Year 26: Stranded at Jool Yet Again
When will we learn
Well, we are in a nice Jool orbit, let's see if we can salvage things.
Transfer all the remaining fuel to one lander! Detrix and SIGABRT
we need you to land and process us some fuel. While Detrix is gone,
the captain is... umm... the ship's guinea pig. Let's go!
Let's run some "simulations" first to see where we might try to go.
Can't seem to get any sort of intercept with Bop which is our first choice.
How about Laythe? We have a heat shield and some parachutes, how hard
could it be? (Note: the last time I successfully landed on Laythe
predates the introduction of fatal re-entry).
We got a nice gravity assist from Tylo:
And here comes Laythe!
And no matter how many times we tried things, re-entering at 4000m/s just
wasn't going to work. Usually this is what happens:
And if we get as close as possible without burning up, this happens
(1020 year orbits, or worse, Kerbol escape velocity: interstellar
destination).
Due to some poor save game engineering we're sort of stuck with Detrix
and SIGABRT heading for a Kerbol orbit. There went all of our fuel
Who can save us? Who do we usually get to save us? Valentina! Valentina
help us! We left you in a somewhat eccentric orbit of Kerbin out past
the Mun in your shuttle, can you save the day... wait. Where are you?
Oh no, in the 5 years of our Jool trip she got ejected out of Kerbin
orbit :(
Well, plan B I guess. We designed a new ship that is mostly fuel that
we're going to send to Jool. The challenge is we have no Kerbalnauts
left, the astronaut complex is full of mostly engineers,
and anyway it will cost $500k to recruit more.
It took *way* too many tries to finally get this thing into orbit, we
eventually had to remove 10k units of liquid fuel.
More or less made it to orbit! Who will fly this thing?
Hey, remember MunStationAlpha that we launched 15 years ago! Of course
you don't. Anyway it has lots of fuel and Sherbert and Gwenlin aren't
doing much. Maybe they'll volunteer to crew the Jool mission.
After a lot of hassle we got the station from Munar orbit to low-Kerbin
and a few EVAs later we are in somewhat better shape.
Now to top off the fuel and see if we can hit the Jool window that opens
in 100 days.
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