CAPE TABLE — March 31st — Thanks to funding infusions from One Dot Nineteen, Inc., the Tablian Conglomerate Space Authority is back on track and speeding along as quickly as ever, much to the excitement of everyone on Kerbin. We were given a chance to speak with the engineering department at the TCSA facility to take a look at what’s been developing.
“There’s a lot of projects and proposals being bandied about by the big guys up top,” said one Sandy Kerman, Chief Engineer for the TCSA, “but until we get a definite go ahead, we’re just kind of twiddling our thumbs.” But they were far from idle during the downtime, he assured me. “No, no. We’ve always go ideas bouncing around in our heads, so we’ve been building prototypes on-the-fly in the simulator!”
To demonstrate, Sandy showed me three successes that he and his team had been working on for about a week. The Aerowat and Aerowat 1.5 were iterations on a fairly large aircraft designed for long excursions from the TCSA’s home base. “It proved successful, ultimately,” he explained, “but the first iteration of it dropped its engines on landing. Technically a success, but we’d like it to take off more than once.”
The other two projects were designed for use together, being dubbed the Tablian Exploration Aerospace One (TEA-1) and the Tablian Exploration VTOL One (TEV-1). Sandy went on to describe potential uses for long-range exploration to remote regions of our own planet, but felt that the TEA-1 had a major shortcoming.
“We wanted to build something very compact, so we used as few parts as possible to not only get her in the air, but keep her appealing as well.” He handed me an image of the vehicle in-flight, which will be added to the article early tomorrow. “It worked, but there was so little lift that it required the entire length of our runway to get her in the air, and she didn’t turn as well as we wanted.” The TEV-1 fortunately didn’t suffer from the same problems, but was cited as being difficult to fly. Neither craft were ever likely to see production, but Sandy was positive the lessons learned from their simulation would be applied to real projects in the future.
“The Engineering Team has been very… proactive during this rough time,” said the head of the R&D department, Dr. Minnie T. Kerman in a quiet, careful tone. “They’ve really been an inspiration to all of us. They’ve even helped… em… spur my researchers into looking back at our previous… experiments, and how best to improve.”
“They’ll improve by shifting more blame to the engineers,” Sandy interjected as he walked by, to which Minnie cleared her throat and smiled in response.
Minnie continued. “There is certainly one obstacle which we have already been researching to overcome that’s proved to be a… umm… conundrum. During the liquidation once Saiv Aisle collapsed, they took the launch tower from our launch pad. We had assumed we might be able to get it back once we secured funding, but the equipment used to… reclaim the tower no longer exists! We are having to research all new methods of stability to make sure our craft will launch without toppling over on the pad.” She assured me, however, that they were confident they’d have their solution before the first launch in the coming months.
Things may be quiet on the launch pad at the TCSA complex on Cape Table, but the buildings surrounded are constantly abuzz with excitement and apprehension at what this new partnership will bring for the future of not just the TCSA, but Kerbal-kind as a whole.