Bowhead was loaded with its last two modules, drone transport modules, and is now ready for one painful and laggy liftoff!
These drones (MK II) are a new variant over my MK I’s depicted on the right below. The landing legs are a little sketchy, but they get the job done.
With everything already on board, let’s just get to it. Bowhead and its 3.4 kilotons of cargo’s destination, if not already mentioned above, is the moon.
Liftoff!
Fuel is looking good.
Getting into LEO at 32 km for transfer to the moon.
En route to the moon.
While on the way there I decided to check the systems for the K-IAC support and did a quick fly around Bowhead.
All systems looked good so it restocked and the mission continued on. This is definitely where the real challenges began. First, I forgot to deactivate the engines of the support craft which thankfully only resulted in minor damage to Bowhead (destruction of two parts) which will require some repairs back at Earth. With the amount of lag happening and my phone pushing forward on its strongest and last 1% (it started this mission at 35% and held onto that last percent for the entire moon encounter and orbit), the engines for Bowhead decided to become uncooperative wherein they wouldn’t deactivate and I’d miss my orbit mark by several kilometers.
Damage done by activated engines. This will be fixed when Bowhead returns back to Earth.
2.5 kilometer flyby of the moon (when I missed my mark by 12.5 kilometers because the engines wouldn’t turn off).
Stable and acceptable moon orbit.
With this point reached, there is now a green light for the deployment of all colony equipment to two similar colonies on the surface of the moon. Getting to this point was definitely a challenge but there is still more work to be done.