The Adventure of the Sun Skimmer

[Geschosskopf]

Since 0.23 killed my KTC sandbox game, I've started over with a nearly mod-free (by my usual standards) career game, the idea being that doing science on other planets would be a justification for the next incarnation of the KTC. I'm not going to bore you all with the long, no-transmission grind from Y1D1 of this game to its present state. Suffice to say that after 4 landings each on Mun and Minmus, a probe barrage on Eve and a landing on Gilly, and an orbit of Duna and a landing on Ike, I pretty much had the tech tree unlocked. Just a few unimportant things left on the upper stock tier (useless probe and airplane parts, mostly), plus several mod parts on the 1000-point tier. This set the stage for the Sun Skimmer Mission.

The object here was to do a kerbaled mission inside low orbit at Kerbol, a place I'd never bothered to go before. Per Scott Manley, low Kerbol orbit is somewhere within 1Mm so I aimed for an 800 Km Kerbol Pe to make sure I was close enough . Such a mission requires MUCHO delta-V both to go and to return (somewhere close to 7000m/s total), and I decided to take along just barely enough to do it, without my usual over-engineered safety cushion. Seeing if I could do that counts as Science IMHO . So the boffins bashed around various ideas and finally came up with this, the 22 Sun Skimmer:

In my career-mode games, I number all my designs consecutively so this was the 22nd design in this game, and probably about the 30th launch due to multiple uses of some designs. Here my standard "Science Pack" of a 1-kerbal capsule, 4 each materials and goos, and whatever standard instruments will work where it's going, and enough parachutes to land all this safely. This is what will eventually get recovered. Immediately below that is a collection of 2 nukes and a lot of fuel, with just barely enough fuel to get from Kerbin to low Kerbol orbit and back. All this is sitting shamelessly atop a typical stock asparagus lifter. The main reason I have in the past used propulsion mods like KWR and NP is to avoid asparagus, which makes me want to puke just remembering the taste.

Matby Kermin drew the unenviable task of flying this mission, mostly because at the time he launched, Jeb, Bill, and Bob were still on the way home from Duna. Why unenviable? Because while you can go from Kerbin to a low Kerbol Pe any time you feel like it in about 18 days, getting back home will take a while. Basically, burning for a low Kerbol Pe will put you into an elliptical orbit with your Ap out at Kerbin's orbit. But your orbital period and Kerbin's don't synch up very well so it'll be like 5 of your own orbits later before you encounter Kerbin again. Now, in my universe kerbals are fungi and go dormant at need so no real problem there with sitting in a 1-kerbal can all that time. But that's a lot of time spent comatose when you could be enjoying watching other kerbals blow up rockets .

How do I know it takes so many orbits? Because I used the old trick up putting a maneuver node out near Kerbin, then put several more behind it closer to Kerbol, each of which is on the next orbit. Anyway, the outward trip was nothing but a long departure burn at Kerbin and then an 18-day coast. Before too long, Matby arrived at his Pe and exposed all his goos and materials, plus ran his thermometer and negative graviton unit (which didn't work well) and made his crew and EVA reports.

And then Matby went dormant for a long time, getting out as far as Kerbin's orbit many times but no planet was there. During this time, mapping probes launched for Jool, Dres, Duna, and Eve, and the data they collected sponsored the top-end SCANsat instrument, which made a beautiful color map of Kerbin, and several of the probes en route made mid-course adjustments.

But finally the day came and Matby was brought back to life by subtle stimuli so he could execute the burn needed to actually intercept Kerbin.

At the end of this burn, Matby had about 350m/s left and was barely passing within Mun's orbit. There was no hope at all of getting home without a monumental aerobrake at Kerbin. But fortunately, he had just enough fuel to tweak his Kerbin Pe down to about 15km.

Then it was just a matter of hoping that this was a low enough Pe to stop at Kerbin because there was nothing left for anything in the tank for more significant maneuvers. And so after another 18 days or so, Matby screamed into the atmosphere at over 6200m/s. But it worked! Fortunately, being fungi, Kerbals don't care about extreme G forces . Soon, Matby was parachuting comfortably down near where his LV-N transfer stage had crashed. But having done 5 or 6 passes within 800km of Kerbol, he was already more radioactive than the minimal fallout produced by the impacting engines .

And so finally Matby came home after 218 days, 5 hours, 55 minutes, and 42 seconds in a 1-kerbal pod. The stats from his epic trip are as follows:

28.8 Gs! OUCH!

And all this hardship netted 921.8 Science! Without landing on anything other than Kerbin. Not a bad haul. 3 cheers for Matby!