Flight to Independence

[DDE]

Chapter 30: Per ardua, ad ardua

"Do you even realize how much it will cost us to convert the kit to two-thirty volts?" the representative of Rokea shouted.

"I heard you the first time," growled the techie from STEADLER, causing his opponent to exaggeratedly drop a massive binder to the tabletop.

Val pinched her temples and closed her eyes. Anyone without rose-tinted glasses on would have foreseen what was happening, but anyone in proximity of Jeb suffered from crippling optimism.

Their prospects were murky. The program was becoming bloated; all advanced manned spaceflight projects had to be forgone to keep the Duna landing mission moving. Except they had no idea what it was going to look like – after three months of number-crunching, Linus invalidated Jeb's original mission configuration, with two eyeballs-out aerocaptures. Hypersonic 10000 K plasma turned out to behave counterintuitively, and ballute aeroshields weren't all they had been made out to be. Alternative solutions kept cropping up, generating an exponential variety of architectures to choose from: the current darling was a single-stage solar-electric craft, but it remained to be seen how the new, bigger nuclear stage would perform. Either way, it seemed the new ship would be best served by a single-launch configuration with orbital refuelling. That meant having to deal with Kerbodyne...

And if that alone wasn't a disaster waiting to happen, Jeb left them with something else. He had had the brilliant idea of making Olympus not only modular but allowing commercial access to it, with module equipment design outsourced to other businesses in the field and, eventually, allowing their crews aboard.

The ensuing chaos should have been absolutely predictable.

---

Mission day 54

Time to Duna SoI: 101 days 5 h

“Life support system cycle 27, complete,” Bill droned to himself. The CO² scrubber canister still had to be manually switched between the Sabatier reactor and the main air filtration system.

Jeb was snoozing in the return pod, converted into moderately quiet sleeping quarters. The newly added camera system made manoeuvring about the habitat much more difficult.

Thus far, nothing had broken down. The radiation dosage, from both the reactor and cosmic rays, was at acceptable levels. The reaction mass stayed refrigerated despite the falling power output.

Bill’s greatest worry was the thermal expansion of the hull. Without constant day-night cycles, one side of the ship was permanently exposed to sunlight. After the initial creaks and cracks that ended on day 5, it should have achieved a state of equilibrium, and no further issues should arise. Should.

All was going well. For now.

---

Time had come for Orion Mk 1 to cede the floor to the new Orpheus bus.

The Orpheus went by as the three-dish, with a flip-out antenna on one side alongside a new model of disk-shaped solar arrays. The other side mounted a particle collector for direct sampling of Eve’s uppermost atmosphere.

On top of the Orpheus sat the puck – a heavily aeroshielded lander that would just plop down on its bottom and open up the side doors to expose the instruments. It was powered by a small radioisotope slug.

As usual, the probe was a twofer.

---

Gene’s agenda was getting really short. But he was very happy to kick the next one off the list. The chemists’ repeated explosions led to the F1 Claimjumper.

Mission Control watched the feed from the landing radioaltimeter as the experimental mining platform descended into the munar night.

There were four key innovations that made the Claimjumper possible: the automated drill-scoop system that channelled the regolith dust into the storage tanks, the catalysed reaction and expulsion package for turning that dust into usable fuel, the ion dust repellers that kept the solar panels clean, and the new octuple engine cluster adapted for the produced fuel.

And then the manned munar program resumed.

The check-up mission, along with a Hornet Mk 3 flight trial, had been assigned to Jenrick and Rosgrid. And, when presented a choice between additional bags of snacks and Yaroslav Kermanov, they, astonishingly, picked the latter.

Except for the reversed launch order, the flight was perfectly uneventful. As the Hermes began its first orbit following the injection burn, Ros started pinging status reports from the platform belong. It had been plopped down on a particularly mineral-rich spot on the nearside, east of the original Sarnus landfall and thus with well-understood geology. Deviation from target coordinates was merely 16 meters. As terminator reached its LZ, all solar panels reported nominal performance.

Back on Kerbin, Gene and Gus rolled out the Hornet.

Another day later, it arrived to Mun. The Mk 3 variant was designed for to work alongside the Claimjumper, with the same thruster package, and a more permanent Munar base delivered by a separate cargo lander variant; so, it was put on a very tight diet yet was carried on the same booster, so it had plenty of Δv to spare for the crash stage scenario.

“Holding the fort, Yaroslav?” Jenrick asked through the hatch.

“I’m already penning your obit if you, ahem, blow it.”

“Don’t take your cues in humour from Kath.”

“Alright, prepping to drop, closing the ship’s hatch.”

The automated landing cycle was executed flawlessly. Jenrick kept rolling the lander to keep the mining platform in front of him as they touched down.

Ros jumped to her feet immediately, already suited.

One of the many changes to the Hornet was a change to only three landing legs. Instead of mounting a leg in front of the pilot’s viewport to keep the vertical ladder, the lander had a sloped ladder right on top the aft leg. Which, for someone in a bulky suit, was potentially a better option.

Ros had a relatively simple task outside the lander: set up a bunch of collapsible storage huts containing additional fuel tanks, and link them to the main platform, forming a larger propellant depot.

Once that was done, the rest was to be performed from a safe distance… while still suited up.

“Drills lowering”.

“Confirmed, drills coming down,” Jenrick noted from his flight position.

“Stand by. Drills spinning up. Standing by for contact. And… engaged.”

“Debris coming up from the platform.”

“Observing regolith flow. Transfer tanks at 2%... 5%... feeding first shipment into the reactor. Reactants loaded. Safety is off, heating coil powered up.”

“Alright, let’s see what happens. Bake that crap.”

The processing of each batch was approximated to last around five minutes. After six minutes, Ros finally decided to fire up the spectrometer.

“This looks like… looks like ready-to-use fuel. Transferring shipment to the main tank, engaging automated controller.”

“We good?” Jenrick asked.

“I’d rather stay here until dusk. Could you get on the horn with Kerbin?”

“Alright, I’ll pressurize the lander.”

Ros spent the next two Kerbin days staring at the instrument read-out. Fuel production was hardly impressive; it would take about a month to produce a lander’s worth of fuel.

“I’m done,” she finally muttered, turning away from the screens.

“Mission Control, fuel production experiment complete,” Jenrick announced.

“Hornet, CAPCOM, lander trial are herewith successful, RTB, repeat, RTB, over.”

“Alright. We’re done here. Stand by for blast-off.”

Spoiler

 

So, I’ve ultimately decided not to bother with the KSS. I’ve been through it several times, and it’s not that satisfying. I’d rather get some boots onto Duna.

Besides, as proven above, a space station constructed as part of cooperation, let alone international cooperation, is utterly impossible.

At least there won't be TV series memorabilia or korilla suits there.

 

 

[MarkWatney]

It's amazing how much KSP resembles real life sometimes. With all the cancellations and everything

[DDE]

Chapter 31: End of the Line

Out in the blackness of deep space between, someone was boiling a kettle. Or firing a thermal thruster on an Orion Mk 2, sometimes it was hard to tell.

 

---

Millions of miles ahead of it, Gold Team was in business. Film was loaded into the magazines. Guidance stars were locked in. Duna was ahead.

This was a brief event, well-scripted and well-rehearsed. The fly-by was to last no more than two hours, total. This meant that Jeb had to execute the requisite attitude changes, Bob had to operate the camera, and Bill ran the necessary errands.

Two canisters were expended during the Ike flyby. Jeb then locked onto the manoeuvre vector, and executed the correctional burn. They’d bounce halfway to the Belt before reaching Kerbin two years later. The expended film canisters clang loudly against the aft bulkhead as Jeb engaged the nuclear rocket.

Once the manoeuvre was complete and the reactor was throttled down, all that was left was to keep taking shots of Duna while lighting conditions allowed it. Vulkan slowly drifted into Ike’s shadow.

---

Almost as soon as Vulkan completed the powered flyby, the two Orion probes began their approach to orbital injection.

 

---

Bill felt uneasy. Gene had pretty much merged the manned and unmanned teams in preparation for the probe landings, taking away the attention from Vulkan. To a lay-kerbal, it would have been logical, but no to someone familiar with the flight cyclogram. Operating in Ike’s shadow for several hours, combined with heightened power consumption and intense manoeuvring, meant the whole life support plant was disengaged. And now he was busy bringing the converter back online, slowly and safely. On top of that there was the thermal expansion problem.

The air recycling system came back online; the dials, indicators and metrics slowly crept upwards. No explosions, no short-outs.

Then it was the turn of the water reclamation apparatus. The spin frequency could be judged by sound along.

…And it coughed up and ground to a halt. Bill finally relaxed and turned around to fetch the protective gear. It was time to do the plumbing.

---

The retrofit of Orion into a lander-equipped probe made use of a passivated injection stage as an improvised stabilizer and aeroshield. Once it did the deorbiting burn, it needed to soak up just a small amount of very hot plasma, before being dropped at the 4 km mark.

Between that and landing, the process was automated. The probe would descend via an oversized parachute system – it was tiny enough to omit any sort of thrust systems.

“01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000,” the probe announced. As the mission control centre exploded in applause – with the sickening crunch of an intern’s spine as a purely accidental result of attempting a tackle-hug on Gene – the lander was busy determining its orientation and choosing between its four solar arrays.

The next shift easily duplicated the feat with the back-up lander.

---

Elsewhere in the Kerbin system, Orpheus was busy adjusting its trajectory while going about its business, preparing to drop a skeet into Eve’s thick coat of gas.

---

“Progress on the filter?” Jeb asked through the intercom, protected from the stench of ‘greywater’ by the sealed hatch.

“Assembly complete in two, I’ll attempt another restart.”

“Master alarm!” Bob announced over said system’s loud and obstinate screeching.

“Circuit?” Bill shouted.

“Hab pressure.”

Hull breech.

Bill immediately squeezed a few bubbles of water into the middle of the hab. Someone – presumably Bob – began to repeatedly kick the bulkhead.

He watched the bubbles drift, slowly but surely, towards panel A-6. He removed it, and watched the bubbles get sucked towards a tiny hairline crack in the aluminium pressure vessel. He armed himself with a syringe of epoxy, and began to methodically fill up the crack until there was visible excess glue. He then reached for a small aluminium membrane, and glued that on top of the troublesome area.

He marked the time. Five minutes later he asked, “Pressure?”

“Now stable,” Jeb responded, his voice chilly.

“Alright, back to plumbing,” Bill growled, adjusting the electrolysis system output and firing up the backup nitrogen cartridge.

---

Gene Kerman was reaching the end of the line. His staff was at their limit operating the existing armada of probes, and no expansion was forthcoming.

Orion 9 was their shot at Sarnus. Which was a huge deal, of course, but felt all too routine by then.

[Angelo Kerman]

Good luck at Sarnus!

[DDE]

Chapter 32: Under Pressure

The Independent Space Program plodded on, slowly but surely.

Back in the VAB, Gus was overseeing the construction of a ginormous mounting cradle for the Pyramid. The new E8 Achilles II Duna Expeditionary Complex had been finalized, and work had to be started on a 50 t-class launcher. Ultimately, reusability was out of the question after the hull leak, which allowed use of the same Kerbin Return Vehicle as Vulkan, and the final configuration had the entire craft assembled in Kerbin orbit, lander included, to make the most use out of the nuclear thruster. This called for four launches: the habitat with the crew on-board, a 50 t main propulsion section, a 45 t departure drop tank set, and a 37 t E7 Marina Duna Excursion Vehicle with a trunk carrying the surface base components.

---

A bit closer to the Sun, the second wave of probes approached Eve.

The battle-plan for Orpheus probes was quite interesting.

It began with a braking burn that left the probe with an eccentric orbit, during which its particle collectors could perform direct sampling of Eve’s exosphere.

Then, at the apoapsis one Kerbin day later, it performed a deorbit burn.

After that, it dropped the skeet, flipped over, and burned back into orbit exactly three minutes later.

The two probes plummeted in relatively close proximity. But while the bus didn’t even brush the atmosphere, the skeet rammed it head-on. Projected deceleration was in the range of 30 g. Avionics were self-contained, relying solely on a gamma-ray backscatter altimeter to execute the flight program.

While the initial deceleration would be extremely violent, the subsequent descent of a vehicle with a high ballistic coefficient through a soup-like atmosphere was painfully slow – well over half an hour. It didn’t help that the target area was near the terminator. Only the last minutes needed to be cushioned by the parachute.

Back in orbit, the bus slipped out of radio contact, and went about adjusting its orbit with its upper stage and its own engine. The skeet’s landing area moved out of line of sight of Kerbin, and with spotty bounce-backs from the older Orions, contact with the lander was only established a few days afterwards. Luckily, so long as it didn’t crash or melt, its RTG could last for years.

The lander only squawked back two days later.

Orpheus 2 arrived hours later, and repeated the procedure on the dayside. The second skeet was aimed dead in the middle of the largest ocean, and confirmed that it was lifeless, dense, and mostly acid.

---

Far away beyond the asteroid belt, Orion 6 was approaching a much bigger target. Its aft-pointing imagers, telescopes and radiometers peered at Jool’s inner moons. The flight plan called for using the innermost moon, Laythe, as an anchor for a powered deceleration assist.

Gene peered at the aggregate data from the numerous sensors. The plasma wave tripod and the magnetometer detected a colossal magnetic field, and the imagers confirmed plenty of aurorae and were providing initial insight into joolean meteorology. The particle collectors reported a drastic change in the interplanetary medium.

But when dealing with data on Laythe, Gene just stared blankly at the sheets.

“This is data for Kerbin,” he complained.

“No, it’s not,” the intern noted in a shaky voice.

“…are you kidding me?” Gene blurted out, looking at the blue marble in the photograph.

“Hardly. Atmospheric spectra are rather distinct.”

The upcoming close flyby was brief, and the retroburn was going to jam the sensors with the plume. Data feed from the radio and magnetic sensors would be saved on the datatapes. But the wide-angle imagers would still work, peering at the Kerbin-like world beneath.

The initial retroburn resulted in an unstable orbit among the greater moons; a quick adjustment yielded another flyby and assist at Tylo, along with a reasonably close approach at Vall.

Even with the few available sensors, Laythe was a goldmine. Its magnetic field was quite strong and its interactions with Jool complex; atmosphere appeared moderately breathable – but ammonia was plentiful enough for the probe’s collectors to actually sample it. Gravimetrics and long-range albedo measurements suggested an active geology underneath the anomalously cool planetwide ocean.

Tylo was nowhere near as interesting. The sensors failed to detect an active magnetic field or evidence of geological activity. Ultimately, it was a lifeless chunk of metal and rock – massive but boring.

Gene’s final decision as to circularize the probe’s orbit in between Laythe and Vall.

---

Halfway between Kerbin and Duna’s orbit, Jeb was reading the messages off the screen.

“Idiot,” he noted.

“What?”

“He settled for a Jool orbit.”

Bob simply sighed.

“He came into a retrograde orbit. Textbook inbound gravity assist, but he’d have to pay around six k of dee-vee to get into Laythe orbit.”

“What’s he got left?”

“3k plus the backup thruster.”

“…Think he could pull off an inclination reversal manoeuvre?”

“Well, he could try and use Tylo to launch the probe into a polar orbit, but that’s just halfway to success.”

“I have another thing in mind…”

---

Gene stared at the data relayed from Vulkan. Jeb had a crazy plan. Crazy, but doable. He’d roll with it.

The first part of the plan involved returning back to an elliptical orbit in order to convert most of the kinetic energy into potential energy. Orion thus had to swing all the way back to Pol first.

There, it would reverse its velocity vector, and dive back towards Laythe.

With the opposite approach velocity, the insertion burn was quite acceptable; the dV budget could have been cut by another kilometre per second, but that would have resulted in a two-month manoeuvre.

Once the final insertion was complete, the stage was jettisoned. Over the next few days, Gene’s crew could use the small chemical thruster to bring the probe into an optimum orbit for long-term study at their leisure.

---

It was over.

A year and a half later, Vulkan returned to Kerbin’s sphere of influence. A brief pulse of the nuclear thruster adjusted its grazing fly-by of the planet.

Jeb turned around for a last glance at their home away from home, and floated through the hatch. Bill locked and dogged it, and moved out of the way as Jeb lowered his coach into place.

Kerbin’s atmosphere met them with slight jitter. Not willing to overstay their welcome, Jeb pulled the ‘Abort’ handle.

Edited February 6, 2017 by DDE
Added images

[DDE]

Ladies and gentlekerbs, I'm sad to report that principal photography has been completed. The two final chapters are forthcoming. If you wish to encounter spoilers, my Steam account is linked in the sig. I am hereby mothballing my backup.

It's been a pleasure.

[DDE]

Chapter 33: The Outer Reaches

Munemone Kerman had the most thankless job in the entire space program. Jeb’s crew relied heavily on expendable interns to carry out even relatively important duties. But her job was even worse.

After mapping the potential landing sites, they just stockpiled hundreds of miles of magnetic tape with unprocessed high-resolution radar data. And it wasn’t until five years later that they decided to start selling a Munar atlas mapping the whole place with 50 cm resolution. Which meant that the computer they used to compound the data from multiple passes only worked maybe a third of the time; Munemone spent the rest chasing down the requisite technicians or out-of-production spare parts.

Reel 2310. Insert, review, load up, run process, extract. Ten minutes total.

Reel 2311… she once again glanced at the screen to confirm that it was not blank. She couldn’t do much more. There wasn’t enough data for her to try and match up the passes to each other within any reasonable amount of time. And it wasn’t like the image was easily matched to a regular map – radar reflections are extremely counterintuitive. White areas were slopes and edges, a complete departure from the appearance of objects in the visible spectrum.

This time, something caught her eye. Normally she’d get moderate returns from basaltic rock. This particular dataset, however, contained a massive bloom of a signal. This was highly unlikely to be a mere malfunction. In fact, it was too big for a spent Sarnus or Tunguska stage.

---

“What activities are planned during the nine-month surface stay?” one of the reporters asked, prompted by Jeb. There was an illusory freedom of access to the in-quarantine pre-launch press conference: all but a handful of vetted journalists would be simply ignored. Internal documentation referred to this as “measures to prevent proliferation of brain cancer”.

“The current mission architecture imposes considerable limitations on the range of equipment that can be delivered to the surface,” Jeb began, hoping to obscure the flag-and-footprints nature of the mission with sufficient platitudes, “and we opted against a brief surface excursion followed by moths stuck in orbit waiting for the transfer window. As a result, the lander’s trunk is dedicated entirely to the surface base, and we designed the scientific program around this limitation.”

Before anyone could formulate a follow-up question, Jeb pointed at the next person on his own list.

“What… what would you consider the largest risk involved?”

“Well,” Jeb responded, actually surprized that someone expected a serious analysis of that, “in terms of physical risk, the Duna descent is easily the most dangerous stage. But in terms of availability of abort scenarios, it’s after we get back to the ship in Duna orbit that we end up without backups. While on Duna, we have the chance of becoming self-sufficient in terms of supplies via our biological experiments, and we always have the option of retreating to orbit. En route to Duna, we can scrub the landing, and have both the main propulsion bus and the lander’s engines at our disposal. But once we’re at the point where we need to leave Duna orbit… we won’t last until a replacement return stage is delivered.”

Before Jeb could spot the next verified reporter, one of the people in the audience shot to his feet. Jeb’s heart sunk – it was a bottom feeder from the Hourly Mail. Unapologetic and undeterred by the murmurs, the watery-eyed mudraker fired off his question as if it were an accusation:

“Can you comment on your sexual harassment policies?”

Everyone else was taken aback. The grinning man pulled out an audio recorder, which announced in Valentina’s voice,

“I'd love to mate.”

There were gasps, and there was chatter. Jeb stood up, and took a step towards the window, and took a swing at the glass. Whatever he had in his hand was enough to reduce the tempered layered glass to dust. In subsequent turmoil, the Hourly Mail reporter accidentally fell out of his chair, face-first. Repeatedly.

---

Pyramid was Jeb’s greatest exploit in avoiding having to deal with Kerbodyne. With oversized payloads of up to 45 t needing to go into a high 1000 km staging orbit, one Mainsail was nowhere near enough. But rather than deal with those jerks, Jeb proposed using a cluster of three Mainsail stacks, with another three stacks as detachable boosters. On top was a wide orbital stage with a new JKJSP quad-nozzle motor. Even then, Achilles had to be assembled in four launches.

The first launch carried the main propulsion module, complete with the Neptune atomic rocket and the large solar panels needed to keep the refrigeration systems running.

The second launch contained two massive supplemental fuel modules, with additional hydrogen surrounding an internal tank of slush oxygen. Both modules mounted automatic docking systems, allowing them to move into position around the main bus.

The third launch omitted the side boosters, since the lander was relatively lightweight compared to the whacking huge fuel tanks. The lander would until the final launch to begin rendezvous.

The final launch contained the return vehicle, the hab, and Gold Team. For that, a Mainsail sufficed, allowing all of the time-proven safety systems to be used.

You couldn’t go wrong with a four-booster Mainsail stack, Jeb thought as the launch went on routinely. The oversized ship was delivered into low orbit before using the Tunguska to intercept the propulsion section.

The Achilles was a considerable improvement on its smaller predecessor. The larger motor and much larger tankage gave it enough energy to cart around the lander, and the internal layout of the hab had been perfected, with personal quarters encased into a radiation shelter the size of Vulkan’s entire interior, the return vehicle relegated to its flight station role, and a new commons and science area out back based on Athens.

The hab finally clamped onto the bus. Jeb and Bob immediately unbuckled and headed into the hab area, while Bill prepared for EVA.

“Capcom, initiate decoupling,” Jeb said while manning the auxiliary control panel in his own personal quarters.

“Tank module stage, stand by, detach!”

The ship shook slightly.

“Propulsion bust stage, stand by, detach!”

Bill climbed out the return vehicle and engaged the jets. The side propellant modules needed to be further strapped down manually, which took about ten minutes. He had to be careful with the Kaptron-coated propellant tanks around him.

“Starboard aft, complete,” he reported.

“Confirmed, stand by for nozzle inspection.”

The carbon-carbon bell slid into place.

“Confirming.”

“Get back in, Marina’s coming in… twenty minutes.

The lander arrived, slid into position and docked. Its own ascent stage was jettisoned to reveal the insertion heat shield.

Achilles was ready.

---

“Comms.”

“Check.”

“Life support.”

“Check.”

“Guidance lock.”

“Check.”

“Pile status.”

“Ready to go.”

“Feed lines?

“Precooled.”

“Pumps?”

“Spun up, running wet.”

“Alright, let’s get this show on the road,” Jeb said, “Begin feed.”

“Hydrogen line pressurizing. Oxygen line pressurizing, evaporator engaged.”

“Flight, I need your permission for trans-Duna injection.”

“Achilles, you’re cleared for departure,” Gene noted after a pause.

“Copy that. Brennschluß to 67 seconds, firing in 95 seconds.”

The time ticked down. Finally, the engine at the back of the ship sparked to life. And then the supersonic oxygen injectors in the nozzle fired up, and the ship really started going. The auxiliary tank modules allowed a chemically-augmented high-thrust burn while keeping the main bus untapped.

In fact, in augmented mode and with the high-expansion nozzle, the new motor was dangerously close to being usable for a Kerbin launch.

They spent the week in the storm cellar with the reactor hot for the initial correction burn.

Once on a solid intercept trajectory, the mostly-empty fuel modules were ditched. Achilles assumed cruise configuration, with full hydrogen tanks and some lOx in the auxiliary buffer tankage.

---

Long-duration interplanetary flights are typically uneventful. The bulk of the tech had been tested on both Vulkan ships, and living conditions had been immensely improved. Bob was kept busy thanks to a magnetometry and plasma array, although his crewmates failed to properly appreciate his attempts to monitor Joolean auroral choruses without using a headset.

Months later, Achilles was nearing on Duna. Preparations for orbital insertions involved stoking up the engine once again, and deploying the heat shield. The crew watched the multi-layered donut inflate through the windows of the return vehicle. The supply of lOx was sufficient for the planned correction and insertion manoeuvres, so the first burn was augmented.

Then they braced for the deceleration.

The free Δv seemed much less attractive now that they faced a prospect of a fiery death if they went too low. The tenuous atmosphere meant a very small margin of error.

They retracted everything they could as they crossed the terminator. The ship groaned slightly as it reoriented.

Then the vibrations started, and the edges of the shield lit up.

Deceleration continued to mount. Jeb watched the artificial horizon. As soon as they began to approach the 20 km mark, where there was a risk of tumbling, he went into barbeque mode, firing roll thrusters as the rest struggled to keep the ship stable.

Even as they passed the periapsis, they could see they failed to brake into low orbit.

An extra week was spent on a high orbit before another aerobrake.

This time, it was more successful. Once the dip was complete, they ditched the shield, and prepared the engine for a final circularization burn.

---

Jeb sealed and dogged the overhead hatch, and floated into his seat. The lander undocked, and a brief click of the thrusters sent it clear of the mothership.

Half an hour later, the main thrusters initiated the retroburn.

Another half-an-hour later the lander approached atmosphere.

They had limited margin of error from there. The insulation cork on the bottom of the cargo container would work for the upper atmosphere, but much of the descent was powered, at 75-80% of nominal thrust.

This was a classic automated suicide burn, slowing down at a precariously low altitude before descending with a considerable sway. The ground was not particularly even, but good enough, so Jeb green-lit the final descent.

“Landing struts compressed. Angle within limits, engine shutdown, deploying ladders. It’s a stay.”

Bob squeezed off a brief message in Morse code to avoid clogging up the lander’s low-bandwidth channel, as Jeb and Bill suited up for the lengthy descent down the side of the tall lander.

The rusty red soil was unexplainably different from the Mun, and from the ice-concrete mixture on Minmus. The sky was a more vivid shade of butterscotch than on the probe photos.

“Yep, it’s a world alright,” Jeb dispensed enormous insight.

Bob just grunted under his helmet.

“You’re going to help me or what?” Bill asked, having crawled into the cargo compartment.

“Nope. Care for a two hundred meter sweep, Bob?”

The base layout consisted of seven principal elements. The RTG slugs in the lander’s cargo compartments, along with its radios, were linked to the inflatable camp. The camp proper consisted of an external drill mount and airlock, a laboratory hut, a habitat hut and a pair of greenhouses constituting the Extra planetary Agriculture experiment. Additionally, the base fielded a heliotracker solar array, and a freestanding chemical reactor unit.

The crew of Achilles buttoned up for the long stay.

Spoiler

Important lesson learnt: do not actually use KAS struts. They caused the adapter between the hab and the prop bus to fly off, even after I disabled joint detachment in the console menu.

@Angel-125, that electricity consumption on the greenhouses was a nasty surprise. Are we supposed to break out geothermal or atomic power just to get the basic life support circuit running?

 

[Angelo Kerman]

@DDE: For initial bases, solar arrays and Buckboards converted to generators provide electrical power. Later on, geothermal taps and atomic power become available. In the tech tree, early bases struggle for power but as tech improves you get a fission reactor and eventually a prototype fusion reactor, giving you power to spare. It's tough to balance gameplay with that seat-of-the-pants struggle that the pioneers of the Old West faced, and one way is the power requirements.

Sadly I can't do much about the KAS struts, though I recently made some revisions to Pathfinder to reduce the chances of parts exploding when you mount them to the surface. Maybe the upcoming Sandcastle release will help; finally realizing my vision of 3D printing bases on the planet, an end-game feature of Pathfinder. Basically, Sandcastle uses Extraplanetary Launchpads with robotic printers from Pathfinder, so no KAS needed.

Hurray for making it to Duna!

[DDE]

@Angel-125, problem is, at Duna that Poncho couldn't power one greenhouse during the day.

And because I haven't quite caught that in testing, well, I'm lucky I brought a Buckboard of life support supplies instead of a second Poncho.

Edited February 18, 2017 by DDE

[Angelo Kerman]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

@Angel-125, problem is, at Duna that Poncho couldn't power one greenhouse during the day.

And because I haven't quite caught that in testing, well, I'm lucky I brought a Buckboard of life support supplies instead of a second Poncho.

Do you have any Ore or drills? If so, you can convert a Buckboard 2000 or 3000 into a generator. If you only have the Buckboard 1000, I can add a generator config to that as well.

[DDE]

9 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

Do you have any Ore or drills? If so, you can convert a Buckboard 2000 or 3000 into a generator. If you only have the Buckboard 1000, I can add a generator config to that as well.

Nah, this trunk already housed unrealistically much.

[DDE]

Chapter 34: Self-Exploration

Jeb Kerman circled around the northern “pot”.

For Bob Kerman, the mission was going very well. Over the 270-day surface stay, he’d left no stone unturned in a five-mile radius, confirming several ancient rockbeds and gullies. The embedded geology lab spared them from the need to carry the bulk of his samples, now forming a neat pile just outside the airlock.

For Bill Kerman, the mission was tolerable. His primary duty had been maintaining the meteorological records as they watched the walls of dust roll by.

For Jeb Kerman, the mission was a mess. He was relegated to “housekeeping duties”. The basic scrubbers and the composters worked as advertised, but he didn’t even get around to using locally-produced fertilizer – his crops were failing miserably. He kept staring at the weak shoots in the dim light that penetrated through the transparent roof.

Solar irradiance alone was supposed to be sufficient, they’d tested for that. Soil samples and atmospheric conditions matched control tests. Alas, it would remain a mystery until the handful of frozen samples would be examined, probably in between trying to coax any life from Bob’s soil samples.

Luckily, the crops were an experiment. The storable rations and CO2 scrubber had picked up all the slack, and it was time to leave. Achilles awaited in orbit.

The climb back into the DEV was a lot easier after months outside zero-grav.

There was a brief checklist to run, after which Bob briefly caught Bill’s eye.

“Any regrets?”

“…Nope.”

“Come on, what more can we get done in this lifetime?” Jeb laughed from his seat deeper in the craft.

“I dunno, Laythe sounds like a nice place to retire,” Bob chuckled.

Jeb listened to the pumps whirr in the main stage, and then pulled the handle. The pyrobolts in the mounting ring on the landing platform just as the twin rockets fired, leaving behind the legs, RTGs and an empty container behind along with the base.

The landing stage had enough energy left in it to work through much of the lower atmosphere.

There, it separated, leaving the tiny ascent stage to press into orbit.

After all these months, the Achilles was slightly chilly and reeked of a different kind of plastic. There wasn’t much time to waste, though – orbital alignment was perfect for the ΔV they had to be mostly used up in a fast-tracked return burn.

---

“Slava, we need to talk,” a voice announced from the other side of the door, barely pretending to knock.

“Come on in,” Dr Kermanov annoyedly beckoned from behind stacks of papers.

Linus Kerman, messy-haired as usual, herded in a bespectacled female intern, clad in an oversized sweater, before him.

“There’s a high-contrast anomaly south of the Vallis Fortuna LZ,” he announced plainly, “I need you to back me up when I petition Jeb to run a Hornet mission.”

“Start from the beginning,” Yaroslav demanded after a sigh.

“This intern here spotted an anomalous return on one of our older radar scans. I managed to wake the satellite and scan the area again, repeatedly. The first kicker is that we’re looking at something huge and nearly perfectly flat to be shining back at us like this – much bigger than anything natural, or any of our spent stages.

“And the second kicker is that we’ve found what’s left of our hijacked lander. With a few tweaks we’ve been able to resolve an unattributed debris field immediately west of our Giant Flasher. I refuse to consider it an accident.”

---

It was useless to petition Gene Kerman at the time, he was really busy with Orion 9.

The month-long mission within the Sarnus system was going to be his magnum opus, a showcase of every lesson painfully learnt at Jool.

A week before the initial manoeuvre, the probe zipped by Tekto, its final target.

The initial braking burn occurred about three ring diameters away from Sarnus. It was aimed for a high elliptical orbit.

That orbit was well-aimed. The probe was to sneak up on Slate.

Slate was increasingly puzzling. From far away it seemed just another Tylo, but the closer they got, the more bizarre it looked. Magnetic and plasma readings were conflicting – it was supposed to be a dead rock, but there was some weird activity.

By then, Gene’s crew had grown accustomed to executing manoeuvres mid-flyby.

As Orion left Slate, Gene could not shake the feeling of unexplained dread. The readings were not just conflicting, they were contradictory. Standard atmospheric and geological activity markers were absent, yet the landscape in the images bore evidence of a very active past, and in fact suggested an entire biosphere. It wasn’t just a dead world, it was a fairly recently dead world.

Orion pushed onwards with its tour of the larger moons, the next leg bringing it precariously close to the rings.

The next stop was Eeloo.

That moon was a bit more ordinary, although puzzlingly enough it wasn’t covered in any sort of ice. The scanners showed some highly reflective, powdery, confusing mess of organics on top of silicates.

The final manoeuvre brought Orion on intercept course with Tekto.

Tekto was much more of a known variable. Sure, discovering an apparently induced magnetosphere was surprising, but even from Kerbin it was plainly apparent that the moon had a thick blanket of organics and hydrocarbons, which the probe promptly sampled with its collectors. The atmosphere was much more transparent to UV and IR sensors, and picked up vast swathes of apparent liquid oceans.

---

“MISSION PLAN 23-A AUTHORIZED,” Jeb curtly responded to the forwarded file.

The Mission Control team exchanged surprized glances. They expected more requirements, or at least some arguments. Then the teletype came to life.

“TELL MUNEMONE TO STOP WEARING SWEATERS TO WORK.”

The intern spent the next few seconds dying under the crossfire of stares, until Gene’s barking voice broke the silence, seemingly younger by a few years.

“Alright, I want TERRA to start cooling the hydrogen tanks, signal SAT and VAB to begin launch prep!”

The twin launches and crew delivery were executed flawlessly. With limited preparation, ISP called upon its veterans – Val, Yaroslav, Raygan.

Bringing the slim Mk 3 lander on the designated landing site was quite easy. They could have done even better than that, but wanted to give the Giant Flasher a wide berth.

“Got a visual?” Slava asked, unusually nervous.

“…Yeah. Couple hundred meters, just as advertised. Shall we?”

“Alright, prep jets, fifty meter separation.”

“Hornet, Achilles, how copy, over?”

“Moderate interference.”

“Hornet, CAPCOM, say again?” Gene stammered.

“Achilles says they’ve tuned in on our circuits.”

“Copy that, maintain discipline on the omni. I think we’ve got eavesdroppers. Establishing Kerbin-Achilles circuit.”

“I swear, we’re getting encryption after this,” Jeb muttered.

“You’re optimistic,” Gene responded.

“What, you didn’t plug the leaks in time?”

“No, our friends outside the program got smart. They see the weird readings from Slate, they see an urgent mission, they connect the two, and they start screaming.”

“CAPCOM, we’re touching down.”

“Hornet, how copy?” Gene asked after two minutes of silence.

“CAPCOM, on target, proceeding with the mission, over,” Yaroslav responded before switching to local, “They might as well have sent a poet.”

“I am not taking a mallet to this thing,” Val responded, pointing at the flat obsidian obelisk towering before them, “Clearly an artefact.”

“Hm, a shaped charge could probably break it.”

“Don’t even think about it. We stick to sensors and soil samples.”

---

“How bad?” Bill asked as Bob sealed up the hatch to the RV.

“Well, we’ve dispersed the SAR and switched the LZ, so we’ve got that,” Jeb responded, “As to the rest, I don’t like where this is going, the public is in a tizzy about our attempts to usher in a Slatean invasion or whatever.”

The RV separated from the rest of the Achilles.

---

Walt Kerman stood guard at the blast door at the tunnel leading to the causeway. Well, he had actually fetched his lounge chair, so he wasn’t exactly standing. The tunnel was the lynchpin in KSC’s perimeter – the surrounding marshland had been further inundated over the past years, and was a worse approach than trying to swim in from the sea.

Thus far, the most the crowd outside seemed to have tried was banging their head on the thick steel plate. Walt’s eyes slowly closed.

Then there was noise, and there was heat, and Walt smashed into a wall and tumbled to the ground. Hundreds of boots ground the tarmac past him, frenzied cries of schadenfreude. A single amplified voice cut through the havoc.

“Burn everything you see, but spare the Slateans! We will have them interrogated! And dissected! We will learn their secrets! For the glory of Kerbin!”

Slipping in and out of consciousness, Walt saw a familiar green face lazily follow the crowd, holding a megaphone, grinning like a madman.

A bit over five minutes later the crowd barged into the south-west corner of the R&D facility, setting fire to everything in their path. By then, the staff of the KSC was in complete disarray. The intruders broke down into several groups about a hundred each, and split the Centre into sectors.

One of the groups on the right flank rushed straight for the propulsive fluids facility, only for the first ranks to rush back, causing a pileup, as the liquid hydrogen tank let off a giant flame.

Over at the primary Mission Control building, another strike group were even more bamboozled by the sight of a kerbal in a spacesuit standing in their way. Finally, one of the nutters decided to try and tackle them, only to receive and Indian Kerman haymaker.

Jeb pulled out a Molotkov cocktail from the attacker’s bag, and slashed it across his helmet. He repeated the operation with the other two bottles, and once thoroughly on fire, he rushed the crowd, who were promptly routed.

The mob meeting the most resistance was trying to get inside the communications centre. They encountered severe resistance in the form of a chilling glare from Bill Kerman. It is very difficult to maintain interpersonal aggression towards someone who fails to even move an eyebrow at the threat of having their brains bashed in, and eventually the backed off, only for the comms centre to be rocked by explosions. Bill failed to break out of his pose, but in his mind he noted that it sounded like heavy-duty demolition charges, not just a schmuck with a Molotkov.

Over in the VAB, Valentina Kerman fought for the preservation of the unique and expensive equipment. The mob outside had no interest in making their way inside and just kept trying to set fire to the exterior – something the water mist fire suppression system easily neutralized. Thus far all they needed was to avoid the mist system sabotage, which is why she was doing the rounds in the basement when she heard screaming. She cut a corner, barely noticing a shadow disappearing up the stairwell while Gus tried to stymie the bleeding from his face. She raced right past him.

Twenty floors above, agent Kirrim Kerman dropped the duffel bag and surveyed the floor he’d picked for the demolition charges. Someone was huffing loudly behind him.

“Well, hello there, Ms. Kerman,” he said, eliciting an ear-to-ear Kheshire grin, “Your supposed romantic escapades have been making quite the…”

Kirrim’s face was smashed hard with a fast-moving object – a reinforced telescoping titanium aluminide flagstaff. However, he barely reeled from that, and the next overhead sweep ended very badly for Valentina, since Kirrim easily grabbed her improvised quarterstaff, and thrust it right in her gut, subduing her effortlessly.

At that time, a clueless wrench monkey was wondering past, pretending to be uninvolved, ready to mix in with the mob at the first sign of trouble. And for the first time in forever, he did something noteworthy, and applied the wrench to the back of Kirrim’s head.

This time Kirrim half-collapsed. The flagstaff clattered to the floor, and a second later Val heard the unmistakable sound a gun side being racked.

And then there was the sound of a gunshot.

The standard-issue ISP flag contained a pyrotechnically-driven tungsten dart designed to solidly anchor it in igneous regolith. When pointed appropriately and not pressed against a hard surface, it made a decent musket, and the dart solidly embedded itself in Kirrim’s gun hand. Then, in the best traditions of musketry, the now-empty flagstaff was brought down on him, repeatedly.

---

The few remaining fanatics were being quickly expelled by another mob that showed up, this time with light blue-and-yellow armbands and vigorously applied shovel handles.

Jeb surveyed the mess from atop the VAB. Much of the facility had been thoroughly torched, including the Academy.

“You want the good news, the bad news, or the really bad news?” Gus asked, fresh stitches on his cheek.

“In that order.”

“Rockomax called.”

“Did they get hit?”

“No, but they thoroughly disposed of all equipment and documentation anyway.”

“Morons. Another two to five years, then?”

“Yep, we’ve lost the bulk of tech irreversibly.”

“The bad news?”

“The tracking station’s archives are gone. And our friend Kirrim had passed through Mission Control and demolished the data room there too. We’ve lost the keys to our entire satellite group.”

“So, how much worse can it get?”

“Look at the massive placard over there. Some people want a change of leadership at the highest level.”

“Oh, no… no… No!”

[DDE]

Welp, I'm done. I'm very slowly rebuilding my install in 1.2.2, but it would take a lot of time before I'm ready for another go. See you all around.