Starbound
Kerbal space program novel and AAR
Prologue
Kerbin is dying,slowly but surely she is fading away.
We kerbals as a species only have ourselves to blame, the great war saw to that, how stupid were we to use atomic devices as weapons, true enough we were fully aware of the damage it would cause to city's and kerbals, but we completely overlooked the lasting damage it would cause to the planet.
Well now we're paying for it.
The war ended as soon as we realised our mistake but it was too late, the damage had already been dealt, at first it was the wildlife that succumbed to the toxic clouds.
shortly after the vegetation began to disappear until all we was left with was a few hardy plants which had become poisonous to eat.
Our thriving civilization became endangered quickly and millions died from starvation, we were soon about to be extinct.
Then as luck would have it, fate decided to throw us a bone, the barren wasteland started to became greener, although not with trees,plants or grass.
It was green algae.
The algae had adapted and flourished, it was enough to sustain our greatly reduced population and in our underground hives we managed to carve out a new way of life, at least the future didn't look quite as bleak,
There were some side effects to our new way of life, are skin turned from grey to green and our growth was stunted and we became shorter as a species but these were changes we could live with.
For 50 years we lived in our hives and repopulated our civilization, we were no longer just groups of survivors any more, New nations appeared and we became a little like we used to be before the war.
Now it seems we have a new problem, we're not sure if it was the radiation or the toxic clouds but something has changed how much oxygen the algae is producing.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, we've survived radiation poisoning and starvation, but it looks like suffocation might be our demise.
Restrictions have been put in place to stop population growth but a more permanent and effective solution must be found.
It was a scientist named Wernher Von Kerman who came up with a rather radical and risky solution.
He announced that "instead of trying to fix a whole broken planet, it might be easier and less costly just to find another one".
The idea was met with much criticism, but it was the only realistic idea we'd found.
Kerbals had never left the planet or been in space, but we did have well proven rocket technology which had been used to deliver the nuclear weapons during the war,
Wernher himself had designed much of the technology during the war as a young scientist.
We spent 6 years building a new space center on the surface, in a moderately safe area of the equator for pursuit of our new goal and finally we were ready to explore the heavens.
