By the time he dared open his eyes again, they were on the deck. Be advised, some nausea and dizziness during transition is common for us-" Jeb hastily released the controls as his stomach lurched and his head spun both at once. Fifteen seconds to grav envelope, suggest pointing your landing gear downwards, over." TAB "Homesteader One, this is Fredriksson approach control. Maybe the terminology hadn't translated all that well and this thing was a pocket carrier rather than the Kerbal definition of "cruiser". TABThe landing bay airlock was bigger than he'd expected, enough for a couple of decent-sized spaceplanes to pass through at once. It'd take something pretty damn serious to make him this jumpy. Bob was a remarkably level-headed guy, usually the least nervous astronaut in the capsule even if Jeb was a bit better at hiding it. TABIt wasn't just the guns that made Jeb uneasy, though. He was also the only one of the original three -Jeb had made a point of not asking Scott or Kurt about this- who'd ever fired a gun before the work-up to this mission, the only one who'd scored better than barely acceptable in training and the only one who was really comfortable handling them. We'll tell 'em it's a cultural thing." It was sort of true, actually Bill was the only one of the original three to come from an armed forces background, having been a lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers before breaking his leg badly enough to warrant a medical discharge in an accident he refused to discuss to this day. Didn't understand a lot of it, but I didn't like a whole lot of what I did." TAB"For the guy who was the most psyched about making contact you're awfully twitchy about this." TAB"Leave yours in the capsule if you want, but I'm keeping mine." TAB"I still think we should've left the guns behind," Jeb remarked, shifting uncomfortably as the service automatic dug into his back.
#KERBAL SPACE PROGRAM LOUD AND CLEAR SOFTWARE#
A laptop with translation software and a VHF radio antenna that could be plugged into it were wedged awkwardly in between some spare O2 bottles, taking up most of the remaining space. TABImproved electronics had made room for a second seat in the Mk1 capsule, barely, and Bill was crammed in alongside Jeb. TABThe atmosphere in the lander was therefore somewhat tense. Estimates of their warfighting capabilities were being revised sharply upwards. TABBut apparently that hadn't been the case after all, forcing some fairly drastic reassessment of which programmes should be treated as pure fiction and which might have more grounding in reality, not to mention some rather urgent questions about what else Kerbin's immediate neighbours might do with the ability to manipulate gravity.
#KERBAL SPACE PROGRAM LOUD AND CLEAR SERIES#
But when the Kerbals saw people walking around its interiors normally in spite of the lack of a gravity wheel, they'd drawn the obvious conclusion the budget didn't stretch to filming on-location in space all the time, so the series had been set in some nebulous near-future period where not much had changed except that someone had come up with a technobabble-powered artificial gravity device. TABThey'd seen it on the television, of course one of the shows they'd used most extensively to test the translation software was actually a drama series set aboard an Alliance Navy warship, which Scott had become quite fond of. TABHe might have been slightly comforted by the knowledge that the shock and amazement hadn't been a one-way street in fact, the pandemonium breaking out at the other end of Starfarer 1's QEC line put his reaction entirely to shame, mostly thanks to the first four words of the first contact report:
But even if the Admiral didn't have ample grounds to have him relieved of duty (and a small part of him thought he might've been relieved in more than one sense of the word if that came to pass), there probably wasn't much point in trying to simply delay the inevitable. TABCaptain Tarrant could have objected, technically permission to come aboard was one area where the authority of a ship's captain theoretically trumped the orders of an officer of higher rank. Two of the Kerbals -that's what they call themselves, apparently- are coming aboard too." TAB"We're getting a conference organised. TAB"Actually, the thing with the aliens really happened." TAB"I'm terribly sorry, Admiral," he said weakly, as the Chief of the Boat pressed a mug of hot sweet tea into his hand, "but it appears I've finally gotten around to going insane." TABAdmiral Liu called for an in-person conference of every captain in the taskforce this wasn't the kind of conversation one had over the radio, and in any case it bought time for Captain Tarrant to be helped into his ready-room and brought round with smelling salts. Not happy with this at all, to the point where I'm rethinking my stance against major rewrites before the plot's over and done with, but anyway:
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