THE BARTDON PAPERS - "Cancel all previous directives."

[The solid fuel chemist]

Krakens! i returned to the thread, only to speculate, get it right, then scroll down to find......another chapter. 

[UnusualAttitude]

12 hours ago, The solid fuel chemist said:

Krakens! i returned to the thread, only to speculate, get it right, then scroll down to find......another chapter. 

Sorry SFC, but I don't like leaving those cliffhangers hanging too long, or it defeats their purpose... 

However, you can count on someone in this story getting into trouble again, before long. 

[KAL 9000]

Ooooh, so THAT'S how it went! I see!

[Garrett Kerman]

I was close. Ish.

(do I get a participation medal?)

[NotAgain]

On ‎18‎/‎01‎/‎2016 at 9:19 PM, UnusualAttitude said:

There was also a rather more expensive but embarrassingly unsuccessful attempt by my esteemed fellow engineer Froemone to extract water to convert into rocket fuel from Near Earth Asteroids. It's a long story, so I'll tell you more about that some other time. It is... entertaining. Suffice to say that the figures just didn't add up with the technology available to us at the time, and Froemone's grand design failed to deliver a single drop of H2O to LEO.

When is 'another time'? (This is from the second post of the story). I'd quite like to hear about this...

[UnusualAttitude]

10 hours ago, Garrett Kerman said:

I was close. Ish.

(do I get a participation medal?)

That gives me an idea. Working on something along the lines of a membership card or seal of the "Camwise Unorthodox Engineering Society." Gimme a couple of days. 

2 hours ago, NotAgain said:

When is 'another time'? (This is from the second post of the story). I'd quite like to hear about this...

Now that is dredging up the past. 

This is one of the many things I intended to include in one of the logs at some point, but just didn't get round to finding a way to write about it in any shape or form that would be remotely entertaining for the reader. Now you mention it, it's a shame, because it is one of those classic cases of KSP RO/RSS teaching me some of the harsh realities of real space flight, as well as some good basic science. And it was a real slap in the face in terms of gameplay.

My in-game experience was as follows: in a previous stock-sized game, I had captured a Class-E asteroid and relocated it to Low Kerbin Orbit to serve as huge fuel depot packing more than two thousand tonnes of "ore" that could be converted directly into fuel and oxidiser. In a single stroke, my fuel requirements were drastically diminished and I could cut down on the size of my launchers dramatically. Anything I sent beyond LKO could be refuelled for free, just above the atmosphere.

Launching stuff to Low Earth Orbit is much harder in RSS, so naturally I attempted to repeat this trick when I started playing in the real world. With a big rock circling just above the Earth, I thought, my problems would be solved and I would have boots on Neptune in time for a late supper.

Well, as Camwise would say, not quite.

I built a probe mining rig with a claw, drills and a liquid hydrogen powered NTR and launched it at the first Class-E that came our way. I did some research. A typical C-type carbonaceous Near-Earth asteroid should consist of (we're being optimistic here) about 20% water ice and/or hydrates. That is still 600 tonnes of precious fuel if it's a big one, right?

Nope.

You see, if you extract the H₂ from H₂O, you're left with only a fraction of the original reaction mass. The hydrogen (the "lightest" element) in water makes up just over 11% of its molecular mass. Your 3,000 tonne rock contains barely 60 tonnes of useable fuel for your hydrogen NTR. That certainly won't be enough to relocate a Class-E to Low Earth orbit.

Even if you mine it in-situ and bring it back to LEO as liquid H₂ in a tank, you're still going to have to cope with shedding more than 3 km/s of delta-vee to get your hydrogen into a low circular orbit from escape velocity. Any future asteroid mining operation is going to have to come up with some pretty novel solutions in terms of aerobraking to get rid of that excess velocity and get any useful mass from NEO objects to LEO. TLDR: mining asteroids for propellant will be hard.

This, with the additional difficulty of boiloff (liquid hydrogen fuel leaking out of your tanks into space) killed any of my ambitions as an RSS asteroid miner. I chose a name for this whole fiasco: the FFF or Froemone Fuel Fallacy. A typical case of one of the characters taking the blame for the author's ignorance.

Now, however, we have active cooling systems that reduce boiloff, and Froemone is on the verge of developing propulsion systems with much higher ISP. We will see how this affects asteroid mining plans in the coming episodes.

Edited December 17, 2016 by UnusualAttitude

[SR]

If you are redirecting asteroids into Earth Orbit you don't have to use hydrogen for fuel.

Two possibilities are:

Using Water, which means you have more fuel at a lower isp.

Using some kind of electric engine to provide thrust from rock mined from the asteroid.

You could also use areobraking, as most asteroids could probably survive , due to being a large lump of rock.

also the minimum possible delta vee to return from an asteroid is 60 m/s.

if you use an asteroid that will be very close to earth in 10 years then a small burn will put it on an areobraking trajectory.

Edited December 22, 2016 by SR

[hidude398]

I'm not the only one here who forgot the Espedaillac was a thing, right? Riiiiight????? 

Edited December 17, 2016 by hidude398

[Starman4308]

23 hours ago, UnusualAttitude said:

I built a probe mining rig with a claw, drills and a liquid hydrogen powered NTR and launched it at the first Class-E that came our way. I did some research. A typical C-type carbonaceous Near-Earth asteroid should consist of (we're being optimistic here) about 20% water ice and/or hydrates. That is still 600 tonnes of precious fuel if it's a big one, right?

Nope.

You see, if you extract the H₂ from H₂O, you're left with only a fraction of the original reaction mass. The hydrogen (the "lightest" element) in water makes up just over 11% of its molecular mass. Your 3,000 tonne rock contains barely 60 tonnes of useable fuel for your hydrogen NTR. That certainly won't be enough to relocate a Class-E to Low Earth orbit.

Even if you mine it in-situ and bring it back to LEO as liquid H₂ in a tank, you're still going to have to cope with shedding more than 3 km/s of delta-vee to get your hydrogen into a low circular orbit from escape velocity. Any future asteroid mining operation is going to have to come up with some pretty novel solutions in terms of aerobraking to get rid of that excess velocity and get any useful mass from NEO objects to LEO. TLDR: mining asteroids for propellant will be hard.

This, with the additional difficulty of boiloff (liquid hydrogen fuel leaking out of your tanks into space) killed any of my ambitions as an RSS asteroid miner. I chose a name for this whole fiasco: the FFF or Froemone Fuel Fallacy. A typical case of one of the characters taking the blame for the author's ignorance.

Now, however, we have active cooling systems that reduce boiloff, and Froemone is on the verge of developing propulsion systems with much higher ISP. We will see how this affects asteroid mining plans in the coming episodes.

This is why my asteroid mining expeditions went with a LOX-assisted, trimodal NTR instead of a pure LH2 NTR. Granted, even then I badly underestimated how much delta-V I would get out and wound up converting 90% of the asteroid mass into either H2O or discarded waste product and barely got it into lunar orbit.

In the future, if I know ahead of time that it's a carbonaceous asteroid, I might try for a methalox engine, which will have even less Isp, but be able to use more of the rock.

EDIT: Also: gravity braking off the Moon. It's a wonderful thing.

Edited December 17, 2016 by Starman4308

[UnusualAttitude]

15 hours ago, SR said:

Using Water, which means you have more fuel at a lower isp.

 

1 hour ago, Starman4308 said:

In the future, if I know ahead of time that it's a carbonaceous asteroid, I might try for a methalox engine, which will have even less Isp, but be able to use more of the rock.

 

Certainly. Both these solutions are more viable, and now I am wiser I would certainly choose one of these if the goal was to just get more fuel to LEO for traditional rockets.

Soon, however, we will be aiming for the outer planets. Water fuelled solid core NTRs and chemical methalox just won't cut it. Hohmann transfers won't do at all. I may need some advice as to what is the most plausible near(ish)-future solution for such missions. Stick around, guys. 

2 hours ago, hidude398 said:

I'm not the only one here who forgot the Espedaillac was a thing, right? Riiiiight????? 

Well, I did drop some hints a while ago. Right???? 

"Mitzon wants to examine Espedaillac and see if any of the components of her propulsion system could be salvaged if something on our own shuttle fails. It turns out that she is in perfect condition and would only require refueling in order to be able to take off again." 

Edited December 18, 2016 by UnusualAttitude

[Starman4308]

37 minutes ago, UnusualAttitude said:

Soon, however, we will be aiming for the outer planets. Water fuelled solid core NTRs and chemical methalox just won't cut it. Hohmann transfers won't do at all. I may need some advice as to what is the most plausible near(ish)-future solution for such missions. Stick around, guys. 

What I've been doing recently for ejections to hard-to-hit targets is to use an extra kicker stage to get me another ~1.5 km/sec (on top of the booster, which usually gets me just barely out of Kerbin SOI); by that point, inaccuracy caused by additional, low-thrust, Oberth-hates-your-guts burns tends not to be very high, and can always be corrected later with a MechJeb fine-tune rendezvous maneuver.

If you're planning on super-fast, very high-dV maneuvers, I suppose you could pick a likely-seeming spot on the porkchop plot, attempt to match that vector reasonably well on your ejection, and then hit "rendezvous with target at X time" once you're past Kerbin SOI.

If you don't use MJ, well, there's always "fiddle with maneuver nodes until something sticks".

[KAL 9000]

I want my participation and even-more-outlandish-idea-than-what-actually-happened awards!

[hidude398]

On 12/18/2016 at 6:29 PM, KAL 9000 said:

even-more-outlandish-idea-than-what-actually-happened awards!

But was it "landing on the landing wheels reverse mun escape style, but on phobos" outlandish? Save on fuel by not using it to actually land!

[Garibaldi2257]

Well @UnusualAttitude, having spent the last few nights reading this entire story, it was quite entertaining and very well written.  definitely on the level of @Cydonian Monk and @Just Jim.

[UnusualAttitude]

8 hours ago, Garibaldi2257 said:

Well @UnusualAttitude, having spent the last few nights reading this entire story, it was quite entertaining and very well written.  definitely on the level of @Cydonian Monk and @Just Jim.

Wow, nice of you to say so. Thank you. Like the excellent mission storytellers you speak of, I attempt to make your loss of sleep interesting and meaningful.

  

Edited December 22, 2016 by UnusualAttitude

[UnusualAttitude]

YEAR 12, DAY 199. BARTDON.

So, it looks like we'll be going home after all. Although I sure as hell have absolutely no idea what home will be like when we get there.

That's assuming we arrive in one piece, and I for one wouldn't like to bet on our chances of enjoying long drinks on the beach at Omelek any time soon. Naturally, I had Karanda and Mitzon make a complete inspection of our remaining hardware, and they didn't find any further signs of foul play or instruments of sabotage hidden on board either Laroque, Cadrieu or Quissac. Then again, the obviously intentional explosion in the lander's oxygen tank and the meltdown of Laroque's reactor had occurred without us having any idea that such well-dissimulated failure modes were even possible. I therefore live in fear of the Board having further tricks concealed up its vast, shady sleeve, and I will continue to do so until I have both of my two feet planted firmly back on Terra Firma.

And even if I do live to play another round on the links of Tanegashima, what then? The Board has made it both officially and surreptitiously known that they don't want me around any more. Will we be safe, even if we do make it back home? Damn them all to hell and back! The worst thing is that I'm starting to think that they're right. I've made one poor decision after another, and I haven't even proven my self capable of keeping my own crew out of danger. How am I supposed to expect anyone to follow my leadership if I can't bring the team home safely?

My thoughts drift back to those three dreadful days that followed the explosion on Phobos. The capsule had been tossed clean off the ground and somersaulted twice in the moon's low gravity. It came to rest on the surface with a sickening crunch. None of us had been strapped in, of course, and Munvey had dislocated his left shoulder when he fell against the hull. Mitzon and I got off lightly with just a few bad bruises each. But our very first inspection of the damage told us that Cadrieu had reached her final resting place, and when I finally managed to raise Laroque we learned that it would probably be ours too, unless we could come up with something wonderful.

I remember wrenching Munvey's arm back into position as Mitzon busied himself with reconnecting the drilling rig and solar panels. “Don't worry, lad,” I said with false cheer to our pilot as he gritted his teeth against the searing pain. “We'll come up with something. We still have power, so there is hope.”

But as we slumped on the sloped wall of the capsule that had now become our new floor, and rested from our ordeal, I began to look for practical solutions and yet I could see none. Whether our solar panels continued to provide enough power or not was irrelevant. We couldn't eat electricity. We were three fragile living creatures, trapped in a small tin can of air on a dusty rock hundreds of millions of miles from the nearest source of sustenance. Three bags of green meat shot into space in order to prove that such a folly was possible. But our tin can had failed us, and we would starve, if madness did not take us before the end.

And there, lying in the darkness and cold that was all our life support system's backup mode could provide, I felt despair. I, Principal Investigator Bartdon of Omelek Space Centre, conqueror of Mars and the first Kerbal in history to set foot on another planet, swore that if I was lucky enough to make it back to my home world alive I would be eternally grateful, and never be foolish enough to leave it again. As we lay there waiting for nothing, I was intimately convinced that we had no place beyond Earth. Anything more adventurous than cowering beneath the comforting blanket of our life-giving atmosphere was nothing short of insanity.

We would never make it to the blasted stars. The dream was over, old boy. It had all been just a selfish publicity stunt leading to this inevitable disaster. And so we began ticking off the days until our demise.

But on the third day we got a message from Karanda in Laroque. With no other choice, she had re-established communications with Earth and, against all odds, someone in Froemone's team had come up with a plan. The idea sounded pretty far-fetched to me, and although our Senior Engineer took credit for it, I could tell that it wasn't his own. Too outlandish. You need imagination to come up with something like that.

But it didn't matter. The point was that we had something to peel ourselves off the capsule wall and work for. Somewhere, someone had granted hope to my crew. And that Kerbal wasn't me. I had been lying there shivering with the others, and I was a mere spectator of our possible salvation. Get up, Bartdon. Help Mitzon make enough fuel to get everyone home. Stay strong, work hard, and try not to die of hunger before rescue arrives.

And arrive it did, just over thirty days after disaster had struck. Quissac drifted down from the dark heavens, an improbable silhouette against the pale glow of the Red Planet. The vessel that, by rights, should simply not have been there. But there she was indeed, and as she settled cautiously onto the small plateau where we had been shipwrecked and we made our way over to the more spacious accommodation of the shuttle, all I could say was, “Hullo gals. About time, too. I hope you brought some snacks with you.”

With hindsight, I can only assume that it came as something of a shock to Karanda and Lisabeth to see their fearless leader as a gaunt, half-starved wreck of his former self. There was no time for our crewmates to feel sorry for us, however, as the race to be ready for our transfer window home had only just begun.

Our first task was to recover Desfal, our brave Assistant Investigator, who had been volunteered to stay behind on Laroque and crew the remote command station. He was still there, sitting on top of a damaged nuclear reactor with only a few cubic metres of water and a big tank of natural gas as a shield. If we were to salvage our crew accommodation for the trip home, we would have to get down there and start hauling Laroque back up Mars' gravity well.

Quissac's internal fuel supply would be nowhere near sufficient for her to act as a tug for an interplanetary transfer, so we would also need to recover one of the large fuel tanks that had been abandoned in LMO. We would park it in orbit above Phobos and use Quissac to ferry the fuel we produced on the surface up to fill it. This would take four or five trips if we wanted to leave the moon with a full load of propellant.

Karanda had reclaimed a set of radiators from our Martian ISRU rig. This would improve the efficiency of Cadrieu's experimental equipment somewhat, but extracting the seventy tonnes of fuel we required to make it home in the three months that remained before our window would be a challenge. There was no time to lose.

I left on Quissac with Karanda and Munvey as soon as we had transferred the fuel we had produced while waiting for them to arrive. I didn't like abandoning Mitzon and Lisabeth on that blasted moon, but I couldn't bear the thought of spending another hour there when I could be actually getting something done. Quissac kicked out onto a suborbital trajectory and aerobraked into LMO for the most dangerous part of this complex mission: recovering Laroque.

We spent many orbits coordinating our approach with instructions from Desfal, in order to rendez-vous and dock with our crippled transfer ship whilst remaining in the shadow of the radiation blazing from her stern.

Quissac then nosed up to Laroque and docked.

Desfal, who was giddy with relief from seeing an end to his solitary confinement, joined us in the shuttle, and then came the moment of truth: detaching the big ship's crew quarters, and backing slowly away from the drifting radioactive debris, ever so slowly. If the manoeuvre unsettled the drive unit and it began to tumble, then we would get the dose of our lives.

Despite all that he had been through, Munvey's hand was as steady as ever, and he pulled it off cleanly. Soon we were drifting several kilometres away, free to turn and rendez-vous with the vital transfer stage.

With all this extra dead-weight in tow, we would lack the fuel to make it back to Skyresh crater. We used Quissac's engines once more to boost this whole menagerie into a 700x700 orbit where we parked Laroque, planning to return and fetch her once our fuel tanks were full.

Then it was back to Phobos, towing our oversized fuel bowyer behind us. Leaving anything in Phobian orbit is a bit of a gamble. Your blasted gear has a tendency to wander off on its own business when you're not looking and end up on the other side of Mars. But it was a risk we would have to take and besides, we would be making regular trips back up to meet it and transfer the fuel we would be extracting on the surface.

Two more tedious months had passed, as we toiled to coax the most out of our drilling rig, and shuttled to fruits of our labour back up to orbit. Somehow, we endured, and eventually the transfer stage was topped off. It was time to go home.

Boosting Laroque back up out of Martian orbit was a tricky process, as our ship was now a laughable combination of crew habs, a shuttle being used as a tug, and a large drop tank with a useless engine still attached to its tail. Dragging so much useless equipment, Quissac's small engines were lacking in thrust for this sort of work. It took us two long twenty-minute burns to get up to escape velocity and escape from the Red Planet for good.

As the luck of orbital mechanics would have it, we swept past Phobos one more time on our way out. Gazing through the thick glass of Laroque's bridge, I could see the prominent features on the surface, even from several thousand kilometres away. Stickney, Skyresh, Filmnap... all these craters that had been our prison for the past long months. And, in the end, almost a death trap.

“How much bang do we have left in this damned ship?” I asked Karanda, once the empty transfer stage had been dumped, and we were drifting out into interplanetary space.

“One-point-three klicks per second, PI.”

Dammit! Capture at Earth would be a close thing. Once more, our chances of success were not the sort I would like to bet on. And once more, we would be dependent on assistance from our home world if we were to ever see the blue skies of Earth again. The eight-month trip home would not exactly be a serene one.

“You might want to see this, PI.” My thoughts were interrupted by Desfal, who had just received a transmission from Omelek.

Displayed on the screen in front of him, the first images from all three Fontanes probes. Data and pictures that had winged their way across billions of kilometres back to Earth, before being passed on to us. Vistas that were so alien and exotic that Mars and Phobos seemed like just next door in comparison.

Our robotic envoys to the outer solar system had arrived. We still had a deadline, and it would be our duty to go after them.

 

Edited December 29, 2016 by UnusualAttitude

[KAL 9000]

Yay new chapter!

[UnusualAttitude]

Yay, indeed. And thus ends Part Four: Too Big to Fail.

Since new versions generally have apocalyptic consequences for my save, I'd really like to update my game to 1.2.whatever before launching my next crewed mission(s), and RSS/RO is not quite there yet.

Getting everything up and running correctly on my old computer literally takes days of work, and then I will be designing some even more ambitious missions, so it may be a while before this story continues, I'm afraid.

But continue it shall. I can't wait to see the look on Cam's face when he learns what the next harebrained scheme is. 

[Just Jim]

1 hour ago, UnusualAttitude said:

Yay, indeed. And thus ends Part Four: Too Big to Fail.

Since new versions generally have apocalyptic consequences for my save, I'd really like to update my game to 1.2.whatever before launching my next crewed mission(s), and RSS/RO is not quite there yet.

Getting everything up and running correctly on my old computer literally takes days of work, and then I will be designing some even more ambitious missions, so it may be a while before this story continues, I'm afraid.

But continue it shall. I can't wait to see the look on Cam's face when he learns what the next harebrained scheme is. 

I hear ya. I just finally updated to 1.2.2. But I got lucky this time and only had to do a little repair work.  

Take your time and make a couple backups of your saved games, and good luck.  

[Garrett Kerman]

Really looking forward to the next installment! Keep up the good work!

One question: Why did the megacorporation want to kill Barton and his crew? Sure, they were expendable, but why kill them? Surely the dissagreement between them and Barton was not enough to warrant their termination. What am I missing out on?

[UnusualAttitude]

22 minutes ago, Garrett Kerman said:

Really looking forward to the next installment! Keep up the good work!

Thanks! I shall.

34 minutes ago, Garrett Kerman said:

One question: Why did the megacorporation want to kill Barton and his crew? Sure, they were expendable, but why kill them? Surely the dissagreement between them and Barton was not enough to warrant their termination. What am I missing out on?

Bartdon has been a thorn in the side of the Board of Trans Pacific Resources for a while now. While they are pushing for a reckless all-out search for the Crew's datacores (that they hope will provide them with a technological advantage over their competitors), Bartdon has been urging for a much more cautious approach. And because he is in charge in the field, so far he has gotten his own way in a certain sense.

Until now, Bartdon has been resourceful enough to wriggle his way back into a position where the Board really needed his leadership for the space programme. On Mars, when Bartdon cut off the Martian Face transmission, the Board got the final proof that they can't control him, and he would do things his own way, regardless. So they found a convenient way (that had been planned for all along should such a situation arise) to remove him. Permanently. 

The rest of the crew would have just been collateral. There are plenty more kerbonaut candidates waiting for their turn. Yes, the Board members are ruthless, and the world in which this story takes place is harsh, but I believe that I have been hinting at this since the beginning. 

Also, what could be worse for a resource company than having some game-changing sustainable technology (such as advanced fusion power) slip into the wrong hands (ie: anyone else's)...?

I hope this makes things clearer for you. And don't worry, when I read back through this story, I do realise that I haven't made certain points obvious enough. This is just one of the quirks of posting it week-by-week, I'm afraid. Don't hesitate to ask. 

[joelang6126]

Where can I find the parts that you used for  Quissac ?

Edited January 10, 2017 by joelang6126
deleting long quote

[UnusualAttitude]

2 hours ago, joelang6126 said:

Where can I find the parts that you used for  Quissac ?

The hull sections are from Nertea's Mk IV Spaceplane System mod. If you want rotating outboard engine pods you will need Infernal Robotics. 

Also @joelang6126, would you mind editing your post to remove the entire episode you quoted? It makes threads such as this one very difficult to follow when readers start doing this. Thanks. 

In the future, if you just want to get a forum-user's attention, you can type in that person's username with a commercial-at in front, like this: @UnusualAttitude  

[joelang6126]

@UnusualAttitude Thanks for the info and posted edited!

[Plecy75]

So, how will they het back to the surface of earth from orbit? It's not like the board will allow the launch of anything with any sort of return or landing capability when they see the crew coming back