Rescue Mission: The Journey Home

Read the first chapter.

Read the previous chapter: Build Me a Rocketship!

Man, I bet Dufus or whatever his name is is glad to be on board where he's nice and safe. Himself and Rolin have a kushy ride home.

I bet they totally forgot about this guy:

[caption id="" width="580" align="aligncenter" caption=" Lets face it, it's hard to feel sorry for them when they're so disengaged."][/caption]

They settle into their metal seats in zero-G without seatbelts or anything and don't seem to notice that I was a little cavalier with the fuel on the way in. In fact, none of us seem to have noticed. Not even me.

Instead of panicking about that, I just get down to the business of circularising our orbit and setting sail for home.

We run into problems about, I'd say, 9% of the way through. I make a series of bad calls that waste the paltry amount of fuel we had after the bad calls I made on the way in. It's a management issue, really.

This is the closest we get to Kerbal:

My fly skill lands us in a steeply elliptical orbit, getting this close, and then swinging out to here.

Turns out you can't do a bloody thing out in space without fuel, except spin around like a tool, and even that is probably pushing it.

This is the point most people give up. I'm not most people. I'm in a very small percentile. I'm a risk-taker. Some would say a visionary (most don't). Poor wee Donbus spent weeks on Minmus, alone in the cold with only a flag to keep him company. Now, sitting in the capsule, with only Rolin to keep him company, a marginal improvement, he deserves to get home safely. I built the capsule to survive re-entry, which is to say I stuck a parachute on it, so as long as he stays inside it he should be ok.

To this end, I shove Rolin out the door and try to alter our orbit by using his jet pack. This has a positive and negative effect, neither of which have to do with our orbit.

The good news is that Rolin gets to go home.

The bad news is that it's like this:

Next up: Going back for the other guy

In the index: Kerbal Space Program