DDE

Don't mind me, I'll go look for those old Soviet canal-digging mini-thermonukes...

Chapter 31: End of the Line Out in the blackness of deep space between, someone was boiling a kettle. Or firing a thermal thruster on an Orion Mk 2, sometimes it was hard to tell. Millions of miles ahead of it, Gold Team was in business. Film was loaded into the magazines. Guidance stars were locked in. Duna was ahead. This was a brief event, well-scripted and well-rehearsed. The fly-by was to last no more than two hours, total. This meant that Jeb had to execute the requisite attitude changes, Bob had to operate the camera, and Bill ran the necessary errands. Two canisters were expended during the Ike flyby. Jeb then locked onto the manoeuvre vector, and executed the correctional burn. They’d bounce halfway to the Belt before reaching Kerbin two years later. The expended film canisters clang loudly against the aft bulkhead as Jeb engaged the nuclear rocket. Once the manoeuvre was complete and the reactor was throttled down, all that was left was to keep taking shots of Duna while lighting conditions allowed it. Vulkan slowly drifted into Ike’s shadow. Almost as soon as Vulkan completed the powered flyby, the two Orion probes began their approach to orbital injection. Bill felt uneasy. Gene had pretty much merged the manned and unmanned teams in preparation for the probe landings, taking away the attention from Vulkan. To a lay-kerbal, it would have been logical, but no to someone familiar with the flight cyclogram. Operating in Ike’s shadow for several hours, combined with heightened power consumption and intense manoeuvring, meant the whole life support plant was disengaged. And now he was busy bringing the converter back online, slowly and safely. On top of that there was the thermal expansion problem. The air recycling system came back online; the dials, indicators and metrics slowly crept upwards. No explosions, no short-outs. Then it was the turn of the water reclamation apparatus. The spin frequency could be judged by sound along. …And it coughed up and ground to a halt. Bill finally relaxed and turned around to fetch the protective gear. It was time to do the plumbing. The retrofit of Orion into a lander-equipped probe made use of a passivated injection stage as an improvised stabilizer and aeroshield. Once it did the deorbiting burn, it needed to soak up just a small amount of very hot plasma, before being dropped at the 4 km mark. Between that and landing, the process was automated. The probe would descend via an oversized parachute system – it was tiny enough to omit any sort of thrust systems. “01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000,” the probe announced. As the mission control centre exploded in applause – with the sickening crunch of an intern’s spine as a purely accidental result of attempting a tackle-hug on Gene – the lander was busy determining its orientation and choosing between its four solar arrays. The next shift easily duplicated the feat with the back-up lander. Elsewhere in the Kerbin system, Orpheus was busy adjusting its trajectory while going about its business, preparing to drop a skeet into Eve’s thick coat of gas. “Progress on the filter?” Jeb asked through the intercom, protected from the stench of ‘greywater’ by the sealed hatch. “Assembly complete in two, I’ll attempt another restart.” “Master alarm!” Bob announced over said system’s loud and obstinate screeching. “Circuit?” Bill shouted. “Hab pressure.” Hull breech. Bill immediately squeezed a few bubbles of water into the middle of the hab. Someone – presumably Bob – began to repeatedly kick the bulkhead. He watched the bubbles drift, slowly but surely, towards panel A-6. He removed it, and watched the bubbles get sucked towards a tiny hairline crack in the aluminium pressure vessel. He armed himself with a syringe of epoxy, and began to methodically fill up the crack until there was visible excess glue. He then reached for a small aluminium membrane, and glued that on top of the troublesome area. He marked the time. Five minutes later he asked, “Pressure?” “Now stable,” Jeb responded, his voice chilly. “Alright, back to plumbing,” Bill growled, adjusting the electrolysis system output and firing up the backup nitrogen cartridge. Gene Kerman was reaching the end of the line. His staff was at their limit operating the existing armada of probes, and no expansion was forthcoming. Orion 9 was their shot at Sarnus. Which was a huge deal, of course, but felt all too routine by then.

So, here's my crаppy fusion torch. I'm adding an image from CoaDE that simulates the exhaust. http://imgur.com/a/IncYC Should I resort to Paint to preserve your eyes in the future?

Well, hello there, Robert Zubrin!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wk-jT9rn-8

Frak, my drawing skills are awful, but I do have some stuff to show... Admittedly, some of that stuff involves deuterium-tritium antimatter-catalyzed fusion. Yeah, I wanted an RSS SSTO, and with dV to spare. My intentions were not peaceful.

Yes. Yes we would. They're wearing NASA EMUs with SAFERs. The larger, nuclear spacecraft looks really familiar. And the image of Titan is not in the visible spectrum.

Are you sure you haven't forgotten anything? Or anyone?

Somehow I doubt someone that can force the USN into a situation where it has to TUNA will also allow them to fish-spread unmolested.

So that's why Cortana is unavailable in Russia!

http://spacenews.com/elachi-touts-helicopter-scout-for-mars-sample-caching-rover/

Done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F/A-XX_Program

Here. Oh, wait... There's a laundry list of relatively conventional materials that easily shrug off laser hits, or even overload the blade entirely. Lightsaber-resistant metal swords are all over the place in KOTOR.

Which is why I've started scratching my head into how many officers you'll need to execute to 'convince' them to go back to throttleable liquid fuel motors.

Chapter 30: Per ardua, ad ardua "Do you even realize how much it will cost us to convert the kit to two-thirty volts?" the representative of Rokea shouted. "I heard you the first time," growled the techie from STEADLER, causing his opponent to exaggeratedly drop a massive binder to the tabletop. Val pinched her temples and closed her eyes. Anyone without rose-tinted glasses on would have foreseen what was happening, but anyone in proximity of Jeb suffered from crippling optimism. Their prospects were murky. The program was becoming bloated; all advanced manned spaceflight projects had to be forgone to keep the Duna landing mission moving. Except they had no idea what it was going to look like – after three months of number-crunching, Linus invalidated Jeb's original mission configuration, with two eyeballs-out aerocaptures. Hypersonic 10000 K plasma turned out to behave counterintuitively, and ballute aeroshields weren't all they had been made out to be. Alternative solutions kept cropping up, generating an exponential variety of architectures to choose from: the current darling was a single-stage solar-electric craft, but it remained to be seen how the new, bigger nuclear stage would perform. Either way, it seemed the new ship would be best served by a single-launch configuration with orbital refuelling. That meant having to deal with Kerbodyne... And if that alone wasn't a disaster waiting to happen, Jeb left them with something else. He had had the brilliant idea of making Olympus not only modular but allowing commercial access to it, with module equipment design outsourced to other businesses in the field and, eventually, allowing their crews aboard. The ensuing chaos should have been absolutely predictable. Mission day 54 Time to Duna SoI: 101 days 5 h “Life support system cycle 27, complete,” Bill droned to himself. The CO2 scrubber canister still had to be manually switched between the Sabatier reactor and the main air filtration system. Jeb was snoozing in the return pod, converted into moderately quiet sleeping quarters. The newly added camera system made manoeuvring about the habitat much more difficult. Thus far, nothing had broken down. The radiation dosage, from both the reactor and cosmic rays, was at acceptable levels. The reaction mass stayed refrigerated despite the falling power output. Bill’s greatest worry was the thermal expansion of the hull. Without constant day-night cycles, one side of the ship was permanently exposed to sunlight. After the initial creaks and cracks that ended on day 5, it should have achieved a state of equilibrium, and no further issues should arise. Should. All was going well. For now. Time had come for Orion Mk 1 to cede the floor to the new Orpheus bus. The Orpheus went by as the three-dish, with a flip-out antenna on one side alongside a new model of disk-shaped solar arrays. The other side mounted a particle collector for direct sampling of Eve’s uppermost atmosphere. On top of the Orpheus sat the puck – a heavily aeroshielded lander that would just plop down on its bottom and open up the side doors to expose the instruments. It was powered by a small radioisotope slug. As usual, the probe was a twofer. Gene’s agenda was getting really short. But he was very happy to kick the next one off the list. The chemists’ repeated explosions led to the F1 Claimjumper. Mission Control watched the feed from the landing radioaltimeter as the experimental mining platform descended into the munar night. There were four key innovations that made the Claimjumper possible: the automated drill-scoop system that channelled the regolith dust into the storage tanks, the catalysed reaction and expulsion package for turning that dust into usable fuel, the ion dust repellers that kept the solar panels clean, and the new octuple engine cluster adapted for the produced fuel. And then the manned munar program resumed. The check-up mission, along with a Hornet Mk 3 flight trial, had been assigned to Jenrick and Rosgrid. And, when presented a choice between additional bags of snacks and Yaroslav Kermanov, they, astonishingly, picked the latter. Except for the reversed launch order, the flight was perfectly uneventful. As the Hermes began its first orbit following the injection burn, Ros started pinging status reports from the platform belong. It had been plopped down on a particularly mineral-rich spot on the nearside, east of the original Sarnus landfall and thus with well-understood geology. Deviation from target coordinates was merely 16 meters. As terminator reached its LZ, all solar panels reported nominal performance. Back on Kerbin, Gene and Gus rolled out the Hornet. Another day later, it arrived to Mun. The Mk 3 variant was designed for to work alongside the Claimjumper, with the same thruster package, and a more permanent Munar base delivered by a separate cargo lander variant; so, it was put on a very tight diet yet was carried on the same booster, so it had plenty of Δv to spare for the crash stage scenario. “Holding the fort, Yaroslav?” Jenrick asked through the hatch. “I’m already penning your obit if you, ahem, blow it.” “Don’t take your cues in humour from Kath.” “Alright, prepping to drop, closing the ship’s hatch.” The automated landing cycle was executed flawlessly. Jenrick kept rolling the lander to keep the mining platform in front of him as they touched down. Ros jumped to her feet immediately, already suited. One of the many changes to the Hornet was a change to only three landing legs. Instead of mounting a leg in front of the pilot’s viewport to keep the vertical ladder, the lander had a sloped ladder right on top the aft leg. Which, for someone in a bulky suit, was potentially a better option. Ros had a relatively simple task outside the lander: set up a bunch of collapsible storage huts containing additional fuel tanks, and link them to the main platform, forming a larger propellant depot. Once that was done, the rest was to be performed from a safe distance… while still suited up. “Drills lowering”. “Confirmed, drills coming down,” Jenrick noted from his flight position. “Stand by. Drills spinning up. Standing by for contact. And… engaged.” “Debris coming up from the platform.” “Observing regolith flow. Transfer tanks at 2%... 5%... feeding first shipment into the reactor. Reactants loaded. Safety is off, heating coil powered up.” “Alright, let’s see what happens. Bake that crap.” The processing of each batch was approximated to last around five minutes. After six minutes, Ros finally decided to fire up the spectrometer. “This looks like… looks like ready-to-use fuel. Transferring shipment to the main tank, engaging automated controller.” “We good?” Jenrick asked. “I’d rather stay here until dusk. Could you get on the horn with Kerbin?” “Alright, I’ll pressurize the lander.” Ros spent the next two Kerbin days staring at the instrument read-out. Fuel production was hardly impressive; it would take about a month to produce a lander’s worth of fuel. “I’m done,” she finally muttered, turning away from the screens. “Mission Control, fuel production experiment complete,” Jenrick announced. “Hornet, CAPCOM, lander trial are herewith successful, RTB, repeat, RTB, over.” “Alright. We’re done here. Stand by for blast-off.”

Except when they turn out wrong, curtesy of the internet. Please be advised that about the upper four-fifths of the images are an artist's impression produced via Photoshop.

That seems to fail to exclude any effect caused by the interaction with the magnetic field, et cetera. We need some sort of a dummy EmDrive imitator. Last time we tried that, it turned out a working EmDrive as well.

Chapter 29: Starfleet’s Finest “FAO, how’s the progress?” Gene asked, his voice weary. “78% of payload stowed, we’re on schedule.” Piraeus was due for retirement. After a year in space, all the kibbals – and, less importantly, all the Kerbal crew – were still alive and reasonably healthy, hence its mission had been a roaring success. It took only about half an hour to get the live cargo out of orbit. Then the fun began. The Hermes-Cargo ship was used as the retromotor system. After a fairly brief burn, the descent began. For Mission Control, this meant more work – they had to sequentially undock, separate and prime two Intern re-entry canisters before the comms arrays got fried. Half an hour later, the burnt, cherry-red hull of the station smashed into a random grassy hill. Several groups of looters (or reporters – it was hard to tell) were chased away by ISP Falcon jets. Gene would rarely sleep through a launch, but he was going to have a very busy week. The launch was simply an addition to the Beacon network. Two long-range communication satellites would hang just outside Minmus orbit, providing enhanced datalinks for long-range flights. The bizarre fairing design was necessitated by the 2.5 m single-piece dish. Beacon-Echo ended up having a coincidental Mun flyby. He would be around for Orion 6, though. This one was quite remarkable. The booster was an updated, fine-tuned variant, forgoing the bizarre liquid hydrogen upper stage in favour of extended Poodle tankage. Jeb watched the rocket blast off into the clouds. As it disappeared into the distance, briefly flashing as the jettisoned metal-coated SRBs tumbled wildly, he grabbed a fistful of Kerbin dirt. He wasn’t going to see it in a while. The upper stage burnt until dry, placing the spacecraft on an intercept trajectory to Jool. Orion 6 was a Mk 2 design, very heavily rebuilt for the extended mission. The CANDL upper stage was to manoeuvre it about the giant’s moons, and the probe also mounted its own auxiliary motor. It had a massive package of sensors, including cameras, a magnetometer boom, an RPWS tripod, and particle collector wafers. The power was provided by a pair of heavy-duty blutonium turbogenerators on even more extendable booms. The press conference got axed because some joker set fire to the Munie News Network van, so for Jeb and co the quarantine was uneventful. The VAB has swarms of wrench monkeys running back and forth as it was about to roll out its second-biggest launch ever. "All hands, Terra Actual, reactor transport will enter the site in two minutes. Stand by to receive hazardous cargo," Gene shouted into the PA system. The Kerbal Atomics Neptune heterogenous twisted-ribbon bimodal nuclear thermal rocket was the single most advanced and potentially the most environmentally damaging piece of technology to come out of ISP thus far. It had increased thermal output thanks to unconventional fuel element design, and mounted an electrical generator system to scavenge power from the reactor pile during the cost to Duna. Triton's major failing was its use of liquid hydrogen reaction mass – a propellant massively lacking in density, hence requiring enormous tanks. Jeb told Bill to avoid Kerbodyne like the plague, so the propulsion stage ended up very long. Launching a rocket taller than the VAB itself was an unlikely proposition, so a very unconventional approach had to be taken. The encapsulated payload was strapped to the side of three Mainsail stacks, with the autopilot automatically throttling each separate engine to keep the monster balanced and flyable. It blasted off, wiggling ever-so-slightly as the machinery tried to find the sweet spot. If only Bill had more time, he would have probably designed something more elegant and natural. But the sea-level high-performance hydrolox rocketry was out of favor with absolutely everyone, leaving no hope of a crossfeed system that would make optimal use of the nuclear motor throughout the flight. As the core stage cut off and detached, the aeroshell popped off, revealing the load-bearing fairing of the extremely long nuclear engine. In addition to siphoning fuel from the core stage, the payload stack had its own supply for its three motors, which were fired up once again for the circularization burn. The solar arrays had been extended as soon as possible, as the tug had a power-hungry refrigeration system to keep the propellant from vaporizing away, which had been acceptable for departure stages, but not for interplanetary ships. The Vulkan was rolled out onto the pad only a few hours later. “Flagship Mission Control, begin launch checkout,” Gene Kerman announced, “Booster?” “Go…” "Alright, this is what we live for..." Jeb muttered. "If we quit now, we might as well never go outdoors," Bill chimed in. The three main engines fired. Half an hour later, the still-suited crew brought their ship alongside the tug, having ditched their upper stage after the intercept burn. The Vulkan had an abundance of docking thrusters, so it was no trouble for Jeb to dock it with his eyes shut. "Capcom, Vulkan, beginning preparations for Trans-Duna Injection." As Jeb validated the life support system, Bill began to stoke up the reactor pile, and Bob unlatched the dogs on the hatch and descended into the habitation module. With a flip of the switch, the fairing slipped off the nuclear motor, and tumbled into the darkness along with the supplemental rockets. The interior seemed much smaller, now that one of the portholes had a massive camera built on top of it, with reels of oversized film stored alongside it. The trunk was stuffed with supplies, and there wasn't a single square centimetre of unused bulkhead surface. Some of the clutter would go into the return vehicle and hence the place would become easier to get around in later on. Everything seemed to be still in its proper place. "Capcom, Vulkan standing by for guidance star data," Jeb announced from his command seat. The final orbit continued. Life support hummed along, and the Geiger counter clicked faster and faster as the reactor reached its nominal operating output of 101.42%. "Vulkan, Mission Control, beginning departure go/no-go. INCO?" "Go." "FIDO? "Go." "Jets?" "Go." "GUIDO?" "Go!" "Vulkan, Capcom, confirming departure burn, Brennschluβ at 3-0-5, repeat, 3-0-5, burn in 3-5 seconds, repeat, 3-5 seconds." "Capcom, Vulkan, acknowledging burn data, preparing to execute." "Godspeed." There was silence in the cockpit. Bob strapped himself back into his seat. The turbopumps hummed way back in the tug. And with a groan and a knock, the engine fired. It wasn’t much of a kick, 0.3g at best. The RCS thrusters clicked a few times before the gimbal could autocorrect. “Cut-out in ten… Five, four, three, two, one… Cut-out confirmed.” “Reactor throttling down to standby.” “…turbopumps de-spun. Depressurizing fuel lines.” “Throttle-down confirmed. Neutron flux decreasing. Engaging dioxide cooling loop.” “Tying reactor generators to Main Bus A. Stand by for controller switch into cruise mode.” “Duna flyby in 230 days,” Bob finally chimed in. The wouldn’t be alone on their way, though. Orions 7 and 8 would arrive a week later each, with a tiny lander slapped into between the usual probe and the braking stage. The season of coincidental Munar flybys continued, it would have seemed.

M'kay, opened file, closed file, did something else completely but very related: http://imgur.com/exu0Wck

Religious fanaticism. Fwoosh! @Jonfliesgoats, aircraft carrier carriers will be back. The Soviets used the Combined Dive Bomber (TB-3 with a pair of I-16s) in WWII with some success. They considered flying two Su-27s off an An-225 thirty years later in order to cover the approach from the Arctic. And with DARPA looking into drones and aerial rearmament systems...

@MarkWatney, are you really, really sure? Anyway, I've got a thesis deadline coming up, and instead am suffering from heavy addiction to Fallout 4. Don't expect me to be around for another week. But, after that... it's a manned Duna mission!

Problem is, this would apply to a tiny minority of the population. If you use that as a political ideology, the only natural outcome is for the terrestrial population to exterminate the spacers, and ban space travel forever more because of its "harmful" psychological effects.

They didn't do much back when the oil was at $100+. All of the Mars missions ended in disaster, and everything else was on paper. Many of the institutional problems persist. Harsh as it may sound, I have zero confidence in my country's space agency being able to undertake a large-scale, novel project.

@Streetwind, it may be even worse. Roscosmos may be upholding the Soviet practice of deliberately misleading fuel names: UDMH becomes "heptyl," N2O4 becomes "amine", IRFNA-27I becomes "mélange"...

Alright, I've been reading the annual reports of the Salavat chemical plant, which is Russia's sole source of unsymmetrical dymethylhydrazine (do not ask me why I did that). And I've found a pretty expensive refit programme being run by XIth Department of Spetsstroi to adapt the plant to produce "napthyl". What is that? I don't know, that's why I'm asking. All I know is that, according to mainstream Russian media and with no details provided whatsoever, napthyl is going to be used as a drop-in replacement for RP-1 at Vostochny. Those who heard of "syntin" (1-methyl-1,2-dicyclopropylcyclopropane) may be suffering from deja vu.