Earlier this year the Monolith, a structure of unknown origin erected at some point during our long absence from the surface of Kerbin, “activated”, for lack of a better word, and released three humongous bursts of energy directed up into space. The details of this event, known since simply as The Incident, can be found in this report written after the initial chaos had quieted down. Since then, a massive investigation has been underway to ascertain what exactly happened that day and why. You can get caught up on all the dealings with the Monolith we’ve previously reported on using this collection. Today, the government finally released a report before the end of the year as promised, though we feel it also came rather quickly after an act of violence by religious radicals. Coincidence? Well, regardless the point is there’s a lot that remains unknown as the investigation is still not complete but new details at least are given about the mysterious crystal structures found in Umbarg and Kravass as well as what lies underneath the Monolith since excavation began a few months ago. Plus tons of speculation and lots more questions. Here are the highlights from the 150+ page report.
Category Archive: Plot Summary
Dec 21 2017
Report Released for Ongoing Monolith Study
Sep 19 2017
Response to KerVoyant Launch Protest
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.
Sep 13 2017
1st Birthday Desk Note
A year? Already?! Well, I can’t imagine a better time to be writing this, already two days into our most ambitious launch campaign yet that is firing off rockets – into space!! If you had asked me a year ago what I would be doing now I could have only dreamed this is what it would be. Of course, it was always the plan to get rockets heading up past the boundaries of the atmosphere within a year but the challenges that we knew we would have to surmount at the time seemed so huge! The fact that we have made it this far in so short an amount of time is testament to the dedication of all the employees here at the Kerbal Space Agency who are dead set on seeing kerbals become an inter-stellar species. We know we are not alone, and we know we have to find the answer to the existence of the Monolith.
But we need to remain grounded (ha!) and focused, working on the basic technologies that will pave the way for future endeavors. We are right now in the process of making a big step, introducing automated control to our rockets. The first flight of the Progeny Mk5 yesterday was not a complete success, however it did an incredible job of moving us closer to a fully-automated rocket flight. I’ll be attending a flight review meeting later today after which we will release full details on what went right and what went wrong. We may have made it to space already, but these are still exciting times. There will always be new boundaries to push for, new frontiers to explore.
Despite all we’ve achieved so far, I don’t think a year is long enough for reflection, so I’d like to continue to look ahead. Our Extremis program is still developing slowly, picking up its pace gradually as the first launch window approaches late next year. Lots of R&D work is in progress and we still expect to hear from our astrodynamics team later this month on whether they have worked out new trajectories or will be sticking with our original windows & flybys. There hasn’t been anything announced yet but rest assured we are working on design specs for orbital engines that will soon be released for contractors to begin designing & bidding. Currently we plan to achieve orbital flight in the first or second quarter of next year and the orbital engine specs will depend on what type of escape trajectories our Extremis probes will require. As eager as all of our astronauts are in getting up into space, they are certainly not eager to die. In order to ensure their safety as much as possible we will be slowly and carefully working our way towards kerbed spaceflight sometime in 2019.
Finally I would like to thank all members of the public reading this right now, because the fact that you are shows you have a vested interest in the KSA, and your support is valuable to us. Please continue to interact and provide feedback as we go about our operations. Enjoy these following four launches over the next week and a half, I know I will 🙂 Here’s to another exciting year!
– Drew Kerman
Founder & Operations Director
Jul 14 2017
Reaching Space and the “Monolith Incident”
During the ascent of the third Progeny Mk4 earlier this week, the Progenitor program at last succeeded after months of operation when the rocket broke through 70km ASL at L+1m44s and officially entered into space above Kerbin, heading for an apokee of nearly 135km. Cheers and applause had barely gotten underway when all of the sudden arcs of electricity began to shoot from all the consoles in Launch Control and the Tracking Station. Kerbs still outside reported a huge ball of plasma around the Monolith. The scene inside quickly dissolved into barely-organized chaos as several severely-burned operators were tended to by emergency medical personnel that arrived shortly after the arcing had ceased after several seconds of crazy sparking. Elsewhere around the KSC campus similar reports were made, although at the time of launch no other building had as much electronics in operation as Launch Control and the Tracking Station. After nearly two hours of tending to injuries (no deaths, thankfully) and putting out small fires here and there, an overall assessment was finally begun – which is when all hell broke loose again. Thankfully with most active electronics destroyed during the first event there wasn’t as much widespread damage done, lots of melting components but no serious arcing or fires, however new equipment brought online to help determine the overall situation of the KSC was knocked offline. Repair work was begun again from a rapidly dwindling supply of spare parts when roughly two hours later a third event struck, and all recovery efforts were put on hold for 6 hours in case the events continued to repeat.
May 12 2017
Civvie Prototype Service History
Due to the limitations of surface living after the asteroid strike, building airports from which to launch fixed-wing aircraft was not a feasible idea. The natural caverns that were found and enlarged to hold what remained of kerbal civilization were massive in their depth but none of them were long enough near the surface to allow for runways here either. In this time, the airship became the best means of long-distance transportation as they could be inflated within the huge caverns and travel vertically through tunnels to the surface. Even before kerbals were forced underground the technology for fixed-wing flight was only in its infancy, and mostly had ended in failure for the few brave souls who attempted it. With the construction of the KSC, the first permanent surface habitation since the asteroid strike, the opportunity arose at last once again to attempt flight with a fully rigid structure.
In conjunction with C7 aerospace, the KSA worked to develop a very basic single-engine aircraft designed to be slow and easy to fly, with the aim of marketing it to any kerbal who wanted to learn how to take to the skies, hence it was nicknamed the “Civvie”, which stuck as its official title. The aircraft was put through its paces by test pilots Commander Valentina and Captain Jebediah, who both crashed the aircraft at least once, severely in some cases. But the airframe was built extra-strong to handle any mishaps and keep the pilot as safe as possible – an emergency parachute was even used to assist with landings at first. Over time, with more flight experience, the aircraft began to live up to the promises of its design, and a new era of flight began.
Feb 14 2017
KSC Shutdown Due to Health Concerns
The Disease Management Organization has concluded its analysis of the air samples, blood samples and surface samples it has taken from KSC and its employees over this past week. It looks like a normally harmless bacteria has mutated slightly in the generations since kerbals have lived on the surface and has been infecting kerbs here at KSC over the past few weeks. On its own, it causes minor symptoms from coughing to shortness of breath to dizziness and several kerbs have been struck by it lately but none were incapacitated enough to actually check in to the medical center. Recently however trees from the Grasslands to the west have been releasing a large amount of pollen into the air, and kerbs spending more time out west in the Grasslands (field researchers, mostly) were the first to become affected, as the pollen brought about a mild allergic reaction in almost everyone that then allowed the bacterial infection to also grow more serious as the body defended from attacks on two fronts. The entire of KSC was affected after a large wind storm passed through the area, stripping large amounts of pollen from trees and depositing it over KSC.
It’s actually not so surprising that we might encounter diseases on the surface that are slightly or even extremely mutated from pathogens that were encountered in the past when surface living was more widespread. Given that the Kerbal Space Center is the one location on the surface were kerbs have lived above ground for an extended period of time, if any sort of epidemic were to happen it would happen here. The tree pollen especially is something that kerbals haven’t had to deal with for a few generations – underground there are moss spores but no trees.
The bacterial infection that began this whole ordeal needs to be purged from the KSC – surface swabs have found colonies growing in various places around the campus and the entire facility will need to be decontaminated. The DMO expects this to take a week at least, so we will be moving all staff to a quarantine facility in Umbarg City where everyone will be checked over and cleared of bacterial infection while the KSC itself is also cleaned. We hope to be back at KSC by Feb 27th.
All of our sick are being treated for the bacterial infection and are recovering well. We did have one death of an elderly staff member but an autopsy has since shown it to be from natural causes and not directly related to the bacterial infection.
Moving forward once operations resume, we will be setting up better medical protocols for field researchers returning from science expeditions as well as for UTV teams returning from balloon launches. Air quality monitors will let us know when pollen levels become high enough to cause problems. Living on the surface certainly brings back old challenges, but we’re working to adapt once more.
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