Looking for Our Lost Home

[Orion1500]

Chapter One: A History Lesson

My name is Archibald Kerman, and I have been selected to lead an expedition to our old home. The mission is expected to take approximately 20 years. Why are we going back? Well, here's a short history lesson:

Hundreds of years have passed since the Kerbal race has left their old home of Kerbin for the better worlds of Duna and Laythe. The massive colonial effort that took place so long ago was lead by The Great Trio, Jebediah, Bill, and Bob. The reason for the evacuation of Kerbin has since been lost to history, but most speculate a Class F asteroid. The Great Trio have long since passed, but are heralded as heroes in colonies around Duna and Laythe. But now we are having trouble at our now current homes. Laythe is expected to fall into Jool within the next 50 years. The terraforming of Duna so long ago has lead to complications nowadays. We need to go home. For the good of Kerbalkind.

The motto of the mission: Ex nova saecula redimus ad vetera. From new worlds, we return to the old.

The construction of our ship, the Remebrant, began about 10 years ago. Because of the limited resources on Duna, we had to be very conservative of our ores and fuel during its production. All work effort went into the craft, which was assembled in orbit. A module would be built, then sent up to rendezvous to the Remebrant to be attached. Here's a list of the module construction that's taken place over the years.

• Launch of the Remebrant Crew and Service Module (RCSM) All following modules were docked to this.
  
• Launch of the Science and Planet Scanning Module (SPSM).
  
• Launch of the Life Support Module (LSM).
  
• Launch of the first Solar Truss (ST-I).
  
• Launch of the second Solar Truss (ST-II).
  
• Launch of the first engineering expedition for maintenance (EngEXP-I)
  
• Launch of the cargo bay. Will be used as storage for all exploratory landers. There are four in total.
  
• Launch of the first two landers: “Horizons†and “Saviorâ€Â.
  
• Launch of the second two landers: “Jebediah†and “Perseveranceâ€Â.
  
• Launch of the Engine and Fuel Block (EFB)
  
• Launch of the second engineering expedition (EngEXP-II)
  
• Launch of the crew ascent ship
  

Now all the crew is on board and is ready to take on this amazing journey. Godspeed to us all.

[Bev7787]

This looks good! Subbed. Also, rep for you

[astrokerb]

This has a lot of potential. You deserve some rep

[Orion1500]

Here is the second part of this story for you guys. We jump ahead about 240 days into the flight to a mid-flight course correction, but things don't seem to go as they should.

Chapter Two: Alarms

Data Entry #236

We are 236 days into our flight. The mid flight course correction is set to happen in five days. The whole crew has been getting restless, since we haven't fired the engines in about 230 days and Gerry, our engineer, is a little worried. We've had a few alarms early in the flight about radiation leak from engine #3. So far, there has been no evidence of such a leak. Gerry has told me that I shouldn't throttle the engines to 100% during the burn in case the alarms are true. Anyways, that's my update for today. Commander Archibald out.

Data Entry #239

Well, the burn didn't go exactly to plan. The leak did turn out to be true. After burning for 30 seconds at 85% thrust, Gerry came on the intercom and told me to throttle back immediately, as engine #3 was about to overheat. I throttled down to 65%, but the heat didn't subdue. We had a good two minutes of panic until the heating went down at 33.5% thrust. The burn took three times longer than scheduled. Gerry is going to go on a risky observation EVA to look at engine #3 tomorrow. If we need to, we can shut it down indefinitely, but we would have to shut down engine #1 as well. That means we’ll only have one half of the thrust we should have for this mission. I really hope this problem can be fixed.

Data Entry #241

We could be in some deep crap right now. Engine #3 is pretty much broken, except we can fix it, temporarily. This fix requires parts from one of the radiators along the main hull of the Remebrant. The construction of this vessel only put on enough radiators as it would need. Getting rid of one might cause us to overheat even faster, but at the cost of being more efficient with our thrust. Max, our mission specialist, says we should use the radiator and risk overheating, while Gerry said the repair might not even work, so we should just settle for less thrust. I’m supposed to make an official decision by day 245. This is going to be hard. Commander Archibald out.