What exactly is a Kerbolantern?
Either a way to scare aliens into leaving you alone or scare politicians into giving the space program money.
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In the aftermath of the direct assent missions of the early Kerbal Space Program heyday, the organization had a period of drift. The program had been created to gather science and it seemed that there was plenty of science to go around. Although the Kerbalnauts were as suicidally eager as ever, the backers of the program decided to indefinitely delay program JAPA and it was rummored that program MAINIAC was next on the chopping block. It was against this dire fiscal backdrop that a young engineer was forced to make a sales pitch for the future direction of the space program.
"Uh, well there is the possibility of in situ resource exploit-" he nervously eyed the glassy eyed response of the audience "-
"-tation... but uh, um, really, just a whole host of possibilities I mean anything from defending ourselves from aliens, to"
"Hey now, what was that about aliens?"
The presenting Kerbal was stunned by the first response to anything he had said all presentation.
"I mean, it's basically our first line of defense of course, which is all part of uh, why we need..."
"We can defend ourselves against aliens?"
"Uh, yeah, I mean, uh, naturally, right?"
"How?"
"-oh..."
"yes?"
"Well uh, naturally they'll be scared off by all the things our space program can do."
"Your telling me that you have a plan in works to scare of space aliens? What are they afraid of anyway?"
"Well, uh, they are scared of... heads." frantically the presenter picked a word out of the air. After a moment of consideration he desperately committed to it. "Yeah, big round scary heads... with glowing eyes... and teeth on them. Giant metal teeth..."
"Hot damn, you can make those?"
"Well... I mean... sorta? I mean of course we can!"
"What else we got?"
"Well if you take a look at some of the numbers..."
"Aliens are afraid of numbers?!?"
"No, no, no, that's not what I meant at all I meant that..." the inherant hostility of the audience scared the man back into ever so slight distortions of the truth. "... I meant they don't like some numbers! Like, uh, 10! And 31! And... 13. Very unlucky number for the aliens. So naturally that's the heart of project MAINIAC. We have 10... liquid boosters to put it into orbit. And 31... solid boosters as the first stage." the kerbal turned glassy eyed for a second as he tried to imagine a rocket that fit the build, some sort of branching mechanism?"
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The misdesigned heap that was project MAINIAC rolled out onto the launch pad. It's intellectual father sighed in desperation. What a mess. Completely pointless secondary payloads? They served no purpose known to kerbal kind. Still... at least it would fly... he hoped.
The countdown ended and the beast roared into the air as 19 solid boosters lighting up at once. Technically all 31 didn't light at once, something the engineers had declined to mention before this point. They burned gloriously for about three seconds then half of them shut off. Who said that a booster couldn't burn for three seconds before fizzling? The point was that there were 31 boosters on the rocket, technically speaking.
to be continued...
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Topic: Kerbal SCIENCE Program (v0.22) (Read 20967 times)