Back to the Mun, Inconvenience near Ike

We still had time before any of our in-flight ships got anywhere useful, and we were running low on funds, so why not see if we can pick up any contracts in the meantime?

Hmmm, put a flag on the Mun? Didn't we do that already? Actually honestly we can't seem to remember. Well why not do it again.

We went to a Canadian Lord of the Rings cosplay convention and picked up two new Kerbalnauts: Merrey and Luny. As you can see the first attempt at an all-new lander didn't go so well. (Trying to use a single Skipper engine to make orbit when not quite out of the atmosphere: bad idea)

This time we made it, and plenty of deltaV, maybe this won't be so bad.

Landing on a steep crater hill might have been a bad idea. An explosive Corbin maneuver!

They survived somehow but the capsule rolled for a very long time. I guess they do say Ithaca's only a long roll from Cornell. The rest of the craft also rolled down the hill, continuously exploding into finer and finer pieces. Anyway even though they seem to be really enjoying this, I am going to cheat and call in a quicksave and see if I can get a better landing.

Well that was somewhat better. The science station on the nose blew up though. It's a good thing I decided against putting the parachutes on the top. You can't tell but the ship is ever so slowly rolling down the hill, so Luny planted the flag and then quickly (and actually very incompetently) got back in and tried to see if we could somehow re-launch like this.

Success! It only took 2-3 quicksaves to manage to not explode horribly.

Even made a safe re-entry, and even better by sheer luck we landed just offshore of the space center (you can see it down below in the picture).

Well check that off. Nice to have some Kerbals return home for once. Didn't bring in as much funds as we could have hoped. Did get a bunch of science. Let's unlock nuclear rockets, what could possibly go wrong.

Let's fast-forward a bit and see if we can do something useful with our Ike station expansion.

Great, not enough delta-v in the transit stage to enter orbit. I guess we'll have to fire the lander rockets.

Ummm OK that didn't work well. Our engineers should have thought through this design a bit better. The hope was we'd dock with the station, then drop off the lander afterward. What we should have done was flip the lander to the other side and attach to the docking ring (did we put a docking ring on? This is the problem with doing long-term staggered missions, no one can remember the ship "features").

Anyway we just tried to fire the engines anyway and so blew off all the solar panels and RCS tanks. Who needs those anyway.

Anyway we entered Duna orbit but are stranded now with a crippled ship. Also seem to have a 90° orbital inclination somehow? Not good.

We grow tired of all these Duna missions with not-quite-enough delta-V. So a lot of time was spent coming up with a design that could boost 42tons with 7000 deltaV. And that 42tons could have another 4000 or so deltaV. Or that's the plan.

Here's Merrey trying out the DunaDestroyer™.

Looks like it might need more struts:

Ahh this looks better. A total pain to get into orbit though, it handles like a boat. Or I guess like a really massive rocket with inadequate SAS.

Well let's launch this thing to Duna. Wait, the window is how many months away? *sigh*. Well at least there's some other things we can do in the meantime.

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