Shuttle to Jool: STJ-1 Pioneer

[DannyG]

Hello Folks!

I reccomend you sit down and relax on this one, you are gonna love it.

So, Kerbalkind had managed to put a kerbal on the mün and bring him back, the same with minmus, but after Sat scans of these 2 bodies showed precious kethane underground, the biggest project in kerbal history begun.

First kerbals built two space stations:

Artemis SS in Low kerbin Orbit

Horizons SS in Mün orbit

These two would be the hub of Kethane transportation in the Kerbin SOI.

It became obvious that kethane could exist on other planets so a quick expedition to Eve was planned: EVE Xplore was launched, Jebediah, Bill and Bob flew to Eve and its moon to scan for kethane.

Later on, the Kerbal Institute of Interplanetary Colonization (KIC) Decided that a mission to Jool was a go.

5 Crew members where drafted : Aldin Kerman, Mitwig Kerman, Danbert Kerman, Barler Kerman and Daniel Kerman (custom name) were the best hope for this mission.

After many exercises and tests, the ship was built, she was a beauty if I do say so....

The ship carried 4 kethane probes, 2 landers, 2 cupola modules and 1 3 kerbal command pod.

The mission was easy: get too the Jool system, scan Laythe, Vall, Bop and Pol, land a Kerbal on Vall and Bop and later transform into a starting point for a Laythe Space Station

Launch was normal, at night, but at 15km something had exploded, no idea what, kept going on....

Once into orbit, the two landers where sent up to dock with Pioneer...

Crew was ready so we started burning, after 8 min, we had our encounter........ 185 days later, we entered Jool´s SOI, with a very high Periapss, wasted too much fuel to fix that.

After 4 mins on burning we set a Aerobraking node, all those ajustments gave us a speed of 9000m/s so aerobraking was normal, and we pointed for Laythe.

At Laythe we put a probe on Polar Orbit and started scanning.

Later to Vall,

Once at Vall, fuel was critical so it was decided that the lander would land and a probe would be set in orbit, used the Pioneer to fix the AP and PE to a stable 50X55km orbit and waited....

Later it was decided that a good scan of the surface would be a good idea, so Pioneer droped altitude and got to a 20km orbit.... Too low.....

In seconds, a huge mountain appeared in the horizon, a probe was let loos but it crashed into one of the 4 nuclear engines, there was no way we could evade now!

"Main engines retrograde, burn retro rockets!" screamed Captain Danny, but it was too late, Aldin had jumped in a Lander and crashed landed 100 km away with and Mitwig had stayed in orbit with lander 2.

The 3 remaining kerbals, prayed and prepared themselves, the engines slowed them down to 89m/s but it was not enough, the crash destroyed a cupola and killed Danny.

After that, Mitwig landed in the crash site to check on his friends, to find the 2 other survivers in the Command module. A grim message was recived at KSC that morning and it was decided that a rescue mission was a go......

Thanks for reading guys and hope you enjoyed.

DannyG

[Odo]

Screenshots make all stories better.

Good job though!