DDE

*checks the Like ratio* OK... need more bodies per chapter... Got it. Problem is, both Eve and Moho windows are 80-something days away. No worries; some old friends are coming back. I'm forced to revise the Vulkan mission to a mere fly-by, unless someone teaches me how to efficiently do missions with Duna stay time of under 1 year.

No, you can't. And that's one of the many reasons full-size plants are inferior to algae in our case.

I think they can't hold a stinger to a 3D printer. Plus I'm not sure how much plants you'll need to get the system working. Open-air plants.

Chapter 26: The Kessel Run “Inner hatch locked!” Rosgrid’s voice reached through the metal. “Start the pumps,” Eilphie responded from inside the airlock. She had a mission for this munar day. The week-long night meant they crawled out of the habitats several times in a row to fill up the sample bags, but this time was a more complicated. She checked her gyrocompass heading, her fuel level, and fired up the jetpack. Kerbin reappeared over the horizon as she ascended. She flew over the edge of the twin crater formation west to the base, and decelerated before landing. 12 km total hop. Eil spent almost an hour hopping from rock to rock on her remaining propellant margin. She finished it off with a marker flag. She then began the return jump, forced to keep much more alert due to the added weight of Mun rocks. ---------- With Hornet 3 halfway through its mission, Hornet 4 had been launched into position. This mission was much different from the preceding ones – the target orbit was 2200 km above the surface, lasting well above two days per revolution. FIDO also bashed his head on the wall, repeatedly, during a personal debriefing with Val. And this exotic mission required a certain kind of crew. Yaroslav Kerman shifted nervously in his seat as the countdown to TMI began. “Engine firing!” Valentina Kerman barked, once again stating the obvious – the almost-empty Tunguska had quite the kick. “Stage sep!” Raygan Kerman responded as everyone onboard was shoved forward. Then the Poodle fired, and this time mercifully nobody said anything. After five hours, Hermes began its swing around the dark side of the Mun. Following a periapsis burn and a plane correction burn halfway to the Hornet, it finally matched orbit with its target, and began docking. As her passengers transferred to the lander, Val cracked her fingers. That idiot spent 200 m/s Δv instead of altering the time of the TMI for the Hornet, cutting into her budget for the landing. With the Eagle and the Prospector as backup relays, she was going to have her hands on the lander’s controls as it descended. It was a polar landing, so the burn began right after undocking, but the descent would last a whole day. The landing area was one of the small, relatively flat valleys amidst the craggy mountains around the north pole. The remaining hydrogen in Tunguska burned up, rather faster than Val would have liked, and the stage was jettisoned. The final deceleration began. Surprisingly, the autopilot worked flawlessly. Val watched the contact lights go green, and the engine cut out; she eyeballed the remaining Δv; it was enough for an orbital ascent, but it was still going to be a pain in the backside. Yaroslav turned to Raygan as they hit the dirt. They were in a permanently shadowed valley, illuminated only by the lander’s lights. Raygan was at serious risk of tearing his cheeks apart. “Alright, I’m going up.” “For what?” “Science!” Yaroslav blasted off, and headed for the nearest mountaintop, well over two kilometres above him, and landed on the top. He may have been a scientist, but he increasingly had to become a salesman; he was already forming a cadre of less-than-perfectly-idiotic reporters, but he needed something else. He needed a cultural icon. Meanwhile, Raygan was laying down the foundation for Base Alpha-2. He then plopped down the containerized airlock and habitat on said foundation. He then redirected his attention to setting up the power hub. The assembly of the drill closet took a while; the thermite welding charges were a bit irreversible. The primary habitat slowly rose before him as the nitrogen-releasing tablets burned inside. He repeated the operation with the second habitat. Above him, on the ridge, Yaroslav was done, and finally began his jump back. “Silver Two, coming in.” “Silver Three, I’m inside, could use your help with your lab.” ‘My lab’, Yaroslav sneered. It took another two hours to work on the interior; luckily, they started with pressurizing the place, so at least they didn’t have to mount floor boards in a spacesuit. Once that was done, Slava kicked in the core sample drill. ---------- Two weeks later, Eilphie Kerman stuffed the wrapper from the last snack into the waste container. They were mothballing up the base; they’d leave a few cans of breathing mix inside and the RTGs would keep the beacon on, but they vented the atmosphere as they left. The big blue marble of Kerbin reappeared from behind the horizon once again as the lander ascended. “I thought you were finally gone for good!” Jenrick grumbled as the rest of the crew boarded the ship. ---------- Similar to their brethren at Base Alpha-1, Yaroslav Kerman had had a fun month; he got to round up water-rich samples from the entire valley and the surrounding mountains. The in-situ lab removed any and all limitations on sample mass. But as all good things, time ran out. The lander began to sophisticated series of manoeuvres by inserting itself into a polar orbit 50 km high. “Command downlink established, I’ll take it from here,” Val announced over the radio. Slava and Raygan knew how much of a bedside manner Val had, so they weren’t’ surprised that the lander immediately flipped over and fired the main engine. It was an attempt at a plane change. The fuel left was enough for a regular rendezvous, but this time their planes were perpendicular. Nor was it enough for the plane change – Val pulled the last few m/s using the RCS thrusters. “Alright, I’m decelerating in three hours, intercept in one day. Try to conserve battery power while I’m at it.” That high up, Val could afford the plane change, and to plummet towards the intercept point at break-neck velocity. A few more burns brought her in close – close enough to perform docking. The empty lander tumbled away as the away team settled back into their seats. “Glad to see you still have it, Val,” Yaroslav remarked, “I hate to admit but Gene may start trying to send you up more. Your planes are getting on his nerves, and in the coming weeks he’ll be trying to gather as much attention as possible. I suggest you stay out of his way.” ---------- Gene once again had made sure to reduce the workload on his crew as a key mission came up. Other than the six Kerbals and four kibbals in low orbit, his crew was free to undertake something unprecedented. Orion 1 already had Duna in its scope. Its albedo sensors could see the spectral lines of CO2 and ozone; its plasma sensors detected the planet’s weak magnetic field, and its primary camera suite could resolve some of the features on the planet’s butterscotch surface. A brief pulse of the attitude control jets ever-so-slightly adjusted its course, and it was once more on the way. Ike swung around once more as the probe approached the planet. They were already being fed a plethora of data and images, even measuring a drop in gravity above a massive canyon, but the most challenging part was right ahead. “Jets, what’s the word on the stage?” Gene asked, his face carved of stone. “I’m reading successful pressurization and adequate monoprop levels. It should work.” “Alright, FIDO, feed it the firing program. And then, we wait.” Orion slipped into the planet’s radio shadow; the stage, having spent well over two hundred days without maintenance, was to slow it down into orbit. “Expected re-contact in case of failure, mark.” That announcement excluded the possibility of a mere misfire. Either the probe had slowed down, or there wasn’t enough left to contact. “Pingback!” Everyone in Mission Control stopped breathing. “Receiving telemetry.” “FIDO!” “250x260 circular orbit, inclination 38… insertion confirmed.” “Go to mode 3 and start the science program!” Gene shouted over the cries of adulation and triumph. Millions of miles away, above the dim aurorae of Duna, Orion 1 dropped the explosive hazard the braking stage remained. The probe swung about, deploying the radar array that used to be mounted on the adapter of the now-gone stage. ---------- Their business was hardly over, though. Orion 2 was about to have its turn; and after a quick correction burst, it was dead-set on a course for something pretty extreme. It was about to shoot very close to Ike. The little data that came from Orion 1 depicted a much more exciting version of Mun. And the decision was very extreme – passing within five to ten kilometres from the surface at interplanetary speed; the entire encounter would last a mere twenty minutes. Orion broke comms with Kerbin and swung around to keep its sensors aimed at Ike. Its cameras swept over the bright mountain ridges and the massive flat basalt-flooded areas as the plasma array recorded the reflections off the rock. The images were taken non-stop as it hurtled by the airless hills. Ten minutes later, it used its star-trackers to reacquire Kerbin, and fed all the data it could until entering Duna’s radio shadow an hour later. There, it performed the first burn in the insertion sequence. Gene’s team watched the data flow as Orion briefly resumed contact between burns. Its initial burn merely dropped the apoapsis to two Ike orbits, so that the plane could be changed more easily. There, it left the equatorial plane to improve its coverage of Duna’s surface. An apoapsis burn adjusted the periapsis. A second periapsis burn circularized the orbit. Only then did the probe dropped the stage and joined Orion 1 in scanning the planet.

Would you need radiators on Mars, though? You have a pretty cold planet as a heat sink. Also, bees? You sure? It's not the first choice of in-situ waste processing research. Most people are content with algae and sushi.

@The Raging Sandwich @cubinator @insert_name Technically Progress ships have a spring-loaded ejection system for a small return capsule in the access hatch.

What, again? Are you kidding or did they really end up landing it in a major storm?

In pieces. The data transmitted is generally accepted to depict a structural collapse before reaching surface - the lander was rated for 60 atm.

...with most evidence pointing to its electronics being fried by lightning before it even touched down.

Chapter 25: From Hell’s Heart I Stab at Thee Parts were shoved around as the surviving Super Darter emerged from the scaffolding with a rocket slapped on top of it. The refitted design used a mess of off-the-shelf components: a crude load-bearing frame within the cargo bay, haphazard slits cut into the doors to allow a reinforced pylon to stick out of it; mounted atop it was another Intern with a concrete orbital propulsion bus. The new upper stage was strapped together from a Dachshund tank, a bunch of stabilizers and the oldie-but-goody Swivel motor. Despite the tumour on its back, the Darter launched quite normally, the added horizontal control surfaces actually improved the handing. Nevertheless, not everyone was excited. “Impressive as it may be, we’re still looking at several percent higher costs than just an expendable rocket,” Mortimer droned on. “You concluded that from a sample size of one,” Val snapped at him. “True, but with such an advantage you’ll be hard-pressed to argue against Gene and the rocket gang. It’s not enough of a magic bullet.” Just as the waist rockets fired, the aerodynamic pairing blew off the engine bell. A heartbeat later, the rocket fired. A cousin of the Reliant, it had more than enough thrust to push the shrouded payload through the atmosphere. The fairing’s aluminium and beryllium superalloys glowed cherry-red as the oncoming barrage of plasma slowly eroded it; the fairing had to have active cooling added to it just to survive. The engine died and pulsed for a few brief instants as the rocket drifted through the thin upper atmosphere. Val watched the launch vehicle go through the motions, dropping the half-boiling fairings and conducting the usual handshake and telemetry run-down, confirming its ability to inject into orbit. Then, it aborted, and dropped the return vehicle. “They want a magic bullet? I’ll show them one.” ---------- Meanwhile over at Gene’s Ginormous Grandiosity, the Hornet 3 launch went normally. It was the first of the Series 2 landers, most of the differences were inside the cargo bay. The lander itself merely had bigger RTGs and a couple photocells bolted to it to provide more power once landed. The ship with the crew was launched the next day. Once again, Jenrick, Eilphie and Roszie were unto the breech, although this time their mission was quite different. A day later in Munar orbit, Jenrick herded the passengers off "his" ship. The Hornet began its descent towards its target landing site. After a swing around the opposite side of the Mun, the ship fell towards a flat area east of the distinct twin crater, slightly behind the limb. A stage and sharp deceleration later, Hornet steadied itself on the Munar surface. The bored crew had already suited up during descent. Ros kicked in the external lights and descended down the ladder. Eil failed to even unbuckle from her harness. “You gonna help me?” “Nope. You’re the engineer.” “Suit yourself, princess.” The process was in fact quite demanding. Two tons of equipment had to be unloaded piecemeal from an overhead cargo bay, and then put together. At least the process included a small amount of explosives to drive in the bolts holding the mounting bracket. The first of the huts was containerized, and the other three sections had to be manually connected by airtight hatches; Ros also had to assemble a closet-sized airtight compartment out of aluminium plates, and to manually push half a ton of gear through a tight hatch. Eil watched through the lander’s hatch amusedly as the three dome-shaped buildings began to inflate. Ros was busy bolting down that tiny cupboard, its seams still red-hot from the thermite used to plate them over, and mounting a drill assembly to it. Eilphie decided to finally get off her hands and clambered into one of the buildings, still unpressurized, as Rosgrid mounted up the external lamppost and dragged the RTGs to their new mounting beside the base. They still had a day’s job ahead of them. The base’s life support still had to be hooked to the lander’s lOx lines, and all the interior had to be put into place. Yet in total they had a two-storey habitat, a two-storey lab hut with airlock and internally accessible drill station in the rigid closet, and a three-storey main lab, along with a month's worth of snacks. ---------- Back at KSC, Val was looking over the readouts from Darter's systems while seated in a cockpit. Of course, it wasn't the booster plane that bore the cockpit. If it could handle that rocket, she reasoned, then it could handle a fully fuelled Carrack spaceplane. Which was why they proceeded to strap it in place of a regular payload. "Tower, requesting permission for engine start." "Granted." "Engines one through four firing," Terigh responded. Mounted on the outside of the craft and at half the distance from the forward part of the cargo bay, the noise was deafening. Soon after takeoff they broke the sound barrier, but the voracious roar of the turboramjets was quickly replaced by the aerodynamic noise, and the vibration still reached them through the hull. They reached 10 km and began the downrange boost. As the ground speed count reached its high point and acceleration began to slacken, Val realized that the Darter had underperformed by a good 100 m/s. It was unclear, however, if that was going to be mission-critical. Finally, the jets choked up. Val reached for the "Abort" handle, which they instead rigged to serve as a manual staging activator, and pulled it. The Carrack broke free of its mounting rail. At the same time, twin retrorockets mounted around the nose intake of the Darter fired. This new solution had to be used to avoid compromising Carrack's Thermal Protection System, and worked marvelously to clear the way for what happened next. The pumps howled, and Carrack's aerospike erupted. The TPS was going to see them through the extended push, but with plasma licking at the windshield, Val was increasingly coming to grips with the fact that they desperately needed the Hyper Darter. This was a thrill park ride, not a reliable method of getting into space. But a fully reusable orbit transport system, even if just a proof of concept, was definitely going to turn some heads. They finally achieved sufficient velocity and drifted towards the apoapsis. "Terigh, fuel level?" "Good enough for a 'stay', not good enough for a quick visit to Athens." "It's a 'stay', then. Plot the circularization burn." After a brief half-orbit, they spent their remaining fuel decelerating, and entered the atmosphere as a steep angle. This maneuver came to be referred as "body-slamming Kerbin" among Mission Control staff. The high surface-to-mass ratio caused the Carrack to bleed off a lot of velocity at higher altitudes, though. Useful - if one could manage the g-forces. The end of the deceleration forced Val to sent the Carrack into a steep dive towards KSC's airstrip, where the Super Darter landed less than twenty minutes ago.

At such an investment, I'm beginning to seriously wonder why the transfer tug isn't nuclear-electric. Thus it can slowly decelerate into Titan orbit in advance of the lander's arrival. Also, given the plethora of methane to go around, I wonder if it would be possible to create an airbreathing rocket with just the oxidizer onboard.

Nitpick incoming! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Tengiz

@Angel-125 Can confirm.

They do. It's interesting to see how what's left of a reality-compliant plot show up between the lines in Armageddon. Also, Tsiolkovsky and the Soviets were right on it... if you're into calling you spaceship Joseph Stalin, launching it from rails, and using liquid chambers to survive g-forces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmicheskiy_reys It's still better than the Russian spin on Avengers.

Alright, guys, I did my own digging on Reddit (world-class sleuthing work, I know, no need to thank me) and the project is a bit sinister. Their website contains some interesting lines: Now, the project is chaired by the previous head of Almaz-Antei, Russia's surface-to-air missile manufacturer, who was known to proclaim the following: And Asgardia's primary objective is some kind of an asteroid defense system. Musk isn't the only supervillain in town, it seems!

@Angel-125, note circled area: Log: https://1drv.ms/t/s!AmlSZuL0ax7C1BsnfWFWYr6r7o3N

Nope, issue persists. It's just got an added blue ridge around it, which is also transparent from the other side.

My Doc hasn't gotten the memo, I've taken it to the Mun in a KIS container already. The trick is to affix a Doc to your ship first, and then drag THAT into the container.

@Angel-125, OK, so I've pasted all the assets from the latest version. And now the section above the upmost seams of the Doc is see-through; not just the textures, seems like a part of the model is missing.

My guess exactly. Issue resolved; I've learnt to deal with the KAS problem.

@Angel-125, reporting another damned peculiar glitch; using the old 1.1.3-compatible version. Can't pull a Doc into a KAS container from the VAB's selection of parts, but could do so if I was pulling from a Doc already attached to the ship. Also, re: complaints about solar array and telegraph size, looks OK on my end, the solar array is huge; should check if override for KAS volume calculation is working, just in case - was a problem with RoverDude's inflatables - but looks like it does. Further to the above, Doc appears to be missing a collider and is intangible when inflated. (Edit 2: issues may be intermittent) Also, is there any way to remove the requirement for TERRAIN before taking core samples?

Hey @Angel-125, I see you've dramatically cut down on the number of KAS pipe ports per part. Any tip on how to link all those fancy Gaslights of yours to the main base?

Chapter 24: Heat and Kitchens Sidhat glanced once again at the gloveboxes housing his still-ongoing crystal growth experiments. He’d spent a bit too much time on microgravity combustion, so the next crew will have to keep their filthy hands out of the experiment chambers, and just take some photographs from the outside. It was easier for Stelemma, who merely had three miles of film to pack up after testing Vulkan’s future porthole-mounted camera. The Hermes undocked on schedule and initiated descent. ---------- Meanwhile, Val hit a snag. She had agreed to handle the launch of the third and final docking-capable Intern ship. It was lighter than the Vector she tested on, so it should have been usable off-the-shelf. However, the Vector was designed to be pretty slick, and the Intern... wasn’t. And no, the Super Darter’s cargo bay could not fit a fairing. At the very least, they had to plaster it in a whole lot of ablative coating, and go for bigger grid fins. And that still probably wouldn’t be enough. Which meant they still launched right away. Val watched the drone climb and accelerate until the jet cut-out point. “Bay doors open. Payload sep! Engine firing!” The first failure scenario was not realized; the upper stage did not destabilize and flip. It began ploughing through the upper atmosphere. And it kept ploughing on. Numbers kept creeping over the consoles, and they weren’t good. “Temperature alarm, Flight.” Gene furrowed his eyebrow, and glanced at the launch cyclogram. The ship was blatantly underperforming due to drag. “Abort,” he said tersely. He didn’t say anything to Val. But as soon as the return vehicle separated and entered ballistic descent, Mission Control exploded with not entirely friendly observations. ---------- Gene’s team had no such bizarre variables to overcome with Hermes-Cargo. A slightly cut-down Hermes Mk 2 launch system, topped by a modified, shrouded ship. Just like the failed Intern, it was a part of the plan to stock up Piraeus ahead of Expedition 3. The cargo variant was a mismatch of parts from several different Hermes models, with EX’s solar panels and half of the monopropellant-radiator array along with Mk 1’s propulsion section, topped by a glorified supply closet. ---------- “Yeah, the carbon extractor loop is holding up,” Jeb announced into his headset, “We’re losing maybe a few percent of water; I suggest we compensate on the flight by starting with a filled-up greywater tank. “We’re seeing rising particle counts, though, and it’s coming from Athens. You’ve got to warn Expedition 3 to what they’re likely to run into as well.” The interior materials weren't exactly holding up during the long mission, apparently. Meanwhile, Bill glanced at the atmosphere sensor dashboard. The CO2 indicator readout was rising before his very eyes. Hurriedly, Bill glanced at the internal temperature measurement. Yep, it was climbing as well. Jeb’s eyes fell onto his horrified expression. Shoving Jeb aside, Bill lined up on the open hatch to Athens, breathed in loudly, and launched himself inside. In seconds, he flew back the way he came from. “Fire!” he shouted without a tinge of panic. “Oh, snap!” Bob snarled as Jeb locked and dogged up Vulkan’s internal hatch. “LOC, priority alert, fire in Athens station, foremost section. Requesting immediate airlock override and flush!” Bill rattled off. The stench of burnt plastic suddenly became much more detectable against the plethora of other odours permeating the ship. “We’ve got it under control already!” Jeb barked, “What’s the CO level?” “Not enough to kill us, apparently,” Bob scoffed. The hissing of the escaping air was barely audible, and the creaking of the larger pressure vessel was a much better indicator. It would remain a mystery whether the fire starved itself of oxygen itself or was extinguished by the flush. “We can still salvage the station with a Hermes-Cargo,” Bill suggested. “No real need; we can complete the mission with what we have on this side,” Bob responded. “Looked like a regular electrical short. I think we have a new sensor to add to our ships,” Bill resolved. ---------- Valentina was chairing the meeting of the greater part of the aeronautical division. The backup Intern had already been rolled onto the pad, mounted atop a conventional booster. Meanwhile the rest of KSC were expressing their Schadenfreude in typical Kerbal fashion, and the walls of the new aircraft hangars were being painted into the vomit-inducing red of rotten tomato innards. "So?" asked one of the line engineers. "So!" echoed Terigh. "So-so," Val mocked tiredly, "We need a new plan." "Abandon the air launch, stuff a Darter with passenger seats, spin off an airline," that same engineer suggested, immediately attracting several furious glares. "I'll be sure to take that under advisement," Val deflected. "If we let ourselves stop now, we're pretty much good for nothing - very few commercial payloads will fit into our margins, let alone our own ones. The problem is with the low altitude of separation. We can treat the issue as a tactical or a strategic one." "What do you mean by that?" Val asked Terigh, raising her voice to overcome the din of the other engineers rushing for dictionaries and thesauri. "Well, we can try to dispose with the low launch altogether, and opt for a 'Hyper Darter' of sorts that is at least partially rocket-powered. Or we can force our way through the problem by... adding more boosters." Val had to wait for the loud booing to die down to continue. "But we can't, not in the existing architecture." "Never said we had to fit it inside the cargo bay." "Ah..." "We had major problems with external mounting, but we dumped it pretty early on. Our mistake, I guess." "Start there. An, oh, there happens to be a spaceplane around that I'd love to mate with the Darter for testing purposes," Val quietly mused. Somewhere under the table, a tape recorder clicked off. ---------- Kath's station as a Hermes pilot t her seat was on a lower deck and further back, thus the ancillary payload was strapped to the interior in front of her. In this case, the gantry engineers were busy strapping the payload in after the crew was already inside, which was hardly surprising considering its nature. The four caged Occidental kibbals all kept their beady eyes on the only Kerbal they could see, and whom they rightfully expected to be their next tormentor after Allock personally implanted them with biosensors a few days ago. Expedition 3 was to stretch the limits on endurance as well as the size of organisms Jesla was willing to use in her experiments; they planned to try and set up a whole terrarium in one of the equipment racks. "Launch in five, four, three..." Bobak Kerman counted off, having been recently promoted. "Brace, you fools!" Kath shouted to her animal crewmates. "Two, one..." The rest of the phrase was drowned out by the blast, and the kibbals splattered all over their transparent plastic cages.

And that's without the fuel and oxidizer teams getting set on fire in case of a handshake. It's still better than the Inhibited Red Fuming Nitric Acid still used in Kh-22 cruise missiles.