music video: periapsis
Here's a little something I put together: a video of a trip to the Mün in Kerbal Space Program, edited in to a music video for the first track from my RPM 2012 album, periapsis:
I had to cut about two-thirds of the video to fit it to the track, but you get to see all the major events in a flight to the Mün:
- takeoff
- booster stage separation
- Kerbin orbit insertion
- transmünar injection (that's the burn that sends you to the Mün)
- Mün orbit insertion
- orbital adjustment for landing altitude
- orbital braking burn
- core stage separation
- final descent and landing
The rocket design is the smallest and simplest I've come up with so far that can get to the Mün and back again; you don't see it on the video, but I did get those Kerbal astronauts back home safely.
I captured the video using ffmpeg, with KSP running under Wine on my Linux desktop, and then used Kdenlive to edit it. Kdenlive worked well for the edit (no crashes!), though I suspect there was something funny happening with the audio/video sync -- I'd place an edit right on a beat, and then find upon repeat listens that it sometimes didn't quite match up, but it was such a close-run thing that it may have all been in my head.
