DDE

You shouldn't have added "planetary exploration". Because, right now, SpaceX is nothing more than a taxi service, and hasn't actually done any planetary exploration. Even India is ahead of SpaceX. Also, they have not achieved reusability. Word is the landed Falcon stages are too banged-up to ever fly again.

Returning to the OP subject, from what I've picked from Freitas's Xenology, which is pretty dated but should still represent SETI, SETI pretty much up-front tells us that they 'may' instigate a media lockdown and cover-up if they judge it to be For The Greater Good (tm).

Uh... they don't have to be powered. From what I understand it's possible to "arc-boost" a regular monoprop thruster.

The problem is that Squad seem to go for the 1970s-1980s tech. For that time period, and even for today, it's a pipe dream. So we probably won't see it in stock.

-1. If you feel it to be this necessary, you can quickly rename the basic design in the VAB before rolling it out onto the pad.

Aye, sah, I shall run them down! Fooooor da Empra!

Guys, is anyone getting injured by all the puns I have flying fast and loose here? FYI, the bit with Morse code comes from the transcript of Vostok-1 comms. The Soviets, especially early on, had a problem similar to what the ISP has - very limited radio coverage, so I thought it was appropriate. The Phoenix lander is going to get quoted much, much later.

As I imagined. Got any step-by-step instructions? I know the Scatterer has a UI, but it's a bit too in-depth for me.

Chapter 6: Rendezvous and Drama The Intern booster carrying the A3 Targeted Automated Rendezvous and Docking Instrumentation System departed the pad a few minutes after midnight, its twin Hammer boosters leaving a column of smoke. As it entered the thermosphere, the nose fairing ejected, and the solar panels and whip antenna extended, but instead of the payload separating, the two small engines alongside the Dachshund kicked in, completing the orbital insertion and the extended circularization burn. After that, the ejector valves on the stage ensured it wouldn’t explode in the near future. The oversized satellite came to rest in a 250 km equatorial orbit. Jeb arrived to KSC a few minutes later. Before he was kitted in the new ISP-issue spacesuit and strapped into a Vector, Bill– quiet but seemingly lucid – showed him the experimental Kerbal Ramification Artificial Simulation Hub. KRASH still needed more work. Val didn’t bother to show up in person. But then, there would be an emergency interruption on all TV channels anyway, so there was no need to rub it in her face. The Vector blasted off within five seconds of the predetermined time required to catch the target hundreds of miles above. However, the rendezvous was inherently set outside of comms range. Jeb was going to handle it on his own. The problem was amplified by the fact that, in the middle of the Chelyabinsk burn, he began to realize he’s going to overshoot the target. As the circularization burn was coming up, Jeb had the automated docking system send a heartbeat to the target vehicle. The signal came back, allowing for the separation to be measured. The distance shined on the console. 221.3 km. Jeb pulled out his kustom astrogation slide rule. After a few manipulations, he produced the required orbital period for an intercept on the next orbit. A few more operations, and he had the value of 26.6 m/s that could effortlessly be added to the circularization burn. He informed the KSC of the unscheduled manoeuvre half an hour later. There was panic among the junior staff, before Jeb managed to get a telemetry update out of them. The intercept was coming up. Distance on the docking radar kept ticking off at a maddening pace. At precisely the determined time, Jeb fired the SM engine. The Spark rapidly slowed down the ship to a stop relatively to the target. Jeb unclutched the gyros, and brought the ship around, peering through the tiny window. The TARDIS hung in space, less than 2 km away. Jeb immediately fired an 11 km/s burn along a vector passing slightly ‘above’ it, and less than a minute later he used the forward two RCS jets to kill the velocity again. He then carefully compensated for the slight overshoot, flying slightly back before locking his bow onto the docking port. Carefully he brought the ship onto the approach axis, using lateral thrusters. He had half the thrust on the left-right axis compared to the two others, but that wasn’t much of the problem; neither was the slight asymmetry causing the manoeuvring thruster to generate torque – the gyros and automatic stabilization compensated for it. Controlling the docking was no simple affair. Jeb had no direct view of the target ship through the tiny window. He had to rely on the docking radar and, later, on the narrow-angle camera embedded in the docking ring. Finally, he began to bring the ship in, somewhat overzealously using the retrograde thrusters to keep his velocity down. A few last meters… He saw the camera black out; he heard a bang, and watched the indicator lights flicker as the ports grappled onto each other. He pulled a handle on the console, and the two ships were linked solidly. Telemetry from TARDIS’s flight computer flowed onto his consoles. But that wasn’t the end of the day’s work. Jeb almost immediately undocked, backed away from the port, and then sent his ship “upwards”. He waited until he drifted to 50 m, and then reinitiated the docking approach system. “Alright, tin man, show me what you can do,” Jeb mouthed, flipping on the autopilot. The RCS thruster valves clicked furiously. Jeb wouldn’t have risked translating along three different axes simultaneously, but the autopilot did so with mechanical precision as it moved to the final approach initiation point, and then performed a nice, soft re-docking. Jeb ran the checklist on TARDIS and the docking system before undocking and departing the target. He was hurtling towards the terminator, and KSC’s radio range. ‘Never too old for this,’ Jeb thought, as he began to tap on the long-range radio: “...- . -.-. - --- .-. ..--- .-. --.- ... - .-.. -. -.. .. -. --. ... .-.. - .. --- -.”

Downloaded yesterday. It's that the ocean has followed me into Low Kerbin Orbit. As well as Low Mun Orbit.

My thought is that you can toss it into the same facilities as Fusion Pellets. Both processes by and large use centrifuges to separate isotopes, it's just that Uraninite (?) conversion into raw yellowcake material also involves some pretty nasty chemicals. Plus I don't plan to use your fusion rocketry

Hey, @Angel-125, do you know what this mod is missing? A way to produce Uranium for, say, @Nertea's reactors.

Hello, guys. I've been looking forward for a KRASH-like solution for a while. However, while thus far I haven't done anything but try to load the simulation, I've already come across a non-mission-critical glitch seen below. As you may guess, I'm knee-deep in vismods (SVE, Scatterer, Texture Replacer, Planetshine).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yubileiny , for starters. Very little material has ever been translated. Torsion fields are just one fairly resilient bunch of pseudoscience that bred on the "open-mindedness" of late Soviet science, and was then thrust onto the general populace, and the rest of the world, in the 90s. The official position of Academy of Sciences' unofficial Committee on Combatting Pseudoscience is that Russia is the world's leader in export of utter bunk underneath the veneer of Soviet Superscience.

Hazmat suits are standard for any spacecraft equipped with hypergolic maneuvering thrusters, i.e. practically all of them. That stuff is toxic. Oh, and speaking about unmanifested Russian payloads, there is a scientific satellite equipped with a high-powered gravity torsion field drive; supposed to propel it all the way out of the solar system. It's a box with an electric motor, a newer version of the old Dean drive. Added without authorization, might I add. Don't be scared by bizarre payloads. ...As to the subject at hand, it's clearly not intended as a fast-reaction spysat. That niche is covered by the new Centaur upper stage with 27 (!) slots for auxiliary payloads.

It's called "Range Safety". In the US it's a self-destruct. In Russia it's aiming to crash in the Kazakh or Siberian steppe. Well, it has a dV of 300 m/s, but it has no more blast than the Terrier. The Soviets created the LES for the Buran based on a small dedicated SRB, despite have an OMS-like system where the Shuttle had SSMEs.

Yeah, Venusian surface is such a tremendously inhospitable environment that a swarm of planet-cracking RKVs is the very best solution from the start. It could also blow away some of the atmosphere, drastically improving access to resources for the bombarding faction.

Is anyone else bothered by portholes through a liquid hydrogen tank array?

Without integration of some sort of ISRU proof-of-concept, this mission would have merely been an overly elaborate Fobos-Grunt op.

[citation needed] Legs, guys. Legs.

Chapter 5: Resting on Laurels It had been a noisy week at the KSC. The build-up of surge capacity meant that their courtyards were filling up with FL-series tank fuselages and empty RT-series bodies waiting for the solid fuel to be cast into them. Jeb had spent these days running up and down the stairs and gantries of the VAB and the HIF, as well as the new warehouse housing the Spacecraft Assembly and Testing facility, where the larger space-worthy designs were strapped together in clean room conditions – although, admittedly, he spent a lot of time patting the ‘clean’ room personnel for any smuggled snacks. Finally, in the dead of night he plopped down in his chair, only to notice Bob hidden amongst the piles of paperwork scattered about his office. “Have you seen Bill?” Bob asked bluntly. “He was ordering around the second line in the HIF.” “So, is that just me, or we just lost the babbling part in Babbling Bill?” “Pretty much, yeah,” Jeb sighed, “Doesn’t sound like a mere mental breakdown, does it?” “Oh, we’ve seen plenty of those already. No, he seems almost… enraptured.” “Shorter words please, Doctor!” “Remember how much time you spent staring during Sarnus V?” ---------- “Sarnus V, flight controllers, pre-launch checklist! Booster?” “Go.” “FIDO?” “Go.” “Guidance?” “Guidance go.” “Surgeon?” “Go.” “EECOM?” “Ready.” “GNC?” “Go flight,” said the guy before relaxing, because astrogation wouldn’t be needed until out of atmosphere. “TELMU?” “Go,” responded another controller who had no part in the launch. “INCO?” “Go,” another switch was flipped. “Network?” “Go.” “Pad leader, Cueston Flight Control, go for launch.” “Roger that, sixty seconds.” “Alright, helmets on, Bob,” said Jeb, strapped into the flight station by the pod’s only window, which was facing the insulation in the aeroshell anyway. Bob tightened up the belts on his seat in the back of the can. Then they heard growling and creaking of the 300-ton rocket under them. The launch vehicle’s machinery started up. “How’s our reactor?” Jeb asked. “Subcritical, neutron flux within limits, cabin exposure negligible.” “Pad, Cueston, we are go for launch… ten… nine… seven… six… five… ignition sequence start!” The growling was drowned out by the thunder. “Four… three… ignition!” The furious vibration drowned out the rest of the Universe. Slowly they felt the acceleration build up. “Liftoff! Tower clear! Cueston, how copy?” There was no response. “Pad, Sarnus, how copy?” “Good copy, Sarnus, trying to raise Cueston on our end too.” “Alright, beginning roll program,” Jeb called out over the intercom. The fins and the gimbals on the outboard motors went to work, spinning the rocket around the longitudinal axis. “Still no response from Cueston. Roll complete, we are pitching.” The drag-induced shaking intensified as the Sarnus slowly began to tip over into a gravity turn. “Sarnus, this is Flight. We’ve experienced structural failure on all of our windows during ignition. We’ll be back with you in two minutes. We’re also getting third-party reports of an earthquake at KSC, in case you’re wondering.” The tiny command pod shook with laughter. They were still mostly climbing, and picking up g’s, as they crossed the 10 km mark. However, the five Mainsails drained the two outboard tank stacks, so it was time for a staging event. There was a backwards jerk as the two engines died, then a bump as the pyrobolts and the separation motors pulled the first set of strap-on boosters free of the rocket. The ascent continued, with the pitch slowly increasing as the rocket began to build up downrange velocity. “You know,” Bob spoke up, “If they can’t handle one of these without getting glass in their face, how will they handle even bigger boosters in the future?” Jeb remained silent. ---------- “Did you know back then?” Bob wondered. “I had my suspicions,” Jeb responded, offering Bob a glass. Bob sniffed. “Fuel-grade ethanol?” “Yeah.” ‘Just like the old days,’ Bob thought. Though they had more explosions back then. ---------- The ascent continued on three motors. The second separation event took place at 37 km, well over halfway to space. The rocket was already in nearly horizontal flight. The second set of boosters fell off, leaving the last Mainsail and a fully fuelled reduced-length tank stack underneath the transfer vehicle. A few seconds later, the Orbital Correction System came into action, with a supplemental ring of four Thud motors. “MECO in ten. Five. Four. Three. Two. One!” There was a burp as the Mainsail cut off. A few seconds later silence fell as the Thuds also died. “Sarnus, this is Cueston, we’re back online!” came the voice on the radio. “Great timing Cueston, we’re halfway to the Mun already,” Jeb sneered as he fired up the OCS’s lateral steering rockets and pitched over for the circularization burn coming up in seven minutes spent on arguing with EECOM over checklists. The Mainsail was not designed for vacuum refire; so only OCS’s Thuds were involved in the brief burn, with next to no noise and acceleration compared to the main engine. ---------- “Do you realize how far we’ve gone since then?” Jeb asked. Bob shook his head. “What do you mean?” “The Mainsail, the one on the Hermes core stack. Back on Sarnus we had about 10% power in reserve; Hermes will normally use 43% more thrust than each of the Sarnus stacks. All thanks to our – how did you put it? – ‘enraptured’ mutual friend.” ---------- With the final launch stage dead, Sarnus V was rapidly passing over the terminator. The crew began preparation for the Transmunar Injection. “Craft fairing jettison…” Jeb read off, flipping switches. The foil in front of him flew outwards, revealing the dark side of Kerbin outside. “…Interstage fairing…” There was a bump. “Stage detach.” “Alright, stoking up the pile,” Bob announced, “Control drums to standby positions, coolant pump one operational, pumps two and three on standby. Neutron flux increasing… criticality achieved.” Jeb just sighed as he read off the output of the flight computer. He did not want to be on the other side of the ship’s radiation shield. ---------- “You know, to think of it, mass limitations and the short mission duration are the only reasons why we didn’t add full-blown turbogenerators instead of solar panels. Jeb tried to leave a post-it note, but his handwriting was getting dangerously erratic. ---------- “TMI in two minutes. Orientation 0-35-40, Brennschluβ set to 5 minutes 25 seconds, remass pumps standing by, drums in full power position. FIDO, please confirm burn data.” There were some creaks and hisses the pair could feel through the tank and over the final interstage. “Commencing burn in three… two… one.” There was a slight jerk. The acceleration was barely sensible. Bob and Jeb exchanged glances, and then both looked at the radiation measurement sensor block on the bulkhead. Sure, the nuclear motor had twice the mass efficiency of a chemical rocket, but at that moment, nervously watching the heightened radiation flux indicator lights, they really doubted if it was worthwhile. After six nervous minutes, the autopilot cut off the reactive mass flow. Bob immediately began to push the reactor back down to standby power levels, and the γ-ray detector stopped displaying unhealthy measurements. They began the day-long drift towards Mun’s Sphere of Influence. ---------- “And that’s when your cabin crazy started to manifest,” Jeb complained. “My cabin crazy!?” Bob objected. “Do you even remember how much monoprop I burnt when you wanted to photograph Minmus?” “I… I undertook… astronomical measurements. You? You just slept, ate, and stared into the window.” “And what exactly was wrong with that? I could just retract the panels and hook you up to a generator!” “You were staring at Kerbin. For hours! And whenever you’d look back, it was as if Kraken had eaten your soul!” ---------- By the end of T+1 day, they were entering the sphere of Mun’s gravitational dominance. Their trajectory was beginning to curve behind the dark side. They fell out radio contact with Cueston, but as they came into the shadow, they stoked up the reactor pile again, and with a one-minute burn they slowed into low munar orbit. ---------- “You reached the peak of hysteria one hour before landing,” Jeb commented. “Oh, did I?” “Claiming retrograde amnesia, are we? Well, I’ve transcribed some of the things you said. Let’s see. ‘Watery world-door’. ‘Ten-foot laser pole’. ‘Duna potatoes’…” ---------- Cueston relayed the final landing solution as they swung back over the nearside. What followed was unofficially known as a ‘suicide burn’. Aimed to maximize use of the nuclear rocket, it involved almost completely cancelling the orbital velocity before plummeting almost directly downwards onto the desired LZ. “Bingo fuel, pump dry!” Jeb shouted. “Scramming the reactor!” Bob responded in a rare moment of lucidity. “Detach!” The retrorockets pulled the final stage clear of the landing craft, for a calculated crash about 10 km away, while still keeping it in the shadow cone of the directional radiation shield. The lander began the fall towards the surface. However, there was no terminal velocity on the Mun, so it just kept accelerating. The rocky, cratered, dull grey surface was approaching rapidly, which caused loud objections from Bob. “Not yet,” barked back Jeb, concerned about their reactor. “Just fire already!” “Not yet!” Jeb watched the radar altimeter. At just near the point of no return, he kicked in the throttle. The Poodle rocket motor ignited and kicked into full thrust. In a thick atmosphere, it was absolutely hapless, but on the Mun, it gave the 10-ton landing craft a thrust-to-weight ratio of over 10, the sudden g-force finally shutting up Bob as Jeb clenched up to resist the black-out. The attitude control rockets and the engine gimbal worked furiously to keep the ship on trajectory, killing the vertical speed as well as the remained of the sideways movement. With a click, the six landing legs dropped and extended. The g-force let up as Jeb hovered to get a quick estimate of the terrain. They were above a slight incline, within tolerance, so he continued the slow descent. There was a bump, and the leg contact indicators flashed green one-by-one. Finally, Jeb cut out engine thrust completely. The craft slightly tilted on the shock absorbers, and then came to rest. “Cueston, how copy, we’re landed, preparing for EVA.” He slapped the half-unconscious Bob before accidentally catapulting himself into the ceiling due to the deceptive gravity. ---------- Jeb turned back before starting the vacuum pumps, and had to sigh. “Bob, helmet!” ---------- Jeb peered carefully through the open hatch. The surface was pretty far below, the sun was blinding, but it was pretty far up. He carefully turned around, and felt for the first step of the ladder built into the side of the rocket. The climb was pretty long, the EVA suit heavy, but the low gravity made it manageable. The last few meters were a collapsible section to make room for Poodle’s long nozzle. Finally, his boots touched the ground. ---------- “You know, I was honestly expecting you would be sucked in!” Bob exclaimed. “Why?” Jeb asked, followed by a hiccup. “I thought the Mun was covered in a few meters of dust. But then Werner was pressed by Fitz, so he just, like, ordered the Mun to be solid. We had a scrap of paper with his signature assuring us we were to prepare for regular old rock.” ---------- Bob carefully followed Jeb down the ladder. He pressed his boot into the regolith, and watched the thin layer of sharp dust particles flow around the aramid fabric. “Snacks!” Jeb suddenly said, taking aim with his helmet-mounted camera. He then produced a tube from his life support pack, extended it, shoved it into the ground, and turned the latch, causing the spring-loaded horizontal bar to pivot upwards. The metallized fabric of the Kermerican flag shook slightly after being unfurled. ---------- “Oh, the conspiracy nuts gave us sooooo much flak for that!” Bob cried. ---------- Jeb turned away from the lander, and glanced downhill, surveying the sun-baked munscape. A lot of random boulders, a few hills here and there. As a geologist, Bob should have been more excited. “Basalt,” Jeb heard Bob grumble over the local radio, “And yet more basalt. Maybe a meteorite here and there. I’d give anything for a core drill…” Despite complaining, Bob spent twenty minutes grabbing seemingly random rocks before returning to the ship. Jeb paused for a few minutes, glancing towards the paler hills in the distance. Despite the tremendous effort, the victory began to feel hollow. The alien landscape before him felt only more inhospitable, more unwilling to give up secrets. They were clearly doing something significantly wrong if all they could do after so much effort was grab a bag of rocks. They both got in, repressurized, and stowed the samples. Jeb got into the flight seat, and mechanically ran through the pre-flight check-list. In five minutes he got the go-flight from Cueston, and fired the Poodle again. Mun’s craters quickly fell into the distance as the ship was climbing into a 50 km orbit. After another quick orbit, another burn sent Sarnus on an escape trajectory into a highly elliptical Kerbin orbit. After that, there was only a adjustment burn between them and home. ---------- “Did anything even happen during that day?” Jeb suddenly wondered. “Well… my snacks got stuck in the heater, so I threw a tantrum,” Bob responded. “…oh, and you were staring at Kerbin again.” ---------- They were coming in hard and fast, with an extra kilometre per second over a regular entry. They ejected the landing stage at atmosphere interface, facing the oncoming impact with a shield of epoxy glue and ceramics. The deceleration was pretty rough, with tongues of plasma licking Jeb’s window. Inside, the vibration was quite nasty, and the temperature control system failed to handle the heat that broke through. “Alright, we’re midway through!” yelled Jeb, and Bob heard the clicks of the attitude correction motors firing despite the ruckus. Jeb was trying to avert a ‘double dip’ scenario, which would subject the heat shield to another cold-hot cycle, likely with disastrous results. Finally, the pod slowed below 800 m/s, and began to fall merely at hypersonic velocity. The heat eased up, but the g-force held up for another minute. Then there was a jerk as the initial drogue chute came into action. The offset chute caused the pod to tip down on Jeb’s side. Finally, there was even a sharper jerk as the main parachute array deployed and the capsule descended towards the sea. ---------- “So, you think I’ve gone crazy from staring at Kerbin?” Jeb asked. “Crazy? No. Did it have an effect? Most definitely. We’ve already seen how badly space travel screws with spatial orientation. A psychological impact from such a view is pretty much to be expected. I’ve known you since when, the dorm explosion? You changed pretty dramatically after the first Moho flights. You were never such a fanatic; just a week prior you were just in it for the glory. “So we broke Bill, but we may have awoken something much greater.”

Hey, @Ven. After having a tankbutt disappear on me as usual, I've decided to recommend that you take a look at what @Nertea did with his Cryogenic Engines. He uses a removable frame apparently working through the B9 executable. I don't think it would be affected like the faux-fairings are.

Interlude: Press Pass Bob was driving. He didn’t know if Val’s red eyes were due to crying or drinking tears away, but he wasn’t going to take chances. The checkpoint at the boundary of KSC proper was normally deserted. But this time, there was a swarm of people clogging it up. “Oh, krak,” Bob mouthed. Reporters. They rushed towards their car as soon as they spotted them. “Is it true that you’ve killed a pilot!?” “Has Jeb set up a secret fortress on the Mun!?” KA-BOOM!!! “Fall back, I’ll cover you!” They saw Walt Kerman, wearing armour on top of hazmat gear and gasmask, racking the slide of a shotgun. The front-most lines of journalists rushed back, resulting in a pile-up that the two astronauts easily ran around and through the half-open gates. “Come on, you brainsuckers!” KSC’s head of Public Relations shouted before putting a few more blasts into the paparazzis. “He’s going to murder someone!” puffed Bob as they slowed down to a jog. “Come on, it’s just rock salt.” “How would you know?” “What, you’ve never climbed KSC’s fence in the dead of night?” Val asked. ---------- Agent Kirrim pulled off his gasmask as he left the engine test-fire bunker. “Specialist, execute.” The egghead at the control console – whose name Kirrim could not be bothered to remember – flipped a few switches. The Dachshund engine in the bunker wound up its turbopump, the gas generator burped, but there was no sustained ignition. “Repeat.” The gas generator spun up the turbopumps again, this time completely dry. Nothing happened. “Again!” The turbopumps were spun up again, and this time they proceeded to explosively delaminate, sending hypersonic fragments screaming in all directions. Then the fuel and oxidizer flowed out of the broken pipes, and there was ignition, major uncontrolled ignition. Special Agent Kirrim will return once he substitutes a treasonous supplier! ---------- “Jeb, you’ve got Walt shooting up the press!” Val shouted as she charged into Jeb’s office. “Good.” “OK, you ordered it?” “Of course. One more way to shake the press down for cash, not running into the shotgun-wielding bogeyman” Jeb responded, spinning about in his chair. “So,” Val said, straightening out her business suit and dramatically raising her voice, “the first meeting of the Space Council is called into order!” Gene proceeded to tap her on the shoulder, and the motley band of KSC, JKJSP, STEADLER, Rockomax, MuTech and KADB employees gathered round. “Ladies and gentlemen, Mortimer has a crucial announcement to make,” Jeb began. The stern-looking accountant stood up. “Thanks to the publicity gathered by Vector-1, we have received a considerable number of publicity contracts just for conducting spaceflight. Our monthly budget is now approximately… “OVER 9000!?” Bob interjected. “…less than one hundred billion…” Mortimer grinned slightly. “…just from TV people…” Valentina inserted. “…but well over what we need to expand our operation and pay off Fitz for any ‘defective’ parts,” Jeb ended, “We can begin the scramble to secure funding for pet projects in five, four…” ---------- “So, the Vertical Assembly Building is just a skyscraper-sized assembly hall?” asked one bubblehead, which Walt thought worked for the 4-o’clock news. “Well, if you would call it that,” the now-dressed up and seemingly harmless kerbal retorted, before stepping inside the VAB’s work area. He seriously enjoyed the next few seconds, as the journalists all dropped their jaws on the floor and almost broke their necks looking upwards. They weren’t to blame, exactly. The Hermes-A handling mock-up only stretched halfway to the roof, which was already getting some cloud condensation – gotta ask Gus to check the dehumidifiers – and it was made of spare Sarnus V parts and painted cardboard on an aluminium frame, but it was quite the sight. The worn-out Mainsail, surrounded by fins and drag brakes, stood at the bottom of the massive, slender stack, which stretched upwards until the interstage, which was missing the Tunguska, Chelyabinsk’s bigger, badder sister. Its insulation-coated tank terminated in the electronics ring and the payload fairing. ---------- “Guys, we’re out of time, could everyone shut up please!?” Jeb shouted. No-one reacted, so he fetched in his pockets for a flare launcher and pulled the ring on it, firing a tiny rocket into the ceiling. The ruckus died down. “Alright, so before I leave, an executive summary: communications relay, instrumentation sat, weather sat, Mun probe, orbital laboratory, no manned Mun mission on the agenda.” He then stormed out. ---------- The press was far more civilized this time, not charging Jebediah Kerman as he appeared before them, but limiting themselves to thunderous applause. “Now, dear visitors, please be seated.” “No, Mr Kerman, I’d prefer to stand,” a few of them chorused with pained expressions. Walt Kerman couldn’t hide a grin. ---------- Val had to admit, Jeb could handle the inanest questions with charismatic swagger. If she were in his position, there’d be murders. Finally, he sent them off, and Walt corralled the whole lot out of the room. Jeb paused on the podium, looking back at the only other major piece of furniture in the room – an actual, working Hermes-A Return Vehicle, a sleek truncated cone with the door on one side, windows on the other, docking port and parachute system on top, and the bottom lined with attitude control jets. He lingered on it, as if reminiscing about something. “So, no Mun mission!?”, the indignant Val finally broke the silence. “No real point. No science, expertise or glory to get by retracing Sarnus. We should focus on permanent orbital presence. Push gradually, rely on probes, and eventually extend our range. It’s a year’s flight to Duna, and we haven’t been up for more than five days. We need a completely different approach,” he began to mutter absent-mindedly. “And that’s a plan that requires docking ports…” “I know you’re a sceptic, Val. So fine, I’ll do it. I’ll have Linus slap together a target sat, priority launch. We’ll be preparing for a fairly intense sequence of launches with the comm array anyway. I’ll bet money on it if you want.”

Yeah, but I think Val broke someone. This is gonna get interesting later.

Chapter 4: Volunteered The old airplane hangar has been ultimately redubbed the Horizontal Integration Facility. With a handful of refits, it would be able to handle even the theorized seven-stack 1.25m satellite carrier rocket. But that day, the design was far less gargantuan. The stages had already been partially outfitted, resting in cradles arranged in resemblance of the general layout. Bill was running another presentation. The primary booster system was a set of three Sickles and a Hammer. One of the Sickles was outfitted with an onboard ignition system, a more robust frame, and small stabilizer fins; the RT-10 was stuck under it, and the RT-20s, topped by nosecones, were attached to the sides. The ship itself was equally familiar. The Kerlington Mk 1 pod was only slightly updated, and the Spark retrorocket with a toroidal fuel tank was a trusted piece of kit. But the reaction control system and parachute compartment on the top of the pod was gone. Val stared at the device on top of the parachute assembly for half a minute before remembering where she saw it. “You’re actually going to attempt a docking?” she finally asked Jeb. “Well, Fitz footed the bill for a direct ascent vehicle with Sarnus V, so we delivered. But this method is not sustainable for bigger expeditions, so we need to practice on a small scale.” The ring connecting the pod to the service compartment, which normally carried just the external telemetry antenna, now also mounted two clusters of five miniature engines, which were clearly immensely more useful at fine manoeuvring. That explained the bizarre rearrangement of the rest of the SM’s key components. The heliostat-equipped folding solar panels, the whip antenna and the supplemental avionics package were offset by 45° from their expected positions, and now shared the space with four small tanks labelled as containing more manoeuvring jet monopropellant. “And the mast?” she asked, pointing to the flimsy girder with a crown of solid rockets on one end and an adapter fitting the docking port. “Ah, the Launch Escape System,” Bill interjected, “we can’t abort by cutting thrust on either of the two stages, so we’ll just rip off the pod with this thing. It is blown off automatically five seconds after Separation Event 2, once you switch to H-lOx. We just fire the motors and the guillotine at the same time, instead of sequentially.” ‘H-lOx?’ Val thought, looking back at the alarmingly long third stage, covered in what looked like thermal blankets, “Bill, are you about to introduce us to yet another experimental engine?” Bill paled. “Congratulations on yesterday’s promotion to Chief Test Pilot,” Jeb noted quietly. Bill just made his way to the back of the stage. The mounting ring was already there, surrounded by Project Moho’s trusted Sepraretrotron™ ullage-separation motor packages. The primary engine, however, was mounted separately nearby, seemingly guarded by a kerbal engineer in grey overalls of unfamiliar make. “This is Mr Kerbalov of the Automatics Design Bureau, the guys behind the Ct10 design,” Bill introduced him. Val gawked at the new design. The oversized nozzle started immediately from underneath the frame. “Deploy it,” Bill intrusted. “Da, comrade.” The nozzle fell down, revealing the usual machinery of a rocket engine. The resulting nozzle was bigger than that of the gargantuan Mainsail! Val just kept staring at the seam between the two halves of the nozzle, almost next to the combustion chamber, by her guess the area subject to greatest stress. “You want me to fly THAT!? Without the LES?” “Val, we tried!” Bill began apologetically, “We couldn’t fit the design within the capacity of THREE strap-on Sickles if we used the Terrier; we had to either drop the manoeuvring system, or drop the LES. We needed that one-third boost in efficiency, Val!” “Jeb,” Val slowly asked, “would our future projects need an engineer flying them?” “Yes,” he answered, pulling something out of his pocket and beginning to move between Bill and the nearest door. “And it’s not like we ever do unmanned test flights…” she continued. The device in Jeb’s hand popped out and extended, electric sparks running between the prongs at its business end. ---------- “You always assign pilots this way?” Kerbalov asked. “Nah, it’s a special case.” ---------- “Kraken’s guts…” Bill tried to get up, and felt the safety harness push against his shoulders. “Booster?” “Go flight.” “CAPCOM?” “Go, flight,” Val answered sweetly. “Surgeon?” “Go flight!” Bob responded. Great, he was strapped in, and through the tiny window he saw the crew gantry retract. “Commence final countdown! T minus ten, nine, eight, seven…” “Uh, guys?” The umbilical keeping the hydrogen tank filled up despite the gradual boil-off also retracted. “…five, four, three, two, one, committing!” The noise of the fans and the chirping of electronics inside the pod was instantly drowned out by the thunder of the solid rockets. Bill was promptly hammered down into his seat as the rocket blasted clear off the pad. “Tower clear.” “Flight, pitch anomaly!” Gene called out. “Stand by!” Jeb responded. “…pitch back to normal, Flight.” “Pad chief, please assess damage to the tower. Continue tracking, Booster.” The acceleration continued building up. The first separation event was to occur at 10 km. From the pod’s instrumentation he could see it coming up. The acceleration died off. There was a bump. The indicator lights on the console changed. Bill braced himself. He was then hit with a sledgehammer as the remaining RT-20 ignited, and the acceleration came back. “Flight, pod’s computer just crashed, rebooting in 5,” Linus’s voice came up on the radio. The boot-up sequence began to flash across the screens again. Then, it was flooded with error messages. And finally, the Master Alarm went off. “Flight, Booster, failure of launch computers A and B!” The stage kept firing, though. “Flight, Vector-1,” Bill finally forced words out of his throat, “Attempting to separate computer systems from each other. Reboot launch computer A on my mark...” He began to tap code into the console. “Mark!” He felt the booster tilt sharply as the engine gimbal kicked back in. He lost much of the stage’s telemetry, though. “This is Flight, ten seconds to Sep 2. FIDO, report!” “Slight overshoot, flight. Not mission-critical,” some new rookie Bill didn’t recognize responded. He felt the acceleration climb in a crescendo and then slacken off as the last Sickle finally burned out. However, it didn’t disappear, as the separation and ullage motors surrounding the bottom of the third stage ignited. 8 seconds in, there was still some humming, the acceleration did not disappear completely, and there was no explosion. That could only mean one thing. The Chelyabinsk was up to its job, spewing out a stream of steam and unburnt hydrogen. The long burn to achieve orbital velocity after the initial loft was going to uneventful. Bill briefly glanced at the surprisingly sharp stars in the window before beginning to work around the half-dead computer to deploy the ship’s radio and solar panels. The four interstage fairing panels blew off with a bump. The burn dragged on for another minute. “Flight, INCO, feeding an altered circularization program to the flight-comp.” “Vector-1, please confirm thrust cut-off,” Jeb finally called out. “Confirmed.” The seven-minute drift to the final burn began. “Vector-1, CAPCOM here, please acknowledge receipt.” Nothing. “Vector-1, darling, please respond,” Val continued, “surgeon, is he even alive in there?” “Pulse below normal, but he’s still around.” The engine reactivated on time, exhausting the remaining fuel in the tank. A few seconds later, without cue from the puzzled mission control, Bill separated the final stage. “INCO, what’s he doing?” Jeb finally asked. “Another flight computer reboot, he seems to be removing his fix… And he’s reorienting the ship manually.” “Flight to Vector-1, please respond.” “Flight to Vector 1, Bill, you alive out there?” ---------- The ship left the radio range. It came back, but there was no communication. Val had to be sent away. “Ten minutes to expected re-contact,” Linus announced. “Alright, Gene, we need to consider our options,” Jeb finally said. “Nominal supplies of life support for three days, full retrorocket, nice low orbit,” Gene counted off, “I say we let him run it as he wishes.” “Contact… FIDO, what’s with this telemetry?” “Flight, we’ve got a problem!” Jeb simply sighed. “He’s coming in, and he’s coming in fast! Pretty sharp entry, must have burnt for twice longer than planned!” ---------- Bill watched the radar altimeter count off miles. As it hit 68 km, he reached for the switches on the board, and began flipping them. There was a bump as the service module separated. A few seconds ago, the first streams of ridiculously hot plasma began to appear. The grew colder, but much thicker, as the ship rammed the atmosphere. The g-force counter began to go upwards as the world grew blacker around Bill. ------------ ISP’s SAR flight found Bill’s capsule descending on the parachute 40 km east of KSC, just at the terminator. The recovery was successful. The pilot was responsive, but stubbornly quiet.