The Halberdiers: SSTalmostA Ch2: Deep Space Manouvres

[fulgur]

The Halberdiers is a mission log / story around a ship I built: a SSTO which can land nearly anywhere. The lander can also do Tylo in multiple stages, and the upper stage can do larger moons.

I'm playing in Sandbox. There is a single mod part, a kOS controller, on the Halberd. I also have Better Burn Time, DiRT + a skybox by Jade of Maar, FMRS, Kerbal Engineer, Navball Docking Alignment Indicator, Restock, SciFiVE, Transfer Window Planner and Kerbal Alarm Clock, plus dependencies.

Without further ado, let me present the Halberd!

Val locked the cockpit as she climbed in. It felt good to be back at the controls of a ship, after such a long time in high orbit at Aster Station. She checked the fuel levels, the old-fashioned dials reading: "Far too much" LF, "Just enough" Ox, "No RCS" for monoprop and "Infinite, you have RTGs" for EC. "Are you all ready for takeoff?" she asked the others. "Ready when you are!" replied the perpetually cheerful Jebediah. Val smiled and hit [SPACE].

The plane eased off the runway, the four RAPIERs providing little power for the large craft. Although, now she came to think of it, there might be enough to add a couple more tanks of fuel... It was too late now, anyway. They accelerated slowly through the lower atmosphere.

They hit the four hundred metres-per-second barrier and eased through it just below the clouds. Everyone but Jeb treated themselves to a small smile. Jeb of course whooped exultantly.

As the speed increased, so did the thrust from the RAPIERs. Flames licked at the wings and fuel tanks, dancing round the cockpit. "Angels eighteen" called Bill, and Val staged again, the pink exhaust of the nuclear engines mixing with the flames. Then at twenty-five kilometers, she triumphantly hit [1], quickly draining all the oxidant in the tanks... but not before the apoapsis touched space. Val's expert hands pulled the craft gently upwards, the slight lift from the wings increasing apoapsis despite the thin air.

As the ship cleared the atmosphere, Val opened the solar panels and antennae. The sun shone next to the Veil Nebula as she coasted to apoapsis. With a burst on the nuclear engines, she circularised the orbit around the blue jewel that was Kerbin.

"Where shall we go next?" she asked Bill. "Minmus, or the Mun?" "While the Mun would be fun," he replied, "we don't have any oxidant left. So we need to fill up on Minmus."

Despite having only 1200m/s left in the tanks, Bill assured her that the ore would make up the difference. She plotted a course which would graze the minty moon, and followed by gently glowing radioactive exhaust, the Halberd flew on through the night.

The time passed very quickly, and soon they were coasting in down to the minty moon. With less than 500m/s left, Val felt that the margins were nailbitingly thin...

The combined circularisation and deorbit burn was to set them down on the edge of a flat, where the ore was good. Numbers flowed down the screen of Bill's k-pad as Bob scribbled calculations, and luckily some of them were bigger than the others.

The ship descended in the correct manner - slowly - near the edge of the flats, just a minute's taxi away from the less-lowlands. Val expertly throttled down to keep the Halberd floating at under 5m/s, and - realising that there was no oxidant for the RCS - asked Bill to override the cargo's closed fuel valves. With a fuel rushing to the engines, the ship managed to flop down in an ungainly fashion onto the Minmus flats.

Val pressed the quick-start button and began drilling for ore, as the others jumped out of the cabin in the low gravity. Val pulled out a Kerbal Space Program flag with a flourish, stabbing it into the ground. As Jeb, Bill and Bob made their way back into the cabin, muttering about the pros and cons of a manoeuvre called 'barratry', optimal chemical compositions and the presence of olivine in the surface compositon respectively, Val stretched her legs for the first time in the six days since she had embarked, jetpacking over to an interesting rock formation.

While it was rather larger and further away than Val had anticipated, she had a very nice ten minutes without Jeb's bad jokes, Bob's technobabble and Bill's eternal keyboard-tapping. Having checked out the rock formation, and how steep the hill was - potentially useable as a runway - she turned around and returned home. When she got there, she went to the cabin, because Bill was distilling his famous dimethyl hydrazine.

At sunrise, a couple of Minmus-days later, Val's headache had finally worn off, and incidentally the liquid fuel tanks were all full and the oxidant was all drained. Val, finally stone cold sober, attempted to open the door connecting the cabin to the cockpit. It was locked, as was (ten minutes later, having found the keys in her suit pocket) the outside door. However, from her pocket kPad, she could still access the speaker systems, which she did. "JEB," she screamed, "WHY ARE YOU IN THE COCKPIT?" "Well," Jeb smiled, not picking up on her anger in any way, "Bill says that we don't have the TWR to land on the Mun. But I looked at the cargo, and we can land that on the Mun..." "SO WHAT?" blasted the speakers. "It's a Tylo lander," he smiled, "and since we only need the upper stage, I though we could visit Jool!" "YOU IDIOT!" she shouted, and opened her kPad, to try and lock the engines. Unfortunately, Jeb had deleted that program. The Vernors began to lift the nose off the ground, and she managed to immediately shut them off. Then Jeb closed the landing gear, to try and rotate while they fell down. Val hit [G]  just in time to cause the Halberd to bounce up in the air. With a "Wooooo!" Jeb pulled back on the throttle.

Jeb, laughing maniacally, managed to clear the edge of the hill with metres to spare. Val meanwhile attempted to find out what systems she could still control, and finding nothing important, began to calculate the next transfer window to Jool.

As Jeb burnt for orbit, Val told him, "The next window isn't for 150 days anyway. Gene will have us brought back by then!" Jeb just smiled, keeping the ship pointing prograde. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" she screamed as he kept on burning. "Well, as you said, Gene will bring us back... but nobody has successfully rendezvoused in solar orbit! And from there we can actually get to Jool faster!" "Fine," she sighed. "If this is irreversible, then I'll take you to Jool. But give me back the controls!" "Right," said Jeb, a gleam in his eye. "And now you have had the controls, you have been the one to allow us out of Kerbin SoI!" Val sighed and tapped out a message to Gene: "We are going to Jool. Jeb's fault."

[fulgur]

Chapter 2: Pike
As Val sent the message, Bill tapped out a command on his kPad. It altered four letters of the word: "We are going to Duna."

Back at the KSC, Gene exploded in a cloud of rage. His beautiful Jool-5 prototype ship had been taken to Duna! And why? There was no reason to do that, even to test anything important. Steam rose gently off his head as he stormed down to the VAB. "WERNHER!" he screamed. "DO YOU HAVE ANYTHING INTERPLANETARY?" Wernher, standing by the door, replied "Ja, we have something but it is not perfect-" "I DON'T CARE!" shouted Gene. "STRAP A HITCHHIKER ON IT, PUT THE FIRST PILOT ON THE ROSTER IN IT AND SEND IT TO DUNA!" "But the first pilot is-" "NOW!" screamed Gene, the jets of steam shooting out of his ears.

And that was how Adhat Kerman, stupidest kerbal on the program, flew an ancient rocket to Duna. The exhaust from the Mammoth engines rose into the air as the behemoth spacecraft rose into the air.

Adhat turned the ship sideways, because planes fly sideways and this has plane tail-pieces on it.

Adhat turned the engines off, because it was too hot. Luckily, the apoapsis was already in space.

When he was in space, Gene told him to turn the engines on. He was bored of the boosters, so he let them fly away, and enjoyed the pretty exhaust.

A couple of weeks later, which he had spent looking out of the window at a blue-ish star, Gene got him to burn the engines. Eventually, he told him to turn them off.

Gene, whose anger had now worn off, realised that his rushed choices were pointless, as the window to Duna was only today, and completely stupid. He just hoped that he would have fun watching the Halberd flying around Duna, trying to evade a gigantic rocket. Although he did now remember that the Pike did not in fact have any parachutes.

***

After several weeks being held in the cabin, Val finally decided to just enjoy an unplanned holiday to Jool. And perhaps she'd get to land on Vall again. So she plotted a burn to Jool, with a Tylo encounter to fiddle with.

The Halberd burnt most of its fuel in a very long burn. They were now committed to Jool, as much as they had ever been. Val busied herself with transferring fuel out of the cargo - fuel not needed until they reached Tylo. Bill spent a while processing the 150 units of ore they had brought with them, and then started fiddling with his kPad. Bob pointed an antenna towards a part of the Veil, setting it up as a radio telescope and continuing his study of its origins.

***

Adhat had pointed his ship towards Duna a while ago, and finally it appeared as more than a red dot. He smiled; there wasn't really much longer to wait.

He was quite surprised to see Ike growing larger than Duna in the window, and radioed Gene: "Thanks for sending me to Ike! I like Ike! I should land there!" Gene, who agreed that it was better than landing on Duna without parachutes or landing gear, told him to go ahead and land somewhere with ore.

The gigantic fuel tanks easily put him into orbit around Ike, and Adhat began to land.

Duna set over the horizon as he began the suicide burn. The four NERVs provided enough thrust to easily slow down.

Adhat, who was a good pilot if he was interested in it - and he liked Ike - throttled down. And up. And down. Because that also was interesting.

Adhat got out and looked around. It was quite nice, so he went walking around Ike. Eventually, nearly a year later, a bleep in his helmet told him that the Pike was full of fuel and ore, having dredged it up from somewhere with barely any. Having had a look at Duna's clouds, he decided to go and look at them.

He circularised at about five hundred kilometres, and pointed the ship towards an interesting cloud pattern. Back at the KSC, Gene ran the scanners in the Pike's cargo bay.

Shortly afterwards, having found out that the Halberd was nowhere near Duna, he promptly blew his top again. But having no idea where it was, he did not order ships to every single planet. He merely sat and steamed gently in the breeze.