The Delphinki Near-Kerbin Radio Observatory

Delphinki on the launchpad.

 So the most recent update to the game has added asteroids, which, sadly, can impact. Since I happen to be of the belief that planetary extinction effects are bad for the human condition, I've decided to begin work on my completely informally-educated response to the threat - Project Dragon.

The project comprises a series of launches to form a swarm of asteroid-killing satellites (the Dragon Formation) that are directed remotely from a specialized mission group on the ground. In order to target asteroids, however, I would logically need something capable of seeing them.

Coasting to orbit.

Enter the Delphinki NKRO. I genuinely have no idea if a space-based radio telescope is feasible (I worry that the same signals that allow it to communicate with the ground would inhibit detection) or precisely how it would function (asteroids don't natively broadcast radio, so presumably this functions more like Radar). Either way, though, this is the system I have chosen to use, and the actual working parts of the system will come in later launches.

Next time, I'll begin launching the Dragons.

Eyes front, Little Bean

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.

Launching, Rendevous, and Docking of Caravan Missions 1-4

AH-001 Fuel Lighter

 So, even with the collapse of the Demeter-Hermes mission it was decided to go ahead with Yondalla - after all, there's only so many times per Kerbin year that you can transfer from Kerbin's orbit to the Duna-Ike system. While it's going to be a joke to launch Demeter II, we needed to fuel the Yondalla tug NOW and so I constructed and deployed an ad-hoc fuel lighter, designed simply to get into orbit, offload the vast majority of its remaining fuel into the tug, and then turn around retrograde and burn whatever was left, destroying itself with re-entry heating. Quick, simple, dirty, and a ten-minute mission.

Mundane Missions: Kethane Mining on Minmus, Fuel for Yondalla

So, after some debate about "whether or not to bother", it occurred to me that the whole point of setting up the Demeter-Hermes mission was that it was realistically more economical to take fuel from a moon, fly it into planetary orbit, and refuel there than do a half-dozen or so launches with surface-based craft to fuel up a similar-sized ship.

I was off doing some math on the efficiency of the process and I realized that I could fuel the Yondalla Duna Tug much more economically if I was bringing fuel in from Minmus rather than the Mun, which is pretty counter-intuitive given that Minmus is over twice as far away.

Twice as wide an orbit, however, is not the same thing as twice as much delta-v. In fact, round trip from LKO to Minmus is about half the delta-V (that is, half the fuel cost) as the same to the Mun, and so I decided to change my mining operations by moving them to Minmus - as soon as possible, since a design flaw in the Yondalla mission meant that it had to be fully fueled before we could load up the actual cargo.

Going to space without fuel.

Launches look like this. Totes Realism.

 So, at long last we make a little bit more progress with our Duna project.

I've decided to call the suite of missions to assemble the spacecraft that's going to Duna Project Yondalla. It's going to be a multiple-flight type of project - so far I've made four launches, and only just assembled the drive system.

Fuel Module and RC Depot in Place.

Many of these launches were made with empty fuel tanks on the "final" stages, just to keep the weight down and make it easier to make the orbits I needed. The construction orbit is just outside that used by Theseus, which will make it easy enough to fuel the ship later, once it is fully constructed.

The struts and Orbital Registration Bus (ORB) arrive on site.

The first launch was the main fuel canister and auxiliary power systems, along with a canister of extra RCS fuel, which will be useful later. This system has its own probe-core controller and short-range communications suite - partly because the former is necessary to keep the object spawned in game, and partly because realism is important and the probe core will help keep the fuel tank stable while we're docking other parts to it.

Maneuvering Alpha Strut into position.

The next launch was three parts launched all as one - a pair of full fuel tanks that double as separation struts for the engine modules, and a nifty little device called an ORB, which I'm using to correctly position the parts in orbit and then dock them to the craft. I've built orb-like designs before, but this is the first one I've built with an actual rocket attached to it, rather than just RCS.

Taking Risks to dock the Beta Strut

This part of assembly was simple, though Mech Jeb made me nervous by taking maneuvers I totally wouldn't. You simply need to dock on the first strut, disconnect the second one from it, dock that to the matching port on the far side, and then go back to Kerbin for the next launch.

It didn't really get complicated until we sent up the engine modules, which had to be docked the right way around. Once that was done, though, it's on to the next phase - designing and testing the first of three landers - A Cargo Hab.

Finished product after two launches.

ORB breaks away to go grab the first Engine Module.

Hauling the first Engine Module into place.

And we're locked.

Stealing some power from the nuclear engine.

Nuclear Engine, parking in orbit beside a station,
moving at about a mile per 5 seconds.

The completed Tug Module. Port side lost a shield.

Green Orbit is our station - this is the space near Kerbin.

Donner and Vasco De Gama: Project Duna, phase 1!

Donner I on the launchpad.

 So in the wee hours of the morning, ZAXA engineers rolled out the Donner Launch Vehicle to the platform. DLV was a purpose-build vehicle on the 3.5 metre platform provided by KW Rocketry, quad-boosted with basically just two stages to orbit - SRB burn and then liquid fuel burn. Donner, a trio of rovers intended to do site selection for a Kerbal colony on Duna, launched shortly afterward.

Donner Launch!

Planning For the Future: Zaxton's Plans for Duna

Duna, the Fourth Planet from Kerbol, is the second-closest of all planets to Kerbin, our home, and far more hospitable to space travel than the closes, Eve. Naturally, this makes it a good prospect for colonization.

Of course, we can't just go off to another planet willy-nilly and set up a new society, any more than you could just go to another continent without a little planning, so we're going to take a conservative approach to colonizing Duna, and her moon, Ike.