The Long Rhode Home

[jimmymcgoochie]

"Sparrowhawk 1, tower. You are cleared for takeoff."

"Copy that, tower."

Val pushed the throttle forwards gently, giving the lethargic jet engine time to spool up; it wasn't called the "Wheesley" for nothing, after all.

"Sparrowhawk rolling."

Not much more than some surplus aircraft parts welded together, Sparrowhawk 1 was a testbed for a new fly-by-wire flight control system; if this flight met all its criteria, the system would be rolled out fleet-wide to the squadron of SSTO passenger and cargo planes, intra-Kerbin jets and even the future Duna spaceplanes, assuming the prodigious quantities of red tape surrounding that particular mission could be cut through in time. Stupid radiation regulations, Val thought to herself for the thousandth time. That's what the radiation detox units were made for.

Just as she reached takeoff speed and lifted Sparrowhawk off the runway, a blinding flash lit up the entire sky and all the flight instruments went dark. The controls went dead in her hands, the jet engine behind her began winding down and the plane dropped like a rock back onto the runway. The nose wheel buckled on impact, sending the plane careering down the runway in a shower of burning jet fuel and twisted metal.

Amazingly, the cockpit's reinforced crash structure lived up to its name and Val was unharmed bar a rapidly growing bump on her head where she'd bounced off the canopy.

"Sparrowhawk, tower. Are you alright?"

"Still in one piece, tower, though the plane sure isn't. Bumped my head, but nothing a bag of frozen peas won't deal with."

Her eyes flicked to the horizon- and froze in stunned disbelief.

"But... how?!"

"Uh, say again Val?" The tower controller sounded confused, but he must have looked out the window just then because Val heard some rather inventive swearing through the radio before it clicked off abruptly.

Val pushed back the canopy and clambered out of the wrecked plane, staring in fascination at the impossible sight on the horizon.

Not just the mountains rearing up where no mountains should be, but what lay beyond.

"I don't think we're on Kerbin any more."

Spoiler

Me again, with another story-fied KSP game. Unlike with Into the Snarkiverse, I'm playing this one in science mode with the Beyond Home planet pack, and will be cheating the necessary science to unlock nodes as time goes on; basically I can't be bothered doing a proper playthrough to unlock everything properly, but I still want some progression by keeping the really late game parts for later. My intention is to make this almost like KSP2 with progressive colonisation first of Rhode's moons, then other planets in the Tempus system, then finally interstellar missions to Kerbol.

I'll still be focussing on It's Not Rocket Science, but there's only so much RP-1 I can face in one go before it gets a bit tiresome and this save should help alleviate some of that.

[Admiral Fluffy]

Ooh!

Another jimmymcgoochie mission report!

(first!)

[Maria Sirona]

Wow! One more follower 4 this thread.

[jimmymcgoochie]

A frantic team meeting was called in the Administration Building. It soon became apparent that the KSC itself was completely intact and all the staff were unharmed, but there were almost no aircraft or rockets on site with which to explore their new environment and Sparrowhawk 1 was a total write-off.

The only thing they had to attempt a launch was an old mass driver prototype, originally intended to throw payloads back to Kerbin from the surface of the Mun, with some batteries and a probe core welded on to power it. The probe itself was little more than a collection of spare parts hastily stapled together with a few science instruments stuck to it.

"Lauching in three, two one..." Wernher pressed the big red LAUNCH button and closed his eyes. There was a loud electric hum, a loud THUD and-

"Launch successful! Probe is climbing under its own power, but it looks like we lost the fins." Linus reported. "Running temperature, pressure and radiation scans."

The probe's meagre fuel supplies wouldn't be enough to reach space even with the mass driver's help, eventually running out of propellant with an apoapsis of around 65 kilometres.

"Huh, that's weird."

"What's weird, Bob?"

"It looks like the probe is slowing down more slowly than it should be, almost as if the gravity on this planet is lower than Kerbin's."

"Atmospheric pressure just dropped to zero and we're not even at 60 kilometres yet," Linus reported. "It also looks like this planet has a magnetosphere of some sort, radiation levels are pretty low."

"Images coming in from the probe."

Everyone looked to the big screen.

"What a barren landscape," said Bob. "Almost no signs of life whatsoever."

"We should get some better images and better data when the probe comes back down," replied Wernher.

"Yeah, about that..." Said Linus, pointing to the screen.

 

 

 

"Atmospheric pressure is a lot less than Kerbin at low altitudes too, the probe isn't slowing down as much as it should."

"Will the parachute open?"

"Ah, great..." Wernher turned away in disappointment.

"We've got enough spare parts to build another probe and the mass driver is still on the launchpad." Linus tried to sound upbeat, with some success.

*a little while later*

"Three, two one..." LAUNCH hummm THUD

BOOM!

"Misfire!" Bob shouted as fragments of the destroyed probe sprayed out in all directions and the mass driver itself leapt into the air, almost falling off the launchpad as it came back down.

"See, I told you we needed to secure it to the pad!" Said Bill. "We'll need to strip the whole thing down and check it over before we can use it again."

"What's the situation with rocket building?" Gene asked Gus. "Do we have any parts at all?"

"Right now, not really. We still have the manufacturing stuff stored in the VAB but it'll take time to get that back up and running. We did find some old solid boosters though if you're interested."

A search through the darkest recesses of R&D unearthed a small trove of parts which were hastily combined into a two-stage sounding rocket called Atmos 1 and wheeled out to the pad within the hour.

"Lift-off! Trajectory looks- uh... Where's it going?"

"Jeb, now is not the time for one of your stunts!" Gene shouted over from his mission control chair.

"It's not me!" Jeb protested. "I've got no control whatsoever, the rocket has no gimbal and the probe core has no reaction wheels."

"Really? I thought that probe core had reaction wheels." Wernher looked a bit sheepish. "Oops."

"We're going to lose the signal soon and then we'll have no way to track it to recover it." Bob reported.

"Just fire the second stage and try to get some altitude, we'll worry about getting it back later." Gene replied.

The probe's signal dropped off as it arced through the upper atmosphere.

"Is it just me, or is there something beside that moon?" Bob asked. He got a lot of blank looks.

"Really, nobody else sees that but me?"

"LOS on the probe," reported Linus. "Wherever it's going, hopefully the parachutes open in time."

Unknown to the KSC team, the probe's parachutes did open in time and it landed safely over three hundred kilometres from the KSC.

***

"Why me!?" Bob wailed. "I hate flying!"

"You're the scientist, aren't you? Besides, I've already crashed once today so this flight will be fine." Val grinned.

"That's not reassuring!"

"No hijinks, Val- find the probe, grab it if you can and come home." Gene instructed her.

"Easy peasy," Val replied.  

The old KSC corporate jet lumbered into the sky and turned to the south-west, following the flight path of Atmos 1 before it.

"Look! There it is!" Bob shouted, then clutched the armrests as Val turned her head to look and made the plane wobble.

"There what is?"

"That weird speck beside the moon! Surely you can see it now?"

"I can't see anything from up here, the windows don't go that far around. I can come back there and look out your window?"

"No, no, just stay there!" Bob replied very hastily. Where were the sick bags in this thing?

"I've spotted the rocket, going in for a landing." Val reported from the cockpit.

"Be careful, Val!"

"Relax, Bob, I've got this." The plane touched down gently. "See? Nothing to worry about- uh oh."

The plane's left wing dropped suddenly, hit the ground and broke apart; the plane rolled sideways and ended up on its roof, the entire tail section and engine pods breaking off and scattering nearby.

"Oof! You OK, Bob?" Val asked. Bob was too busy hyperventilating into a sick bag to reply. Val walked along the ceiling to the hatch and forced it open, hopped out of the plane- and sank down almost to her waist in the boggy ground.

"Well, that explains a lot."

She got on the radio.

"Uh, KSC? Good news and bad news. Good news is we found the probe; bad news is we bogged down on landing and rolled over, the plane's trashed but we're OK."

Something unintelligible came through from the other side; the only word Val understood was 'beacon'.

"I've activated the locator beacon, we'll hang tight until the rescue team gets here. Val out."

She looked up at the sky.

"You know, there's something weird about the sun here but I can't quite figure out what it is."

She flipped down her helmet visor and squinted up.

"Wait... is that... another sun?!"

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/HA3yWlZ

[Admiral Fluffy]

Is this in the same universe as into the snarkiverse?

[jimmymcgoochie]

8 hours ago, Admiral Fluffy said:

Is this in the same universe as into the snarkiverse?

No. I’m going for a similar style, but this is completely separate- but I might throw in the odd reference here and there to see if you’re paying attention.

[jimmymcgoochie]

There were more than a few crossed fingers (and toes) in Mission Control as the final launch countdown began for OrbSat 1, the first attempt to orbit this strange planet that the KSC and its staff now called home. Production facilities unused in years, or in some cases decades, were being brought back to life to make bigger and better rockets in future, but for now they were restricted to only the smallest and cheapest parts they could make in a hurry and whatever spares could be scrounged up.

The launch went without a hitch. The rocket may have been small and powered by a relatively low-power engine, but the combination of weaker gravity and thinner atmosphere on this new world meant it was capable of reaching orbit without even igniting its second stage.

It was still hard to believe the sight of those two suns in the sky, though. The two shadows thing was just plain weird; poor Linus nearly had a heart attack when Val came shuffling towards him with arms outstretched, helmet visor down and that double shadow, repeatedly saying "Hey, who turned out the lights?", leaving many onlookers utterly baffled until someone explained the reference.

Following a successful orbital insertion, mission controllers ordered the probe to burn all remaining fuel in its booster stage and all of the second stage in an attempt to change its inclination from an equatorial orbit to a polar one, a move that was largely successful. It was a tense wait while the probe orbited around the planet with no communications, but eventually it came back over the KSC and began to download its science data and plenty of images from orbit. All the instruments still reported that they were orbiting Kerbin; the science team were eager to learn what they'd say when they went somewhere else.

The orbital path of the planet's first satellite move away from the KSC, but while controllers waited anxiously to regain communications with it the VAB team were hard at work putting a second identical rocket together to explore that strange moon, apparently mutually tidally locked with the planet so it always hung low on the eastern horizon from the KSC.

This launch followed a trajectory to fly directly to that nearby moon, apparently positioned perfectly for a launch straight to a transfer orbit without circularising first. Launching at a point where the moon was almost directly between the two suns and the planet, OrbSat 2 was able to confirm the presence of an atmosphere on the moon, even if it was incredibly thin- surely no more than 30km, though Bob argued it must be less than 20.

Once again the rocket proved to have excess delta-V in the first stage, which did the entire launch and transfer and still had fuel left to do most of the capture burn too. Wernher made a note to reduce the sizes of all fuel tanks on future launch rockets.

The probe's arrival brought more confirmations that were nevertheless still surprising: the moon had liquid water on its surface and even signs of life in the lower regions, while the atmosphere was incredibly thin- it couldn't be more than 10 kilometres high above the surface of those lakes, and barely half that over the mountains.

Liquid water, yes, but probably not something you'd want to drink...

***

"Sorry I'm late, dozed off and had a weird dream about Bobak taking over the Space Program," said Gene as he trudged into the boardroom. "Where do we stand on the rover project, Wernher?"

"The cryogenics team have restarted liquid hydrogen production and we should be good to go on that front within the hour," Wernher replied. "The rover itself is being mounted to the rocket right now."

"How are you making the hydrogen?" Gus asked. "And does it have anything to do with most of the construction equipment driving towards R&D this morning?"

"Ah. Yes. I was meaning to tell you about that. Anyway- all the terrain surrounding the KSC appears to be some kind of thick mud. Plenty of water in it, but we need to squeeze it out and purify it before we feed it into the electrolysers. We're using that construction stuff to dig up the mud and cart it over to the old astronaut training pools, where we've got a couple of road-rollers driving across it to force the water out. Everything's electric, so we should be fine as long as we can keep the power on."

"Walt, how's the power situation?"

"We're good for the next year or so, Gene- those prototype NTR reactors are more than enough for us right now and we'll have plenty of time to build a longer-term solution before they run out."

"I still can't believe you hooked up a bunch of nuclear rocket engines to our power grid," muttered Mortimer. "Still, at least now you have to admit that not getting rid of them was the right decision."

"You've been waiting this whole meeting just for that, haven't you?" Walt rolled his eyes.

"I literally have nothing else to do- what use is money when there's literally nobody else on the planet to buy or sell from?" Mortimer seemed to deflate a little as he heard his own words.

"Maybe not, but everything we used to buy in from outside is in critically short supply now," said Gene. "We'll need somebody to keep an eye on the inventory and stop certain rocket scientists from getting a bit carried away with their designs." Wernher made a face at him and Mortimer smiled.

"That's a good point, actually. Rocket parts are currency now, at least until we can make them on-site. Assuming you can do that?"

"We can probably get production up and running in a few weeks, but if somebody hadn't pulled the funding for Project Sandcastle we'd be able to start right away." 

"You've been waiting this whole meeting just for that, haven't you?"

"And what about us?" Jeb interrupted. "Are we meant to just sit around twiddling our thumbs when there's a whole solar system out there?"

"After what happened to Val and Bob, we've grounded all crewed flights until we can get some communications satellites in orbit."

Jeb stood up, paused to push his chair over when it didn't fall over, then marched to the door and tried to storm out only to get stuck for ten seconds trying to pull open a push door.

"Should I have someone follow him around, make sure he doesn't try to steal a rocket or something?" Gus asked.

"Nah, we don't even have any rockets for him to steal," replied Wernher. "He'll get over it."

Or so they thought.

***

Powered by all cryogenic propulsion systems, the rather unimaginatively named Rover 1 lifted off to head to that strange moon and explore its mysteries, like how could something that small sustain an atmosphere and liquid water on its surface and what were those strange structures on the surface that Bob had seen with his telescope?

The first stage once again managed to launch the vessel all the way to an intercept with the moon, but the second stage proved to be underpowered and struggled to slow the rover down. A few in Mission Control were regretting using a direct descent trajectory, but at last the parachute opened and the combination of drag and thrust slowed the rover to a safer speed. Landing in the mountains didn't help the situation due to the wimpy atmosphere at that altitude.

A last-minute stage separation dumped the second stage and then the rover touched down safely, deployed its antennae and solar panels and finally its mast camera.

And then...

"Wait, Jeb, we weren't finished-"

"Too late! So long, suckers!" *gleeful cackle*

"Hey, check it out, the moon has another moon next to it! Is it a small moon closer up or a big moon further away?"

It seemed Jeb had turned off the speakers for the pod's radio, or maybe it never had any to begin with- it was only a mock-up after all, hastily fitted out to be flyable- because he seemed blissfully unaware of the blistering tirade being bellowed at him by Gene, and Wernher, and Mortimer, and pretty much everyone else too.

"Woot! First orbit of crazy alien world, Misterrrrrr Jebediah Kerman!"

Then Jeb noticed something that very nearly left him speechless.

"Hold up a minute- there are three moons?"

Spoiler

The next part of this will use the same Imgur album so I'll post the link then- no spoilers!

[Admiral Fluffy]

Just now, jimmymcgoochie said:

"Sorry I'm late, dozed off and had a weird dream about Bobak taking over the Space Program," said Gene as he trudged into the boardroom. "Where do we stand on the rover project, Wernher?"

A refrence!

[Maria Sirona]

16 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

had a weird dream about Bobak taking over the Space Program," said Gene as he trudged into the boardroom.

[jimmymcgoochie]

"Stupid tiny window, I can barely see anything from here."

Not again, thought Gene, but it was too late.

"Woo! First EVA around this crazy planet goes to Jeb, mark it on the scoreboard."

"Jeb, we don't have a scoreboard. You smashed it up when I beat you to Duna, remember?" Val radioed back.

Jeb pretended he didn't hear that.

"Whee, 'science experiment' deployed. You guys will call anything 'science'- this spinny thing, playing golf, the top hat and magic wand, the banana thing-"

"What magic wand?" Bob interrupted him. "We don't put those in the EVA experiment kits."

"Well there's one in this one," Jeb replied. "Whatever."

"Jeb. Get down here. NOW." Gene's tone left no room for arguing, even by Jeb. "And bring that rocket back in one piece, we're running out of parts as it is."

"OK, OK, fine." Jeb didn't sound happy about it, but he did his deorbit burn anyway and started coming back through the upper atmosphere.

"Hey, there's something down there! Looks artificial but it's too far away to-" the rest was lost to plasma static.

And inevitably, the rocket flipped pointy end forwards and nearly burnt off the parachutes so Jeb decoupled and let the booster crash into the ground.

"Oh."

"What is it now, Jeb?" Gene sighed.

"Mountains. Like, kilometre-high cliff mountains."

"Jeb, grab the data drive and get out of there. You did bring your EVA chute, right?"

"Woo, parkour!" Jeb shouted as he let go of the capsule and deployed his own parachute.

"That's not what parkour is!" Bill replied, but the mountains blocked the signal so Jeb didn't hear him.

"I really hope that pod doesn't get smashed to bits on that cliff," said Bob.

Alone on an alien planet, with no communications to the KSC even though it was relatively nearby, Jeb's fearless facade began to crumble a little bit. The terrain around here was just downright weird, all lumpy and spiky in a way that Kerbin never was, and every time he looked around he was sure the ground shifted ever so slightly.

"Stupid Val and her stupid TV show freaking us all out," he muttered to himself as he trudged downhill towards what was left of the capsule. Most of the external parts had been destroyed as it scraped down the cliff then rolled further downhill, but the capsule itself was relatively intact and the data drive inside undamaged. Ah, right- data drive. Knew there was something I forgot.

A recovery team arrived shortly afterwards to haul Jeb and his pod back to the KSC, where he got a thorough telling-off from Gene, Wernher, Gus, Val (as head of the Astronaut Corps, a position Jeb hadn't even bothered applying for) and then Gene again for good measure.

By the time they were done, the Spaceplane Hangar doors had opened to reveal possibly the most bizarre aircraft the KSC had ever attempted to fly. Jeb was sent aboard- as navigator, disappointingly- to direct Val towards that mysterious structure he had seen during the descent. The plane's cavernous cargo hold contained a relatively tiny payload: a copy of the rover sent to the moon earlier.

("We should really think about naming these things," said Walt in the lunchtime status meeting. "Calling it 'the moon' isn't very informative when there are two or possibly three of them around here." Which of course meant he was given the job of naming them.)

"Thunderhawk is airborne, turning to heading 270 degrees." Val reported.

"Thunderhawk? What sort of a name is that?!" Jeb complained from the navigator's seat.

"That's what it said on the blueprints for this thing, so that's what we called it." Said Wernher over the radio. "If you don't like that... too bad."

Around fifteen minutes of very noisy flight later...

"Visual contact with the unknown structure, looks like some kind of airstrip?"

"Opening the bay doors, stand by for rover release." Bill reported. "Three, two one-"

The ventral doors were an unusual feature of this particular model of cargo bay, but they made air-dropping payloads much easier than the conventional dorsal doors on top.

"Payload is away, good chute. Monitoring altitude... And touchdown confirmed."

"So can we land now?"

"Seriously, Jeb? You want us to land at some weird abandoned airfield on an alien planet with no backup and almost no communications back to the KSC, who would take days to come and rescue us if something went wrong?" Bill asked.

"...yes?"

Bob looked a bit green. Er.

"You forgot to mention the part where nobody has ever landed this plane before anywhere at all, never mind some questionable 'runway' made of dirt." Val added.

Bob turned even greener-er.

"I'll fly over nice and low and slow so we can get a good look at it," said Val, swinging the plane oh so slowly around to line up with the dubious runway. "Wow, this thing handles like a shipping container. No, scratch that, it handles like the ship that carries the containers."

And then she pulled the lever to deploy the landing gear and Bob closed his eyes.

"Easy peasy. This thing actually flies pretty well at low speeds." Val said as she shut down the engines. "I'm going to take a look around; Bill, Bob, don't let Jeb anywhere near the controls."

But of course that didn't work...

*scraaaaape*

"What did I just say!?"

"Sorry."

"What? All I did was turn us around so we can fly out again!"

"Ugh, now I have to check you didn't break anything."

"Jeb, you idiot, you broke the outboard elevon off the wing!"

"Oops..."

"Bill, get the rover up here if you can, we can check it over to see if anything broke during that airdrop before we set it off exploring. Jeb, taxi over to those hangars, and do it gently- *thud* I SAID GENTLY!"

"Drive it up the ramp, Bill."

"Yup, everything looks good here, go ahead and-"

The cargo bay doors opened and dropped both Van and the rover to the ground.

"Ow!"

"Sorry, wrong button!" Bob shouted. He didn't quite catch all of Val's muttered response, but judging by what he did understand, it was probably for the best.

"OK, rover looks good. Back it up and let's get out of- ah."

Someone had forgotten to install a ladder in the cargo bay, so there was no way for Val to get back to the door she had fallen out of exited from earlier.

"Jeb, retract the landing gear."

"But we're landed."

"Yes, I know that."

"Won't that, you know, scrape the paint or something?"

"Jeb, you already broke one of the control surfaces off literally five minutes ago."

"Oh yeah. Never mind, then."

"What a weird place to put an access hatch."

A bit of scraped paint and a lot of reverse thrust later, the Thunderhawk took off, wobbling around a bit due to the missing elevon, and flew back towards the Space Centre, leaving the rover alone. It deployed its antennae and solar panels, tested its laser system on the nearby ground and then settled in for a long wait as the seismometer and gravitometer gathered their long-term readings.

But as they flew home, Bob's attention was drawn to the little moon in the sky. Something seemed off about it somehow. When they returned to the KSC he headed to the old observatory, deployed the telescope within- and almost fell out of his seat when he saw the surface of that other moon.

"Is that... LAVA?"

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/rBPBDTV

[Admiral Fluffy]

I realized why they think the third moon is weird. There are only two moons around Kerbin, so a third one around Rhode would be a suprise.

[4D4850]

4 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

But as they flew home, Bob's attention was drawn to the little moon in the sky. Something seemed off about it somehow. When they returned to the KSC he headed to the old observatory, deployed the telescope within- and almost fell out of his seat when he saw the surface of that other moon.

"Is that... LAVA?"

What I'm imagining when Val hears about this:

 

Val: "That's no moon, that's a spa- oh nevermind, it looks like someone got to it already."

 

Also, am I correct in thinking that this Val making obscure references is a reference to Val speaking "meme" in Into the Snarkiverse, or is this just how you characterize Valentina.

[jimmymcgoochie]

With whatever pomp and ceremony they could muster, the KSC team launched Phase 1 of their new five-step program to explore and evaluate their new home. The combination of thinner air and weaker gravity meant that some faintly ridiculous crafts could be constructed, which would never have been viable on Kerbin.

Like, for example, this:

Lurking beneath that fairing is Super Scanner 1, cramming every last bit of SCANsat technology plus some additional resource detectors and science experiments into one satellite. The oversized fairing was required because the resource scanner had to be launched when it was opened out- launching with it closed would actually have needed an even bigger fairing!

The launch into polar orbit was successful; the attempt to recover the first stage booster after it came back around on the next orbit... not so much.

Lack of fuel caused it to overshoot the KSC by a considerable margin, but then it had the misfortune of landing on a steep-sided mountain and, well...

Recovery crews went out to try and salvage what they could. To their amazement, the Deinonychus engine had not only survived the crash, but had also survived plummeting down the mountain into the valley below, ending up almost a mile away from the rest of the wreckage.

A few modifications to the design were made before Super Scanner 2 was launched to the innermost moon. Gene had put his foot down and vetoed both "Moony McMoonFace" and "That's No Mun...", so the name for that moon was picked out of a hat. The winning name was Lua, submitted by, uh, Lua Kerman?

"Sorry, I thought we were supposed to put our names into the hat. Oops." - Lua

Ah well, Lua it is.

Once again the first stage was able to put the payload into orbit on its own, leaving the second stage to perform the transfer and capture burns over to Lua.

Both probes' first priority was to perform a resource scan, requiring a lower orbit than the mapping scanners would prefer; this isn't an issue around the planet- *rummage in hat* yeah, we definitely can't call it that, let's keep this family-friendly, Jeb... *rummage again* Rhode? Eh, it'll do- around Rhode, but Lua's puny gravity and proximity to Rhode make its SOI absolutely tiny, which combined with its tidal locking could make getting good scanning data a challenge.

Once again the first stage booster tried to return to the KSC. And once again, it overshot by miles.

And once again, it landed on the side of a really steep mountain, only this time it was in the dark so nobody could see the mountain until seconds before landing.

Rather surprisingly, the booster survived after it got stuck against a boulder, allowing recovery crews to pick it up and return it to the KSC for future re-use.

Sticking with the topic of re-use, the OrbSat design was brought back for the first mission to Rhode's second moon.

(Armstrong? After that weird monument thingy we found on the Mun? ...fine.)

Unlike Kerbin's second moon, Armstrong seems to be devoid of mint, or ice cream, or any form of edible substances at all. How disappointing.

Buoyed by their successes, the engineers put their heads together to create something that could mine the local resources and turn them into usable parts to supplement the ever-dwindling stock of spares that most of the missions so far had been built from.

Desfort and Panand were assigned to probably the jankiest looking contraption the KSC had ever produced- mining drills, resource converters and part manufacturing modules were all hastily stuck together, stapled to a chassis frame with a huge battery and some wheels bolted to it, with an old prototype nuclear reactor in the middle to power the whole thing.

"Uh, guys? Small problem..." Desfort reported. "The ore drill isn't working, resource abundance too low."

"Same for the metal ore drill," said Panand. "We really should have waited until after the resource scans were done."

Somewhat dejectedly, they trundled back to the VAB. Both were rather miffed that they'd had to sit inside the thing all night, missing out on lasagne night at the KSC canteen too!

***

"Are you sure that thing is going to work?" Asked Bob, for about the thousandth time.

"It worked fine on Kerbin every time we used it, why wouldn't it work here?" Bill replied.

"Thinner air. Less gravity. That whacking great cargo bay you welded onto it in place of the disposable fairings. Need I go on?"

The truth was, Bill was nervous too. Yes, the Kronus was a reliable and efficient SSTO spaceplane that could throw thirty tons of payload into orbit in a single flight, but that was on Kerbin.

"Just say the word and we're off," said Val from the pilot's console. "I've flown hundreds of these flights, this will be a doddle."

"TREES!? WHY ARE THERE TREES!?" Val nearly pulled the flight yoke off the desk as she wrestled with the controls to try and gain some altitude.

Bob peered out from between his fingers.

"MOUNTAINS!? OH COME ON!" It wasn't even that big a mountain, but it was directly downrange of the runway as if placed there on purpose to get in the way.

For once Val was completely stumped.

"I don't get it. Eight Panthers at full afterburner and we can barely break 200m/s or gain any altitude. This thing is almost unflyable and I can't understand why."

"Try firing the rockets?" Bill suggested.

"Firing the rocket engines. OK, we're accelerating, a bit, very slowly... no, it's stopped again and we didn't even get close to Mach 1. Sorry, guys, but I'm calling this mission. Aborting and returning to the KSC."

Even then the troubles didn't end- still heavily laden with the payload and propellants, the Kronus lumbered through the sky like it was dragging a giant anchor behind it, its eight engines bellowing fire and fury yet barely managing to maintain altitude. The approach was sloppy and wobbly and utterly un-Val-like, the touchdown caused the whole aircraft to start skipping along the runway, porpoising front to back, until it began veering to the right and did an uncontrolled 360 spin while skidding off the runway and into the boggy terrain beyond. Somehow, almost unbelievably, there was no damage, though it took a combination of jet and rocket power to drag the plane back to the runway where it could be towed back to the Spaceplane Hangar.

An investigation later concluded that the drag cubes were totally wrong after rescaling 7.5m cargo bays to 3.75m the cargo doors hadn't closed correctly, resulting in immense drag being generated by the cargo bay and crippling the plane's performance. The Spaceplane Hangar team hoped to get a fix done as soon as possible, or else they'd have to go back to the old disposable fairing panels.

"Look, I'm all for saving resources by not chucking away the fairings every time, but is adding ten tons of cargo bay really a better solution?"

Everyone gawped at Mortimer. Mostly because of his new moustache.

"When we did that fairing material trial a few years ago, wasn't there a really cheap option that was basically some kind of fancy cardboard, that we rejected because it was too flimsy? If this planet has thinner air, surely that wouldn't be as much of an issue any more?"

"That's actually not a terrible idea," Bill said eventually. "We can test it out on the next rocket launch, then if it works we'll rip that cargo bay off the Kronus and just use the cardboard fairings instead."

***

Over in R&D, a lonely intern was poring over the images returned by the Lua scanner. Something caught her eye at the edge of one image, a strange shape made of unnaturally straight lines, but the satellite had flown over without getting a good look at it. She waited impatiently for the next orbit, slurping some lukewarm coffee until the images came through- at which point said coffee was sprayed all over the screen.

"What is THAT?!"

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/AT7etf9

[4D4850]

@jimmymcgoochieQuick question: Why isn't this thread linked to on your signature?

[jimmymcgoochie]

11 hours ago, 4D4850 said:

@jimmymcgoochieQuick question: Why isn't this thread linked to on your signature?

Because…

 

…I forgot?

[jimmymcgoochie]

Spoiler

PSA: Trees on Rhode are solid objects, not just holographic images like many stock terrain scatters are, so don't hit them. Or else this happens:

And back into character...

"How? How could the docking ports be producing so much drag that the entire plane couldn't reach Mach 1?" Bill asked incredulously. "They're inside the cargo bay!"

"I'm just telling you what the flight data recorders reported," replied Linus, who wasn't enjoying being the centre of attention. "I don't know why it happened or how it happened, just that it happened."

"Does it even matter?" Val interrupted before the argument could spiral out of control. "We're not using that cargo bay any more, so what's the big deal?"

Bill looked like he wanted to argue the point further, but decided that it wasn't worth it.

"Fine. Let's just hope that this cardboard fairing thing actually works."

***

Were those trees there before? KSC staff were baffled: they didn't remember seeing them before, but how could entire trees just appear from nowhere? Were they real, or just hallucinations or holographs or something else entirely? Val decided to give them a wide berth anyway.

"Oh yeah, this is MUCH better!" Val shouted from the pilot's console in Mission Control, as usual forgetting that she didn't need to shout when remote-piloting. "Speed and altitude are increasing and we are go for orbit!"

That mountain that she had to fly around last time?

Straight over it at supersonic speed, no trouble at all.

When the jets began to falter and the rate of climb slowed, Val fired up the aerospike rocket engines and then the NERV to keep powering on up to space.

Circularising at apoapsis using just the nuclear engine, in the end there was a substantial amount of fuel and oxidiser left; hardly surprising considering Rhode's smaller size, lower gravity and thinner atmosphere.

The payload for this flight was little more than a fuel tank with some gubbins attached to it for power and control. It was intended as a seed module for a future space station, or failing that an orbital refuelling depot. There was some speculation as to the cause of the strange looking shadows in the onboard footage: a dirty lens, strange interactions of the two stars' emission spectra as the smaller red dwarf was in front of the larger blue star, those flesh-eating shadow-bugs from that TV show (Linus, they're not real...). By the time they'd finished arguing about it, the Kronus had orbited around the dark side of the planet and back into sunlight and the mystery shadows had (mostly) disappeared.

Payload deployed...

And then it was time to test re-entry, something only attempted once before (by Jeb) on this planet.

The little rover at the mysterious abandoned airfield looked up as the streak of fire raced across the sky, then turned its attention back to the surface.

In the end it was almost disappointingly easy, gliding down with the spoilers deployed almost directly to the runway without even needing to use the jets for the approach.

Having passed the test with flying colours, Gene was happy to sign off on the use of the Kronus with the new fairing panels as the primary launch vehicle.

The first "real" orbital launch came the next day when two separate probes were ready to be put into space: an orbital science probe to be sent out to the lava moon (named Ash by popular vote, but only after "The floor is lava!" was vetoed by Gene), and a solar science satellite to be launched into interplanetary space to study the two stars and the space surrounding their new home. This required an abnormally long fairing to fit them both in, but the total payload mass was a little over ten tons which was almost trivially easy for the Kronus.

Solar Sat 1 was the first to depart, and the first vessel to leave Rhode's gravity well.

About fifteen minutes later, Ash Sat 1 performed its transfer burn out to the mysterious third moon. Painstaking work by the scientists had determined that Ash was in fact a relatively large moon very far away, unlike Armstrong which was a small moon close up, and this apparent size along with the lava lakes made some (Jeb) very keen to visit it.

Having seen its two payloads off, the Kronus burned to re-enter and rode the plasma back down into the atmosphere. Possibly due to the lighter payload resulting in more fuel being left over, Val misjudged the re-entry slightly and ended up overshooting the KSC a bit; nothing that couldn't be fixed by flying in a circle to lose speed and altitude before landing on jet power.

But just when everything looked like it was going well...

"What do you mean, there are no parts left!?"

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/xZGxa9y

[jimmymcgoochie]

Ash Sat 1 arrives at Ash, confirms the floor is (partially) lava.

This lifts moods at the KSC slightly, but not by much. They're pretty much stuck right now with no parts left and no obvious means of making more, since the resource scans of Rhode indicate that there's nowhere on the entire planet with enough ore to allow the drills to extract it.

After days of brainstorming, a plan was hashed out to look for ore on Lua, where resource scans look more promising.

There was just one problem- it required the Kronus, currently the only vessel available to try and launch a payload to Lua, to fly all the way there and back again. This would be a risky move as even though Lua's atmosphere seemed to be oxygenated, it was also incredibly thin and it wasn't clear when, or even if, jet engines would be able to start up; likewise it would be very hard for parachutes to open so air-dropping the rover would be potentially dangerous and inaccurate.

A few hours later and Val prepared for the first atmospheric flight on another planet in this new star system. 

"Slowing down pretty slowly, altitude is 1200 metres and the engines have just relit."

"Val, those are mountains. And you're still travelling at orbital velocity." Jeb said.

"DO NOT distract me when I'm flying a plane on an unfamiliar moon!"

Val had to gun the rocket engines and boost back out of the atmosphere to avoid crashing into those mountains, but the second approach would be a bit slower. And straight at more mountains.

"Enough of this nonsense, I'm aiming for that lake."

Most of the people watching were staring open-mouthed as Val used massive pitch, yaw and roll angles to try and steer through the tenuous atmosphere and avoid crashing, again. To their amazement, she managed it. And then she absolutely blew their minds and landed.

Gene tried to berate her for recklessly endangering their only functional SSTO spaceplane, but even he had to admit that her landing was perfect, touching down in a relatively flat area near one of the lakes. The science team were simultaneously enthusiastic about getting samples of that strange mossy-looking stuff, and terrified of the idea of that strange mossy-looking stuff getting them.

The rover was dropped off, deployed its resource scanners and concluded that these mossy lowlands were woefully short on ore. The orbital scanner above suggested that the mountains to the north were richer in ore, so the rover prepared to drive over there while Val prepared to return the Kronus to Rhode.

"PUNCH IT!!!!!!"

Val's enthusiam may have gotten the better of her, since she used rather a lot of fuel getting off of Lua and was left with only just enough to return to Rhode. Landing near the KSC was far from guaranteed...

One aerobraking pass wasn't enough to re-enter, but Val used the atmosphere to slow down and adjust her trajectory to come down near the KSC on the second pass.

And overshot a bit. 

And then tried to slow down by pulling some aggressive turns and discovered that when completely out of fuel, the Kronus becomes rather, uh, lively.

If "flipping backwards and tumbling towards the ground" can be called "lively", that is.

Many in Mission Control were hiding under their desks at this point, but Val kept her cool and recovered control of the aircraft, bringing it down towards the runway.

Success! Some scientists in full hazmat suits went out to scrape some samples off the landing gear before ground teams moved in with industrial-grade cleaning appliances to sterilise every surface of the plane and the runway where it landed. Mission controllers picked Val up and carried her around crowd-surfing style, despite her protests ("Get off! Put me down! Watch where you're grabbing, Linus!") until they made the mistake of trying to carry her through a door and ended up giving her a minor concussion instead.

Unnoticed by anyone, Ore Rover 1 reached the mountains and began its search for that sweet, sweet ore. Sensors deployed, then the drill, and at last! Ore!

But why does it think it's in an ocean, when it's very clearly on top of a mountain?

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/pvK6OoA

[jimmymcgoochie]

With no parts left, the KSC team had to get creative. Anything not absolutely necessary for continued operations was taken apart and repurposed for use on the three rovers designed to mine the resources of Lua and convert them into spacecraft on-site.

No rockets could be built and the few that were still lying around the KSC were disassembled for spares, so the job for launching those rovers to Lua fell to the trusty Kronus spaceplane and Val piloting from Mission Control.

This sort of flight is already becoming routine, but the views are still pretty special.

The first rover is the miner, equipped with drills to dig up ore and metal ore which are both required for manufacturing parts and propellants, as well as storage for a variety of raw materials. It's the smallest and lightest of the three rovers and the Kronus could handle it with ease.

"So let me get this straight- you want me to lower the periapsis to under 3km over Lua's surface, detach the rover and then boost back up onto a free return trajectory?" Val asked. "Okey dokey, one Tactical Yeet^TM coming right up!"

And with that, a new phrase entered the KSC lexicon. Even if nobody could agree exactly how to pronounce ^TM.

Lua is a strange place. How does it manage to retain its atmosphere when it seems too small to do so? Why is it oxygenated? And why can parachutes open so early and at such a high speed compared to anywhere else? Many thought that the mission was doomed when the chutes popped open at over 5km altitude and over 600m/s airspeed, but they handled it just fine.

A safe, if rather rough, landing ensued and the rover's self-driving system was activated. There was no room for such fripperies as science experiments on this rover, only the basic utilities and enough cameras to navigate by rather than study the surroundings in detail, so as such nobody at the KSC spotted something just off to the right of the rover, partly hiding behind the terrain.

Lua returns on a free return trajectory make for particularly toasty re-entries and the planetary alignment is never any good for a direct descent, but Val is getting to grips with this new atmosphere and her double-dip re-entry technique allows for a return to the KSC without using up too much fuel in the process.

By the time the plane came back around Rhode and descended towards the KSC, night had fallen. With the night came cloud cover that partly obscured the KSC- and more worryingly, the mountains directly west of the KSC that Jeb landed on- so Val deliberately overshot and then landed westbound.

Or at least, that's what she told everyone. In reality she just overshot, plain and simple.

Another day, another rover dispatched to Lua. The larger size of this rover necessitated a larger, draggier fairing, which combined with the greater mass of the rover meant there was less of a fuel margin for this flight.

Mining rover 2 features two large ISRU units that between them can perform every chemical process required to produce fuel, oxidiser and monopropellant as well as harvest various resources from the air, ground and even the ocean. Somebody took the 'ocean' readings from the prospector rover a bit too literally and added a water pump, though whoever was in charge of the other end of the rover put a more appropriate water drill on instead.

Another Tactical Yeet^TM was performed...

And a bit of misfortune with the trajectory resulted in a landing in some mountainous terrain, reducing parachute drag and also causing the rover to land at an angle. One of the landing legs crumpled on impact, but it absorbed most of the force of the landing in the process and no further damage was done.

The second rover set a course for the ore prospector, siphoning gases out of the air the entire time, while Val brought the Kronus back home.

Another night landing. Rhode's days last for just over 13 hours, something that's been playing havoc with the KSC team's sleep schedules since it's slightly more than two Kerbin days, however it also means that these flights technically happen on consecutive days even though they're two Kerbin days apart.

Mining rovers 1 and 2 arrive at their destination within a few hours of each other and go looking for suitable places to park; there's plenty of ore at this site, about 3.5%, however there's no metal ore to make parts from; around 500 metres away there's a spot where the ore concentration is 2.5% and metal ore is 2.4%, so the first rover heads there while the second sniffs out subsurface water to dig up and keeps sucking in all the atmospheric gases it can. No ammonia here unfortunately, but nitrogen can be easily harvested and both oxygen and carbon dioxide are present, though the high altitude means they're not abundant enough for the harvesters to function effectively.

"OK, who approved this!?" Wernher was aghast at what he saw in front of him. "This is an absolute travesty!"

"I never said it was a good solution, but it should still work." Said Bill. "You can still fly this thing, right Val?"

"If you stuck wings and a propeller to a shipping container, I'd make it fly," replied Val.

Wernher sighed. He'd seen some crazy designs in his time- made some of them himself- but this...

Mining rover 3 carried a Sandcaster robotic 3D printing arm, a prototype smelter system to refine metal ore and a big nuclear reactor to power the entire mining complex, along with big radiators to keep it cool.

"Well, would you believe it- sticking a massive crane-like thing out of the fairing causes all sorts of aerodynamic issues. We're getting very low on fuel right now." Val sounded a bit less confident than usual.

"You can still make this work though, right?" Gene asked.

"Getting the rover down? Sure. Getting the plane back? Eh... maybe?"

Another Tactical Yeet^TM...

("Is that nuclear engine meant to be glowing like that?" Linus asked, but as usual he was ignored.)

The landing was pretty straightforward, right up until someone looked at one of the navigation camera feeds and realised there were TREES!!!! in the landing zone, but by then it was too late to do anything about it.

The mossy terrain was one thing, but actual trees? On a moon this small, with air this thin? The scientists were baffled and immediately disappeared into the bowels of R&D to speculate and postulate as to how trees could exist on Lua. And why they seemed to be so similar to some trees they'd seen on Rhode; just not the purple ones that glowed in the dark.

Despite the lack of fuel, Val still managed to get the Kronus back home. The final approach and landing was unusually slow due to the plane running completely out of fuel, but Val maintained her 100% successful landing rate- with this plane, at least. Nobody mention the Velociteze incident.

All three mining rovers were now in place- the first dug up ore and metal ore, the second created propellants and the third produced metal and powered the whole party. 

Nobody was really sure how the resources could be shared between the rovers; ask a scientist about it and they'd start mumbling about quantum entanglement and Metaphase Omnidirectional Delivery Systems without ever giving a definitive answer.

Still, the mining operations have now begun. The first Lua-made rockets should be ready in, uh...

Wait- HOW LONG!?

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/LoJAyzy

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

A few minor technical difficulties are holding up this report, but hopefully they'll all be fixed soon. However, a slightly bigger problem exists: Kerbalism's ISRU processes are painfully slow, plus the mining setup I just sent to Lua requires them to be loaded in physics range at all times otherwise Simple Logistics doesn't share the resources and everything stops. Making parts on-site isn't going to be much use if I can't make the fuel to go with them and I'm not (yet) prepared to stoop to the level of HyperEdit-ing the fuel into the tanks and handwaving away the production, though that might change if I can't find a way of bodging Kerbalism to boost production rates by a few orders of magnitude.

[Stamp20]

4 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

though that might change if I can't find a way of bodging Kerbalism to boost production rates by a few orders of magnitude.

You can edit the input and output items and rates by editing the profile. In GameData\KerbalismConfig\Profiles you can edit the Default.cfg profile or create a new one, then edit the values for how much it produces and consumes.

For example, water electrolysis looks like this:

  Process
  {
    name = water electrolysis
    title = #KERBALISM_Process_WaterElectrolysis
    modifier = _WaterElectrolysis
    input = [email protected]
    input = [email protected]
    output = [email protected]
    output = [email protected]
    dump_valve = Hydrogen,Oxygen
  }

I haven't tested it, but you should be able to double the input and output values to make it work twice as fast.

[4D4850]

@Stamp20Even better, jimmymcgoochie's mod pack probably includes Module Manager as a dependency for something, so they could use that. I don't have time at the moment to add an example, though.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Spoiler

After hacking all the Kerbalism ISRU configs to run either 100 or 1000 times faster than normal but with 10x the power usage, I'm finally getting somewhere on the Extraplanetary Launchpads/Sandcastle front. Ironically, since it's probably no longer going to be necessary.

With very few precious parts to spare, a plan was hatched to create a minimalistic electric plane to be built on the surface of Lua and then explore. Exactly how said plane was going to fly in such a puny atmosphere, especially when the mining rovers were in the middle of a mountain range where the air is even thinner, wasn't discussed in any great detail. Nicknamed the Lua Glider for its unusually large wingspan, built to catch as much of the air as it could for maximum lift, the prototype was wheeled out onto the KSC runway and Val took the controls in Mission Control for the test flight. The results were...

Far better than anyone had anticipated, actually. Flying at over 200m/s just from the power of two little motors was a lot faster than anyone expected, while the plane handled well and could remain airborne at under 30m/s thanks to its wide wings and deployable flaps, though those also made it pitch down a bit and one test landing ended up breaking some of the propeller blades as a result.

With the design shown to be functional, it was sent up to the Sandcaster printing arm aboard Mining Rover 3 to begin construction on the surface of Lua. A whole week later it was finally ready- and the printer promptly dropped it on the ground, where it skidded downhill and got stuck in a small gully.

Undeterred, Val waited until the sun had come up to recharge the plane's batteries before carefully driving the plane uphill to the small plateau that the rovers were parked on. She checked all around, chose to try and take off to the west since there was a sizeable hollow in the mountains that would give the plane the best chance of reaching flight speed before crashing, gunned the engines and-

"Wow, this thing is slooooooooooow..."

But despite the dreadful acceleration and the repeated skips across the terrain, somehow Val dragged the plane into the air!

"It's a lot easier once it gets going, but I don't like the looks of those mountains."

By adjusting the propeller pitch to maintain acceleration as the plane continued to gain speed, she kept climbing until the plane was safely clear of the lower-lying areas and could fly between the peaks, heading roughly westward along a natural valley. A much wider valley with flatter and lower terrain lay to the south, but getting to it would be difficult as the plane just couldn't go high enough to clear the top of the ridgeline. Eventually Val spotted a gap in the mountains and threaded the plane through it, just as the batteries were beginning to reach dangerously low levels.

A safe landing on the valley floor ensued- and just in time, too!

The eclipse blocked out both stars, yet something else in the sky still glowed brightly. Alas, the KSC was in the wrong place to try and look at this mysterious object and by the time Rhode had rotated around again it was too close to the binary stars to point a telescope in its direction.

Continuing the flight a couple of hours later when the suns were directly overhead, Val pushed on further west, hunting down the location of a surface anomaly that one of the R&D interns had spotted in the orbital imaging data. The plane's onboard cameras captured some very nice images as it flew onwards at a pretty respectable 110m/s.

And then the anomaly came into view...

"It's..."

"A LAUNCH SITE!?!?"

A low pass over the site confirmed it: an almost perfect replica of the VAB, Spaceplane Hangar, runway and launchpad, plonked down on the surface of Lua. A Tracking Station sat off to one side, while several other buildings appeared either partially constructed or destroyed.

Val wasted no time, pulling a slightly ridiculous turn (and discovering that under the right (or wrong?) circumstances, the Lua Glider could pull a Kobra with an angle of attack of over 90 degrees...) and landing on the runway to confirm that this was in fact a real thing on the surface, not some weird apparition or collective hallucination.

Gene wasted no time, ordering the first available aircraft to be refitted for operating in space. Engineers went to work on the old Thunderhawk, giving it a comprehensive overhaul until it was almost unrecognisable: a pointier cockpit, air-breathing rocket engines to get into space, a four-chamber Corgi rocket engine on the back for orbital manoeuvring and sacrificing almost all payload capacity for a pressurised crew cabin and as many fuel tanks as they could cram into it.

Which turned out to be too many fuel tanks, as Jeb and Val discovered in the simulator. Some of the tanks had to be underfilled or just not filled at all to make the plane not try to flip backwards at the slightest provocation.

The flight crew had a good view of the mystery blue object during the ascent, but had more pressing things to worry about. After the transfer to Lua was completed, they realised that there was far too much liquid fuel and not enough oxidiser left, which would make things rather tricky when they got to Lua as the air-breathing engines would only work at very low altitudes.

Dodging mountains in the dark with barely any thrust becomes a whole other level of terrifying when you're sitting in the cockpit, not safely back in Mission Control!

Several attempts were made to fly to what many were now calling the LSC, but the plane's size and cantankerous handling combined with the thin air meant it was nearly impossible to line up with the runway and then try to slow down for a landing attempt.

Missed approach followed missed approach until Jeb lost patience and decided to set the plane down by force if necessary, which at over 200m/s was probably not a good decision...

Bumps and bruises all around, and the plane lost both wings and the rear fuel tank and engine attached to it, but somehow they were down on the ground and not smeared across it!

They had to wait until sunrise, by which point the batteries had run out and the entire crew were freezing in the frigid temperatures on Lua's surface, which were recorded at 224K by the Thunderhawk Mk2's onboard sensors.

Val was first to head outside just as one of the suns appeared from behind Rhode, sneaking out before Jeb or anyone else was awake.

Finding the gravity to be very benign, even more so than the Mun's, she saw an opportunity to do something that every Kerbonaut had always wanted to: jetpack to the roof of the VAB!

She then tried base-jumping off the roof with her parachute, but that didn't go so well...

"Owwwww, my shins..." was all she could say.

Bill and Bob were next to head outside, deploying the extensive selection of deployed science instruments to gather even more data about Lua.

The readings from the weather station, combined with the data from the plane's environment sensors, suggested that there was insufficient oxygen in the rarefied air to breathe unaided; however it should be possible to use some kind of air pump to create a pressure suit and respirator rather than needing a full spacesuit, making working on the surface feasible.

While Bill and Bob helped Val hobble back to the safety of the Thunderhawk's cockpit, the rest of the crew on board headed out to explore this mysterious facility. Inside they found a treasure-trove of parts and manufacturing equipment, along with a fully kitted out tracking station with dust covers over all the computers and the protective films still attached to the monitors. The place seemed to be brand new, yet there was no trace of whoever had built it.

Even stranger, everything they found looked exactly like its counterpart in the KSC, right down to the squeaky hinge on the door to the VAB canteen and the vending machine in the Tracking Station that would occasionally give you your money back if you entered the right code on the keypad.

Jeb spoke for everyone when he walked into a perfect replica of the Spaceplane Hangar briefing room and found the tell-tale marks on the whiteboard where he'd accidentally used a permanent marker and then tried to clean it off with monopropellant.

"What IS this place!?"

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/231wjAw

[jimmymcgoochie]

There was a flurry of activity at the mysterious Lua Space Centre in the hours immediately following Thunderhawk Mk2's arrival. Inventories were checked, machinery was switched on and in a matter of hours the automated fabrication systems had produced a small probe, filled it up with fuel from tanks buried deep underground and wheeled it out to the launchpad.

Though absurdly small even by the standards of the rockets they had been launching from Rhode, InterProbe was destined for a flight to another planet. Telescopy data suggested that several planets in the system were in approximately the right places for interplanetary missions to be sent in the near future, with the first heading down towards the second planet from the suns. Gene continued the tradition of naming planets by drawing names out of a hat, but two pieces of paper got stuck together so only half of each name was visible so planet two was called Hydrus.

Everyone crammed into Mission Control to watch the remote feed of the first rocket launch from the surface of Lua.

With such a puny atmosphere and such puny gravity, it was over in a matter of seconds- by the time the Hammer solid rocket had burnt out, the probe was most of the way out of Lua's gravity well and a small burn from its Terrier engine was enough to send it out into Rhode orbit, where it would make a burn towards Hydrus in around seven hours.

And then the fabricators spat out a second probe.

After the initial consternation had given way to puzzlement, it was discovered that when the machines hadn't started up immediately Bill had pressed the big green START button several more times before it had any effect, but this had made the system think he wanted several copies of the same probe.

"Oops..." was all he had to say on the matter.

With a couple more planets in vaguely decent positions to travel to, the second probe was launched anyway and targeted at the fourth planet in the system; the hat draw produced the name Scaythe.

Bob eventually found the big red STOP button to shut down production, but by then a third probe was almost completed and a third planet was kinda-sorta in a transfer window, so they finished that one and sent it off too.

Over the course of the next eight hours, all three probes completed their transfer burns and flew away from Rhode and into interplanetary space. First, to Scaythe:

Secondly, to Rock. The original suggestion had been Planet Rock, but they eventually compromised on just Rock after Walt threatened to break out his old electric guitar.

The third probe to leave was the first to launch, heading for Hydrus.

The automated navigation systems on the probes were clearly confused by launching from Lua, since the probe going to Scaythe ended up on a collision course while the probe headed to Rock plotted its capture burn several years too late; both problems were resolved quickly and the probe's unusual solid-fuelled electric RCS was able to correct the trajectory of the Scaythe-bound probe. It was at this point that everyone realised that sending a probe with relatively small solar panels and communications dishes so far from the suns might not be the best idea ever, but too late now.

With interplanetary probes out of the way, the next step will be a more detailed exploration of Rhode and its moons to answer all the important questions, like: Why is there a replica KSC on Lua? Does Armstrong taste like cookies-and-cream ice cream as its appearance suggests? Is the floor on Ash really lava? And most important of all: If someone made a perfect replica of the KSC and then left, where did they go and why?

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/pGAGhjM

[tilliepops]

@jimmymcgoochie it been qwiet 

[Maria Sirona]

2 hours ago, tilliepops said:

@jimmymcgoochie it been qwiet 

Agre