NuclearNut

What mod is the command pod from? I have been attempting to build an ITS-Alike ship and that command pod looks like it would fit right in with a good ITS-alike craft, sort of like what it looks like you were going for.

I love the mod and recently sent an airship to the north pole and discovered how incredibly efficient the airships in the game are as I used up less than 10% of the fuel that I had taken with me while making speeds of around 30 m/s (I found that lower airspeeds are exponentially more efficient than higher ones for obvious reasons). The trip was mostly accomplished by using mechjeb to allow me to fly without watching it as it cruised at over 4 000 meters above the surface. Images of the flight

Ah, I see. Powering the entirety of humanity on a single 10 000 ton black hole would be awe inspiring, if anything could survive such power densities. And I am certain that the physics of the game would start to beak down when we consider multi billion ton black holes. But if I may, I would suggest that the black hole reactor could also be based on the relativistic jets that some black holes can produce. Not only should it be more manageable than compressing the entirety of mount Everest into an area less than the size of a atom, but it would also avoid the mass requirements by allowing us to ignore hawking radiation. The reactor would in essence run at some absurd coolant outlet temperature, producing only charged particles. The reactor would probably have an efficiency lower than antimatter but considerably better than fission or fusion. Though unfortunately the mechanics behind the creation of relativistic jets are poorly understood. Well it could also be a large asteroid, but I like your idea of tons of DU needing to be shipped to the accelerator better, mostly because it seems more realistic than guiding a short lived black hole into a large asteroid/small moon.

I would like to suggest that the four units be rather heavy to launch, preferably far more so than any of the reactors, thus requiring in space construction or tons of energy. And I do definitely agree with you, this is one point where the beamed power feature could really make a difference in space travel That way the program is suitably expensive and serves as a high barrier to entry for superluminal travel. Do you think it would be possible to require certain research be done by certain things? That is to say that you cannot just develop warp drives by scanning planets, but rather you have to have some huge particle accelerator or what not operational. But on the topic of creating black holes, in the book a black hole was created using the accelerator using one of Jupiter's moons. So possibly to make a black hole there could be a requirement like "have a ton of mass on hand so that the mini black hole created can be directed at the mass and stabilized." That way to fuel up black hole ships you will need tons of mass to be brought to the accelerator. Another way to make the black hole reactors interesting is to simulate (currently theoretical) hawking radiation (and possibly have the black hole reactors produce power that way). Hawking radiation emission rates are (if I am not mistaken) inversely proportional to the mass of a black hole, and thus should present a potent energy source if you can capture small black holes. Of course the black hole decay rate increases as it's mass decreases, releasing more and more energy, so if the black hole is cut off from a supply of fresh matter for too long... Hawking radiation is also primarily hard gamma radiation, so the black hole would suffer from the problem of being unable to emit charged particles, and instead just producing prodigious amounts of heat.

I was reading a book and it had an idea that made me think of this mod. In the book there is a particle accelerator called the circimsolar particle accelerator. It, as it's name describes, wraps around the sun, in this case it is located at around Jupiter's orbit. Because space is a near perfect vacuum the accelerator is composed simply of a series of space stations containing the relevant equipment to accelerate the hadrons to high speeds, no vacuum chamber needed. This allows the device to accelerate particles to extremely high speeds. I think that a particle accelerator of that type would make an awesome addition to the mod, as well as adding some larger engineering requirements for warp drives to the game, though I do not know how realistic such a device would be.

Actually starch would do just fine, but solids with a high hydrogen content would do better. You see, the radiation you are dealing with is ultimately high energy nuclear particles such as protons and alpha particles. These particles have to be slowed down via elastic scattering, that is to say that they need to bounce off of a large number of atoms. Thankfully hydrogen is great at this and is rather common. It also can slow down neutrons via the same means, though it is terrible at absorbing neutrons, so usually an element with a high neutron cross section is included (boron).

Actually it is a great idea. The salt is the fuel as well as the coolant, when it expands due to heating it ultimately becomes sub critical, giving it a strong negative temperature coefficient of reactivity, negating the problems with graphite as a moderator (graphite actually makes a great moderator). The biggest problem is not the hot salt, that is actually good, but rather the fact that this will need onsite reprocessing, so each unit will have to be larger than micro, at least 200 MW to be reasonably profitable.

Is it stock? This should be fairly lag free in 1.1. EDIT: 1,1 means 1.1. I should have noticed that.

The multistage planes almost remind me of early 1950's designs for spacecraft.

Riding on a supersonic nuclear powered airplane in the atmosphere of Saturn would be hands down what I would want to see. Not only could I visit the south pole and see the southern lights, but I could observe a wide variety of atmospheric disturbances and so on.

I am presently attempting to build a military ship, the likes of which this forum has probably seen several times before. Now with the 64 bit, I can build it much bigger than I ever did before. Goodbye 600 part limit, hello ungodly part limit.

I am not clairvoyant. I cannot dig into the minds of those that lived in that age and why the held such asinine beliefs. You can make inferences, yes, but even then it is hard. Perhaps the best way to look at it would be to look at what happened in real life. In the US slavery in the south did not end on it's own, it required the industrialized north to eliminate southern slavery. The reason the north was willing to go without slavery was simple, it did not require it by any means, in fact it damaged it's economy. In the south cheap labor was needed and bigotry was entrenched, thus people were willing to force others to work in atrocious conditions. The conditions in the south would not change without someone moving it externally unless they became less dependent on agriculture, similarly to how slavery ended in the northern colonies and England. In order to industrialize or variously feel the need to build such capital intensive equipment you would need a high demand for labor and a low supply of labor, something that the romans would never experience due to their massive empire and extensive food supply. So to put it simply, rome would need to have a massive change in it's supply of labor to overcome it's backwards social ideas.

You definitely got the whole fall of the roman empire thing mixed up. Rome did not fall because they were invaded by "barbarians" but they fell because of internal decay. They had a rapidly changing leadership with rapidly changing priorities, they had corruption (obviously), they had fun with hyperinflation when investing in wars, they suffered slave rebellions and had an extreme dependence on slavery due to their agrarian economy (not something that would support advanced technology). To put it simply, the reasons rome fell were internal decay, not external assault. The external assault came more because the roman empire became weak.

I will say that human life will probably cease to exist due to other reasons separate from the ones listed. Humanity has been and thus far is a very, very hardy species. What would destroy others serves to merely temporally weaken us. We have survived in a wildly expansive variety of environments, built technologies that largely serve to enhance that capability, and have built tools for other uses that our ancestors could not have dreamed of. There is not an inch of this world that we have not in some way altered, and only a few places on the surface that we cannot inhabit at all. Thus I see it as unlikely that global warming, a nuclear war, a pandemic, or some rouge AI will spell doom for humanity. Well, the last one is sort of interesting, but back to that later. Humanity presently is developing technology that will further augment our capabilities, genetic modification seems to be the most close one, but neural interfaces and AI present interesting possibilities in the long term. To put it simply, we may make ourselves extinct via improving ourselves. This is the least onerous (and in fact would be quite pleasant) thing that might occur. The reason I think it is most probable is the continued rapid development of technology and our ability to survive problems as well as the fortunate rarity of such species threatening problems. An two examples of the progress we have made with technology would be nuclear weapons and computers. Nuclear weapons started as bulky, inefficient devices and within a matter of two decades diversified into a number of small, elegant, and efficient devices. Thermonuclear two stage weapons were developed within a decade of the first nuclear bomb, and likewise tactical weapons usable by infantry were developed in but three decades. Computers likewise have undergone rapid development, going from massive bulky devices to much smaller ones at a possibly faster rate than nuclear weapons. However, I cannot stress this enough, it is likely that any time frame for the development of such technologies to allow for extensive modification is inaccurate, regardless of length. That is to say that, like any other technology, the time frame in which it will become developed to a degree that it is possible to use is extremely variable, though I err on the side of significant quantities of time needing to be taken to develop any of the technology required to augment Homo Sapiens Sapiens sufficiently to be considered another species or set of species (and thus extinct).

Or extract it from the moon. Again, it would add a lot to the capital cost, but if you had a functioning lunar base with functioning lunar hydrogen extraction, it would work.