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.



Liftoff!  We have liftoff of Mun Rescuer Whatever Number We're Up To Now and the latest attempt to rescue Bill Kerman from the wreckage of Mun Lander I Mun Base I, our unplanned science facility on the larger of our two moons.  At the controls of Mun Rescuer WNWUTN is Bob Kerman, not the expected Jebediah.  Unfortunately, Jeb came down with a horrible case of Parasitic Reniform at the last moment and couldn't be cleared for the journey. 
So it was Bob who went screaming into the heavens on four pillars of fire.  And by "screaming," I mean that literally.  Bob is not exactly the most stable of kerbals, but he's one of only three beings allowed to wear the orange jumpsuit, and in Kerbal Space Program, orange is the universal color for "useful."  A flawless launch sent Mun Rescuer WNWUTN into the first phase of the mission: get up high.  The four Mainsails ran out of fuel just before Bob reached orbit, as expected, so it was time for Phase 2: go round and round.

One more Mainsail with just less fuel than an Orange Can gets Bob going round and round the planet, trying to find just the right time to head for the Mun.  After a lot of scratching of heads and gnashing of tooth, someone had the bright idea to aim the pointy part at Mun, then throttle up the noisy part at the back.  Much to everybody's surprise, this worked, putting Mun Rescuer WNWUTN into something resembling a Hohmann Transfer Orbit.  It may not have been one, but it felt awfully good.  Before the burn was over, though, the "round-and-round" stage used up all its fuel, sending us into Stage Three: "There and Back Again."

Nobody is going to accuse it of being graceful.  Or aerodynamic, which doesn't make any difference up here in spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace, but if it gets back home?  Who knows... I have less than 100% confidence in the strength of the mating of the Mk1/Mk2 cockpits.  I had this terrible image of the parachutes deploying... and the Mk1 snapping off, sending Bob to visit his little green ancestors.  Not the best way to end a mission.

Don't mind me, just being artsy.  If you wanted, you could click on the picture for a larger version of the runup to the Mun... because there it is, the Mun!  Now comes the hard part... landing near enough to Mun Base I that Bill could perambulate over to Mun Rescuer WNWUTN.  This, as it turns out, was not nearly as easy as it sounds.  For example, Bill entered Munar orbit retrograde, while Bob was coming in prograde.  Oh, and in a completely different orbital plane to boot.  The first orbit made it clear that there was no chance of putting down within walking distance of Mun Base I... without doing radical burns perpendicular to the direction of travel.   After a few more laps of the Mun, some experimental firing of the nuclear engine, and one or two moments of Bill threatening to "come up there and drag it down by hand," the results were... actually pretty good!

This... is better than I could have hoped, to be honest.  The arrow points to the location of Mun Base I, the light blue line shows the orbit of Mun Rescuer WNWUTN... terminating some distance beyond Bob.  Just one problem... Bob's close to being on the "dark side" of Mun.  Probably better if Bill landed short of the orbit endpoint, the better to maximize the amount of sunlight (and electrical power).

Somewhere, Ed Hochuli has elevated his Burmese Pythons vertically, signifying "touchdown!"  Even better, Mun Rescuer WNWUTN put down 1136 meters away from Mun Base I... just over 3725 feet.  Easy peasy!  Except that it's top-heavy and nearly fell over half-a-dozen times because it's not on level ground.  It didn't, but a hard sneeze might topple it.  Fortunately, no atmosphere!

Bill bids a somber farewell to Mun Base I, knowing that it had kept him alive all this time, yet also knowing that if the engine hadn't've been a few inches too long, he wouldn't have to trek over a kilometer to his taxi home.  Still, it's only a klom... on the Mun, no less... how hard could it be?

Once again, being artsy, and once again, you can click for a bigger version.  Mun Rescuer WNWUTN is still too far away to be visible, and Bill started to get, shall we say, antsy?  First running, then jumping... then he realized that he had a EVA pack on his back.  WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!  On one hand, it really sped matters up... Bill was going so quick that hundreds of meters would go by between jet-bursts.  On the other hand, Bill had discovered that landing was less than simple.  In fact, he'd touch down and roll and tumble and somersault along the ground in a ragdolling, uncontrollable mess.  At high speed.  In fact, it turns out that Mun Rescuer WNWUTN was parked on a reverse slope, and once Bill began to tumble, he just kept going, and going, and Going, and GOING... and zipped right between and under two of Mun Rescuer's landing legs.  Unfortunately, didn't get a screenshot of that one... I was too busy screaming like a goat and cowering under my desk to hit the button.  I suspect that if Bill had hit one of the legs, we would have had Mun Base II and the Chief Designer would have either stroked out or killed Bill if he was dumb enough to return to the Space Center.

That's Bill on the ladder, Bob on the nose.  At this point, the discovery was made that kerbals have climbing instinct... Bill could climb up the ladder, but he couldn't translate to a horizontal surface afterwards.  This led to some 15 minutes of frustration as Bill kept getting stuck or fell off.  Eventually he fired up his EVA pack and jetted up to his spacious accommodations for the trip home.  Once in, Bob wasted no time in in cranking up the nuclear engine.

Nothing fancy here: point at Kerbin, go really fast.  The End.  That's exactly what was done, and it mostly worked.  It wasn't particularly elegant, but eventually Mun Rescuer WNWUTN was close enough to home to get this picture:

Oooh, purty!  While the plan was to put her down on the land, that turned out to be not possible... the last of the fuel was used up making sure that re-entry was going to happen.  Bill didn't care; he just ran a klom in a spacesuit after spending waaaaaay too much time in Mun Base I without a shower.

Re-entry!  Remember what I mentioned about Mun Rescuer being neither graceful nor aerodynamic?  This is where that became blindingly obvious.  She tumbled while still high in the atmosphere.  Pitch, yaw and roll were all uncontrollable; Bill in the Mk2 cockpit was mildly uncomfortable.  Bob, on the other hand, was alternating between vomiting and vomiting some more.  Dumping everything below the cockpits helped somewhat, but led to close to five kilometers of free-fall before the parachutes deployed.

When they did, Bill disappeared from the pilot windows on the HUD.  Normally, that means something very very bad had happened, and in this case, it wasn't that far from the truth.  Once again, remember when I mentioned that I was afraid that the cockpits would separate when the 'chutes deployed?  They did.  Bob, in the primary control cockpit, was shown on the screen, even though it was precariously balanced on top of the Mk2 cockpit; if I touched a movement key, you could see it begin to rotate on the end of the Mk2.  Quickly, I took my finger off the movement keys... and hoped it would make a difference.  The water landing actually caused the two cockpits to float away, but they were HOME!  The rescue of Bill Kerman was a complete and total success!

Welcome home Bill!  Welcome back, Bob!  Great work, both of you!  Just stay away from Jeb, he's still infectious.

I'll be damned... I dood it!

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:35 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 1681 words, total size 12 kb.