Late yesterday as the KSA was entering the final stages of launch preparation for lift off of our third Progeny Mk5 rocket an unidentified vessel approached within our launch corridor. Refusing to answer all hails or turn about when confronted by our range monitoring vessel, it proceeded to anchor itself just 2km offshore directly downrange and blanket all comm channels with a recorded speech that prevented us from contacting our range monitoring or payload recovery vessels. Nevermind that the ship was full of kerbs, our Flight Director Lanalye Kerman made the right call under violation of our range safety measures and stood down from launch operations, scrubbing the launch for the day. The ship was a merchant vessel owned by KerVoyant and it had a message for us all here at KSC:
This ship stands in protest of the activities carried out by the Kerbal Space Agency as well as the denial of our religious rights to access the Monolith for proper ceremonies and worship. The followers aboard will use this time & proximity to pray in the hopes that They are listening, so that They might answer once again and strike down all in proximity, and cleanse the caverns of non-believers. To those ashore, know that you are misaligned, that your actions will bring nothing but death and destruction down upon our world. We are meant to serve, we are meant to be guided. THEY will show us the way. To find it on our own, we sully the wonderful gift given to us, this world reborn, remade from disaster and meant for all to cherish until They return. TURN BACK NOW, and your deeds may yet not anger Them and They may yet return to us, to bring us forth into the stars, as their children. STAY THIS COURSE, and see the End Times brought upon us, for refusal of Their gifts can only be met with fire and death.
Our Operations Director Drew Kerman says he has no direct response to the message and is only concerned with the actions of the vessel interfering with our launch. Regulations have been pending in the government these past several months that would legally prohibit ships from entering our launch range while it is active for a rocket flight, but given the light to non-existent marine traffic within the KSC area officials have not moved quickly in getting it passed while more pressing matters existed. KerVoyant, which is owned by a deeply Monolithic family of merchants and controls over half of the merchant fleet, used this loophole to legally park their vessel offshore of KSC. Thankfully, the government saw fit to take quick action via an emergency meeting of the Assembly in order to ratify the new regulations and allow us to remove the KerVoyant ship from our waters.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely KerVoyant will receive much in the way of punishment for its little stunt given its position & power – if we were to try to bring suit against them they would likely litigate us into oblivion. We doubt they will attempt it again though now that the government has once again made it clear which side they are on, much to our relief. More troubling is the response to the act, which while not unanimously supported by the various Monolithic groups out there it has been decried by absolutely none. It has been made just as clear that those who follow the Monolithic beliefs are opposed to our purpose here. We hope that they can soon come to realize that we are pursuing the same goal.
After numerous delays the third flight of the Progeny Mk5 was able to lift off into perfectly clear skies and light winds. While we had hoped for this flight to be the first fully-automated rocket flight in the initial planning for this launch series, we had to test one last little bit of code which meant although the majority of the actions on this flight were computer-controlled it was still not yet fully automated. The good news however is that review of the telemetry data has shown that the test code used to calculate the needed throttle for a specified TWR worked flawlessly and we can integrate it into our fourth launch for the first fully-automated flight. Not all the new code worked well however. For now, we have taken out the distance traveled measurements from the logger until we can determine a better means of devising this metric on the rocket itself. We will continue to use radar monitoring to track the rocket’s travel distance as it heads downrange.
