional.
Jifgif: Jif Gif or Jif Jif--massive debate among astronomers! Named after the popular argument over the pronounciation of the animated image format .gif.
Imterril: Im Ter rell. It was named before I knew what it'd actually be, I just handwaved the existence of "the hot planet Imterril" in an early dev post discussing possible future features.
Etrograd: Et Roe Grahd. Retrograde but with a short a sound and no "R"
Tannor: Tan or / Tan er.
Aerious: Air Ee Us. Named to include all full-time vowel letters in english, and to sound like it's airy, sparsely packed.
1 Wers: Werz.
1 Vizea: Vie Zee Ah. V sound refers to Vesta, the solar system object it is heavily based upon.
Mesbin: Mez ben. Named as a portmanteau of Mesklin (Mez Klen) and Kerbin (Kerr-Ben). Mesklin is the original, classic spinning super-earth created by Hal Clement in 1954.
Statmun: Stat muhn / moon. Named for its stationary appearance from the surface of Mesbin.
Thresomin: Three soh min. Named for its THREE to one RESonance, and being a MINor moon.
Graymun: Gray Muhn / Moon. Name is exactly what you think it is.
Kerbmun: Kerb Muhn/Moon. Portmanteau of Kerbin and Mun.
Troymin: Troy Min. Trojans are from TROY, and this is a MINor moon which is a trojan of Kerbmun.
Derbin: Derb In. Bin comes from Kerbin, though I don't know why I chose that, and Der is meaningless.
Derminmus: Der Min Mus. Portmanteau of Minmus and Derbin.
Valyr: Vah Leer / Val ir. Name is a modification of Lyr, the planet designed by Chris Wayan that Valyr is heavily based upon.
Denna: Den nah. The original system had Rik (Will Riker) and Denna (Deanna Troi) orbiting as trojans, a vague Star Trek TNG reference.
Plaph: Plaff / Phlaff. Sounds vaguely like "fluff"
Oshan: Ocean. Name is a modification of Oisin, the moon designed by Chris Wayan that Oshan is heavily based upon.
Manonam: Man Oh Nam (the a sound is the same in Man and Nam, and matches the english word "man"). Named after Mananan, a moon mentioned by Chris Wayan to orbit Lyr, and the They Might Be Giants song i Palindrome i, where "manonam" is chanted in the background vocals.
Didd: Did. Named after the asteroid Didymos. Diddmun: Did Mun / Did Moon. Named after minor planet minor moon Didymoon.
Egad: Ee Gad. Originally named Adjar (Add Jar), both versions are plays on the name Egar, the original name for Duna from NovaSilisko's original solar system concepts. Both Egad and Egar were proposed to have more extended ice caps compared to Duna. Adjar originally orbited Reander, and Egar originally orbited Meander, so at the time the name made even more sense. For a long time I felt that Adjar just didn't sound quite right, so I changed the name to Egad because it is also an exclamation that feels kind of... antique? (It means A God, and saying "Egad!" is like saying "oh my god!")
Yeerbor: Year Bore / Yeer boor. Originally this name went to a moon that had belonged to Shol. Both moons had one thing in common: they both had eccentric orbits. The original Yeerbor was a boring lump of salt and sand in an orbit that skimmed Shol's atmosphere and its SOI boundary, which frankly was rather ridiculous and unstable. The current yeerbor has a similarly eccentric orbit brushing Egad's roche limit, and has a rather nice and interesting shape and surface.
3 Rik: Rick / Rike. Named for Will Riker, for reasons discussed above.
Reander: Ree An Der. Named for Meander, the original name for Jool in NovaSilisko's solar system concepts.
Lito: Lee Toh. Scrambled version of Tylo.
Yalthe: Y'all'th. Scrambled version of Laythe (it was originally larger and had an atmosphere similar to Laythe.)
Yokane: Yo Cane. Very vaguely resembles the word Vulcan.
Dakkonme: Dack On Me. I was listening to Take On Me when I named this moon.
Totoöa: Toe Toe Oh Ah. The ö means that the first o sound is repeated, as in the constellation Boötes. I was listening the Toto-Africa when I named this moon.
Mally: Mal-lee / Molly.
Yawer: Yaw er / Yauer. Named after the fact that it is "yawing" (turning the same way a spacecraft or aircraft might yaw) very quickly.
Gememma: Jem Emm Ah / Jem Emma. Named by picking a random female Kerbal name. Gememma specifically means "Gememma's Star." The Kerbin Kerbals called it Kaywell B, the Mesbinites had long called it "Rodocer," confusing it with a totally different red giant star, and it was Mesbinite Gememma Kerman who first discovered the planetary nature of the star.
Ammenon: Am Men On. Butchered version of the name of my friend Annie, who like Ammenon, is both hot and cool. ;)
Lowel: Low ell / Loh well. Named after Percival Lowell, the 1800s astronomer who thought he saw criss-crossed patterns on Mars and came to the conclusion that Mars had intelligent life. He thought they were artificial canals, which is probably due to a misunderstanding with italian astronomer Schiaparelli, who saw "canali" (natural channels) on the surface. In both cases, they were actually seeing the blood vessels in their retinas projected onto their view of Mars.
Ollym: Olly em / All eem / Ah lee im. Named after Olympus Mons, the martian mountain.
Gannovar. Gan no var.
Mandrake: Man Jrake / Man Drake. Drake rhymes with Cake. Mandrake and Rutherford are names taken (with permission) from former KSP dev NovaSilisko's original design for the solar system, which would have had two nearly equal mass Neptunian planets orbiting each other in the outer system. In universe, in both Whirligig World and in NovaSilisko's original plans, Mandrake and Rutherford were conjoined twin astronomers.
Rutherford: Ruh therr ford / Ruh therr ferd. See above explanation.
Lozon: Loh Zahn / Loz on.
Beagrid: Bee Grid.
Jancy: Jan See / Yan See.
Tatian: Ta sheean / Ta tee ahn. It either rhymes with Martian or it is a shorter version of the name Tatiana.
Pragnik: Prag Nick. (Unreleased as of 12/18/2018)
Fophie: Foe Fee. Rhymes with Sophie.
Dec/18/2018
[Ed note: A sketch of an underground lava tube city on Mesbin.]
Snails: "ooh lava tubes. damn a depressurization of that thing would b wild."
Snails: "suc."
Me to GPD: " wasn't it you who wanted to see underground kerbal cities? This probably isn't quite what you had in mind, but there is a sketch above in WW lore there was a tragic depressurization event caused by faulty atmosphere sensors which are the barometers used on spacecrafts."
Snails: "kerbals : use the barometers responsible for a tragic depressurization event ever again. actually yeah that sounds pretty kerbalish"
there are also other kinds of cities, where you essentially build the habitats aboveground and cover them in dirt. Of course, there was that one time when the city planning council forgot to install the connector tubes before filling in the dirt, resulting in a buried ghost town for several decades.
SnailsAttack: "artemis-style"
Me:
SnailsAttack: "lmfao. current mood is a kerbal in the upper floor of whatever that thing was. what if mesbin had a super-low orbiting asteroid that just like. would knock the shit out of anything in its path on occasion. but have so much inertia that itd just keep goin. not sure if thats possible. might b"
There are a handful of moonlets in geostationary orbits which cross lowlands of Mesbin before rising back up into safe space. They're not stable orbits by any means, but there are enough that this tragedy occurred to the Overland Hotel and Resort, a hotel built by the Mesomesbin Relaxation Company.
As it happens, the asteroid dealt a double-whammy
the reduced orbital speed meant that on the next orbit, it smashed into a mining operation several dozen kilometers to the west.
The mining company had a moment of bittersweetness as a chunk of precious metals had landed on their footstep... killing 60 kerbal workers.
The tracking and possible redirection of "straglers" is one of the reasons for the establishment of the Mesbin Space Probe Company.
Snails: "huh. can a moonlet be in geostationary orbit and still dip down toward the lowlands every once in a while"
in theory yes
in practice, Mesbin's fake atmosphere will actually interfere with this.
However, I do spawn in straggler asteroids (most end up on impact orbits on the first orbit)
Snails: "Huh. Mesbin is a scary f[redacted]g place to live."
!
for sure.
Snails: "its got lava. volcanoes. high gravity. vacuum caves. no atmosphere. asteroid strikes with an absolute ridiculous kinetic energy. a shitload of rocks orbiting around it."
not just vacuum caves.
Snails: "poisonous and also high-pressure caves. yeah those f[redacted]ers aswell"
yes.
note that on large vertical caves, natural weather systems are possible
it has been known to rain inside Mesbin. (like NASA's VAB without the HVAC units)
SnailsAttack: "would external radiators be needed to yeet excess heat into space from the planet's geothermal energy to keep the interior habitable"
Me, regarding "yeet":
Internal temperatures in the caves can get quite high, and yes, this does require external radiators to cool down. never thought of that but you're right about radiators.
Adstriduum: nice worldbuilding.
SnailsAttack: "it's strangely f[redacted]n captivating."
yes.: "Works about humanity or any other relatable species trying to get by in an exotic environment are one of my favorites."
SnailsAttack: "and mesbin's the ultimate one of those^"
yep. also have I mentioned the trains?
[ed note: I love trains.]
Snails: "what would they do for power. nope but i saw one in the pic. i'm sure trains would be the best form of transportation"
power is solar boilers or geothermal boilers, occasionally nuclear reactors.
trains are generally run underground or at least on track tunnels on the surface but covered in dirt.
they are run in a near vacuum for aerodynamic efficiency, and they are powered by steam
sometimes the steam is fed from station to station pre-heated by geothermal boilers or whathaveyou.
sometimes the train is a nuclear thermal locomotive
Internal combustion engines were more or less bypassed due to the lack of suitable fuels, and electric motors are extremely expensive with current manufacturing tolerances.
so we get mesbinf[redacted]ing steampunk.
the surface expeditions I've mentioned in the past have generally been solar-thermal or nuclear-thermal steam tanks, not on-foot expeditions.
actually solar thermal doesn't make sense for the same reason solar electric cars don't make sense in the real world. not enough insolation.
Sylandrophol: "where would lithium/rare earth metal stuff be found on mesbin? i'm assuming mesbin is of similar composition of like either the moon or ganymede"
Crust is like that of the Moon but with all the metal ores of Earth. essentially (for simplicity's sake), most minerals are about as common on Earth as on Mesbin, except where the minerals are generated by life. so no limestone for example
yes.: "Is the entirety of the Kaywell system short on Phosphorus?"
just Mesbin system.
SnailsAttack: "because mesbin absolutely f[redacted]ing hates kerbals"
(the original idea for Vitals Mining was that you'd go and bring back vitals from the other planets, before I realized that even one shipment would reasonably REK the economy and I scrapped the idea
SnailsAttack: "what'a the poor bastards even got stacked in their favor?"
Mesbin's got water! Locked up in minerals and in liquid form in caves. And they could make a space elevator out of conventional materials. Not much ice on Mesbin. No surface ice except at the poles, and internal supplies of water are kept nice and warm by tidal heating. The poles don't have oceans.
the Kerbals brought several species of animals and plants from Kerbin. I'll be using names evocative of their analogues on Earth, because worldbuilding new life forms from Kerbin is outside of the scope of WW. They have basic livestock such as cattle, chickens, and pigs. They also have brought dogs of a few different breeds with them. Algae-based food is the main staple of the Mesbinite diet, only the upper class will regularly dine on meat and "conventional" vegetables.
yes.: "Did they happen to bring mini-wardogs with them?"
[ed note: that image comes from a kerbin-based worldbuilding post I made on r/KerbalCulture]
SnailsAttack: "burn it."
yes.: "It's xenofauna. Deal with it."
alas no, though the colony ships did include digital copies of the DNA of many many more species than were actually brought along
Snails: "it's f[redacted]ing nightmare fuel is what it is mate"
like most of the ship's records, they were lost on Mesbin.
the middle class can generally have vegetables on special occasions, and very rarely even meat.
Equus (horses) were brought along too, and show some limited use as beasts of burden.
vegetables include tree nuts (trees and all manner of other "decorative" plant species were brought along), as well as wheat, rice, potatoes, and some fruits.
insects and rats were brought along by accident.
Snails: "do plants need bottleneck elements"
yeah, or at least, if they don't, they're not nutritious enough to survive on. But they do need it.
Snails: "company that kidnaps kerbals to turn them into fertilizer"
(fantastic lore, that)
a known crime. Not super uncommon.
Snails: "Sounds like Cannibalism with extra steps."
QFC, the Questionable Fertilizer Company (officially, the Quarry Freedom Company).
Snails: "plant-stealing might happen every once in a while though. recreational gardens remain under constant surveillence for would-be thieves"
recreational gardens are of course only used by the rich, and generally heavily supplemented with artificial plants.
GrandProtectorDark: "What does the commoner get?"
Snails: "...like in terms of what sorta garden things are open to em or what?"
oh yeah like for sure gardens are open to the public. having a garden that uses up precious Vitals for decoration that normal people aren't even allowed to see? you'd have a riot on your hands!
GPD: "What recreational options does the lower class have? How is their access to fauna/flora"
books and films are popular among the lower class. many of the lower class work as farmers (mostly in the algal goop production, but occasionally in the production of vegetables)
many cities/caves have urban ecosystems built of the insects, birds, rats, and stray pets. so there's usually some animals
and small dogs are a good replacement for a second child if you don't have the money to pay a vitals tax.
GPD: "How you talk about real vegetables, kerbals workin on those would already be considered a higher importance, i would guess."
SnailsAttack: "how could kerbals like theoretically venture to the poles? exosuits could enable movement but it'd still hurt like f[redacted]k. maybe a big cushioned bed in a rover?"
Kerbals haven't gone past 9 Gee as of the start of the game.
SnailsAttack: "1gee already hurts like hell. See how uncomfortable you are right now? your butt hurts and i've made you aware of it."
I was already aware of my uncomfort
GPD: [the poles could be explored with] "unmanned drones."
6G is as far as the inhabited lands go.
there are no complex computers at WW game start. remember that the Kaputnik is the state of the art and it's really a glorified calculator
Snails: "kerbals are already sorta advantaged over us for surviving high-gee environments. they're stocky, and have long arms for gorilla-like movement. assisted walking on all 4s."
GPD: "Is there any kind of ground movement mechanism that could realistically work in 13g?"
about 30 percent of the population lives between 2-3 gees, about 20 percent lives between 3-6 gees, and 50 percent lives between 1.3 to 2 gees.
in Mission of Gravity, Charles Lackland has a space suit
which is probably an exosuit.
but he walks bipedally.
in Mission of Gravity, the native mesklinites are like centipedes
SnailsAttack: "why would kerbals live anywhere but the equator? gravity hurts. the equator is huge"
because there's only so much usable land in terms of easy-to-colonize caves. And besides, the equator is where rocks fall from the sky sometimes!
[at this point the conversation diverges as we try to explain to SnailsAttack what a bearing is.]
Dec/20/2018
[Regarding what caused the Manifest Destiny to crash]
They thought mesbin was spherical and this that their low sciemce-gathering pass on Mesbin would be safe
That's how the manifest destiny crashed
Snails: "oh I read in an earlier thing ye said that they were aiming to orbit kerbmun as a space station and was going off of that"
They were trying to land But there would have been an orbiting station too
GPD: "Wait, Did that station go splat or what happend to it?"
SnailsAttack: "the station was the colony ship idk that’s what he said in an early thing you can search for it with the name of his ship"
The station would have been largely made out of the crewed section of the ship.
GPD: "You kinda made it sound like as if there was a seperate station send in advance"
That's not a bad idea tbh it would be kind of cool to put up a derelict station spawn around Kerbmun!
Regarding Tyepolbynar
yes.: "What's it supposed to mean, anyway?"
it comes from ancient kerbal and it means "the tie that poll'd bynar."
Jan/01/2019
STATMUN HAS NO FUEL
thresomin does
Statmun is literally solid iron with a bit of dust and rust
Snails: "yeah you can combust that"
not in ksp you can't.
anyway, the whole point of the system architecture was to make it easier to launch from Mesbin to interplanetary. On Mesbin it's trivial to launch fuel tankers into low orbit.
Kerbmun of course would find it a lot more difficult.
Jan/05/2019 - Jan/06/2019
yes.: "How's the climate like at Mesbin's poles?"
temperate, but don't be fooled. You'd pop your ears going from laying to standing, and you'd break your bones and have a heart attack at the same time.
SnailsAttack: "omg."
[Ed note: Kerbin and Mun and all of Mesbin's moons by mistake.]
Jan/20/2019
Clonos: "Just realised that spin rhymes with Mesbin"
It is a coincidence Kerbin rhymes with mesbin That is not a coincidence
Jan/30/2019
Images from a Shol probe [Ed note: Modified in photoshop to look like they were taken by a spacecraft camera with different filters]
the images were taken at different times when the color filters were swapped out. This specific camera is the PR camera and takes images at a normal field of view.
Cleaned up.
Snails: "hows it all red like that? are the planet’s gases hot enough to ionize? or something"
it's hot enough to glow red. still gas, not a plasma.
This picture is from the Telephoto Science Camera. The filters are Red, Yellow, and Blue, so this is false color.
The infrared camera photographed the far side of Shol. (False color)
More pictures:
From the second flyby:
From the engineering camera:
Some of the camera scan lines were lost for some of the exposures in this image:
Another Engineering Cam shot:
Here's a two-color image. The blue channel was unusable so I just used the green channel twice, making it appear two-toned grey and red.
Here's what it looked like with the stuck color filter wheel:
you can see the yellow where the plastic holder for the filter obscured part of the blue view letting only the red+green=yellow light through, and the purple region where the full visible spectrum beamed into the camera on the blue pass
here's the raw blue channel:
The secret: take three screenshots one or two seconds apart. split their channels to RGB in your photo editing program of choice. use the red of the first shot, the green of the second, and the blue of the first. then you can sprinkle in whatever noise you want, try to collimate the images if they're not quite lined up, and then combine from RGB.
after the end of the mission, we used Shol to eject us on an orbit that would cross Valyr, and flew by Oshan. The probe was not designed for the darker parts of the solar system, so its cameras are not really fit for this. This picture, largely a failed experiment, used a long exposure on the greyscale and three RGB-filtered exposures for color, with digitally enhanced saturation.
a much clearer image can be seen with just the RGB channels
Engineering Cam of Oshan and Valyr:
It's grainy because the gain had to be turned up--the camera was designed to operate in the blinding light near the sun, not beyond Mesbin.
These images were fun to make, because I was actually flying the mission and pretending to take pictures from the probe, then put them "back together" to make a somewhat authentic probe-like picture.
Feb/06/2019
The planets of Whirligig World to scale. For reference, if this were at RSS scale, Jupiter would fit right in between the sizes of Reander and Tyepolbynar. Shol is huge! Sometime I should do dedicated art of just Shol to really hammer home how puffy this thing is. It's nearly as big as Gememma!
Feb/06/2019
GrandProtectorDark: "How much about Atmospheric rocketry is forgotten over the time there after the crash"
They are practically starting rocket science over from tsiolkovsky-era knowledge. They know the basics about rocket science, but the engineering is completely gone. before the space program, solid fuel rockets had been used in warfare.
GPD: "As usual"
aerodynamics is not well understood at all
they never have to make anything streamlined because train tunnels can be vacuumed out to avoid drag and no one goes very fast in a pressurized area
they know streamlining is a factor. but think straight cones, not curvy bodies
anyway airplanes are not known aside from "hey they had flying machines on Kerbin"
the head of aerospace is of course a middle schooler girl with ADD who kept making paper planes in class
this is canon
GPD: "Are kerbal hyperloops a thing on Mesbin?"
hyperloops: maybe? I think their tech is maybe a little limited for hyperloops. It'd be more expensive than it would be worth.
GPD: "Wait, how did they preserve the Knowledge of Papier Airplanes?"
she just figured it out
she started with paper balls
then moved on to passing notes by folding them into straight sticks
and then discovered aerodynamic lift
yes.: "What sort of paper do they use?"
SnailsAttack: "probably some artificial stuff"
They have tree seeds with them that are grown in some nice neighborhoods, and in my headcanon, kerbals can grow from trees (I have this whole writeup on my take on partial plant kerbal biology)
but
they probably use some kind of bioplastic paper, much cheaper to make
though
it's nowhere near as cheap as it is on Kerbin/Earth
luckily, paper doesn't include any of the extremely expensive vital elements, so any algae used in the production of biopaper can be recycled.
Yes.: "Valyr Space Program-Green Valyr with an aeronautics-centric start. 50% less funds due to lack of motivation(why colonize other bodies when we're living in paradise?). Lowell Space Program-Motivated by the presence of Ollym, but part prices are tripled due to Lowell being a resource-deprived body."
I don't see why Valyr would be more of a paradise than Kerbin, and seeing that Valyr is a super-earth, I don't think it's wise to reduce funding by a whopping 50%
Lowell is not a resource-deprived body, it's just losing its water. Lower funds would be sensible though given that it's smaller. no no no I don't think I'll be doing either any time soon. the next step is probably Derbin Space Program as it's the next logical alternate history after Kerbmun. the U.S.C. Manifest Destiny crashed into Mesbin because their approach to Kerbmun went too close to Mesbin, which was thought to be spherical until the last minute. But had they noticed the mistake earlier, they could have colonized Kerbmun, and thus we have Kerbmun Space Program. But what if they course corrected at the last minute instead of early enough or too late? Then they'd go flying past Kerbmun and into Derbin. If I ever pull a Before Kerbin/After Kerbin I could like have Lowel be green and not have canals, and rejigger the system backwards in time a few million years or so, and do Lowel Space Program.
SkyPhoenix999: "It says that the kerbals were sent out to colonize the system but ended up on Mesbin. Did kerbin die or something or was it just a failed mission the kerbals sent out just because"
in my headcanon, (but not in WW canon because I want to leave it open to interpretation if someone wants to fly a Kaywell interstellar mission with IC from Kerbin), Kerbals had become a multiplanetary species, having already successfully colonized Laythe and starting to colonize Duna and Eve, by the time kerballed interstellar exploration begins.
probes had been sent to many nearby stars for about a century already, and data was just starting to come back from the last of them
and resources pumped into space industry made the prospect of interstellar space missions possible.
I figure probably there was a mission to Barnard which mirrors Rocheworld, but not a colony.
and Kerbmun was selected for one of the first fleet of colony ships after a sail probe determined it to be a fantastic destination.
Feb/21/2019
Adstriduum: "Speaking of things that are thin... Would you still give Mesbin a thin set of rings?"
Probably not. It has a "diffuse ring system." In the form of many many many moonlets.
SnailsAttack:
02/26/2019
WW vacuum-style rocket sketch:
MythicalDonuts: "I just had an idea. Completely nuclear SSTO from Mesbin."
Possible, with Kerbal Atomics. But not with the stock LV-N Nerv. Nowhere near enough TWR. In actual fact the best launch structure you could do on Mesbin would be a space elevator. You could probably even build one between Mesbin and Statmun.
I mean, not in-game, to be clear.
SnailsAttack: "oh that'd be awesome. Turn Statmun into an orbital... space... platform thing."
anyway a Mesbin-Statmun space elevator would be constructed from Steel, after setting up the factory on Statmun. The steel cables would first be extended up away from Statmun, where mass collected by ion-powered tugs stealing moonlets from their orbit would be placed to keep the cables taught. (If it goes straight up from Mesbin and ends at Statmun, there isn't enough centrifugal force to keep the structure taught, and it would need to be a very tall steel tower in high gravity for most of its length.) Then steel cables would fasten the Up Tether to the Down Tether, which is then lowered to Mesbin's surface and attached to the tower base.
Essentially you're building a space elevator that goes beyond geostationary orbit (as all space elevators must do) and connecting it to Statmun coincidentally.
the whole tether might even be built in space next to Statmun, and only actually connected (and it can be literaly welded to statmun's metal) just before connecting it to Mesbin.
it would still be built by factories making use of Statmun's huge amounts of iron.
Statmun Station could then be fed building materials that are rare on Statmun, like organic compounds, and ships constructed at the Statmun Assembly Building. Then they could ride elevator cars up the Up Tether, which at this point might be constructed of more interesting materials like carbon nanomagic, and flung up to meet another tether at Thresomin where it can dock with a station and receive propellant, and then get flung out into a higher orbit. Building tethers on Graymun may be difficult because it's so massive, so the next stop might be Troymin, where you could catch the Down Tether, and ride up to get flung off to escape velocity on the Up Tether.
having this infrastructure would really open up the solar system to Mesbinite Kerbals.
GrandProtectorDark: "Once mesbinites have a reliable way to leave mesbin, wouldn't they want to immediatly evacuate to an proper homeworld?"
Mesbin is still their home.
sure there are better places to go in this homeworld than their homeworld
but this isn't like a single generation has passed and there's nothing but rickety settlements
by this point, Mesbin will have had nearly a thousand years of history and culture.
For the next hundred years, Mesbin will still be the major economic power in the Kaywell system
GPD: "I was more thinking about stories about worlds with a blue sky, free of any rock cealings Being actually withing reality now."
there will be a LOT of tourism as soon as possible, but people will always end up coming home.
because it's just that, their home
Kerbmun will be the first to be settled. You can't breathe there without oxygen masks, but there IS plenty of oxygen there to collect and put in the tanks for breathing
it's a little warmer than Kerbin and the changes in temperature will be foreign to most Mesbinites who live in well climate-controlled space-age cities.
but all you need to live is the technology to produce oxygen
GPD: "But is it habitable (as in if you kickstart plantlife somehow?)"
There's already grass on land, probably some things that you would call bugs, and a rich marine ecosystem
Kerbals will find it easy to terraform. there's enough CO2 for plants to survive easily, and there's plenty of kerbin plant species to plant. As trees and kerbin-grass cover the landscape, (ruining the native environments, of course), Kerbmun will get greener and over time it will become more breathable
GPD: "Some good old Planetary ecosystem factory reset"
it will take a while for that to happen on its own, so Kerbals might set up oxygen-producing factories which convert ocean water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen must be safely stored or used up by nuclear rockets in space, not on Kerbmun itself or in too low an orbit
One problem stopping Kerbals from colonizing Kerbmun with Kerbin plant life is their reliance on elements which are rare in the Mesbin system, such as phosphorus and sulfur (Vital Elements, if you remember that old plan) it will have to be shipped in from elsewhere in the Kaywell system.
but eventually Kerbmun will truly be a second Kerbin.
GPD: "Why are they so rare in the system?"
just bad luck
The next logical step after Kerbmun will be Valyr. It doesn't (and will probably never) have a breathable atmosphere, it's all hydrogen. but there IS water
a LOT of it
even if it is a bit more like bleach than water
again, like Kerbmun, there is a native aquatic ecosystem, but very little is living on the land.
Valyr's oceans are very deep, and only around shores do you get coral reef-like ecosystems where there's enough sunlight for plants to live. They convert methane gas into hydrogen gas, animals do the reverse.
Valyr is easy to land stuff on, but incredibly difficult to launch from
GPD: "Wait. 'Animals' that [breathe] methane. That works?"
according to a paper I read once, yes. instead of carbon dioxide and oxygen, you can use methane and hydrogen for an analogous process. This applies to planets with majority hydrogen atmospheres.
Oshan will also be colonized at the same time as Valyr. Its ice is frozen at the surface for the most part, but the ice is very thin in places, and cool saltwater can be easily extracted. The glacial seas are very shallow, so despite the ice there's a lot of photosynthesis and life going on. In my headcanon, this is the place you're most likely to find sentient or sapient animals.
Snails: "Oh Oshan has life?"
It's got oxygen :D
GPD: "Will kerbals have a talk with humanoid polar bears"
not polar bears. more like seals. aquatic things. think dolphins. sea creatures with some tool use and society, but no civilization.
I won't elaborate too much because sentient life on Oshan is not hard-canon, just headcanon. It's up to your imagination as much as mine at this point.
Egad isn't a very nice place to live, if even a little bit of atmosphere makes it through the airlock cycles, you could get chlorine poisoning. Still, there's plenty of subterranean water and ice, and lots and lots of polar ice, so maybe there will be a small settlement or base, a scientific nature preserve.
Lito's atmosphere will protect from Reander's saturnian levels of radiation. Dakkonme and Totooa are good enough places to put up bases for scientific research, as is Yawer, but these will be less bustling settlements as industrial and scientific colonies. Huge amounts of power can be generated between Yalthe and/or Yokane and Reander's surface, in a process which is also possible on Io/Jupiter. While those moons are unlikely to have permanent settlements of any kind, they are geologically very interesting places that will see many expeditions. Harvesting electrical power from the magnetic field between Yalthe and Reander will net a colony on Lito or the other moons a LOT of economic power.
Tannor, like the icy moons of Reander, will be reasonably good locations for settlements, with the added benefit of LOTS of solar power compared to the outer planets.
Snails: "Bring sunglasses."
Imterril is a terrible place for a colony in the near term. A HUGE amount of any colony's power must be spent on refrigeration, and there's nothing really interesting in that boiling water. Another place to be mostly ignored by settlers and explored only by short expeditions. Its bulk of volatiles is impressive, but it's the same composition as Tannor, and it's MUCH easier to get stuff from Tannor.
Shol will be explored mostly through probes, there's really no reason to go down there unless you're a miner looking for near-Shol asteroids with metal motherlodes.
(Or perhaps if you're getting a gravity assist, but it's hard to imagine needing one that you couldn't get from less dangerous destinations.)
I forgot to mention Derbin and Derminmus
Derminmus has some fairly unique minerals to the Mesbin system, and as much volatiles as Thresomin and Troymin, but with enough gravity you could actually stand up and build domed cities.
Derbin is as hard to leave as Valyr, but it has some bonuses at the late stage of colonization--it has lots of water, albeit in the form of vapor--and the highlands are actually at habitable temperatures and pressures. The air is not breathable, but it's got lots of ores for building stuff and it may even have groundwater. Instead of using boats to cross oceans between continents, you would cross the hot clouds between the continents on airships. (Or just planes I guess :v)
Graymun is about as easy to settle as Mesbin--it's not ideal, but the technology is already there and it's nearby.
Well before all of Kaywell is colonized, Gememma's planets will begin to be colonized as well.
Snails: "gememma colonization delayed as the mesbinites groan and plan for reander infrastructure first"
Ammenon isn't a great place to go except for solar power, which is actually quite an issue around Gememma with its lower energy per photon. There will be settlements devoted to maintaining the solar energy collectors, and keeping them alive won't be too hard with all that water ice along the backside.
Lowel is the best place to colonize outside of Kerbmun.
In fact in some ways it's easier, a Kerbal could breathe on Lowel.
Lowel used to be inhabited by a technological civilization--less advanced than the Mesbinites by this time. It also has a vast ecosystem, the only true land ecosystems in the whole binary system. it's mostly a desert as there's not much ocean to get rain from, but oases near lakes still thrive.
And plants which even strongly resemble food grow along the canals--ancient irrigation systems built by the previous inhabitants of Lowel.
There is much to be learnt about the ancient Lowellians.
resembling paleontology more than archaelogy--the Lowellians have been gone for longer than modern Kerbals have existed as a species.
SnailsAttack: "never thought your system would have more inhabited worlds than mine. would the lowellians have originated on lowel?"
yes.
well.
;)
Lowellians had invented space travel, and their satellites are some of the most well preserved artifacts of their civilization. Only a few remain in Lowel orbit--Ollym tends to disrupt the low orbits and Gememma disrupts the high orbits. but scattered in the rest of the Gememma system are remanants of probes and spacecrafts. perhaps there is some lost crewed mission, one chance to find a preserved Lowellian as they really were in ancient times.
(I actually plan to add them as easter eggs)
Lowel is the true gem of Gememma--and even Kaywell for that matter. Lowel would end up being preserved as a research planet despite it being the best planet for colonization in the whole system.
Gannovar is a possibility for a colony. It's in the habitable zone and you'd be able to breathe there, but the only solid ground is glaciers which freeze and melt depending upon where Gannovar is in its eccentric orbit. And it's ocean for a good deal of the planet's volume. Colonies will float in Gannovar's oceans. There's life here, and a substantial amount of oxygen as a result, which implies that there must be a solid rocky surface and black smokers deep enough down--like what's inside Europa, Enceladus, (and Vall and Eeloo and Dakkonme and Totooa)
if submarines can get down deep enough, they could mine the surface for building materials and the colony could be self-sustaining.
Gannovar, Kerbmun, and Lowel are the only oceans you'd want to swim in at all--debatable for polluted Lowel.
Beagrid is a possible candidate for life in the Mandrake/Rutherford system, but no better than Dakkonme. It and the other Mandrake/Rutherford satellites could be colonized if Saturn's big moons can be.
Pragnik could be colonized if Pluto can be, too.
Ollym can be colonized too, it's just as good as Mars, and a good place to build if you're afraid of touching Lowel--maybe even a place to terraform in the long term. Unlike Valyr and Derbin which have huge unweildy atmospheres, Ollym is a martian clean slate for the most part.
So the main worlds of the future Kaywell/Gememma system will be Mesbin, Kerbmun, Derbin, and Valyr. These places have the potential to grow to be like additional Kerbins given time and developments. These will be more than colonies--they will be true homes, sovereign worlds with their own nations and cultures and histories.
other worlds will be never quite get going, because they'll never be better to live in than the "home"worlds, and won't have the cultural and historical significance of Mesbin. Graymun, Derbin, Etrograd, Tannor, Egad, Lito. Some of these may still be important and have a significant civilian non-industrial population, and even tourism. Some of them will be nations of their own, not colonies, with their own militaries and scientific fleets. Gannovar, Ollym, and Ammenon in the Gememma system.
Oshan is somewhere between Main World and secondary world. Oshan never has as much of a stake in history as the Main Worlds will, but it is a world of its own. Here, kerbals will play out true colonialism, where unlike the rest of the system excepting Lowel, there's a real stake in industrial activities and settlements on Oshan--the lives and ecosystems of Oshan's aquatic life is at stake.
Then there's minor settlements and industrial parks. Living there is more like living on an offshore oil rig or a space station that just happens to be on a planet. The minor planets and moons, and any potential gas giant floating habitats will be relatively unimportant, with few permanent residents.
Over the timescales of solar system colonization, it's also entirely possible that other Kerbal populations across the Interstellar Consortium may come to contact Mesbin. and certainly limited interstellar probes will eventually be launched. maybe even recontact with Kerbin could be made
Adstriduum: "Perhaps the Kerbals in [Adstriduum Planet Pack] will make first contact with the Mesbinites from Mesbin in the [Gregrox-Adstriduum Planet Pack] system"
Snails: "makes your system canon in my [unrealistic] pack just to bug the shit out of you. and by extent taurus [a very unrealistic world.]"
If your system is part of the interstellar consortium, I must acknowledge at least a version of it. I can headcanonize it into a more realistic version if I want though! I mean I don't have to acknowledge it, but I'd like to set a precedent of lore-compatibility in addition to gameplay compatibility.
Feb/28/2019
From Snails:
March/06/2019
an example of a creative liberty I have taken
I know now that the planetary formation of the Kaywell system is quite implausible.
Super-Earths and gas giants don't usually co-exist in the form we see in WW.
in addition, the planet directly before Gememma should be the smallest, as that orbit ought to have been wiped clear of planet-forming gas and dust long ago
but the system is already mostly finished, it's waaaay too late for a redesign pass now.
but I also do my best to make sure everything else is realistic wherever I can.
the question of authenticity is, "does this planetary system adequeately simulate what it'd be like if there was a space program here?" Because obviously if you have a totally unstable system with arbitrary soi boundaries and impossible planets then there is no real-world counterpart to this, there's no educational value there.
so I guess what I really mean is
is it educational? And also, does it conflict with my education?
a realistic solar system design can do two valuable things
it can educate people who use it. It can tell you "this is how it would be if things were like this" and in some way this will relate to some real planets and moons somewhere in the universe.
and on the other hand it can allow people who already know the things to be learned, to enjoy the thing without feeling like they have tonnes of nitpicks
One of the things I really pride myself in with respect to realism is that it's somewhat educational
which is kind of the heart and soul of KSP from my perspective
just as playing on Kerbin will tell you how rockets and orbital mechanics works, playing on Mesbin will teach you some things about centrifugal forces and gravity and will sort of let you intuit the property of apparent gravity reduction near orbital velocity.
Sometimes systems are built to demonstrate something in particular
Tyepolbynar's moons sort of represent the range of possibilities for warm-jupiter moons. There's JifGif, which takes the cometary approach of deep-frying itself in a dark, non-volatile crust. then there's Imterril, which just entirely melted and vaporized into a steamball. then there's tannor, which was so reflective that it never went below freezing. and etrograd and aerious represent captured bodies
March/08/2019
Little bit of Whirligig World lore I thought about last night
So like, from a legal perspective, Statmun is considered Aetheris Mons
and thus a mountain on Mesbin
and the way land claims work is that claims generally are columns of land going straight down to the core of Mesbin.
so this dude gets a piece of land and innocently claims the land under Statmun as his own
so now he owns statmun legally
and he's like really anti-trespassing
so whenever you fly to Statmun for the first time, the Kerbal--Gabbal Fredrodi Kerman--just decides to take pot shots at Statmun trying to hit your ship
Most of the time he shoots straight at Statmun from directly beneath it
but one time he stands just far enough west of statmun that when he fires his gun, the bullets crash back down at the same speed they were fired at, and he gets ded
GPD: "Lol. That's one way to die I guess."
It occurs to me that this method of land claiming might not actually work on Mesbin
it works on Earth because people mostly just use the surface for habitation
but on Mesbin, if you have a cave that like folds around and goes down and there's bits that "overlap" seen looking down towards Mesbin's center, then someone would own both bits of the cave
maybe there's instead like
you don't own the stuff by default, you own volumes, not areas, of Mesbin
(and of course in the communist city-states no one owns land)
GPD: "Wait. There your society is communist?"
Zaffre: "Of course! That's how they get their launch dates on time."
There's a few major nations and many many city states. there's a communist utopia in there somewhere because that's how far left I am.
GPD: "China communist or soviet communist?"
Neither.
neither are true communist, they're both more like fascism. not even close to communism really. in communism, the government is hands off. just like in a free-market capitalism. neither capitalism or communism proper has ever really been done on a large scale. communism is how small societies generally run. just by accident
no one called it that, it's just the nature of how small groups of people operate transactions without money--no "barter" just social credit. the trick is, can communism work as a large-scale economic system? I don't know, but I am skeptical
Thomas P.: "And thats why you cannot implement communism at the government level (and therefor why "communist" states aren't really communist): It is a form of society not a form of government"
exactly
Communism versus capitalism is about economy, not government. governments can be on a spectrum of hands off to hands on. A moderately strong government with some capitalism and some communism would be socialism. a super strong government with some capitalism and some communism might be considered fascism, or at least authoritarian. anyway there's all sorts of government and economic systems on Mesbin.
mostly as small city states.
I think probably there's a "call-themselves-communist-really-authoritarian" nations that's a major power, just because 1960s geopolitical analogy is fun for a space program game. maybe the southern nation that is aggressive towards mesomesbin from the Mission of Gravity MH-pack. there has to be a competing ideology somewhere--nations with democratic values and similar economic systems are generally friendly and allied. two authoritarian states may have the same ideology but hate each other, but doing that would mean the space program is owned by an authoritarian state and if that's your headcanon, then fine, but it's not mine.
The space program is officially the Mesbin Space Probe Company, which implies it's a capitalist agency in a capitalist nation.
but I've also used Mesbin Space Probe Conglomerate, which is more neutral. or Mesbin Space Probe Commission, which is definitely some kind of government thing. Maybe I should do a few different space program flags.
SnailsAttack: "ooh another lore splurge. gregory seizes the means of production"
March/14/2019
I have determined that anyone who desires to play Whirligig World at full RSS scale is an absolute madman. furthermore, I have determined that they absolutely must be allowed to do so.
3/14/19
LOLEPiC243: "So whats the lore explanation for kerbals living on Mesbin?"
Gregrox (me): "^this."
*A story presented on Discord from 3/17/2019
"Charlene, our Kerbmun Planes keep falling apart on entry, what are we going to do about it?"
"I think that we're gunna hafta just send more and more and more till we get it right."
"It's too expensive to keep sending up these probes to keep having them burn up! The budget for Kerbmun aeronautics is running dry, and we only have so many launch vehicles."
"Oh. Huh. Frick."
"You and your team need to figure out how to design an airplane that can survive atmospheric entry before it launches, or we will go back to using heatshields, parachutes, and luck."
later...
"You think this new wind tunnel is gunna work, Anne Lan?"
"Oh you betcha, Charlie."
"Okay. Jebediah! Turn on the rocket motor!" (what better way to test atmospheric re-entry than with a gigantic rocket engine?) later...
"So that rocket wind tunnel was short lived. But we did narrow down the designs."
"That's not good enough."
"I have an idea."
"What is it?"
"Let's launch all six designs at once!"
"You're insane, kid."
"No, no, no, see we'll build 1/6th scale models of each of the plane designs, real dumb things with just a transmitter and a clock, and we'll toss 'em over to Kerbmun."
"I'm listening..."
"Whichever plane survives the trip will be the final model. It's just two Heavy Lifter launches. One for the test planes, one for the final mission. And we can test that final one in a rebuilt rocket-powered wind tunnel, too."
03/19/2019
Valyrians would be comfortable on most Mesbinite cities--a little under half of Mesbin settlements would be at gravities above 2 gee, with progressively fewer settlements at higher gravities. Derbin and Valyr are twins in a similar way that Venus and Earth are. Mesbin, had it not been spun up early on, would have been a gas giant.
LOLEPiC243: "now lets just imagine the Kerbals terraformed Oshan. Now we have Kerbals living under 0.35g. These Kerbals would need bone implants and such if they ever want to visit Derbin or Valyr as those worlds would have 6x the gravity." LOLEPiC243: "I wonder how the gravity differences causing them to not be able to live on each-others worlds naturally would affect culture" LOLEPiC243: "And then you would have Kerbmun Kerbals who could handle both gravities"
Adstriduum: "I don't think Oshan can be terraformed"
Bill: "All I have to say is... if you're stubborn enough, anything can be terraformed."
Oshan could be terraformed. Fairly easily even. Just melt the ice and you have suddenly drastically decreased the albedo of the moon. Introduce a strong greenhouse atmosphere and it will be done.
Adstri: "isn't the gravity too low though? Plus I'd imagine that it lacks a significant magnetic field"
SnailsAttack: "It's a good ways from the sun. idk what the gravity is though."
Adstri: "in my mind oshan could be terraformed, but the conditions wouldn't be earthlike enough to provide a comfortable environment"
In general, icy worlds can't be terraformed in the normal sense Lito would melt into poisonous water. in fact the whole thing is almost pure volatiles no rocky core really
03/19/2019
Ammenon was, counter-intuitively, the second planet to be discovered around Gememma. Before the invention of the telescope, Gememma was the subject of much study. Astronomer Annie Kerman monitored the light of Gememma with a photometer that was pointed at Gememma and left on a clock drive for several weeks. The data showed that, in addition to regular sunspots, occasional stellar flares, and occultations from Mesbin, the light curve showed something unexpected--little dips in the light for a few moments at a time, with a periodicity of about ten hours. At first she thought it was some strange variability cycle of the star. Much later, astronomer Crimmenon Kerman discovered that the dip in Annie's light curves could be explained by a dwarf planet in a low orbit around Gememma. The planet carries the name Annie and Crimmenon's Planet, but since that's quite the mouthful and didn't have the benefit of a popular science fiction novel canonizing the long name, the official nickname of "Ammenon" stuck. The planet--or dwarf planet--or arguably even moon--is thought to be extremely hot.
03/21/2019
Mesbin's like a giant-planet-mass super-earth before it was hit with "Mestheia" and became a synestia. The original Mesbin would have still had a much larger rocky core compared to its hydrogen envelope, but the hydrogen/helium atmosphere would still have been so thick the planet would have been indistinguishable from a gas giant as seen from space. Maybe 10% atmosphere by volume.
Then "Mestheia" (Mesbin-Theia) hits Proto-Mesbin, spinning it up into a synestia structure--a Mantle/Atmosphere/Disk. The hydrogen/helium is super-heated and easily escapes the synestia, leaving behind a synestia with a much thinner gas content. Once the synestia cools, forming Kerbmun, Graymun, and Notmun (which is not a moon anymore since it eventually got torn apart into a ring, its core became Statmun), Mesbin is a triaxial ellipsoid shape like Haumea. Spinning too fast to be oblate. It still has a thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, several hundred atmospheres of pressure. But it's connected smoothly at the tips of the equator to an atmosphere disk. This atmosphere disk fades smoothly out past where Kerbmun is now, as the gas is slowly siphoned out into space.
Tidal dynamics with Mesbin's moons slow its rotation over time, the atmosphere gets thinner and thinner, to a few atmospheres of pressure. Mesbin is now circular at the equator, an oblate spheroid. At this point, its equator would experience less than 1 gee of gravity. Notmun gets torn apart, and its debris becomes embedded in the atmosphere disk, and statmun forms as discussed before.
A huge impactor strikes a deep crater into Mesbin's north pole. Atmosphere fills the crater and shit I gotta go! I'll continue this in a bit...
[Ed note: I never continued that]
03/29/2019
![Drawing of all WW planets to scale] (https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/366324807832305675/561245880162975804/IMG_20190329_134715_594.jpg)
Mesbin may be huge but it's nothing compared to Shol!
[Ed note: In RSS terms, Kerbmun is about the size of Earth, and Jupiter is between the size of Tyepolbynar and Reander. Shol is HUGE.]
![the inside cover of the mesbin sketchbook] (https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/366324807832305675/561320074687021056/20190329_184434.jpg?width=545&height=407)
Shol is almost as big as the star Gememma.
03/29/2019
GrandProtectorDark: "Some thought I had. Is there something like an "empire strengh gradient" going from equator to polar regions?"
GPD: "As in the strong factions secure themself prime "land" around the nice regions of "normal" pleasant levels of gravity? And the weaker, the further away are factions pushed from the nice gravity"
I don't think so. Kerbals native to a given gravitational environment find it comfortable.
GPD: "Hmm ok."
GPD: "Dunno how much extra gravity is too much for comfort."
Kerbals dont like too much higher gravity so expansion is gradual and slower with increasing gravity that's why they're only up to 6 Gee after nearly a thousand years.
SnailsAttack: "imagine climbing stairs in 6 gees of gravity. 1 gee stairs already sucks."
They don't use stairs, they use ramps. Spiral ramps sometimes to save space.
Snails: "oh right they're probably all in wheelchairs or somethin lol"
Nah. Lot of wheelchairs to support visitors from lower gee. But most of the high gee kerbals walk on all fours.
the population lasted a long time at equatorial gravity, and was small for the first 500 years or so when the population really started growing, all the equatorial real estate was taken up and further north and south had to be colonized and it's slowly been going further from equatorial for the next 400 or so years i have not narrowed down exactly how long kerbals have been on Mesbin aside from "about a thousand years" so it could be as low as 700 years probably not more than a thousand though
3/30/2019
Kerbals from Kerbin are perhaps aware of the Mesbin colony, but they have a principle of noninterference which is argued to apply to lost colonies such as Mesbin.
APRIL 1st 2019
[Ed note: to be clear, this was an April Fool's Joke. I have to be clear because some people seemed to not realize.]
I'm releasing 1.0 today!
Let me show you the new feature:
Gurren Lagann: "I bet it's even more realism."
Of course
you know me
all realism all the time
New, realistic Graymun texture
New, realistic Kerbmun texture
New, realistic Valyr texture
New, realistic Reander texture
New, realistic Ammenon texture
New, realistic Lowel and Ammenon textures
New, realistic Shol texture
New, realistic Imterril and Tyepolbynar texture
And of course a new, realistic Gememma texture
SnailsAttack: ":o"
SnailsAttack: "those look AWESOME. wait. you didn't take this opportunity to do Mesbin??????????"
That one isn't finished yet.
Snails: "Oh okay. I'm gonna get back to work now."
Gurren Lagann: "I knew it all along. New, realistic textures for everything. Everything was GPP-ized."
[Ed note: not sure if he gets that it was an april fool's joke and that's all Mesbin's texture.]
This date is a wonderful date to make realistic planets.
04/09/2019
The difference on Mesbin is that you don't get nearly as much Phosphorus and Sulfur.
Snails: "just skip all them inbetween steps and spoon lunar regolith directly into your mouth"
MythicalBagels: "Sounds tasty."
Snails: "that’s not your insides being torn apart by spiky particulates of ejecta it’s just spice. that’s actually way more food than I would have thought u could get out of just rocks and stuff."
keep in mind that's just by elemental composition. And a cubic meter is a LOT of dirt.
SnailsAttack: "would take an awful lot of
industrial processing
probably a lot of ways to do it though
chemically, separation via centrifuge or filters, melting/burning"
And then you have to do vastly more interesting chemistry to turn carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and trace elements into things like sugars and proteins
The technology to manufacture even very basic nutrition from rock does not exist on Earth today, let alone pre-spaceflight Mesbin
But plants can work wonders with very simple compounds of those elements
Mesbin has always had at least decent electricity generation, and the dominant metal used everywhere is aluminium, as it comes from breaking apart the soil to get oxygen
Snails: "wait really?
huh
I figured it wouldn’t be so hard
and was wondering why we still use plants besides the pre-existing infrastructure built around the things"
your body doesn't need just simple compounds that can be easily generated from chemistry, it needs really complex things like amino acids and proteins and all sorts of complicated junk.
04/11/2019
LOLEPiC243: "how would the higher gravity on Valyr make society there different from Kerbmun?
I suspect Valyr for example would have more aerodynamic planes because the atmosphere is thicker but the gravity is higher too
And also the much longer flight times
As such, we could assume Valyr having a lot more Concorde like supersonic planes
But with more fuel to actually travel the distances."
Valyr society wouldn't really be different due to the gravity. Buildings would be half the size, stairs would be wider. The main difference is Valyr's nonbreathable atmosphere. The water is more toxic until it's filtered out.
Habitats on Valyr will be pressurized to the same pressure as the exterior, which is within the realm of human (and therefore kerbal) habitability. Nitrogen narcosis would probably occur at these pressures, so the habitats will mostly have helium (which is not rare on Valyr), with the same nitrogen and oxygen partial pressures as on Earth/Kerbin, perhaps with some regional differences. It may be wise to increase oxygen partial pressure to help account for the extra energy necessary to get around. It would probably be more like living on Mesbin, except you'd live aboveground just like on Kerbmun. All the water has to be filtered, all air must be electrolosyzed.
LOLEPiC243: "Ooh I didn't know the toxic atmosphere detail interesting
Wait what is the temperature there?"
Comparable to Earth. I don't remember exactly.
LOLEPiC243: "If it's habitable for kerbals I could see them all walking around out with oxygen masks etc So what makes the water toxic?"
It's basically bleach. [Ed note: not literally, I mean that it's very basic. It's ammonia-rich water.]
LOLEPiC: "Ohk so its pH is very high. So would it even still be water at that point?"
yeah still mostly water.
oh right no oxygen masks btw.
LOLEPiC: wot
hydrogen/oxygen is too flammable
LOLEPiC: "Oh it's a hydrogen atmosphere. So if your suit cracks you'll explode."
You dont need a pressure suit, but you do need an airtight suit
something like a hazmat suit with a life support backpack
LOLEPiC: "would Valyr still have a blue atmosphere if it's that composition?"
yes
atmospheres are blue from rayleigh scattering
which is true of any colourless gas.
The atmosphere is not toxic, so airlocks have grated floors to collect water from steam, and they just burn off excess hydrogen before filling the airlocks with helium/nitrogen/oxygen breathing mix, and burn off the oxygen when filling it back up with hydrogen. The methane will also burn.
LOLEPiC: "ohk so it's breathable save for the hydrogen."
No it's not breathable, it's just not a poison. any carbon monoxide produced from the methane/oxygen reaction can be scrubbed out, but CO and CO2 should mostly hang around the bottom of the habitat anyway since it'd be a lot heavier than the mostly helium breathing mix, which is why co2 scrubbers are always on the floors of habitats.
Terraforming probably should not happen on Valyr. There's native life there that kinda needs the hydrogen.
LOLEPiC: "multicellular?"
aye, fishies. Nothing interesting on land. Which is why it does still make sense to settle the planet. The most complex land life in the Kaywell-A system is the grass on Kerbmun. Valyr has no oxygen. the exhalations in the atmosphere that tell you life is there is Methane.
LOLEPiC: "would you did if you ate those fish?" [Ed note: "would you exhale methane" I think is what he means.]
Methane and Hydrogen replace CO2 and Oxygen (but in different ratios obviously). the fish are entirely incompatible biochemistry. it might taste okay as long as you got rid of anything actually toxic. but no nutritional value from it.
LOLEPiC: "Ohk so like eating rubber or plastic."
I can imagine medicines and stuff, maybe even spices, being found in the life on Valyr. By default anything you eat would be bitter or dangerous from the basic ocean, but after you remove the ammonia, it could be fine. Certain similarities in the chemistry might exist, there might be some nutrients that are common between the two. by elemental composition it'd be very similar. but the actual compounds might be very different.
LOLEPiC: "How deep are Valyrs oceans?"
Pretty darn. But not deep enough for pressurized hot ice to form. There's still a sandy surface down there.
Valyr's atmosphere is actually mostly nitrogen, but the hydrogen partial pressure is still quite high.
04/12/2019
No one: ...
Adstriduum:
04/16/2019
[Ed note: I was testing principia compatibility with the Mandrake/Rutherford system, finding that with the osculating elements given to principia, the system is very unstable]
Well that's not... right.
Troymin don't do this to me.
DRASTIC PROBLEMS CALL FOR DRASTIC MEASURES 😐
SnailsAttack: "I don't understand one word of that."
Well crap. It seems like Lowel and Ollym are genuinely unstable. Tides from Gememma pull Ollym into a more inclined orbit, and this also boosts up the eccentricity.
GrandProtectorDark: "Wait. How is your system not stable? Of all modmakers, I'd expect your mods to be basically stable by default."
Whirligig World had always been from the start my least stable design
or so I had thought
turned out I could get Mesbin system to work in principia without too much modification
and I always make it a point to consider the stability of any orbits I create
but sometimes physics surprises you
I hadn't considered how the inclined orbit of Lowel/Ollym would affect what should otherwise be a perfectly stable orbit.
SnailsAttack: "How about the Mandrake system?"
it's falling apart due to the inclined orbit AND some other problem which I have yet to find the root of
SnailsAttack: "Oh."
05/01/2019
The next update, 0.10.0, will probably be the final development version before 1.0.0. And since it is still in development there's still time to make an important set of major changes to the planet pack.
The trouble is, I never checked Principia compatibility for the last several versions of Whirligig World. And parts of the system fall apart. Now most people would probably just make a principia-specific patch to fix those problems and call it a day, but unfortunately I'm not most people. When I started work on Whirligig World, I thought it was uncharacteristically unrealistic for me, but over time I've polished it, made it more realistic, and found justifications for things that I thought were unrealistic. I've sunk a lot of thought and effort into making Whirligig World a realistic system, and I feel I would always regret pushing Whirligig World to 1.0 with an unstable system, too late to fix anything for fear of ruining people's games. The Principia patch therefore must apply to the stock physics as well (aside from the axial tilt.)
Here's a list of stability problems with Whirligig World in Principia:
- Troymin, supposed trojan of Kerbmun, orbiting Mesbin, gets its eccentricity increased until it flies by Kerbmun.
- Kerbmun's orbit does not seem to change as much as Troymin's does leading up to the flyby, which leads me to suspect it might be a problem with how the trojan is set up and not a problem with perturbations from Derbin, but I'm not sure. I would really like to preserve Troymin as a Kerbmun Trojan as best as possible, even if that means moving Kerbmun, but it's possible there's a better solution involving tweaking Kerbmun's orbit.
- Ollym's orbit around Lowel is unstable.
- Due to Lowel's inclined orbit around the nearby red dwarf Gememma, Ollym's inclination and eventually inclination gets significantly pumped up until Ollym crashes into Lowel. (And then it continues to evolve because principia doesn't collide planets) This appears to be a real instability, not an integration problem. I suspect the only solution is to reduce the inclination of Ollym with respect to Lowel's orbit, which will of course destroy the unique axial tilt and equatorial ice belt of Lowel.
- Mandrake and Rutherford's minor moons, despite being a Pluto/Charon/Moons clone in mass ratios and orbit ratios, will fall apart quickly.
- I suspect there is probably a way to fix the resonance since it should be identical to the one in real life.
I haven't decided exactly what I'm going to do about Kerbin and Troymin, but it will probably involve a pretty major change in their orbit.
As for Lowel and Ollym, I don't want to get rid of Lowel's ice belt and axial tilt, so instead I'm going to separate Lowel and Ollym into different orbits. I'm not sure if they'll stay together as trojans, if they remain nearby, or if I move Ollym further out to be more like a Mars analogue, but they're no longer going to be a binary.
Mandrake and Rutherford's satellites ought to be stable since they're based upon the stable Pluto/Charon system. I can tell that part of the instability seems to be a pumping up of the moons' inclinations, likely from tides from Gememma, so Mandrake's orbit will be made much less inclined. If that doesn't solve the problem, and I suspect it won't, there may be some way I can change the specifics of how the orbits are defined so that they remain in their resonance and aren't thrown out by Rutherford. If not, I'll have to break up the Pluto analogy and further separate the orbits.
In somewhat less user-affecting news, WW 0.10.0 will include a new prerequisite (which will come with the pack alongside Kopernicus-Expansions) called Scientific Revolution, which allows for a better way of defining science definitions. I'll also be tweaking the user experience of homeworld switching somewhat. I intend to separate the actual homeworld swap from the lore changes, and there will be three sets of lore (sci-defs, descriptions, science multipliers), Mesbin, Kerbmun, and Generic. Generic will be used for Interstellar Consortium, as well as rare cases when you're not sure if the player is from Mesbin, Kerbmun, or Kerbin.
05/01/2019
So Troymin is stable in US2
so there's some weirdness with how I need to define the orbits in principia, and I don't know what it is.
a similar and insurmountable problem occurs with Mandrake and Rutherford. The system is provably stable, but it is not stable in principia because of how the orbits are defined.
SnailsAttack: "sounds like a pretty dumb issue. i think a principia patch would be better than trying to drastically change the whole gememma system. i know thats not what ye wanted to do though. cuz it seems like your system should be stable under normal circumstances."
I want to make things stable in the real world. no matter what I do with principia, Lowel and Ollym wouldn't be stable irl. it's not an integration error, it's inclination pumping.
SnailsAttack: "oh well yeah those should definitely be adjusted. but if the mandrake system instability is principia's fault and not the real world's you should probably just have a principia patch for it rather than changing it for the non-principia version. well, unless it ends up being better for both"
I might make a principia-specific patch for M&R, and maybe for Troymin if I can't get that to work. troymin -> kerbmun moon.
Snails: "would probably be best. not sure how you'd fix lowel and ollym though given that they need(?) to be in gememma's habitable zone and not get disrupted by m&r. could push m&r further out"
There's no planetary stability problems, it's all in the moons.
Snails: "wouldnt making em further apart fix the moon instability though. making the planets themselves further apart i mean"
Snails: "or join the dark side >:)"
No, it wouldn't help.
05/01/2019
[Ed note: egg is the developer of Principia]
[Me to egg:] the sim i was doing with troymin didn't use km scale tolerance. I dunno what it used, because i didn't disable auto accuracy or whatever the new version of that is
My assumption had been, and perhaps that's wrong, that if the sim had a low accuracy and more perturbations, then if it remained stable then it still proved that the thing would really be stable.
egg: "yeah nope
if the sim has low accuracy, whether it's more or less stable will heavily depend on the choice of integrator
not sure how pefrl will fare there, it's a bit off the beaten track
(it also heavily depends on the specifics of the system)
you have taken a robust integrator with Principia and set a very small timestep, so my expectation is that any difference with US2 will come from either integration error on the US2 side (overly large tolerance for the system + integrator) or different initial state"
I have no idea why troymin shouldn't be possible (it should work perfectly on paper, so to speak) , so I'm more inclined to assume it's a different initial state
egg: "oh yeah it ought to be possible
that is, a trojan ought to be possible
describing that thing by its orbital elements is asking for pain though"
egg: "as for getting elements that work, the easiest might be to do it from first principles in the circular restricted 3-body problem and to compute osculating elements by hand from there."
I haven't even got the dimmest clue how to go about that.
[Ed note: some time passes, during which I "fix" troymin by tilting it to 30 degrees inclination.]
egg about the 'dimmest clue': "asking an egg probably."
egg: "I feel the 'tilt it 30 degrees' solution is a bit boring."
[Ed note: I changed the system by making Ollym its own planet getting about as much light as Mars, decreasing the inclination of Mandrake's orbit so it's nearly in an ordinary plane. Still need to tilt troymin and move rutherford for the principia-specific orbits patch as of 5/29/2019]
05/04/2019
Don't get too excited, this is a bug, not a feature.
05/07/2019
Scatterer's new scaledspace mesh mod is great.
05/12/2019
Presented without comment.
05/28/2019
*Written in response to a worldbuilding prompt "How often do people bathe in your world?"
The Kerbals on the planet Mesbin live in caves and lava tubes underground since there is no atmosphere at the surface.
Water is not impossible to find, but does rely on technology to make use of, there's no natural potable water within the planet. As a redult, water is conserved heavily. But hygeine is also important, otherwise the Kerbals would start killing each other or themselves over the stench, which naturally wouldn't help the issue. (And diseases would spread)
Mesbinites therefore mostly bathed with damp and soapy washcloths that are boiled or microwaved to disinfect. Graywater is dumped into the graywater plumbing network (or in some places, the normal sewage plumbing network) and freshened up for others to use. There is a specific daily water ration per person, but this can be increased if it's needed (staying hydrated when ill, when pregnant, or if you get REALLY dirty and need a bath.) Overuse or misuse of this can get your extension privelages revoked, or cause you to receive a fine or jail time. In Mesomesbin, the nation with the space program, the society is fairly socialist, so you only need to pay for water extensions, not the default water ration.
Other more unfettered capitalist states require that citizens pay for any water they consume. (Causing lots of bad hygeine because poor people will only pay for enough water to survive on) Some have exceptions but only for disabled people. Some places provide as much water as is necessary for free, especially if they are cities that have a big water industry, or if they're very socialist.
Very wealthy mesbinites will take baths or even showers, though the latter re-use greywater internally so they're not too wasteful. A bath is viewed as a luxury, a shower is viewed by the non-rich as decadent.
Some places may have common baths, which exist far more to fullfil the luxury of bathing rather than the hygeine part, as it's expected that you arrive and leave more or less clean. They're effectively public hot tubs, and one of the more successful businesses operating these spaces is the Dawton Kerman Family.
05/28/2019
Creation myth? While the voyage of the colonists that traveled to Mesbin has been warped and mythified over the centuries in different ways by different cultures, there's no creation myth per se. My headcanon also presumes a secular origin of the Kerbol solar system, planet Kerbin, and the Kerbal species, which is analogous to humans and the earth.
In-game, the clock starts on the Vernal Equinox (or the equivalent of it) with year zero being the year that the Space Program starts. Canonically, the calendars start on the Vernal Equinox, the year that the U.S.C. Manifest Destiny crashed into Mesbin and the colony was set up. Thus there's B.M.D. (Before Manifest Destiny) and A.M.D. (After Manifest Destiny). In stock KSP canon, the clock also starts the day that the space program starts. In my headcanon there would be some other calendar with an older dividing date, but I haven't fleshed it out.
05/28/2019
Written in response to a prompt on r/Worldbuilding "What are some interesting weather formations on your world?"
I suppose this is a bit of a stretch but... sometimes it "rains" rocks.
The planet Mesbin is a supermassive rapidly rotating world (rotating once every 28 minutes) with an oblate shape and no atmosphere. Most people live underground in terraformed caves and lava tubes. The world was colonized by the U.S.C. Manifest Destiny when it crashed into Mesbin's equatorial bulge on its way to the Earthlike habitable moon it was aiming for. But there is increasingly more and more surface structures over time, and the equator with its moderate gravity is prime real estate.
Structures have had to deal with hypervelocity micrometeoroid impacts on the surface for a lomg time. Even small specks of dust can do a lot of damage if they hit the ground in excess of 30 km/s, which is by no means unheard of here. This is solved by heavily armoring anything that needs to stay on the surface for large periods of time.
Whipple shields which turn meteoroids into a spray of dust (or at these speeds, let's be honest, probably vapor or plasma) which hits a backplate are standard, and thick layers of foam and ceramics absorb worse impacts.
But sometimes armor can only go so far. Mesbin has a diffuse ring of small bits of debris called "moonlets", ranging from large stones to house-sized boulders. They are mostly in stable orbits, but sometimes a chunk will enter an unstable resonance with one of the moons and it will be turned into a "mountainscraper", or worse, actually hit the planet. Now these collisions are actually fairly slow, as the rotation speed of the planet is not much lower than orbital speed. Usually you won't get anything faster than 3 km/s. They're also a lot less common than micrometeorites. Usually they'll just hit random ground and make a modest crater. But sometimes large chunks hit surface structures, causing SERIOUS damage.
Once, a falling moonlet did not QUITE hit the ground, but instead hit the side of a tall hotel, completelly destroying the building. The resulting spray of debris had its orbit lowered to be in a near 1:1 resonance with Mesbin's rotation, and after more rocks fell from the sky in the same location over the next few fortnights, there was a single large moonlet remaining in an unstable 1:1 orbit for several months. Its orbit was tracked, and its final destination was tracked to a mountain that was being extensively mined. The collision would collapse the mineshafts, but the company refused to lose time evacuating the site, so they lost the lives of most of their workers instead.
Mesbin also experiences modest solar weather. Solar Kaywell wind and other forms of ionizing radiation are monitored constantly by astronomers so that surface crews can find shelter during a flare. Mesbin's powerful magnetic field protects against the majority of solar wind and Kaywell is a calmer star than the Sun, so this is not as important as it would be for, say, the Moon.
05/29/2019. A short story.
A thousand years ago, a huge shining silver and white cylinder blasted through space, boring a tunnel through a fairly dusty region of the local galaxy at a reasonable fraction of the speed of light. As fast as it was going, it was trying its damnest to slow down, which it could only do by, essentially, detonating the combined nuclear armament of every nation on Kerbin at the start of World War III. Every second. Anyone watching down carefully in the direction of travel during the brief reprieve between instances of Nuclear Armageddon would see a bright blue star, getting brighter and whiter with each passing day. And looking up through the vast cupola at the front of the ship would see a dim orange star getting dimmer and whiter with each passing day. Emblazoned on the side of the ship in brilliant glowing white text was the name of the vessel: U.S.C. Manifest Destiny. It would still be another year of deceleration before the Manifest Destiny arrived at its destination: the exomoon Kaywell A-dII, also known as Kerbmun.
A little green woman -- Dr. Jenala Kerman -- floated down the ladders leading to the Mission Control Deck. She shyly peeked her head into the room.
Two dozen crew in button-down shirts with ties and Kerbal Interstellar Consortium Badges on their shoulders were sitting in front of computer screens, idly typing, glancing at the viewscreen in the center of the room, unpacking snacks, and writing on sticky-notes.
Jenala pulled herself towards the desk of the FlIght Dynamics Officer. He didn't look up. Jenala took a deep breath.
"FIDO, I have some concerns with the Oberth-maneuver you've scheduled," Jenala Kerman said.
"What is that woman doing on the bridge? She's not in uniform," said the Flight Dynamics Officer, Gimmal Kerman, only glancing up at Jenala for a brief moment.
"Let's hear what she has to say, Gimmal," said Hidbrud Kerman, the Head of Mission Control.
"I'm Dr. Jenala Kerman. I'm an astronomer and a trajectory analyst, and I've been monitoring our trajectory with respect to Kaywell A-d."
"We're calling the planet by its proper name, ma'am," Gimmal sneered.
"With all due respect Mr. FIDO, I believe we're on a collision course with Kay--err--Mesbin," Jenala said.
"That's absurd," Gimmal said, pulling up the files on his computer screen, "See, look at this. We have a safety factor of 1.5, well within mission tolerances. We'll avoid the radius of Mesbin by the radius of Kerbin!"
"I've double-checked my observations, and ran it through a few of my colleagues. My math checks out. We're on a collision course. Just barely, but very certainly," insisted Jenala.
"Well WE double checked with MechBob 9000. And its math checks out for sure. Periapsis will be no closer than two thousand kilometers from the center of the planet," Gimmal said.
"That's not what the problem is. No offense intended, but if you don't issue a course correction we will actually crash. No doubt about it," Jenala said, punching one fist into the other.
"Hmm... I'm inclined to trust Mr. Gimmal," said Hidbrud, "and I'm especially inclined to trust MechBob. We'll look into the problem. You should get back up to the habitation section before we decelerate."
Jenala lingered for a few moments, as Hidbrud turned around to talk, quietly, to another Mission Control Officer, before turning around. "You're dismissed, Dr. Jenala," Hidbrud said. Jenala, worriedly, climbed back up the ladder and out of the room.
"We'll send Jenala," she mumbled to herself, "it's her data, it'll be great." Jenala made her way back up to the habitat module, muttering "sure, send the shy woman, that'll solve our problem."
"MULCH! MULCH! That Kraken-sworn egg-head was right. BOOSTER, we have to abort NOW!" Gimmal said.
"What? WHAT?" Said the BOOSTER officer.
"SHE TRIED TO TELL ME, I CAN'T BELIEVE I MISSED IT," yelled Gimmal.
"WHAT WAS IT?" Hidbrud yelled, running over to Gimmal.
"LOOK AT THE VIEWSCREEN OF MESBIN. SEE THAT?" Gimmal's eyes were wide. A vast, parabolic terrain was laid out before them, and it was gradually getting larger.
"OH MY GOD," Exclaimed Hidbrud. Gasps and expletives were uttered in the room, which fell silent for a moment.
"The curvature of the horizon... it's... it's oblate. The pile of mulch must be spinning faster than a whirligig, the thing's twice as wide as we thought it was."
Gimmal desperately tried to lay out a flight plan, but the surface was getting closer and closer. Finally he yelled out, "DAMNIT BOOSTER JUST TURN THE ENGINES ON AS MUCH AS YOU CAN!"
The BOOSTER officer complied and issued an order to the engine room to double up the nuclear charges and detonate ASAP. There was no time to ready the inertial dampers. Hidbrud issued a Red Alert and everyone strapped into their seats, reclining them back to turn them into acceleration couches. The first nuclear charge went off, slamming everyone down into the back of their seats. This was accompanied by expletives. More than a few of the Mission Control crew thought, for a brief second, that that was it, they had crashed, they were dead. The thought wore off just long enough for the terror to come back a second later when the crew were slammed into their seats again. This repeated a few times. The novelty wore off after a minute.
"GUIDO, status?" Screamed Hidbrud.
"Velocity down to 900 meters per second, altitude uncertain," said the Guidance Officer.
Ten seconds later, the blasts stopped, and the Guidance Officer said, "We've stopped. FIDO, you had better have a plan, because we're falling, and I have no clue how high we a--"
Before he finished his sentence, everyone was slammed into their seats one last time.
The nuclear pulse engine and engineering decks were completely pulverized, exploding into a mass of rock, dust, and twisted metal as it smashed into the surface. The mission control deck was flattened like a tin can, as well as the main computer deck and the lower habitation decks. The upper half of the Manifest Destiny rested for a few moments on the smashed debris after it finally came to a stop. And the it began tilting, until it fell over, deforming but not breaching the whole starboard of the spacecraft. The interstellar dust shield, a large flat disk at the front of the ship, shattered into huge chunks as it hit the surface.
Jenala woke up on the starboard wall of her quarters. It was a mess, with furniture, papers, filing cabinets, her computer, and her chair dumped unceremoniously around her. She tried to stand, before shouting to no one in particular, "HECK!" Her leg was broken, but she had mostly shouted out of frustration. "Now what?" She mumbled to herself.
She looked out the window of her cabin. She could see a black sky and a bright rocky Munlike surface, the reflected light from which was the only thing that was lighting up the room.
"Welcome to Mesbin," Jenala said, and rested her head back on the wall.
05/29/2019
NatsuX: "so in 1000 years nobody worked on an engine to get out till the Space Program?"
You gotta remember that even though they had built the technology to do ISRU and stuff to survive, for a very long time the tech level (and the economy, even!) was very low.
and for a few generations, the people living underground didn't even really care about leaving mesbin
NatsuX: "Yeah that covers like a few 100 years
They would start doing research around Year 300 imo"
we start with a few hundred people. You need a few million and a strong economy to have a space program.
and expansion is difficult when you have to mine huge amounts of rock to find the vital elements necessary for population growth
NatsuX: "But that doesn't assume the fact that these are already space faring"
they are not spacefaring. at first they can barely produce materials that can hold up against the vacuum.
GrandProtectorDark: "They probably did not crash with an entire spacecraft construction industry."
NatsuX: "They would have if they landed properly"
True.
GPD: "Knowing how to make a rocket is useless if you don't have the tools for it"
Even truer.
GPD: "or the spare resources."
NatsuX: "Yes, but that doesn't mean development stops for a thousand years"
It does though. because it's my world.
again, the "thousand years" could very well be a thousand mesbin or kerbin years. so it'd really only be about 300 or 400 earth years.
GPD: "You basically have to get a society back running from nothing. Hard enough on a habitable world"
Snails: "i think it could easily take a thousand years to build up their society enough to support a space program"
GPD: "Even harder in a place that doesn't support sapient life (by default)"
Snails: "Mesbin's tough."
NatsuX: "I'd say it would take half the time"
Snails: "I'd add another half."
I think you're underestimating how difficult space really is, NatsuX.
for a long time, surface exploration was not even plausible
people mostly lived out their entire lives in small settlements, with very little population growth.
Vacuum-tight, meteoroid-safe equipment on Mesbin was extremely heavy for a very long time, because the manufacturing tolerances neccesary for good, lightweight pressure vessels took a very long time to develop, and there was very little pressure to even begin developing until after surface exploration started. Then the Mesbinites had to practically relearn astronomy from scratch, realize that space would be a cool place to go, and only then could people actually start working on those things. Coinciding with better and better manufacturing tolerances and a public that is more and more interested in space, we finally get a space program with about the same manufacturing tech level as the real Earth one, but just with a lot more experience in keeping pressure vessels sealed and running closed life support.
June/4/2019
Possible design for a Manifest Destiny. Featuring: More Boosters.
Snails: Did it leave from Dres?
Gregrox: in this take, yeah, it was built in Dres orbit and leaves from Dres.
After Gilly was strip-mined of most of its valuable minerals, and given that almost all of the other planets in the system are either useless or protected, the best place to extract huge amounts of material was Dres.
The two MASSIVE quarries shown on Dres are each about a hundred years old. Processing plants store all the useful elements that are mined out for later transportation to factories
Dres has become extremely politically relevant in the future, but also hell.
Adstri: What state was Kerbin in when the Kerbals left for Mesbin?
Gregrox: that's beyond the scope of WW canon.
but I imagine that the kerbol system had been colonized and inhabited for quite a long time by the time the starships are launched
but that also, technology has somewhat plateaued for Kerbals
They colonized the system with "Near Future Tech"
(Nertea's mod)
Orion Drives were also used extensively in some cases, especially for bulk transport
Kerbals had already explored many nearby star systems by interstellar space probe by the time the U.S.C. colony ships were being launched.
Some more than others.
Some systems were being explored before colonization of the solar system had even really gotten going
with laser sails like we see in Other Worlds
GPD: So, Fusion is still too complicated for Kerbals?
Gregrox: Fusion powerplants are probably being used by the time the USC Manifest Destiny launches, but they're too big and bulky and so it uses fission instead.
And the Manifest Destiny probably uses fusion pulse units
In fact that's the most expensive part. All that deuterium has to be taken from Jool or the other giant planets that may or may not exist.
GPD: But shouldn't it look more like Project Daedalus then?
Gregrox: It could but doesn't have to
In a sense, the design is more or less a standard Orion engine, with a standard-to-above-average yield, but you can fit manymore bombs in
There's a LOT of engines per stage though
And they're timed and set up to provide a fairly smooth acceleration profile.
GPD: Did Kerbals try to colonize Laythe or is/was it not worth it?
Gregrox: It was by far the most worth it
By the time of the starships, Laythe was green.
Which was very upsetting to astrobiologists, who were still cataloguing new forms of laythian life.
Duna was also being terraformed but at a much slower pace. Eve too, but even slower.
Eve had not yet reached the "point of no return" and scientists and the public were campaigning to stop terraforming the natural purple wonder
...
GPD: Did the Mesbin people try to send messages back home at some point?
Gregrox: that's a really good question. They'd need to have something like the Aricebo radio telescope/transmitter for their messages to stand a good chance of reaching Kerbin.
Or for that matter, to recieve messages from Kerbin as well.
Mesbinites may also not know for sure which star is actually Kerbol.
And they couldn't detect kerbin as an exoplanet, the only planet they'd realistically see unless kerbol was a transiting system would be Jool and MAYBE Eve.
GPD: I'm assuming that lightspeed delay is a thing in your canon, so instant communication is obviously not possible.
But I a colonisation mission would/should try to send a message home when they succefully arrived. As conformition for home that the mission worked.
Obviously The mesbin colonyship went suboptimal, so I was curious if home thinks that that coloniy ship is lost or if they are not waiting for a message
(What a poorly worded message)
Gregrox: Kerbin definitely thinks the Mesbin colony was lost
But early on would have tried to establish cobtact, but fallimg on deaf, laser-communication-less ears
06/06/2019
Early spaceflight attempts on Mesbin might involve trying to slam into Statmun fast enough to knock chunks down to Mesbin's surface. And yes, it's 69 tonnes. And no, the mission didn't really work.
06/13/2019
oh no i accidentally went back in time and prevented the crash of the U.S.C. Manifest Destiny into the planet Mesbin, and also went back in time and prevented the resulting more successful crash into Kerbmun, and now the ship didn't crash at all and successfully colonized and terraformed Kerbmun oh I'm such a klutz oh butterfingers
06/15/2019
Mesbin was once a briefly habitable hydrogen planet, during the period between its atmosphere being thin and cool enough for liquid water and its atmosphere being completely lost to space. Many fossils have been found of some of these ancient organisms, but far more intriguing are the life forms that are still found to be extant today.
The first native life to be discovered on Mesbin was a species of radiation-hardened single celled organisms called Mesbinius radiodurans, nicknamed the Rock Bug. It was discovered by biologists in the first generation of Kerbal inhabitants on the world who were inspecting the rock samples out of curiosity. But these sorts of life forms were not that unexpected, similar life forms had been discovered on Eve, Duna, and Tylo already, and there had already been evidence of extraterrestrial biology discovered by spacecrafts prior to the launch of the Manifest Destiny.
The big surprise was when the first atmo-cave was discovered. This cave was discovered nearly a century later when the first underground railway was being constructed to link the original settlement with one of the splinter colonies. When the tunnel bore machine hit the inner wall of the cave, the hydrogen atmosphere, pressurized to 13 atmospheres, forced its way through the bore machine, destroying it, while the hydrogen atmosphere escaped into space through the then not finished surface maintenance airlocks. What was found by the damage estimation team was shocking. The whole cave was filled with a porous, spongy biological structure called "cave cheese." Mesbin's leading experts, which at that time were merely botanists trained on Kerbin plants, and a veterinarian named Cob, were called to the scene. They verified, to the best of their ability, that the thing was definitely some kind of life form, and that if it had been alive recently, it was killed by the depressurization. No one could puzzle out how it got its energy, until the "experts" began to show signs of radiation sickness. The creature used energetic particles from radioactive decay to power itself enough to stay alive, in a still poorly understood process.
One aquatic cave was discovered, and was safely blocked off before its water could be lost to space, several decades after that. It was an enormous structure many tens of miles across with many different branches and loops, and at the bottom were geothermal vents. There was an enormous cache of simple animal life and it is a protected site to this very day. Worms, jellyfish, and a huge amount of bacteria feed on the energy in the geothermal vents. The water is nearly scaldingly hot throughout the cave's volume, as there is no easy way to dissipate the heat from the geothermal activity And of course there's the cave goo, which is reasonably well documented already
Snails: I really like the “life is absurdly common but intelligence is rare” sort of thing
cool creature ideas and mesbin geological features
06/22/2019
From Whirligig World (The essay by Hal Clement):
Writing a science fiction story is fun, not work. ...the fun...lies in treating the whole thing as a game.... The rules must be quite simple. They are; for the reader of a science-fiction story, they consist of finding as many as possible of the author's statements or implications which conflict with the facts as science currently understands them. For the author, the rule is to make as few such slips as he possibly can... Certain exceptions are made [e.g., to allow travel faster than the speed of light], but fair play demands that all such matters be mentioned as early as possible in the story...
06/22/2019
Mesbin Exploration Tank. Aluminium/oxygen combustion steam. That rover is fairly slow and low powered. Probable can't handle 3 gees.
Fireless engines are basically tanks of superheated water at high pressure. The steam atop the tank is collected and used in the normal way, and the pressure drops, letting more water boil off into steam.
On Mesbin, long train journeys are powered by heating from an electric third rail. The principle is effectively the same, except exhaust steam is collected and condensed into an external condenser tank to be reheated and returned to the boiler.
GPD: Why is water used instead of using the electricity directly like other electric trains?
Because they don't have electric motors with a reasonable torque
This is an electrically heated conventional steam engine
But more realistically it ought to just be a fireless water tank engine like the locomotive
For use in indoor, pressurized use, such as farming
06/23/2019
[Ed Note: This section starts out with lore that has since been replaced. Mesbin Space Program starts on year 1330.]
Gregrox: The space program officially opens on Day 1 of the Mesbin year 2000, the first year of the second millenium. (Yes. FIRST. Year zero was the first year, not year one)
That corresponds to 851.05 Earth years.
NatsuX: Well that's fair enough.
Gregrox: 12 generations of kerbals. The first six generations lived barely any different from each other, all in the first one or two caverns, and almost no one ever went to the surface except when they had to for maintainence. Each generation lasts about 165 Mesbin years. By year 300, the last electric motor on the last rover died, and there was no way to replace it.
NatsuX: 70 year average lifespan. Curse you gregox.
Zaffre: Preposterous. Kerbals are immortal.
NatsuX: Are the generations named? Did we get any irritating names and stereotypes for them?
Gregrox: no named generations.
Gregrox: Only when aluminium/oxygen powered steam engines were invented in the year 970 did things finally start improving. With the ability to survey new lands with rovers, mine for all sorts of minerals including Vital Elements, and expand to new settlements, things really started to ramp up.
Natsux: Millenials built the Space Industry
Gregrox: Millenials built the Mesbin industry, and a thousand years later they built the Space industry. different millenia, different millenials.
NatsuX: Those intervening 670 years must have been Hella boring. Just cowering.
Gregrox: They really were. hmmmmmmm. maybe too boring
06/25/2019
Gregrox: ok alright ok listen up
the game now starts on the first day of year 1,000
not 2,000
so it has only been 425.525 earth years
[Ed note: still not quite there...]
I'm working on the timeline
and honestly
425 years is a bit cramped
I think maybe I'm going to go back to 2000 myears after all
what I'll do is I'll just keep naturally building the history and then decide where to put the space program start.
Snails: 1000 earth years seemed right to me
they started from almost nothing on a planet that was hard as hell to survive on
425 years to get up and at em with a space industry seems unlikely
NatsuX: I find it much more plausible
I highly doubt a civilisation that's actually survived a crash landing on an alien planet would spend 600 years doing nothing
Gregrox: yeah but when you actually go and write out the history
you find that there's actually a lot to do
you have to go from one barely self-sustaining settlement running on very old appliances with futuristic tech that you can't replace, to a global civilization.
they're not doing "nothing"
they're doing a lot of things
but they're very small things at first because the population is very small at first.
[Ed note: finally some good lore]
06/26/2019
I ended up at 1330. (Mesbin year) earth year 556.
here is an exhausting but not exhaustive history
06/30/2019
GrandProtectorDark: I bet I asked this already, but how does astronomy and observatories even work on a fast rotating planet?
Gregrox: the very first major lore dump in this channel answered that question 😛
GPD: Ah.
Gregrox: The short answer is clock drives. The long answer is... it's complicated
so here's the thing
clock drives and later electric stepper motors can reliably drive the telescope if you mount them on some kind of equatorial mount.
however the dome is a problem two reasons:
- You can't make an equatorial-mounted dome without obscuring part of the sky. It has to rotate azimuthally (in the "plane" of the horizon)
- Mesbin has vacuum in the sky instead of air, and it sometimes rains meteors. The dome has to be armored and protected and pressure-tight
The basic design I ended up with is this
The whole dome is a pressure vessel that rotates azimuthally on wheels mounted to a "cradle" on the surface of Mesbin entering the observatory means going through an airlock, although it's also plausible to imagine that there's a ladder going up through the bottom and some kind of airtight seal connecting the bottom to some other underground habitat, protected by rock and dirt that goes from rotating to static.
The telescope is directly mounted to the dome wall and those shudder door things which may not actually be airtight allow the telescope to move up and down
The trouble with the model above is that the telescope can't actually be driven by an equatorial mount which means tracking has to be done with two motors, one of which is very big, and it must be done precisely, in an era before computers
the other option is something more like what we see in the drawing of Mandrake and Rutherford
here the telescope is on its own mount, and only the dome itself moves, not the whole pressure vessel. The same shudder things are there, but now they move a window up and down rather than the telescope itself
this means the telescope can very precisely track on a clock drive or motors, though the dome must be constantly manually moved.
This is usually done by the intern.
When Mandrake and Rutherford were interns/apprentices, they would each take turns taking care of the window versus the dome, which saved effort. They had rigged up a special system of pulleys to ensure they could both do their job at the same time from the same place.
That was not at Donklan Equatorial Observatory of course, that was at the Suddery Observatory.
but the design of the observatory would be the same in both places.
The first observatory was a glass hemisphere with a telescope mount inside for a small galilean-like telescope
it gave the users skin cancer because Kaywell is quite bright in the ultraviolet.
It is generally advised to wear strong sunscreen even when only working in observatories with windows
another option which is more airtight but a lot less armored is to just have the whole opening be a single solid piece of clear glass. The drawback is that there's more glass to get dirty and damaged and the whole thing is very expensive to replace, whereas a single glass window is much cheaper to replace. And if there's a breach, the whole window could shatter and vent the observatory's air and pull its crew out onto Mesbin's surface. The doors on observatories with this structure are designed to shut quite promptly when need be, to give the staff enough time to evacuate and shut the airlock.
Now for sure in the age of the space program, it may eventually be possible to have robotic observatories, like many modern scientific observatories
Small pressurized room with a digital camera being fed into a screen in the control room, and a device to switch out the TV camera for a film (and even later, just using the camera as the imager itself)
Eventually you wouldn't even need someone in the observatory except for maintenance
NatsuX: who established the first observatory, why and how?
Gregrox:
Year 415: Meanwhile the first astronomical observatory is built, in the form of a glass hemisphere built on the surface of Mesbin with an airlock that would allow an astronomer to use a telescope. Initially the plan was to simply hold the telescope, but the need for an actual mount was quickly discovered--Mesbin rotates too fast. The first astronomer to use the telescope was Jerend Mesoman. She was able to see Graymun in incredible detail and was able to resolve the continents on Kerbmun.
Year 416: The observatory was a catastrophic failure. Everyone who used it, unprotected from Kaywell's ultraviolet radiation, developed severe sunburns and a few astronomers died of skin cancer. Finally, the observatory exploded when it was damaged by a single micrometeorite, which caused the dome to completely shatter. (year is earth years)
NatsuX: oof
astronomers dying like early nuclear scientists
GPD: Did it look like this but bigger?
Gregrox: About that size, but hemispherical
like
cuts off at the "equator"
And a little higher to fit the airlock and storage room
....
oh also I forgot about one of the earlier observatories Imagine a tank but with a long refracting telescope instead of a gun
GPD: So I should imagine this?
Gregrox: you're not far off
the Mobile Observatory was basically an exploration tank modified to be an altaz telescope. with the ability to point straight up just past the zenith, by extending jacks between the steam engine units. It would rotate azimuthally by rolling its treads. The telescope itself could be tilted with more precision by about 5 degrees in any direction. It had a crew of three: two to operate the "mobile" part and one who would sit in the telescope unit. The chair was rigidly mounted to the telescope movement axis, so if you were pointing straight up you would be lying on your back.
Possible design for a mobile observatory.
GPD: Now it's perfect:
Adstri: This is... concerning.
Gregrox: nice.
Gregrox:
The mobile observatory was not super successful, largely because of its alt/az alignment and the inability to track
but it was the precursor to a class of observatories with a similar form of living ball with telescope attached to the front
here is such a telescope on a german equatorial mount
GPD: Is it just the perspectives being wonky, or is it mounted like an L shape?
Gregrox:
it is just like this
you have an RA axis which points towards the celestial pole. That is given a clock drive so that it constantly rotates along with the planet
then at right angles to the RA axis is the Dec axis
Right Ascension and Declination are like longitude and latitude, on the celestial sphere
so yeah it is like an L or a T
in the drawing, the telescope is pointed very close to the pole
GPD: not having to deal with an atmosphere must be at least somewhat useful
Gregrox: it helps the end result for sure
but it makes actually operating the observatory waaaay more difficult
amateur astronomers have to be very very wealthy or influential to operate their own telescopes, because they basically need a setup at least as complicated as the equatorial-mounted ball
HABowman: I wonder if there would be any snacks in the ball.
Gregrox: of course there'd have to be, this is kerbals we're talking about
the cheapest option is probably a glass dome that's barely big enough to fit in, a small reflecting telescope (reflecting telescopes tend to be much smaller for the same diameter), and full-body clothing covering everything but your face, which is covered in sunscreen. One day optically clear UV-opaque glass is invented which makes this much safer.
still, even the most basic investment for an amateur astronomer would not be attainable by most, and so public observatories are actually pretty common on Mesbin.
HABowman: I'd imagine "vacuum-fried" snackfoods like Plaphoglins would be common. [Ed note: see the description for Plaph]
NatsuX: After generations of living on Mesbin, how have the Mesbal's evolved? Are they now a different species of Kerbal? Are there any selective pressures for certain traits?
Gregrox: they're not a different species
but kerbals born in the higher latitudes are quite physically different, from walking on all fours to having a more squat structure to having thicker bones
but if two 5gee kerbals had a kid and moved to 1.3gee, their kid would grow up more or less like a normal kerbal
Adstri: what's the highest latitude that kerbals colonized?
[I never answered him, but the answer is around 5 gees]
07/21/2019
Everything orbiting Gememma except for Mandrake because it is So Big.
All three sketchbook covers together.
07/22/2019
I just thought of something
if Ammenon was truly tidally locked, its ice should be quite old, and be aged and full of dirty tholins and radiation "damage" by now
therefore I'd like to suggest that Ammenon is slowly, slowly turning. As ice sublimates, some of it is deposited on the other side which is just getting cool enough for ice. The result is that eventually Ammenon will lose its ice, but given that it's been 5 billion years, there's still plenty of ice left to go around
07/25/2019
07/28/2019
no this isn't canon.
[Ed note: this is a Mesbin-built fireless steam locomotive with a Thomas the Tank Engine style Kerbal Face on the front.]
Gordold stuck on the line between Gaffald Heights and Bonk. There's a bit of a grade in the tunnel, and Gordold was so fed up with hauling a goods train that he stuck himself there. They had to call Edwig to push him over the hill
Thomaby sneaks up to Gordold. He's going to send a radio chirp to Gordold at high frequency and it will wake up Gordold. Then he's going to run away, saying "you can't catch me"
07/28/2019
the plan [ed note: for an Ammenon mission] is something along the lines of:
- Whole ship with a large crew module brings eight kerbals to the Gememma system.
- Ship aerobrakes into elliptical Gannovar orbit.
- Three Kerbals depart ship and land on Gannovar.
- Three Kerbals depart ship and use the ion rocket to go to Ammenon with the lander.
- Lander lands on Ammenon.
- Lander launches from Ammenon and rendezvous with the ion rocket.
- Ion rocket boosts to Gannovar and rendezvous with big ship.
- Gannovar lander launches to rendezvous with big ship.
- Lander and ion rocket are discarded and big ship either flies home immediately OR
- Ion rocket is discarded, lander is refueled, and the big ship flies to the Mandrake and Rutherford system. The lander, when full, should have enough delta-v to land and launch on all moons except for Tatian.
- Then return home.
- Ship will return to Kerbmun orbit and dock to a space station, where the crew will make the journey to low Mesbin orbit and then the surface.
- The ship should be reusable, and further launches will be staged out of Kerbmun orbit. Additional vehicles and hardware will be brought up to Kerbmun, which is quite expensive, but presumably cheaper than building an entire new ship in Mesbin orbit. probably never gonna do it
And that's... that's it. There's no more Lore Dumps from the Kopernicus server. And there never will be. I left Kopernicus on August 10th, 2019.
But maybe there will be from my own server.
[Ed Note: this is from the Tectonics.js private server. 16807 is the developer of Tectonics.js.]
Gregrox: oh hey I found the map that became Mesbin's heightmap
16807: Ha!
Gregrox: Mesbin In-Game:
[Ed note: old photo of Mesbin, it's now more contrasted.]
16807: That's really cool, so did you have to do some post processing?
Gregrox: Quite a lot.
Here's an export of the map including both hand-painted features and in-game-generated noise.
16807: Ah. Kinda looks like there's a noise map added, and some offset to the heightmap to get the oblate shape.
Gregrox: the oblateness is on a totally different map
16807: oh.
Gregrox: the brightness you see at the equator comes from basically
I multiply the amount of noise by a map that is similar to the oblateness map
as well as the heightmap itself
to replicate how higher latitudes should have less slopes due to the higher gravity
I'm still kind of unhappy with the amount of detail, but given how massive Mesbin is, I'm not sure if there's much I could do.
16807: oh true. seems like there's some rifting in the original, is Mesbin supposed to be tectonically active?
Gregrox: aye
I wish I could do uh
these kinds of features
On Derbin I did a very naughty thing and just
took them from Earth
the rifts/ridges
with the sideways segmentation
can't figure out a good way to hand paint those
and exposing those would look so cool
so at least I did it on Derbin (which actually doesn't use tectonics.js anymore, alas)
16807: I mean, they're kinda supposed to be there in tectonics.js
it's simulated so they ought to
but I think its a much smaller effect
Gregrox: yeah but they don't have enough detail to be useful, and when I exported Mesbin I didn't have the nice bathymetric heightmaps yet
16807: Yeah.
A collection of stuff from the Gregrox Mods discord
08/17/2019
https://pastebin.com/BADWmimW Look at what I found from October 14th, 2017. That's before I even released WW on the forums!
Kaywell's Star (SLIPPIST-60, CSO-6.32/568321) was recorded in a catalog several centuries ago by an astronomer named Kaywell Kerman. He noted that during an observation of the planet, its brightness decreased very slightly compared to a nearby star of similar magnitude. Kaywell's inclusion of this fact in his notes was considered frivolous, as he was not able to identify a definite decrease in star brightness later--not one that he could be sure of. Eventually writing it off as an illusion, it was another century until the SLIPPIST telescope detected a transit signal from the star. Running the records back it turns out Kaywell's first observation of the star was a double-transit of the two gas giants in the system. Prior to the Roadseeker Probe's mission in Y98 to Kaywell's Star, it was known to have three planets:
Kaywell b
- Detection: Transit, Y40
- Radius: ~1.5 Rjool
- Mass: ~2 Mjool (Radial Velocity)
Kaywell d
- Detection: Radial Velocity, Y112
- Mass: ~70 Mkerbin (Radial Velocity)
Kaywell c
- Detection: Transit, Y120
- Radius: ~1 Rjool
- Mass: ~1 Rjool
The Roadseeker Probe, during its flyby of the Kaywell system, noted first that Kaywell d was a binary planet, and that one of the worlds had an oxygen atmosphere (spectrum observed during a transit of the sun.)
Gregrox: omg it is called SLIPPIST-60 that's amazing.
This isn't canon, but I might take bits and pieces and canonize them.
sdschildberg: is Kaywell D meserbin?
Gregrox: yes
SkyPhoenix999: I assume they saw the oxygen from Kerbmun and mistook it for Mesbin
Gregrox: At that point that was the assumption. Though now I figure they did know of Mesbin, Derbin, and Kerbmun all by transit.
08/22/2019
Shamash_D: Had a bit of an idea for dealing with communications on future Gememma missions. I'm not sure its a plan I like, its expensive, its complex, and it cudgels the problem into submission rather than finessing around it, but the more I think about it, the more excuses I keep finding to justify it. Effectively, build a colossal, modular "deep space radio telescope" in high Mesbin orbit. Hexagonal modules supporting up to seven of the largest relay dish that can be honeycombed together as additional sensitivity is required, probably looking something like the Argus array from that one episode of TNG. With six of those modules, a receiving station around Gememma with a primary communications array of four RA-100s could receive reliable signal and distribute commands to other relays throughout the system. I assume in the crash, the crew of the Manifest Destiny probably lost the data on where the Kerbin system actually is in the sky (since apparently most everything else pertinent to space travel was also lost), so building a massive radio array that could search for that and also happens to be able to talk to the most distant of in-system missions as a secondary objective makes sense, doesn't it?
Gregrox: That's a great idea, actually. That's consistent with WW lore and a good gameplay idea.
08/25/2019
Zaffre: So what's the story behind Reander and Tyepolbynar's development?
Gregrox:
Reander was in the first version of the mod, and was named after the old development name for Jool, Meander. Egad (called Adgar at the time) orbited it, like Egar around Meander. The other three moons were Yalthe and Lito, both variants on Laythe and Tylo. Yalthe was like an earth-mass Io and Lito had an absurdly low density. Then there was Yawer, which at the time was just a reshaped Eeloo.
Shol, a dark green hot jupiter, was also there in the first version, along with Yeerbor (no relation to the current Yeerbor) which was a tiny ball of salt and sand going between Shol's atmo edge and SOI edge
Yeerbor was removed for unrealism (but the name lives on as the moon of Egad)
Tyepolbynar and Valyr came in the same update, having been prototyped in Space Engine along with changes to the rest of the system, after i felt that the then existing planets weren't enough.
Tyepolybar was designed from the get-go as an example of how icy moons might fare with much higher temperature
Etrograd was added later, when i replaced Gramun (the basis for Etrograd) with Graymun (which had been named Dermun and had orbited Derbin)
Zaffre: Neato! I thought I heard something about Meander some time ago and was curious about that. So... What's the story behind Tyepolbynar's name?
Gregrox: t sounds cool
The story of its name comes in front, not behind, its name; when some miserable fellow on reddit complained about my planet names, Tyepolbynar in particular, and others made fun of it for its difficulty in spelling and pronouncing it.
So i wrote up a long anecdote in its description about the guy who named the planet in- universe being mad at people who didn't like the name
Zaffre: I can't blame them. I sometimes call it gesundheit.
Gregrox: Typoball is the acceptable nickname
I like Snails' joke names for the planet too though
Can't think of anything in particular but something like typo ball yarn
Speaking of names, momma came up with "Kaywell" while we were on vacation the week before i made WW, for an unrelated worldbuilding project that got scrapped
08/27/2019
SnailsAttack:
SnailsAttack: Source material identified 👀
Props to Lowell for conceiving a dope ass planet idea that he literally just made the fuck up from some red blur in the sky.
Gregrox: It was the blood vessels in his retina that he mapped.
SnailsAttack: Oh lol. Then props to his juice tubes as well.
09/20/2019
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/worldbuilding.php#mesbin
!!!!!!!!!
09/22/2019
Gregrox: HEY BY THE WAY
I miss doing lore dumps, so if anyone has any lore questions LET ME KNOW.
TheAveragePxtseryu (TAP): I remember seeing something about the core of Mesbin being degenerate - is there possibly something exotic inside mesbin? A cold pulsar perhaps?
Gregrox: nah, nothing like that. At worst it's similar to what's inside Jupiter and Saturn--ice held up by electron degeneracy in their case
in Mesbin's case, iron-nickel
TAP: How did it get spinning so fast? Impact?
Gregrox: That's already been recorded in the lore dumps.
It was hit by a giant impactor, similar to that which formed the Earth/Moon system, except both bodies are much larger
it was turned into a Synestia, and it formed some moons.
TAP: Ah. How did Kerbmun gain it's atmosphere? Did it form with Mesbin? This would mean the collision happened during the formation of Kaywell. If it didn't, then it's likely and probably true because I can't remember lore that it sucked up the atmosphere of Mesbin.
Gregrox: Its atmosphere formed after Mesbin. It had a primordial hydrogen-rich atmosphere similar to what Earth had in the early days, except fed from the leak of gasses from the Mesbin atmosphere-disk instead of the solar nebula. Its initial atmosphere was lost to space (too lightweight) and, just as on Earth, volcanic gasses produced the second atmosphere which is currently undergoing a Great Oxygenation Event.
TAP: Derbin always confused me. How did it gain the hellmosphere? From Mesbin flinging most of its atmosphere off? Was it forming into a gas giant?
Gregrox: Derbin was formed before the other moons, while the solar nebula was still quite thick
Its atmosphere isn't actually that bad, there's habitable regions of the surface.
Gregrox: Some time after it [Mesbin] and Derbin's formation it was hit by a massive impactor that turned it into a synestia. Probably there had been two synestias though. Derbin may have been formed by the collision of something like two 35 Kerbin-mass objects that formed Mesbin and Derbin at the same time very early on.
TAP: there were a lot of super kerbins weren't there lol
Gregrox: Yeah the disk in the inner Kaywell system was PACKED.
TAP: How'd the Hot Jupiter [Shol] get to its current position? Did it have any moons?
Snails: I also want hot jupiter lore
Gregrox: Shol formed above where it currently orbits but below where Tyepolbynar currently orbits. Gas giant core comparable to the mass of Mesbin formed out of rock and ice, and it accreted a huge volume of hydrogen/helium and just kept growing, and migrating inwards.
Meanwhile Tyepolbynar formed in the outer system and migrated inwards. As it did so it would have heavily disrupted the inner system's disk, implying that without Tyepolbynar ploughing through there would have been even more rocky planet mass.
TAP: Were there any intelligent civilizations in the Kaywell system before the kerbals?
Gregrox: Not in the Kaywell system, no. 😉
09/23/2019
Top picture: Manifest Destiny, launch configuration. (And a kerb-Daedalus and kerb-Saturn-V for scale)
Bottom picture: Manifest Destiny final stage, as it was before it crashed into Mesbin.
U.S.C. Manifest Destiny was built in orbit around Dres, the main shipyards of the Kerbol system. Other interstellar ships had been built there and more would be built there since, including Daedalus-type ships. After Manifest Destiny's construction was completed, just enough Deuterium and Helium 3 was shipped down from Jool to get the MD up to Jool orbit, where it was parked and fully fueled.
WarriorSabe: It was built around... Dres? Surely there's better places to build it? Like high Jool orbit? Maybe around Pol or Bop?
Gregrox: Dres was turned into a quarry planet.
WarriorSabe: Ah. Since no one cares about it?
Gregrox: Yep. It became one of the most important planets in the Kerbol system! but at first it was considered "just a big asteroid"
Bop was left the fuck alone
Pol was too scientifically interesting
WarriorSabe: Yeah, I can see why you'd leave Bop alone.
Gregrox: Gilly was already developed as a spaceport and was poor in metales. Nowhere else makes as much sense, then, as a mining world, as Dres.
WarriorSabe: What about Eeloo? It might have useful minerals under the ice.
Gregrox: Too hard to access and too scientifically interesting
Mun is too culturally important for a massive, planet-scarring operation.
Moho's too close to the Sun (which does help for solar power, but fusion power made that not so important)
WarriorSabe: Yeah, I wasn't thinking you'd make it lower
My thought was that higher would be better
That's why I mentioned Jool and Eeloo
Gregrox: The Outer Planets (OPM or whatever other mods), if they exist, simply weren't developed yet.
WarriorSabe: What about Tylo with an orbital cannon?
Gregrox: The gravity isn't worth it. Gravity doesn't just make launching harder, it also makes quarrying and mining harder. And there's basically no reason not to use Dres.when you're talking about interstellar delta-v, where you start doesn't matter that much. And Dres is pretty close to Jool already.
GrandProtectorDark: Using ceres as spacecraft construction yard isn't uncommon in fiction. Technically speaking(although it's not like that ingame), dres should be within the asteroid belt. So that should be even more practically free resources?
Gregrox: If there is an asteroid belt between Duna and Jool (and despite the game having the technology to add that, it isn't there) then it may also contain manufacturing sites, but Dres happens to be the one where USC Manifest Destiny was built.
GPD: I meant it more like,
the asteroid belt could also pose as easy target to gather resources and get them to dres / bring the whole asteroid to dres to process them there.
Snails: No point in dumping the asteroid into a gravity well.
GPD: As in, you'd nudge them so they'll eventually intercept dres to capture them there, instead of dragging all the isru stuff and tankage with you (but only the smaller rocks)
Gregrox: Well if you really want small stuff, there is the canonical dresteroid belt / diffuse ring If you want to imagine that the MD was built in a different way to what I proposed, that's fine. WW lore focusing on Kerbin is more malleable
TAP: any other named destinations to which the ships were sent? Slippist, perhaps?
Gregrox: there were laser sail probes and eventually daedalus-type probes sent out to the stars. SLIPPIST-1 will have been one of the destinations, though whether or not a colony ship (and there were several colony ships) was launched there in particular i do not know.
KAL_9000: Whirligig World has great lore.
Gregrox: Thanks. I never really intended to write so much lore for it but it just kinda happened and it was a lot of fun.
09/23/2019
WORLDBUILDING PROMPT FROM REDDIT: Pretty much everything in your world is flipped to its opposite. What is your world like now?
Mesbin is 65 times more massive than Earth, has no atmosphere except around North Pole, and rotates every 1.5 hours. It's a highly oblate shape as a result of its rotation.
Antimesbin, rather than being oblate (think hamburger bun), is a prolate spheroid (think egg), deformed heavily due to tides from its parent body, a supermassive black hole about which it orbits and rotates every 16 days. It masses only slightly more than the Earth's Moon, with its gravity going between 0.26 gee at the rotational poles (which are points on the geographical equator of this world) and near zero gee at the geographical poles (the points furthest from the center). It has an atmosphere comparable in pressure to that of the Earth, made of dense gases like Sulfur Hexaflouride, which leech off into space near the poles resulting in regions of near vacuum. Gas enters orbit around the black hole and is unable to escape, so the atmosphere ends up falling back down to Antimesbin and is never lost entirely.
Mesbin was settled by a starship, the U.S.C. Manifest Destiny, which was intending to settle Mesbin's Earth-like moon. The Manifest Destiny crashed into Mesbin instead, and its crew had to make do.
Antimesbin was settled by the starship T.S.C. Indigenous Rights, which upon discovering that their intended target planet (which also orbited the black hole) was inhabited by native life forms, decided to honor their ship's title and settle the next best thing: Antimesbin itself.
Mesbin is difficult to escape from but the Kaywell system is easy to fly around in
Antimesbin is easy to escape from but the Black Hole system is ridiculously difficult to fly around in
09/25/2019
PRESENTING THE VERY FIRST PIECE OF WHIRLIGIG WORLD MERCH...
THE MESBIN POPSOCKET (Orders are limited to exactly one and i already got it)
Custom ordered
I am now seriously considering selling Whirligig World T-shirts
Not for a profit or anything but just
Because inevitably I'm going to want to have a WW tee
And i might as well make it available as well.
09/28/2019
TAP: have there been any extinction events in the whirligig system
Gregrox: yep
10/10/2019
During Shamash_D's livestream, he was trying to grab a mesbin moonlet with a claw to set up a mining station. Here's how it went
Shamash_D: "After 40 minutes and multiple passes attempting capture on asteroid OWV-135 by the unmanned Asteroid Mining Rig, the grapple unit confirmed a secure hold with the surface. Sixteen minutes later, the anomaly occurred. Last available telemetry indicated a high tumble rate, loss of pressure in main propellant tanks and habitation units, and unresponsiveness of several, mission critical on-board systems. Ground observation confirms and is tracking several previously unobserved objects on orbits that could have originated from OWV-135's position at the time of the anomaly, some with relative velocities in excess of 600 m/s. The exact cause of the anomaly is unknown at this time but based on available information, we have concluded the vehicle to have been lost beyond recovery. While we do not currently believe this or the prior two failures of surface mining infrastructure on Thresomin to be directly related to the ISRU equipment, space agency staff will be working closely with Kerbodyne engineers to identify possible faults and failure modes of the hardware they provide, so that we may ensure the highest degree of safety we can for our astronauts on future missions." -excerpt from the AMR-1 post mission press conference.
WarriorSabe: The kraken get you?
Gregrox: omg I gotta go find the vod. Hey he did capture the asteroid.
"the grapple unit confirmed a secure hold with the surface."
oh no it's gonna be the timewarp that does it isn't it?
yep
I really like that bit of fiction lol
I'm thinking about whether or not there's anything I can do to make the asteroids more stable
we do get some of these problems in stock
Shamash: If there is, that would be great, but I think the real solution in the mean time might be just to not target E-class asteroids and don't send the entire rig up at once. Instead send just an anchor module, get that in place, once its secure and I can validate its not likely to spontaneously combust (do some time warp, some scene transitions, wiggle it, that sort of stuff), then send other modules, preferably one at a time (and ensure nothing explodes at each step). I'm starting to wonder whether or not I'm ever going to have crew on one of my refining outposts, though. This is the third one out of four to have exploded. While the failures aren't strictly related to each other, that kind of streak makes me very hesitant to commit crew to these stations (I've already eliminated manned presence from the Thresomin architecture, though that was honestly as much a weight consideration as safety, given the new heavier ISRU and the 7 tonne payload limit imposed by AROS from LMO to Thresomin).
Also worth noting, though I don't think I noticed it on stream: whatever happened to the mining rig was violent enough to give OWV-135 a 100 km kick to its AP. This is a 62 million tonne asteroid, the altitude increase would require a delta V of over 140 m/s at PE... what the heck!
Gregrox: in-universe, there would have had to have been one hell of an explosion to produce that impulse
Shamash: It now crosses Statmun's orbit.
Which probably rules out pressurized gas pocked agitated by our grapple attempts. Collisions with another object could plausibly supply that kind of impulse, but is far too random and coincidental for my liking as an explanation of the failure of the mining rig.
Gregrox: Statmun may have large amounts of uranium
maybe if the asteroid also contains a bunch of radioactive metals, it could have been a nuclear explosion?
would be one hell of a fluke
ok let's imagine the ore combusted to produce an impulse of thrust with an Isp of 200 seconds
that would mean about 10% of the asteroid's mass would have had to explode
Shamash: We accidentally caused the asteroid to go supercritical from our efforts to grapple to it, that would be quite the amusing report. It was also a carbonaceous asteroid I think, based on the ore concentration (north of 80% of the thing was reported to be minable... how it got under Statmun's altitude is anyone's guess).
10/14/2019
Shamash: So, turns out the object I thought was OWV-135 was in fact not. The game simply chose to label the front half of the mining rig after the asteroid and label it as a space object. The actual OWV-135 seems to have vanished. I don't know if this is an improvement. For context, OWV-135 was target of the asteroid mining rig that exploded last Wednesday. It was over 62 million tonnes of space rock under Statmun's orbit, about 80% of which was minable ore.
Gregrox: oh my god
oh my god
62 million tonnes of material just fucking
exploded
Shamash: So it would seem.
Gregrox: here's a clip of OWV-135 exploding during Shamash_D's livestream. https://clips.twitch.tv/SparklyTastyStarlingBudBlast
Shamash: Funny thing is, the test probe for that that had been sent up earlier to investigate the mechanics of asteroid mining and was grappled to that same asteroid: perfectly OK. Not a scratch. Its in a six degree inclined orbit now, but other than that, pristine.
And yes, we're just going to glide over the fact this thing got roughly a 6 degree kick to its inclination in low Mesbin orbit.
Gregrox:
conjectural composition of OWV-135
volatiles mistakenly identified as "ore" exist in vast pockets within the asteroid, with chunks of porous carbon separated out from some liquid oxidizer
Shamash: Literally just a giant bomb in orbit.
Gregrox: the original probe grabbed onto a region with thicker carbonaceous stone crust
the mining rig dug into the volatile rubble and a small spark generated by the drills caused the otherwise stable fuels to combust
if this hypothesis is accepted then it may be worth launch some cheap "suicide" vessels to test of destruction of this manner is inevitable, and if it can be avoided by seeking out only smaller asteroids or asteroids of different compositions
this hypothesis has however been laughed out of the planetary science department since such a "rubble pile bomb" scenario is highly unlikely
maybe there was just some kind of gas pocket pressurized at high pressure (perhaps related to the fact that Mesbin had at one point a dense atmosphere disk) and the mining rig ruptured the pocket like a balloon
Shamash: I've already got another target with an AP below 1,240 km lined up, asteroid QZI-988, so... chances are we're going to be sending a probe there tomorrow to scope it out as a potential refinery target. I still find some amusement in the nuclear idea, that there were some loose pockets of uranium under the surface of this carbonaceous asteroid, possibly deposited by impact with another asteroid, and which was teetering on the verge of criticality, and we jostled some of the uranium or carbon around enough during our efforts to grapple to push it into a configuration where it went supercritical (carbon moderator plus low grade uranium wrapped in a pressure vessel of rock that fused after the impact site that deposited the uranium cooled down). Probably not much more likely than pressurized gas (particularly now that we know that the OWV-135 was not actually blown to an altitude that crosses Statmun) or chemical explosion, but amusing to me none-the-less.
Gregrox: yep.
Shamash: I also suspect the people of Mesbin probably might not share the level of amusement in the revelation that any of the countless rocks wizzing about above their heads could in fact be nature's thermonuclear version of an improvised explosive device (with the possible exception of that one nuclear powerplant technician who sits wondering if a catastrophic reactor failure could impart sufficient impulse to the cover on the emergency overpressure vent shaft to make it hit Statmun, and whether or not this kind of energy could be applied to a form of spacecraft propulsion 😛).
Gregrox: you know what
I bet the Mesbin media are so fucking onto that nuclear bomb explanation
like
the news outlets overhyped it as soon as the paper exploring the possibility was leaked
another reason for the space program to further investigate these things heh
Kal_9000: Watch out OWV-135 there's a mining probe coming
Oh no he has airpods in oh god oh fuck
10/15/2019
A robotic locomotive used on Mesbin for task that are too dangerous for crewed trains
for example, pulling trains across the surface of Mesbin.
or certain geothermal power plant applications
it also has a very short form factor, which can come in handy
the locomotive uses rechargeable Zappo batteries, and it can either be pre-programmed using the Kaputnik Electromechanical Computer or remotely controlled by wired connection.
Kal_9000: What sort of vehicles are used to retrieve returning crews from spaceflights?
Gregrox: overland exploration tanks I guess.
Snails: they just jump over and over and until the ground shifts below them enough that they wind up back at the ksc
Kal_9000: hmm
Snails: it's called the raviolis effect. you wouldn't understand
10/17/2019
Kal_9000: why is Reander tidally locked to Lito? According to all known laws of aviation physics, there is no way a bee should be able to fly a gas giant should be tidally locked to a moon of that size.
Gregrox: Lito is really close to Reander
the tides on Reander from Lito are pretty enormous
the mass ratio is similar to like if the Moon orbited proportionally that close to the Earth
and in that case they'd definitely be mutually locked
I think Reander and Lito probably initially formed as a binary with a much lower mass ratio
maybe 5 to 1
but Reander could hold onto hydrogen and gobbled up the hydrogen in the disk while Lito's atmosphere never got too thick and was eventually lost
Kal_9000: Shol has no moons, which is sad
Shol is lonely
(Well, no moons except for some probes, I guess :V)
Gregrox: I tested it
Shol can not support moons
KAL_9000: I imagine the tides from Kaywell that close in would throw the moons into interplanetary space or into Shol over geological timescales, right?
Gregrox: exactly
hell
over geopolitical timescales
Wolda is Shol's moon tho
it just doesn't orbit Shol directly
but Wolda is definitely under the influence of Shol's gravity
it's in this mean motion resonance but the actual period and orbital properties vary wildly and regularly over time
KAL_9000: In a KSP with N-body physics, my probes would leave Shol very quickly after they ran out of correction fuel. And Shol would be alone again.
Gregrox: Probably you could use solar sails to maintain your orbit at Shol if it was irl
Kal_9000: you'd still need attitude control fuel to orient the sail
Because real reaction wheels saturate
Gregrox: nah u can use solar sails to steer
real space probes do that to desaturate their reaction wheels
KAL_9000: Yes, exactly. RCS is used to desaturate the wheels
Acer_Saccharum: solar radiation pressure can also be used to do that
KAL_9000: oh yeah like kepler.
Acer: It's just very slow.
Gregrox: and at Shol the solar pressure is much much greater.
Shamash: Any source of attitude control can desaturate a wheel. RCS, differential solar sails, magneto-torquers, and so on.
10/19/2019
I'm just messing with Whirligig World clocks again with Kronometer. I'm making a patch for Kronometer to support "TATS scale" as I'm calling it: Two And Then Some. 2.56 scale, exactly 1.60 delta-v and orbital periods because 2.5 and 2.7x scales are so popular especially among the BDB and JNSQ crowds Turns out that the Fortnight is kind of not a great unit to use for 2.56 scale though because it's very close to an integer + 0.5 hours anything close to x+0.5 hours where x is an integer will have a particularly bad second length I'm just looking into different historical lengths of time and their names for instance a Scruple, which is 1/60th of a day, or 24 minutes. Which is quite nice, since stock Mesbin's day length is close to that (28 minutes) and I'm thinking about renaming the "day" for the Mesbin clocks to that. QUINZIÈME *Quinzième literally means “fifteenth” in French, and in this sense the word was borrowed into English after the Norman Conquest of England as the name of a tax or duty equivalent to 15 pence in every pound. In the early 1400s, however, the word began to be used in religious contexts to refer to the day of a major church festival or holiday and the first two full weeks following it. As a result, a quinzième is a period of 15 days. * this one is slightly better than the Fortnight for TATS scale. a fortnight in TATS scale is 10.58400 hours which is also bad because 11 is a terrible number of hours to have in a day on account of it being prime a Quinzieme in TATS-WW would be 11.34, which results in a better second length but still has a length of roughly 11 hours NUNDINE *A nundina was a Roman market held every ninth day, which takes its name from the Latin word for “ninth,” novem (as in November, the ninth month of the Roman calendar). A nundine, ultimately, is a period of nine days—or, not counting inclusively, an eight-day gap between two dates. * a Nundine is pretty good because it's 6.8 hours in WW-TATS, close to an integer, but pretty bad because that integer is a prime number, 7
aw man what if I'd called the day length of Mesbin a "whirl"
10/20/2019
Snails: [recalling the story of Gabbal Fredrodi Kerbman, who thinks he owns Statmun]
thought of an alt. version of this story
greg says that statmun would slowly drift across the surface as it latches onto random surface features in its nearly perfect geostationary orbit
and what if like
it floats out from above that guy's property and over to some other guy's property
that could either spark a war or a new religion
actually
almost definitely both
i have been chosen by aetheris mons. kneel before me
10/30/2019
here's some Content™
Rotation periods compared:
- 0.1x Mesklin: 5 minutes, 37 seconds
- Inaccessible: 7 minutes, 20 seconds
- Mesklin: 17 minutes, 45 seconds
- Mesbin: 28 minutes, 21 seconds
- 10x Mesbin: 1 hour, 29 minutes, 39 seconds
- Haumea: 3 hours, 54 minutes, 55 seconds
- Jupiter: 9 hours, 55 minutes, 30 seconds
11/06/2019
Mandrake & Rutherford drinking Mundrutherfor-tinis shortly after the announcement of the discovery of their binary planet (1301, colorized)
(Actually a photo of Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, the authors of the paper about the conjectural Planet Nine which they are looking for)
12/04/2019
Let's look at some spaceship things
U.S.C. Manifest Destiny
This version was a many-staged Orion drive style rocket with either fusion or antimatter pulses.
then later KSP2 came along and now we know Daedalus are valid starships
here's a two-stage USCMD with a Daedalus and Saturn V to scale
here's another with radiators!
a three-stage USCMD.
the final stage.
so basically I haven't really settled on a canonical USCMD design.
....
So we know of the two homeworld settings available in WW:
MESBIN SPACE PROGRAM:
The Manifest Destiny, aiming for Kerbmun, crashes into Mesbin because they hadn't accounted for its equatorial bulge.
KERBMUN SPACE PROGRAM:
The Manifest Destiny crashes into Kerbmun instead of entering orbit and deploying the colony correctly.
Possible future optional homeworld settings:
DERBIN SPACE PROGRAM:
The Manifest Destiny swings around Mesbin, narrowly missing it, and misses Kerbmun as well, before crashing into Derbin's highlands/mountains. All that could be done is to try and make do, just as on Mesbin.
LOWEL SPACE PROGRAM:
The Manifest Destiny is sent not to the Kaywell AC system, but the Kaywell B system to colonize Lowel. After a bad flyby of Ollym, the ship crashes into Lowel.
STATMUN SPACE PROGRAM:
The Manifest Destiny avoids crashing into Mesbin's surface, but they crash into Statmun instead, somehow?
I feel like Derbin Space Program is the next logical step lore wise for an alternate timeline, while Lowel is the next logical step gameplay-wise for an alternate mod.
02/02/2020 (hey it's that special super-palindromic day!)
Gregrox: What does the future of Whirligig World look like? In the past I've discussed what it might look in the next few hundreds of years, but what about further on? Much further on?
Exo: Edge of Whirligigity [note: this is a reference to WarriorSabe's Edge of Eternity]
Gregrox: Kaywell is showing its age.
Kracc: 👴
Gregrox: I wonder what would happen as Kaywell and Limnel interact as Kaywell fills up his roche lobe. Limnel will likely gain mass and its own life will be shortened.
Kracc: Derbin must be slowing down Mesbin's rotation, right?
Gregrox: That's a good point, Kracc. Mesbin is slowing down over time
But before it does
Derbin will escape
Snails: gememma & co gonn be chillin as the kaywell system loses its entire fuck
Gregrox: Perhaps Derbin will somehow find stability as a trojan of Mesbin, or perhaps it will wreak havok in the inner system, or perhaps it will one day come back and collide with Mesbin or one of its moons.
[oh btw i didn't show any of the development notes about it in this github dump just because of how stressful it was but Limnel is the new binary companion of kaywell in a low orbit that was added to balance the mass/luminosity of the sun]
Gregrox: Kerbmun will one day become uninhabitable, a world much worse than Venus--it will have its oceans boiled off and turned into a thousand-or-so atmospheres of pressure envelope with surface temperatures hot enough to melt rock.
Kracc: Wait, would mesbin pass through any instability regimes during its slowdown?
Gregrox: Shouldn't do, since oblate spheroid is the only one it will experience
statmun and perhaps thresomin will move out as Mesbin slows down, until which point that it collides with graymun.
Graymun and Kerbmun will also move outwards, after derbin's gone they will be the primary tidal forces slowing down Mesbin.
Eventually Tyepolbynar's planets will become unstable as they are, and enormous cometary tails will be visible throughout the system from gases leaking out of Jifgif, Imterril, and Tannor. Imterril will no longer have liquid water, just a smooth transition between gas and red hot exotic ices, until it is either boiled away entirely or both stars turn into white dwarves and Imterril and Tannor both slowly freeze.
I'm not sure what the red giant phase of the system will be like.
But there's a good chance that Shol, Wolda, and Tyepolbynar & Moons will be swallowed
Mesbin and its moons will likely also be engulfed, but it depends heavily upon just how the complex dynamics of the very close-together binary system works
Mesbin might even make it out as an unrecognizable husk of a planet at the end
Valyr and Egad might be safe from being swallowed up, but their habitability is limited.
Even as Kaywell and Limnel become more luminous on the main sequence, distant Valyr will go greenhouse and become baked worse than Venus.
Egad and Oshan both have shots at quite terrific habitability.
for a time, anyway
and Egad will always be cursed by its chlorine
Reander won't ever have a good long time in the habitable zone I suspect. I don't think it would be in the habitable zone until after Kaywell becomes a red giant, and there will only be a narrow window of habitable insolation.
But its prospects for habitability isn't that interesting anyway--Lito would melt into a deep ocean world like a cooler Imterril, all the other worlds would be airless.
There would be a lot of time during which Gememma is in Kaywell's habitable zone
which is a problem
because the planets there which are already habitable will be receiving twice the light.
Lowel by this time might have no atmosphere anymore.
Gannovar might begin boiling during periapsis passes
Mandrake and Rutherford will warm up, but their moons will either remain frozen or be boiled away
These planets could have a second shot at habitability when Kaywell/Limnel become white dwarves. Gememma has a long time left. Even if the planets lose their atmospheres, they could still be replenished over billions of years due to tectonics and comets.
Derbin detaching from Mesbin is an interesting thing
I feel like the most likely case is it continually flies by Mesbin and fucks up the inner Mesbin system until one day there's a collision
maybe Derbin would get kicked onto an orbit which is affected by Tyepolbynar
maybe it gets kicked onto a Valyr crossing orbit, and that definitely means big trouble
it's plausible that Valyr and Derbin could both hit Mesbin at some point
03/06/2020
Gregrox: @SnailsAttack would you rather teleport to Mars with nothing but a SCUBA suit, or teleport to Derbin's continents with nothing but a SCUBA suit?
Snails: derbin i guess
Gregrox: that is the correct answer
Snails: what's the temp there?
Gregrox: I wish I could have it really represented in-game, but in my mind Derbin's continents are as habitable as some of the less favorable parts of Earth
there's places where it rains fairly often
WarriorSabe: Derbin's like boiling though
Gregrox: Not on the continents.
actually the average temperature at the sea level is "only" 85 Celsius
you would definitely die in that temp
but
remember, Derbin's atmosphere is compressed by gravity so it's actually quite short
anyway I don't have the numbers but it can get chilly in the mountains and comfortable on the continents
It was clearly once covered in oceans, since plate tectonics like what we see on the oceanic rifts in Derbin's maria are only possible when well lubricated by water
Derbin would be an awesome steampunk setting in its more habitable form
vast seas which can only be crossed by airship
refrigerated submersibles subaeronauticals which brave the steamy sea in pursuit of fallen treasure
Clockwork orreries of the Mesbin system
The desperate failures of gunpowder rockets to launch anything useful into space, followed by the advent of fucking nuclear pulse rockets put together with steel and copper
03/17/2020
WarriorSabe: Hey, @Gregrox, I'm curious, from where does Tannor get its 99% albedo? Normal snow and ice doesn't quite cut it there.
Gregrox: It shouldn't be 99%
I don't remember what i said it was but i could have sworn it wasn't so absurd
Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, has one of the highest known albedos of any body in the Solar System, with an albedo of 0.99. Another notable high-albedo body is Eris, with an albedo of 0.96.
Speaking of absurd...
WarriorSabe: I calculated that it would need a 99% albedo to stay frozen (keep in mind that the temperature to stay under in vacuum is not 273K but 175K, and you have to keep the maximum under that, not just the average). Enceladus has a bond albedo of 0.81
Gregrox: wait are you telling me the freezing point of water in a vacuum is well below freezing in air?
WarriorSabe: Yes
It stays pretty much constant u til the triple point
At which point the boilimg point line cuts into it
Going through it the exact same way it did through the liquid phase
Gregrox: Well fuck, Tannor is fake then.
WarriorSabe: You could give it a thin atmosphere right at the triple point; that lowers the needed albedo a lot
Not even necessarily that much
Gregrox: hmm... could the atmosphere be water vapor?
since it'd be at the triple point?
WarriorSabe: It could be anything.
Gregrox: I want it to be water vapor if it is there at all.
WarriorSabe: Yeah, that would make sense. It boiled until the pressure was high enough
Gregrox: I imagine that the atmosphere is constantly being lost to space but is being replenished by the surface sublimating
alright, time to move the very thin atmosphere out of etrograd and on to tannor
this is actually kind of cool
it's an excuse to put an atmosphere on a very tiny world.
although iirc Tannor's moon-sized
still cool
WarriorSabe: You could probably make it as thin as like 90 Pa or something
Gregrox: I'd make the atmosphere just below the triple point
because I don't want any water
WarriorSabe: The triple point's 611 Pa
At 100 the boiling point's still 250K
Gregrox: what do you calculate the albedo of Tannor must be for it to have a maximum temperature of 0 celsius?
WarriorSabe: About 0.94 based on peak temperature, though the atmosphere might help slightly to distribute the heat around. If you can somehow perfectly distribute the heat all over it, you could get that down to 0.74
Gregrox: hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
bond albedo is measured over all phase angles
but the only phase angle that matters is full phase
because that's where the radiation is coming from
so the full spectrum geometric albedo of enceladus is actually greater than one
so maybe if i'm not full of shit, Tannor can be frozen due to opposition surge
Because the Bond albedo accounts for all of the light scattered from a body at all wavelengths and all phase angles, it is a necessary quantity for determining how much energy a body absorbs. This, in turn, is crucial for determining the equilibrium temperature of a body.
yeah I'm probably full of shit.
WarriorSabe: I thought geometric albedo was just measured in the visible eange?
Gregrox: visual geometric albedo is.
WarriorSabe: Besides, that 0.81 was the bond albedo of enceladus, so it probably is already accounting for that
Gregrox: Eris has a bond albedo of 0.96, which is interesting.
wait a minute
the infobar on Eris lists that as the geometric albedo. And it says we can't measure bond albedo without spaceships dammit.
I thought I was soooooooooooooo clever making a frozen world with more sun than Venus.
WarriorSabe: I have one with the same or so sunlight as Venus. It stays cool by rotating rapidly to distribute heat
Also a hPa level exosphere to get another 15K or so out of the boiling point
Gregrox: If I made it rotate once every 6 hours or so, how would that change the situation?
WarriorSabe: Wwll, I'm not really sure how to actually calculate how much it would, but it would probably help a lot
You only really need to get the extremes about halfway to the equilibrium temperature
And with the still high albedo, water's high thermal mass, and a little bit of atmosphere, I'd bet that's enough
Gregrox: the problem is even Imterril has a >1 day long orbit
and tidal stresses from not being locked would probably ruin the benefit of a rapid rotation
WarriorSabe: Maybe you could swap their positions?
03/20/2020
Tannor now has an atmosphere. 0.578 kPa.
03/24/2020
03/24/2020
Angular sizes of planets (and Derminmus)
And a new album of astrophotos: https://imgur.com/a/5y2TYrn
03/28/2020
Thinkin about calendars
Mesbinites and Kerbmunatics use calendars for different reasons than Earthlings.
Earthlings need to keep track of the calendar in large part because we have seasons which can drastically change how we live our lives.
Kerbin has no seasons, and both Mesbin and Kerbmun have very very little seasons. Mesbinites wouldn't care about seasons even if Mesbin had them anyway (except if they utilize solar power) since they live underground.
Now personally in my headcanon, Kerbin does have seasons, we just don't have axial tilt in-game to represent this.
Mesbinites and Kerbmunatics keep time in calendars for navigational and recordkeeping purposes.
While underground, Mesbinites used the Fortnight, split up into 6 hours, and counted time in 426-fortnight-long years (Kerbin has 426 days in a year)
when Mesbinites began exploring, the need for an astronomical-based calendar became apparent
since seasons aren't as important as timekeeping, it's likely that they would use a lunar calendar
or rather, either a Kerbmun or Derbin based calendar
Kerbmun orbits a little too short to replace months, while Derbin orbits plenty long enough to serve as a long span of time.
They therefore probably use a Derbin calendar with 8 Dermetrics ("months") in a Dermetric-Year
the Dermetric Year is shorter than the Kaywell Year
Kerbmunatics have reason to care about both the sun and the moons, however, since the diurnal cycle is more relevant to them and, at the highest latitudes, seasons do become at least a little bit relevant
Their day will be a Kerbmun-solar-day, which I believe is the same as the solar-Kerbmun-month as viewed from Mesbin
The Kerbmun day is split into 5 sets of 6 hours or just 30 hours (depending upon how Kerbal sleep cycles work). They also keep track of the Derbin-solar month, although they can not do it quite as precisely since Kerbmun can be at any phase angle to Derbin while Mesbin sees Derbin full, so they may see a slight gibbous during any given full Derbin. However, on average the full-Derbin will always occur very near the start of a month, there is no drift in the long term.
Calendars will track the actual date of each phase of Derbin for every month.
Meanwhile Mesbin calendars track the phase of Kerbmun (Derbin's phases define the months to begin with so are not separately tracked)
Kerbmun calendars must be lunisolar, tracking both Kaywell and Derbin, using intercalary periods or leap months leap dermetrics to keep up