Year 17: More Asteroids

This is taking long enough I expect that little UFO will show up soon

Well when we last left off we had mined the Class A asteroid down to nothing and had not much to show for it. Could we somehow cut our losses and use the same equipment to snag the Class C asteroid that the shadowy Minmus consortium desperately needs?

But first, we've hit time for Jeb (remember him?) to do his burn to get a Kerbin encounter. That went surprisinly well, once we realized we needed to click "control from here" in the right place, otherwise the navball made no sense at all.

With our limited funds we sent a refueling ship up to Valentina on the asteroid. We made it, but with more or less no fuel. Ugh, what can we do with so little funds left?

But then someone in the Admin building (probably annoyed that it's the one building we haven't upgraded at all) had an idea. No one wants to fund us for our work, but wouldn't it be awful if one of our asteroid ships had an "accident" and somehow managed to impact on Kerbin, causing a major catastrophe? (They didn't really need those scare quotes, that kind of accident isn't really that much of a reach for us).

So suddenly they fired up the powerful transmitters in the tracking station and took over a few sattelite feeds.

People of Kerbin. I am scary-looking commander Luzor of the Kerbal Space Program. To avoid planetary disaster, I suggest you make a modest contribution to our "train Kerbonauts to not accidentally crash asteroids into Kerbin" fund. Send your funds to 123 Modify-the-quicksave St, Space Center, Kerbin. Thank you. Mua-ha-ha-ha.

Meanwhile Valentina has left the Class A asteroid after snagging the ore processing ship on her way out.

And wow, we have funds again. Thanks, people of Kerbin! Let's launch this refuel ship. Wait, Leaukiki, what are you doing on board? Sigh, come on, EVA out of there, this is a robot ship.

You might as well plant a flag while you're at it, I've been meaning to do that for a while as I can never find the KSC when I need to. Also, take a soil sample because why not.

And after a lot of hassle we managed to join up the refueler with Valentina's mess of parts that she calls a ship. That was a challenge as we forgot solar panels, so docking was an adventure, in the end Valentina had to ram into the fuel ship rather than vice-versa.

It turns out we have more fuel than will fit. So why not use the refueler as a booster for the initial plane change? Of course in the end we're going to have to tediously re-dock so we are firing at least vaguely through the center of mass.

This was a lot of trouble as we had to more or less eyeball things and ships we design never have sufficient RCS or SAS at the best of times. We did manage in the end.

And we managed to sort of match orbits! Though by the time we got there it was already past perapsis.

And we managed to move both ships there, land them, and put the asteroid into a Kerbin orbit!

Now all we need to do is figure out how to get this thing around Minmus. Should be fun. The thing's 80% ore but I probably shouldn't mine it until we get that contract checked off.

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