Year 22: Lots of Docking

After a long hiatus

Well it's been a while since we've had a chance to play! I blame 1.1.3 and the fact that it keeps the laptop hot enough to run the fan, which means I wake others if I try to play it after hours.

Also, some other Kerbal related sillyness ensued at one point.

It's been so long since I've played I forget entirely what was going on. Let's treat it as if I'm the new administrator picking up where the old one (who left under mysterious circumstances) left off.

The briefing files here say we are working on some sort of Jool mission. OK I can work with that. There was lander testing program going on, which was nearly complete. Oh look, some pictures.

My goodness, these Kerbals seem to have a passion for extreme meteorology.

And um apparently they can make pinpoint landings to mountain valleys? At least it looks like they survived even if their ship didn't.

Ahh this is better, it looks like they landed the ship after a suborbital flight and managed to fire up an ore converter! Excellent, this should serve us well in the Joolvian system. Not sure what these scrawled note are the say "argh the inflatable heat shield is a disaster, the horror! It either spins us around or explodes when we try to eject it"

OK, enough backstory, we've updated to 1.1.3, let's get going. Let's check in on the one active landing site... wait... it's just two monopropellant tanks rolling down a hil? That's... interesting.

Let's go to the VAB. Ooh love the scintilating flag effects. We can hope that's intentional!

Let's strap a booster onto our lander and get it to the Jool ship. Detrix and SIGABRT it's your time to shine.

And they eventually made it, but used way too much fuel, we're eating into the lander fuel here. Wait... the Jool ship is called the "UltimateWeapon2"? Are we in the right game here?

And eventually after much hassle we docked. That's quite the ship.

OK Lonnie and E-lulz it's your turn. Finally a daylight launch:

The trip to orbit went a lot bettter due to some better engine choices. But then we had to dock with a booster still attached, which made life interesting. We did get there in the end, and transfered the extra fuel over.

There's a spot on the Jool ship for a captain's yacht to sit on top. It says here the captain is someone named Valentina? I hope she's a good pilot.

Umm well hmmm. Though it seems to be the spacecraft's fault. The special mini-shuttle she prefers goes massively aerodynamically unstable around 3000m and this happens every time. And we burned through a lot of money too because she kept surviving these crashes somehow.

Two engineers kept trying to sneak aboard for the flight. So we launched this, which made them think twice about tagging along.

After lots and lots of trial and error, it was finally this design which got us to orbit (although we spun out briefly right before the first stage finished).

There was even enough fuel to fix the inclination and arrive for a docking:

But then... wait. Where's the docking ring? Where's our docking ring? Yes I know it would have looked super cool to sit on top, like an old Starcomm toy. Did someone measure this in advance? We're 9m too long? Are you sure they measured it in meters? Hmmm, just not going to happen no matter how well you pilot in there Valentina.

Valentina wait! Ummm I guess... well. Hmmm. Is that why you swapped out a parachute for a claw before launch? Do you think it will hold together while boosting? I guess we'll find out.

I always have such pretty ideas for ships in my head, and then they end up like this. I guess next up is sending up some fuel tankers, and hope whoever calculated the fuel/engine paramaters did a better job than the docking-port-placement crew.

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