tedious empire

Lupont: And we are detatched. Sig, remember to wait until we're clear before you spin up the farm. Teeny, your course is already plotted. When the button glows, press it!

Sizer: Bye!!!! I'll miss you all!!

Teeny: It's a three second burn Sizer, we aren't going far.

Merfield: You're all welcome back to the farm to visit any time!

Lupont: Wave to Bill, Lindo. I think I see him in the crew cabin.

Bill: A part of me is going to miss having this moon all to myself. But welcome to land of Mint and Honey you two.

Elsewhere:

Tefurt: Munholme is about to pass overhead. You ready to send the tanker up to meet it, Jeb?

Jeb: Too easy.

Richbert: Our asteroid rig is on its way!

Irgan: I think this thing has bigger problems than a missing AA, but who am I to argue with 105k?

Bob: Would you look at that? The survey probe just entered our sphere and it's already spotted two new anomalies just east of our mining camp.

Richbert: About to make contact.

Gene: We have our first asteroid. Looks like the rig is holding up well. Good job on the design everykerbal!

Bill: Yes... good... this is only the beginning...

(Editor's note: Huh, I could have sworn when I teleported out to scout the thing it was a magic asteroid with orange-red streaks. Maybe the game doesn't make that decision when the rock is generated but only when it renders it the first time for the save. I wonder if that means there's a chance that the comet I detected will become a magic comet whenever I finally get around to visiting it.

Either way, yay! I have a rock!

I kind of wish the whole anomaly/kerbnet thing worked a little differently. First off, I'd rather there were many more randomly generated anomalies. Second, it would be nice if the best probe for detecting them from orbit wasn't intended to be used as a rover body.

To me, contracts and anomalies are the best part of the game for getting me to actually explore. The actual assembling and flying rockets part is fun, but honestly getting around Kerbin, Mun, and Minmus lets you do almost every trick you'd want to go to other planets for.

Even an Eve return can be simulated pretty well by orbiting a rocket, landing it on Kerbin, and then launching it again. Actually, I might have to do that sometime to give Jeb 'practice' before doing an Eve return.

But contracts,and procedurally generated anomalies can get you to visit places you might not otherwise. And they give the game a little more spice for replay. It's sort of a game designers and modders have no sense of scale thing I guess.

Gene: Bad news Sudon, the client says a hyperbolic trajectory isn't suborbital even if it intersects the planet. You'll need to correct course, get into orbit, and try again.

Sudon: More piloting is never bad news!

Val: Taking over the helping hand to set up its intersect with that stray part. Looks like we'll have a pretty easy encounter.

Sudon: Yep, tell the client the engine still works! I'll just park in an equatorial orbit and wait for the farm crew to get here to complete the contract.

Jeb: Starting our Moho relay burn now.

Gene: Good work Jeb, looks like we'll just have a minor inclination change before we use our periapsis burn to set up an encounter.

Val: ...that is a heck of an engine to be floating in Minmus orbit.

Val: Got it, bringing it home.

Jedlin: Wow! It's an honor to be following Jeb's footsteps and remote piloting our second ever interplanetary probe!

Ten Minutes Later:

Jedlin: Electric charge is still holding steady at 100%. I guess putting the Rovemate in hibernation mode did the trick.

Gene: That's one concern down anyway.

Gene: Not bad Jed. You overdid the burn a hair, but it should be an easy fix when we get the last couple tenths of a degree of inclination.

(Editor's note: Storywise, I have to say the way I do things probably makes maintaining a narrative a little awkward.

Who knows what sort of dramatic daring-do my kerbals will be up to on Mun or Minmus or an asteroid 44 days 2 hours and 50 minutes from now when I have to interrupt them for a minute long burn in interplanetary space that isn't exactly time critical.

Bill: There's no need. The lab is going to be busy enough with the other data from here until the ion probe makes it here.

Irgan: I just set off for that Satellite upgrade. It feels a little weird leaving the Clubhaus after all this time...

Irgan: Huh, look at that. We must be right at our ascending node with Moho...

Gene: EVERYONE SCRAMBLE! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!!!

Irgan: What's the big deal? It's not like it's a transfer window.

Bob: Moho doesn't have transfer windows, not really. Between the inclination and the eccentricity there's only one good place in its orbit to meet it, right where a ship would hit its orbit if we launched right now. We either launch in the next day or so, or hold off for a year.

A few minutes later:

Gene: Bill I hope your design was final because it is now!

Bill: I mean... It should theoretically be able to get there. And have a strong signal. I hope...

Soon after:

Gene: Next up!

Bill: I did have time to revise the survey sat a bit. So long as that solar array can get it through the big burn here, we should be good.

Gene: The relays are locked in for a burn tomorrow.

Gene: And the surveyor. Sure hope your probe can handle an 18 minute burn, Bill.

Irgan: So that's a relay network and a science probe for Moho, right? What are we looking at for the other planets?

Bill: Just link your console back to the Clubhaus and pop open the maneuver tool. It should be able to spit out some basic launch window estimates.

Irgan: Huh, how did I never know it could do that?

Gene: It isn't exactly perfect, but for everywhere but Moho it should be close enough for figuring out our schedule. This year is all about Moho and Duna. Next year is Eve, Jool, and Eeloo.

Irgan: And then Dres after that?

Gene: Where?

(Editor's note: Yeah, I'm going to have to double check those transfer windows. And I don't know why the trip duration to Dres is 0, but it's funny. Considering that Dres isn't real. And it better not be, because a trip of 0hrs implies it's coming to us.

Transfer windows are one of the things I really like about how space travel works, and one I wish more science fiction leaned into. Because it really is a different world if our cities and countries and towns are minutes away from each other by phone, weeks or months away by ship, and in places where the path to reach them only opens once every three years.

Sangan: We survived the big burn, looks like it'll be much easier switching planes.

Bill: We have some time to kill, so let's work on clearing out some contracts.

Gene: We're about to lose those fins.

Bill: Doesn't matter, we're above the soup and we weren't recovering the booster anyway.

Gene: So what is it?

Bill: Our first ion probe.

Bill: These engines take a ton of charge to run, so we're playing around to see how long of a burn we can manage between our panels and batteries. Looks like 2 minutes drained about a quarter of our charge even in the dark.

Bill: Here's our biggest burn so far. And one contract down.

Bill: And now to move on to the next contract.

Bob: And we are now polar and ready to properly service the surface exploration.

(Editor's note: The difference between a ship and a station is all in your mind. A ship is about the trip, a station is for the destination.

Munholme's new orbit lets it pass over essentially everywhere on the Mun's surface twice a munar day. The hope is that with my current rover's fuel reserves it should be doable to hop to anywhere on the surface from the mining rig and recover at the station if needed without doing any major plane changes, which is what made the last surface mission so iffy.

I just eyeballed it but the station should spend about half its orbit in a high orbit and half in low orbit with the transition over the poles. So, in theory, I can grab readings from both high and low orbit over every bit of Mun's surface from that orbit.

I've basically come to feel that there are two kinds of stations: Up stations and Down stations.

Up Stations are for missions going up and out of the gravity well. You want those to be equatorial so they'll have plenty of launch windows for travelling to distant destinations, which should mostly be on or near the equatorial plane. Staging a bunch of modules for an interplanetary ship? Until you light the engines that's an Up station.

Down stations are for exploring the world beneath them. Those should be polar so that they can be accessed relatively cheaply from any latitude and so that they pass over every part of the surface below. Sending Jeb up to park in orbit until he gets crew readings over every biome? Until his recovery burn he's in a Down station.

Verming: ...sure.

Richbert: Sun's coming up over the horizon, I'm actually glad it's still dark though, the runway lights are making this spot much easier to find.

Verming: Wait, so you got a map marker and runway lights? No fair!

Richbert: Ooooh, looks like that extra anomaly we detected wasn't a glitch after all!

Tebart: Maybe another launch site? I see something shining anyway.

Tebart: Aww, this one's mothballed. I can't even refuel. Another monolith though, these things are everywhere! I have plenty of fuel though, so I'll keep heading north.

Tebart: Shouldn't our ground relays have map markers? At least I was able to just follow the signal to pinpoint it.

Tebart: It's getting kind of toasty in the cockpit. Jet's probably a little too fast for our atmosphere. Wonder if that's what got the aliens? Maybe they had to drop the monoliths to save weight.

Tebart: Oh thank Kerb! Bathrooms!

Tebart: Wake up! Where's the toilet!

Jedlin: Aww, I only get a short hop? Tebart gets all the fun.

Jedlin: Fill er up!

Verming: Behold! The wisdom of the ancients revealed! Fuel tanks can be bigger!

Verming: I hope there's a place to land coming up, otherwise I'm going to need to start watching the throttle so I don't blow up!

Verming: Yay! Two beaches in one relay!

Verming: Glad I packed my bikini!

Tebart: Made it across the ocean. Our first anomaly is a ground station. That's fine. There's several other anomalies we picked up, and it isn't like they'd have all the launch sites and airfields in one hemisphere, right?

Tebart: I'm going to be 100% honest. The core says there's something here, but I don't see shit. So much for my mountain resort.

Tebart: Another ground station...

Tebart: yay. a monolith.

Tebart: An entire continent with no launch sites?!?! What the hell Gene?

Gene: I don't know what to tell you, I just stamp the papers.

Tebart: I'm about to outrun the sun. Still got a bit to fly before I reach Mahi Mahi. I throttled down to cool off, but now things are getting kind of shaky. How well did you look at the balance in this thing with empty tanks?

Gus: We didn't...

Tebart: FFFFFFFFuuuuuuuuuu....

Tebart: I just had to take over for Verming at the cove. What was I thinking? I should have let Richbert fly this leg of the mission. That water looks so cold...

(Editor's note: The crash at the end wasn't staged. I really did just suddenly lose all control and fall into an unrecoverable tailspin. Dropped all the way from 10k to 1k meters fighting for control the whole way down before I decided to have her bail out.

There's a single anomaly I have mapped that I couldn't find. I don't know if there's anything actually there though, I was putting up those markers even if the anomaly was right on the horizon from the probe. So it's possible that I was way off on location and I marked that for the last monolith or the second to last ground station.

The jet was really great for this tour. Plenty of fuel, a top speed over 500 m/s, reasonable enough to land, and stable enough to point the thing, crank up to 4x warp, and walk away to get a drink or use the restroom while it flew and worst case come back to the thing being a couple thousand meters higher than I wanted. But I did check after the fact, and with empty tanks the center of mass was definitely behind the center of lift. Oops.

Jeb: Coming in hot, see you on the ground in a few.

Tefurt: Welcome! Let's get all linked up so I can get this thing running at full capacity!

Jowig: Let's wait for sunrise before Jeb and I head out on our next hop.

Tefurt: Sounds good. I think I've got everything dialed in here if you two want to call it a night.

Gene: You know the timing on this is a little mean, right?

Bob: Why would you say that?

Gene: And we're sure it won't hit them?

Val: Relax, we can make adjustments if we need to.

Val: Beginning terminal burn...

Val: And that's flameout. Project Alarm Clock is due to hit in 5... 4...

Jeb: WHAT WAS THAT!?!?!

Jowig: Really Gene? Couldn't wait for morning?

(Editor's note: No cheating this time. Although I should admit that I did cheat the Mineshack into orbit a few posts ago. But it's the second Mineshack and the new hose connections have less mass than the spare batteries I took off, so I can't imagine it would have been difficult to launch. That was still probably a mistake, because just loading onto the launchpad fully fueled shredded three of its four tires and I had to blow through three repair kits once it landed to let it drive over.

I did have Tefurt drop the airlock on the Mineshack a bit so the science rover could dock with it. but the actual docking was easy. Drive over to line up the docks, and then switch to the landing legs to lift the rover and trust the magnets to keep everything lined up while the vehicle shifts around and make the connection.

I probably should have used the subassembly feature to make sure the things lined up back at the VAB, but where's the fun in that?

Jeb: We're about to set you two down. You'll have control of the wheels once you're on the ground. Go easy on the acceleration, you're a little top-heavy.

Jowig: I spotted our first surface feature on the way down. Let's go check it out!

Tefurt: Bill, it looks like our next version needs the wheels reworked. The scanning arm doesn't like any motion at all and we just don't have the grip with the wheels to keep perfectly still even on a gentle slope. The good news is that we found a rock to scan too and the arm can reach the ground even with the landing pads deployed.

Bill: Good to know. We'll have to see if it's a weight issue when the other one gets here at Minmus.

Jowig: That's all our experiments live and running.

Tefurt: The panels are live. Looks like we were right, with me tuning them we didn't need all five.

Tefurt: Done refueling for our first long distance hop. Shame I can't stay to keep the rig running on high, but we don't have the fuel cells for the power draw and we're going to run out of battery soon.

Gene: Don't stress it. You've got a version of Bill's mineshack on the way. It might be waiting for you by the time you get back.

Jeb: Jowig, Tefurt, make sure you're strapped in. You're coming up on your landing burn for that site where we need the gravity readings.

A little later:

(Editor's note: I cheated the fuel to let them visit the monolith on the same trip. But I was able to get them back to the mining rig from there on the ~1k delta-v they had left after landing at the other site. That was very close though. I ran out of fuel about ten feet above the ground but still landed safely.

Looks like for Mun I either need to get better at planning hops or I need a couple hundred extra m/s safety margin to be doing round trips to the poles from the equator. On the other hand, I do have a mostly full tanker in orbit, and 1000 m/s is plenty to get into munar orbit from the surface. Don't know if it's enough for the plane change. I'd want to put my apoapsis all the way up at the edge of the Munar SOI to even try it on that budget.

I do want a shorter, more stable, rover design. Preferably something with good enough wheels and traction to actually safely climb out of a crater. This thing took a ton of reloading trying to get gravity readings from three surface sites with two inside a crater.

So more fuel, wider base, bigger wheels, or maybe use docking to split the hopper and the rover and use robotics to pick it up and set it down.

Gene: Will someone explain to me why we keep getting contracts to build brand new versions of things we already have in place or on the way? So, I'm guessing this is the core? Rest comes up later?

Bill: Not exactly. This launch should fulfill at least two contracts for us all by itself.

Gene: Still don't quite have room for 19 kerbals, but the inflatable airlocks weren't a bad choice.

Sudon: Did you think I rode up here for the fun of it? Just watch.

Sudon: The RCS thrusters worked just fine for this. Barely used any monoprop.

Sudon: And here's the second arm.

Sudon: On my way to Minmus! It's like having a cruise ship all to myself!

Gene: Looks like our second part retrieval mission is almost over. Time to see if it can survive a reentry from Munar orbit.

Gene: Nice work! Now it's just the Minmus retrieval left.

Liszor: Anyone order a Munar lander? Got a spare Scientist I can grab before I take it for refueling?

Tefurt: Looks like we're about to get busy here at Mun.

(Editor's note: Obviously I'm still playing with inflatable space station concepts. I do have a bit of a plan for the second Minmus station, but it's more something I came up with after the fact.

Spoiler alert, I think I'm going to use it as a mobile academy to level up essentially all my kerbonauts. But given that it has a week of flying before it can even get to Minmus, it doesn't have any passengers, and I'm about to land a science rover on Mun, that probably won't be for a few more episodes.

I keep seeing people on the various forums complaining about super long burn times on ships that use nuclear engines. And... um... why though? The things aren't perfect, of course, they're pretty heavy and have a relatively low thrust. But you can use more than one. And even using three like I did above I was able to shave about ten tons off of the ship vs what I would have needed to get the same thrust to weight ratio and total delta-v with the standard engines I have access to. Yes, I could have used a single engine and squeezed out an extra 1000 m/s, on a ship that already got nearly 4k. But that would have been a ship that took over 7 minutes to burn to Minmus from LKO instead of less than 3. And it might have struggled just getting into LKO in the first place.

Agadun, from my sandbox testing save, has to pop off the struts once it's teleported into orbit.

Hinges bend, cylinders extend, and the thing starts to take shape.

Inflatable airlocks inflate, and solar arrays unfold.

The lights come on, and the station orients itself edge on to the sun before spinning up to 5 rpm for gravity's sake.

Being a single ring, I don't have to worry about rotating joints, vibrations and a bunch of other annoying problems with multi-ring stations, which is nice even if those things don't matter in KSP. But one of the big things I like about this is that irl you should be able to fuse these clusters of four airlocks into a single, spacious, much more rectangular interior by reinforcing the seams and maybe adding a lightweight internal structure.

The whole thing is modular, with each of the six segments of the ring having the space and the power generation and storage to support a single kerbal and the hydroponics they'd need to keep them alive. It should be doable to dock the ring together without the central hub, and I have tested docking three segments together using a specialized tug but haven't done a full ring yet.

The trouble I'm running into is that for some reason if I make the segments into sub-assemblies and then strap them to a booster one or both of the hinges holding the ports likes to randomly decide to detach from the craft when launched. Or to stay attached through being launched and orbited and then just pop off when the segment is docked. It seems to be something about the way I added the bottom battery that bothers it. Maybe.

Jeb: It's successfully reaching orbit is what it is.

Gene:...good, but not what I asked.

Bill: I call it the Hellwasp!

Gene: No. No you don't.

Bill: Shame we had to use fins for the launch. Silly things just don't like reentry.

Gene: Oh. That's what it's for. We're calling it the 'Helping Hand'.

Bill: Boo!

Gene: Well, whatever we call it, it did its job just fine.

Meanwhile:

Bill: Tell accounting I just got to 6k liquid fuel units and we can send out the invoice for the Minmus base.

Gene: What are you going to do now that the tanks are pretty much full? There's still over a week until the farm and lab show up.

Bill: Sleep? Maybe try bringing back that rover that's over the ridge?

Just above the Munar Surface:

Jeb: Looks like our new tanker is landing in good shape near the drill rig.

Tefurt: The new linking arm did its job just fine. Nothing seems to have jumped or exploded. The drill is up and running. I'll head down later to optimize things. Do we want the science rover to meet me there? Just in case I need to adjust its docking ports for surface use?

Gene: Sounds like a decent idea. But one for tomorrow, after it docks with the ring station.

Gene: These Helping Hands are great! All the way to Munar orbit, and it still has the juice to come home.

Bill: Speaking of tomorrow's problems, I guess we'll find out soon if it can survive a munar reentry...

(Editor's note: Realized there's an easier and safer way to eyeball a landing burn in stock:

1 - Get into an orbit that passes over your target and then hits the ground close by.

2 - Make a maneuver node on the ground to figure out how long your burn will take to get rid of your velocity.

3 - Move that maneuver node to be directly above the target.

4 - Burn retrograde when you're half your burn time from the maneuver node.

I'd been doing 1, 2, and basically 4. Trying to get a burn that would stop me just above the ground, as near to the target as possible. And then I'd reload to adjust where I was intersecting the ground and when to start my burn to not die. Adding in 3 makes it much easier and more forgiving, although it does add some hovering time so it's slightly less fuel efficient.

Here it is collapsed. I had to strut it together for stability during the launch, but that's fair I think. Didn't actually do any clipping unless you count the inflatable airlocks, and you shouldn't. Sending an engineer along to pop out and take off the struts isn't hard. Certainly easier than trying to get all the angles in this silly thing right while eyeballing them in EVA construction.

And the launcher isn't anything special. Although this is only just barely enough to get it into orbit. That said, this is a very easy-to-fly rocket. Straight up to 55 m/s, start the gravity turn, hit the prograde button, and then play with the throttle to keep apoapsis about 1 - 1.5 minutes away. The circularization stage is just a single medium 1.25 m fuel tank and a terrier, and had about half its fuel left when I was done parking the thing at a 75k circular orbit. A little bit more work and I could make it all recoverable, I'm sure.

I haven't decided if I'm going to use this in the series yet. I like the expanding rings. Those are great. But I don't like these multi-ring counter rotating stations conceptually, or really anything that tries to join rotating and non-rotating pressurized sections of a craft in space. It just seems to me like a recipe for bleeding out air over time. And the air is also a small but nasty source of friction in the joint.

You could have the joint be depressurized, and do a maglev thing or something, but then people need to suit up and spend hours cycling through airlocks to go between sections unless you have some sort of internal docking and undocking mechanism I suppose.

And then there's the thing where the torque from the two wheels needs to be perfectly balanced or the whole station starts rotating unstably. In KSP it just works if you set the rotors to have identical torques. In real life... just seems like a way to be constantly bleeding off monoprop to control your orientation to avoid wobbling to death.

Bill: This one uses hinges and pistons. The idea is that you line it up with the target port and then extend the final piston for a precise contact.

Gene: That's what, ten points of articulation? Seems annoying. Have fun with it.

Gene: Huh, there's something I don't recognize in the tracking map.

Gene: Looks like our first asteroid visit. Any plans for it?

Liszor: The baby rock can wait. I've got a science gathering truck to deliver to Mun.

Liszor: Gear is tested and deployed. I'm on my way with all those instruments everyone wanted.

Gene: While we're waiting on the asteroid plan, let's wrap up a couple contracts.

Marney: Fresh air! Thank Kerb! It's been getting ripe in here.

Richbert: I suppose you want me to EVA my way over. So demanding.

Gene: Everyone say hi to your new coworkers.

Everykerbal: Welcome!

Gene: Marney, hate to do this to you, but we're tight on engineers so we need to rush you through onboarding and get you out and working. Richbert, take your time. Maybe visit your family for a week or so.

Jeb: Don't worry too much Rich. We have plans that'll get everyone flying.

Gene: That's another heavy booster I see coming down. What did we launch?

Irgan: That is our very own asteroid miner/recovery probe/docking hub.

Gene: Since when do we have nuclear engines?

Irgan: Since we got a contract to test someone else's and I sweet talked them into passing along some spares.

Gene: Nice! I didn't think we'd be doing our visit this soon.

Irgan: ...check the schedule...

Irgan: The transfer window to meet it at its descending node is 14 days away. So it's just parked for now.

Jeb: That's enough time for a Minmus trip. Got any requests, Bill?

Bill: We still need a farm and a lab here. But doesn't our first lab have a Poodle engine for some reason? Why don't we test it out as a tug and have it push itself and our first farm from LKO to here. And then we can build one each of a new lab, farm, and hotel for LKO and make them shiny and fancy.

Bob: You just want to be using well-tested equipment out there, don't you?

Bill: Can you blame me? Oh, and send a rover my way too. Got to give the scientists something to do once they're here.

Sigald: Better send plenty of fuel with that rover. We've got plenty of thrust here but don't quite have the juice to make the trip.

Lupont: Switching control point to the inflatable airlock and activating RCS...

Sig: Still not enough. I can rework the hallways of the farm to store some extra fuel, but we'll need a delivery.

Sig: That did it. We'll hit Minmus with plenty of fuel to get into orbit and still have the lander ready to go meet Bill.

Gene: That seems like a good place to call it a day. We'll pick things up again once the Mun deliveries are parked.

Gillong: Our target distance should be about halfway to the mountains.

Gillong: Oooh! Data! Not much, but still...

Gillong: We just need to do that seventy-six more times and we'll have all the seismic data we can gather here on Kerbin!

Gene: And how big of a boom are we talking about to finish this contract?

Gill: I think... Let me check my notes... Mun is about one fiftieth the mass of Kerbin, so... Actually wait! If we did that same impact on Mun at the right distance from the probe, it ought to finish the contract in one go!

(Editor's note: As far as time spent goes, I think this filler didn't actually take too much less time than some of my actual posts in the series. But it was lazier time, so whatever.

Jeb: The nerds say it'll survive reentry easily. You just need to bail out once you have enough air for your chute.

Gene: I'm not thrilled about any of this, but we do need to test our emergency bail-out capability.

Val: In station configuration now, burning off the last of the fuel now that I'm in a suborbital trajectory.

Val: Temps and pressures are falling again looks like I'm not dying in a fireball today.

Jeb: But what a way to go...

Val: Letting go of the ladder in 3, 2, 1, and a half...

Val: Wow that's dropping fast now!

Gene: Welcome back to land Val. We can't leave that flag there though.

Walt: Darn right we can't!

Gene: The client has signed off on everything but the final orbit. Ink's still wet, but you can light the torch.

Val: Fairing is deployed, airbrakes are set on the booster, and I'm going to switch to station configuration for the detachment until we're clear.

Gene: Looks like a clean detachment. As long as all systems are green you're clear to proceed.

Val: Back in burn config, lighting for our circularization.

Val: And we are in orbit. Looks like we have just enough fuel left to get us where we're going.

Gene: Good. Refueling shouldn't have any effect on the contract, but with this client...

Gene: We have visual on the booster. It's in the atmosphere, and the airbrakes are just starting to flip it around.

Irgan: We're through the worst of the reentry. Now to see if I got the parachute's right.

Irgan...

Gene: Look at it this way, the engine should be safe, and that's the expensive part.

Bill: Trust me Irgan, it happens to everyone.

Val: Getting ready to my transfer burn

Gene: Cutting it a little close with our delta-v budget. How are the hinges looking?

Val: The board is all green anyway. Tefurt can do a thorough inspection once we're in place.

Gene: If this goes well, it'll be much easier to sell clients on interplanetary trips if we can offer munar gravity for the trip.

Thomplan: And there it is. How long are we staying here anyway?

Jowig: Indefinitely, I'd guess. Between this and the other station with the orbital farm and lab, and the mining rig on the surface I'm betting we don't go home until Mun is good and thoroughly explored.

Gene: And there's our first proper ring station. Contract is fulfilled! Could have been more profitable if we didn't have to scrap the prototype, but good work everyone!

Later:

Gene: And there's one more contract finished!

Walt: That ore did not get here from Minmus, did it?

Mortimer: *snort* you didn't hear this, but I rode shotgun on the water truck that brought it in from the shore just past the runway.

Walt: Water? Really?

Wernher: And what else would ore be? What else do you know of that is plentiful and can easily be turned to rocket fuel and oxidizer with just a little filtering and electrolysis?

Gene: The contract says we needed to collect fresh ore on Minmus. And we did. And it says we needed to land ore on Kerbin. And we did. All proper and above board. Witnesses, receipts, everything.

If the client that had us waste a nearly 100k launch on a space station because Irgan tacked on some solar panels wants documentation that the ore we landed on Kerbin was ore that was collected Minmus, they can submit a new contract that says exactly that.

Until then, this was a mission to prove that we have the capacity to land ore on kerbin.

(Editor's note: My original plan was to revert to a save from before I launched last time's prototype and just handwave that the original launch never happened.

I did in fact revert. And I made a newer, better, prototype. And then when I was checking out the booster recovery I found that I couldn't revert, and that except for the quick save with last time's prototype in orbit I didn't have any saves to go back to that wouldn't have taken me back several episodes.

Irgan: Hi Val! I'm going to hop over, do a few checks, move a couple parts, and make sure you're ready for the flight to Mun.

Val: The hinges worked fine. We are now in station configuration and ready for rotation.

Irgan: Please don't spin it up while I'm out there.

Irgan: Your engines are in place, and so are your panels! You should have just enough fuel to get into your Munar orbit.

Gene: That's sounding like a great plan girls, except for one thing.

Val and Irgan: What?

Gene: The client called back. Fully assembled when launched means no welding in space at all. Back to the drawing board.

Irgan: Aww...

Bill: And there's our rig for the Minmus base.

Bill: The Crew Quarters

Bill: And me!

Bill: All the pieces are in motion. It'll be a week until I get to Minmus. Actually, maybe I should have rode the minibus...

Gene: Seems like the sort of thing I'd have brought up. If you actually showed me any plans. Ever.

Bill: Everything's safe and parked in orbit. Time to start dropping modules.

Val: Drill's down. It'll be our target for the others.

Sudon: Tanker's in place.

Bill: Touching down now with the last little bit of daylight.

Val: Crew module is on the ground and in place. All up to you now Bill.

Bill: Well, those linking arms did the trick. Sort of. The connection is good, but I think I'm going to need to repack them manually when it's time to split up. But the base is assembled, and now it's just waiting on the fuel tanks to fill back up.

Gene: Congrats on the mining camp. Have fun reading gauges for the next week I guess.

(Editor's note: Yeah... I'm not sure what did it exactly, but linking up Bill's mining shack actually whipped the tanker ten feet into the air somehow. And you can tell by looking that the hinges are sort of... disassembled? A bit? Maybe next time I'll try leaving them locked but just turn the damping down.

Tebart: We are going to get such a bonus for this flight!

Verming: Think of the tips!

Gene: Welcome back you two! Drinks are on me. You've managed to fund us for the next year at least!

Editor's note: Had a surprise weekend visit from a bunch of friends I served with in the Peace Corps and haven't seen in over a decade. Great time catching up, meeting kids, roasting goat, and eating lots of home cooked and very nostalgic food from Kenya. Including a regional dish that was new to me. Plus drinking a bit more and sleeping a bit less than I should. So have a very short update.

I cheated quite a bit on this one. And I feel no remorse. Basically, my attitude is now that I have a legitimate way to generate fuel on Mun and I've proved I can get that fuel into Munar orbit in a reasonable amount of time, I'm justified in using infinite fuel cheats as long as each leg of the flight has enough delta-v to get me to the orbit where I've parked the fuel tanker.

Actually getting to the arch from where I spotted it was just straight up cheating though. I would have been able to do it, but I almost certainly would have had to send a refueler down to the surface to get back to orbit. Which is possible, but I haven't done it yet. So I guess that's on the agenda: Build and demonstrate an emergency surface refueler.