Upgrades

In low Kerbin Orbit

The supply missions to UKSS had become a regular practice, this supply run could keep the station supplied for almost a year, depending on crew complement of course.

The Charon Heavy was struggling with its payload, they even needed to use RCS to make orbit and the rendez-vous.

Beauty shot. Crews exchanged rapidly: the new commander was Thompwin Kerman, Karlong, and Arlan were the new science crew and Henbles was the new engineer. they docked with the aging Salyut module, wondering when it would be replaced, but then again the Charon’s docking port was incompatible with the other modules.

Charon 08 brought home Katerny, his friends, and most all a thawed Fjallar that was in better shape than his crewmates. This was great news for the upcoming Duna mission.

Meanwhile, Henbles installed the equipment brought from a classified project. He was here to support Arlan in his research in the application of graviolium driven equipment. He had never seen equipment like this before, but it fitted the standard interfaces on the SkyLab module so he set it up. Back in the lab Arlen and Karlong were having a fierce debate on tacheon particles.

Several weeks later, they produced the docking adaptors needed to allow Charon Heavy to dock with the unity node and finally said goodbye to Salyut 02 after a service life of more than 3 years.

In very high Kerbin Orbit

Boosting off from the Desert airfield the 10th Galahad launched for Minmus. So far the promise of reusability was meager since they mostly still had to return to Kerbin. It was also another re-entry test for the booster, and though this time the parachutes did deploy,  they were still traveling too fast. The booster felt underpowered compared to what previous KOS designs were doing. At least the Galahad was on its way.

After an eight-day journey, it docked with Wolf Shipyard and opened its cargo bay to show some more supplies, a dragonfly probe for Duna and 3 cryopods to upgrade Beale 01 to more or less the same specs as Beale 02.

Teams were working overtime and when a pod came loose from the station’s arm due to a manual error called time warping it had to be chased down using jetpacks. After many days of testing, disassembling the Dragonfly that didn’t fit the allotted cargo space (really, who is in charge of planning here!) the lights were green and the unit tests checked out.

It was a majestic sight to see both interplanetary spaceships undock and head out. Now fully automated they would start their mission preparations with a departure in 100 days from now to the red planet.

Both crafts were gently pushed out of Minmus’s SOI where they would start their trajectory preparations. KSC believed that leaving from this altitude would shave almost 900 m/s off the journey. But it had never been tested, we would see.

Housekeeping

The team didn’t have much time to think about that. Prometheus 03 was sent down to Cobalt Base to start refueling. It made a near-perfect landing and deployed its drills. Without crew to hook the converters up to the fusion reactor, it would nevertheless have to rely on solar power, so it would take a while to process all ore required for the mission.

Galahad 10 returned to Kerbin for refurbishment. It survived reentry and landed on a steep mountainside, causing it to flip, but not crash. The recovery teams would have a field day trying to move this baby back to its base. Gene made a note: “perhaps circularizing at Kerbin makes more sense.”

After that, the crew of Wolf Station wrapped up their things and headed home. 4 months of hard work meant that they had earned some R&R time. Perhaps the Spacebar was open?

Samus, Melly, and Telo came to replace the crew of UKSS, they also brought a new space telescope and had a mission to develop a new mount for it. Thompwin and his teammates made a save landing.

Enough preparations, it was time for a big mission.