Year 13: Mostly Disasters

Although Valentina's Group is Surprisingly Competent

Valentina is having a great time with her new rocket-plane and... wait, Valentina wake up, you're dreaming about the kids' sandbox save. You're still stuck in orbit high above Eve.

But wait, plans are afoot to rescue Valentina and her brave crew! Let's build a ship and send Daphty to go rescue them.

We even included a rover we could airdrop down to give Desktop something to do and maybe get some science. Right after we did the escape burn we remembered we didn't put any sort of heat shield on the rover. Oops, that's right, this is KSP 1.0.5 not 0.23.

Well we have a few hundred days until that gets there, what should we do in the meantime?

Let's take a few in-system contracts. Launch a satellite? Rescue another Kerbal from around the Mun? An ill-advised Minmus base expansion? Sure! Let's do it.

Foolishly trying to combine missions here. This one is a combined satellite placement/Mun rescue rocket.

After *way* too much deltaV we got it into the -140 degree inclined orbit... only to find out somehow the separator got left off in the VAB. NOooooo! And we can't get the contract if the ship is manned (later I realized that we could have just put Herely on EVA for 10 seconds, oops).

Well the satellite had a scanner so how can we salvage this mission? Let's go *SCAN THE MUN*:

Hereley is apparently very upset by the ore placement patters for some reason. Or maybe he has discovered the Mun is made of green cheese.

Not really enough Delta-V to rescue poor Kacy stuck in orbit, so let's return to Kerbin and see if we can re-enter with a massively off-balance scanner satellite stuck to us.

And surprisingly, it all went fine. Well that completely destroyed our budget, but let's try again.

This time let's try launching directly into the -140 degree orbit. We're unwisely overflying land! And we started the gravity turn too early so when we dropped the solid boosters they knocked a full engine stack off. Sorry people down below!

We did make it, despite the fact that my math was off and we were still inclined by about 60 degrees when we got to orbit. At least the separator worked this time:

Very mysterious payload, I hope whoever sponsored the launch has good intentions. They must be up to something, as obviously the scanner isn't being used for ore scanning if not in a polar orbit.

Let's head to the Mun and see if Kacy is still hanging around.

She is! Not looking very happy, maybe an EVA will cheer her up. This trip has been expensive, but still cheaper than recruiting more Kerbonauts at home.

Let's head back to Kerbin. Had some extra fuel on re-entry so was trying to burn it up when the separator exploded in dramatic fashion. Then I couldn't cut off the burn because we were no longer connected. It all worked out in the end though.

What other contracts do we have? Pol flyby? Let's check on our one un-assigned probe in Jool orbit and see if we can get an encounter... but horrors it is gone! Completely gone! The Kraken got it? Probably its orbit got perturbed, but weird, shouldn't there be some sort of message when something like that happens?

I guess we'll just need to do the Minmus base expansion instead. That base has been nothing but trouble. Let's send Herley up once again. We're trying for three things here, to expand MinmusBase, conduct a spacewalk around Minmus, and scan Minmus for ore (that last one isn't a contract, we were just curious).

Well it turns out Minmus has next to no ore. I guess it does appear to be mostly made out of water and/or mint flavored toothpaste.

Let's get that spacewalk in:

Now a "funny" thing happened, when in the VAB designing this craft I was interrupted for a long period of time. And when I started up again I forgot to add probe cores to the satellite and expansion :(

How can we salvage this mission? Various plans failed, I think for now Hereley you're going to end up proud captain of the polar orbiting Minmus-Station-Alpha that no one really wanted but now we have it! More worrisome, Hereley was our last pilot. Hmmm.

Year 13 has not been ending well. Let's just fast forward until the end.

Daphty has arrived at Eve!

Let's drop off Desktop's rover. We'll deal with it later.

After a lot of hassle managed to get within 11km of the castaway's ship. That's going to have to be close enough.

Here comes Valentina, looking excited to finally be going home:

I think this was Luzor going next:

Then Madchell is closing things out. She was trying to pick up some science from the instruments (I think that's possible) but maybe she's not scientist enough to do that.

Valentina at least is excited to be going home! Should have plenty of Delta-V, although we don't have a Kerbin encounter yet so it might be many months before they finally get there.

Maybe the year will end on a high note. What about the next event coming up, the Jeb rescue? Well no pictures of that, but due to poor planning we got within 100km of Jeb but with a difference of speed of 4000m/s meant no rescue was possible. That was a waste, and now we have to figure out how to rescue Macie too.

Back to Kerbal pictures