The refueling station
In the days that followed the remainder of the flotilla arrived. It was interesting to see how minor changes in trajectory had resulted in large fluctuations of arrival time. The Galahads had departed hours apart but arrived days if not weeks apart.
After a few maneuvers, mainly gravity breaking and plane corrections. The first arrived at Vall. This Galahad was a fuel configuration, its purpose was to find a good spot and mine it for fuel. It would then ferry it up to orbit and wait for the Shadowmage to collect it. Though it could complete the Jool 5 mission on paper without additional fuel, it was nice to have more margin.
The flying supermarket
The second type arrived in orbit of Laythe, and this had a different configuration. It carried a mobile greenhouse and an explorer rover. Though the latter had bounced in the cargo bay and lost some wheels since some engineer in KSC had forgotten to lock the hinges. It would start by gathering near-space science and was put in a parking orbit until scanners could figure out the best place to refuel.
The arrival
All were tense when the ShadowMage fired up its main drive and made the relatively small jump to Laythe. On low thrust, it took a while, not as long as it took to rotate this “piece of spaghetti” as Scott called it. Lots of red lights went off as the craft flew, but it stayed in one piece and the arrived at this magical water world. Eager to learn more.
Waking up
Once in orbit, the rest of the crew was woken up. KSC sent some updates and Judith relayed technical data and the first radar scans from orbit. Teams were starting to look for potential landing sites.
Bob and Erilorf spent most of their time in the lab, there was a ton of data to be analyzed. So far they had not discovered any new gravioli beams and much to their frustration the investigation of the wormhole was deemed too dangerous without more data, so they had to wait for the last of the discovery probes to arrive.
Valwig and Judith were busy with the technical state of the ShadowMage, things did not look good, but it was too early to worry about that, so they focussed on building a new servo wheel that would help them maneuver more easily. Kateny and Scott were going over the navigation data and spotted several good sites for a landing.
KSC Archives 