Flight to Independence

[DDE]

2 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

Embarrasing or not, at least the crew came home safely.

Yeah, but he'd done a bang-up job of detuning the stage.

Also, please ignore me accidentally messing up the Pilot and Science flight qualification ribbons.

Edit: oh, finally, the first page is over!

Edited June 14, 2016 by DDE

[DDE]

Chapter 11: All Your Base

Yaroslav Kerbalov stepped off the SAR plane, water dripping from his suit. The rest of the crew crawled out, looking as enthusiastic as a wet newspaper; Slava’s eyes kept gleaming under the steamed-up helmet.

“How long till next try?” he puffed in the direction of Jeb and his staff.

“A week, tops,” Bill responded, “I’ve got plenty of data to fix the structural faults. We’re going to have to switch to your Kerbotserkovsky drag fins instead normal tail fins to maintain total mass, but this shouldn’t become a problem.”

“There’s no way we’re going back there!” Lisgrid butted in.

“Say that again, Pilot,” Jeb uttered, pinning her down with a withering glare.

----------

This time the launch occurred without a hunch. Hermes headed off towards a third Tunguska burn in the shadow of the planet.

Another half-hour and half-orbit later, the final approach began. The Terrier engine sizzled as the relative velocity clocked down.

According to their electronics, they were now in station less than one kilometre away from the station. Lisgrid returned the vehicle to manual control, and carefully spun it around. On the “upper deck”, Yaroslav and Roszie peered into the narrow forward windows.

The station was barely visible, a tiny sliver of white in the distance. Lisgrid fired the Terrier briefly, and then spun the ship around. A minute later, she performed the counterburn.

She inhaled deeply, and flipped the automated docking system switch.

A fully kitted Hermes-A had 8 RCS jets around the base of the pod, 4 retrograde jets on the sides of the SM, and 8 more sideways translation and prograde jets around the Terrier engine, for a total of 20. Of them, the autopilot fired a full half at once.

The autopilot aligned them parallel to the docking axis, and besides, the windows had a massive dead zone from their pretty low seating. Instead, they watched as the shadow of a solar panel, and finally the docking port itself, appeared on the docking port visor screen.

The ship kept translating at 2 m/s until the docking port was in the crosshairs. The decelerating along the port-starboard axis was barely noticeable, the RCS thruster valves clicking softly.

Finally, they gave it a good push forward.

Twenty meters.

Five meters.

Three meters…

The outer collars clicked together. There was a thud and a series of groans and clicks as the two ports achieved a hard dock.

“Alright, I have the lead,” Roszie announced, and then paused awkwardly, before suggesting, “Helmets on.”

“We don’t want to get hit by any metal shavings or whatever debris’s floated up in zero-G before we kick in the vents,” Kerbalov narrated, as he plopped on his camera-equipped helmet.

The ship’s hatch was finally opened, and the exterior of the station’s matching hatch was exposed. It opened with some slight coaxing on behalf of a wrench.

“The Athens station is composed of the forward interface section, the main vehicle body, and the aft power section,” Yaroslav continued, as he floated past the empty laboratory gear racks.

“The front is a conical section housing radios, attitude jet fuel and a tunnel leading to the forward docking port. The central cylinder forms the core habitable volume, with three pseudo-decks and three portholes on either side. There are emergency access hatches, but those are forced shut by interior pressure. The actual hatch for regular spacewalks is housed in the aft compartment near the second docking port, behind an airlock system to avoid having to vent the whole craft. Opposite of it is the viewing cupola for surface and astronomic observations, although let’s be fair, it’s mostly for recreation because it’s just so bloody cool!

“The station is powered by two oversized solar panel arrays, producing enough waste heat to necessitate coating half the station in radiators, and we expect to wear out at least one set of batteries, which is why the compartments holding them are also accessible.”

----------

“Alright, Orbit 3, biosig check in 10 minutes.”

“Ros, I’ve got a package I don’t recognize, marked THX dash three-nought. Mind checking the manifest?”

Lis being a pilot gave her a great excuse to slack off in the cupola while her crewmates unloaded the packages occupying every square centimetre of the Hermes’s interior. Above her, the Great Desert stretched across half of the visible hemisphere.

She noticed a small spark. It wasn’t like any atmospheric phenomena she’d been taught of.

“CAPCOM, Athens,” she called out.

“Good copy, send traffic,” Jeb responded, sipping koffee.

“I’ve got an unexplained flash streaking across the desert, around 10° north of equator, please advise.”

“We copy,” Jeb answered, and picked up the phone, “Linus, Athens are calling in an anomaly over the desert, give me real-time data from Thor and prep Odin to lock on.

In a few minutes, Athens’ radio came to life.

“Athens, CAPCOM, we’ve got a major situation here,” Jeb sighed.

“You’ve got an unknown craft on intercept trajectory. Expect visual contact in four minutes tops.”

“You’re not going to evacuate?” Gene asked back on Kerbin.

“They aren’t really safer in a smaller ship, and four minutes… Nope.”

“Flight, target started deceleration burn!”

They watched the flared-up infrared signature slow down near the small blot of the station.

“CAPCOM, you see them?” Lis asked, scanning the blackness.

“Odin’s in range, target is behind the Hermes at five hundred meters, closing in slowly.”

Lis paused and squinted.

“CAPCOM, I have visual.”

She peered at the intruder. The top looked like a regular Mk 1 pod, but it rode atop a small cargo bay, followed by a flared, aerodynamic propulsion stage, with a trio of solar panels sticking out from behind it.

The ship was moving towards her, in between the station and the planet. Its manoeuvring jets fired occasionally.

It wasn’t just doing a careful fly-around. It was – rather sloppily – trying to take a position alongside the station.

Slowly it edged into range, and closed in to below fifty meters, clearly in sight from Lis’s tiny borosilicate bubble.

And then, it ran out of daylight.

----------

“Ros, can you scan the radio waves to see if it’s still around?” Yaroslav proposed. They’d killed all unneeded lights on-board.

“I’m not seeing any interference that a docking radar would cause. He’s down to eyeballing it.”

“Lis?”

“I think I may see his window, dunno…”

“No spotlight?”

“Nope.”

“Then he’s down to drifting near us, getting slightly ahead of us.”

Ten minutes later, the sun began to break through Kerbin’s atmosphere. Lis pulled on the protective goggles, and quickly caught the bogie, two hundred meters away.

It had its payload bay doors open, although she had no idea what was inside.

It quickly began to pull back alongside the station.

It briefly eclipsed the sun, and then began translating towards the station, aiming the cargo bay right at them, the pitch-black shadow concealing its contents.

There was a sharp strike on the exterior.

And then the bogie gunned its throttle, rapidly accelerating away.

“I’ve got a coolant leak in panel 3!” Ros barked.

“Lis! Anything!?” Jeb called out.

“I think it had a cable trailing…”

“Tow bomb!” Yaroslav growled, launching himself towards the airlock. They heard the hatch shut down, and then the alarm for an emergency vent of the airlock fired.

Outside, Yaroslav quickly moved over to the opposite side of the cylinder. And sure, there was a first-sized chunk of radiator missing, a trail of glycol leaking from it.

“Flight! We’re clear! He’s got a no-joy! The harpoon has not connected.”

Behind him, there was a slight flash of an explosion in vacuum.

----------

Jeb leaned back in his chair, and exhaled for the first time in several hours.

The bogie had slipped out of Odin’s vision before re-entering. That huge stage seen in Lis’s grainy shots would give it a lot of Δv leeway for confusion and concealment measures.

“Walt,” he finally called out.

“Yeah, boss?”

“I’ve got a new job assignment for you. Covert B2G.”

----------

With no fanfare, Loki blasted off with its bizarrely-shaped fairing, and pushed into an inclined orbit.

Jeb watched the launch from Walt’s new, secure station. An extra staff of three were also there, waiting for a chance to start doing their jobs.

Above in orbit, the secondary payload fairing cracked open, and a colossal antenna spread open.

The intercepted radio signals flowed in as a torrent that needed filtering and interpretation. The interns dropped their crosswords.

“Just one more squeak, Fitz,” Jeb muttered, “One more stunt, and I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to endanger and destroy my brothers and my sisters. And you will know the heavens belong to us when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

Spoiler

We also tested a 3.75 m version, but we were afraid of the results.

 

[Angelo Kerman]

OOO, evil space agency strikes!

[DDE]

9 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

OOO, evil space agency strikes!

Agent Kirrim will return in Munraker.

[DDE]

Chapter 12: Nous voila, Kerbayette!

“Darter, please proceed with engine activation,” Jeb said softly, lowering his binoculars.

“Copy that, Tower,” Val responded, and flipped the switch in the cockpit.

Behind her, the experimental Whiplash turboramjet sparked to life.

 

“Got ignition, thrusting up.”

The whine built up and strong vibration appeared.

 

“Tower, I’m being pushed ahead despite full breaks!” she laughed.

“Give her a full spin!”

She dropped the brakes and felt crushed into the seat as the Darter blasted down the runway.

 

She pulled back the stick, and slowly the plane left the runway. She immediately retracted the gear.

In a few seconds, she broke the sound barrier.

 

She kept the engine at full throttle until she reached hypersonic at near-sealevel.

 

Then she pulled the stick again. The g’s were devastating, the world grew dark around her, but the plane kept ascending like a rocket.

 

The altimeter flickered like mad. Maybe a few seconds per kilometre of vertical velocity. Before she dropped the stick, she already had crossed the 18 km mark.

 

She maintained full thrust. 20 km… 25 km…

The master alarm wailed at her.

 

Her engine had died. The g’s also disappeared. She was still moving at 1 km/s total velocity.

She shoved the stick again in an effort to orient the craft for… re-entry. That sounded pretty reasonable, as the barometric altimeter was off the scale, and the radar one indicated a full 35 km. But the control surfaces weren’t responding too well.

 

Val kept tracking the situation, and final remembered she had Jeb on the other end.

“Tower, are you seeing this?”

“Yep, it’s a nice engine.”

“Have you noticed that I’ve pretty much done a loft of a Mainsail? Think we can loft upper stages on aircraft.”

“…Umh… we have other cost-cutting measures underway.”

She was descending pretty rapidly.

 

Finally, the barometric altimeter came to, and Val tried to restart the engine. It coughed back to life, and she felt the thrust build up again. And she had regained control.

She immediately began a slow, wide turn back west towards the KSC. It took her a few minutes.

 

She had levelled out at 10 km, and gunned the throttle again.

 

She reached 1 km/s. Except that now the plane sported a plasma sheath!

 

“Val!” the call came through the radio interference.

“OK, OK!” she answered cheerfully, cutting the trust and engaging the airbrakes, which almost tore her out of her seat.

 

She played the remaining three dozen kilometres safe, not going beyond 700 m/s.

 

The runway was clearly visible and quite sufficient. However, Val had to flare and brake after realizing she was still hauling it at almost 200 m/s.

 

Finally, she brought the jumpy, considerably oversteering plane onto the runway. It wasn’t anywhere near a perfect three-point landing, and when she kicked in the weak brakes, the ride became pretty bumpy.

Suddenly the plane swerved around.

 

Val swore profusely. She had almost had her head ripped off by the lateral acceleration.

 

----------

“There’s plenty of potential to go about…” Val started at the base of the control tower.

“No time, no money, no personnel,” Jeb cut her off.

“…we just need to fix the damned wheels!”

“We have other priorities at the time.”

“You mean Hermes-B?”

“If only!” Jeb remarked.

Behind him, a ground crew rolled out a bizarre contraption.

“…Is that what I think it is?” Val asked, as one of the rookies climbed into a tiny cockpit.

“Sort of.”

The contraption’s clusters of rocket engines sparked to life.

 

It took off and began to hover precociously above the field beyond the training complex. Then it landed. All in less than two minutes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“It’s just a training vehicle,” Jeb explained.

“Training vehicle for what?”

He simply led her into one of VAB’s secondary bays. There was a whole bunch of component storage cases – tagged LV-T30.

“Reliants!? They’re back!?”

“Yeah, we’ve found a way to reuse them, so the cost isn’t much of an issue.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“We won’t be able to use them in the first Hermes-B. Will have to make do with Kerbodyne,” Jeb added.

Val was no longer fixated on the boxes. She was staring on a full-scale mock-up in the corner.

“Yes, it’s what it looks like,” Jeb smiled, looking at the small spidery lander.

Val blasted off towards it even faster than the Darter. Instead, the master of the VAB came into sight.

“Jeb, about yesterday…” Bill began, as Val tore off the wooden door of the mock-up.

“No!” Jeb snarled.

“But what exactly is the problem?” Bill asked, unperturbed.

 

“Are you crazy!? Assuming it doesn’t explode or thrust out of control, think of the logistics! You have to cast the fuel in the VAB, then mate it to the rest of the vehicle, and then move the whole thing onto the pad.”

“Oh, we’ve handled a Sarnus with a nuclear reactor. Have thee a little faith!”

----------

Hermes-B blasted off slightly past midday. The upper stage had had to be stretched, and four solid boosters had to be added for the extra initial oompf.

Jeb was hardly happy. He hated the Kerbodyne outfit. He’d had to pull a lot of strings to prevent them from intervening into the Sarnus program.

 But he had to admit – they were pretty powerful.

The boosters also carried the aero surfaces, so the grid fins were kept stowed until the SRBs burnt out. The Mainsail, clocked down to 75% thrust, continued onward, replaced by the Tunguska in the upper atmosphere.

After the circularization burn, the ship remained enshrouded. A small antenna at the bottom of the hydrogen stage maintained the datalink.

The ship drifted into the shadow.

And then it performed the Trans-Munar Injection, firing the engine again for another minute.

“FIDO, please confirm trajectory,” Jeb requested, before looking upwards at Bill and Bob’s seats above. The ship came into sunlight faster than normal.

“Hermes, FIDO, you’re good until Mun SOI.”

“Flight here, you’re clear for TDE,” Gene confirmed.

“Alright. Bill, your lead!”

“Acknowledged. Fairing separation.”

“Stand by for separation, in two, one…”

The ship moved with a bump as it separated. Jeb quickly gave it a quick blast of RCS thrusters.

“Deploying power and comms. Datalink with KSC regained,” Bill kept droning on.

“Transposing,” Jeb responded, and flipped the ship over.

“Permission to jettison adapter?”

“Go ahead.”

The pyrobolts holding the ring around the Terrier fired, sending it and the ship flying in opposite directions. Jeb quickly added to that, aiming for the docking ring on top of the stage floating nearby.

He noticed that, with no source of power and the guidance package computer dead, the upper stage was slightly tumbling. He quickly compensated for that.

The whole deft docking took a mere ten seconds. The docking locks pulled the two parts of the craft back together.

“Preparing to extract!” Bill barked, spooking Jeb, even though the last operation was quite routine.

The separation motors flashed in front of them as the stage was pushed away from them, leaving a closet-sized extension module atop Hermes’s docking port.

It wasn’t just an exact copy of Athens’ airlock. It also carried an RPWS tripod and a magnetometer boom.

Jeb and his crew settled down for the trip. The Mun was about to be examined and carefully listened to.

Behind them, Athens proper drifted undisturbed in its orbit, 50 km above the staging echelon that Hermes-B had departed from.

Kerbalov listened to the vacuum pumps slowly grow silent as the pulled the air out of the airlock. Finally, he saw the indicator go green, and unlatched the outer hatch.

The hatch was on the dark side of the station. He switched on the helmet lamps, and began to climb “up” the ladder along the body of the laboratory, in between the radiator panels. They’d glued the leaky one shut, but the repairs had to be left for the next expedition.

He finally reached the conical section, where the ladder ended in an attitude jet nozzle on top of the docking collar. He carefully checked his target to his left – a material science sample container, with purple goo in transparent tubes, only slightly out of reach. Just in case, he readied the jetpack for a semi-tethered manoeuvre, as he pulled them out of their casing.

Finally, he drifted back for a nice general shot.

----------

“Flight, Hermes, hourly report. Power nominal, EECOM nominal, engine ready, crewmates relatively sane, comms… I’ll leave you to judge. Thirty minutes until Mun SOI.”

Jeb lowered his head as Bill backed out of the airlock feet-first. They’d moved the sanitation system rack from the main cabin into the small, closet-sized compartment behind the bulkhead hatch.

Bob had remained at his station for two hours straight. According to the checklist, he was supposed to begin preparing the photo camera, and that got Jeb worried. Bob wasn’t one to ignore his own schedules.

“Bob?” Jeb finally called.

“Jeb, could you handle the cameras? I’ve got something weird here.”

“A’ight,” Jeb responded as he started to fetch the gear out of the storage racks.

An entire hour passed. Bob remained in his seat, and was beginning to mutter quietly in between repeated clicks of console buttons.

“What is it, Bob?” Jeb finally asked insistently.

“The magnetometer. I’ve got readings above nominal.”

“Interference from the ship?”

“No, the halfway platform is registering the same, so it’s not us. I’m also beginning to see supporting data from the RPWS.”

“Wasn’t the Mun too dead to have a dynamo?” Jeb idly wondered.

Bob only sighed in response. Science time.

They slipped into the Mun’s radio shadow, but the other side was brightly lit, its pockmarked surface spinning noticeably beneath them.

“Bill, give me a stay or no-stay,” Jeb requested.

There were a few more switch flips.

“Stay.”

And so they performed the orbital insertion burn.

“Alright, waiting on Kerbin to give us full telemetry,” Jeb remarked, unstrapping himself from his seat as Bill began undertaking astrogation measurements.

The sight from the starboard window was slightly spoiled by the magnetometer boom that was giving Bob a headache.

Oh, and by the way…

“Bob, how’s our phantom field doing?”

“It’s pretty damned elusive. Looks like it’s a bunch of local anomalies. They’re barely stopping the solar wind, and I’m also getting peculiar readings across the radio spectrum.”

“Flight, Hermes, do you copy?” the regular radio came to life. The Beacons were coming into sight.

“Yeah, we copy, we’ve got results, stand by for data traffic.

Kerbin itself soon followed.

A few minutes later, the entered the shade, but Kerbin still glittered millions of miles away.

Jeb was suiting up for an EVA. As the ship came to a 3/4^th orbit point, Jeb locked himself in the airlock, and began to depressurize it. They were passing just above Pathfinder 1’s resting place.

It wasn’t his first zero-G EVA, although the first with a jetpack. He gave it a few test bursts, and simply dropped free of the airlock without a care.

He finally fired up the orientation autopilot, and gently did a full spin.

Behind him was the pockmarked Mun. On the one side, was his home, brightly lit, clouds swirling above the glistening oceans. On his other side was his only lifeline, the miracle of technology that had brought him there.

The sun glare was obviously blinding. Inside the ship, Bob glanced up at the forward window, and Jeb flashed his helmet light as he moved into sight.

Jeb floated about for a few more minutes, and that was enough for Kerbin to slip out of sight.

He concluded the EVA at that point, and went off the clock, napping in his seat for another whole orbit.

The orbit departure burn was pretty mundane by comparison. Bob was all too distracted by his data.

An hour afterwards, Hermes performed a brief correctional burn to target its atmospheric re-entry.

----------

This time, Gene was operating without Jeb. On the menu was one dusty appetizer – Pathfinder 3. The launch was downright boring.

The Trans-Munar Injection was performed rather hastily, seconds after the circularization burn. But for the Mission Control, that was a reason to put their game faces on and have a few thrilling minutes.

An hour later, Pathfinder 3 deviated from Pathfinder 1’s flight plan, its engines delivering a 40 m/s burn along the normal vector, sending it out of the equatorial plane.

This timetable lead to considerable excitement a day later. Just as Pathfinder was entering Mun’s SOI…

…The Hermes began the entry procedure. Except for jettisoning the airlock, which jerked away as air leaked out of the detached docking port without the door shut, and the SM entering dangerously close to the CM, the return was routine.

Meanwhile, the Pathfinder slipped into a near-perfect polar orbit.

“Flight, FIDO, red alert!” Bobak announced.

Pathfinder 3 was in perfect position to observe Kerbin transiting and eclipsing the sun over the course of a few hours. While it was not specifically kitted for it, the science team was going to make the most out of it, while the techies needed to keep the batteries from dying.

It was a bit tense, and the orbital alignment meant the Pathfinder had constant comms with Kerbin, so Mission Control stood down for an entire hour before beginning the descent.

Their target was near the south pole.

That was troublesome. Their maps of that area were lacklustre, the area permanently poorly lit and at an oblique angle. And while the terrain was rugged, it was still rather even compared to the other pole.

But as they saw on the cameras, they were cutting it pretty close, coming down near an imposing cliff of a crater inside a larger crater.

But that didn’t prevent the autopilot from doing its job a quarter-light-second away from home, the braking manoeuvre had been executed perfectly, and Pathfinder touched down on the dark surface.

That darkness and perennial shade were the reasons they brought the probe there.

“DAN data!?” Jeb huffed as he entered the amphitheatre.

“Stand by,” Linus’s lowly intern responded, “Reading high hydrogen concentrations directly under the surface.”

The coveted Munar polar ice.

The mission control crew erupted.

PSA begins below, can't post without merging.

Chapter 13 1.1.3... Yeah, I got hit with the update. This means this thread is suspended until the mod updates come through - it seems like my last-second 1.1.2 backup is partially non-functional.

The good news is that I've scraped and cheated through the finals, so once I do get a working install, I'll do the actual Chapter 13.

Edited June 24, 2016 by DDE

[DDE]

Interlude: The Wraps Come Off

“Athens, you hearing us?” Jeb asked, adjusting the radio and microphone in the conference room.

“Yeah, we copy,” Slava Kerbalov responded hundreds of miles above, with the rest of the upper-level staff sitting back.

Then the lights went out.

“Third time this week,” Gene sighed.

“What’s with the municipal repair team? Do they keep slipping on banana peels or something?” Val wondered idly.

“We’re installing a Prometheus reactor in one of our basement sublevels right now,” Bill smiled thinly, “For ’endurance testing of nuclear energetic apparata’.”

Jeb did his best impression of an evil laugh as the lights kicked back in.

“Right, back to business. Short-term flight agenda. Hermes-B to Minmus, conclusion of Athens Expedition-1, and the first Hermes-C mission. Any objections?”

Hermes-C, in plastic miniature form, stood before them. Half of the fairing had been removed, revealing the Gadfly lander tucked between the ship and the upper stage. The lower stage had six Reliant boosters as originally envisioned, along with a slightly cut-down Mainsail sustainer.

“Who are we sending up on the two missions?” Val asked wearily.

“It’s a pretty good question. I say we send a rookie crew to Minmus for shakedown and field training. We’ll also need another, scientist-heavy crew for Expedition 2, plus I’d like to get with the program and have the station-rated pilots do trial runs with a Vector first,” Jeb mused.

“And the Munar landing?”

“Here’s where it gets very interesting. The Gadfly is supposed to be light on manned input, so I was thinking of sending Bob down with the rest of the Gold gang flying the orbiter. The single-seat lander means we can reasonably have a back-up pilot with remote vehicle control certification as well.”

He traced Val’s look, and added, “I’m not that terribly anxious to go.”

There was another moment of awkward silence.

“Bill, the R&D section,” Jeb finally mouthed.

“Currently we’re working on no less than five design concepts, most of them early-stage. We’ve got Linus and Gene’s interplanetary probes, mostly in subsystem endurance tests; they’ll be ready by the next Duna launch window.

“But, of course, none of the rest of you really care about that,” he smiled thinly again, “So here are the interesting bits: Piraeus, Vulkan, Hermes Mk 2 and Hermes-Cargo.

“Wait, we’re barely into the fourth flight and you’re already planning to replace the Hermes?” Val piped up as usual.

“Only in orbital missions. We’re going to compromise on engine performance and modularity by introducing a unified fuel system, but we’re planning to double life support duration while developing re-use of the return vehicle and a new booster to almost halve the cost per flight.”

Jeb furrowed his eyebrows.

“There are certain fundamental disagreements left,” Bill added, “And in the same vein we’re designing Piraeus as the next station.”

“Athens won’t be accepting Hermeses after Expedition 2; we’ve already geared it for bio-med research and it has a docking collar for Vulkan cruisers. Piraeus will have a lot more varied capability, we’re working on a new aft section,” Jeb explained.

“Cruisers!?” Walt exclaimed.

“That’s still deeply classified” Jeb hissed, “We’re working on a heavy ship habitable for a full year, with closed-cycle life support, and a significantly refitted RV. For initial trials it will be using Athens for power and the science gear we’ve carted up there; once we’ve confirmed that its gear works as advertised, we’ll slap an interplanetary nuclear tug to it. That’s why it has an oversized docking ring, it’s a thrust frame.”

----------

The meeting had degenerated into a fierce interrogation of Jeb, rudely interrupted by Mortimer, who fainted when Jeb began to at length about a reusable Munar ship with a pebble bed reactor rocket.

“So, your solution to cost issues is building better boosters?” Val asked as the staff began to scatter about.

“You’ve got a hunch on the ramjet toss idea, don’t you?” Jeb responded, “It’s not a terribly bad one…”

“…especially with that afterburning pebble-bed you’re touting…”

“…and I also must admit I’m intrigued by what winged descent vehicles would be like, but once we go into full swing in a month or two, the Mun program will really stretch us thin. I can’t commit fully to principally different launchers like that; best I can do now is scratch together a tiny experimental budget, which will be nowhere enough for your program to have much traction.”

“My program?”

“Yes, Val, if you’re that enthusiastic about the issue, I say we could spin it off along with our other reusability studies. But that may keep you out of orbit as a result.”

Spoiler

There are, of course, behind-the-scenes reasons. For more than a year I relied on Bahamuto adjustable landing gear, and have become spoiled; now that Squad is tinkering with wheels, that mod is suspended, so I am severely discouraged from aeroplaning.

Also, never use CKAN. It can make things far less certain than manual installs. Failed to fetch modern versions of a dozen mods, of which Kopernicus and Module Manager led to surprising consequences elsewhere down the pipeline.

But overall, I now have a mostly working install.

 

[DDE]

 

Chapter 13: Cueston, We’re About to Have Problems

Gene straightened out his white waistcoat. Jeb looked back at the two dozen koffee pots; a strategic supply of near-lethal brew was absolutely necessary for a night launch. Suddenly something occurred to him.

“We’re sending a fully female crew, aren't we?”

Pilot Kathula Kerman, scientist Eilphie Kerman and engineer Zelmy Kerman were to take another Hermes-B for a trip to Minmus orbit.

There was only one major difference beside the ejection burn length: the launch was timed and aimed for Minmus’s slightly inclined orbit.

The blast-off went as usual.

“FIDO, confirm trajectory,” Jeb asked, tensing up. Gene furrowed his brow.

“Flight, orbit is inclined 7.5° relative to Min’s orbital plane. Requesting permission to schedule correction burn.”

Somebody on the ship-to-ground circuit began screaming. Jeb sighed.

“We have more than enough fuel in the Δv budget to cover this.”

“Hermes, initiate TDE.”

“CAPCOM, we have hard dock. Separating stage… Negative.”

“Hermes, repeat trigger.”

“CAPCOM, negative on the extraction.”

“Bill, can you try and bypass the system?”

“I can fire the guillotine from here, but they won’t be getting the separation motors.”

“Collision hazard?”

“It’s abysmal.”

Jeb only slightly relaxed after injection and TDE.

“Neither’s not the rookies’ fault,” Gene tried to reach him.

“I still want Jenrick or whathisname in a Vector ASAP. Gus, how much time?”

“Three hours, boss.”

----------

“Vector, stand by for blast-off in five, four, three, two, one, ignition!”

“CAPCOM, this is a kick-cheeks ride!”

‘I’m beginning to like this guy already,’ Jeb mused.

“Alright, Vector, you’re in a 250 km orbit two hundred klicks ahead of your rendezvous target. Your move.”

There was only a brief pause.

“That would require a boost to a seven-hundred-something apogee for an intercept in one orbit, right?”

Jeb and Val exchanged a raised eyebrow look.

“Booster, I need you to sequence an SM engine firing immediately after exhausting the Chelyabinsk. FIDO, please confirm burn direction.”

“Vector, FIDO here, you’re bound for intercept in 63 minutes, closest approach to TARDIS at 1.4 km.”

“I am definitely liking this rookie,” Jeb said out loud as Jenrick dropped into station and spun around for an approach burn.

“Thanks, sir.”

“CAPCOM, permission to bring her in?”

“Dock that bird, Vector.”

“Aye-aye.”

“Vector to CAPCOM, hard dock achieved.”

“Nice one, Vector, bring her home.”

“Roger that.”

“Flight, I’m plotting a precision entry burn in 4-30.”

“Copy that, advising SAR teams,” Gene responded.

“Don’t get cocky, kid!” Jeb added.

“I’m afraid this hotshot’s overshooting,” Gene said, watching the meteor scream across the sky.

“It’s still better than the North Pole,” Val muttered.

----------

“Alright, Hermes, I’ll be your EVA officer for today, Zelmy, please proceed with checklist 162. Kathula, man the LS controls…”

“Alright, now close the hatch behind you,” Jeb said, grimacing from the engineer’s screeching.

“Now, I want you to drift ahead of the bow, ‘bout fifty meters.”

“Perfect, now could you move to a slightly trailing position?”

“Excellent, I guess that concludes the qualification EVA.”

“You’re now to get inside and continue drift to Minmus SOI.”

----------

The injection into Minmus orbit occurred with no incident.

“Flight, proceeding with mission program, I’ve got Eilphie manning the electronics and Zelmy on the camera. That means I’m up for EVA, right?”

“Affirmative, Hermes, I only need you to drift clear of the craft for a minute or so.”

Kath carefully neutralized her relative speed and peered back at the ship.

“Eil, anything?” she finally asked.

“Nothing, this iceball isn’t registering on any of my gear. Not particularly surprized.”

“Flight, can we take it into lower orbit?” Kath mused.

“Negative, get back in the craft,” Gene responded.

There was radio silence for a few minutes.

“Hermes, this is CAPCOM, we’ve confirmed that a drop to 20 km involves no short-term hazard, please proceed.”

“Eil, anything yet?”

“Had some bizarre reading way to the south, must have been a glitch. Otherwise, iceball all along. Might get occasional cover from the planet’s magnetotail...”

“We’re passing just above Pathfinder,” Kath interrupted.

Eilphie sighed.

“Flight, CAPCOM, FIDO, whoever, this is a bughunt, request permission to begin departure procedures…” Zelmy piped up.

----------

“Alright, anyone, any final thoughts, words, anything?”

“C’mon, I want to get away from the whiff of plastic and burnt snacks already.”

Roszie locked the station’s hatch.

“Alright, CAPCOM, this is… still Athens, proceeding with checklist 412, were currently 20 seconds ahead of schedule.”

After that, they finally uncoupled from the ship, and headed back to the planet.

The next crew launched right away, with Jenrick hauling the eggheads Jesla and Stelemma to the station with barely a snag for another 50-day stay.

----------

The KSC seemed to be developing an affinity for night launches. Hermes-C was one. Ultimately, Val took the pilot seat.

The launch went normally; each individual part of the booster, including the six Reliant motors, was already considered tried and true.

Hermes-C used a slightly modified version of the TDE manoeuvre. Much of the two mission vehicles was still hidden under a fairing.

After the ejection burn, the ship would separate, and reattach with its forward docking port.

However, the second ship was no mere airlock, and the stage was not to be jettisoned. Instead, it had an extendable active radiator array to stave off hydrogen loss during the five-hour trip to Mun orbit.

The Tunguska engine was to be used for the orbital insertion burn.

It was to reignite for a third time, and it worked flawlessly, putting the whole circus into a parking orbit.

----------

Two hours of later, as the crew run through another battery of checklists, Val was coming to the realization that she was wishing harm on a fellow crewmember. Bob was still the primary to take the single-seat lander to the surface.

Finally, Bob had strapped himself into the craft, and they closed the hatches.

“Propulsion, check, guidance, check, LS, check, comms, please confirm?”

“Check,” Val answered.

“Flight, permission to undock and initiate descent?”

“Granted.”

“Hermes, undocking.”

There were clicks and growls.

“Negative on undock. Bill!”

“Looks like mechanical, we’ve still got electric linked. Relatching.”

The sound of the grippers reengaging reverbated through both ships.

“Val, give me forward RCS thrust.”

The latches clicked again.

“Retro!”

And the Hermes drifted free of the Gadfly and the transfer stage. Val flipped it end-over and into stationkeeping position.

“Hm. I guess that solves it,” came Bob’s voice as he reoriented his own craft.

They drifted for a few minutes until the point where Bob was to initiate the suicide burn.

The engine reignited one last time.

“See you on the other side, Hermes,” he remarked, as the acceleration of the mostly-empty and lightly loaded stage pressed on him.

The Gadfly was a very compact design, and it made plenty of sacrifices. Good radio was one of them. The primary antenna could only reach 500 km, with a secondary whip deployable for up to 2000 km; the Hermes had to act as a relay to Kerbin. And because of the descent trajectory, it was rapidly slipping out of sight; the landing used Pathfinder’s automation.

The stage finished killing his downrange velocity, and was jettisoned, leaving him with the lander’s own motor.

The Spark ignited early, bearing a pretty heavy load.

Nevertheless, it did its job, and the ship hovered precociously above the bright regolith before touching down.

A rookie might have gotten taken away, but for Bob, this was a bit mundane. Nor did he have anyone within radio range for the next thirty minutes. He was going to run the flight plan all by his lonesome.

After setting the radio beacon, he opened the science payload panel, and flipped the switches. On the side of the propulsion system, a small drill head dropped into the ground, and began to spin, its whirr only barely audible inside the cabin.

Next, Bob clamped on his helmet, and engaged the pumps.

The Master Alarm barked at him. Life support readings were flat; no way this was real, but he had to sit through a computer restart before the system came to.

The ladder on the Gadfly was rather short, and the whole lander was a lot stouter than the monstrosity assembled for Sarnus V. He had no problem getting down.

The landscape was not novel to him, so first he attended to the science packages that festooned the lander. The exposure canister had locked open as needed, and the drill was hard at work, powered by the fixed solar panels dotting the hull.

He had some minor electrical worries. It was midday, so the panels were barely getting any power. But the lander specifications stated that the drill could cycle fully without draining the battery bank anyway, so he went onwards.

The landing site was almost at the rim of the so-called Farside Crater, visible edge-on from Kerbin had it not been for a mountain range. The flight plan called for two major EVAs; Bob had appropriately been supplied with a high-energy hydrogen peroxide flight pack.

The first jump was to the crater’s rim, 5 km away. So Bob took flight. It was a delicate balancing act, having to keep vertical velocity under control, while not overexpending fuel and not crashing to death – Mun’s low gravity was quite deceptive.

He hovered to a halt about fifty meters from the target, and then glided to a neat, soft landing. He trotted to the actual rim, and performed a quick panorama shoot.

In front of him spanned the crater itself, with steep edges at his feet. The regolith in it was pronouncedly darker. However, unlike conventional craters, or because it was quite old, it had a considerable central uplift taking the shape of a colossal dome, almost at the same level as he was standing on.

He scooped up a few rocks, but he didn’t expect to find much impact material, and he hardly fancied an unprepared trip down the slopes.

He blasted off in a ballistic arc.

The edge of Kerbin appeared as he was passing through the apoapsis. He maneuvered to a landing near his ship, and got in.

Jeb’s early work had led to a mandated 3-hour period between EVAs. The interior of the pod was even comfier than that of the Hermes. Bob watched the snack wrappers glide down in the low gravity.

“Away Team, this is Hermes, how copy, over,” Val’s voice came through.

Bob almost choke up on his snack.

“Gadfly, we’re seeing your beacon, please respond, over.”

“Hermes, I copy, situation nominal here… had to eliminate minor suffocation hazard, completed EVA 1. How’s it on your end?”

“Boring. Anything to share?”

“I’m sinking a drill into this here mountain, so I’ll have major news in about one-two orbits. Think I’m gonna go for a nap, don’t be surprized if I fail to report.”

----------

“Hermes to Gadfly, wake up, buttercup!”

“Whoa… oh dear, it’s three hours already!”

“So, how’s the drilling?”

In addition to a core sample drill, the payload included its own on-board x-ray spectrograph. Bob finally managed to fully open his eyes.

“Feldspar. Aluminium and calcium, no iron or titanium. Largely same as Kerbin. Means it’s not impact ejecta. We’ll know more at the lab, gotta run the second jump,” he babbled, pulling the fuel canister from the storage rack.

He got out of the ship, and sighted down his target. The jump was a wee bit longer and uphill: the aim was near the top of the mountain ridge. He checked if the flag package was still with him, and went to business.

The landing was a bit rougher, but he was still sharp and in business. A mere 7 km had allowed him to come back into sight of Kerbin. He scooped up a few more Munar mountain rocks, found a spot with relatively soft soil, and thrust the flagstaff into it before deploying the flag itself.

“Away Team, how copy, over,” Jeb’s tired voice came over the comms.

“Good copy, go ahead.”

He wouldn’t be able to stay connected for long.

“That range you’re standing on is now officially Montes Triumphi.”

“I take it you haven’t arranged it with the KAS, have you?”

“If they want to change it, they’ll have to get there themselves. Meanwhile I’ll be making money selling ‘revised’ atlases.”

During the jump back, Bob got brazen enough to pull off a panorama in mid-flight.

After pulling out all the samples from the exposure unit and drill, and clambering back into his lander, Bob paused. Why was that getting so routine for him? Was it because the LZ was typical and hence there was little immediate gratification. He’d been where no geologist had – twice – and has thus far felt none of the expected elation. A lot of what he was seeing had been predicted in advance.

He had to get to Minmus – or, at least, get a drill to Minmus.

“Gadfly, how copy?”

“I copy. Bill, mind running a diagnostic? I’m planning to attempt a Mode 2 blast-off right away, put a staging orbit at 50 and then fire up an automated rendezvous. Val, are you good with this?”

There was silence on the other end. Mode 1 required the Hermes to guide the lander into a direct rendezvous; Mode 2 locked Val out of the loop, and required more manoeuvring from the lander.

“Proceed,” Val finally called out.

“Technical, clear,” Bill added.

“Copy that, all systems in ascent mode, launching in five, four, three…”

The small engine still strained to put the lander into orbit, but it managed, even though it was going on fumes. But manoeuvres in Munar orbit were a tenth of what they were around Kerbin, so the autopilot used those fumes to stage an intercept.

Although Bob had had stable radio contact by then, he found himself considerably spooked – the rendezvous was occurring on the night side.

However, the issue proved nil as Hermes’s windows lit up nearby, and the docking radar achieved a stable lock.

Bob didn’t pretend to be an ace pilot and simply allowed the autopilot to dock the craft.

The hatches clicked open one by one.

Val’s grinning face appeared above him. There wasn’t much need for words; Bob averted any niceties by shoving a sample bag into her arms. The two began unloading the lander as Bill, stoic as ever, stood watch at the controls.

An hour later, the finished, and sealed off the lander. The scuttling procedure was to take place next.

The lander undocked – this time, curiously, without incident – and began to float clear of the ship.

Then both its main motor and its prograde RCS fired, sending the Gadfly down its second and final descent.

After that, the return was uneventful.

Edited July 8, 2016 by DDE
These links don't auto-embed, and I have too many of them to add all at once without risk of crashing

[DDE]

Thanks to having completely lost sense of the days of the week, I'm going to try to turn your Sunday into a Monday with these. They're proof Jeb deserves that second qualification ribbon.

Before the next major op, I may have to populate the KSC Mission Control rosters with mostly-generic Kerbals (Bobak, get out from under the table!). All four of them.

[DDE]

 

Chapter 14: Is Everyone’s on Mental Shore Leave?

“CAPCOM?”

“We’re go,”

“Booster?”

“Go, Flight,”

“Network,”

“Go,”

“FIDO?”

“Go,”

“EECOM?”

“Go!”

“Surgeon?”

“All readings at ‘badass’, Flight!”

“Local Orbital Control to Pad Firing Team, Hermes Mk 2 test flight is clear for launch, stand by to initiate launch sequence,” Gene Kerman announced, moonshining in the more routine department while the watch roster was being filled up.

“Hermes, you’re clear to launch,” Bill Kerman echoed in his post as FAO-CAPCOM.

“Copy that,” Jeb noted, glanced at the mannequins "manning" the upper deck, and turned to the flight computer. The inertial nav system had calibrated, and the output showed the guidance computer was now in mode 02.

Unsurprisingly, there was a button called LAUNCH; there was no need to time the launch, so he just pressed it.

The rocket shook as the gantries began to retract. Then the Rockomax MAXX ignited.

It sounded like an explosion. The new solid-fuel first stage had even more thrust than the Mainsail, and was even bigger. It kicked in like a sledgehammer, and the rocket blasted off. The computer nonchalantly went into mode 11, and began to spit out raw telemetry; the new booster relied on the RV’s computer for the entirety of the flight to save weight, unlike the entire ring of electronics in regular Hermes cores.

The flight continued as usual for the solid-fuelled loft-and-sustain boosters – with ever-mounting, crushing acceleration until well past twenty kilometres, where the motor slowly died, and the ullage Sepratrons pulled the regular Tunguska upper stage. Still without Jeb doing anything, the ship pushed for orbital velocity, jettisoning the LES.

The circularization burn was also carried out with Jeb passively watching the computer do its work.

Unlike past launches, the fairing separation was not to happen until the upper stage was done. The SM formed part of the hull from the onset, with its RCS thruster clusters on the exterior; a whip antenna extended out of one of them. The new RCS system was redesigned to minimize the use of the RV's thrusters. Finally, the motor died.

“CAPCOM, Hermes, confirming MECO, all systems nominal,” Jeb called out.

“Hermes, confirming.”

“Hey, Bob, Gene, if I’m reading this correctly, I’m only 60 klicks behind Athens with a full tank of monoprop.”

Gene sighed. He should have seen it coming.

“Roger that, Hermes, preparing rendezvous solution. Stand by to receive first burn program,” Bob responded without a pause.

Launching from the 250 km staging orbit allowed to avoid the need for multiple orbital phasing burns; instead, Jeb just waited an hour before pulling off a direct Hohmann and the velocity kill burn, putting the ship within visual range of the station.

“CAPCOM, Hermes is about to come in for final approach, commencing staging.”

The ship’s deployment operation was another heavily automated aspect. The solar and thermal control systems had been mounted around the elongated bell of new SM motor; the Breeze and the RCS clusters now used the same fuel and plumbing system; the Tunguska was equipped with passivation valves to reduce chance of explosion.

So, Jeb flipped in the autopilot again, and watched the ship fire its main engine and began its final approach. Athens was growing larger and larger, but the autopilot of course aimed for a near-miss.

The closest approach came…

Nothing happened. The ship kept flying. No retroburn.

Jeb tried to fire it manually, but the computer kept its iron grip on the controls. Then he tried again, and this time there was a sizzle as the motor fired.

“Are you seeing this, CAPCOM!?”

He reset the computer, triggering another approach. The engine fired again.

And then again, on closest approach the controls froze.

“Bob,” Jeb growled as he programmed in a descent burn, “We’re going to have to talk.”

----------

“So what’s with the second briefing this week?” Lisgrid wondered.

“Guess Jeb’s… outraged,” Raygan shrugged, “At least that’s in the SAT, so it won’t be all plastic.”

This briefing included no-one but the newly formed flight crews. Some faces were really unfamiliar, but Lisgrid’s optical sensor array locked onto a trio already sporting a mission patch reading “Heimdall” and “NUC SEC”.

“Who are you lot?” she asked.

“Heimdall crew, spaceborne nuclear power endurance test,” Jeb’s voice boomed from across the room, “Bit of an autonomous project for now. That’ll be our third station, unmanned for most of the time.”

“And…”

Jeb cut her off by pulling back one of the partitions to reveal Piraeus.

Wasn’t nothing really interesting. The trunk, including the airlock and cupola, had been rebuilt, with what looked suspiciously like a Gadfly pressure vessel acting as a science station and inline airlock. It also mounted the second docking collar and enlarged manoeuvring fuel stocks.

There still were a few whistles, though.

“Note the small docking ports on the sides,” Jeb continued unperturbed, “We’re going to send another model of Intern up…”

There was a horrified scream from one of the gantry, and someone began to run to the nearest fire exit.

Jeb just shook his head.

“…as an external scientific payload, and it’s also compatible with Vector’s docking probe.

“But this of course is just routine orbital flight where the egghead has all the fun,” he chuckled, “The future is over here”.

The Vulkan stood in the other assembly area, missing come minor components, but already mostly flyable.

“We’re not done with the drive section yet – that’s Heimdall’s job – but this is what it will be carrying. Twenty solid tons of spaceship. Five major systems over here.

“The Return Vehicle is broadly the same as on the Hermes, but we’ve removed the docking collar and made a whole lot of internal alterations, most of them in the astrogation systems. Oh, and there is a hatch through the middle of the heat shield.

“The primary Habitat is more than half the size of the Athens habitat. We’ve loaded the primary usable space with everything that can stave off boredom and muscular degeneration, with the RV acting as the science and conning deck for the entirety of the flight. Back of the module is stuffed to the gills with ration packs, and leads to the tunnel that ends at the aft docking ring and collar.

“The upper half of the tunnel mounts the racks for the ECLSS components. Unlike past flights, where we just ejected the crap and liquid, we’re trying to recycle everything, so we’ve got primary oxygen and water tanks, a hydrogen buffer tank, CO² and greywater collectors, a water filter, a Sabatier reactor and an electrolytic cracker; all we’re throwing out is solidified waste and methane. Should cut down consumables by more than 90%.

“The aft of the ship is the Orbital Manoeuvring System, composed of the main tanks and two twin retractable clusters of Sparks. Used at the beginning and the end of the trip.

“On the other hand, the Orientation and Docking System is composed of eight twin clusters and four unidirectional motors, and is fed from the blisters on the sides of the habitat.

“Finally, the Cladding is composed of these surface-mounted panels and radiators. Ultimately, it looks like that the tug will need the same Gigantor panels as the station.

“Any questions, fliers?”

Edited July 28, 2016 by DDE

[Angelo Kerman]

I'm enjoying the development of your story. Sounds like recycling is just coming into play. What mods are you using? I recognize Nertea's cryogenic engines, are you using Ven's for the revamped capsules?

[DDE]

19 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

I'm enjoying the development of your story. Sounds like recycling is just coming into play. What mods are you using? I recognize Nertea's cryogenic engines, are you using Ven's for the revamped capsules?

I'm not shopping for an inflatable greenhouse.

Yet.

A partial modlist was in the OP; yes, I am; re: Vulkan, the twin RCS thrusters are from Nertea's NF Spacecraft, the radial motors are from an old Bahamuto mod, there's a mix or RT's original antennas and Ven's ones; note that I'm using an old version of Ven's mod (1.9.3?) because I use an even older version of his panel retexture. There are also Smart Parts fuel ejection valves and grid fins from USI Sounding Rockets coming into play. The towers are from FASA...

Edited July 29, 2016 by DDE

[DDE]

Chapter 15: Minty Ice-cream, Scanned

Linus glared at Gene over his shoulder, so the Deputy Director of Operations took a few steps back. Jeb had already carried a folding chair and table to set himself up in the corner.

The former intern, now in charge of the Satellite Group Control unit, had been getting very territorial, even though his little empire encompassed three shifts of four: launch, comms, astrodynamics and payload engineer. Walt and his “black” division managed Loki from a different broom closet.

“Booster, initiate launch procedures,” Linus noted with poorly-concealed self-importance.

“Copy that, Flight. Pad, please confirm firing readiness,” Bobak responded. Since that time hiding under the table, he’d become slightly less neurotic.

“SGC, Pad, pad clear, fuel line drained, ready for launch.”

“Flight, Booster, Eagle 0 ready for launch.”

“Booster, proceed.”

“Copy that. Initiating launch sequence.”

Thanks to the latest upgrade to Vector’s computer systems, Bobak had an immensely complicated mission of turning the launch key, and then pressing a red button if everything went south. Because this time, everything was supposed to go north.

The Eagle was mounted on a regular Vector stack and Terrier upper stage. When Bobak turned the launch key, the expected happened.

Thirty seconds of inertial guidance platform calibration.

Then the automatics fired the two side boosters, and the rocket careened off the pad.

The SRB stages were dropped as usual.

The Terrier burnt out entirely on the horizontal part of the flight, however. Once the last bit of fuel was gulped up by the pumps, the separation sequence began.

 

The probe left the booster behind, adding a bit more velocity with its own Spark motor until it reached the trajectory taking it into a high polar orbit.

“FIDO, please confirm circularization burn,” Linus repeated several times at the fidgeting subordinate. Nervous bosses and automatic flight sequences were a pretty bad combination.

“…and that’s without the signal delay,” Jeb noted to Bob.

Finally, the confirmation arrived.

“Alright, PME, begin operation.”

The Eagle was engineered around mounting a new, high-resolution radar array – and rather long one – along its side; the elongated hull contained a plentiful supply of fuel for the probe’s own motor, enough to manoeuvre to Minmus on its own steam.

“Data coming through,” the Payload Management Engineer responded, as the massive reels of magnetic tape began spinning. The KSC was already knee-deep in those things, but Eagle’s radar was feeding a massive, constant stream of data. One reel was filled up in under five minutes; there were two rookies from the Academy just to keep the machines fed with tape.

Jeb took the first full tape, and shoved it into SGC’s massive mainframe in the next room.

“I’m sorry Jeb, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” a jittery, metallic voice from within the machine announced.

Bob furrowed his eyebrows. Linus jumped. Jeb stepped back and applied his vintage leather aviator boot vigorously to the side of the machine. Someone seemed to run out through the service door in the back.

Finally, the processor did its job, producing a map of a small patch of Kerbin. The magic of Eagle’s radar was that, while it only had slightly better resolution, the computer processor back on Kerbin integrated that data to create a virtual antenna about 500 km in size, allowing highly precise radar altimetry – to the order of one meter.

----------

Eagle 0 tested its all-seeing eye on Kerbin. Eagles 1 and 2 were unsurprisingly headed off to use their arrays on Mu and Minmus, and were launched into equatorial parking orbits first.

The astrodynamics of these missions were, however, quite fussy. Not only did the Eagles require a burn to eject them out of Kerbin’s equatorial plane, but the orbital insertion was split into three burns – initial injection, circularization in high orbit, and a final inclination correction.

With the mission to Minmus, similar gymnastics were required on departure as well because of the target's inclined orbit.

----------

With the other probe program, Prospector, Gene managed to wrestle the control from Linus, and took the opportunity to train up his FMC crew.

The Prospector was a bigger cousin of the Eagle, clocking in at 3 t at parking orbit. That was exactly at the upper limit of a combination of a Vector – 7 Sickles total – and a slightly elongated Terrier stage. Bill had been given it his very best.

The first four Sickles ignited at blast-off, and burnt until 7 km.

“Ripple-fire!” the new Booster guy laughed as the first separation event occurred. There was no pause in this design – as the empty cans fell off in between the numerous tail fins, the net set of two boosters ignited.

At well over 20 km the second set of boosters also fell off, leaving the last Sickle to struggle against the mass of the payload.

Once it was done, the Terrier joined the fray.

With the loft complete, the last stage was ejected, leaving the Prospector on its way to its circularization burn.

The Prospector was a pretty unusual craft, surprisingly aerodynamic for a deep space payload. Prospector 1 was also testing the new motor for the Gadfly lander; the twin-nozzle Thunder was fitted to Spark’s thrust frame, but unsurprisingly packed more wallop.

“Flight, GNC, got minor oversteering here… RCS kicking in, we’ve got a minor drift… this thing is pretty overpowered.”

Gene just shrugged.

A day later in low polar orbit over Mun, the Prospector pened its payload bays. The radio source on top began to spin, and a tripod antenna extended out of the side bay. This was the most powerful weapon in Bob’s water-detecting arsenal – and L-band radar mounted alongside a multispectral scanner.

Prospector 2 blasted away hours later and departed as expected. This time it wasn’t carrying an overpowered engine; that engine was going to get into action later that day, though.

----------

The second Hermes-C launch blasted off normally as well.

“Say ‘hello’ to our audience, Jeb,” Yaroslav Kermanov asked, sticking the camcorder through the gap in the seats.

“Potato!” Jeb responded, and pretended to be busy with the post-TDE correction. Said audience had spent the entire pre-flight press conference asking him whether Minmus is made of minty ice-cream. Ice-cream, to a person who’d spent the preceding week on salted cardboard – sorry, flight rations. Monsters.

“I still don’t get it,” Raygan Kerman, the rookie flight engineer from the Silver Crew, “Aren’t you the guy who thinks Minmus is shaky?”

“If you mean I don’t think that a probe can keep shaking with a moderately stable amplitude, for five hours, with the reaction wheels off, yeah, that’d be me, Raygun.”

“Raygan, not Raygun; Newgun’s a whole other guy.”

Slava shrugged. “PhD in cryotectonics, here I come,” he added quietly.

Spoiler

Sorry for the unmodded sunflare in the last several posts; this has been fixed to JJ-compliant levels.

Out of range of keyboard for another week.

 

Edited August 3, 2016 by DDE

[DDE]

Chapter 16: Creaks and Spooks

The sound of the air-horn woke Val out of her slumber, known otherwise as pretending to do paperwork. She looked out the window. Bill was outside, on top of a bizarre contraption parked smack in front of the building.

“What gives?” she demanded in direction of the walls as she zigzagged down the stairs.

The… trolley he was perched on was barely a pair of metal frames, two wiry seats with precisely enough space for a suit life support and propulsive package, and a massive fuel tank on the back slapped with H₂O₂ stickers. The rear assembly was supported by an extra wheel pair.

“Anaerobic propulsion via monopropellant?” she asked, “You’re planning on taking this… somewhere?”

“I’m having significant qualms over use of batteries,” Bill mused, “Chemical fuel cells may be lighter, yet quite sufficient for any reasonable mission. Care to try a ride?”

“Better than anything I have in mind.”

The seat was incredibly uncomfortable for someone not in a thick spacesuit; however, she noticed that Bill fitted the seat with a sleeping bag, and another one was tucked behind her seat.

Bill began to take the… vehicle off the pathways around the admin building. The electric motors in the four rear wheels whined loudly. He took the trolley down the steep slope behind Mortimer’s pillbox.

Naturally, the left front wheel column got torn off.

“We’re testing! This is entirely intentional!” he screamed in a mocking high-pitched voice as Val giggled madly.

----------

They drove directly east. The rest of the ride went fairly normally.

The experimental vehicle handled natural slopes of the Exclusion Zone well. The twin fuel cells ran smoothly, powering the buffer battery reliably.

As night approached, Bill kicked in the lights.

After exactly an hour, he let off the throttle.

“So… 27237 m on the odometer, average speed 75 kph or so…” Val began to summarize.

“Tank’s at 92%, so total mileage is at three hundred forty kilometres four hundred sixty-two meters and fifty centimetres.”

“Are the centimetres important?”

“Very.”

----------

Prospector 2 arrived to Minmus first.

The probe began a sequence of burns to put itself into the target orbit.

Hermes followed them in.

The Tunguska stage had been left behind at Kerbin. For Minmus orbit injection, Hermes’s Terrier was quite adequate.

The then lengthy landing process began. The new twin motor was proving itself very energetic.

Yaroslav killed the engine as all touchdown markers lit.

The sun was slowly slipping away, leaving the thin crescents of Mun and Kerbin hovering among the stars.

“So,” he began to narrate to his camera, “I want to be on the Great Flats at dawn. But, after four hours of landing…” he yawned, quite sincerely, “Those Minmus orbits are slow, horrendously. It just barely moves in front of you. On Mun, due to its long day an overnight stay is suicide. I’ve killed the vehicle computer, almost completely shut down cabin heating, and only the alarm and the short-range radio are on; I’ve got a bunch of humidity absorbers to prevent condensate build-up. Let’s see if I survive till dawn.”

He pulled the blanket closer to him.

----------

The alarm probably prevented him from freezing to death, despite the blanket and the spacesuit. The batteries were almost flat, and his breath was steamy. Nevertheless, he clamped down the helmet, and vented the pressure vessel. The solar cells would recharge the lander by the time he’d be back.

The suit had radiators, but no heating – other than the wearer, which left Slava spazzing around as much as he could, leaping well above the Gadfly. Finally, he could be bothered to check the minty-green soil under his feet.

“Lander legs are about two centimetres in,” he began to narrate again, “The surface is homogenous rock-ice crust covered by green powder. Will drill once I get back.

“Now… radar altimeter check. Gyrocompass check. Jets check. Target distance 18 km. We’re go for launch.”

He briefly entered the sunlight at the upper half of his trajectory.

As he descended back into the darkness, he watched the altimeter and the variometer carefully. The flight plan was to begin the braking burn at 1 km, and even then he got pretty of wiggle room.

Finally, he settled down on the incredibly flat, featureless surface.

It wasn’t ice; he’d expected genuine water ice from the Pathfinder’s photos and scans, but what he got was, at least on the surface, more like cement. That explained the lower albedo. His bet was now on calcium hydrates with a good portion of chlorine compounds.

----------

“So, anyway, Gadfly’s a dead end,” Raygan continued.

“Well, it’s not that bad, we still have those two rift valleys and it can reach Minmus’s poles…” Jeb protested.

“And? What’s next? The payload tolerances are awful, and besides, what can one egghead do?”

“Steady on, wrench monkey! Sounds like you’re bucking for an away job.”

“Guess I am,” Raygan continued after a pause, “We’re going to build things there eventually. Besides, it’s not the only dead end in the program.”

“You know something I don’t?”

“Soon as we get back, Bill is going approach you for funding for a smaller Mainsail equivalent.”

“Well, that’s hardly unexpected. Prospectors put the Vector system to the limit.”

“Problem is, engine development from a blank slate is no small deal. Plus, he’s still labouring on how to put the Vulkan tug stage into orbit.”

“Last I heard, he’s considering an asymmetric booster. That’s uncharted waters right there, too.”

“Uncharted waters…” Raygun sighed, “What were our options for Sarnus V?”

“Direct Ascent,” Jeb began to count off, “Rugged, inefficient, pretty much not an option with our increased safety tolerances bloating the lander size.

“Kerbin Orbit Rendezvous. No considerable improvement, requires new techniques for orbital assembly.

“Munar Surface Rendezvous. Literal pipe dream – precision landing and EVA refuelling operations from a pre-placed fuel depot.

“Munar Orbit Rendezvous. What we’re doing now.

“If you try a bigger lander, you might run into payload stability problems…”

“Why do we have to launch together?” Raygan interjected as soon as Jeb paused for breath.

“Because… You’re proposing that we preplace the lander into Munar orbit and rendezvous twice?”

“I don’t see a problem there. Plus, if we apply our new safety methods, removing the lander from the manned launch is an immense improvement,” Raygan rattled off, “And MSR is rubbish only because that fuel is hauled from Kerbin anyway.”

“You’re proposing wilderness refuelling?” Jeb blinked.

“We’ll have to start somewhere sooner or later!”

----------

After an hour of work, Slava had barely scratched the surface of the flats, but what he was seeing was already confirming the new hypothesis. He’d scratched enough samples to work with. Although now he had to wonder where such a bizarre moon had come from.

The sun was blinding. It turned out that the mist that Pathfinder had supposedly spotted was yet another lie; this further reinforced the model of Minmus as a rock-ice pile coated in enough protective salts to stave off the heat.

The tremors were certainly there, but they were far from what he’d imagined. Back in the lander he’d confirmed that they continued throughout the night, detectable from the other side of the small moon.

“Away team to Hermes, how copy?” he finally said.

“Good copy, we’re approximately one hour away from the terminator, how’s the trip going?”

“Site 1’s giving me good data. I’m preparing to jump back to base and then go into the northern bay.”

With daylight, the navigation was slightly simplified, but the portable altimeter remained a crucial improvement to these jumps.

He'd plopped down next to the tiny lander, the weak gravity giving Yaroslav pretty of leeway for manoeuvring. There was no need for repressurization, and long coasts in freefall passed as breaks; he just had to start the drill and swap out the peroxide bottle.

On introspection, the newly-designated Sinus Stridentia did look like a bay. Originally, not unlike Mun’s mare, Mimus’s flats were believed to be seas. Ultimately, they probably flowed, if slowly – the qualities of hydrates under vacuum obviously were never studied. The absence of craters would also have to be explained later on.

Right at the moment, the flats were giving Kermanov attitude and stubbornly resisted having a flag planted in them. He had to spin it using the flag holder as a crank, drilling into the damned cement.

----------

“Hermes, away team, requesting ascent solution,” Yaroslav said into the radio, before getting back to the spectral read-outs, attempting to divine whether or not they were mostly Chamosite.

“Away team, Hermes, stand by to receive, over,” Jeb responded.

----------

Gadfly may have been obsolete before it was launched, but the program went into full swing anyway – another Munar landing mission blasted off, with the crew slapped together from available hands: Eilphie, Kathula and Roszie. Two of them had been part of the original Mimus mission, while Roszie hadn’t left Kerbin orbit.

Eil was dropped off in her lander atop the transfer stage.

This time the plan was to use the Tunguska for as long as possible to conserve the lander’s fuel.

The stage was ejected barely a kilometre above the surface, and rammed into the wall of the target crater.

The flight program began with the first EVA, aimed at initial exploration of the LZ.

The LZ itself was at the southern rim of the north-west impact basin, recessed by several hundred meters relative to most of the crater floor.

“Basalt, basalt, basalt, and… basalt,” Eilphie remarked, looking around herself at the dark surface with occasional insets of impact products. The previously negotiated name for the area was Vallis Fortuna, but as she tried to stick a flag into it, the name didn’t seem too fitting.

----------

“We’re dark on the rock,” Special Agent Kirrim Kerman remarked to himself, checking his holster, “Mission is a go.”

Edited August 19, 2016 by DDE

[DDE]

Chapter 17: Yarrrr!

“Away team, Hermes, how copy? Kath, please check our position, can’t get through to Eil.”

“We’re in LOS. How’s the high-gain?”

“CAPCOM, Hermes, how copy?”

“Good copy, Hermes,” Gene responded.

“CAPCOM, Hermes, be advised, observing fault in Communotron 16. No response from the away team, no squawk from the lander…”

----------

Eilphie was quite busy digging through the thin layer of munar dust. The crater was clearly younger than the basalt flooding the region, and there was quite a bit of ejecta and candidate meteorite fragments. Briefly, she glanced back at the lander.

Nah, she was seeing things, she thought. This was not new – suit overheating and overdose of adrenaline were some of the problems outlined back in the Academy.

Except that the lander’s rockets proceeded to reignite and throw up a cloud of dust.

“Wha…” was the only thing Eilphie managed to mouth.

The lander blasted off, ripping the drill head off in the process.

“Wha… what?” Eilphie continued, the gravity of the situation slowly dawning on her.

She was ten million miles away from home, with less than six hours of life support and no way of escape. About to have her slow death broadcast on live television.

Her hyperventilation was steaming up the helmet. Maybe she should start by removing that thing. Get over with it.

The thin crescent of Kerbin would hover above her. Forever.

How did that guy got to the Mun anyway, she idly wondered.

“On a rocket, dummy!” she shouted at herself, and began to erratically scan the bottom of the crater around her.

----------

Rosgrid smacked the beeping console.

“Got a squawk from the Gadfly’s docking radar.”

“Good, she’s coming in. Set transponder to beacon mode.”

----------

Eil ran, stumbling, for well over a kilometre. Mun rocks were fairly smooth boulders, in spite of lack of erosion; an artificial object was thus quite distinct from afar – once you began to look for one specifically.

Her suspicions were only reinforced as she got close. The white conical propulsive stage of the Athens bogie, topped off by a Moho capsule sporting a whacking big radio antenna – and a Kermerican flag on the side.

Typical government equipment, she thought. The ladder only began near her nose, and a pull-up while wearing a spacesuit was no trivial task.

Finally, she got up to the return vehicle. With another pull-up she managed to place herself into the seat, and surveyed the interior.

It did look like the old Moho with several updated computers slapped on top of old avionics. Like the rest of Mohos, it had no short-sleeve life support, but standard suit umbilicals.

“Enter personal access code,” one of them demanded, with a small interface option reading “Emergency override.”

Since Eilphie regretfully could not drag the hijacker back there and beat the password out of him, she clicked on that one, and paused.

Government tech.

It had to be obvious.

Naturally, it had to be stupid.

“00000000,” she tapped.

“Override accepted,” the capsule responded.

Quickly, she got to the radio controls. The radio was set to loop a noise track. Ingenious.

“Mayday! Mayday!” she managed to bark into the radio before being shut off by a coughing fit.

“This is CAPCOM, come again?”

“It’s the away team. One of Fitz’s guys got here and stole my lander,” Eil announced with unexpected, frightening serenity.

“And where you’d be?” Gene responded with icy calm.

“Oh, I’ve just stolen his ship, it has a model 32 radio with some sort of interference generator,” she said, reaching under her seat.

“Interrogative: have you checked for the self-destruct charge?”

“You mean the blast pack I’ve just chucked overboard?”

----------

“Hermes, CAPCOM, cease docking procedures and initiate departure immediately!”

“Say again?”

“The lander has been compromised. You are to avoid capture by the hostile element onboard.”

“What the krak is that supposed to mean?” Rosgrid exploded.

“Fitz,” Kath responded quietly.

----------

Eilphie was very busy trying to remember everything she’d known about Moho’s flight computers. All she’d gotten thus far was lock the door and engage the external lights.

----------

“You sent them off without checking if it’s a DA?” Bill asked Gene, and shook his head.

“Away team, come in.”

“Good copy.”

“Tell me what you see.”

“An AR-202 flight computer suite with some sort of supplemental blocking mechanisms on top of it. Status diagram says it’s an ‘XF-2 Protector’. It’s a Moho capsule with an electronics bay on top, mounted on a conical Terrier stage…”

“Stop.”

“…yeah?”

“Input V06N24E.”

“Ok, it’s reporting guidance star acquisition.”

“Good, give it thirty seconds, then send command V01N45E and make sure it goes into Major Program 105.”

“And what would that be?”

“Before Sarnus, we planned to take Moho to the Mun. It’s the leftover autoreturn program.”

The Terrier fired unexpectedly.

“It’s working, it’s working!”

“Protector, Flight, confirming good entry trajectory…

“You’re foolish to think you’ve seen the last of us,” an unfamiliar male voice butted in.

“All callsigns, go to channel 3-2-0,” Bill announced, before shoving the microphone into the speaker.”

He waited for a minute before resuming comms.

“Eil, I need you to go on EVA and snap as many images of the vehicle as you can.”

----------

“I told him it’s a bad idea,” the agent growled, weighing his options. The smashed-up radio sparked incessantly.

The lander had about half the ΔV required for a landing. That left him with one other option. He burned what was left of the fuel, changing the inclination significantly.

Then he opened the door and kicked free of the lander.

Without the lander, he still had a chance. He had four cans of nitromethane in case the Hermes tried to evade his boarding attempt at close range, and he intended to use all of them.

He’d miscalculated. The landing was bone-jarring.

Somehow Kirrim managed to roll without breaking anything.

“I hate this job.”

He got up, and dusted off. One of the monoprop cans had been jarred loose and lay beside him. He kicked in, and it burst open and zipped away.

He had known perfectly well where he was headed, and 500 m was pretty good accuracy. He glanced at what all this fuss was about before boarding his backup ship.

----------

----------

“She’s coming in,” Gene noted.

“Flight, Protector, RV sep, over and out.”

They were crazy to plan to go to Mun by Moho, she thought, having spent five hours strapped in a seat and unable to take her helmet off.

“Flight, SAR, LZ confirmed.”

“Copy that,” Val responded wearily, “Tower, send up the Gull.”

“Acknowledged. Gull, bolter.”

“Full throttle, Tower.”

“Boosters in three, two, one, ignition!”

“Seagull, Tower, confirming RATO jettison, proceed to heading two-six-zero.”

----------

----------

President Fitz Kerman was back at the Emerald House, and quite busy. Billions needed management and misplacement. Pesky genii were busy exploring nearby stellar bodies, poking their noses into where they needn’t…

The intercom set into his desk buzzed.

“Yes,” he yelled into it.

“Jebediah Kerman at the front gate.”

“Take care of him!” the Kermerican president responded, and stuck his nose back into the paperwork.

There was a pistol shot outside, making him sit up sharply. When he told the agents to handle him, he didn’t quite mean ‘shoot to kill’.

There were yet more blasts of gunfire, along with slight sizzling and what sounded like cracks of lightning. Then, a deafening silence.

A very pale-faced agent ran in, shut and locked the door behind him, and took position behind the corner, weapon drawn.

In less than half a minute, the lock exploded inwards, showering Fitz – who remained had remained seated in mounting alarm – with splinters of the door, which was then kicked inwards.

Jebediah Kerman marched in. The last agent standing promptly fired at him, dead centre, only for the bullet to turn into a shower of sparks. Jeb, in turn, casually raised a bizarre weapon with a barrel perforated along its entire length, sending a shot that hit the opponent with crackles of lightning. He keeled over.

“So, Mr. Kerman, I believe that recent events require a statement on my part,” Jeb proclaimed icily, pulling a spare chair across the room, clambering onto it, and putting his boots on Fitz’s table.

“You tried to get three of my people killed,” he spat out, before abruptly checking his watch.

“And what do you expect to hear?” Fitz responded, his voice an octave too high due to the pistol at Jeb’s side.

“What I’m going to hear later this evening is ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’, but the time is yet to come.

“What I want you to hear is that there are consequences when mere mortals try to fight someone who has an eye in the sky. The future belongs to us, Fitz, and you’re helpless to stop it.

“Oh, and among other things you can’t stop is the evening news!” Jeb grinned, edging towards the television without letting the President out of sight.

“…today, Channel One can exclusively report on the recently revealed information,” the usually hysterical Judy Kerman screeched, “Based on anonymously leaked information from within the Office of the President, President Fitz Kerman has utilized a portion of the acquisition funding secured for the Sarnus and Sewage Interface Collation Kits programs to purchase a 600-bedroom apartment complete with an underground airstrip…”

“The bit with the five mistresses is near the end,” the spaceman chuckled.

As Fitz lunged at him, Jeb squeezed off three more rockets.

[DDE]

Interlude: Spoils of War

“Flux weld along the edge,” Val observed, standing back up, “How thick do you reckon is this door?”

“Standard door fortified against atomic blast. Steel armourplate around ferroconcrete layer,” one of Bill’s contractors from KADB, a massive guy with a thick accent, responded, “Total up to one meter.”

“Well… we can go back and try to descend through the vents… What are you doing?”

“Fluorine-magnesium torch. Very hot. Should stand back.”

“Gas! Gas! Gas!” Valentina shouted before ducking behind the nearest corner and pulling on her gas mask. Bill’s engine design exploits produced such “torches” – as well as new types of high explosives – on a regular basis. She still remembered the two-thousand-yard stare of an intern whom he’d made burn dicyanoacetylene with concentrated ozone; the engine’s steady-state chamber temperature clocked in at a whopping 6000 K.

Kermanov’s hellfire projector lit up and began to burn through the door, with fountains of sparks, small explosions, and a massive cloud of hydrofluoric acid fumes. The door was reduced to slag in under a minute, and Val moved in, her ‘hand-held semi-automatic flare rocket launcher’ at the ready.

----------

Jeb marched into the tiny office next to Flagship Mission Control, and began to pin the fresh photographs onto the board. Eilphie was cuddled up under a blanket in the spinning chair; they’d been unable to part her with the water bottle after the six-hour suited flight.

“So?”

“Well…” Bill drawled, looking at the photograph, “I have to agree with our prodigal geologist here. That is a Moho with a specialist electronics package on top of it. The propulsive stage has a Terrier underneath. Ladder on one side, the landing radar and optics package on the other – here, under the interstage. In the skirt… wide-angle and narrow-angle spotlights, battery banks and…”

“The finned canisters,” Jeb added, “Any guess what those are?”

“There are no photocells, so, by exclusion, that would be the power source. Radiator fins mean plenty of waste heat, so it’s a thermoelectric system rather than a chemical one… We worked on something like this. Thermocouples with the gradient maintained through heat of blutonium decay. Stable power output for decades.”

“Great, I’ve scattered two of them all over the western desert,” Eil complained from where she was sitting.

“Don’t…” Jeb began.

“…be so sure,” Bill interrupted, “They’re bound to be pretty solidly encased, and the stage’s conical shape makes it quite likely they ended up out of the worst heat. They’re probably pancaked in some random dune.”

“We have to suspend all long-ranged manned flights indefinitely,” Jeb blurted out.

“Why?” Eil protested.

“Look what we’ve got!” Val announced, shouldering her way through the door, before almost crushing through the table with a blutonium generator.

“How many?” Bill asked.

“A dozen, plus a hundred empty ones and storage cases. They had a full reactor set-up in there.”

Jeb moaned.

“What?”

“These mean Fitz had far bigger plans than I thought. They can power any sort of surprizes. We can’t even survive a night on the Mun? Well, these kept the Protector powered and prevented it from freezing. Until we manage to dig through absolutely everything Fitz’s people have left behind, I can’t let anyone go beyond LKO.”

“Well, that’s gonna be a problem,” Val responded, “We’ve found pretty big piles of ashes where their data cabinets used to be.”

Jeb exhaled loudly.

“What else?”

“Three spare Protectors. Some parts from the Athens bogie. Three brand-new booster types. One was just a clustering of Dachshunds, but the other two used a weird four-nozzle motor with integrated verniers. Best we can tell, the Protector was launched on a trio of them.”

“What’s the third?”

“Looks like they were trying to cook up a propulsive landed LKO ship… trying being the key word.”

“Can we use the new engine?” Jeb interrupted.

“Flox-70,” Val smiled.

“What?”

“A 30-70 mixture of liquid oxygen and liquid fluorine. Doesn’t require replacing the plumbing, pretty much the optimal oxidizer for kerosene, but there’s a lot of strong acid in the exhaust,” Bill explained.

“Whoa,” Jeb exclaimed, “That’s some terrifying commitment.”

Edited August 21, 2016 by DDE

[DDE]

Dear readers, today I have a question to address to you.

The Mk2 Hermes variant, supposed to act as the workhorse ship for my space stations for the foreseeable future, has rather inexplicably stopped working. I'm currently unable to identify the source of the issue, but basically the whacking big SRB is no longer delivering the hydrolox stage to a necessary altitude; as the whole thing was built with very tight dV tolerances, the result is ugly.

There are two ways out of this. I can clip a few more SRBs into it to have it working again. As an alternative, I've already slapped together a working "modernized" version with extra boosters.

Which one would you like to see?

[insert_name]

26 minutes ago, DDE said:

Dear readers, today I have a question to address to you.

The Mk2 Hermes variant, supposed to act as the workhorse ship for my space stations for the foreseeable future, has rather inexplicably stopped working. I'm currently unable to identify the source of the issue, but basically the whacking big SRB is no longer delivering the hydrolox stage to a necessary altitude; as the whole thing was built with very tight dV tolerances, the result is ugly.

There are two ways out of this. I can clip a few more SRBs into it to have it working again. As an alternative, I've already slapped together a working "modernized" version with extra boosters.

Which one would you like to see?

I think the modernized one sounds better, and less likely to explode due to clipped srbs

[DDE]

1 hour ago, insert_name said:

I think the modernized one sounds better, and less likely to explode due to clipped srbs

M'kay. Prep the gas masks, RealPlume gives the Skipper an unhealthy exhaust colour similar to the Dachshund.

[DDE]

Chapter 18 suspended indefinitely due to Steam screenshots refusing to embed, for some reason. Won't start looking for now until I hear from the mods.

EDIT: Yep, it's a forum update.

Edited August 27, 2016 by DDE

[DDE]

Chapter 18: What You Are in the Dark

“Jeb! Oh, great, you’re still here!”

“What happened to knocking?” Jeb growled. He was essentially sitting on packed suitcases; the next week would be spent into quarantine, and a very energetic Val barging in risked becoming the victim of pent-up ire.

“Got a pet project to sell to you.”

“You’ve beefed up the Darter?”

“Think higher.”

----------

“We’re calling this thing the Crocoduck. We had to combine a reinforced airframe and two small jets with a conventional rocket tank for the liquid oxygen, and a thruster array.”

“I see you’ve clustered everything near the tail,” Jeb noted, touching the tips of the stubby wings.

“Yeah, this keeps it stable despite all the mass redistribution during the main engine burn, forward visibility be damned. It’s a bit wobbly in subsonic flight, but it can land on any reasonably flat area. And the auxiliary jets will keep it flying for almost half an hour.”

“And the internals?”

“Ground ingress-egress through the hatches in the aft. Two seats in the cockpit. Life support gear in the side bays. If we get greedy, we can cram some cargo into the tunnel through the nose.”

“Tunnel?”

“Hey, Terigh! Open up!”

“Docking port? In the most aerodynamically loaded portion of the hull?”

“That from the guy who’s put a hatch in the middle of a ballistic heat shield!”

“OK… What are you asking for?”

“Need a first-stage booster for the horizontal ascent, but Orion’s going to have that covered,” Val rattled off without skipping a bit, “We’re counting on RTGs for on-board power and heat. But most of all I need Bill’s expertise in completing the rocket motor.”

“And what is the problem, exactly?”

“I need to turn twelve engine nozzles into a vacuum-restartable rocket, probably with plasma ignition, and I need a better turbopump.”

“What exactly have you been cooking there?” Jeb asked after a pause.

“Oh, nothing, just a carbon-carbon regeneratively-cooled truncated aerospike motor that you’re absolutely going to need for Eve landers.”

“The only thing I’m hoping you’re not going to defect and start yet another space program.”

Valentina feigned a pause for thought before grinning.

----------

“Hermes, FAO, proceed with removal of unit 142 from rack 2B. We’re only thirty seconds ahead of schedule.”

“Network, do we have a link with the ship yet?” Gene Kerman asked, slowly and with clarity.

“Negative, Flight, the flight computer is being uncooperative. You should get Jenrick to flip the switch again.”

“Alright, FIDO, hold onto that descent program.”

“Spacecraft separation confirmed. Five meters… ten meters… second thrust pulse… twenty meters… Reorient for retroburn.”

----------

“I have to reiterate again: this is nothing more than an endurance test mission. We want to see if the life support breaks down, or if we die due to microgravity health complications – or due to boredom – and we want to test it within range of a fully outfitted medical lab and one hour away from landing.”

With Walt back and Yaroslav kicking out the complete imbeciles, the press conference would have gone easier for Jeb. However, in addition to that, the crew was already in quarantine, and so the frothing mob of paper-wasters was separated from them by a hermetic glass partition, and had to share one microphone to communicate. Hence the level of pressure was kept at bay.

“So, when are you going to Duna?” a reporter with slightly less dullness in his eyes than usual asked.

“Transfer windows force us to stick to a schedule; the next one is in roughly a hundred days; the next one for Eve is in about a year. As our schedule stands, the nearest transfer windows will be used by pairs of Orion orbital probes; the manned fly-bys are at least two windows away. Manned landings are still in the conceptual phase, as we have next to no requisite information on our destinations.”

“Could you elaborate on the Orion probes?”

“Bob, you’re up,” Jeb noted, passing the mike and making a mental note to get that reporter whitelisted.

“The Orion is an unmanned probe as well as a dedicated intermediate booster system, composed of the first, upper and deep-space orbital injection stages. The probe itself carries the solar power systems used on Beacon satellites, as well as a matching radio system. The scientific payload is composed of a plasma and radio analysis complex, gravimetric and solar flux sensors, a multispectral scanning complex and a radar altimetry mapping array.”

“Don’t rattle off when reading your cribs,” Jeb quietly suggested.

----------

“Bill, Bob, last chance to scrub the mission,” Jeb noted as the gantry crew locked the hatch in front of him.

There was no respond.

“CAPCOM, confirming fairing seal. Three minutes to gantry retract, say confirm?”

“Guidance computers booting. Two minutes.”

The Vulkan’s design was a major departure from the use of a Launch Escape System found on the Hermes ships. The RV lacked the necessary armature interface, and the parachute system had been rebuilt. So, they had to hope the first-stage engines would be polite enough to shut down when prompted – rather than explode.

The faring was ejected soon after the Tunguska stage kicked in.

“CAPCOM, confirming upper stage separation. Docking radar marks closest approach to target at four-zero-zero.”

“Bill?”

“OMS is at nominal, we’re ready for the retroburn.”

“A’ight, CAPCOM, we’re proceeding with opening the hatch.”

Jeb floated upwards, and folded his seat. The hatch was at the bottom, of the quick-acting type, with eight dogs driven by the central handwheel. The whole crew had already donned the usual anti-debris masks and goggles; the fans in the RV were already active, but its LS systems were kept in reserve.

The habitation module had slightly dimmed lights, and filled with stowed equipment. The smell of plastic was more overwhelming than usual.

Bill floated all the way to the aft bulkhead, and began to engage the whole life support array.

Jeb checked the watch; they had under thirty minutes.

“Bill, brace, burning in twenty!” Jeb shouted. The OMS, with its two twin angled Spark engines, had quite the kick.

Another pair of burns cut the distance to within 150 m.

Jeb then engaged the RCS jets and the docking autopilot. There were grunts in the habitat compartment as Bill clutched the handhold.

The mechanical grip of the soft docking ring was quite audible. The ship spun slightly, and hard dock was achieved. The pressurized crew tunnel then extended from the station, connecting with another series of clicks and growls.

“CAPCOM, this is Athens station. Clocking in for one year, proceeding with internal hatch opening,” Jeb announced, watching Bill pull the bicycle out of its stowing space in the aft crew tunnel.

----------

Piraeus station was launched the following night. There were no changes to the booster compared to Athens.

----------

The first Piraeus expedition finally matched Jeb’s roster: Alpha crew, with Kath as a pilot-engineer and two scientists, Jesla the botanist and Allock the biologist.

----------

With Jeb largely out of the picture for a year – he had loaded up with astrodynamics textbooks – Gene was settling into his role as The Boss. He was looming over the administration meeting, looking particularly grim.

“The Hermes experienced thrust issues on the way up,” he began, “It seems that the MAXX has somewhat underperformed and as a result the upper stage suffered significant slow-down early in the burn. We had to abort-to-orbit using the ship’s own engines, and are cutting pretty close on the dV budget as a result.”

“None of that was on the TV feed,” Val complained immediately.

“We’re keeping it under wraps for now, with the usual editing trickery,” Walt piped up.

“Unfortunately it’s largely impossible to diagnose SRBs. I’ve ordered the three SRBs we have in the inventory to be fired on the test rig. In the meanwhile, I believe we should try to improve the rest to the vehicle to accommodate for any anomalies. My preliminary calculations show that we can replace the hydrolox stage with an equally-sized Skipper stage while only slightly enhancing the MAXX with additional solids.”

“The Skipper? Isn’t that the Poodle’s high-thrust predecessor?”

“Mostly, yes. It uses non-cryogenic fuel, thus greatly simplifying our logistics.”

“But before that we’ll need to pull a very old motor with toxic fuel out of storage and adapt it for modern use. Maybe we should just cut the fuel load on the Hermes?”

Val’s objections were interrupted by an emergency klaxon.

After the depleted staff ran out, the source of the emergency was quite apparent: a massive orange-hot plume was blasting out of the top of the hydrogen storage reservoir. The thermite flares were mounted around the emergency pressure release valve to prevent a whacking massive explosive cloud from forming.

“If you back me up, I’ll have your back on your spaceplane design,” Gene quietly noted, without looking in Val’s direction.

“I knew it!” Gus announced, managing to make it to the cryo plant and back in under three minutes, “Somebody stole the catalyst. All of the orthohydrogen made it to the tank when we refilled it after the Hermes launch. It decayed and released heat until the emergency valve fired. Now this is definitely sabotage.”

No coherent thoughts were aired after this news.

----------

“Alright, Terigh, are we good?” Val asked, glancing over her shoulder.

“LOx pressure at nominal. For now. Make up your mind already.”

“Do you want to back out?”

“No!”

“Tower, permission to blast off?”

“You’re clear.”

Val started the gas generators spooling the turbopumps. Then she waited as the noise from the machinery grew.

Then the main engine fired.

This was no airplane. The acceleration was instant, there was no spool-up. Val simply pulled the stick, and the Crocoduck obediently pulled up.

She threw it into a sharp turn. The rocket allowed aerodynamic manoeuvring she would have avoided in an air-breathing plane.

Finally, she settled the plane into a 45° upwards pitch, headed north.

The motor cut out two minutes into flight, after tossing the plane to about 30 km altitude.

Val disengaged the automatic stabilization, and gently pitched over for descent.

The plane began to pick up speed. Terigh watched the capacitors on the ignition system charge up, and then engaged the jets.

She watched the RPM climb, and realized that Val has gunned throttle. She was slowly levelling out, and it seemed she was intent on not going straight back to the KSC.

“Val?”

“Landing on any random flat area, right?”

There was rumbling as the landing gear deployed.

“VAL!?”

Spoiler

PSA: Used Imgur for this one; thanks to those guys for hosting my stuff free of charge, but I'd rather keep my eggs in fewer baskets. Plus its uploading system is sloppy - the sequence of images is not maintained.

 

Edited August 27, 2016 by DDE

[DaMachinator]

Hmm...The Sun-Praisers' Aerospace Agency might be able to conjure up some defense systems, mostly related to tungsten carbide rod clusters with a deorbit engine packing enough Delta-V to neutralize surface-relative velocity from high polar orbit...

[DDE]

On ‎28‎.‎08‎.‎2016 at 3:56 PM, DaMachinator said:

Hmm...The Sun-Praisers' Aerospace Agency might be able to conjure up some defense systems, mostly related to tungsten carbide rod clusters with a deorbit engine packing enough Delta-V to neutralize surface-relative velocity from high polar orbit...

Hold your horses! All their base are belong to Jeb, so you won't be hearing from them for quite a while.

[DDE]

Hi all,

Currently I'm busy elsewhere. However, I understand that there is a disturbance in the code coming up. To that, my response is

"C:\Games\Kerbal Space Program 1.1.3\KSP_x64.exe" %command% -popupwindow

Courtesy of @Manwith Noname or however the guy with that handle on Steam goes by here.

Stay unsafe and play 1.1.3!

 

[DDE]

Chapter 19: There and Back Again, Sharpish

The empty snack wrapper tumbled in the middle of the module, slowly drifting to its impending doom at the fan filters.

The hatch to Athens was closed but not sealed; their next visit would be in two weeks, to run a battery of medical tests – ECG, blood work, et cetera. The Vulkan had half the habitable space of Athens alone, and had to run on a maritime eight-hour watch schedule because Mission Control would be on the wrong side of fifteen-minute lightspeed lag during the real mission; that meant the trunk would be noisy – Bob was hammering away on the bike at the time – but only one bunk would be needed, which is why the flight stations in the RV were partially dismantled to turn it into a common sleeping space.

"Alpha Actual, come in, launch cleared, payload approaching in five," the radio speaker on the bulkhead suddenly spat out.

----------

"Copy that, Flight. Expedition 1 standing by to receive Intern-1."

Piraeus was roughly 1/5 of a revolution ahead of Athens, so they both got a decent look of the Vector boosters briefly careening over the night side of Kerbin before being replaced by the invisible blast of a Chelyabinsk upper stage.

"Flight, Alpha One here, tell Pad and Booster it's a good shoot, Intern is at 35 km and I can see the hydrogen venting from here."

"Stand by for terminal approach, Alpha."

It all took under a minute. Kath watched as the dot rapidly grew on the docking periscope until she snapped away. The small cylinder festooned with manoeuvring thrusters was racing in at over 100 m/s relative velocity, yet slipped into position with uncanny perfection.

"Alpha, Flight, INCO confirms guidance lock, beginning docking approach."

The cylinder lazily tumbled over and began to creep towards the station's ventral docking port. Excessive thruster power ensured it stuck to the letter of the standard approach pattern. It docked effortlessly, the contact barely sensible aboard the larger craft.

"Jesla! Confirm!" Kath shouted down the hatch.

"Hard dock!" she heard echo down from where the resident botanist was inspecting one of the fist-sized airlocks that allowed retrieving samples though a 0.625 m docking collar mounted atop the materials science package, which sat on a heat shield and interstage followed by an expendable propulsion pack.

----------

"This is still a very bad idea," Terigh complained as they stepped off the elevator.

"I know, right!" snapped Val. She had to get it done anyway; Gene had pressured her into not only backing the Skipper for Hermes flights, but to also test the captured Kermerican engine, dubbed Bollard, on herself rather than as part of Gene's precious Orion probes.

But it paid off handsomely. The Crocoduck hung beneath her, redubbed B8 Carrack and mated to its booster. It would have probably been possible to replace it with a mess of strap-ons and drop tanks, but there was beautiful simplicity in the design. The drag from the stubby-winged spaceplane was countered by the oversized grid fins retrofitted aftwards. The four-nozzle first stage engine was coupled with integrated verniers to grant even more control authority.

However, this wasn't the first flight; the aerospike had not been upgraded to service standard yet. Gene had pressured Val into performing a "powered pitcharound" abort test before the proper orbital engine was provided.

She followed Terigh down the tunnel in the nose, to the cockpit almost two storeys below. She knew why Gene was trying to stonewall her. Not only was he busy settling old grievances with several pieces of tech he and Jeb had disagreed on, but the Carrack risked rendering the Hermes obsolete if a bigger version could be built.

The new engine worked marvellously, not exploding on start-up as one would expect from government hardware. The rocket bobbed slightly before the fins dropped open and the autopilot adjusted trim.

A major issue with having a massive first stage is that as it empties, the acceleration mounts. The abort was to take place at 2.6 g and above 30 km. The first stage handled a large portion of the downrange acceleration.

Val watched the seconds to staging click down, her arm hovering above the abort handle. Finally, seconds before the Bollard ran out of fuel, she pulled it.

A Rabbit sounding rocket motor, recessed under the liquid oxygen tank fired, and as the spaceplane separated from the booster, the asymmetric thrust flipped it over.

Val felt herself crushed into a slurry and pressed out of the cockpit through a tiny crack. Terigh's wail suggested a similar sensation.

Slowly the senses came back, first of them the sound of the attitude control jets clacking as they kept the spaceplane level but backwards.

Then she was almost knocked out again as the aerospike kicked in.

Valentina finally managed to shake off the minor concussion, and focus on the airspeed indicator. The analog one was thoroughly busted due to the inverted position, but the telemetry furiously counted down the metres per second. The Crocoduck had enough onboard delta-vee to reverse the downrange velocity and get back to KSC.

"Cut off in five, four, three, two, one... Engine out!"

"Dumping fuel," growled the voice behind her.

They did end up briefly passing the 69 km mark before falling back.

The airframe groaned as they began a ballistic descent. The attitude controls got overwhelmed around 20 km, and Val broke through the cloud deck above the KSC at half a kilometer per second.

"They definitely know we're alive now!" Val laughed as she levelled out the plane, "Tower, this is Carrack, I'm coming around for a second pass. Clear the strip, we're coming in hot. Terigh, kick in the jets."

----------

Heimdall became the second project to feel Gene's ire. The good news was that it got pushed to completion in record time. The bad news that it was being used to test the Skipper upper stage. The really bad news was that Gene had axed the station part of the Heimdall, so it was just a reactor core with a parachute, a propulsion bus, and a docking collar.

Hence the record speed.

Val watched the tall, all-white rocket blast off from a few kilometres away. The flagging MAXX didn't need the extra boosters for that mission. Nor were there any surprises in store while the SRB did its job.

It wasn't that the Skipper was unreliable. But it was Dachshund's equally toxic big brother that got a bad rep during Val's years in KASA. Gene had good reasons to like it, though: Tunguska was an upper stage engine that couldn't haul a fully fuelled Hermes to orbit, and couldn't entirely carry the stage for first half a minute of the burn. This used to be tolerable back when the MAXX did its job of tossing properly.

The Skipper, on the other hand, was a rugged hypergolic upper stage engine that had no trouble lifting itself, a payload and its much heavier fuel, if one could live with the unhealthily brownish exhaust trail, and could be stored fuelled and ready for firing for decades.

The Skipper burnt almost all the way to the fumes before shutting down. Then the coast to high orbit circularization burn began, and the reactor test bed began deployment, stretching out its solid-state radiator petals.

Team Heimdall got downgraded to manning an extra console with the LOC mission control team, but seemed horridly intent to get their job done right.

"Reactor control drums to boost... Neutron flux increasing, power generation nominal."

Should something go sideways, the spacecraft would eject the reactor core, equipped with a an aeroshield and a parachute package. Long and slender, it would stabilize itself upon entry, and produce enough drag to crash-land relatively safely even should the chutes malfunction.

"Neutron flux at nominal, confirming criticality, control drums to steady, engage automatic controls. Heimdall is operational."

Val let out a breath. She was not exactly looking forward to recovering that one.

----------

Gene was chewing methodically, staring into his food tray in the quietest and fanciest of KSC's three canteens, ferociously defended from both the pad crews and the academy cadets.

Val smashed down her food tray in front of him, and began to eat while making an exaggerated effort not to notice his existence.

"I'm not the enemy, Val," he finally muttered, annoyed.

"Doesn't really sound like it from where I am," she began, "'Trailblazer's going to render y'all flyboys obsolete'?"

"Linus's words, not mine."

"But it's indicative of what your probe team thinks. You've axed Heimdall and you've just created an excuse to drag your heels on the Hornet."

"Dammit, Val," Gene grimaced - for the first time in a month or so, "you think it's a giant conspiracy to 'axe' the manned program?

"You're a hotshot, I've always known that. Even Jeb knows he can't make it to Duna on duct tape and guile, and even then anything the Vulkan can do a small probe like Orion can do much better. We need slow, incremental development, and with everything groundbreaking on Mun and Minmus done we can't just keep going around manned with mallets needlessly. Hornet, once done, will give us the ability to set up permanent camp, and Vulkan paves the way to other planets. Until then, we've got to cut costs and play it safe, so probes it is."

Valentina's stare in response was withering. The next twenty seconds were only interrupted by munching sounds from other tables.

"Guess I'll be a cost-cutting hotshot then," she chirped unexpectedly, pulled out a slightly crumpled sheet of paper, slapped it on the table, and stormed off with a half-full tray.

Gene Kerman knew better than to touch the note on the table. He reached into the inner waistcoat pocket, and pulled out a mirror on a telescoping handle - a relic of his days in nuclear reactor testing. Using it as the next best thing to a hazmat suit, he spun the paper around.

It was a launch sequence diagram. And it was distinct by the whole vehicle taking off an airstrip, and the first stage coming back from upper atmosphere. It was an airplane launch – right up Val's alley.

----------

The first of the heavy Trailblazer probes was destined for Mun’s northern basin in hopes of finding evidence of ancient volcanic activity on a strip of terrain not resurfaced by major impactors. It also tested hazard avoidance and lateral correction thrusters.

Upon landing, the probe sprouted a magnetometer boom, while the drill dug into the ground to provide samples for the on-board spectroscope. It really could do more than a Gadfly.

[DDE]

Chapter 20: To Infinity and Beyond

“Simple heating is still less efficient than electrostatic,” Bill retorted, launching his notebook towards Jeb.

Jeb looked up from Fundamentals of Astrodynamics and Applications, spotted the notebook – with the pen naturally attached to it using a safety line – and then made a clumsy attempt to grab the pen and slingshot the notebook back at Bill, instead virtually stopping it mid-air.

“Yeah, good luck scavenging enough solar power to ionise and then expel, without lugging around a nuclear reactor suitable for direct heating,” he grumbled, “And besides, how long did it took your prototype to burn through the anode?”

Bill was supposedly too busy digging through a reference table binder to respond.

It was mission day 170. All systems were holding fast. The space program had fully entered the long haul stage. The second Trailblazer landing at Minmus’s north pole revealed nothing particularly interesting.

The darker surface had more hydrated silicates than chlorinates, that was it.

----------

Kath barely dodged Allock as the two eggheads, as homesick as she was, ping-ponged between equipment racks.

“Alpha-1, Flight, we need a confirmation for cast-off.”

“30 seconds, Flight,” she muttered, pulling off a checklist clipboard hanging next to the hatch of the tiny airlock.

“LOC, pressure seal released, flight computer up, you have the stick.”

She knew that outside, the Intern’s science bay doors were being welded shut as it thrusted clear of the station. The retroburn would then send the upper half of it back to Kerbin for groundside inspection.

Other samples, most notable the lettuce, would remain on-board, which had Jesla the plant girl going bananas.

It didn’t quite cross Kath’s mind that this was still the first real mission of a Mk 2 Hermes; space was getting oddly routine.

----------

For Valentina Kerman, though, spaceflight was anything but ordinary.

“Booster?”

“Go.”

“Network?”

“Go.”

“Eecom?”

“Clear to go, Flight.”

“Surgeon?”

There was a long yawn.

“…Go.”

“Carrack, Flight, you’re clear to go. Ignition in thirty.”

The plane-rocket hybrid blasted off without an issue. As previously, the Bollard completed the ascent and began the downrange acceleration.

The first stage cut off. With a bump, the stage and the abort rocket separated.

And then the new aerospike fired.

Val watched the m/s on the surface velocity indicator climb as Carrack’s motor worked furiously to achieve orbit. It cut off in less than a minute.

“Flight, first burn complete, on trajectory to circularization, beginning system checks.”

With solar power replaced by RTGs, the Carrack had little in the way of hull clutter. The whip antenna extended, and the attitude jet clusters popped out. And Val could clearly see one of the petals of the docking port shield open up in front of her.

They proceeded with the Hohmann, from an unusually low staging orbit of 200 km to Piraeus’s 300. Val brought the ship in for docking; manoeuvring it gave her no trouble, and visibility was quite improved.

The docking ports clamped together and locked.

“Yarr, ye scurvy space rats, prepare to be boarded!” Val shouted as Terigh unbuckled and began to float down the tunnel.

She returned two minutes later with a bunch of plastic plant pots. Val checked the hatch light and immediately initiated decoupling.

“You know,” Terigh suddenly piped up, “This in no way looks like lettuce. It’s more like…”

“Yeah?” Val echoed, cautiously withdrawing her hands from the controls.

“Salad rocket.”

----------

“Alright, Flight, we’re twenty seconds to atmo interface. Attitude nominal, oxidizer dumped, expendable cooling valves open. Over and out.”

Val watched the tongues of plasma lick at the edges of the airframe. As deceleration began and heating mounted, the leftover fuel was forced towards the bottom of the tanks, where it absorbed the heat from the ceramic underbody, boiled, and escaped out of the craft. That helped cope without an ablative heatshield.

They passed max Q, and the descent remained within acceptable parameters.

“Val, we’ve got an undershoot of about ten klicks,” Terigh announced from behind her.

“Copy that, will glide from twenty, stand by with jets.”

There were still plasma trails when she dropped the pitch hold, but they were soon replaced as the Carrack entered regular supersonic flight. Val flew over the mountain ridge with the remaining velocity, and the jets coughed to life just in time to take her over the plains of KSC’s Exclusion Zone.

The brakes on the wheels screeched as the Carrack ground to a halt less than a hundred meters into the landing strip.

So, Val had just chaperoned a happy wedding between a rocket and a plane.

----------

There were reasons why Piraeus Expedition 1 ended slightly short of the 100-day mark – Gene wanted to minimize workload for the launch team, as he needed to scavenge a full three shifts for FMC-U.

Flagship Mission Control – Unmanned.

Orion was – hopefully – going to be their next big win, aimed for Duna and Eve; the amount of stages involved, though, explained why it was developed alongside a new, medium-class booster.

Unsatisfied with a mere flyby, Jeb and Gene wanted to insert a probe into low orbit. That required an upper stage capable of being fired after a year in space, and ballooned the rest of the vehicle. The second stage had to use a Poodle for the second half of the ascent, the circularization and the transjection. An additional compact version of Chelyabinsk was on the drawing boards should a four-stage design be required.

Gene’s new crew watched as SGC controllers guided the first probe into orbit. The hand-over occurred immediately after the second burn and confirmation of successful insertion from FIDO-SGC.

“Alright, she’s ours now, thirteen minutes to TDE. Run the checks!”

“Jets, upper stage within nominal, retro stage in the green.”

“Guido, beginning star acquisition, guidance nominal.”

“PME here, checklist underway.”

“INCO, pinging Beacons via medium and high-gain, so far so good.”

“FIDO, please confirm transfer trajectory. Five minutes.”

“Flight, Jets, burn initiated, confirming thrust at nominal.”

“Roger that, guidance acquisition holding steady.”

“Thrust cut-out confirmed. FIDO?

“Stand by… confirming hyperbolic trajectory, predicted arrival into Duna SOI, closest approach at fifty thousand k.”

“Jets, Flight, dump the booster.”

“Proceeding.”

With the booster jettisoned, Orion 1 began its five-day cruise out of Kerbin’s sphere of influence.

----------

The Spacecraft Assembly and Testing was by then a dozen of separate clean rooms. Gene was strolling through it, surveying his realm. With Orion 2, he was already developing an augmented mission plan to swing behind Ike if Orion 1 attained the primary objectives.

“What is this rubbish?” he asked a bunch of Academy kids hauling what looked like a refitted metal detector.

“Electrostatic Munar dust remover,” grumbled one of them, seemingly not recognizing his boss.

Gene did not respond. The dust was a problem they’ve just been overlooking, but it wasn’t possible to overlook it on longer-term missions. Longer-term mission… multi-use laboratory… Mun orbital station?

“Gene!” he heard someone exclaim behind him. It was Yaroslav Kermanov, who had previously locked himself up in his office labouring on a doctoral thesis.

“Good thing I could grab a hold of you,” he continued, “I’ve got a proposal to augment Hornet 4. 3’s the first mission with surface hab, right? But 4 is largely a backup in case not enough data is generated.”

“…for Munside fuel production. Your point?”

“Reroute 4 to the North Pole.”

“Not even with Hornet’s high margins.”

“True, probably not enough even if you use a very high orbit as a starting point, but we can always go back to Mun Surface Rendezvous. You’re going to need precision landing and EVA fuel handling for Hornet 5 anyway.”

Gene merely hemmed in response.

----------

Three days later, Orion 1 crossed the somewhat imaginary boundary of Kerbin’s SOI.

“INCO, you ready?”

“Ready, Flight.”

“Alright, initiate Flight Mode 2.”

Orions came equipped with both an interplanetary dish matching those of Beacons as well a medium-gain dish strapped to the retro stage, just for the first five days. The procedure required the probe to flip over and switch between the two systems, losing connection to Kerbin in the process.

“INCO?”

“…got ping, connection established.”

“PME, panels?”

“Stand by… reorienting themselves as they should.”

“Alright, Science, your move.”

“PME, SOF, deploy the RPWS.”

While the planetary science packages had to wait, the tripod antenna that could detect planetary magnetic fields through their interaction with the solar wind could start its work right away.

Orion 2 followed hours later.

----------

“So, Lis, what exactly did the test for the ‘Quartermaster’ qualification entail?” Stelemma sneered as Gus’s gantry team was strapping them in.

“Careful there, Glasses, your fancy optical gear might get smeared just at the moment we run out of tissues,” the pilot fired back.

“All science is either physics or stamp collecting,” muterred Sidhat, the second scientist on Piraeus Expedition 2.