My Space Program is in utter disarray...

[Goddess Bhavani]

My Space Program Is In Utter Disarray

A pointless short story / early career AAR

Long story short, being invited to be the lead engineer of a certain area of an IT project, running rotating shifts for 3 weeks. Also attending night classes 3 times a week only to see my exam results sabotaged by a pointless peer review for no reason. Effective work hours something like 4am - 1am due to ridiculous dramatic conflict started by bourgeois manglement and the proletariat workers soviets expecting me to lead them in a Hunger Games style revolution.

Throughout the mind-numbing infuriating mayhem I managed to stir up no end of trouble in my extra-hard, -1000 rep 1.02 Career, including launching mission after mission after mission in KSP and not following them through to completion. Thanks to Kerbal Alarm Clock, I sort of managed the chaos pretty well but forgetfulness would lead to a near-death experience for a Munar flyby crew, which I will cover shortly.

At the same time I also thought it was a good idea to send all my high orbit commsats to orbit the Mun instead to support upcoming munar missions, when in hindsight leaving the heavy commsats in place and using omni antenna signal relays is much more logical.

Is this a probe, a lander or a ScanSat? Depends on mood...

Mission Control personnel are in uproar over confusion in munar probe assignments. Landers became signal relays, ScanSat probes became makeshift landers and low orbit polar recon sats ended up landed somewhere in a crater on the equator.

Worse, the Capricorn One mission that was not supposed to go to the Mun at all, departed Kerbin orbit using its descent stage and actually made it to the Mun. With no thrusters and no actual return stage, the first kosmonaut to the Mun decided on a highly risky suicide burn maneuver on the dark side of the Mun to exploit Oberth Effect to try and save some DeltaV, failing which she would surely end up with a Munar survival tale of Lara Croft proportions.

I deliberately engineered this ship to be crap and not make it to the Mun. Instead, it landed successfully and made this epic screenshot. Oh, the huge manatee...

Capricorn One skimmed the dark, deadly Munar Midland ridges and landed nearly blind save for two guidance spotlights I may or may not have randomly placed. With 400 delta V left and low battery levels after operating ScanSat equipment, it was decided Jaca would not survive the night on the Mun. There is no way to recharge its solar panels on the dark side of the Mun, and no conveniently placed

there. Unable to jettison its external fuel tanks (due to el-cheapo engineering by yours truly), the same engine that brought the ill-fated ship to the Mun in the first place now struggled to impart as much horizontal velocity as possible just skimming the hilltops, and once the last drop of fuel was expended, Jaca used the drifting, slowly spinning ship as a springboard as she leapt blindly off firing suit thrusters in the general direction of prograde to make up for the remaining 300m/s or so dV required for a stable orbit.

Life support supplies were minimal and Jaca could only pray a fast rescue clipper could be designed, built, assembled and launched to the Mun fast enough to reach her before she froze or suffocated to death.

An X-2 micro shuttle stack demonstrates the awesome Korolev's Cross booster separation sequence.

Just as all hope was lost, Mission Control managed to raise an X-2 micro-shuttle transitioning through Munar SOI on a free-return trajectory. With only 25% of its OMS fuel remaining, this shuttle was not intended for Munar rendezvous much less interception and capture of a small object travelling fast and low over the Munar surface, and subsequently boosting out of Munar SOI to convey said object back to Kerbin.

The ship had no pilot (controlled by probe core), one hapless noob of a scientist on board (which means, no Kerbal Engineer-derived precision trajectory and fuel management), and certainly it was not in the mood to be re-directed at the last moment citing poor maintenance conditions and low quality replacement parts. I am serious and don't call me Shirley.

Nevertheless, desperate situations require desperate housewifery, and after some consultation with fellow X-2 micro-shuttles of the same class en route to Minmus, the stubborn ship agreed to make one and only one flyby of Jaca's orbit before slingshotting out of the Mun's gravity well to return home. It was better than nothing, and all the world's prayers were directed to increasing the astronomical chances of this rescue succeeding via divine intervention.

Rescue ship on a "one pass, then haul ass" rescue attempt trajectory.

With some blind luck (or uncanny display of Apollo 13 style improvised navigation), the final major burst of EVA thruster usage aligned to within 4 degrees the orbital planes between improvised rescue mission and Jaca herself. All she needed to do was use the last 30% of EVA propellant to zero-ise the 250 or so m/s of velocity difference between rescue ship and kosmonaut.

Jaca was even perfectly stationed for a drive-by pickup without synching orbits. This required 3-dimensional thruster maneuvering! She had one and only one chance to make a decisive leap of faith!

This impossible no-nav, out of plane, suit thruster only Munar rendezvous was somehow accomplished without the button mashing, savegame reloading mayhem associated with Tomb Raider adventures, and she posed triumphantly before the cockpit of the shuttle and absolutely dominated the frontal view out of the micro-shuttle.... and was stuck there! She had run out of EVA propellant posing and donning eyeliner!

Hello there, beautiful.

Long story short again, the scientist had to get out and push her in such a way she could drift close to the grab handles of the empty Mk. 1 inline cockpit, and the rebellious little ship didn't even use a drop of fuel to help with the rendezvous nor did it have RCS thrusters installed due to our space program's current cost saving strategy (Astronaut Complex HVAC has been restricted to office hours only, do you expect them to give free us RCS thrusters on non-docking missions?).

Now, with our heroine safely aboard the shuttle, the space program finally started to get its act together, sorting through mountains of administrative clutter to restore kosmonaut salaries, air conditioning and some semblance of order to the many 1.25m class missions flying around Kerbin SOI on a dozen odd missions. With RnD department morale restored, we can also commence drafting blueprints of a new class of non-hoax Munar landing missions and low density edible supersonic decelerators for use with the new 2.5m class ships to follow.

Low density edible supersonic decelerators... you didn't think I'd actually have one ready, did you?

~ The End ~

Please note as per usual T&Cs of the Real Lifeâ„¢ MMO, Divine Creations, LLC will not refund any time wasted reading this useless article.

Edited June 20, 2015 by pandoras kitten

[sam.johnson841]

Pushing a kerbal around on EVA using another kerbal. Interesting technique.

- Sam

[Rocket Farmer]

Great except for the part about not synchronizing your orbits. A successful rendezvous can not occur without sychronzing first (with one exception I have witnessed as below).

Last week a grasshopper successfully rendevoued with my vehicle while I was doing 130km/h and he was doing about 10km/h. While he did successfully dock on my windshield the results were not overly favourable for him. He would have much preferred synchronizing his velocity to mine first however that would have required access to Kerbal rocketry and while they are both green species the similarities end there.

[Master Tao]

Moved to Mission Reports.

[PB666]

He missed-timed is cancel relative velocity burn. Thats because you did not slow down, you should have slowed to say 20 m/s.

There is a miss-sense here. The grasshopper was not actually trying to dock with you, in his mind he was just hopping up when out of the corner of his compound eye he notices a threat, while attempting to turn and avoid the threat hit him.

Bats actually perform a better manuever. The manage to track the target with their vocal cords and ears and move the head relative to the target while altering forward velocity.

If you are close to an ascending or descending node for a transfer, you can adjust grade, normal and radial vectors to intercept without planar synchronization the targets SOI. This can be the most efficient way to transfer since the hypotenuse of a right triangle is always shorter than the cumulative length of two other sides (IOW if you have to apply a velocity vector in the normal plane and then velocity in the elliptical plane separately it is often more expensive than wasting a little velocity spent along the radial, because it only add slightly to the length of the 3D hypotenuse) dL² = dX² + dY² + dZ². For docking manuevers your residual dV should be within the capability of the craft to cancel at closest approach. If you are making a normal antinormal approach (not recommended) then it will not be unless the orbital velocity is very low.

[Goddess Bhavani]

Great except for the part about not synchronizing your orbits. A successful rendezvous can not occur without sychronzing first (with one exception I have witnessed as below).

Last week a grasshopper successfully rendevoued with my vehicle while I was doing 130km/h and he was doing about 10km/h. While he did successfully dock on my windshield the results were not overly favourable for him. He would have much preferred synchronizing his velocity to mine first however that would have required access to Kerbal rocketry and while they are both green species the similarities end there.

Indeed normally this would have been catastrophic but I just synched up at the last second by eye because the rescue ship had no fuel for a plane change and I thought the suit thrusters are going to have more deltaV than the micro-shuttle inbound. Using the shuttle's last bits of fuel for a plane change would have stranded them both around the Mun, and I thought to let the Kerbals have a go at re-enacting the scenes in Gravity where suit thrusters and Mk. 1 Eyeball were used to zeroise velocity at the last minute and hand-capture the target

It wasn't as difficult as I expected - just remembered that, if a surface to air missile were heading for your cockpit it would seem stationary on the canopy - I just flew Jaca's suit until the microshuttle was stationary relative to it and burn 'backwards' until she ended up on its windscreen.