Flight to Independence

[DDE]

For those who do not frequent /r/kerbalspaceprogram, I've ran into something that would have been horrendously appropriate for Chapter 19. Props to /u/alltherobots.

Also, an admission: the IVA for Inline Mk2 clips into the 1.25m-to-Mk2 long tank, and doesn't have RPM support in whatever version I'll stick to, so yo won't be seeing any IVA porn from the Carrack.

[DDE]

Interlude: Sweepstakes

"Gene, I've just spent three hours scraping the soot from Intern 2 off the launch table. You're going to owe me so much for this..."

"Alright, alright. Open the cargo trunk.”

“Trunk’s a mess …and that spacesuit is the wrong size.”

“Remove the stakes and the mallet from the cargo compartment.”

“Why the stake, though?”

“In order to unfold the rover, you’ll need to hitch the other end to that stake, and then pull.”

“Uhm…”

“Hammer the spike in the ground.”

“Gene, I’m at the launch pad.”

“Yeah. And?”

“It’s supersteel and concrete for a few hundred meters. It’s a mallet, not a jackhammer.”

“Oh… uhm… I think I can hear the coffee pot going off.”

“Gene… Gene. Gene!”

There was silence on the other end.

“Thanks for the mallet, Gene.”

----------

“Alright, Bobak, is it?”

“Yeah, Boss?”

“I need you for a few minutes. Grab some overalls.”

“Would that entail me being set on fire, sir?”

“Nah, just assembling something according to instructions.”

----------

Gene almost jumped when the phone on his desk rang.

“Program Director.”

“Gold Lead here,” Jeb responded cheekily responded hundreds of miles above.

“Yes? Did you go over the proposal we forwarded?” Gene responded, nodding to Bobak as the latter stuck his head in.

“Yeah. Do tell Yaroslav to stop asking for a tanker; if we start with a 2200 km equatorial, we can manage without it.”

“2200 km sounds a bit unsteady.”

“Yeah, the Hermes pilot is going to keep their head on a swivel lest they get perturbed off-course, and the ascent rendezvous is going to be quite tricky. But it’s completely doable, and perhaps safer than a low-orbit plane change.”

“Descent time?”

“Three hours.”

“Good. See ya.”

He slammed down the phone, and Bobak crept in.

“Are you sure the manual is correct?”

“Yes, what’s the problem?”

“I don’t think the rover is supposed to have one of the wheels pointing upwards, and the other skewed by a half-perpendicular.”

Gene tore the booklet out of Bobak’s hands and began to try and make sense of the diagrams himself – quite furiously. And quite fruitlessly.

“Hey, Gene!” they heard Gus’s voice through the doorway.

Gene felt the sudden urge to tie his non-existing shoelaces, while Bobak cluelessly turned to face the incoming mallet.

Edited September 28, 2016 by DDE

[DDE]

Chapter 21: Where There's a Wheel There's a Way

It had been a while since a Mainsail was joined by six Reliants to form a seven-barrelled chorus of fury. Hornet 1 was being inserted into position by LOC controllers.

“Alright, prepping for TMI in thirteen.”

With the Hornet on a five-hour cruise, Mission Control faced a mission that was enjoyable to some but seemed solemn to others.

“Establishing uplink with Deacon. Receiving pingback.”

“Prepare to discharge battery banks into the primary flight computer,” Gene ordered, “On my mark. Two, one, mark.”

“Confirmed. Aaaand bricked.”

“Switch to Eagle 0 and kill its comms.”

“Confirmed loss of signal.”

“Alright, now, Odin.”

“And Loki.”

“…Whatever it is,” Bobak chuckled.

“Reorient it to prograde before dropping comms, will you?”

“Executing.”

----------

----------

With the Hornet lander dropped into the standard low Mun orbit slot, the manned portion of the mission began. Amber Team was an interesting bunch. Jenrick the pilot never made it past LKO. Roszie made it to Mun orbit. Eilphie had seen Minmus and already walked on the Mun.

“FIDO, requesting revision to TMI. It’s looking like I can turn the orbital injection into a rendezvous.”

‘I’. Jenrick paused after noticing it. He liked this ship more than any other. That was hardly surprising – the EX version of the Hermes had none of the cost-saving measures, and the Poodle motor gave it a kick. It wasn’t figure-skating in bathroom slippers – it could put out 1.5 g.

The drift to Mun orbit was uneventful. About twenty-five hundred kilometres away from the Mun, Jenrick re-fired the Poodle, cutting minimum separation from 47 km to 4 km.

Orbital rendezvous went without a hitch either, despite the high initial relative velocities involved. The Hermes slipped into position at Hornet’s docking port.

The ports slammed together loudly. That was the new SOP, supposedly it solved some problems with thermal distortion; but it really was satisfying.

“Alright, you two, get off my ship!”

“Gee, easy there, we haven’t opened the hatch yet.”

“They don’t pay me enough to clean the snack wrapper out of the toilet, Eil. Shoo, out.”

“I’m going to miss you too!” Roszie grinned as she closed the hatch behind them.

The insides of the Hornet were largely inherited from Sarnus.

Hermes cast off a few minutes later.

“Finally some peace and quiet!” Jenrick called out on the radio, quote-unquote accidentally.

Hornet also inherited the “crash stage” approach, using up as much of remaining hydrolox as possible until being overridden and dropped at the 5 km mark.

The Poodle was designed to land the much more massive Sarnus return vehicle, so it was very nearly excessive for landing the much lighter Hornet.

Contact lights lit up, engine cut off, suits were donned, and the hatch was pried open. The scientist descended first.

“Oh, look!”

Ros was too busy trying not to fall off the ladder head-first to look what caused Eil to skip away.

“Got a permanently shaded part of soil here!”

“I’m very happy for you,” Ros grumbled, struggling to stick the flag into the compacted regolith.

“I’m filling up my sample bag, this is a good find. Wasn’t exposed to sunlight for millions of years.”

“Yeah, I mean, I’ve only set up the base here, never mind me…”

“What?”

“Hurry up, I need your help with the sensor boom.”

----------

“…So,” Angelos Kerman continued before the breathless auditorium of cadets, “What inflatable structures bring to the table is a lot of usable volume without actually having to transport a lot of rigid modules. We can replace the rover and surface experimental gear with twelve times’ the interior space of Hornet’s cabin, including a two-level science module.

“So, how does that work? We’re trying to sell the same kit to polar explorers, so we’re using dedicated tension units filled with nitrogen gas, not just the atmospheric pressure. That’s how we, for example, have a central support column in the Panderosa. In case of the Doc, the entire exterior is one large balonette, doubling as dampeners, while in the optionally pressurized Chuckwagon we use a rigid geodesic dome. Either way, don’t mind the razor-sharp rocks, our fireproof aramid fabric takes a lot more than that to breech.

“Oh, a question, good.”

“So,” Val drawled as she lowered her hand, “Is the cowboy get-up necessary to operate your inflatable habitats?”

Angelos furrowed his eyebrows.

“Yes, it is!” the orbital-range radio transceiver on the front table barked “Go on!”

----------

The two kerbonauts spent a munar night cooped up in the lander, warmed by the RTGs. At dawn, they began the second EVA.

Before retreating into the ship, Ros had unloaded the eight-wheeled electric buggy. There were some… peculiar instances of outgassing from its battery banks, so it spent the night safely away from the lander. At dawn, it was still almost completely charged, so the two mounted the vehicle.

Eil set the gyrocompass heading, and gunned the throttle as the headlights came on.

The drive lasted half an hour.

Half an hour of Rosgrid’s uninterrupted screaming.

“Ladies, what the heck are you doing down there?” Jenrick called out from the Hermes as it came round into line of sight.

“Eil’s trying to achieve orbit! In a rover!”

“How much?”

“25 m/s,” Eilphie responded, unperturbed.

“Try harder next time. Fifteen klicks done, five klicks left.”

“Alright, alright, dropping speed to eight. Ros, stop complaining, start looking.”

“At oh-thirty, three hundred meters, see it?”

“Yeah.”

Eil slowed down to a crawl before stopping next to the target.

“Engine blast crater to the left, see it?”

“Yeah, it bore through a good centimetre…”

“…Messed up the footprints for around twenty meters.”

“Flag is still up, though.”

----------

[DDE]

Achtung! Achtung!

The Mun is going to look somewhat different from here on.

Feedback requested!

[insert_name]

that mum looks kind of weird, I would recommend KASE instead.

[DDE]

@insert_name Assuming that its new grey version of the Mun isn't weirder... But it has textures for Duna and beyond! Does it have the redux for Minmus, I'm not seeing any screenshots and SVT does it really well.

I'm also currently investigating what has caused terrain scatters to become tangible to rovers.

Aaaanyway, you're about to see SVT's version of the Canyon biome. 18 km to go. I do think it looks nice.

Edited October 5, 2016 by DDE

[DDE]

Chapter 22: But Radiation Should Scramble the Photographic Film!

Eil and Ros spent the next day cooped up in the lander, while the team “back down” was busy putting Hornet 2 into a parking orbit.

Finally, a week into their stay, Roszie descended down the ladder one more time, and kicked the power lines free of the lander.

The Poodle refired, and the acceleration crushed the away team into their seats once again.

Jenrick didn’t move an eyebrow as Eilphie floated into his ship and shut the hatch behind her. He maintained a demonstratively stoic and annoyed look. Back in the lander, Roszie flushed the atmosphere out and stepped overboard one more time. Instead of floating free, she forced the ladder to redeploy, and descended down, facing the engine bell.

The two targets of her interest were there, at 1:30 and 7:30. The RTGs were mounted onto quick-release bayonet lock systems, and it too only a minute to dismount them.

Jenrick still remained stone-faced as she entered the Hermes and clamped the blutonium cans to the hull racks.

“Missed me that much, huh?” she finally said.

Jenrick cracked up for a few seconds.

“Dumping the Hornet,” he said, trying to force the wide grin off his face.

“Amber Actual, engage engines one through three, stand by for trans-Kerbin injection.”

----------

“Gantry-Four-One to Pad Leader, peas are in the can, clearing level twelve, over,” one of the hardhats yelled into his radio, before turning to Yaroslav Kermanov, “Gotta go, sir, five minutes until launch, we’re about to retract the crew gantry.”

ISP had several Hermes flight crews. Gold was Jeb & Co., cooped up in Athens-Vulkan; Munar missions were by now way below their station. Amber were being trained up to the same standard of versatility, slated for an Eve flyby. Alpha and Bravo were from the start assembled as station rotation crews; Silver was bogged down by his and Valentina’s terrestrial engagements. That left X-ray and Zulu, two rookie teams. Zulu required the addition of a flown engineer to keep them… stable; X-ray were bright, and Kirsen Kerman was Yaroslav’s very own personal choice for the upcoming mission – the next best thing to going up himself.

----------

“Commencing injection burn. Thrust to full,” Newgun Kerman announced quite needlessly, as it was impossible to miss the Poodle firing.

“Pump pressure nominal,” echoed Billy-Bobler.

Kirsen Kerman just clenched up in her seat.

“Insertion confirmed. Computing intercept solution.”

“Docking vector acquisition complete. Engaging autopilot.”

Once the ship docked with the lander stack, Kirsen and Billy-Bobler split off to get on with the actual mission.

As to the new landing zone, it was on the farside, and it was a real treat. Hornet 1 had been just a dress rehearsal of actual work.

“Contact lights. Engine cut-out!”

“Green across the board.”

“Hornet 2, you have a Stay.”

“Suits on!”

Hornet 1’s LZ had had an acceptable margin of around 12 km; the current LZ was nudged in between a sizeable impact basin, and a canyon two dozen kilometres long. Needless to say, the surroundings were considerably more scenic.

Billy-Bobler meanwhile got busy with a wrench.

As with Hornet 1, the mission began with an overnight stay.

And in the morning, they broke out the rover. It was going to be a fun day.

The rover was well-fitted for the terrain, with sharp inclines of crater walls, and plenty of ejecta boulders to dodge around. 18 km one-way total, and a good kilometre upwards too.

Eventually the canyon walls came into view. The bottom was nowhere near flat, and Billy had to drive carefully through the narrows until finally dismounting in what was the lowest-lying part of the gully.

Kirsen’s head slowly scanned horizontally, constantly running the risk of breaking the limits of the neck joint.

“Billions of years right in front of us…”

“Yeah.”

“This looks like a rift valley, which means we’ve got quite old igneous build-up under our feet as well as plenty of exposed samples in the wall.”

“Uhm-hm.”

“I’m going to fill the sample bags to the top!”

“You’ve got two hours,” Bobler finally responded coherently.

“…I’d give anything for my Walkkerb right now.”

“Trust me, I’m an engineer! I think we'll put this thing right here. Trust me, I’m an engineer! What the krak did just happened here? Trust me, I'm an engineer! With epic skill and epic gear! Trust me, I’m an engineer! Oh dear, I think I’m outta here!”

“What?” Kirsen gasped.

“I built a lot of bridges; some of them even dance. My buildings are VERY secure – intruders have no chance!” Billy continued singing in a nasal voice, “You want to drive a broken car? I can help you in this! No wheel, no tire? No problem! Those parts I never miss…”

“For the love of all holy, STOP!”

----------

Mission Control revised the return route after one too many crater wall scares.

Which in retrospect was a bad idea, because Billy-Bobler got the chance to break Roszie’s speed record.

----------

The magnetic guidance system hummed loudly as ISP’s fancy new 15 m synchrotron produced x-rays for the spectrographer. The trio of planetologists watched the printers spit out the results.

“Basalt… basalt…” Eilphie translated.

“Weird one in sample 174, though …whoa,” Slava noted.

“Oh dear,” Kirsen exhaled, “Look at the signal from hydrogen-oxygen groups.”

“There’s a lot of trapped water in there. And not just the poles. And here I was, thinking Minmus was weird enough for a PhD.”

Spoiler

Why am I going through those motions? Well, the CRP has given me this doozy:

Yes, up to 6% water on the Midlands. If our Moon was like this, I would have an apartment on Mars.

 

Also, @insert_name, I’m sticking to SVT because KASE is even weirder! Plenty of artistic license taken.

 

Edited October 6, 2016 by DDE

[DDE]

Chapter 23: Affordable, Reliable, Hypersonic

The ground crew hastily retreated from Val’s newest contraption.

The Super Darter turned out quite a bit different from the original. It dropped the crew entirely, with the intake in place of the cockpit for the apparent added insult.

The quad turboramjets compensated for the increased take-off weight, making it only slightly more sluggish than the original. Even with brank new ceramic brakes, it still could not be held in place as the engines roared to life.

The reinforced articulated front canards, combined with the pulsed attitude control jet system and a vanadium steel spring for the front gear, had solved to problem of ungluing the aircraft from the runway.

Val watched it pitch up and blast off like a rocket, the engines only building up more thrust as they pushed onward in the dense air.

At around 15 km she finally shoved the control stick forward. It was time to maximize downrange velocity before payload release.

The airspeed kept climbing rapidly; high and fast was where those engines truly excelled.

The Darter became visible from the ground once again as the plasma sheath formed around it.

And at the predicted 26 km mark, alarms went off and the engines choked up.

“Alright, we’re there,” Terigh noted.

“Start the procedure.”

Up above, the payload bay doors swung open and the separation rockets carried away an old fuel tank filled with concrete blocks.

“Flight computer is entering braking mode,” Terigh reported.

The Darter spent the next few minutes bleeding off speed and descending back into usable atmosphere. Eventually, telemetry reported that the engines came back on, and the autopilot began a turnaround as the plane fell out of the sky.

“Course 1-2-0… 1-5-0…” Terigh read off.

“Whoa, that’s a 15 g turn!” Val exclaimed.

“2-7-0, it’s thrusting up.”

“Down at 10 km?”

“Yep… I’m getting a temperature alarm already.”

“Twelve hundred… fourteen hundred,” Val read before the screen blinked dead.

“Loss of telemetry from Darter,” Terigh drily stated.

Val descended from the flight tower. The alert sirens went off. The half-molten plane had picked up enough raw speed to reach them; it came in screaming like a meteor, and augered in north of the runway.

But Val had learnt from Gene’s Orion program. The second Super Darter stood ready in the hangar, with the cargo bay extension the upcoming full-spectrum test required.

And besides, recovering the air-breathing stage was only a secondary objective.

----------

“Tower, Darter 2 requesting permission for take-off.”

Val was cooped up in a regular Vector ship, mounted inside the spinal cargo bay of the spaceplane. This at least placed her in position to fly the plane herself if necessary; she had at one point undergone training for flying an aircraft while in a backward-facing seat, and it wasn’t particularly enjoyable.

“Darter 2, clear for launch, course 0-9-0.”

“Tower, engine start.”

She watched the autopilot do the rest, her hands on the two sticks. The plane blasted off after reaching barely 80 m/s.

The revised ascent angle was restricted to 30°, allowing the Darter to tear through the sound barrier seconds after launch.

At 10 km, that angle was reduced to 17°, and the final acceleration began, with a sustained acceleration of 4 g.

Slowly the acceleration began to die off as the engines ran out of air. Eventually, the thrust died.

A klaxon sounded as the payload bay doors swung open.

And then the “waist rockets” fired, pulling the Vector and its stretched upper stage clear of the Darter.

The grid fin stabilizers snapped open and the Terrier sparked to life, ready to shoulder its half of the Δv budget.

The Darter remained on its ballistic trajectory, shutting the payload doors and deploying the drag fins.

Its attitude jets then forced it into a nose-up attitude to bleed off even more speed. At 30 km it let go and prepared for engine refire.

The excessive thrust was resolved by keeping the two inboard engines off for the rest of the flight.

The Darter came back to the runway, fins extended, eleven minutes after launch.

----------

A klaxon sounded as the payload bay doors swung open, and then the “waist rockets” fired, pulling the Vector and its stretched upper stage clear of the Darter. The grid fin stabilizers snapped open and the Terrier sparked to life, ready to shoulder its half of the Δv budget.

Val felt the craft jerk upward, and then heard the whine of Terrier’s turbopump. The upper stage began to push the ship up and ahead. The launch resulted in a long coast through the upper atmosphere, but it spared the clusters of SRBs.

After circularization, Val had the docking system lock onto the TARDIS. The old rendezvous training target was about to be used one more time.

The docking itself was a boring process; despite all that time, the instrumentation bus on top of the rocket was still fully functional and guided the Vector in.

But instead of undocking, Val reoriented the stack and fired her ship’s engine. TARDIS was due for retirement, and she was to drag it out of orbit.

Spoiler

Now here’s something that isn’t going into the story: Val cooked up on re-entry. It’s an old bug I encountered back in 1.0.5: at some point, weeks or months into a modded install/save, the 1.25 m heat shield stops protecting the Mk1 pod, so it burns up at around the 45 km mark; other combinations remain unaffected. I’ve been unable to deal with it by conventional methods, although I seem to have found a guy suffering from the same issue; my only option is to retire the part, and I consider myself lucky that I had no more plans for it anyway.

This is hardly the first bug I’m dealing with over the course of this series, but it’s for sure the most frustrating.

 

Edited October 8, 2016 by DDE
Fighting the formatting...

[DDE]

1.2 is here. HYPE!

Oh...

That's what they meant by 1.2:

Disclaimer: yea, not the 1.2 release, not mine: http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/267225554884229254/34DB9ED64B69DA783292372CC2F492859460A2F2/

[kunok]

Now with more suns!

[DDE]

Chapter 24: Heat and Kitchens

Sidhat glanced once again at the gloveboxes housing his still-ongoing crystal growth experiments. He’d spent a bit too much time on microgravity combustion, so the next crew will have to keep their filthy hands out of the experiment chambers, and just take some photographs from the outside.

It was easier for Stelemma, who merely had three miles of film to pack up after testing Vulkan’s future porthole-mounted camera.

The Hermes undocked on schedule and initiated descent.

----------

Meanwhile, Val hit a snag.

She had agreed to handle the launch of the third and final docking-capable Intern ship. It was lighter than the Vector she tested on, so it should have been usable off-the-shelf. However, the Vector was designed to be pretty slick, and the Intern... wasn’t.

And no, the Super Darter’s cargo bay could not fit a fairing.

At the very least, they had to plaster it in a whole lot of ablative coating, and go for bigger grid fins. And that still probably wouldn’t be enough.

Which meant they still launched right away.

Val watched the drone climb and accelerate until the jet cut-out point.

“Bay doors open. Payload sep! Engine firing!”

The first failure scenario was not realized; the upper stage did not destabilize and flip. It began ploughing through the upper atmosphere.

And it kept ploughing on. Numbers kept creeping over the consoles, and they weren’t good.

“Temperature alarm, Flight.”

Gene furrowed his eyebrow, and glanced at the launch cyclogram. The ship was blatantly underperforming due to drag.

“Abort,” he said tersely.

He didn’t say anything to Val. But as soon as the return vehicle separated and entered ballistic descent, Mission Control exploded with not entirely friendly observations.

----------

Gene’s team had no such bizarre variables to overcome with Hermes-Cargo. A slightly cut-down Hermes Mk 2 launch system, topped by a modified, shrouded ship. Just like the failed Intern, it was a part of the plan to stock up Piraeus ahead of Expedition 3.

The cargo variant was a mismatch of parts from several different Hermes models, with EX’s solar panels and half of the monopropellant-radiator array along with Mk 1’s propulsion section, topped by a glorified supply closet.

----------

“Yeah, the carbon extractor loop is holding up,” Jeb announced into his headset, “We’re losing maybe a few percent of water; I suggest we compensate on the flight by starting with a filled-up greywater tank.

“We’re seeing rising particle counts, though, and it’s coming from Athens. You’ve got to warn Expedition 3 to what they’re likely to run into as well.”

The interior materials weren't exactly holding up during the long mission, apparently. Meanwhile, Bill glanced at the atmosphere sensor dashboard.

The CO₂ indicator readout was rising before his very eyes.

Hurriedly, Bill glanced at the internal temperature measurement. Yep, it was climbing as well. Jeb’s eyes fell onto his horrified expression.

Shoving Jeb aside, Bill lined up on the open hatch to Athens, breathed in loudly, and launched himself inside. In seconds, he flew back the way he came from.

“Fire!” he shouted without a tinge of panic.

“Oh, snap!” Bob snarled as Jeb locked and dogged up Vulkan’s internal hatch.

“LOC, priority alert, fire in Athens station, foremost section. Requesting immediate airlock override and flush!” Bill rattled off.

The stench of burnt plastic suddenly became much more detectable against the plethora of other odours permeating the ship.

“We’ve got it under control already!” Jeb barked, “What’s the CO level?”

“Not enough to kill us, apparently,” Bob scoffed.

The hissing of the escaping air was barely audible, and the creaking of the larger pressure vessel was a much better indicator. It would remain a mystery whether the fire starved itself of oxygen itself or was extinguished by the flush.

“We can still salvage the station with a Hermes-Cargo,” Bill suggested.

“No real need; we can complete the mission with what we have on this side,” Bob responded.

“Looked like a regular electrical short. I think we have a new sensor to add to our ships,” Bill resolved.

----------

Valentina was chairing the meeting of the greater part of the aeronautical division. The backup Intern had already been rolled onto the pad, mounted atop a conventional booster.

Meanwhile the rest of KSC were expressing their Schadenfreude in typical Kerbal fashion, and the walls of the new aircraft hangars were being painted into the vomit-inducing red of rotten tomato innards.

"So?" asked one of the line engineers.

"So!" echoed Terigh.

"So-so," Val mocked tiredly, "We need a new plan."

"Abandon the air launch, stuff a Darter with passenger seats, spin off an airline," that same engineer suggested, immediately attracting several furious glares.

"I'll be sure to take that under advisement," Val deflected.

"If we let ourselves stop now, we're pretty much good for nothing - very few commercial payloads will fit into our margins, let alone our own ones. The problem is with the low altitude of separation. We can treat the issue as a tactical or a strategic one."

"What do you mean by that?" Val asked Terigh, raising her voice to overcome the din of the other engineers rushing for dictionaries and thesauri.

"Well, we can try to dispose with the low launch altogether, and opt for a 'Hyper Darter' of sorts that is at least partially rocket-powered. Or we can force our way through the problem by... adding more boosters."

Val had to wait for the loud booing to die down to continue.

"But we can't, not in the existing architecture."

"Never said we had to fit it inside the cargo bay."

"Ah..."

"We had major problems with external mounting, but we dumped it pretty early on. Our mistake, I guess."

"Start there. An, oh, there happens to be a spaceplane around that I'd love to mate with the Darter for testing purposes," Val quietly mused.

Somewhere under the table, a tape recorder clicked off.

----------

Kath's station as a Hermes pilot t her seat was on a lower deck and further back, thus the ancillary payload was strapped to the interior in front of her. In this case, the gantry engineers were busy strapping the payload in after the crew was already inside, which was hardly surprising considering its nature.

The four caged Occidental kibbals all kept their beady eyes on the only Kerbal they could see, and whom they rightfully expected to be their next tormentor after Allock personally implanted them with biosensors a few days ago. Expedition 3 was to stretch the limits on endurance as well as the size of organisms Jesla was willing to use in her experiments; they planned to try and set up a whole terrarium in one of the equipment racks.

"Launch in five, four, three..." Bobak Kerman counted off, having been recently promoted.

"Brace, you fools!" Kath shouted to her animal crewmates.

"Two, one..."

The rest of the phrase was drowned out by the blast, and the kibbals splattered all over their transparent plastic cages.

[DDE]

Chapter 25: From Hell’s Heart I Stab at Thee

Parts were shoved around as the surviving Super Darter emerged from the scaffolding with a rocket slapped on top of it.

The refitted design used a mess of off-the-shelf components: a crude load-bearing frame within the cargo bay, haphazard slits cut into the doors to allow a reinforced pylon to stick out of it; mounted atop it was another Intern with a concrete orbital propulsion bus. The new upper stage was strapped together from a Dachshund tank, a bunch of stabilizers and the oldie-but-goody Swivel motor.

Despite the tumour on its back, the Darter launched quite normally, the added horizontal control surfaces actually improved the handing. Nevertheless, not everyone was excited.

“Impressive as it may be, we’re still looking at several percent higher costs than just an expendable rocket,” Mortimer droned on.

“You concluded that from a sample size of one,” Val snapped at him.

“True, but with such an advantage you’ll be hard-pressed to argue against Gene and the rocket gang. It’s not enough of a magic bullet.”

Just as the waist rockets fired, the aerodynamic pairing blew off the engine bell. A heartbeat later, the rocket fired.

A cousin of the Reliant, it had more than enough thrust to push the shrouded payload through the atmosphere.

The fairing’s aluminium and beryllium superalloys glowed cherry-red as the oncoming barrage of plasma slowly eroded it; the fairing had to have active cooling added to it just to survive.

The engine died and pulsed for a few brief instants as the rocket drifted through the thin upper atmosphere.

Val watched the launch vehicle go through the motions, dropping the half-boiling fairings and conducting the usual handshake and telemetry run-down, confirming its ability to inject into orbit. Then, it aborted, and dropped the return vehicle.

“They want a magic bullet? I’ll show them one.”

----------

Meanwhile over at Gene’s Ginormous Grandiosity, the Hornet 3 launch went normally.

It was the first of the Series 2 landers, most of the differences were inside the cargo bay. The lander itself merely had bigger RTGs and a couple photocells bolted to it to provide more power once landed.

The ship with the crew was launched the next day. Once again, Jenrick, Eilphie and Roszie were unto the breech, although this time their mission was quite different.

A day later in Munar orbit, Jenrick herded the passengers off "his" ship. The Hornet began its descent towards its target landing site.

After a swing around the opposite side of the Mun, the ship fell towards a flat area east of the distinct twin crater, slightly behind the limb.

A stage and sharp deceleration later, Hornet steadied itself on the Munar surface. The bored crew had already suited up during descent. Ros kicked in the external lights and descended down the ladder. Eil failed to even unbuckle from her harness.

“You gonna help me?”

“Nope. You’re the engineer.”

“Suit yourself, princess.”

The process was in fact quite demanding. Two tons of equipment had to be unloaded piecemeal from an overhead cargo bay, and then put together. At least the process included a small amount of explosives to drive in the bolts holding the mounting bracket. The first of the huts was containerized, and the other three sections had to be manually connected by airtight hatches; Ros also had to assemble a closet-sized airtight compartment out of aluminium plates, and to manually push half a ton of gear through a tight hatch.

Eil watched through the lander’s hatch amusedly as the three dome-shaped buildings began to inflate. Ros was busy bolting down that tiny cupboard, its seams still red-hot from the thermite used to plate them over, and mounting a drill assembly to it. Eilphie decided to finally get off her hands and clambered into one of the buildings, still unpressurized, as Rosgrid mounted up the external lamppost and dragged the RTGs to their new mounting beside the base.

They still had a day’s job ahead of them. The base’s life support still had to be hooked to the lander’s lOx lines, and all the interior had to be put into place. Yet in total they had a two-storey habitat, a two-storey lab hut with airlock and internally accessible drill station in the rigid closet, and a three-storey main lab, along with a month's worth of snacks.

----------

Back at KSC, Val was looking over the readouts from Darter's systems while seated in a cockpit. Of course, it wasn't the booster plane that bore the cockpit.

If it could handle that rocket, she reasoned, then it could handle a fully fuelled Carrack spaceplane. Which was why they proceeded to strap it in place of a regular payload.

"Tower, requesting permission for engine start."

"Granted."

"Engines one through four firing," Terigh responded. Mounted on the outside of the craft and at half the distance from the forward part of the cargo bay, the noise was deafening.

Soon after takeoff they broke the sound barrier, but the voracious roar of the turboramjets was quickly replaced by the aerodynamic noise, and the vibration still reached them through the hull.

They reached 10 km and began the downrange boost.

As the ground speed count reached its high point and acceleration began to slacken, Val realized that the Darter had underperformed by a good 100 m/s. It was unclear, however, if that was going to be mission-critical.

Finally, the jets choked up. Val reached for the "Abort" handle, which they instead rigged to serve as a manual staging activator, and pulled it.

The Carrack broke free of its mounting rail. At the same time, twin retrorockets mounted around the nose intake of the Darter fired. This new solution had to be used to avoid compromising Carrack's Thermal Protection System, and worked marvelously to clear the way for what happened next.

The pumps howled, and Carrack's aerospike erupted.

The TPS was going to see them through the extended push, but with plasma licking at the windshield, Val was increasingly coming to grips with the fact that they desperately needed the Hyper Darter. This was a thrill park ride, not a reliable method of getting into space.

But a fully reusable orbit transport system, even if just a proof of concept, was definitely going to turn some heads.

They finally achieved sufficient velocity and drifted towards the apoapsis.

"Terigh, fuel level?"

"Good enough for a 'stay', not good enough for a quick visit to Athens."

"It's a 'stay', then. Plot the circularization burn."

After a brief half-orbit, they spent their remaining fuel decelerating, and entered the atmosphere as a steep angle.

This maneuver came to be referred as "body-slamming Kerbin" among Mission Control staff. The high surface-to-mass ratio caused the Carrack to bleed off a lot of velocity at higher altitudes, though. Useful - if one could manage the g-forces.

The end of the deceleration forced Val to sent the Carrack into a steep dive towards KSC's airstrip, where the Super Darter landed less than twenty minutes ago.

Spoiler

P.S. Fifty in-game days to Duna encounter. Just one more chapter focused entirely on Hornet 3 and 4 missions.

 

Edited October 18, 2016 by DDE

[DDE]

Chapter 26: The Kessel Run

“Inner hatch locked!” Rosgrid’s voice reached through the metal.

“Start the pumps,” Eilphie responded from inside the airlock.

She had a mission for this munar day. The week-long night meant they crawled out of the habitats several times in a row to fill up the sample bags, but this time was a more complicated. She checked her gyrocompass heading, her fuel level, and fired up the jetpack.

Kerbin reappeared over the horizon as she ascended.

She flew over the edge of the twin crater formation west to the base, and decelerated before landing. 12 km total hop.

Eil spent almost an hour hopping from rock to rock on her remaining propellant margin. She finished it off with a marker flag.

She then began the return jump, forced to keep much more alert due to the added weight of Mun rocks.

----------

With Hornet 3 halfway through its mission, Hornet 4 had been launched into position.

This mission was much different from the preceding ones – the target orbit was 2200 km above the surface, lasting well above two days per revolution.

FIDO also bashed his head on the wall, repeatedly, during a personal debriefing with Val.

And this exotic mission required a certain kind of crew.

Yaroslav Kerman shifted nervously in his seat as the countdown to TMI began.

“Engine firing!” Valentina Kerman barked, once again stating the obvious – the almost-empty Tunguska had quite the kick.

“Stage sep!” Raygan Kerman responded as everyone onboard was shoved forward.

Then the Poodle fired, and this time mercifully nobody said anything.

After five hours, Hermes began its swing around the dark side of the Mun. Following a periapsis burn and a plane correction burn halfway to the Hornet, it finally matched orbit with its target, and began docking.

As her passengers transferred to the lander, Val cracked her fingers. That idiot spent 200 m/s Δv instead of altering the time of the TMI for the Hornet, cutting into her budget for the landing. With the Eagle and the Prospector as backup relays, she was going to have her hands on the lander’s controls as it descended.

It was a polar landing, so the burn began right after undocking, but the descent would last a whole day.

The landing area was one of the small, relatively flat valleys amidst the craggy mountains around the north pole.

The remaining hydrogen in Tunguska burned up, rather faster than Val would have liked, and the stage was jettisoned.

The final deceleration began. Surprisingly, the autopilot worked flawlessly.

Val watched the contact lights go green, and the engine cut out; she eyeballed the remaining Δv; it was enough for an orbital ascent, but it was still going to be a pain in the backside.

Yaroslav turned to Raygan as they hit the dirt. They were in a permanently shadowed valley, illuminated only by the lander’s lights. Raygan was at serious risk of tearing his cheeks apart.

“Alright, I’m going up.”

“For what?”

“Science!”

Yaroslav blasted off, and headed for the nearest mountaintop, well over two kilometres above him, and landed on the top.

He may have been a scientist, but he increasingly had to become a salesman; he was already forming a cadre of less-than-perfectly-idiotic reporters, but he needed something else. He needed a cultural icon.

Meanwhile, Raygan was laying down the foundation for Base Alpha-2.

He then plopped down the containerized airlock and habitat on said foundation.

He then redirected his attention to setting up the power hub.

The assembly of the drill closet took a while; the thermite welding charges were a bit irreversible.

The primary habitat slowly rose before him as the nitrogen-releasing tablets burned inside. He repeated the operation with the second habitat.

Above him, on the ridge, Yaroslav was done, and finally began his jump back.

“Silver Two, coming in.”

“Silver Three, I’m inside, could use your help with your lab.”

‘My lab’, Yaroslav sneered.

It took another two hours to work on the interior; luckily, they started with pressurizing the place, so at least they didn’t have to mount floor boards in a spacesuit. Once that was done, Slava kicked in the core sample drill.

----------

Two weeks later, Eilphie Kerman stuffed the wrapper from the last snack into the waste container.

They were mothballing up the base; they’d leave a few cans of breathing mix inside and the RTGs would keep the beacon on, but they vented the atmosphere as they left.

The big blue marble of Kerbin reappeared from behind the horizon once again as the lander ascended.

“I thought you were finally gone for good!” Jenrick grumbled as the rest of the crew boarded the ship.

----------

Similar to their brethren at Base Alpha-1, Yaroslav Kerman had had a fun month; he got to round up water-rich samples from the entire valley and the surrounding mountains. The in-situ lab removed any and all limitations on sample mass. But as all good things, time ran out.

The lander began to sophisticated series of manoeuvres by inserting itself into a polar orbit 50 km high.

“Command downlink established, I’ll take it from here,” Val announced over the radio. Slava and Raygan knew how much of a bedside manner Val had, so they weren’t’ surprised that the lander immediately flipped over and fired the main engine.

It was an attempt at a plane change. The fuel left was enough for a regular rendezvous, but this time their planes were perpendicular. Nor was it enough for the plane change – Val pulled the last few m/s using the RCS thrusters.

“Alright, I’m decelerating in three hours, intercept in one day. Try to conserve battery power while I’m at it.”

That high up, Val could afford the plane change, and to plummet towards the intercept point at break-neck velocity. A few more burns brought her in close – close enough to perform docking.

The empty lander tumbled away as the away team settled back into their seats.

“Glad to see you still have it, Val,” Yaroslav remarked, “I hate to admit but Gene may start trying to send you up more. Your planes are getting on his nerves, and in the coming weeks he’ll be trying to gather as much attention as possible. I suggest you stay out of his way.”

----------

Gene once again had made sure to reduce the workload on his crew as a key mission came up. Other than the six Kerbals and four kibbals in low orbit, his crew was free to undertake something unprecedented.

Orion 1 already had Duna in its scope. Its albedo sensors could see the spectral lines of CO₂ and ozone; its plasma sensors detected the planet’s weak magnetic field, and its primary camera suite could resolve some of the features on the planet’s butterscotch surface.

A brief pulse of the attitude control jets ever-so-slightly adjusted its course, and it was once more on the way.

Ike swung around once more as the probe approached the planet. They were already being fed a plethora of data and images, even measuring a drop in gravity above a massive canyon, but the most challenging part was right ahead.

“Jets, what’s the word on the stage?” Gene asked, his face carved of stone.

“I’m reading successful pressurization and adequate monoprop levels. It should work.”

“Alright, FIDO, feed it the firing program. And then, we wait.”

Orion slipped into the planet’s radio shadow; the stage, having spent well over two hundred days without maintenance, was to slow it down into orbit.

“Expected re-contact in case of failure, mark.”

That announcement excluded the possibility of a mere misfire. Either the probe had slowed down, or there wasn’t enough left to contact.

“Pingback!”

Everyone in Mission Control stopped breathing.

“Receiving telemetry.”

“FIDO!”

“250x260 circular orbit, inclination 38… insertion confirmed.”

“Go to mode 3 and start the science program!” Gene shouted over the cries of adulation and triumph.

Millions of miles away, above the dim aurorae of Duna, Orion 1 dropped the explosive hazard the braking stage remained.

The probe swung about, deploying the radar array that used to be mounted on the adapter of the now-gone stage.

----------

Their business was hardly over, though. Orion 2 was about to have its turn; and after a quick correction burst, it was dead-set on a course for something pretty extreme.

It was about to shoot very close to Ike. The little data that came from Orion 1 depicted a much more exciting version of Mun.

And the decision was very extreme – passing within five to ten kilometres from the surface at interplanetary speed; the entire encounter would last a mere twenty minutes.

Orion broke comms with Kerbin and swung around to keep its sensors aimed at Ike. Its cameras swept over the bright mountain ridges and the massive flat basalt-flooded areas as the plasma array recorded the reflections off the rock. The images were taken non-stop as it hurtled by the airless hills.

Ten minutes later, it used its star-trackers to reacquire Kerbin, and fed all the data it could until entering Duna’s radio shadow an hour later.

There, it performed the first burn in the insertion sequence.

Gene’s team watched the data flow as Orion briefly resumed contact between burns. Its initial burn merely dropped the apoapsis to two Ike orbits, so that the plane could be changed more easily.

There, it left the equatorial plane to improve its coverage of Duna’s surface.

An apoapsis burn adjusted the periapsis.

A second periapsis burn circularized the orbit.

Only then did the probe dropped the stage and joined Orion 1 in scanning the planet.

 

Edited October 22, 2016 by DDE
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[DDE]

*checks the Like ratio*

OK... need more bodies per chapter... Got it. Problem is, both Eve and Moho windows are 80-something days away.

No worries; some old friends are coming back. I'm forced to revise the Vulkan mission to a mere fly-by, unless someone teaches me how to efficiently do missions with Duna stay time of under 1 year.

[Wahgineer]

This really cool, looking forward to future installments.

[DDE]

Guys, sorry, I need to get away from my Kerbals for some time.

Instead, I've found you some krazy Soviets instead!

 

[insert_name]

darn, looking forward to your return

[DDE]

Chapter 27: Some Kerbals Just Want to Watch Stations Burn

“…Yeah, I think we can rush the lander,” Gene responded.

“So, you’re going ahead with this improv?” Jeb’s voice echoed over the private channel.

“I already have it on the pad.”

There was a long pause.

“Whoa.”

Orion 3 was the first of Gene’s improvisations with second-gen probe tech. Orion-Orpheus simply slapped a lander in place of the radar array, while Orion-Moho was stripped down and mounted the new Candle propulsive module. Because that wretched rock’s astrodynamics were horrible.

The Orion launcher was designed for such a mission in mind, capable of accommodating a third stage.

The pancaked third stage with a Chelyabinsk motor was hidden underneath the massive fairing.

The second stage was almost completely exhausted, so it was jettisoned in favour of a straightforward ejection burn.

And after a half-orbit the engine fired.

Upon completion of the burn, the empty stage was dropped.

Gene’s team watched the probe drift to beyond Minmus’s orbit, tracking its outbound trajectory. Sure, the new stage was giving the much lighter probe thrice the Δv, but that did not remove the need for constant vigilance on behalf of FIDO.

One of the wonderful aspects of the new design was its unlimited re-fire capability. After all, it was just a water tank with surface tension anti-sloshing system, and an RTG boiler on one end. It wasn’t exactly the most powerful engine out there, but it was nearly fault-proof.

----------

Allock coolly watched the sleeping kibbal tumble in its experimental chamber. The batteries in the implanted monitors had long since died, but he had no plans for space surgery. If all went as planned, they wouldn’t leave the vivaria until landing. Even if they die. Tough.

----------

Elsewhere in the same orbit, three other test subjects were preparing to finish their mission.

“Alright, are you sure you’ve balanced your notebooks properly?” Jeb asked for the twelfth time.

“I balanced it with your camera,” Bob muterred.

“Bill, we can proceed with the station undock anyway.”

“Copy that, declamp in three, two…”

There was grinding and creaking as the two docking collars separated for the first time in a year. There was a quick click of manoeuvring thrusters, and the Vulkan cleared the station.

“Bill, switch,” Jeb instructed. Docking was a bit above Program Chief Engineer’s pay grade.

He rolled by 45°, reacquired the vector, and fired the reverse thrusters.

“Bill, deploy the OMS, start the checklist.”

The two craft banged together again.

“Soft dock… locking clamps, accessing Athens attitude thrusters.”

The results of the twin OMS thruster exhaust interfacing with the observation cupola could be… quite unpredictable.

“Five minutes to retroburn.”

“One minute to retroburn. Beginning flip maneuver.”

The lateral thrusters pulsed for a few seconds, turning the station and ship assembly end-over-end.

“Stand by for thrust.”

The twin blades of fury struck into the dark. The feeling of acceleration, after all this time in freefall, was quite reassuring.

“Engine cut-off in ten, five, four, three, two, one, cutoff!”

“Flight, we’re coming in .”

Entry interface occurred as planned. The station, naturally, lacked thermal protection, and had plenty of inertia, contributing to a very poor ballistic coefficient.

“Station thermal alarm!” Jeb calmly announced.

They waited for almost a minute. Jeb watched the temperature data for the Vulkan’s life support package. He wanted out before the pressured gas cans went off.

Then the craft began vibrating noticeably. This was a sign of impending docking port failure, so Jeb jerked the handle that said ABORT.

Once the capsule was jetisonned, it was just another Hermes landing, minus the asked position when descending on the main chutes.

This greatly eased the final impact, which no-one onboard was terribly opposed to. Jeb could barely raise his arm. Trying to get out of the ship on his own was out of question.

They had to wait for the SAR team, and hopefully they would be able to walk again.

Spoiler

Sorry for the short chapter; I decided to start by clearing out the accumulated material. Those antennae plasma effects were rather surprising…

I was disheartened and kinda thrown into hiatus by how awkward the Orion 3 turned out. I had envisioned the third stage to be a bit fancier, and Porkjet’s RTG rocket has a glitched decoupler node that sent both parts of the rocket spinning; plus 1.2.1 means there’s somewhat of a stable release, so I’ve planned my endgame and transition to a subsequent fic. One can hope I can pull through long enough… (bad news: I may find a job)

But it’s still Duna or bust! Therefore, Kerbals are superior to us puny Earthlings.

 

Edited November 13, 2016 by DDE
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[DDE]

Chapter 28: Atomic Gardyloo

“Any regrets? Changed your mind about ever leaving Kerbin again, perhaps?” one of the reporters asked, grinning.

“Nope,” Bill sneered.

“Nah,” Bob added.

“Hell no!” Jeb snarled.

“We’re still go for the Vulkan mission to Duna in one year. The actual flag-planting mission ship is, as of now, at napkin stage,” Jeb continued.

“The Eve missions – Orion 4 and 5 – are blasting off this week. 3 arrives at Moho two weeks before they start the arrival manoeuvres, so this is going to be a very exciting month for us. In the long term, we’re working on the Orpheus family and Orion Mk 2.

“The Orpheus program is a two-parter. We’re already working on the Duna lander, and it’s definitely going to be ready for deployment in the same window as Vulkan – we’ve used the existing probe bus and stage to support the lander in transfer. The actual Orpheus bus would be a dramatic improvement over the first Orions, and it’s probably going to handle the first Eve landings.

“Now, Orion Mk 2 is also a dramatic refit.

“We’re gunning for Jool with that one.”

“And the Mun colony?”

Dammit, Jeb thought, it seemed that someone cured all those reporters of their attention deficit disorder while they were away. Nasty.

“Get the film, Bill,” he said quietly.

Bill stared back, and Jeb nodded.

Bill turned off the lights and fired up the projector. The film depicted an innocent-looking shed. For ten seconds, nothing happened; then the shed vanished in a flash. It took three seconds for the blast wave to shake the camera.

“It’s a work in progress,” Jeb announced, “There is no point setting it up unless we have lightweight chemical reactor solutions. Constantly shipping raw resources from Kerbin would be a major expenditure, so we won’t be bothering that rock until we can really… sink our teeth into it.”

----------

Heimdall, with its nuclear reactor idling at full power, had spent a full year in orbit. Finally, it was time to take inventory of the result.

That meant the reactor jockeys of Team Heimdall were being sent up in a Hermes. Rookie crew as it may have been, the ascent went on as normal, followed by intercepting the reactor in its 1000 km orbit.

“One millikievert per hour and counting,” Tragela Kerman noted, holding up the Keiger counter to the viewport, “Looks like the reactor is still hot. Pat, rush the docking, will you?”

Patgar failed to answer. The Hermes slipped into position at the wider end of the craft, near the cherry-red ceramic heat radiators.

“One hundred millikieverts. Pat!”

The thrusters finally began to click as the ship reached the docking axis, behind the propellant tank forming an impromptu shield.

“One hundred microkieverts, going down.”

The docking ports locked together. As Patgar sent the command for retraction of one of the radiator panels, Tragela opened the two hatches.

The odour inside the tiny trunk was vomit-inducing, so she hurriedly began to retrieve the materials samples from deeper within the craft, already quite convinced that the odour is at least partly due to lengthy radiation exposure. It was disturbingly similar to that metallic taste in the mouth that victims of acute radiation poisoning reported shortly before death…

Which was a distinct possibility for the other engineer, Melsy, who was shaking like a leaf.

Trag locked the hatches, and pulled her helmet on. The vacuum pumps began to remove the air from the command pod.

Melsy opened the door, and got out. He pushed off the pod’s rails.

The radiation counter began to wail immediately. He wasn’t going to waste time; snap to position one, three shots of the lower turbomachine assembly, three clicks of thruster fire to position two... The bucket-sized reactor pressure vessel glared at him from underneath the parachute compartment.

He was done in under two minutes and rushed back behind the tank/shield; he shouldn’t have taken more than one full kievert in the process.

Patgar didn’t wait on the pod to repressurize as he pulled away from the reactor craft.

Heimdall proper waited for another six hours before firing its thrusters for one last time.

It entered atmosphere at a steep angle, and jettisoned the reactor assembly.

----------

Gene Kerman’s frown typically terrified the console monkeys. And frowning he was. He needed a ground team to cordon off and babysit the landed reactor for a month or so. And he also faced perhaps the worst body in the Kerbol system from the astrodynamics standpoint: Orion 3 was coming in on its target.

The optical sensors tracked the hot silicate rocks on Moho’s dayside as the radiators worked furiously to keep the probe from sharing their fate.

Almost as soon as the encounter began, the probe flipped over, and injected water into the RTG mounted at the bottom of the thruster bus. The injection burn began a dozen planetary radii away.

KSC received weak telemetry via the omnidirectional antenna as the burn continued into Moho’s shadow.

After another fifteen minutes, the probe reported successful engine cut-off. Gene briefly fiddled with his slide rule.

“Prograde, 200, ASAP!” he yelled snappishly at INCO. INCO, in turn, keeled over and disappeared under the console.

“Medic!” Gene barked as he got behind the keyboard himself and pulled out the thousand-page operating manual for the STEADLER RC-001S RGU.

That final kick settled the probe into a highly elliptical orbit with a period of several days, which allowed a few adjustment burns before the final 250 km polar orbit and propulsion stage jettison.

Orion 3 was stripped so badly that it was restricted to optical sensors and some jury-rigged proxy detectors for things like hull ionization. Of course, for Moho, a mosaic of surface imagery was quite sufficient for a decent planetwide survey.

The next target was a different story.

----------

The two next Orions were sneaking upon Eve.

Gene had spent the day trying to keep his FIDO from breaking down in the face of conflicting mas and radius estimates coming from Science’s data. While he was catching a snooze in the break room, Orion 4 executed the final course correction.

The next few hours it drifted towards the burn point, still on the dark side of the planet; the burn would have to be pre-programmed and executed autonomously.

Linus was in the amphitheatre, rubbing his eyes, having neglected his station for the last few days.

“Funnily enough,” the science officer called out, “the magnetic field isn’t just huge. It’s so huge there are no radiation belts.”

“And the atmosphere?”

“Occultation scans are reading CO2, methane, water and hydrogen sulphide, of all things.”

“So, I’d say the planet is… rotten.”

“Among its other failings. Greenhouse effect down there is crazy.”

The flyby continued, with the illuminated crescent growing larger. The reflectivity spikes smack in the visible spectrum, leading to an opaque atmosphere.

Orion 4 slipped into the radio shadow.

Half an hour later ISP’s radio telescope picked up the weak confirmation signal from its omnidirectional antenna. After a handshake, it spat out the navigational telemetry cache.

“Whoa, that wobble got nasty,” Gene observed, pointing to the hundreds of RCS thruster firings.

“Drop the retrostage and deploy the sensors,” Jeb quietly instructed from the comfy armchair in the dark corner of the room, sipping koffee.

This was where the on-board surface-scan radar factored in.

Orion 5 repeated the procedure a day later.

By then Orion 4 transmitted a decent portion of its own map.

“So, you really do think those are oceans?” Jeb asked.

“At this amount of pressure, there’s going to be an ocean of something,” Bob responded.

Spoiler

I’m currently testing something else that may or may not appear in what remains of the fic, depending on whether it pans out. I’ll give you a hint: it’s called Faget.

 

Edited November 18, 2016 by DDE
I'm giving up on font size!

[DDE]

Hello, everyone. I have a Watsonian announcement to make.

Spoiler

Faget hasn't worked out. It is flyable in the same sense you can do a grocery run in a Ford Model T, but it's very unstable. Previous KSP versions, aerodynamics iterations and MechJeb versions seemed to handle the craft much more reliably. This one is kicking and tossing all over the place.

But damn is she pretty.

 

[MarkWatney]

Great to see how this going can't wait for the Manned Duna Mission

[DDE]

@MarkWatney, are you really, really sure?

Anyway, I've got a thesis deadline coming up, and instead am suffering from heavy addiction to Fallout 4. Don't expect me to be around for another week.

But, after that... it's a manned Duna mission!

[DDE]

M'kay, opened file, closed file, did something else completely but very related: http://imgur.com/exu0Wck

Edited December 14, 2016 by DDE

[DDE]

Chapter 29: Starfleet’s Finest

“FAO, how’s the progress?” Gene asked, his voice weary.

“78% of payload stowed, we’re on schedule.”

Piraeus was due for retirement. After a year in space, all the kibbals – and, less importantly, all the Kerbal crew – were still alive and reasonably healthy, hence its mission had been a roaring success.

It took only about half an hour to get the live cargo out of orbit.

Then the fun began. The Hermes-Cargo ship was used as the retromotor system. After a fairly brief burn, the descent began. For Mission Control, this meant more work – they had to sequentially undock, separate and prime two Intern re-entry canisters before the comms arrays got fried.

Half an hour later, the burnt, cherry-red hull of the station smashed into a random grassy hill. Several groups of looters (or reporters – it was hard to tell) were chased away by ISP Falcon jets.

---

Gene would rarely sleep through a launch, but he was going to have a very busy week.

The launch was simply an addition to the Beacon network. Two long-range communication satellites would hang just outside Minmus orbit, providing enhanced datalinks for long-range flights. The bizarre fairing design was necessitated by the 2.5 m single-piece dish.

Beacon-Echo ended up having a coincidental Mun flyby.

He would be around for Orion 6, though. This one was quite remarkable.

The booster was an updated, fine-tuned variant, forgoing the bizarre liquid hydrogen upper stage in favour of extended Poodle tankage.

Jeb watched the rocket blast off into the clouds.

As it disappeared into the distance, briefly flashing as the jettisoned metal-coated SRBs tumbled wildly, he grabbed a fistful of Kerbin dirt. He wasn’t going to see it in a while.

The upper stage burnt until dry, placing the spacecraft on an intercept trajectory to Jool.

Orion 6 was a Mk 2 design, very heavily rebuilt for the extended mission. The CANDL upper stage was to manoeuvre it about the giant’s moons, and the probe also mounted its own auxiliary motor. It had a massive package of sensors, including cameras, a magnetometer boom, an RPWS tripod, and particle collector wafers. The power was provided by a pair of heavy-duty blutonium turbogenerators on even more extendable booms.

---

The press conference got axed because some joker set fire to the Munie News Network van, so for Jeb and co the quarantine was uneventful. The VAB has swarms of wrench monkeys running back and forth as it was about to roll out its second-biggest launch ever.

"All hands, Terra Actual, reactor transport will enter the site in two minutes. Stand by to receive hazardous cargo," Gene shouted into the PA system.

The Kerbal Atomics Neptune heterogenous twisted-ribbon bimodal nuclear thermal rocket was the single most advanced and potentially the most environmentally damaging piece of technology to come out of ISP thus far. It had increased thermal output thanks to unconventional fuel element design, and mounted an electrical generator system to scavenge power from the reactor pile during the cost to Duna.

Triton's major failing was its use of liquid hydrogen reaction mass – a propellant massively lacking in density, hence requiring enormous tanks. Jeb told Bill to avoid Kerbodyne like the plague, so the propulsion stage ended up very long. Launching a rocket taller than the VAB itself was an unlikely proposition, so a very unconventional approach had to be taken.

The encapsulated payload was strapped to the side of three Mainsail stacks, with the autopilot automatically throttling each separate engine to keep the monster balanced and flyable.

It blasted off, wiggling ever-so-slightly as the machinery tried to find the sweet spot.

If only Bill had more time, he would have probably designed something more elegant and natural. But the sea-level high-performance hydrolox rocketry was out of favor with absolutely everyone, leaving no hope of a crossfeed system that would make optimal use of the nuclear motor throughout the flight.

As the core stage cut off and detached, the aeroshell popped off, revealing the load-bearing fairing of the extremely long nuclear engine. In addition to siphoning fuel from the core stage, the payload stack had its own supply for its three motors, which were fired up once again for the circularization burn.

The solar arrays had been extended as soon as possible, as the tug had a power-hungry refrigeration system to keep the propellant from vaporizing away, which had been acceptable for departure stages, but not for interplanetary ships.

---

The Vulkan was rolled out onto the pad only a few hours later.

“Flagship Mission Control, begin launch checkout,” Gene Kerman announced, “Booster?”

“Go…”

"Alright, this is what we live for..." Jeb muttered.

"If we quit now, we might as well never go outdoors," Bill chimed in.

The three main engines fired.

Half an hour later, the still-suited crew brought their ship alongside the tug, having ditched their upper stage after the intercept burn.

The Vulkan had an abundance of docking thrusters, so it was no trouble for Jeb to dock it with his eyes shut.

"Capcom, Vulkan, beginning preparations for Trans-Duna Injection."

As Jeb validated the life support system, Bill began to stoke up the reactor pile, and Bob unlatched the dogs on the hatch and descended into the habitation module. With a flip of the switch, the fairing slipped off the nuclear motor, and tumbled into the darkness along with the supplemental rockets.

The interior seemed much smaller, now that one of the portholes had a massive camera built on top of it, with reels of oversized film stored alongside it. The trunk was stuffed with supplies, and there wasn't a single square centimetre of unused bulkhead surface. Some of the clutter would go into the return vehicle and hence the place would become easier to get around in later on.

Everything seemed to be still in its proper place.

"Capcom, Vulkan standing by for guidance star data," Jeb announced from his command seat.

The final orbit continued. Life support hummed along, and the Geiger counter clicked faster and faster as the reactor reached its nominal operating output of 101.42%.

"Vulkan, Mission Control, beginning departure go/no-go. INCO?"

"Go."

"FIDO?

"Go."

"Jets?"

"Go."

"GUIDO?"

"Go!"

"Vulkan, Capcom, confirming departure burn, Brennschluβ at 3-0-5, repeat, 3-0-5, burn in 3-5 seconds, repeat, 3-5 seconds."

"Capcom, Vulkan, acknowledging burn data, preparing to execute."

"Godspeed."

There was silence in the cockpit. Bob strapped himself back into his seat. The turbopumps hummed way back in the tug.

And with a groan and a knock, the engine fired.

It wasn’t much of a kick, 0.3g at best. The RCS thrusters clicked a few times before the gimbal could autocorrect.

“Cut-out in ten… Five, four, three, two, one… Cut-out confirmed.”

“Reactor throttling down to standby.”

“…turbopumps de-spun. Depressurizing fuel lines.”

“Throttle-down confirmed. Neutron flux decreasing. Engaging dioxide cooling loop.”

“Tying reactor generators to Main Bus A. Stand by for controller switch into cruise mode.”

“Duna flyby in 230 days,” Bob finally chimed in.

---

The wouldn’t be alone on their way, though. Orions 7 and 8 would arrive a week later each, with a tiny lander slapped into between the usual probe and the braking stage.

The season of coincidental Munar flybys continued, it would have seemed.

Spoiler

Also, Rogue System. Ah, those manual docking maneuvers.

 

Edited December 18, 2016 by DDE
Added images

[Angelo Kerman]

Congrats on beginning your Duna mission!