The Ore Travelling Circus Mk 1: Episode 2: The Indoctrination Cruiser

[Geschosskopf]

EPISODE 1: EARLY DAYS

INTRO:

So, 1.0's release lured me back out of the void. Hmm, female Kerbals. There goes my hypothesis that Kerbals are fungi. Or OTOH, maybe they're still fungi, just different species? Who knows. Either way, they're not getting special treatment.

OTOH, there's now stock refueling. So, that's what I'll be doing this go-round, largely making it up as I go along. However, because the ore-related parts are way down the tech tree, I had to do a lot of stuff before I could even get there. Plus there's Kerbals to level up and all. So as with every career mode game, there's all the early grinding before getting to the fun stuff. So I'll try to keep this brief and just hit some of the highlights. After all, the new tech tree, combined with the removal of nearly all science rewards from contracts, has turned even Easy Mode into a serious grind.

The story picks up as the end of the tech tree is becoming visible. The minimum kit required for ore exploitation has finally been unlocked and the window for Duna is only a few weeks away. Time to brainwash a batch of pressganged slaves---er, I mean train a class of eager new recruits, in the basics of their jobs.

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Phase I Indoctrination

A few supernovas ago, the radiation altered Kerbal genetics, giving them all learning disabilities. No longer could they be trained merely by a Clockwork Orange-style video barrage and drug regimen while en route to their destinations. Now they actually had to have some hands-on training as well, although the old methods remain in use to drum the lessons home. The upshot was that before sending Kerbals off to pump gas on Vall for all eternity, they had to go on training missions as well. So the boffins designed a mission and a special ship for this.

The 1st feature of note is the use of a Hitchhiker instead of a capsule, to hold more Kerbals for less mass. Given that none of the occupants know anything about actually flying rockets, the lack of a command pod is no problem. That's why we have probe cores. The other main feature is the very large transfer stage, needed to fit the requirements of the mission. And all this needed the newly unlocked 3.75m rockets to get off the ground.

The 1st job of the transfer stage was to go from LKO to Munar orbit.

Without bothering to land there, the Indoctrination Lander then left Mun for Minmus. This required a rather hefty burn to be done in a timely manner, which was the main reason for the big transfer stage.

Upon landing on Minmus, the usual electrodes "gently" prodded the Kerbals out the hatch, and the hatch wouldn't let them back in until each had accomplished the tricky task of planting a flag.

Then the lander came back home, shed its engines, and landed safely. Way out in the ocean so the Kerbals couldn't escape before the armed guards arrived to round them up. The boffins had previsously noted that reports of radiial decouplers working properly now without Sepratrons weren't entirely accurate, at least of there were any struts involved.

Other Early Highlights

One of the few contracts in all this that had a worthwhile science award was to build a base on Mun. Space for 9 Kerbals and a Mobile Lab. I have no idea what good it is, but the customer was satisfied.

During the grinding up the tech tree, the boffins naturally had been ignoring the largely useless airplane branches as normal, until they finally unlocked the Ore scanning parts, at which point it became necessary to have a fairing. The 1st use of this was to make an ore scanning probe and park it in orbit for an eventual trip to Duna. The fairing is still there for aerobraking at Duna and all the solar panels are necessary for transmitting data.

There's also a small probe lander with the surface ore scanner and enough fuel to make several hops around on Ike.

Other elements of the 1st Duna Expedition will be added as time and tech tree go on.

Speaking of the tech tree, yet more grinding of Mun and Minmus biomes is ongoing, taking the opportunity to train yet more pressganged Kerbals. The new standard science lander shares many features of the Indoctrination Lander but, not needing such a large transfer stage, isn't quite as big.

With the time remaining until the Duna window beginning to run short, the boffins decided to break one of their usual rules and send 2 such landers to Mun at once to increase the rate of Science! acquisition per game day. This made for an eventful arrival of 2 ships close together, but it was good refresher practice for handling flotillas.

It also nearly made for a nasty accident. Despite the different trajectories, the 2 landers nearly ended up in the same place at the same time.

But disaster didn't happen and both landers landed and returned safely.

The boffins decided that several of the last few nodes on the tech tree weren't as important as going back and getting some of the things previously bypassed in the airplane branches. Such as 2.5m fairings. This led to the acquisition of numerous essentially useless airplane parts and the boffins couldn't resist making something just for laughs. Of course, they justified this by saying it was to experiment with the changes in the atmosphere caused by the most recent supernova.

And that's where things sit at present. KSC has long-since been fully upgraded and there's like 6 million Kentavos in the bank, so money's not an issue. Just a couple more trips to Mun and/or Minmus should finish out the tech tree. And after that, it'll be time for the 1st Duna Expedition.

Edited May 2, 2015 by Geschosskopf

[HafCoJoe]

Some nice looking craft! Best of wishes in this next series . No more kethane traveling circus...

[Geschosskopf]

Some nice looking craft! Best of wishes in this next series . No more kethane traveling circus...

Well, thankee . The new service bays do clean up ships. No more tumorous lumps of batteries, RCS tanks, and such all over the outside.

My last few adventures were the Karbonite Travelling Circus. Kethane was nice when it was the only thing there was, but it has several very annoying features and limitations so I kicked it to the curb when Karbonite came along. Now we have a stock system so we'll see how that works. Roverdude, author of Karbonite, got hired to do the stock system, so I'm expecting it should work pretty well, just in a rather different way. I'm still trying to figure out how best to do the 3-step scanning process and am concerned about the silly situation we have where Squad introduced part heating without giving us any way to counter it. I'm totally sure there will be a number of disasters along the way .

HOWEVER, now that we're in 1.0, I doubt we'll see any more supernovae---er, I mean game-breaking updates, at least not at the usual frequency. So with the hope of game longevity, I'm rather less concerned about disasters than I was previously.

[Geschosskopf]

EPSIDOE 2: THE INDOCTRINATION CRUISER

INTRO:

When we left the OTC, it was grinding along the tech tree and accumulating a stock of Kerbals who had been indoctrinated about as much as possible just going to Mun and Minmus. Even contract financial rewards had become unremunerative so all the Science! grinding was putting a dent in the bank account. Fortunately, at this point the Great DMagic updated his Orbital Science mod, which uncorked not only a bunch of parts to get more science per mission, but also lots of lucrative contracts to use those parts. Yay! So the boffins quickly built an improved Minmus lander, crammed it full of DMagic parts, and sent it off.

This mission managed to find the lost blueprints for the Mk3 fuselage, which the boffins had been looking for all over. Now they could finally finish the training of all their test subjects---er, I mean kerbalnauts. The boffins had also recently acquired the plans for the Space-Y heavy lifters. Putting these together, they assembled the awesome Indoctrination Cruiser. It can be yours for only $332,822.4 .

The sole purpose of this rocket is to take up to 20 Kerbals just out of Kerbin's SOI and return them more or less safely. For some obscure reason, such a trip is required to reach the 3rd and final level of indoctrination. The vehicle consists of the Mk3 cockpit and passenger bay, an orbital maneuvering stage, a transfer stage, and then the big 5m Space-Y lifter. The upper stages have rather more dV than they really need, but this is as small as the fuel tanks come. Also, there's a time crunch. A round trip takes 9 days and some of these Kerbals have to catch rides to Duna in 19 days. So rather than a leisurely return using multiple aerobraking passes, this beast has the macho to bring its post-aerocapture Ap down with fuel to spare. Besides, the entire mission relies on exploiting KSP's 2-body physics, which sometimes can be glitchy and invoke the Kraken, so the fuel is also there to make sure the ship can get home at all if things go haywire.

So all available Kerbals, 16 in all, were prodded aboard and locked inside. Most had already set foot on both Mun and Minmus during the grinding, but there were 4 newly shanghaied Kerbals going on their 1st mission. The Indoctrination department whined about the 4 empty seats but the Kentavokeepers pointed out that the filling them up would cost more than the ship itself, which was too much.

And so the Indoctrination Cruiser blasted into the sky. The 5m stage lacked just 40m/s of being SSTO. (NOTE: that was in 1.0. I see we now have 1.0.2 and the air has changed but I haven't flown in that version yet).

Then off went the rest of the rocket on the transfer stage.

The transfer trajectory was careflully set up so that the Ap was just BARELY out of Kerbin's SOI, slightly wide of Kerbin's orbit, and the final path nearly parallel with Kerbin's orbit but hooking back inwards just a hair at the far end. All the better to exploit 2-body physics--er, I mean, this is applied Kerbal astrophysics as learned between the moons of Jool.

So then it was 4 days out to Ap and KSC was deserted except for the boffins. Everybody knew that they had to pay the pressgang $100K to catch a new Kerbal, but everybody was bored with nobody to perform fiendish experiments on, so pretty soon the pressgang dragged in Sigke. She was sent to Mun in the Minmus lander just to see if it would work. To calm her fears, she was given an extra dose of Kerbal Joy Juice in her chemical indoctrination regimen. This appeared to have the desired effect as Sigke had a huge, rictus grin and a blank stare throughout the mission.

Getting down worked but that and taking off again used up pretty much all the fuel, so Sigke had an eventul return involving dead-stick aerobraking for about 3/4 of an orbit straight in from Mun. The boffins were duly impressed with the ship's ability to withstand this.

To pass the time before the main herd returned, and try to recover some of the costs of the Indoctrination Cruiser and Sigke, the boffins did a few quick probe launches on high-paying DMagic contracts. And so 4 days went by and the Indoctrination Cruiser duly escaped Kerbin's SOI.

And here's where 2-body physics comes into play. The Indoctrination Cruiser was now in Kerbol orbit, at a slightly larger radius than Kerbin. Thus, it was now going slower than Kerbin, despite having just burned a heap of fuel to be going significantly faster than Kerbin. So Kerbin was catching up from behind, and the slight inward hook of the Iindoctrination Cruiser's path helped put it more in the way. Things were a bit dicey, with the map view rapidly flickering between showing the Indoctrination Cruiser in Kerbol orbit, in Kerbin orbit, or some Kraken-spawned place all by itself. However, a small burn half-way between retrograde and radial inwards solved all that and got a solid fix from Kerbol's SOI back into Kerbin's. Time in Kerbol's SOI = about 1 day. During which time, nobody dared open the hatch or even send a crew report due to the presence nearby of the Kraken.

And so the Indoctrination Cruiser reentered the Kerbin system with all hands properly baptised by the Kraken and now ready to explore other planets. But first they had to land safely.

It was another 4 days until the Indoctrination Cruiser came back to Kerbin, but at KSC, everybody was too interested in watching its progress, expecting at any moment for the Kraken to drag it back, to bother doing anything else. When the Indoctrination Cruiser was about 1/2way between Mun and Kerbin, it did a slight correction to set its Pe at 34km.

And then there was nothing to do but hang on and enjoy the ride.

Post aerocapture, the Indoctrination Cruiser's Ap was out beyond Mun. That would take too much time. So it burned the last drops in the transfer stage, then used its OMS for the purpose it had been dragged all this way for, dragging the Ap down close to Kerbin.

A few small burns and 2 orbits later, the Indoctrination Cruiser was ready for final descent. Beginning from 85km over the western edge of the desert, it aimed for a spot in the ocean well west of KSC. The objective was to use the shallow path to scrub as much speed as possible because the single RealChute on the nose wasn''t QUITE capable of handling a steeper, faster landing.

Still, it was a near-run thing, with the Indoctrination Cruiser getting all the way down to 2km altitude before it was slow enough to risk opening the chute. But it opened in time and set the 16 Kerbals down relatively gently at 5m/s.

And here's what the OTC got for all its money and effort:

Not shown is that 12 Kerbals have now reached the important 3rd Level of Indoctrination and have learned pretty much all they can learn that makes a real difference. And 9 days' exposure to chemical and video indoctrination did them no end of good . Soon some of them will be sent to Duna and, a while later, some others to Eve, and then beyond! Some of them might even come back. Who knows? All will be as the Inscrutible Kraken has ordained.

Tune in next time for what will probably be the launch of the 1st Duna Expedition.

Edited May 2, 2015 by Geschosskopf
typos