Despite all the best efforts of my Chief Designer, no progress had been made on rescuing Bill Kerman from the surface of the Mun.  Failed designs littered the landscape around the Space Center, often in tiny fragments.  The problem, it seemed, was providing a seat for our misplaced kerbalnaut... I just couldn't figure out a way to get to the Mun with room to spare for Bill.  The three-seat capsule was too big, and the various other passenger units were too heavy for my skillz.  It looked like Bill was going to be staying at MunBase I for a while... until I stumbled upon a picture in a book that solved the problem!

This is the Gloster Meteor F8 Dual-Cockpit "prone pilot" test plane.  In an attempt to allow pilots to endure higher G forces, the thought was that having the pilot lying down head first might do so.  As it turns out, it did, but advances in G suits made the arrangement moot.  Plus, the visibility to the rear was horrible, and ejecting added a whole series of problems.  But that didn't matter to me, the dual cockpit arrangement triggered something in my brain.  Away went the Chief Designer to the drafting table!

Take a Mk1 Cockpit from C7 Aerospace, attach it to a Mk2 Cockpit, and suddenly we've got a solution.  The mission is flown from the pointybit, Bill will ride in the back seat, and it will still stack on top of an evolution of the original Mun Launcher I... which we know works.  How hard can it be?  As it turns out, the design could have saved a bit of weight by using a Mk 1 Capsule from Kerlington Model Rockets and Paper Products, Inc., but two things prevented that.  First, aesthetics: the two bits we used are, stylistically, the same.  They just look better together.  Then, and perhaps more importantly, C7 Aerospace bought uniforms for the Space Center's kerball team.

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Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:35 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Two days is not long enough to recover from a long week.  I need another week off.

Look, here's how tired I've been: I have a new graphics card for Nori, a GTX 650 (this one, as a matter of fact), and I haven't been able to generate the energy to install it, even though it should kick all sorts of asterisk.

Yadda yadda work, yadda yadda tired, yadda yadda blah blah blah.  I know, I know, quitcherbitchin' Wonderduck.  Sorry.  I'm trying.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:14 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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