The Royal Squirrel Patrol Space Force

February 24, 2014

The best memorial is to continue the job

The Kassie II launch that cost Philmon Kerman his life brought operations at the Kerbal Space Center to a halt for several weeks, but now it's time to get back to work. Philmon certainly would have wanted us to continue the mission, and bring back Bill alive. We won't let either of them down.

In support of that goal, our engineers have taken the original Kassie I prototype, and gone over it with the proverbial fine toothed comb, searching for any flaw, no matter how minor, at the same time upgrading it and preparing it for flight.

The Kassie II may have cost Philmon his life, but it nearly came to blows over who would have the privilege of strapping into the capsule of the Kassie III to continue the mission in his honor. In the end, we drew straws. The other pilots suspect that I cheated. I will not lie. Of course I did. If the Kassie is going to claim another life, it will be none other than that of Jebediah Kerman.

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February 13, 2014

Philmon Kerman, Every Kerbal's Hero

Ladies and gentlekerbs. Astronauts, engineers, scientists. Family. Dear friends all, gather round. Today I am here to tell you the story of my friend, Philmon Kerman.

Others will tell you of his childhood, of his life as a young Kerbal, of his excellence as a son, husband, father. I will tell you of his life as an astronaut, as a member.. no, as an exemplar of the Royal Squirrel Patrol Space Force.

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February 10, 2014

"We Appear to Have Experienced a Major Incident"

You are not going to space today

Ladies and gentlekerbs, your attention please. We are as yet unclear on the exact status of the launch of the prototype Kassie Eve Rescue lander, reports are still coming in. However, obviously there has been a major incident. We are still waiting to hear the status of Philmon Kerman at this time.

Initial reports coming in indicate that one or more of the launch boosters failed on ignition, causing the craft to spiral out of control just after it cleared the tower. There are indications that components of the rocket are impacting all over the Kerbal Space Center at this time. We ask that everyone stay in the bunker and remain calm.

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February 03, 2014

Holiday on the Mun

Hello, space fans! Philmon Kerman here, with another update on the exploits of the Royal Squirrel Patrol Space Force.

Our week-long visit to the Mun wen't extraordinarily well, with lots of new technologies and abilities demonstrated, and all of our astronauts getting a chance to develop and perfect their skills in space. But it left us with a bit of a problem in deciding what exactly would be next. The rover and space plane programs continue to make progress, if not quite as quickly as we'd like. We've demonstrated that we can dock multiple craft in space, thus building much larger vessels than we can reasonably lift into orbit on a single launcher, and we've also demonstrated that we can refuel vehicles in orbit, allowing us to rely on upper stages to get us into orbit, knowing that we can refuel them and use them again. But even with all this progress, we're still not ready for the scope of effort that will be required to rescue Bill Kerman, and the transfer window to Eve is coming up quickly.

The scientists were thrilled with the data we brought back from Minmus, and wanted us to simply repeat that mission on the Mun. The engineers insisted that another mission with a bunch of small stages wouldn't get us any closer to the developments we need for the Eve lander. And from the viewpoint of those of us in the astronaut corps, we want flight time to practice with the larger vehicles, and we don't want to risk spending weeks out at the Mun and have the Eve transfer window arrive with us busy doing something else.

The compromise we came up with is to build a much larger lander, one capable of landing on the Mun multiple times, thus getting more scientific data for our researchers, giving our engineers a chance to work out kinks in their big rocket designs, and giving the pilots practice at landing a very large lander.