[kappa-ray] Tragedy on the Mun

[soundnfury]

(This occurred while using my kappa-ray mod. Other mods in use include Kerbal Engineer Redux and Persistent Rotation.)

Tragedy on the Mun

It was about 50 days into the second year that the story which I shall now relate took place. Twice before, single Kerbals had bravely travelled to the surface of the Mun and returned. The doctors, eager to learn of the health effects of travel beyond the Van Allen belts, had examined Jebediah and Valentina after their respective returns. The results of these examinations had been submitted in reports to the Space Program leadership, reports which stated that such a mission carried about a 1 in 20 risk of radiation-related medical conditions. For this reason, the new Mk1-2 Command Pod was built with much better shielding than the old single-seat Mk1. Once rockets powerful enough to launch it were ready, the exploration of the Mun could continue where it had left off.

The great day had at last come. Kerpollo-3 stood on the launchpad, 180 tons of the finest Kerbal engineering. The designers would have preferred to add still more shielding below the pod, but the weight could not be spared. The pilot would be Berbelle Kerman, who not long before had been rescued from low Kerbin orbit after her previous employers failed to use sufficient struts. Alongside her were Bill and Bob Kerman. Bill, the engineer, had been kicking his heels for some months after a spell on-orbit supervising the construction of the Kerbal Space Station; Bob had recently returned from that same station where he had been pursuing fruitful scientific research in the microgravity lab environment.

The launch itself went according to plan, and some ten or twelve minutes later the ship was heading out through the Van Allen belts, on course for the Mun. To minimise radiation exposure, the bulk of the vessel  including the 700-gallon fuel tank  was kept between the command pod and the sun, the idea being that kappa rays would be absorbed by the rocket fuel, and prevented from striking the crew. However, it would be necessary to deviate from this alignment when making maneuver burns, as well as to perform the munar landing and ascent. Moreover, there are other sources of kappa rays besides the sun; the galactic background of cosmic rays is of low intensity, but the individual particles often have very high energies. The three Kerbals on board were, nonetheless, confident that their capsule, with its brand-new shielding, would protect them well enough; after all, had not Jeb and Val survived in their primitive Mk1 pods?

A little over a day after launch, Kerpollo-3 arrived at the Mun. Berbelle flew an absolutely nominal orbital insertion, and tilted up the orbit to pass over the mission target: the Southwest Crater. Soon enough they were crossing the crater rim and slowing down for the landing. Though Berbelle had seemed a little tired, the other two were not overly worried; she was an experienced pilot and the approach was on course. Until, that is, Berbelle lost consciousness and slumped forward onto the controls. Terrified, Bill and Bob leapt into action, pulling her off the control stick which had already sent the ship way off track. While Bob tried to rouse Berbelle, Bill grabbed the controls and steadied the ship. They were already late in the descent  too late to abort the landing  so Bill would have to land the ship himself. A non-pilot, with no SAS to help, while distracted by anxiety about his friend Berbelle.

"Bad news," Bob's voice pierced his concentration, "I think she's bought it. Kraken knows how, she seemed fine two minutes ago."

"Then put her down and give me a hand with this throttle," Bill replied. "I can't land this thing myself, there's more levers than I can handle."

As they struggled to set the ship down gently, they realised how much they had relied on their pilot. "I'll never be rude about stick-jockeys again," said Bill, "how they cope with this I'll never know."

At last the capsule touched down on the surface. Though some distance from the intended location, the landing was still inside the Southwest Crater. With the immediate panic over, the crew could at last radio back to a nervous Mission Control, who had been asking for some time 'what was going on' and 'why you've all stopped talking to us'.

"Yeah, we're down," Bill told them. "Something's happened to Berbelle, though; she just passed out halfway through the landing."

"I think she's dead," Bob added, "I can't find a pulse anywhere."

"Roger, we copy. Any idea why?" came the crackly reply from the radio.

"Not a clue."

"So what do we do now?" asked Bob. "Head for home?"

"I guess we try to finish the mission. Otherwise 'belle will have died for nothing," said Bill.

So Bob gathered up his sensors, his shovel and his sample bags, and climbed out of the ship and took his first step on the Munar surface. Next to the flag that he had firmly planted in the regolith, Bob built a little dolmen from brecciated Mun rocks, as a memorial of Berbelle's sacrifice. Not long later, his scientific observations were completed and Bob clambered back aboard the lander.

"All done," he said, "let's set off for home."

If anything, the take-off was a more harrowing task even than the landing for the two untrained pilots. Keenly aware of the falling fuel gauge, they wrestled with the controls and managed to bring Kerpollo-3 back into Munar orbit - and then onto an escape trajectory. But the latitude of their landing-site meant they were on an inclined orbit, and would end up on an even more steeply inclined orbit of Kerbin, and struggle to hit re-entry. Patiently, Mission Control talked them through the final maneuver to leave the Mun in the right direction. By now, it was well over 10 hours since the three kerbonauts had blasted off from the Space Center; but at least two of them would make it safely home. They had run it fairly close  there was less than seven seconds' fuel left in the tanks (which would have given them just 160m/s more delta-V)  but they were on course for Entry Interface with a 37km Kerbin periapsis.

Yet danger still threatened these hardy explorers, for the solar radiation continued to stream by. Without the help of SAS, keeping the pod pointed away from the sun proved a daunting task. A steady axial rotation of about 4rpm helped to stabilise the craft, but the axis still drifted over time and required regular corrections. Shortly after the two-day mark, Kerpollo-3 passed into Kerbin's shadow, shutting down the solar panels. To conserve the batteries, Bill retracted the antennas  there was, after all, little to tell Mission Control that they didn't already know  and turned out the lights. The two kerbonauts settled into a grim silence in the eerie cockpit, dark but for the blue glow of the navball and the streaks of stars seen through the window; what little light there was seemed to limn the body of their fallen companion. And yet in that cockpit there seemed to be another source of light, inexplicably tinged with green.

"Hey!" interjected Bob, "it's those samples. Look, they're glowing. They must be radioactive!" He grabbed a piece of photo film, as a makeshift dosimeter (there was no Keiger-Müller tube on board) and wrapped it around one of the samples; sure enough, the rocks he'd collected from the Southwest Crater were emitting low but detectable amounts of radiation. Was it deadly kappa particles, or something benign like alphas? There was no way to tell; better to err on the side of caution. Quickly Bob took the samples out through the hatch and stuck them to the outside of the ship; the pod's shielding would protect them, and the samples could be brought back in just before re-entry. "Better check our personal dosimeters," said Bob as he climbed back into the pod. They were both reading 0.129, standing for a 1-in-8 chance of cancer. This was far higher than Jeb and Val had experienced, and it was sobering for the kerbonauts to think that they might by now easily have tumours growing within them.

A little over an hour later, the sun rose over the limb of Kerbin. Though the sunlight and solar power were welcome, the resumption of solar kappa rays was not; Kerpollo-3 was still more than 6600km from Kerbin and re-entry was almost two hours away. Bill steered the ship back to point away from the sun, and restarted the slow gyroscopic roll. From his window, Bob could see the Mun go past once per roll  the Mun whose exploration had claimed Berbelle's life.

Fifteen hours into the mission, and at 3200km the ship was just nudging into the outer reaches of the Van Allen belts. Soon the crew would be safely inside the protective embrace of Kerbin's magnetosphere, shielded once more from the sun's harsh kappa rays. Soon the crew  or at least, those members of it who were still alive  would be able to kiss the ground of their home planet, would be able to sleep in their own beds, would be able to bury their unfortunate pilot in a solemn grave. Soon the nightmare that was the Kerpollo-3 mission would be over.

"This is Kerpollo-3 calling Mission Control, do you read?" Bill had turned the radio back on and was calling via the Chromium-5 satellite.

"Loud and clear," came the answer, "How are you coping up there?"

"As well as can be expected," Bill replied, "we're about half an hour from Entry Interface. Can you get us on radar, check our trajectory? Neither of us really know how to shoot a re-entry and I can't read the handwriting on Berbelle's notes."

"Roger, we'll give Tracking a kick," said the voice of Mission Control.

About five minutes later, the numbers came through from Tracking Central. "Yeah, we've got a fairly tight ellipse on your flyby, it looks like a bit above a 38km perikerb."

"Is that good, bad, what? We don't know what height Entry Interface should be," Bob spoke up testily.

"We reckon it's a bit high, you want more like 36."

"Roger. You think you can work out a burn for us?"

"Sure, give us a minute to crunch the numbers."

"OK, it's going to be a really small one," Mission Control came through on the radio, "just 3.6m/s retrograde. You wanna make it real precise now."

"Wilco," Bill acknowledged the instructions. On the dregs of its fuel, Kerpollo-3 made the correction burn; the periapsis was now within tens of metres of the 36km Entry Interface.

A short while later, the ship was down to 300km and safely inside the bulk of the Van Allen belts. Bill's dosimeter read 0.147; Bob's, 0.149. Had they taken too much? They would have to wait for the doctors on the ground to check them over; until then they could only guess.

They passed by the Kerbin Space Station, only 18km away; they could see the light reflecting off its solar panels. Then it was time to drop the service module and prepare for the re-entry. The kerbonauts were grateful for the pod's stability; otherwise, keeping the heat shield pointed the right way as they slammed into the atmosphere at Mach 9 might have been rather difficult.

Re-entry always feels endless; it certainly did for Bob and Bill in 'the hearse'. But at last it was over, and they were drifting down under the 'chutes. Two days, four hours and forty-five minutes after launch, they splashed down at 114° East and called up the recovery team. They were back.

A crack medical team gave the two surviving kerbonauts a thorough examination; to everyone's relief, neither of them showed any signs of cancer despite their elevated dose. They also performed an autopsy on Berbelle's body, and found severe ionisation damage to the Kerbal equivalent of the liver.

Bob's observations and samples weighed in at around 200 science points, and a priority for the labs examining the rock samples was to investigate their radioactivity. But it seemed they were only emitting alpha particles; Berbelle's killer was not a crater full of radioactive rock. Did the sun strain itself to produce an extra-high-energy particle? Or was Berbelle the victim of an unlucky hit from a cosmic ray? The statisticians say it was probably the latter, but we'll never know for sure.

In the years that followed, this tragedy hung over the Space Program, leaving them reluctant to send any Kerbal further than low orbit. The exploration of the Kerbol System would be carried out by robots, driven by ever-smarter computers (not that those are immune to kappa rays either...), and the dream of landing kerbals on other planets would remain unfulfilled for decades. Even after Kerbalkind at last travelled to its destiny in the stars, Berbelle was never forgotten as the first to give her life pioneering that destiny.

Her gravestone reads: "Berbelle Kerman, d. y2d053, just above the Mun. Determined to explore space, even if it killed her."

[Nahim]

Wow guy, that was pretty realistc for me...

Sad, but realistic.