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Jul 14 2017

Reaching Space and the “Monolith Incident”

Categories:

Behind the Scenes, News, Plot Summary

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.

Now nearly 00:00 UTC, during this time we had been able to send and receive a courier to Umbarg via the access tunnel and the report came back of similar timing to events that included huge bolts of lightning coming out of cavern walls and melting power lines, exploding transformers and in some horrible cases rendering kerbals into instantaneous piles of ash. We had hoped to receive some aid from the city but it turned out they had their hands full. MSV Tongjess and MSV Lymun were both able to lend supplies, but the need for aid was still extreme. Commander Valentina volunteered to take a Civvie aircraft up to Kravass, the next-closest city. Thankfully one aircraft had still been in the Horizontal Assembly Building, which is heavily shielded, and was able to start up and take her aloft, which she did at 4th sunrise (01:16 UTC ). At best speed it takes a Civvie roughly an hour to reach Kravass and spending just shy of an hour there Val got back 3 hours later just as the sun was setting. Unfortunately the tale was the same as Umbarg.

By the following day, the 12th, we had decided the events were over and had begun to get basic systems and utilities up and running again after repairing our emergency generators with the last of our spare parts. Shortly after second sunrise at 13:34 UTC an airship en route to Umbarg stopped by with kerbs from Sheltered Rock and Ockr wondering why all communications with us, Kravass and Umbarg had been lost. To our relief, we learned that both cities on the other end of the continent had remained unaffected. We accepted some aid supplies from them and they continued on to Umbarg, apparently another airship was sent to Kravass as well.

More good news for us to share is that the Mk4 third stage survived re-entry and was recovered 135km downrange by Lymun! We never were relying on any command to be sent to the vessel to deploy its chutes, which were armed at 8km during ascent and set to a pressure sensor. It is in pretty bad shape, the engine is almost completely destroyed and the fuel tanks crushed but they did a great job absorbing an obviously higher than intended impact with the water and the payload bays are still intact. We’ll have much more analysis once we have a chance to go over all the data from the rocket’s TDU and what we can recover here at KSC.

As for the Monolith – the evidence we have at this time it was in some way responsible includes the eyewitness reports and the roughly 250m diameter patch of scorched ground that now surrounds it. Thankfully all researchers were here at KSC to watch the launch and no pilgrims/worshipers were gathered around it at the time. The kerbs that stopped by from Sheltered Rock and Ockr also relayed information that they had picked up large amounts of radio static from the upper atmosphere that coincided with the timing of events here. What exactly the Monolith did will require a lot of investigation to determine if this was a deliberate act to sabotage our attempts to reach space or an unintended side-effect of its true purpose for which we happened to be unfortunately vulnerable.

We have spent yesterday restoring as much of our vital equipment as possible with what parts we were able to scrounge up, salvage or re-purpose. We can communicate again via this website and our media accounts, but it will take until next week until we are able to restore our operations services (Flight Tracker and Crew Roster). Beyond that we are expecting additional airships from Ockr and Sheltered Rock but with the need to also support Umbarg and Kravass getting things patched up here will still be a slow process. We will see how next week goes.

Here are the images from this past week, as this post is serving as our Ops Summary for this week.

From the Desk of Drew Kerman

Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuff

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