Saturday, March 23, 2013

Station rearranging...

... is not a very exciting blog entry, sorry.

So here is the deal. Both solar arrays are effectively backwards (I want to reduce the polar moment...  basically I want as much of the mass in the center of the craft and not at the ends). To do this I need to flip the array towers around, but they both have their booster motors. Since I am going to dump them, I opt to dump the booster on the original habitation module as well.

So, here we go...


These are the three boosters that I had to cut free. Unfortunately I realize now that I was so busy trying to time the de-orbit/re-orbit that I forgot to take screenshots. (grumble).

So I use that big motor from the orange tank to deorbit the entire station from its 110kmx110km orbit and then I cut free all three of the circled boosters (I did pull in the solar panels for this 'just in case') I then had to re-orbit the ship in to a final orbit (which is more like 109.km x 111km right now, but the thing is so wobbly I don't think I'll do this kind of thing again.)

Pro-tip: When your station is wobbling like mad, don't count on the RCS or ASUS to dampen out the oscillations  just turn them both off and let it settle.

Anyhow, I began putting the station back in to orbit:


Using a mayflower engine for orbital adjustments is like pulling a tooth with a locomotive.


Anyhow, we are back in orbit, so now I need to flip the two solar beams around:



Now the other side:




Ta Da! It is all flipped around. 


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