Year 2, Day 77, Mission Elapsed Time 272 days, and the first crewed mission to Duna has arrived. Crossing Duna’s sphere of influence, it is a little under two and a half days to fall to Duna and perform the orbital insertion burn.
But first, there is an intersection with Ike’s sphere of influence that wasn’t being predicted by the map view while in interplanetary space. Ike’s influence adjusted the craft’s trajectory, intending that it crash into Duna unless there is a course correction. 17 m/s of correction.
Passing over Kerbin’s north pole and performing the insertion burn puts the craft into a 62 km orbit. The transfer stage has 7.36 ton of fuel remaining and the plan is for the return craft, after its time on the surface, to return and refuel for the transfer burn back to Kerbin. The return craft has a capacity of 3.2 t, so the transfer craft has easily twice what is needed.
But first, is the primary mission of landing and investigating the “mysterious signal.” That location is in Duna’s northern hemisphere and happens to be west of the current ground track. It will take only a few orbits for there to be a deorbit and landing opportunity.
The next to last orbit passes over the landing zone near enough to see that it is in the center of a crater and that crater appears to have a distinctive central peak. I am also able to see the one pixel flicker of the object in the landing zone being rendered even though I am outside the 50 km range in which the waypoint is marked. If there was also a marker outside of map view that showed the projected impact point, as with KSP1’s Trajectories mod, precision landings would be much easier.
At a quarter orbit away, I make a correction burn to bring the path somewhat east of over the landing zone so that when I deorbit, the rotation of Duna will bring the landing zone beneath me.
At about an eighth of an orbit, I perform my deorbit burn, in Map View having my projected impact point about the same distance to the other side. As the distance gets to about a third of that, I burn again. And then do the same thing again as the landing zone is almost directly below, attempting to zero in.
My reentry is slow enough that I see no heating effects.
I have set the four landing chutes to open at the highest altitude and lowest pressure to maximize their deceleration. I have also set action groups. Two to deploy. Three to cut. Four to repack. As I come down, I see the target as some sort of spire and also that I am coming down too far north. I rotate my craft, cut the chutes, and heel over to burn towards the landing zone. I am quickly running out of fuel that I will need for at least part of the ascent so I redeploy the chutes and accept that I will still be landing too far north.
Touchdown is half a kilometer north and on an incline. I try to keep the craft from falling over but that fails. The crew is safe but now trapped on Duna for at least as long as it takes to have another launch window open from Kerbin (156 days), the time it takes for that mission to arrive (258 days), the time for a launch window to return to Kerbin (173 days) and the time it takes to do that (266 days). All in all, Bob, Erbert, and Huduki are going to be away from home for another two years.
Well, might as well go see what we came all this way to see.
The region, only 112 m in diameter, identifies the object as “Duna Monument”, like those on the Mun and Minmus, but I think of it more as a totem. It consists of a large being depicted from the shoulders up with a crown, five antler or branch-like protuberances on the head, and statues upon some of those antlers. Duna’s gravity is heavy enough that RCS thrusters on Kerbal’s jetpack are not enough to lift the Kerbal so, unable to fly to the top, a more precise measurement is not available. A rough estimate has it 50 m high.
The being represented is in many ways similar to the one found on the Mun, but with a taller or longer face and with long hair or tentacles on the back of the head as well as the tentacles on the face. The base is 18 m wide and 16 m front to back, though there are some concentric ring sections showing to either side suggesting buried shoulders. The eyes are closed and are sunken in the eye sockets, giving perhaps the impression of age.
The statue faces West South West, 247.5 degrees.
On the head is a golden crown, made of metal where the bulk of the totem is stone. The front of the crown has a symbol of concentric circles and around the crown are 26 additional glyphs. None of the glyphs are repeating so rather than a text this appears to be an
Abecedaries or
Abecedarium, a representation of an alphabet. The crown has even spikes along the top perimeters and a second layer of flames or leaves above that across the front.
Aside from the concentric circle glyph, all of the others seem to be made of short straight segments. Even the parts of the glyphs that are somewhat rounded appear to be made of straight segments. Some are also quite complex, which has led some to speculate that these are not letters but are instead constellations, as in the movie “Stargate.”
Above the crown, the alien head continues up with a central trunk with a twisting pattern. At the top, the trunk itself twists to support a blue-green stone sphere, much like the spheres held by the statue on Minmus but not glowing. Around the stone is a metal ring with what appears to be representations of flames or prominences.
There are four antlers with what appears to be similar motifs of a small sphere and a being standing on to of that sphere. The rightmost arm seems to have a Kerbal. It is certainly proportioned like a modern Kerbal and has a mouth instead of the tentacles of the other beings. The assumed Kerbal is looking up towards the central sphere.
The next antler has the same sphere but the being that stood atop the sphere has broken off. Only the feet remain. It is similar in size to the Kerbal depiction.
The third statue appears to be the same tentacle-faced but otherwise Kerbal-like being found on Minmus. In this context, it is depicted as the same size as the Kerbal statue. It is also looking up towards the central sphere but with it’s left arm upraised.
The fourth arm is missing not far from the base. One would assume this too once had a statue of perhaps another Kerbal-like being.
Next to the totem is a pillar at slight angle. At first glance you might assume it to be the base of the broken antler buried in the sands but it is too wide and lacks twisting trunk pattern. I interpret it to be the forearm of the totem’s right arm, the hand missing. It is bent back towards the totem rather than outstretched like the squid-faces being represented here and on the Mun.
The various broken pieces are not to be found on the surface, suggesting they were buried by shifting sands long ago.
Were we not restricted by game mechanics, and knowing they were stuck on Duna for at least the next 587 days, the crew would begin an archaeological dig. In fact, having found megalithic structures on both the Mun and Minmus, one of the crew would have been a professional archaeologist while the others would have been trained in archaeology to at least a “give the grad student a trowel” level.
With the Ike flyby, space, and surface exploration there are 738 points of science that can be transmitted and 410 points of samples that will need to wait for the return. There is another 75 points as the
Orbital Survey that arrived earlier has completed 25% of its visual scan. There are a few scan milestones from Moho and, of course, the big payout for completing the mission to Duna, totaling 3,390 points available to buy something in the Tech Tree. There are a few Tier 2 nodes remaining, with trusses or xenon propulsion, but the Tech Level 3 entry Heavy Rockets and it’s small S3 tank and KR-2XL "Rhino" engine will be more useful. I also buy into Deep Space Probes. While the probes and the antenna will be useful, I really want the next node with the SP-XL "Gigantor" solar panel.
Mission Control offers up a whole suite of new missions. “Better Signal” is offering 5,000 points to put an 86 Gm antenna in orbit around Jool. I already have half a dozen of those halfway there. There is also an offer of 3,000 points to do an atmospheric survey of Jool. That will need to be a new mission. Had I known that was in the offering I could have added the necessary science module to one of the craft headed for Jool’s moons and just dipped into the atmosphere on orbital insertion.
There is 3,000 points offered for putting a craft in Eve’s sphere of influence. That transfer window is coming up relatively soon and I will be sending two Orbital Survey craft.
They are also offering 3,000 points to put a 300 t craft on Duna and another 1,000 points to put three crewmembers on Ike. My plans were going to be to put a craft on Duna to rescue Bob and company. Adding an appropriate return craft to that massive craft would be easy but moving that much mass is going to be a challenge. Putting that much mass on Duna doesn’t seem useful at all other than the 3,000 science points.
There is also the Lil Chonker mission sitting there but it only offers a handful of points for putting a 300 t craft on Minmus. I’ve been passing on that because I have heard that the next game update will offer more points for the mission.
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