Year 18: More Ore

Well let's see if we can make progress on our huge pile of outstanding contracts.

How about that 400 ore from the Mun one that went so poorly last time? Let's add some parachutes and struts and try things again. We're sending Jeb because he quickly got bored with being back on Kerbin, and science-twin Leaukiki has finished her training and is returning to the Mun to hopefully up the science lab output.

Made it to the Mun no problem:

Ghost-Daphty picked us up in the rover. We landed a bit closer this time. Maneuvering near the base is a pain because the frame rate massively drops whenever we get within 2.2km. Maybe KSP 1.1 will help with that eventually.

We managed to "dock" with the station:

Let's take a break while we wait for the ore and fuel to be generated. Jeb has an odd dream from the sandbox save, remembering a time during training when he climbed the flagpole.

We had rescued Jeb, but you might remember that Bill and Detrix are stuck in a similar orbit out past Duna. So let's send a rescue ship for them too. It's going to have to sit in orbit a bit though until we can find a good intercept.

OK, a few hundred days later and Jeb is ready to return with his load of ore! We're taking 600 units, just to make things more difficult.

We were sort of stuck in a corner and the rover couldn't get us out, so we took off right from the base. Luckily it at least looked like we didn't damage anything in the ascent. We managed to avoid the pod racer that someone parked there too.

Managed to get to Kerbin orbit, trying another targeted landing at the KSC. That was a bit of a mistake, some mountains are right on the path when you come in prograde.

It wasn't looking good, but maybe we'll survive?

Oh no! Just like last time we flipped when the chutes fully deployed and landed ore-first. It wasn't quite as bad as it looked, it turns out one of the ore containers (with 300 ore) survived, and Jeb survived too. No contract completion though :(

Anyway, around now the Duna window opened. So we're sending Jeb with our new Ike base we unwisely promised a while ago (it's always Ike). Hopefully Jeb's trip to Duna goes better than his last one.

I hope there's enough delta-V here, as I was too lazy to work out the rocket equations.

We're on our way! The only worrisome thing is the contract vaguely asks for the base to "be on wheels" and despite having some wheels on there alarmingly the contract checkoff is not marking this as done. I guess we'll find out in a year or two.

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