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To Duna with Pulsed Fission - The Voyage of the K.E.V Curiosity


CDSlice

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Using the Far Future Technologies mod I decided it was finally time to send Kerbals beyond Kerbin's SOI in my JNSQ TAC life support save. The obvoius choice was Duna as it is closer than Edna or Dres along with more science. Eve was also ruled out since I don't have the technology for a Eve surface return (yet! The Nuclear Salt Water engine might change that...)

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Blasting off with the core of the habbitable section of the K.E.V. Curiosity. Thanks to Waterfall for the beautiful plumes.

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Adding the lab and greenhouse modules that were launched seperately. The crew have also arrived in a Salya class LKO crew transport vehicle docked to the front of the Curiosity.

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Bringing the massive X-20 Pulsed Fission Engine to the Curiosity.

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The K.E.V. Curiosity completed in LKO. With a habbitation ring for 8 kerbals, two labs, two greenhouses for experiments in growing food in situ, around 3 years of life support, and a lander designed to carry 4 kerbals to Duna and Ike's surface with a wide selection of experiments. The X-20 engine and two fission pellet tanks give the Curiosity over 20k of dV with a TWR of around 0.4 or so. This is slightly overkill for a simple Duna expedition but this served as a good testing ground for the new technologies and made the mission shorter since the excess dV lets us force a transfer back to Kerbin whenever we want instead of waiting over a year for a Duna to Kerbin transfer window. We will still head from Kerbin to Duna at a transfer window in order save on dV and more importantly lower the escape burn time.

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Firing the X-20 to transfer to Duna.

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Making a deep space correction burn.

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Arriving at Duna. We have a fairly high PE since it will take a while to burn into a capture orbit and we don't want to dip into the atmosphere.

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Performing our capture burn.

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The D.E.V (Duna Exploration Vehicle) begining its descent to the surface.

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My TUFX configs might be a bit too bright for Duna.

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Duna's atmosphere is the worst, it is thick enough to make take off annoying but too thin to land with parachutes.

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Running some experiments on EVA.

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Photo with the crew. I really like this lander design and have been using variations of it for almost half a year now. 

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Heading back to the K.E.V. Curiosity.

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Which then burns for Ike.

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Ike's cool grays are a welcome change from the red of Duna.

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The Ike landing crew decided to be more playful with their photo.

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With the return of the lander it was time to head back to Duna to prepare to return to Kerbin.

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Thanks to the massive amount of dV we can force a transfer back to Kerbin ASAP without needing to wait over a year for a transfer window. This lets us save on life support and bring our Kerbals back home sooner.

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Arriving back at the beautiful blue ball we call home.

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Sending another Salya class craft to take the crew back to the surface. However, after this point when the Salya had re-entered the atmosphere it was realized that the craft never had parachutes installed! Luckily all of our brave explorers were able to bail out and parachute to safety with the precious data.

 

The mission was a resounding success, with over 6000 science brought back in experiments and nearly as much transmitted back home from in situ lab analysis. With the magic of pulsed fission, nearly everywhere in the Kerbal system has been unlocked for crewed missions instead of just probes.

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