Lonely at the top

[Starchaser]

(This will be an overview of my in game missions, written from the point of view of a newly appointed director of the space program, due to his predecessor's mistakes and oversights. I hope you all enjoy)

 

Space Journal entry 1. Day 152 of mission operations.

Well, this is it. I'm in the big desk, with huge shoes to fill. I look over the asset list and the science pools and just shake my head. We have a 7.2 million pool of resources and a science pool large enough to pull the trigger on a half dozen advances should we need them. And I'm here because Werner made mistakes? If that's the expectation, it might not be as fun a place to work around here as it's been in the past. It will definitely be a tight-rope for me to walk. But lets discuss that later. I'm Charles Kolden, the new KSP director. Lets look at today's mission activity.

1 Mission KM2RovLP2 2.0  Our Minmus rover mission. It's been on planet for 8 days. Pilot, Seanul, Engineer, Bill, Scientist, Shelbert. This is a stricken mission, with a rover that's been hugely reduced in effectiveness. We caught Seanul turning donuts on Minmus at high speed. When we told him to stop showboating, he pointed to the mission objective to test the new self-righting mechanism. With reluctant fairness to him, it did take 7 attempts before the rover failed to land on it's wheels. However, by the time he did manage to get it to land on the science jr, only 1 of the solar panels was functional. So now, multiple times during the day we have to stop and park the rover into Kerbol to recharge the batteries. One of Werner's mistakes was authorizing a replacement rover for them. It's still 5 days away from Minmus. However, they will have finished the major science efforts and the mission contract within 2. I've repurposed the delivery mission. More on that later. They drove 7 km before I made them park to turn mission control over to the Minmus Probe teams Distance driven in this mission segment. 8.5 km 98 to go on mission route.

2 Mission KM2Pr 4.0 More than anything, the 3.0 and 3.01 Minmus probes cost Werner his position. The 3.0 probe arrived on it's assigned polar orbit, and the contract refused to pay out, citing a lack of mission critical equipment. The design team left thermometers off of both the 3.0 and 3.01 missions. 4.0 and 4.01 were launched, with thermometers and an upgraded probe core. 4.0 reached it's assigned orbit today. 4.01 is near it's assigned orbit, but we're waiting for it to be over the specified sector before making the final mission burns. Further millstones from these missions, all 4 have undersized antennas HG-5's and were overdesigned fuelwise. Both 3.0 and 4.0 have 1300 m/s worth of fuel left in their transfer tanks, beyond the 1038 m/s in their adjustment tanks. As they are in nearly the same orbit right now, I'm considering the worth of sending the refueling probe into Minmus orbit to drain those transition tanks. 

3. Mission KM1RPrP1 1.0 Our bright spot for the day. We picked up Burlo from Munar orbit, and burned retrograde to the Mun to return them home. We couldn't get a free return, but it got us more than 2/3 of the way back, and the probe-guided ship still has 930 m/s in reserve.

4 Mission Rover delivery. This mission has been repurposed to finish a temperature survey mission from points on opposite sides of Minmus. We came up with a plan to dip in and out of orbit to pick up the 2 'below altitude' requirements when we had Jeb in orbit, but it was deemed he had too low amounts of fuel left and he wasn't allowed to attempt it. At the time I thought "this is Jeb, he's gonna do it anyway" but surprisingly he obeyed the command to burn out of orbit. I guess he was worried about his tank too. Anyway, we're going to do the orbit dipping with this probe and use the thermometer on the rover. Our ground rover drove under the point for the 'below 2300 m' requirement and confirmed it's in the lesser flats, so maybe we will drop the replacement rover there also. We burned today to move our entry trajectory from a high polar orbit to one with a periapsis of about 9000 m. A final check before committing the burn exposed a staging flaw that would have decoupled the rover when the lander stage's engines were triggered. That would have been an auspicious beginning for me.

End Entry 1

[Starchaser]

(Correction to above. it was really day 158)

Entry 2, Day 158-159

The boys on the rover didn't manage to get far today, as rough terrain kept them moving slowly and other missions kept making them park while other teams used the control room. Distance traveled 15km. 83 to go. They did send home a great picture though

https://imgur.com/a/0Oamu

 

Mission KM1RPrP1 1.0 Burlo landed today and joined the staff. While it's great to have him aboard I should note that his debriefing file had a picture he took of the rescue craft. It threw some water on the 'bright spot' I mentioned in entry 1.

https://imgur.com/a/T5nRU

I've issued a strongly worded memo ordering the design teams to run their final releases past the astronaut group before construction begins.

Mission: KM0Pr 3.0 This was a typical probe, on a simple equatorial orbit, It reached it's assigned orbit easily enough. The payout was nice. I wish more of our missions went like this.

Mission:KM2Pr 4.01 is still on a near-stationary orbit of Minmus. The designated sector is slowly catching up with it. it still seems to be a quarter of it's rotation away from coming under the probe. Patience is a virtue here.

New contracts. We were offered 3 new contracts today. Placing a new station in Munar orbit. I guess someone wants bookend stations there. The specifications for this station match the one we already sent into orbit. The lifting vehicle for our station design is large enough that although the payout seems huge, we'll only make about 40k profit on the mission. We accepted this mission and KM1Sta 1.03 is on the way to the Mun already. Going in and tightening up on smaller design flaws in the rocket made for a much smoother liftoff than the first station, which we almost scrubbed, but somehow the rocket came under control once the first 4 boosters were jettisoned. This was under control throughout, but still required us to delay the gravity turn until very late. 

an image of the rocket pre-launch.

https://imgur.com/a/HLPw5

It got cropped out of the pic somehow, but Jeb managed to sneak aboard and we almost launched with him in the probe. He knows it's supposed to be under probe control in transit, but he's just itching to go into space again. DM0Pr 1.0 is hanging out just outside of Kerbin's SOI, waiting for it's burn window in 79 days for Duna. I haven't told Jeb yet, but 2 weeks before that burn I'm going to authorize a manned mission in to orbit and conduct science in the Duna system. I am toying with it being a 3 man ship. We'll see how the group's track record looks over the next 60 days. Anyway, one of our probes caught this pic of the station entering orbit. Quite dramatic.

https://imgur.com/a/H9lmH

 

The second contract was a completely new mission for us. A derelict probe in low kerbin orbit. I thought about this one hard. The design team gave me several options, but without seeing the probe I don't know what's viable. I thought about making a close flyby with existing material to get a look at it, but nothing was really close enough to make that effective. In the end I thought of an old Hal Kinden movie I saw about a suborbital passenger craft that suffered a malfunction and got blasted into orbit. It was laughable in several ways, however they solved their re-entry problem by using a slightly bigger heat shielded ship to ride interference. Never mind that there is no way that doing that would allow the sub orbital craft to decelerate fast enough to not crash into the leading ship. However it did lead me to approve sending a grabber unit mounted on a 2.5 meter rocket, and use the bigger mass to protect the probe. It presented a design challenge. With the grabber unit we can't mount a top parachute, and the engineering team assured me that modeling just bringing down the fairing base, and the grabber would be horribly unstable, and likely to flip, we are landing the maneuvering stage along with the probes to provide extra weight and stability. We all have our fingers crossed on this one. 

https://imgur.com/a/0wPxX

The last contract is for 2 tourists to land on Minmus. I've held this launch until we get the probes down. The 2 craft will rendezvous in 10 hours. Time for some sleep!

End Entry 2

(the pics didn't embed.  I will replace them with links, but I need bed right now.)

Edited October 27, 2017 by Starchaser
added note

[Kerbalstar]

I like this very much @Starchaser!

[Starchaser]

7 hours ago, kerbalstar said:

I like this very much @Starchaser!

Thanks! The encouragement is appreciated

[Starchaser]

Day 159-160

The missions seem to have slowed down some. Is that a good thing? 

KM2RovLP2 2.0 The rover mission covered some flatter ground today, and Seanul managed to put 30 km and a science stop behind him. The drive in the Minmus 'afternoon' was at such an angle that the sun was able to charge the rover's 1 remaining panel so we only had to stop once to recharge. There's 1 more science stop, then the contract survey to go. Then it will be time to drive back to the rover. As an aside, perhaps it would be a good idea to include a probe core on these landers, even if they are manned. It would have saved a lot of time if we could have moved the lander to the second survey area while they drove the rover there. At least Seanul will be the first Kerbal to circumnavigate Minmus. 

KM1Sta 1.03 This station slide smoothly into munar orbit, and that was an easy contract to collect. The 2 stations are on similar orbits, and at this point nearly in opposition. One of these will be useful in Minmus orbit. Will be able to refuel outbound probes and ships. I'll wait until I'm offered a contract to do it though. These launches are expensive and it would be helpful to defer the cost.

 

[Starchaser]

Entry 4

Day 160-161

The rovernauts made fair time, and finished the science and contract aspects of their missions. They had 2 pucker factor moments with very sudden cliffs in their path. Bob tried to get an image of one, to show us what they were looking at.

https://imgur.com/a/96cOp

They are on their way back to the lander now, about 78 km away and parked near another steep hill.

 

The probe rescue proved difficult. The grabber unit seemed to not want to trigger on the stalled probe. it took several impacts before it suddenly just seemed to grab it. It appears that grabbing the body of the small probe was ineffective and it only succeeded when it could grab it by the small ring along the top of the probe. Then, as the engineering team predicted, even with the mass of the upper stage, the whole thing inverted as it was landing. At least it held it's orientation through re-entry. The probe is on the bottom and the rocket engine is on top in this picture

https://imgur.com/a/1M5hn

We have another rescue in munar orbit that came in, and they've now asked us to put a station on the Mun. A permanent base. I've got my team looking into how to do this. Also, the asteroid capture mission came up again. We haven't seen an asteroid small enough to qualify for this mission yet, so I'm authorizing putting a small telescope in orbit to help detect them.

[Starchaser]

Entry 5

Day 161 - 162

The boys in the rover made 35 km today and are parking for the Minmus night with 43 more km to  go. We're certain that can be finished tomorrow.

We also launched  2 new ships Mun-ward. We had 4 munar objectives so each handled 2 of them. Sherdas piloted one ship, with both a lander for his 'plant a flag' mission, and an orbital scanner. 

This is intended to help us decide where to place our Mun base when we are ready to launch that

Interestingly enough, as we're beginning to plan our Mun surface base, another request was made for a station around Kerbin. We're looking into our Munar base design and seeing if we can use that.

The other mission consisted of 2 probes. One contained our brand new SENTINEL telescope.

Here it is, on it's way out of the Kerbin system.

And the second probe was controlling a craft with a Mk-1 pod to rescue our stranded Kerbonaut. The interstage fairing might make that difficult.

Things have been going so well lately I'm afraid to even glance at a mirror for fear of breaking it.  Something is bound to go wrong.

 

[Starchaser]

Entry 6

Day 162-163

We had a minor mishap today. Not anything Kerbin-shaking. But let's start with the good first.

Seanus, and his crew parked their rover near the base of their lander and carefully transported all the science packages from the rover and stored them away in the command module, then blasted off and began their return to Kerbin After nearly 10 days driving around the surface of Minmus, they seemed happy to be on their way home.

As the boys were in their last hour of the drive to the rover, Thee repurposed rover delivery vehicle dipped it's orbit and simulated a landing injection burn, to a point. The vehicle got under the 5600 km ceiling for the requested temperature scan. It completed the scan using the rover's thermometer, then titled back into launch burn profile and returned to it's 8500km orbit. However, the return burn wasn't quite precise enough, and we wound up in an orbit with an inclination of 86.7 degrees. The other required survey location was almost exactly on the other side of Minmus, although both locations were below the equator. We passed just west of the location, however we were still over a different section of the Lesser Flats. A decision was made to land, and drive as a rover to the location, and then take off briefly again. The landing was successful.Then the 'fun' started

Any attempt to move the rover at all, resulted in the craft wanting to pitch over. It didn't take us long to discover that the craft's reaction wheel from the lander was also trying to execute commands given to it's wheels. We disabled the reaction wheel and were off.About an hour later, a tight turn was needed but the top-heavy rover couldn't handle it. One of the lander's solar panels paid the price. Turning the reaction wheel back on, and we were able to get the rover upright easily enough

 

An image of our wounded craft. 

After the turn, it's a straight drive to the test zone. This unit has plenty of electricity, over the previous rover, as it has the batteries of the rover and the lander. We debated pushing on to target, but after flipping it, we were all kind of shook up and decided to put it to sleep for the night

 

[Starchaser]

(Oops. I got into playing...and I'm 13 kerbal days behind on this post now. I'll need to sort through some save games and make some notes before I begin posting again.)

[Pretorian28715]

Awaiting MOAR.. .