peadar1987

Are you sure? My data said that with a 2km/s relative velocity and a 100km tether you would have a window of about 3.5 seconds when the relative velocity of the payload relative to the tip was below 100m/s. Not ideal, but not insurmountable. I'm having trouble visualising what you're proposing with your retrograde airbags solution. Surely if you're picking up a payload from a suborbital trajectory you want it to be hit by something moving prograde? Are you suggesting essentially using an orbital version of the Pelton wheel, turning the flow of gas back in the direction it came from?

Sorry, that's a typo, should read 2km/s of Delta-V. The simplest answer is that you spin the tether up before you catch the payload. That way the relative velocity between the hub and the payload might be 2km/s, but the relative velocity between the tip and the payload is close to zero at the intercept point. Once you've captured at low relative velocity (we allowed for up to 100m/s due to navigational inaccuracy), your acceleration relative to the hub is done over an entire quarter revolution of the tether, reducing forces. I can't think offhand of how you'd be able to capture something moving at 8km/s relative velocity without destroying either it or the station. Airbags are one possibility, but that requires mass to be brought up to the facility every time you capture something, and also will pose the problem of creating debris. I haven't run the numbers, but I'd say you would need a lot of airbags as well, just judging by the distance a reentering capsule travels through the atmosphere before it is slowed down. Again without numbers, I would say that you would need a mass of air much greater than the mass of the payload, as all you are doing is transferring momentum from the payload to the air in the bag, and you are not going to transfer anything close to 100% as the air escapes.

I actually did my Masters Dissertation on Momentum Exchange Tethers. More specifically, the design of a capture system for them. The tether system itself can be either boosted by interacting with the earth's magnetic field, without use of propellant (this is slow, but very doable with solar or nuclear power). The other way the tether system can be boosted is by using it not only to catch payloads from earth, but also return payloads from the moon. The proposed use for my system was to supply a lunar colony. The lunar colony would use a railgun or coilgun to fire payloads on an earth intercept. Slowing them down would speed up the tether system, which would then drop them into a descent trajectory once it had captured enough momentum. It would then have enough momentum to catch a suborbital payload from earth of similar mass without itself reentering. A combination of capturing returning payloads from the moon and electrodynamic tether propulsion would allow the station to theoretically operate without additional reaction mass. The system we came up with for capture was essentially a giant net. It would be held "open" by centrifugal force, by spinning the net attachment point about the long axis of the tether. We could get about 3km/s of delta-V this way without subjecting the payload to excessive G forces, and using existing materials (Kevlar for most things)

Yes, yes it was. With some snow thrown in for good measure. Although at least I'm not in a crashing aeroplane... 12000 metres above the Tespen Sea The nose of the stricken transport began to slowly pitch down. Two Kerbals fought their way towards the cockpit, calling for help from anyone still conscious. Jadra unbuckled her safety harness and stood up at the same time as Virenna, the blood rushing from her head. She staggered slightly and felt her head begin to spin. Her vision narrowed and she almost fell, before she felt Virenna's hand on her shoulder. "Jadra? Are you still with me?" She took a deep breath, filling her lungs with stinging, icy air, with its meagre amount of precious oxygen. The darkness receded slightly from the edge of her vision and she nodded. Supporting themselves on the seats and walls of the aircraft, the two moved towards the cockpit as well. Stars above, it was less than 10 metres, why was it this hard?! The cockpit itself had been turned into Amblian Cheese. Vicious daggers of smoking metal were embedded in the bulkhead behind the pilot and co-pilot's seats. As for the flight crew themselves... Jadra forced herself to look away. They had joined the two Javelin pilots wherever it was brave Kerbals went after they died. She hadn't known either of them well, but a crushing sadness mingled with her fear. Only four of the twenty Kerbals on board the aircraft had made it to the cockpit. The rest had presumably been incapacitated, either by the thin air or the multiple impacts. Jadra stood back as the two male air force Kerbals rushed for the controls, unceremoniously pushing their colleagues' remains from the seats. There would be a time for sentiment, but now was not it. The one in the pilot's seat, Lorcan, pulled back on the stick hard to try and arrest the steepening dive. It hit the stops with no resistance and no change in the rate of descent. As the three trained flyers cycled switches, pulled levers, and tried to restore control in the cockpit, Jadra's mind flashed back to the airbase and her conversations with the engineers on the ground. She couldn't fly the plane, but she could help. The aircraft was of the simple, rugged design favoured by the Tespen Confederation. That was probably the only reason it was still in the air. It was a beast to fly, the mechanical controls needing a lot of strength to operate, even with the reduction gears giving maximum mechanical advantage to the pilots. If the stick was slack, there was no connection between the control surfaces and the cockpit. Jadra rushed back into the cabin, coming close to passing out with the effort. She took a few moments to catch her breath, then started pulling up the floorboards, screaming over the wind and the alarms for Virenna to come and help her. By the time they found what she was looking for, five minutes had passed. Control cables running under the floor into a robust-looking box, twisted, slack and frayed towards the nose of the plane, bar-tight on the tail side. "How long do we have before we hit the ground?" Jadra shouted. "About ten minutes." replied Virenna. "The rate of descent has slowed down now the air is thickening, but we're still not walking away from this unless we can get back some control." Jadra ran to the back of the cabin. Virenna was right, the air was thickening, there was no way she could have run a few minutes previously. She tore the emergency supplies cupboard apart for anything resembling a spare cable. No rope, no wire, the best she could manage was a roll of bandage. Rushing back to the hole in the floor, she tied the end of the bandage to the torn end of wire from the control system. Hurry, hurry, hurry. Five minutes left. The bandages secure, she went back forwards to the cockpit. It took her another precious minute to explain her plan to Lorcan, but when he nodded his assent, she ripped off the cover from the control column, exposing a tail of shredded wire perhaps a metre long. She led the bandage around the pulleys of the control system and attached it to the end of the wire. She had cut her hand somewhere along the way and the blood stained the bandage and made her grip slippery. Three minutes. The ground was now clearly visible from the cockpit. Swamp and marshes on the shore of the Tespen Sea. Flat ground. Lorcan pulled gently back on the stick. It hit the stops before the improvised control line went taut. Swearing profusely, Jadra cut the bandage. No time to untie. Two minutes. With Lorcan pushing forwards on the stick as hard as he could, Jadra took out all the slack from the bandage she was able to and retied it. Sixty seconds. Lorcan pulled back on the stick and the bandage went taut. The elevators on the tail were pocked and holed by debris from the explosion, but they responded and bit the air. Jadra stood up from the floor of the cockpit and let out a whoop of victory, before a loud bang rang through the confined space, and she was thrown against a bulkhead as the plane lurched. The bandage had given way. Thirty seconds. If Jadra could get a spanner on the reduction gears themselves, she could perhaps slow the descent to a survivable level. She stumbled back to the cabin, pulling an adjustable spanner from her overalls. Twenty seconds. Picking what she though was the right gear, she snapped the tool onto the stubby driveshaft at its hub. Ten seconds. "Jadra, we're going to hit. Strap in!". Virenna's voice came to her from a very long way away, even as Jadra felt her hand land on her shoulder for the second time in half an hour. "But I can..." "Strap in!" Five seconds Jadra abandoned the spanner and dove into the nearest seat, snapping the buckle on the harness into place just as the transport hit the marsh, bounced once, then broke apart. Of the eighteen Kerbals left alive on board, seven were killed instantly. Five more would succumb to their injuries before rescue arrived six hours later. Jadra escaped with an arm broken by a flying spanner, probably her own. With the sudden lack of trained personnel, the uninjured Virenna was pushed to the front of the rotation for the next Javelin flight. News of a disaster in the Tespen Space Program quickly filtered through to Yeflana, where the one junior technician foolish enough to greet it with a cheer was silenced by a look from Matrick that managed to be icy cold in spite of the searing desert heat. Author's note: I was not expecting it to be that hard to write about the deaths of unnamed Kerbals. In fact I was a bit worried about trivialising the dangers of aviation by writing a bit too gleefully about explosions and crashes. It was also very tempting to let Jadra save the day, but that wouldn't really work for what I've got planned for the next few chapters. Hopefully she'll forgive me!

Pretty unlikely, as they would naturally just freeze out of the atmosphere even more easily than CO 2 given the chance. You'd need some sort of massive thermal event, like global volcanism far greater than anything we've seen anywhere in the solar system (Io doesn't even pump out enough gas to form a decent atmosphere) or else a massive bombardment of small bodies energetic enough to vaporise all the ice but not blast it off into space.

Plenty of other reasons though

So I actually messed up the equation a bit. The actual expected temperature is 130K. For a really dark body you can get that up to maybe 160K. CO2 starts to sublimate at about 190K, so if you added some heat from impacts or large scale vulcanism or something, you could a actually get a reasonably thick CO2 atmosphere. Pulling the fudge of adding massive amounts of tidal and radiogenic heating, and doubling the amount of energy reaching the planet (an extremely optimistic case) raises the expected temperature to 170K. Turns out that adding to the energy flux has pretty rapidly diminishing returns, due to the fourth power in the Stefan Boltzmann law. Increasing the temperature a little bit increases the amount lost to space by a heck of a lot. If you had a REALLY thick CO2 atmosphere you could probably get enough of a greenhouse effect to maintain extremely salty or ammonia-rich liquid water at the surface. New numbers here if you want to play with them.

Numbers time! Edit: the numbers are wrong, updated, warmer version here: From wikipedia, the expected temperature of a planet with no greenhouse effect can be given by: Where Aabs/Arad is the effective area of the planet getting heated by the sun (0.5 for slowly-rotating bodies) L is the luminosity of the sun a is the albedo of the body, which is about 0.367 for earth. Sigma is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant Epsilon is the emissivity of the earth, here taken to be 0.612 D is the distance to the sun. Plugging these numbers into Wolfram Alpha gives an expected surface temperature for an earth-like body orbiting Jupiter of 61K. Earth's own Greenhouse effect adds about 40K to the temperature, but even with that we're at -170 degrees celsius, well below the sublimation point of CO2 under atmospheric pressure (-78 degrees celsius). Even if your body is coal-black and absorbs almost all of the radiation from the sun, the average surface temperature only goes up to 69K. Now, on earth, the variation between the average temperature and the maximum average temperature is about 25-30K, giving a maximum temperature on our pseudo-Laythe of possible 140K. We still have over 100K to make up before we even get to the melting point of antifreeze. So the sun isn't enough... What about tidal heating? Well Jupiter gets about 54W/m2 of solar radiation, which means that an earth-sized planet would get 54W*pi*r2, or 6.8*1015W from the sun. This calculates that Io generates about 6*1017W due to tidal forces, less than 1% of which is converted into heat (the rest just moves rock around). The tidal heating seems to depend on the radius of the planet, rather than its mass (which I found surprising), so an earth-sized body would experience about 3x the tidal heating as Io, giving a tidal heating of 3*1014W, an order of magnitude smaller than the solar radiation. If we're being reeeally generous (and fudgey), increase this by a factor of ten, and just treat it as doubling the solar energy absorbed by the planet, I can still only manage to increase the expected average surface temperature to 80K. I'm really struggling to see how we could make this happen. Jupiter is just too far out. If anyone wants to play around with the values I've used, click here

It's been absolutely Baltic in Glasgow recently, and no wind to go sailing. Good excuse to stay indoors and do some writing!

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/apollo-sites.html I'd be interested to see which parts of the moon evidence you believe NASA have failed to answer basic queries on. There is a huge amount of peer-reviewed scientific literature on the lunar landings, from the orbital mechanics of the mission, to the technologies of the spacecraft, to the geology of the lunar material brought back. A search for "Apollo mission" on Sciencedirect gives me over 6,900 results.

P<0.05, so we can disregard them.

Many kilometres to the north-east, Jadra sat strapped into a seat in a Tespen Air Force transport, along with most of the rest of the astronaut corps. Any slim hopes she might once have had of acclimatising to the program had been dashed long ago. The Air Force Kerbals seemed leagues ahead of her at every turn. A test in a centrifuge that left most of the unfased had her blacking out and vomiting for half an hour afterwards. She was being given basic flying lessons in a small propeller plane while they tested spacecraft systems on supersonic jets. The only area she felt that she hadn't made a complete fool of herself in was the mechanical side. She could still take apart an reassemble a jet engine hours more quickly than the pilots, who were probably used to having an entire ground crew do it for them. Tespen Air Force transport She glanced to her right at the Kerbal from Samish, who she now knew was called Virenna. Virenna had adjusted to the heat better than Jadra had adjusted to the programme, and was probably the closest thing Jadra had to a friend in the corps. Being from the tundra of Samish might not have made her as much of an outsider as Jadra, but it at least gave them some common ground. To Jadra's left was the reason they were in the air in the first place. A slender, elegant aircraft flew alongside the transport. Stubby wings protruded from either side, but the most distinguishing feature was the huge maw of the engine bell at the tail. Its official designation was the XS-03b. The pilots called it the Javelin. It was being used for testing high-speed, high altitude performance of air- and spacecraft, under conditions a pure jet could never hope to achieve. The majority of its airframe was given over to the cylindrical solid rocket motor that was about to be fired, hurling the Javelin forwards with five Gs of acceleration. Both aircraft were struggling to fly at 300 knots, the Javelin with its nose high in the air, scraping all the lift it could from its small wings, right on the edge of stalling, the transport with its twin engines labouring to keep up, fighting the drag. A Javelin in flight The final pre-ignition checks buzzed over the radio, the voices of the two pilots in the Javelin rattling off the status of all of the important subsystems. "All systems green, you are cleared for motor ignition" came the voice of the mission controller from the cockpit of the chase plane. A shower of sparks flew from the engine bell, quickly followed by the red flame of the initiator and a second after, the white-yellow of the fuel itself igniting. Jadra had seen similar tests on three previous occasions, and still a 5g acceleration seemed so unnatural to her. This time, however, there was no acceleration, instead there was a violent crack, and a fraction of a second later the Javelin was no more, replaced by a rapidly-expanding ball of flame, peppered with debris. The lumbering transport had no chance, it flew straight into the cloud with a sound like a Zeswurg hailstorm, two loud bangs signalling the complete destruction of the engines as they ingested the remains of the Javelin. Jadra's ears stabbed with an instant blinding pain as the cabin depressurised, but even with two ruptured eardrums she could hear the cacophony of sirens and alarms struggling to make themselves heard over the screaming of the wind whipping in through the hundreds of holes in the aircraft. The smell of burning rocket fuel scorched her nostrils, and mingled with kerosene from what must be a ruptured fuel line. The transport was going down. Jadra flashed back to a burning crater in northern Yeflana, mortars landing around her. She'd managed to pull through that one, but had no idea how she was going to get herself out of this.

Three months later Tombart stood in the cramped confines of a blockhouse several hours journey to the west of Nammard, deep in the central Yeflanan desert. For the past six weeks he had been working flat out, supervising teams of welders, fitters and assorted technicians as they worked feverishly on the mammoth project that he was now watching through a narrow slit in the blockhouse wall. Behind him stood a dense crowd of dignitaries. Local governors, departmental heads, and a certain Kerbal by the name of Matrick, who had been in the news non-stop since he had arrived in the country. In front of him, the brushed metal skin of the first Yeflanan rocket, Arkus-1, stood out in stark contrast to the dull browns and greys of the stony desert surrounding it. The Program Director, a burly Kerbal in what was presumably the uniform of a very high-ranking officer indeed, cleared his throat and a hush fell over the room. "Our rivals have claimed they have a five year head start on us in our race to the Mun. Today is the day we close that gap. When Arkus 1 breaks free of Kerbin's atmosphere, Yeflana and our friends from the Eslen Alliance will be the clear leaders in yet another field of Kerbal endeavour" There was a smattering of applause, and the Director initiated the launch sequence with the push of a satisfyingly large red button. A klaxon blared out through the early desert afternoon, sending a lone bird flapping from the gantry holding the rocket upright, before a metallic, prerecorded voice took its place. Twenty seconds. The fuelling hoses dropped away from the tanks on the first and second stages, clattering off the sides of the rocket as they went, metallic parts flashing blindingly whenever they caught the sun. Fifteen seconds. Lights on the control panel in front of the Flight Officer flashed to green as the control systems were switched to remote. Ten seconds The roar of the starter motor almost drowned out the countdown as it spun the turbopumps up to speed Seven seconds Sparks flew from the pyrotechnic ignition system into the flow of fuel inside the single engine bell. Arkus-1 lurched as the thrust kicked in, before being restrained by the launch clamps. Five seconds Four seconds Three Two One Liftoff! The launch clamps sprung free, swinging back under the action of their counterweights. Arkus-1 seemed to hang above the blistering concrete of the launchpad for a second, before beginning a slow climb into the air on a column of fire. This time the applause in the blockhouse could not have been more enthusiastic, although much of it was drowned out by the sound of Arkus-1's ascent. Tombart watched with pride as another blinding flash of sunlight was reflected from the rocket's metallic skin as it cleared the tower. No... Not sunlight, flame. Tombart's pride quickly turned to horror as hot, incandescent gas erupted from just above the base of the rocket, slewing the tail towards the tower. The main engine fired for less than a second longer and, deprived of thrust, the stricken craft rolled onto its side, fell back to the launchpad and exploded. The blockhouse was shaken to its foundations. Plaster cracked and fell from the ceiling. The lights flickered and died as the power failed. Shrapnel from the tower was later discovered almost three kilometres away. Even in the darkness, Tombart could feel scores of eyes pointed directly, judgementally, at him. The crackling of secondary fires was the only sound, apart from the ringing in his ears, until the voice of Matrick broke the silence. "I suppose this means we're still five years behind?"

I never got the people who say that living on Mars would be a cramped and difficult existence, they wouldn't fancy it, therefore we will never go there. There are seven billion people in the world. We could fill a Martian colony a thousand times over with people who are willing to put up with that to be one of the first to live on another world. There are a million problems with colonisation, but a shortage of volunteers would certainly not be one of them.

It's definitely an option. Without running the numbers any further, I'd still say a nuclear-powered Brayton cycle would give you less headaches in the long run though.

Power of a wind turbine is Eta*0.5*A*Rho*v3 where eta is the efficiency (maximum of 57%), A is the swept are, rho is the density, and v is the windspeed. Density at the surface of Venus is 67 kg/m3, but wind speeds are quite slow, apparently around 3 m/s. A 1MW turbine would have to have a minimum area of 970m2. This corresponds to a rotor diameter of ~36 metres (compared to a 60m diameter for a similarly rated turbine on earth). A corresponding 1MW (~1500HP) gas turbine would be a lot more compact, if not a huge amount lighter.

Not at all, actually. Modern combined cycle gas turbines work with a heat rejection temperature from the topping cycle of over 500oC quite happily. Turbine inlet temperatures can now approach 1500oC, so your Carnot efficiency between your two thermal reservoirs is going to be about 56%. Practical efficiency is going to be closer to 35%, and you're going to have to bleed off quite a lot of power for active cooling of various systems, but thermodynamically the numbers add up just fine.

Earth and Mars build warships to maintain the power balance for the same reason the USA and USSR kept building tanks and guns after ICBMs were invented. Neither was going to escalate things to a full nuclear exchange if they could have avoided it. If you're scrambling for influence over resources in the Belt, a warship is going to be a lot more use than going straight to scorching the surface of the earth.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I don't know too much about binary systems, I don't know if they ever form far enough apart or have the right size difference to have stable L4 and L5 points

Binary star systems could very well have them though, no?

We use them on marine outboard engines. A big lump of (I think) zinc bolted onto the bottom just below the prop. We had one come loose and fall off, and were amazed at how quickly the engine attached to it rusted into complete uselessness before anybody noticed.

As far as I know, the atmosphere at the surface of Venus is mostly supercritical CO2. The clouds of HsSO4 are much higher in the atmosphere. Even with current technology, getting something from the surface is just an engineering and economic problem. The pressure is bad, but we can deal with it. 90 bar isn't insurmountable. The temperature is also a problem, but active cooling can deal with this. Under Venusian conditions, a heat pump to refrigerate to room temperature would have a maximum theoretical COP of about 0.5, which isn't great. A real-world system would probably max out at around 0.3. Meanwhile, a thermal power plant, most likely a gas turbine with a nuclear fission reactor as the heat source, would have a Carnot efficiency of up to about 50%, and an actual efficiency of about 30% as well. So about 10% of the energy generated from the fuel is going to go into actively cooling the mining vehicle. For mechanical simplicity, I would avoid anything wheeled, and go with a low-altitude dirigible. It can drift around lazily in the slow-moving currents near the surface until it finds what it's looking for, scoop it up, and send it into the upper atmosphere by balloon. If whatever Maguffin we're after can't just be picked up, but needs to be mined or refined, again I'd go for simplicity. Massive explosive charge, blow the ore seam to rubble, then send up chunks of rubble. Once in the upper atmosphere, the balloons are collected by an autonomous floating station with ISRU for fuel and prefabricated empty launch vehicles to send them back to earth, or to an orbiting station, wherever they are needed. The technology to do this does exist, or could be developed without any groundbreaking discoveries. However it would never even be close to economical for anything short of pure antimatter or something.

But there are no moons with a greater mass than any planets, which is what counts if you're trying to blow it to pieces with antimatter. Mercury is twice the mass of Ganymede. Although when Pluto was still classed as a planet it was (and presumably still is!) less massive than Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, Io, Earth's Moon, Europa and Triton.

Apologies for the huge delay. I've been in thesis hell! However, I've finally scraped together some time for a bit more writing on this. And sorry for stealing your turn of phrase from earlier @KSK, but I rather liked it ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nammard, Yeflana "Comrade Matrick. You are probably feeling slightly confused as to why you are here. First of all, let me reassure you, you are not going to come to any harm." The First Comrade's smile hardened slightly. "At least, no intentional harm" "I had wondered" replied Matrick. "I was never much of a fan of public executions, but I don't recall you being personally involved in any" Tarcan chuckled. "Believe me, the fewer Kerbals I need to have executed, the better. As our enterprising cousins to the north would say, it's 'bad for business'. Particularly when those Kerbals are as talented and useful as yourself." "First Comrade, with the greatest of respect, you can stop being cryptic. I know why you had me flown back here, and I'm not going to kill people. Send me to a work camp, shoot me, do what you want, but I'm not dropping bombs for you." Again, the First Comrade laughed. "My apologies comrade. A certain level of showmanship is necessary to be elected Head of the Party. And the PEB love it. I'll be frank with you. Firstly, you were not flown back here to fly for the air force. You are a fine pilot by all accounts, but that's hardly worth the effort we went to to get you back from half way across the world." Matrick listened, partly shocked, partly intrigued, as the First Comrade continued. "I doubt you will have had a chance to read the newspapers over the last few days, so I will bring you up to date. The Tespens have declared that they are going to land a Kerbal on the Mun, to 'prove their superiority' over their rivals. That means us. Technology is a matter of pride for Yeflana. It was scientific research and cooperation that let us tame the deserts, master 'impossible' refrigeration and fight off invaders from all points of the compass. And we are not being beaten to the Mun by a corrupt and decadent empire" "And you want me to help design the craft to go there?" said Matrick "No, comrade Matrick. I want you to fly it." replied Tarcan. "You are a record-breaking pilot, and a capable engineer. And, importantly, you are an icon to anybody who follows competitive sportsflying. What better way to score a propaganda coup than landing a national hero on the Mum?" "And if I refuse to fly the highly dangerous, experimental craft, I'll be shot for defection" "And yes, we will have a certain... unique leverage over you in that respect." "Well... It seems like you're making me an offer I can't refuse. In that case, I won't refuse it" The First Comrade's face lit up. "Excellent. I know I will be able to count on you! Now, I happen to have a very fine bottle of berry spirit in my desk for... diplomatic purposes. I would hazard a guess that you will not be drinking much over the next while. I insist you join me in a celebratory toast. To the Mun!" And in spite of everything, Matrick found himself smiling back. ---------------------------------------------------------- A few hundred kilometres to the north-east, Jadra finally stepped down from the jeep inside a walled compound at the corner of Braklau airbase. General Billgren threw her bag after her and reassured her that all would be explained shortly, after everyone had eaten. She walked slowly into the building in front of her, along a broad corridor, and into the canteen. Conversation ground to a halt as she entered, the assembled Kerbals, there must have been thirty of them, all looking at her, sizing her up. Every one of them wore the scarlet of the Combined Tespen Air Force, the trim indicating which of the kingdoms they hailed from. A few from Tokana, one or two from Cirra, even a tall blonde woman from Samish, who looked to be struggling in the southern heat. In her dusty khaki Private's uniform, Jadra could not have felt more out of place. She found an empty table and sat down alone with a meagre tray of food. She was picking at a crossfruit when General Billgren marched back through the door. "At ease, soldiers" Jadra noticed at least half of the air force Kerbals stiffen at being called soldiers. "All of you have been called here because of your unique talents. You have all shown extraordinary skill, courage and ingenuity in your chosen fields. You have pushed the endeavours of Kerbalkind far beyond their previous limits in the defence of these sixteen kingdoms. And I sincerely hope that this will continue, as one of you standing in this room will be the first Kerbal to set foot on the Mun." After a second of shocked silence, the Kerbals launched into an impromptu rendition of the Tespen national anthem. Jadra's shocked silence lasted a second or two longer than the others', and she had forgotten many of the words, but she tried her best to keep up. She felt there would be a lot of that over the coming months. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tombart sat in a cell, deep below the Ijzerberg castle in Amblia. Ice-cold water dripped through a crack in the wall. He had no idea how long he had been down there for when the door was wrenched open with a clatter by the jailer. He was accompanied by none other than the Minister for Science and Education. "Oh my, Dr. Tombart, your accommodation leaves a lot to be desired. Have you been treated well, at least?" "I... You see... Well... It's cold." "Ah, well you won't have to worry about that for too much longer. It appears you are to be sent to Yeflana after all" Tombart looked up, speechless. "Second chances are rare in academia, Dr. Tombart, but the Yeflanans were able to offer us something extremely valuable in exchange for your services. It turns out that perhaps your research wasn't so useless after all. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- And in Reman, Emperor Kermor was fuming. "The Mun?! She can't go to the Mun. She shouldn't even be able to go to Tokana for her stupid summits and conferences. Why wasn't her plane shot down?!" "Your Sereneness, it was over neutral airsp..." replied the First Air Lord, before being interrupted by a spray of spittle and rage "I DON'T CARE! SHE FLIES, YOU SHOOT HER DOWN. THEN YOU BRING HER TO ME ALIVE!" "But Your Legitimacy, I don't..." "And find a way to get to the Mun before her. Or you'll be the First Latrine Lord by the end of the week." The First Air Lord slunk out of the room. Dealing with the Emperor definitely was not worth the extra bar on his epaulettes or the admittedly very impressive hat. He couldn't bring his leader the Empress, but he did have a plan for the second demand at least. He picked up the telephone in his office and began to dial a number.

And fortuitously almost completely invisible to the rudimentary radar of the day, being made mainly of timber and canvas apart from the engine blocks. Radio waves just passed straight through instead of being reflected. 617 Squadron used to use them as pathfinders for their raids. Sneak in low and fast, and drop a flare for the Lancasters to follow and aim for