Spring Clean

With the first days of spring under our belt, I think it’s time to clear our skies a bit. I’m not worried too much about crashing into the massive amount of debris and I feel I should leave that there as a punishment for not being too bothered about debris in the early stages of exploration.

The thing that is getting annoying is that all our old landers and satellites, that are of no more use, are floating around or sitting on the Mun or in other ridiculous places. All of these are then presented in the list of craft when I’m looking for things in the Tracking Station.

We’ve also got a couple of contracts to complete and some spacecraft to maintain. I refer specifically to making sure Atlas I and Tesla III are okay and doing what they are supposed to do.

Decommissioning:

To start with it’s time to get rid of the two empty fuel shots that are whizzing around above the Mun’s surface, they have plenty of mono-propellant left so a short retrograde burn sends them into the surface. They are going about 800m/s on impact and the debris has quite the bounce after impact!

Sub orbital trajectories can only end one way

The last second

Impact

The debris flies several hundred kilometers

Next up it’s the Vanguard I and I-A probes. I just abort these from the tracking centre – obviously someone fitted some explosives inside for just this reason! After that I get rid of Vanguard II and the entire Occulus satellite range, they have served us well but now they have reached the end of their operational tours. Then the final things are to de-orbit the remaining Odin II boosters and tidy up any debris that has landed on Kerbin.

Just to complete that satellite contract we missed last time I build a new Occulus I and launch it into the desired orbit, it’s neither hard, nor time consuming, but it does net another 160k funds and 24 science.

Back to Tesla III:

Now that Tesla III has left the Kerbin SOI it’s time to collect the RPWS and Magentometer science to complete the contract sections for science high around the sun. This gets a total of 158 science and 88k funds, but I’m really not convinced that Tesla III is going to be able to complete its desired mission. I really don’t think it has enough fuel, but maybe it can be retasked to do a flyby of Jool. Either way, it’s going to take me time to decide and I can’t really do anything else right now so it’s back to mission control.

The One I’ve Been Waiting For:

There’s 1.85M funds in the bank now and I decide to bite the bullet and upgrade the R&D Building. This opens up the next tier of technologies and I immediately spend 550 science on Advanced Science Tech which unlocks some of the best experiments as well as the ScanSat high resolution imager. This opens the door to a space probe that can accurately map planets and scan for biomes and resources.

Then I decide to go fishing for contracts and hit upon a test contract that will return 800k funds! All I have to do is launch a Kerbodyne KR-2L Advanced Engine into a sub orbital trajectory and then re-fire the engines after messing with the staging.

I’ve devised a highly technological “cone” for this mission. It’s just fuel, the engine under test, parachutes and solar panels connected to a probe core and SAS. It doesn’t have far to go, but those engines are not cheap so I’d like it back!

Launch is simple and after shutting the engine down and changing the staging it’s easy to reactivate the engine by staging at the appropriate altitude and then wait for the descent back to Kerbin. The parachutes weren’t quite enough to slow down the ship to land on its engine, so the engine exploded anyway. Typical.

Debriefing:

A much tidier mission control was the main aim of these missions and we came away with the added bonus of having 1.1M funds in the account as well as the upgraded R&D building. I’ve also decided to spend another 550 science from the last few missions on Meta-Materials. This gives access to the 2.5m diameter docking ports so we can finally start building that space station we always wanted.