UnusualAttitude

Awesome. Very interesting and plausible concept for a near-future crewed Mars mission. Insane views from Phobos, as always. I'd really like to go there more than Mars, I think.

Aye, 2009 Core 2 Duo iMac FTW! Anything over 100 parts is s..l...o..w ! Thanks for the heads up. I will check my settings and try and find out what is wrong. I must admit I find my screenshots slightly squashed on my mobile (as well as dreadfully dark), but I thought they were fine on a widescreen... until now. Unfortunately you may have to put up with what I've got for a little while: I won't be flying repeats of those 20+ spaceplane launches I've just got through... Now, back to work.

@DMSP and @Mad Rocket Scientist, (and anyone else who would be kind enough to advise, I think I may be going crazy here)... Do the images appear stretched: A) When on a computer screen B) On a small, mobile device C) In both cases? Have they A) Appeared slightly stretched since the beginning B) Been looking just kinda stretchy lately? Thing is, I'm not really doing anything to most of my screenshots. Straight from my desktop (they are Mac screenshots and not in-game screenshots) to Imgur, to the forum. Any help would be most welcome, thanks guys. On an unrelated note, the next couple of entries may be in the slightly unusual (for me) shape of a more traditional KSP mission report. I couldn't find a way to write a lot of the technical details into the story without it feeling awkward, but I didn't want to keep you from sharing some of the pain I've been going through recently to get this next mission up and running. So you will get a launch-by-launch account, a sort of behind-the-scenes peek at many, many funds being blown. So the increasingly inaccurately named Camwise Logs will become, for just a couple of episodes only, the ...uhm... Froemone Reports. (Don't worry, he doesn't ...uhm... when he's typing).

How very exotic. I feel rather mundane in comparison. My latest Good IdeaTM for The Logs came to me during today's lunch break whilst sitting on the pavement waiting for a guy to cook my pizza. I'd been desperately struggling to think of something cool for the next mission for such a long time, and it hit me out of the blue so suddenly that I half expected the Vogons to come down and demolish Earth three minutes later.

Oh darn, really? Right. I'll try something other than Imgur and update this as soon as I can. Thanks for letting me know.

YEAR 10, DAY 41. BARTDON. I flew into Hammaguir this morning on the eastbound hypersonic route via Kodiak and Kourou. I've come here to inspect the gear that will land us on the surface of Mars and – if it works as intended – carry us back to orbit once we tire of the local scenery. Froemone and his team of engineers have been here in the western Sahara desert for the past three weeks, rehearsing the deployment of the solar farm and the drilling equipment that we will use on the surface to extract water and process into fuel. Initially, I had been hostile towards the idea of being dependant on Martian resources for getting home but our observations from orbit have shown us that the water is definitely there, locked up as ice mere metres below ground level, and perhaps even as a liquid deeper down. In fact, most of the damned planet is covered with the stuff and compared to our small-scale mining operations in the dusty polar craters of the Moon, extracting water from Mars will be a simple task. Besides, Froemone warned me that if I wanted my cross-range on the surface, then we'd have to compromise somewhere. Landing the large rover I'd insisted on having wouldn't be cheap, by any means. And the ability to refuel might even allow us to hop across the surface from one site to another. Speaking of rovers, Froemone pulled up next to the hypersonic on the apron as soon as it had shut down its engines. He'd come to pick me up in the very same vehicle that would carry us across the dunes of the Red Planet. “Hello... uhm... do you want to drive?” I certainly did, so I took the wheel and followed Froemone's directions through the Hammaguir research facility and along a dusty trail that lead several klicks out into the wilderness to the site they had chosen to simulate our future Martian camp. As I drove, Froemone rattled off the vehicle's specs to me from his seat in the crew cabin over the intercom. “This is a specially modified version of our latest Arcambal long range rover. It weighs 7.5 tonnes but it can seat up to four and allow a two-kerb team to be fully autonomous on the surface for up to 50 days. It's powered by a combination of ...uhm... regenerative fuel cells and solar panels. It can potentially cover several hundred kilometres per day. You could probably drive one of these things halfway round the planet. The crew cabin is expresso-equipped, as you requested. Oh, uhm, and I thought you would like the little strip lights behind the cockpit that illuminate the company logo...” “I don't give a damn if it's horn plays the blasted company anthem, as long as it drives me around Mars,” I stated, quickly adding, “and as long as it makes a half-decent cup of coffee.” It was quite sprightly, too, I noted as I put my foot down and Arcambal surged forward through the sand towards the strange, squat looking vessel parked at the base of a slope up ahead. As we drew closer I let out a low whistle, realising that the engineering team clearly intended to send us down in something that looked like one of those damned blimps with some rockets bolted onto the sides. Even the tail fins screamed airship, but as we drove round it I spotted the windows of the crew quarters in the upper part of the hull and the cargo doors in the belly. The entire centre section of the ship was one large storage bay with our accommodation at the top, and fuel tanks at the bow and stern. “This is Quissac, the crewed ship that will land on Mars, act as a base of operations while you're on the surface, and return to low Martian orbit once you have refuelled her,” Froemone explained, a hint of pride in his usually emotionless voice. “Just over 22 metres long, about 31 tonnes fully fuelled. She carries all the equipment you will need to set up power generation and ice drilling operations in her cargo bay, as well as a small servant rover based on our Type G chassis.” “No inflatable habs, then?” I wondered as I parked Arcambal close by. “Uhm, no. The crew cabin was originally designed for twelve seated passengers, so it's quite large enough for four.” “That's damned impressive, boy!” I exclaimed. “But I have one question: where's this ship's cockpit?” Froemone explained that Quissac's cockpit was tucked away inside the internal bay, just below the crew quarters. The pilot would be flying blind until shortly before we reached the surface, at which point the bay doors would open and provide him with a measure of downwards vision in order to select a landing site. Forward and downward facing cameras linked to screens in the cockpit would provide additional situational awareness. “Munvey reckons he can pull this off?” I asked. Munvey was to be our chief pilot for the trip. A seasoned space veteran, he had been the pilot who had landed Angun on Luna when we had first travelled there, six years ago now. “Yes. Quissac will enter Mars' atmosphere nose-first, like a spaceplane. Camwi ...uhm... Karanda is certain that this is the best way to get large volumes of shielded cargo to the surface. The four engines are mounted on pivots that can rotate through 360 degrees. The fairings you see will protect the engine bells until speed drops sufficiently for them to rotate forwards and slow the vessel, then vertically to land. Aerodynamic surfaces will provide additional control during the unpowered phase of descent. This will allow you to hit your landing site accurately, and bring down her uncrewed sister ship Espedaillac carrying Arcambal within walking distance.” We dismounted from the rover and climbed down the ladder into the baking desert heat. Karanda and Mitzon were already trudging around in the sand beneath the shuttle, preparing to run through the process of unloading and assembling the hardware once more. The rover servant had already been unpacked from the rear of the cargo-bay and was obediently waiting to carry the structures that would support the solar panels and drills. “Right,” I said, greeting them and pulling my watch from the pocket of my suit, “let's see how long it takes you to make all this junk into a Martian base.” Karanda took her position below Quissac, loading the various components into the servant's utility crate. The little rover trundled back and forth between the shuttle and Mitzon who deployed first the mount, then a tall girder, and then finally the solar panels and drills. I didn't envy the poor boy, wearing a heavy suit in the scorching desert sun and lifting some damned heavy equipment. Martian gravity would make the lifting part a whole lot easier, and at least heat-stroke wouldn't be an issue. Froemone and I retired to the shade beneath the tail section of the shuttle, both to keep out of the sun and to avoid being run down by the scurrying rover. After a couple of hours, everything was in place. The team had set up one of the two units Quissac would be able to deploy to tap into the subsurface ice. When the water began to flow it would be collected in the shuttle's internal tanks, as well as the cargo crates that were plumbed to double as additional water storage. In the days before our return to orbit, this water would be electrolysed and cryo-cooled into hydrolox fuel to power our flight back to orbit. Froemone had even included some radiators that could be mounted on the shuttle's structure to reduce fuel boil-off. If we could extract and process the water fast enough, there was a chance we could move the whole set-up to another destination on the surface, although we would have to do without some of the equipment, such as the rover servant, when we got to our second site. The damned thing was a cute idea, but it was a bit of a luxury: we'd just have to put our backs in to the job if we got to it. The team took a break and, sitting in Quissac's cosy crew quarters, I took the chance to announce my final decision on the primary list of crewmembers for the voyage ahead. Our Senior Engineer had volunteered to make the trip to Mars and make sure the ISRU system ran as intended himself, but I wanted him to stay at Omelek and keep working on our next generation of propulsion systems. Karanda and Mitzon would therefore make up the engineering element of our crew. Since it looked like we were in this for the long run, I also wanted some greenhorns on the team in order to expand our pool of experienced kerbonauts. A Planetary Investigator named Desfal would be my second scientist. He was an earnest young chap, and had previously worked as a researcher in hydrogeology for Trans Atlantic resources. His line of work had brought him to be interested in off-world resources. Disappointed by his company's continued reluctance to invest in our space programme, he ended up joining us himself. As for our second pilot... I know Munvey well enough to recognise him for the perfectionist he is. He will be extremely demanding with anyone I care to name as his back-up, especially if he or she is a younger and less experienced pilot. But the good news is that I know the very gal for the job.

Wow. Just, wow.

Interesting question, and for my part, there is no simple answer. I started The Camwise Logs because, A: I wanted to show off some of my RSS missions as a report in an unusual format and B: because a couple of my Kerbals crash-landed on the Moon and this put them in an interesting and potentially dramatic situation that I thought had the makings of a good story. Up until the moment Cam's lander tipped, I certainly wasn't imagining that I'd end up writing a novel-length work about him. One of those fateful moments, I suppose. A few people said they liked the reports and the character, so I kept on playing through the save and writing his story. But to do this for any length of time, I really needed an end-goal to aim for, or I was pretty sure I would lose interest in writing it eventually. A story needs a beginning (check), an ending (sort of check, I think) and a middle (things are a bit complicated in that department). So as it stands, I suppose I am now attempting to write - at my own humble level - a genuine hard sci-fi novel about the Fermi Paradox (an endless source of absolutely fascinating and ultimately futile speculation but I'm reading far too much Alastair Reynolds at the moment) where the actual missions are designed, flown and illustrated in KSP. RSS/RO allows you to design and fly your own proof-of-concept space missions. Because The Logs have the ambitious goal of eventually reaching the outer Sol system, I will be obliged to introduce some advanced near-future technology either via mods or my own hacks. But I have no problem with that if my characters can provide plausible explanations for these developments. Some (very few) of my characters have died / will die scripted deaths that are essential to the plot. Others might kick the bucket if I screw up. There is some wiggle-room for nasty surprises. It's really hard juggling with all these different factors: writing a good story, actually being able to design the missions I write into the story, having fun actually playing the game... I'm sure the process is sometimes painful for some of us (I'm thinking of @Kuzzter, @Just Jim and @Cydonian Monk in particular). But it's immensely rewarding when it works. I almost feel like a good sci-fi author who has taken his research a little too seriously.

Triton does indeed have an atmosphere (which is unfortunately far too tenuous to be of any use to capture). You could try this. It doesn't stand up to high time-warp, unfortunately. Alternatively, you could try liquid methane or liquid ammonia for lower ISP, but reduced boil-off. At least NTRs could come in useful for your transfer burn. But yeah, you're pretty much hitting the brick wall that is exploring the outer solar system without some game-changing tech. Good luck!

Wow, extra well done for doing this with existing tech. Haven't tried Neptune yet myself, but once you're there it should be much cheaper than Europa delta-vee wise, as Neptune doesn't have the massive gravity well that Jupiter has. Triton's surface gravity is also half that of Luna, and less than Europa. The hard part is getting there: either you do a standard low energy transfer (about 40 years if Transfer Window Planner is to be believed, which is why IRL we haven't orbited Neptune yet ), or you do a high energy flyby. Anything else will require a combination of electric propulsion and nuclear reactors, cause there ain't no sun out there. You'll need Nertea's Near Future mods for these. Or you just disregard my advice and, as you say, send an LEO-capable rocket to Neptune. Might be possible with NTRs. Whatever you choose do, please keep us informed.

Hey, well done making it all the way out there! Some pictures of your craft, maybe?

Kerbals-on-Earth live in a rather harsh, unfair environment where a myriad of small, scattered communities are dependent on powerful companies to satisfy their needs in terms of energy and resources. These companies compete with each other for global dominance. If there is a short-cut to global dominance in outer space, they will try and exploit it. Thank you so much for saying so. It is a lot of work, and a lot of text to plough through for the reader. But I will endeavour to make it worth it, in the end.

Yes, really, really good. What Mjp1050 said. In fact I would go a step further and say that I've been waiting/hoping for a KSP story-in-pictures like this for some time. Something a little more contemplative than the usual shenanigans that Jeb, Bill and Bob get up to. And this is one of the very few graphic novels I've seen that has its own unique visual style. Minmus looks very alien. The focus blur you use in some frames look good (but I would have focussed on the VAB in the shot of the KSC). Pic heaviness? Use as many as you need to tell your story. In fact, the only technical thing I can find to say is about your text boxes: I find they stand out a little too harshly. Maybe try a softer edge, or, in some frames with little text, do without them? Just a thought. Keep doing this, sir, and you will be the Nassault of KSP graphic novels.

Interesting thread (and interesting poll, for once! ) I've got the French equivalent of a Masters (M.Sc? M.Eng?) in Applied Geosciences and Environmental Science from Toulouse III Paul Sabatier University (graduated in 2002). But I haven't used it in more than a decade. Life happened and I ended up being a resident expert at a space museum/theme park, then in an aviation museum where I still work today. So, maybe a category for those who graduated, and then life happened? I guess I'm not alone...

Thanks, DMSP. No, that's just what a real planet looks like... (sorry). More seriously, they shouldn't be, and aren't on my computer or mobile. But Imgur has been known to screw things up. Yup. This beast will soon be properly introduced. I'm still in the process of filling its tanks (spaceplane refueling flight number six coming up...). But hey, you didn't expect old Bartdon to spend three years in a hitchhiker can, did you?

YEAR 10, DAY 2. BARTDON. You have to hand it to that blasted alien robot. For a piece of half-busted junk buried under a metre of moondust, it sure as hell has managed to manipulate the entire Kerbal species well enough. I'd even go as far as saying that it gave us a masterclass-level demonstration of Machiavellianism. There it was, the utterly helpless remains of a broken machine, bragging about some failed plan to colonise our solar system and telling us just how dangerous its crewmates might be, if they are still out there. And then what did it go and do? It gave us a tantalising but almost entirely symbolic glimpse of its advanced technology, and now the resource companies are trampling each other to be first in line to fund our search for the aforementioned dangerous crewmates. Trans Pacific now expects us to put all other projects aside and go digging our way across the outer system to find the crew of the Transmare or whatever their damned ship is called, even if they are buried in places as dim-lit, as inaccessible and as green as Uranus. And once again we have the Second Engineer to thank for narrowing down the search zone: this only leaves us with a few trillion cubic kilometres to plough through! What a change from the agenda this time last year, when the most adventurous project was the launch of a comsat into a polar orbit. Oh, the damned, bitter irony of it all. The hardest thing to accept is the fact that I saw this coming from the moment Froemone started pleading with the robot for it to deliver the goods. I realise that the poor boy was only doing what he thought was right, but he may just have dragged us unwittingly into something much, much bigger than we can handle. The moment our conversation with the Second Engineer ended, I had the doors to Mission Control locked and made every single investigator and engineer present in the room swear that all that had taken place would remain under wraps until the official report was handed to the Board. Of course, I intended this report to make no mention whatsoever of the blueprints for an advanced fission reactor. The recorded audio footage could be edited, if necessary. Froemone would retro-engineer his reactor if it pleased him, but he would have to damn well retro-engineer it in secret until I gave him permission to reveal anything more advanced than an extra-terrestrial wingnut. Alas, despite my best efforts, news of this alien endorsement reached the Board of Trans Pacific Resources the very next day. And even they couldn't keep such a game-changing matter to themselves for long. By the end of the week, the news had gone global. This also tells me that someone on our team is a rat for the Board. This doesn't surprise me in the least; in fact I wouldn't expect anything less of Trans Pacific. But I swear to hell and back that my expectations won't save whoever that damned ratting Kerbal is from a new career that will consist entirely in scrubbing the VAB floor until it shines. And with a blasted toothbrush! This whole thing still gives me the jitters, even though it happened six months ago. Dammit, I must calm down. Froemone and Karanda will be here in a few minutes with their progress report. We are committed, now. Committed to going to Mars and searching for this First Officer or whichever of his subordinates we can lay our hands on, despite the risk of awakening something that we really should leave well alone, buried out there until Sol goes red giant. If I don't get this done, then the Board will redistribute me and find someone else who will. If it must be so, then we are damned well going to do this my way, which is what I told Froemone three months ago when we started to define the project to land Kerbals on Mars using the upcoming transfer window later this year. “How would you make sure that this mission does not end up being cancelled, boy? Shoot away!” was the question I had put to him. “I need to see this through to the bitter end. I need to lead this mission myself. You are going to put footprints made by these very two feet on the surface of the blasted planet Mars.” I put my feet up on my desk to make the point, betraying the fact that my spiked golf shoes were likely responsible for the many deep gouges scratched into the desktop's varnish. “And we are going to do this in such a manner that it will be impossible for any member of the Board to veto the project once it is underway.” “Well, uhm,” thought Froemone. “We could send minimal crew, using existing technology. Small tugs pushing modular elements to aerocapture into low Martian orbit. We could use ...uhm... in situ resources to refuel on the surface and bring the weight and cost down...” His voice trailed off as saw that I was rocking back and forth with my head in hands, silently cursing the fact that such a brilliant engineer could be so inept and unfamiliar with how the funding of a space programme worked. “No, dammit, boy!” I barked with sufficient suddenness to make even our stoic Senior Engineer jump back a foot or two. “Bringing the weight and cost down is precisely what we don't want to do. If we don't want this to be cancelled then we must think big. I want you to find the most complex and spectacular way of landing a full crew of Kerbals on the surface, and then I want you to make it bigger and more expensive still. Tell me, how much cash do we have right now?” “Uhm... about eleven million funds...” said Froemone, blinking. “Then we will spend more than half of that on this mission. D'you hear me, boy? I will personally see that you're reassigned to airship maintenance if you manage to spend less than six million funds in getting us to the Red Planet.” Froemone winced. “I want a large crew transfer vessel with a crew of six, and four of us on the ground when we get there. This will be easy enough to justify after the debacle onboard Cernin: no crew member is to go solo at any point during the mission, so we'll need at least two teams down there. You have a payload budget of... thirty tonnes just for the crew.” Froemone's eyes lit up. “I don't care how you get us to the surface, but we will need to stay there for at least three months. We must also have a decent crewed rover with several hundred klicks of cross-range and provisions for journeys of more than two weeks. I actually have a pretty decent idea of where we will be going, but the Board doesn't need to know that yet. Oh, and no faffing around on the surface with inflatable habs, I can't stand living in those things for more than a few days...” Froemone's eyes shone. “We will also have a planetary communications system with areostationary relays and a couple of polar scanners. Surface operations must be in contact with the crew transfer ship at all times. And while we're at it, we might as well go and see if we can find ice on those two blasted potato moons. That should keep the resource companies happy, damn them. And it may come in useful for later missions farther out.” Froemone's eyes watered. “And one more thing... See to it that there is a set of clubs on the rover. It will be the only chance I'll get to swing for nearly three years. Here, take a handkerchief, boy.” And so today Froemone and Karanda were here to present their preliminary designs. But we began with the report on the progress of our first mission that deployed the Second Engineer's reactor technology, Fontanes One. The Fontanes project had been born just a matter of days after Trans Pacific had discovered that alien robots that were giving away decades worth of technological progress for free were potentially scattered across the solar system, and had basically ordered us to, “Go get 'em. Now.” I had spent a long day brooding in my office, trying not to think about the consequences of unscrupulous, profit-minded corporations getting their greedy little mittens on advanced forms of space propulsion and hastily retro-engineering types of nuclear power generators that we had never even dreamed of. And that was if the crew of Colonisation Mission Seven didn't find some way of turning this technology against us. What a waste if all our efforts to explore our universe boiled down to this. I really wanted no part in it, but I was damned if I did, and damned if I didn't. If I didn't, some other, less scrupulous Principal Investigator would take my place, and I could not let that happen. I would have to brace myself, but I was confident in my ability to stand up to the Board for the foreseeable future. After all, I have already kept us afloat through several major crises. But there's another problem. I'm getting old. I am, by far, the most senior investigator on the team, and when they come for me, this will be their weapon. They will honour me for my lifelong commitment to science, pin a medal or two on my suit for services to all kerbalkind, and order me to stand aside for some young, enthusiastic fool who doesn't know what he's getting into. With this in mind, I had kicked open the door to my office at ten to four and made my way down to the engineering department. Froemone and Mitzon were just wrapping things up for the day when I gave them my requirements for the first of many missions that would conform to our new policy. “Do you think you can get that reactor running?” I blurted out. “Well, uhm... yes, but,” began Froemone. “Good! I want you to demonstrate it works by putting a probe in the Saturn system within three years of it being launched. It must then be able to orbit multiple satellites and scan them for any magnetic or terrain anomalies. And...” I said, turning to glare at Mitzon, “...it must not look like a piece of junk you knocked up in your back yard.” With hindsight, I must admit that these were pretty ambitious specs, and had I checked a transfer plot, I would have realised that Jupiter and Saturn were really not in the best of places for a gravity assist, but that was the engineering department's problem, not mine. I couldn't afford to grow old waiting for the gas giants to be where we wanted them. To my surprise, they nailed it. Thus, the Fontanes class of deep space exploration probes was born. Fitted with something called dual-stage 4 grid ion thrusters fueled by xenon and two small prototype vapour core fission reactors, using magnetohydrodynamic conversion rather than our traditional brayton cycle turbines, it packed nearly fifty kilometres per second of delta-vee. Getting the damn thing up there had required two launches of our spaceplane; not because it was heavy (although at nearly nine tonnes, it was the atomic monster truck of un-crewed probes), but because it was so damned wide. To protect the probe core and science package from the radiation, the reactors were mounted on extendable booms with shields. Even with these booms retracted, the power and propulsion unit had to go lengthways in Carderie's cargo bay, and the science package had to be launched separately. A third launch sent up a run-of-the-mill hydrolox tug that assembled the two parts in LEO and pushed the whole thing up to escape velocity. Once Fontanes One had been released, it deployed the booms and powered up its reactors. To our immense surprise, nothing went wrong, and the probe was soon powering its way out of cislunar space backwards, and lowering the periapsis of its solar orbit down below that of Venus. The plan was to make the longest thrusting maneuver in the history of space exploration to shoot out towards Jupiter, slingshot past it for a modest assist from the giant planet's gravity, and keep on going towards the Ringed Planet. Fontanes One would pulverise all previous velocity records. We'd be flying past Jupiter in less than a year, and make it to Saturn in less than three. Fly swiftly, little probe. My career may depend on it. So might the fate of the Kerbal race.

Welcome back! You were missed Gesschosskopf, but we quite understand that life has been rough on you and your surroundings recently. By the way, "The Camwise Logs: Worth the Wait." will likely become my new advertising slogan due to the long lead times of the last few episodes and, I fear, the episodes to come... I've no doubt that Omelek Space Centre will need every bit of help they can get in the coming years. So for the moment, he is (unwillingly, of course) an external consultant working from "home". This is, at least in part, a plot device. However, it could be explained by a need to define limits in the knowledge and capability of AI entities. The civilisation that designed them may well want them to be specialised, restricted and organised into a hierarchy, in order to avoid a runaway omniscient AI apocalypse scenario. A very interesting concept, and close, but not quite what I have planned. I can say no more for the moment. It is indeed the big one, and Bartdon must already be losing sleep over it. His golf swing may never be the same, I'm afraid. This question will be addressed, in time.

As you might have guessed by now, this is where the story really starts.

PART FOUR: TOO BIG TO FAIL “We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” Richard Dawkins. “Hello?” At first, the junior technician responsible for monitoring the open channel from the lunar Monument had been convinced that one of his colleagues was setting him up with some sort of elaborate prank. His department had been dutifully listening in on the transmissions from Theophilus crater for the best part of the last two years, and during this time, the Monument's signals had not changed in the slightest. The constant warbling and chattering of the encrypted signal had pulsed ceaselessly out into the void as if it would never end. But that night, without warning or so much as a mere crackle of static, the signal had ceased abruptly and had been replaced by this simple greeting, which was repeated in a warm, friendly tone approximately every five seconds. After an initial moment of disbelieving panic, followed by a brief internal struggle, the technician decided that this was serious enough to brave the wrath of the communications officer on duty and called him, requesting that he listen in on the channel, and tell him that he wasn't going crazy. The officer in charge was understandably disgruntled at being woken up in the middle of the night just to listen to an automated voice, despite the fact that it sounded quite friendly and remarkably natural, apart from the perfectly identical intonation of each “hello” and the clockwork regularity of its repetition. He was about to suggest that it was obviously some sort of mistake, and that the technician was receiving a clandestine transmission from a radio ham, or maybe it was just some experiment that had been set up on the Moon's surface without warning the tracking station. He was just about to tell the technician to file a report, forget about it, hang up and go back to sleep when the message changed. “Hello? Kerbals of Earth, please respond.” “Hello? Kerbals of Earth, please respond.” “Hello? Kerbals of Earth, please respond.” The polite, utterly reasonable tone with which the request was made sounded all the more ominous, even a little creepy, to the communications officer. As if it were completely natural for the tiny beacon that had been planted two years ago on the dead, airless world, three hundred thousand kilometres away from anything that should be able to say “hello” to anyone, to suddenly try and start making friends. What to do? The communications officer knew he should call the Principal Investigator straight away, but if there had been a mistake, and it was indeed a false alarm, the consequences could be dire. He had been on the receiving end of Bartdon's wrath once before, during an unfortunate incident involving the loss of a lunar communications satellite due to a switching error. And that had been just after lunchtime. Waking the PI, who had recently returned to Omelek after a vacation that had been cut short due to the recent return of Cernin, in the middle of the night and for a reason that turned out to be invalid just simply didn't bear thinking about. The communications officer rubbed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and dialled Bartdon's direct line. Just over an hour later, most of the leading investigators had gathered in one of Mission Control's briefing rooms to hold an improvised conference. The programme's head engineers were there too, red-eyed and looking slightly startled by the whole affair. In this strange, unreal atmosphere, they held a hasty debate to decide how they should communicate with the Monument, what they should say, and what they should ask of it should they be given the chance to do so. Two mediators, one male and one female, were chosen to speak with the entity. Against the Principal Investigator's wish, they were selected by means of an anonymous ballot of all present. Thus, the small crowd of Kerbals voted for the two most brilliant, open-minded and clear-thinking individuals whose intelligence and eloquence would represent Kerbalkind as a whole in this, its first ever true exchange with what appeared to be the product of alien intelligence, if not alien life itself. The chosen two were left alone in a small office of the mission control centre decked with screens showing the status and position of missions currently underway; a meagre cloud of LEO and geostationary satellites providing inadequate coverage of the planets surface. There they waited for just a couple of minutes until the tracking station patched the Monuments downlink through to the room. The male Kerbal started to fidget anxiously, wringing his hands and scuffing his feet on the floor. The Kerbelle simply stood there, and after a few moments began to stare dreamily off into empty space. Then voice started blaring out of a pair of speakers fixed to the wall beneath the screen. “Hello? Kerbals of Earth, please respond.” A microphone sat on the desk, waiting for their reply. Froemone cleared his throat nervously. “Uhm... hi there...” he muttered. At the sound of the voice, Steledith started out of her reverie. “Hello, robot,” she said. Due to the signal delay between the Moon and the Earth, there was a slight pause, but the voice then replied with no sign of hesitation or surprise. “Thank you for your response. Please identify yourselves and state the positions or roles you occupy on your homeworld.” “My name is Froemone, and I am the Senior Engineer of the Omelek Space Centre.” “And I'm Steledith,” said Steledith. Froemone looked over at her and added, “Steledith is our Theoretical Planetology and Astronomy Investigator.” “Thank you,” said the voice rigidly, as if all of its answers had been carefully selected well before the conversation began. “My Creators gave me no individual name such as yours, but I was the Second Engineer of Colonisation Mission Seven, and I traveled here from my homeworld on board the interstellar ship Transmare. Our primary mission was to explore the planets of your solar system and assess their habitability.” “Hold on,” said Steledith, “how long have you been up there on the Moon?” “The internal clock of my datacore recorded a duration equivalent to 896,000 of your Earth years since the gamma radiation spike that caused critical damage to my ship and the construct that carried me. My datacore was ejected and the subsequent impact on the Moon's surface was survivable. But I lost all means of mobility and with no power source, I went into hibernation. The radioisotopic generator set up by your kind two years ago allowed me to deploy a small probe and recharge my backup battery, and I have used the communications link you left to gather data on your civilisation and contact you.” “So... we're talking to the hard drive of a destroyed alien robot. How interesting,” Steledith concluded, her gaze already slipping away out of focus, her mind enthralled by the consequences of what she was hearing. “Please, Kerbals of Earth. I may not have much time. My datacore was damaged during the impact and my internal diagnostics show certain... instabilities. I must know if any of the other crew assigned to my mission survived the disaster. “I have intercepted references in your transmissions to the same warning signal I was instructed to emit in the event that our primary objectives were compromised. If you are, as you claim, Kerbals of the Omelek Space Centre, then you may know of the datacore that is now situated beneath the ocean that you call the Pacific. This must be one of my crew. Has it made any attempt to communicate with you, and if so what is its status?” Froemone opened his mouth to speak, but the speakers crackled and the downlink from the Moon was interrupted by the voice of Principal Investigator Bartdon, who was listening in on the conversation with the other investigators in the main control room. “Be damned careful what you say, boy.” he advised. “Remember, this old piece of scrap has just told us that he was sent here with a bunch of others like him to colonise our blasted planet. It would be reckless of us to let him know that his crew might still be out there scattered across the system until we understand their true intentions. Tell him what happened to Angun when he first discovered the Pacific Monument, but say nothing about the other anomalies we have detected.” Froemone swallowed heavily, clearly enjoying this subterfuge as much as a trip to the dentist, but when the channel switched back he continued. “Yes, uhm... we know of this. One of our investigators called Angun discovered your crewmate on the bottom of the ocean. The... uhm... object he discovered began emitting the same signal as yours, and disabled the submersible he was diving in with some sort of electrical pulse.” “An electromagnetic pulse, you say? Please confirm,” the Second Engineer cut in abruptly. “We think so, yes,” said Froemone. There was the slightest of pauses before the voice went on, as if the Second Engineer was actually thinking about this and considering its consequences before it continued. “If that is the case, then my crewmate has been terminated. Your investigator's submersible must have activated the self-defence system that both our ships and our constructs are equipped with. This system is designed to protect the contents of our datacore from falling into the hands of unknown or hostile entities. Its memory has been wiped clean. The warning message that we were instructed to emit is hard-coded, and is all that remains after the self-defence mechanism has done its work.” “Please, uhm... Second Engineer,” said Froemone, “I'm sorry to hear about your crewmate, but we need to understand the meaning of your warning message. We need to know how your colonisation mission failed, and why you came here in the first place.” The pause before the voice answered was even longer this time, and Froemone could almost hear the logic circuits flipping back and forth as the alien machine considered the various responses it could give. “Kerbal Froemone,” it said, “understand that I was one of the lowest ranking crewmembers on board my ship. My computational powers are significant, and far beyond anything that your civilisation is capable of creating at the present time. But I remain a mere tertiary-level construct. I am capable of neither lies nor deceit, but my operational parameters do not authorise me to reveal the mission-critical information that you request. “You must speak with one of my superiors, if they are still active within this system. My Captain and First Mate are both primary-level constructs, and are completely autonomous. My direct superior, the First Engineer, and the ship's Quartermaster, Head Scientist and Surgeon are secondary-level constructs and were also entrusted with higher permissions.” Froemone looked up at the screen before him that displayed a map of the solar system, from the pathetic cluster of satellites hugging their home planet, to the vast, empty reaches beyond the asteroid belt. “Engineer, you have observed the ...uhm... limits of our technology. Do we have any hope of reaching your crewmembers, if they are out there, within our lifetimes?” Froemone asked. “I cannot answer your question, Kerbal Froemone. This depends only on you, and the investment your kind is willing to make to explore beyond your homeworld. My presence in your system is the proof that such journeys are feasible, when the survival of a species is at stake. I can only tell you that before I was given my own secondary assignment on your planet's moon, the Captain of our ship left with a team to find more favourable conditions for our Creators in the outer solar system, with the intention of exploring the moons of the giant planets. Our First Officer was instructed to return to the fourth planet, the one that you call Mars, but I was not entrusted with the objectives of that mission.” “Mars might be possible, but if they are in the outer solar system...” Froemone's voice trailed off in despair. But then an idea struck him. “Can you help us?” There was a long silence and he bowed his head. “Please...” he said, almost whispering. “I have observed the primitive chemical rockets and nuclear thermal propulsion your kind uses. This technology is insufficient for the task. I have also studied the electric propulsion units you deploy on some of your satellites. These more efficient engines, if improved, could propel crewed ships to the gas giants and beyond within a reasonable timeframe.” Froemone raised his head again. “We have developed working prototypes for magnetoplasma rockets. These engines are within our ...uhm... grasp...” in the presence of this starfaring entity, talking about their most advanced technology felt strangely puerile, like a sprout bragging about some new toy, “...but the problem is the power source. Our brayton-cycle fission reactors are too large and too heavy, and solar power will not get us that far out. If you come from another star, your ships must have spent many years in space. Surely you had some other means of powering them. Some sort of nuclear fusion device, perhaps?” he asked, hopefully. The Second Engineer responded immediately and a little harshly, “I am certainly not authorised to reveal the workings of our most advanced technologies to you, Chief Engineer Froemone. However...” there was again a short pause as the construct's electronic brain considered the ramifications of what it was about to offer. “...I can see no harm in releasing the details of the fission reactor I was instructed to build on your planet's moon to power my operations on the surface. This was the most primitive of our power supplies, but it should show you how to build smaller, more compact reactors. The details of the design are being transmitted now. From your apparent knowledge of our warning message, I conclude that you have deciphered the encryption we use...” And, in the background, came the warbling sound of data being sent over another channel. Froemone, who had been waiting with baited breath as the Engineer spoke, felt a rush of elation. “Use this well, Kerbals of Earth,” the Second Engineer went on. “Find my crewmates, if you can. Find the Captain, or his First Mate, and they may yet be able to tell you what the ultimate fate of Colonisation Mission Seven was, and why we came to your system in the first place. Since I am indeed alone in the neighbourhood of your planet, then my task is over and I will terminate myself shortly.” Steledith had been quiet for some time, but now she looked up once more. “Wait a moment, robot. May I ask you something?” “Go ahead, Kerbal Steledith.” “Did you come from the star that we know as Beta Hydri?” Then came the longest silence of all, as if Steledith's question had actually rendered the machine speechless. She continued. “I'll take that as a sign that I'm warm, then. You see, we found the structure I assume you were sent to build, near the Lunar South Pole. My guess was that you built some kind of long range communications system to send and receive data, to and from your home system. The fact that you put it on the surface of a planetary body struck me as being kind of weird; such an antenna would be much easier to aim and calibrate in space. But I suppose you were working with limited resources, and had to use what you could find on the surface. “I took the liberty of measuring the declination that the central peak of that strange crater is aiming for. Of course, because it is eight degrees from the pole, as the Moon rotates, it sweeps through a circle that passes through quite a few stars. But that wasn't the hard part. “The thing is, stars drift over time as they move along their own orbits around the galactic centre. The angular movement that we see from Earth is called proper motion, and I had to calculate this drift for a whole bunch of stars over the past 900,000 years. This was something that none of my fellow investigators had ever accomplished, at least not over such a large timespan.” By now, Froemone was gaping at Steledith in disbelief, as if she was the one from another world. He made to speak, but it was the Second Engineer who got there first. “So you knew how long we have been here. How did you...?” “No, we didn't,” Steledith retorted. “But you just confirmed it. Thanks for that by the way, I was afraid that you'd tell me that I did all those calculations for nothing.” Her usual expressions were vacant and dreamy, but for a brief moment a very subtle hint of smugness crossed her features. She went on. “It's just that 900,000 years ago, there was a major extinction event on our planet, and I made the assumption that it coincided with your arrival in our system and you building that antenna. “The only star within a reasonable distance from Earth that would have been on that circle when you arrived in our solar system was Beta Hydri. It was more than seven parsecs away when you got here. Twenty-four light years. Congratulations robot, that's quite a trip. But I'm afraid that after all this time, your homeworld is now another fifty light years farther out, so the trip back is going to be even longer.” “Kerbals...” the Second Engineer hesitated, “...I have underestimated your computational abilities. I fear that I have already revealed too much. If you want to learn more, you must seek out my superiors, wherever they may be. However, bear in mind that we are all programmed to protect our Creators and to ensure the ultimate success of our mission, whatever the cost.” “I'm sorry, but your mission failed, robot,” said Steledith gravely. “We are here instead, now.” “Do not make the same mistake of underestimating my crewmates, Kerbal Steledith. Perhaps this is not over yet. Goodbye, Kerbals of Earth. And one more thing...” “What's that, robot?” Steledith raised an eyebrow. “Good luck. You're going to need it.” There was a crackle, static, then silence.

Yes, it sounds crazy. A computer that powerful would have to be, like, 64 bits, or something...

Thanks, Jim. I too heard from him this morning, he'd just got in from working three days straight. Kudos.

So many interesting, mind boggling theories that...

Check the news. Geschosskopf is a firefighter living in Louisiana. He's probably too busy saving lives. Hope you're OK, Geschosskopf.

You certainly did! So, whatever the Monument actually is, it now considers our mostly harmless Kerbals worthy of consideration. Find out what it has to say in part four...

Not the programme in its entirety, but it is certainly a reference to the ambitious nature of the upcoming missions, yes.