Probing Duna, Minmus, and the Mun
We took on a contract to explore Duna, but realized we didn't have
the tech to send a manned mission. So probes it is!
This is more or less our Mun flyby rocket with an unmanned stage armed with
a heat shield and parachutes.
After a lot of hassle managed to find a Duna insertion and after a few years
of travel, here we are!
Even got a bonus Ike encounter while trying to bring the orbit lower.
Aerobraking...
Using stock parachutes turned out to be a mistake... will we make it?
Believe it or not we survived! (Or at least, our next attempt where we
left the booster stage attached until the last minute). Half the ship
exploded, including the science lab, but enough survived that we managed
to trasmit one mystery goo reading before things stopped working.
After this massive success we were rolling in the money, and we decided
to send a Mun lander probe even though there was no contract for it.
This made for some nice visuals that will hopefully inspire the budget
cutters back home:
We've reconfigured the lander a bit to not depend on an atmosphere.
Let's see if this landing goes better than the one on Duna.
It did! Well, actually it landed on its side, but with some RCS fiddling
we managed to get it upright.
Let's try minmus next, because why not.
After a lot of hassle (curse the maneuver node interface) managed to
find out way here.
And yet another perfect landing. Wasted most of our RCS fuel trying
to get upright to no avail. Luckily there's no one around to notice.
We managed to rack up a decent amount of science, so maybe we have enough
tech to do some more manned missions now.
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