A Grand Day Out: Visiting the Mun in Kerbal Space Program.

Awhile ago, I decided to make my standard "Mun" rocket more efficient and more realistic. I was inspired by the original Saturn V rocket. I decided that rather than simply landing on the moon and going home, my lander would undock from an orbiting module, land on the moon, come back, redock, and fly home. This made the mission much more difficult, but much more efficient since I didn't have to bring the "going home" fuel down to the lunar surface with me.

The rocket begins with 5 large fuel tanks to achieve orbit. The fuel tanks use asparagus staging, making the rocket extremely efficient.

The craft achieves a low equatorial orbit around 70 km.

After achieving orbit, the craft uses the very efficient "Poodle" engine to extend its periapsis to the Mun's altitude.

The craft's orbit intersects the Mun's sphere of influence.

Once inside the Mun's sphere of influence, I make a retrograde burn at my periapsis to circularize my orbit. In the above photo, I am about halfway through the burn.

This photo shows the completed burn.

The lander (on the right in this photo) now detaches from the orbiting module. The orbiter first transfers fuel into the lander to help with the descent and ascent from the surface.

I performed a retrograde burn with the lander to begin the descent. Notice that the lander's orbit (blue) puts it on a landing trajectory whereas the orbiter's orbit (white) remains above the surface.

When the lander neared the surface, I performed another retrograde burn. Then, I set her down in the flattest spot I could find. I sent Handas Kerman out to plant a flag, and then it was time to go back home.

Contrary to achieving orbit back on Kerbin, on the moon, I perform a gravity turn almost instantly. Also, instead of just aiming straight east, I am aiming to intersect the orbit of the orbiting module.

Here, you can see the lander's orbit before the circularization burn. I managed to bring the lander and the orbiter very close on the first time around.

Here, the lander's orbit is almost exactly the same as the orbiter, allowing them to dock.

Here, you can see the orbiter (left) about to dock with the lander (right). The lander has its lights on, so you can see the orbiter in this picture. However, everything else is very dark because the Mun is blocking the sun.

After the two redocked, I performed a standard reentry maneuver to bring the craft back to Kerbin. Along the way, I jettisoned the orbiter module and only brought home the lander.

Recording Myself Playing Guitar

I decided to record myself playing guitar recently. My step dad scheduled a time for me to meet with his sound manager, and he agreed to help me. I recorded two songs, "Bouree in E Minor" by Bach and "Paranoid Android" by Radiohead. My guitar doesn't have classical, nylon strings, so "Bouree" doesn't sound so good because you can hear my fingers squeaking on the strings as I rapidly move around the neck. Other than that though, I was very satisfied with the end result of the recordings.

I don't have much else to say, so here's a link for you to download them and listen.

A Thing I Made Up: Kelly Diagrams

In my Vector Calculus class recently, we were tasked with writing a paper detailing all rhombic tilings of the sphere with at most two distinct "types" of vertices. A "rhombic tiling of the sphere" effectively means a polyhedron made out of rhombi. I found it difficult to visualize these polyhedra because they exist in three dimensions. Drawing them didn't help much since drawing is a 2D medium. However, I came up with a new way of diagramming polyhedra: the Kelly diagram.

The Kelly diagram for a cube.

To create a Kelly diagram for any polyhedron, draw all of its faces out flat. Then, draw loops around the corners of faces that meet at a vertex. This means that, in a Kelly diagram, each vertex is represented by a loop that encloses the corners of the polygons that meet at the vertex. For example, the Kelly diagram above represents a cube. Note that there are 12 loops, and each one encloses the corners of three squares (for the outermost loop, assume that the area around the drawing is the inside). This is because there are 12 vertices on a cube, and each one has 3 squares meeting at it.

Kelly diagrams were a very useful visualization tool in my paper. Using this new form of diagram, I was able to prove the non-existence of the rhombic octadecahedron. If you want to read my full paper, you can download it here. The file is an open document text (.odt) so you may have to download Openoffice to view it.