Landing on Duna and Project Going Forward

Caravan III touches down beside the Cargo Pod

With the Yondalla Mission's Caravan now safely parked in Duna's orbit, there was very little left to do but to land the cargo pod and the Caravan landers at George's site on the surface. Because manual landings aren't my specialty and I already had a few disasters manually landing the probes in the Donner Mission, I'd elected to put a Mech Jeb controller on each landing module.

Caravan IV Moved Wrongly!

Caravan II also moves wrongly.

 For convenience's sake and to keep my number of active flights down as low as possible for as long as possible, I separated each module from the Yondalla space craft individually and only more-or-less in time for their metaphorical bite at the apple. That meant that the fourth lander to launch from Kerbin, Caravan IV, was actually the first to make planetfall. Overall, the landing went very smoothly, but after realizing it was destined to land on top of the cargo pod, potentially destroying all of the vital scientific equipment and spare parts inside of it, vessel commander Huddrin Kermin took over control from his Mechanical Jeb, attempting to move over to the side a few meters using only his gimballed lander rockets. In spite of his best efforts, the system couldn't correct for the new vector in time, and the pod landed on its side - thankfully taking no damage and with no casualties aboard.

Caravan I Low Approach

The landings that follows proceeded smooth as glass, each landing relatively in turn, until Caravan II's MechJeb unit did something strange... burning for a landing, and then continuing to fire the rockets until it was in a very eccentric, very high orbit over Duna proper with bingo fuel.

Well... It's not on it's side anymore.

Since there's not much that can be done in space without fuel, and since Yondalla didn't bring the mostly-empty ORB tug along, there's actually very little that can be done with our Duna assets to rescue Caravan II. Fortunately, their life support systems were designed to function more or less indefinitely (barring some breakdown elements which I plan to model statistically), so it might still be possible to rescue them using Kerbin-Launched Assets.

And so, while Huddrin flips his spacecraft upright in the wrong orientation, and his crew prepares the tedious process of tearing out every fixture and installing it properly upright for the craft's "inventive" landed orientation, we have to make a few judgement calls about the mission, take what we learned and decide on a new plan going forward.

Now, I have been asked on the Kerbal forums and in a few other places why ZAXA has focused so heavily on Duna when Laythe seems the better candidate for colonization - after all, it has water and a thicker atmosphere that some speculate to be oxygenated. One is that a few have hinted that Laythe is going to have volcanic activity and high radiation problems in later versions of the game. The other is that I have a bias toward Mars (Duna's evident reality-based counterpart) as a potential "Earth II" planet. I think it's going to be the first planetary body humans go to beyond our own, and I would not be at all surprised if it were one day colonized.

So, going forward, I do want to grow the colony on Duna - I believe I once stated that 50 Kerbals would be enough to be genetically self-sustaining, so 4 more of these caravan-style landers should do it. Unfortunately we won't be able to bring them all at once on a big rocket train - that was too unwieldy. Pushing them to Duna orbit one at a time shouldn't be too difficult, provided we have a way to refuel whatever is pushing or pulling them at the Theseus station. That'll require getting the new Kethane Miner online in the near future.

So, moving forward, we'll need to move 4 pods and a buggy to Duna. I'd also like to land a Kethane miner at the colony, as well as sending a Hermes-Demeter-style Miner Mission to Ike.