On the second rescue attempt, I took 253 screenshots. I pared that down quite a bit, so if it seems like there's some bits of the mission that are missing from the below post, that's probably because there is.
Roight.
Rescue Attempt Number Two, Electric Boogaloo:
This time, instead of going to the station for a pit stop, prior to transfering to Duna, the pit stop came to the interplanetary vehicle. Since the station's reserves were low, and the interplanetary stage just needed a little topping up, after reaching its low, eighty-five kilometer parking orbit, I just sent the oiler straight to the rescue ship.
After topping up the rescue ship and dumping the rest of its reserves in the station's fuel depot, the oiler returned to Kerbin for the most perfect landing ever.
The blokes at the Kerbal Space Center saw this as a wonderful sign for things to come, and so they ordered the rescue mission to depart Kerbin orbit.
Upon reaching Duna, the capture process was much the same as before, dropping the Duna periapsis, until we got a decent Ike encounter, and then doing a proper capture around the moon.
Ike orbit established, the automated lander was turned loose. I had a strategy for landing on a slope, as level ground seemed a rare commodity on Ike, but as it turned out, the lander found a patch of the stuff about sixty kilometers from the stranded oiler. That was too far for an EVA hop (at least too far for a
safe EVA hop), but the knackered rover from the previous operation was still near the oiler, so sixty kilometers didn't seem unreasonable. Moreover, any leftover fuel in the lander was going to make a handy reserve for the return trip, so I didn't really want to go burning all of it looking for another landing site.
Speaking of the knackered rover, that thing had been sitting around for about a year. Hopefully the vaccuum kept the rover from breaking down the way cars do, when left unused too long. After one last look around the oiler, it was time to find out.
One-fingered salute to the old lander!
If you do intend to send a ground vehicle to Ike, think rock-crawler, instead of rover. There's no getting around the canyons, besides going straight through them, and the slopes on each side get pretty immense. I hit a thirty-degree incline at one point, and twenty degrees seemed to be the norm for the steepest portion of any given wall. You'll also notice that the indicator for the interplanetary vehicle passes by....twice.
Eventually, the oiler crew found themselves in a familiar position: out of fuel.
Keldon, having a name vaguely Klingon-ish, was given the duty of diving head-first toward the second lander, because surely, his skull would be the most capable of surviving the impact, right?
After Keldon's compatriots joined him, they all paused, briefly awestruck. After a year-and-a-half, most of it spent on a desolate, gray rock, it was hard to believe that their return trip to Kerbin was at hand. The Kerbonauts orbiting above regretted not sending one of their number down in the lander, so that they could bring the KSP cattle prod to bear on those morons, who'd apparently exposed their brains to vaccuum one too many times.
I kept a shot of the map view handy, just to show the expanse of terrain that the stranded crew ultimately traversed.
Crew finally aboard, the lander pulled up stakes and set itself to intercepting the interplanetary vessel above. It started out orbiting in the wrong direction, initially, so I wound up burning off all the extra fuel I hoped to keep handy, but mistakes are what reserve fuel is there for!
Now, I wanted to have a bit of a pause in the commentary here, since there was at least one complaint about difficulty docking, using side- or rear-facing docking ports. If you right-click on a docking port and choose "control from here", your navball and controls will all reorient themselves so that the selected docking port is treated as the front of the ship. I use the technique here for an effortless docking maneuver, using the rear-facing port on the lander, instead of having to switch to the interplanetary ship to use its forward-facing docking port.
After shuffling some fuel around, the interplanetary craft dropped its remaining boosters.
Then they plotted out a nifty course that would take it to a fifty-five kilometer periapsis above Duna, before blasting out into interplanetary space at ludicrous speed. (Okay, maybe they didn't quite go plaid, but it was a fun escape maneuver that took me closer to Duna than I'd previously been.)
After a couple of corrective burns, the crew of the rescue craft realized that they needed a new mission planner, namely
anyone who pays heed to phase angles.
Eventually, the ship made it back to Kerbin's sphere of influence, where an aerobraking maneuver was plotted out. The blokes at Kerbal Space Center promised that this aerobraking maneuver wouldn't be quite so ambitious as the one they sent Nelfurt and company on.
After everyone survived the aerobraking manevuer, I did a corrective burn to keep the interplanetary vehicle in orbit. It's got a 2,000,000 meter apoapsis, but a seventy-five kilometer periapsis, so if I can get an oiler out to intercept it for refueling, it will only take a relatively short burn to get the ship back out of Kerbin's sphere of influence, where that NERVA can get it damn near anywhere in the solar system.
After ensuring that section's safety, it was time to transfer the crew to the lander and let the two sections have their final parting of ways.
On the next close approach to Kerbin, the lander circularized its orbit at seventy-five kilometers to bide its time to land. Remember that the ship came in on a highly inclined orbit, and the reserve fuel to be used for a plane change was spent correcting for a wrong turn over Ike.
Eventually, the lander decided the time was right, retracting its solar panels and beginning its descent. Because it was an unusual angle of approach, I got to see some parts of the southern sea, that are usually over the horizon.
Land ho--holy ****.
With a narrow base and high dry center of mass, this thing was not designed for a water landing. Still, there was nothing for it at this point, but to pull the chutes.
Beautiful! Not even one bit torn off! What somebody failed to mention was that even empty fuel tanks are highly reactive to water.
Still, checking the tins, we see that of
nine six Kerbonauts deployed on this mission and subsequent rescue, all six are alive and well!
Now, those Kerbonauts just need to wait for a version of the game that will implement a nautical shipyard, so that the Kerbal Coast Guard will have something with which to retrieve them.
