Closer to a Star

The last month had been busier than ever before. Thousands of Mits had run through the Gael Surface Comm Network (GSCN), and by now, two thirds of the scientists had left the lab due to the loads of work to be done, now hanging out in the Astronomy Lab or the Tracking Station instead. This had crippled the processing efficiency to about 30% of the original lab. Meanwhile, a new Mission was waiting to be set out on the Runway, in particular the Thalia-Eta Mission, or short Thaleta. This Mission would be accomplished by a newly built spacecraft, the Namera SSTO. This 340-ton vessel was more than capable of getting into Orbit in Thrust Mode, with six KS-25 "Vector" Engines pulling an impressive 6 Meganewtons of thrust. To get Interplanetary, the Engineers, namely Desmond, Malcolm Jr. and Bill, had developed the so-called "Dark Drives" with three Meganewtons once high enough. Problem with them was though the only 900 kN of thrust while on the surface. Another KS-25 was hiding under the Cockpit to get that SSTO off the ground. To refuel, Malcolm Jr. had put on some Karbonite equipment. With Jeb giving his okay, the ten Kerbals designated for the mission got in the Shuttle. Their names: Jebediah, Valentina, Sigdorf, Bill, Suedith, Lincy, Luliana, Bob, Gemet and Eilnne Kerman. All of them were trained to operate in Space for a long time, especially Jeb, Bob, Bill, Valentina and Luliana, all well above 2000 years old and with a lot of experience in long-term missions. The youngest Kerman on board was Eilnne, who was only 35.

Launching the craft was tricky. Jeb, commander and the pilot of the mission, first used the bottom engine to lift the nose off the ground. Then he started both the Dark drives and the KS-25 engines on the back. This way, the SSTO took off with a TWR of more than two, and had enough gimbal. Shortly after take-off, he shut the bottom engine down to prevent rollover and a crash. Then he pointed the craft towards the sky at a pretty aggressive angle, about sixty degrees of pitch. This was to get up out of the thick parts of the atmosphere as fast as possible to be able to shut the remaining low-efficiency engines off. His idea worked out, though he topped out lower than expected, at just above 40 kilometres. No problem for Jeb though, who carefully trimmed the Apoapsis up to about 100 km, leaving Kerbin's surface behind. After reaching Apoapsis, Valentina, who was second pilot of the mission, circularized. In Orbit, they had about 14 km/s left for the Dark Drives. The GSCN worked just fine, with a clear communication to the Namera. This was partly due to a new relay Antenna put to use, enabling much further communications. "We'd be able to get to Icarus with this. Don't know if we could get back though." "Your target isn't Icarus though. It is Thalia. Actually, Thalia seems to have a moon. We'll call it Eta." "Roger. Setting course for Thalia at the next Transfer Window. Going to get into a higher parking orbit though. Just because we can." "Don't waste too much. Just a question: How much Delta-V is left in your tanks? Just counting your dark drives here." "Just about 14 km/s. Should be enough to get into Thalia Orbit and back, even without refueling. We'll do one anyway. Just because we will probably land on that moon anyway for the science." "Copy that. Get into your parking orbit and do your orbital stuff to get to Thalia. Mission Control over." Valentina got the SSTO into a parking Orbit of about one Megametre. As the transfer window opened, Jeb turned the Dark Drives on and got the spaceplane into a Thalia transfer window with a scaringly low periapsis of less than twenty kilometres.

The red surface of Thalia became visible days before the Namera got into Thalia's SOI. "Now is a good time to get the Radiators out. We'll turn the nuclear reactor on for that matter." Being still multiple thousand Megametres away from the Planet, it's radiation belt wasn't that strong after all out there. "Communication test. Can you hear me?" "Loud and clear, Jeb. CommNet is working. Antenna fully operational." That was a good sign, as the Research lab would need stable communications back to Kerbin to transmit its results for further investigation.

While the Namara was closing in on it's frightening low periapsis of less than twenty kilometres, Baldur and Johnson Kerman got distracted by another space Object coming in for Gael. They performed, of course, the routine work - and found out that the rumors of a space station full of survivors were true. The Minmus IV had a crew capacity of well above two thousand Kerbals, was equipped with a full set of Tyros Atmospheric Landers, small unguided parachute-landers each holding fifteen Kerbals. 'It must've got a heckload of comm eqipment to pull off this', Baldur thought. The two told the lead of Mission Control shortly their findings, as well as their estimated current position, somewhere in the SOI of Gauss. They undoubtedly had some advanced technology from Kerbin, especially the Warp Drive. Thenur Kerman, in charge for contact with other survivors, told Johnson now: "Get your comms out, and send them a message. It's important that they know that here's some infrastructure." So Johnson went to a Comms console and tried to establish a stable connection. He was lucky, as he turned the transmitter on just after Minmus IV left Gauss' shadow, and got a near-immediate response: "Jenmal Kerman here. What's the matter?" "We'd really like to welcome you all here on Gael. The GSC is operational for about a year now, and some more Kerbals to accomodate for the ever-growing need for engineers and scientists are of course welcome. We've been landing here 118 years ago now." "Hmm, sounds interesting. We here have been searching for a new Home Planet for about the same time now. Seventeen ships have been flying in all directions out of the Kerbol system - you know something's wrong when even Laythe's oceans boil away. It's essentialy a giant space rock with a diameter of a thousand kilometres now! We call what's left from the fleet together, and in a few days we'll send our landers down. The carryships will unfortunaly need to burn up in Gaels Atmosphere via an interplanetary direct atmospheric entry. No joke, the main engines are set up to give full thrust so those ships really burn up. Atmospheric Entry will be at no less than six kilometres per second.Our landers will be re-entering much slower, at only about three and a half to four kilometres per second, but they have some inflatable shields to radiate off the heat and keep the parts behind it from burning up. It also has a high drag when opened. So watch out for a meteor shower of another kind." "Ok. Go for it. Johnson out." "We'll see us in a few days."

In the meantime, the Namera had already begun executing it's Thalia Capture Burn, and now planned ahead to fly to Eta, where the ship would refuel to get full tanks, having then more than enough to theoretically do a Tour of the planets inwards of Gael. The crew of course didn't know what happened at Gauss at the same time, and so they set up their databanks to store all the gathered data from experiments. Their Lab had of course a lot of helping instruments, and the by now quite experienced crew could do a full transmission run within two hours by now when the Lab was full. The Engineers were in the middle of a full Systems check, looking at every single part via a monitoring system from the cockpit. While Bill looked at one of the rear wheel, Sigdorf was just completing the scans on one of the Vector Engines.

Arriving at Eta, the Namara crew got busy again. The scientists , who had organized the data a bit to be able to find it later now got the high Orbit science from Eta in, the Engineers looked if all engines were ready for operation, and the pilots patiently waited for the Insertion burn. They did though successfully get into Orbit, landed, refueld, did some science and launched back into Orbit. Now it was waiting...

about 50 days later

On their way home, Jeb discovered what seemed to be a planetoid. Too heavy to escape, yet so small it couldn't be seen from Gael. "Distance reading?" "Forget it, Bill. This ship is not even close to strong enough to get out of this." Then he called Mission Control. "Mission Control, this is Namera. We are Thirty minutes away from Impact. Escape is not possible. Something is pulling us in. And we don't know what. Jeb out." Fifty minutes later he encountered something... strange: Spacefaring Gaelan natives. "I am Cator. You stepped foot on our homeland. Why?" "Because our planet is just about as dead as it gets. There are less than five thousand kerbal survivors. In total." "At least you're not polluting our atmosphere like the last ones. You don't mind if we bring you all to the real Gael System, right? you are out of Fuel anyways." "That... is to debate. We still have more than twenty km/s Delta-V in our tanks." "You still don't mind?" "For kerbalkind. Or what's left of it."