[Writing] Replacement Part

[Commander Zoom]

Dedicated to the staff of Anatid Robotics and Multiversal Mechatronics,

In memory of Dr. Richard Daystrom, and with regards to Captain Dunsel.

The first landing on the Mun had been a giddy historical event. The ones that followed proved that it was no fluke. By the fifth (Jeb\'s third), however, it had begun to seem almost routine. The beancounters finally began to take notice of the program\'s cost, and there were whispers of scaling it back or ending it entirely. Its defenders replied with suggestions of civilian applications - comm sats, power sats, and other things not yet dreamt of.

It was in this climate - with the KSP resting on its laurels a bit and searching for a new mission to justify its continued existence, and the brave kerbonauts out on a publicity tour - that a small group of engineers got the go-ahead to try their own bold experiment.

It was well-known in hindsight that the Orbiter 1 rocket was considerably overbuilt for its modest original purpose; it came from an era (not so long ago, but sometimes seeming very distant) when basic amenities like real-time orbital plotting were unavailable, and achieving a stable orbit was a matter of trying to hit numbers on pre-calculated tables with a fair amount of guesswork and seat-of-the-pants flying. Jeb himself had shown how much the rocket was really capable of when, with Munatic still on the drawing boards, he\'d flown an Orbiter around the Mun and back. A few believed that even more could be squeezed out of the design, with the right pilot at the controls - one as fearless as Jeb, with the same lightning reflexes, and the added ability to follow a more efficient flight plan exactly. As no such pilot existed, they decided to make their own.

The result of their efforts now sat atop an Orbiter stack, staring at the clear blue dome over KSC with an unblinking electric eye. As their creation required no oxygen, the engineers had cut the service module down to a single fuel tank; their calculations said this should be plenty, especially with the weight savings. The upper stage also included the new folding landing gear and the LV-909 engine, both of which were scheduled to fly on the next Munatic mission(s); the rest of the stack was the original design. The engineers waited anxiously in Mission Control, watched by skeptical console jockeys.

Those doubts began to fall away like spent stages immediately after launch. The robot performed flawlessly, keeping the rocket perfectly vertical during the ascent phase and curving smoothly through a gravity turn, coasting to its programmed altitude and burning the rest of the fuel in the lower stage to put it into a 100 km parking orbit with less than a dozen meters of eccentricity. One orbit later, the autopilot completed its second trial by executing a TMI burn at the press of a single button; tracking soon confirmed that it was precisely on course for the Mun. Impressed despite themselves, the controllers settled back to wait.

'Orbiter 1m' settled into munar orbit with just as little fuss, and its creators turned to the Flight Director to select a landing site. He\'d already picked one out: a crater in the northern hemisphere, at the end of a canyon running north from one of the 'seas' around the equator. It was a medium-sized crater with a terraced rim, which should give the robot a decent challenge, especially as it would have to adjust the inclination of its orbit. The robot did just that as soon as the new coordinates were fed in, accepting them without comment (naturally) and firing the upper stage engine to change course for its target.

The minutes ticked by as the lander glided toward the Mun\'s surface in a shallow arc. It seemed to most of the veteran flight crew that the craft was coming in too fast, and was about to make an expensive new hole in the crater floor. At the last moment, the autopilot fired the engines to kill most of its velocity, deployed the landing gear, and touched down on a small jet of flame at a mere half-meter per second - light as a feather - just as programmed.

For a long moment, there was no sound in Mission Control but the beeping of consoles and quiet confirmations that the robot had shut down the descent engine and was in safe mode, awaiting further instructions. Then the Flight Director cleared his throat.

'Someone get Jeb on the phone, tell him he doesn\'t have to come in next week.'

[StelarCF]

...the next day all that was left of KSC was a pile of rubble and some booster pieces.

[Commander Zoom]

Heh.

I wanted to reflect on the changes that new versions of the game, particularly the advent of plug-ins like MechJeb, have wrought since I began playing back circa 0.8. The post-Apollo transition years seemed like a fair metaphor, along with a touch of TOS 'The Ultimate Computer'.