Rakaydos

I designed an ion powered lifter to bring kethane from minmus to minmus orbit. It's only cappable of launching at sunrise or sunset, and can only land at midday at the target site. And it brings a single FL400- equivilant tank of Kethane.

Well, then that AI then gains the right to own property, and all the other rights of a Corporate Entity.

I seem to remember hearing that Spiders adapted very well to space. Not sure if that was ISS or Spacelab, though,

A NERVA is safer than three mile island was. And while Three mile island and Chernoble spread radiation around, they didnt go up in a mushroom cloud. At worst, a NERVA will radioactivly contaminate it's payload. Probaby not the best for passangers, but not catestrophic for a cargo flight.

Or design a "bolt on" asparagus stage, designed to lift itself while fueling one other identical engine. In the center you have 1 engine. It has 4 "bolt on" asparagi attached to it. Asparagi pair A feed themselves and Asparagi pair B, asparagi pair B feed Center engine (at half rate because there's two sources.) Second stage, Asparagi pair A drops empty. Asparagi pair B's "other engine tanks" are half empty, while their "self lift" tanks are full. they continue to feed the center engine. Both sets of tanks will empty at about the same time. Third stage, Asparagi B drops away, leaving the center stack at max fuel.

Hmm... My biggest problem with it is shutting off the drive ruiins the drive. It's effectively an infinite SRB.

Fusion power has been "A decade away" for the last half century. :/

Yes, you would test stuff like artificial gravity and 6 months witout resupply closer to home. When we get the political will to start the mars mission, we'll put an artificial gravity wheel in orbit to test it. Meanwhile an antarctic base will test the life support system. (because when testing your air system, even being 40 minutes from help can be lethal)

I am of the opinion that a true "Robot overlord" AI will see humans like humans see housecats. Aww, arnt they so adorable, look at all the silly things they're doing... and now it's demanding to be fed. Such is existance being "owned" by a human...

"But the problem with metastable helium is not with obtaining it, but storing it. The 2.3 hour limitation only applies to a completely isolated atom; metastable helium packed in with anything else, even other metastable helium atoms, will result in jostling and it losing its metastable state in a fraction of a second." Ouch.

Out of curiosity, is the fuel costs for a non-hoffman transfer dependant entirely on how close you are to a proper hoffman transfer, or are there other points in the orbit where, say, a Bi-eliptic transfer (or other tranfer types) will cost less Dv than they would otherwise?

I've done nuclear powered flybys of Eeloo and slingshotted from Jool into interseller space, but I only recently started to mess around with jets myself. The key, it seems, is having 2+intakes per Turbojet. With a fairly basic design I called the Hammerhead (because of the bi-coupler that mounted the doube-intake in front of the cockpit) I was able to reach a 60km apoapse (after my engines cut out at 35km), RCS to a 60 km PERIAPSE with a 90 km apoapse, and circularize from there.

To be fair, the Quantum Thruster isnt a reactionless drive, any more than the buzzard ramjet is. It just has an infinite fuel hack (again, just like the buzzard ramjet)

Quantum dot masses are probably a better bet for simulating difficult to produce materials. A quantum dot simuates an atom by confining electrons within a quantum-scale area, where they begin to behave like the electron cloud of an atom. Since chemical properties are deturmined by the electron cloud, not the nucleas, it gains the chemical properties of the element it is copying.

Are you saying that the 64 bit version of KSP would be a Steambox Exclusive? (being linux based) ...assuming it was done, of course...

Hmm... I wonder if you could set up a calibrated to launch a given mass at the right speed to get a free return. For munar sighseeing, it would mean the craft literally has no way to maneuver.

Please tell me those budget numbers are in thousands of dollars. $17,646.00 is less than I earned during a 6 month stay in afganistan. :/

Target: Interstellar space, Alpha Centauri (with slingshot options from there to other destinations.) Propulsion: Fission reactor + Solar powered Quantum Thruster (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_vacuum_plasma_thruster) for nearly infinite endurance. (at low ISP) Goals: post-heliosphere intersteller medium tests, relativistic intersteller medium interactions, interstlar range parralax with ground observations, and eventally a close, relativistic flyby of another star. Other: Relativistic interaction with the interstellar medium may require a level of aerodynamics. Also, the probe is not intended to slow down. It will keep accelerating until it fails to dodge something that can cripple it.

I managed a polar flyby of Mun when returning from minmus. Though I already had the equitorial bioms completed, there was no reason I couldnt have turned it into a polar orbit.

I put an ion assisted jet into orbit.

How large are the Kethane Hexes? I found a deposit half a hex-edge offshore, entirely under water, and was wondering how far (or deep) I would need to make my mining aparatus go offshore.

As I understand it, they intend to use smaller high atmosphere rigs, shuttling the cargo over. I could be wrong though. http://jpaerospace.com/Tandem/tandem.html

The structure does have to be light, but airships are one thing where the square cube law works FOR you as you scale up a vehical- by doubling the vehical's size, you square the building materials, but cube the displaced volume that floats the craft.

Would that be a larger problem for a greater surface area, or greater radiation exposure? Blimps have been a thing since before WW1, and they've been working with high altitude weather baloons for most of their high altitude testing. If it's a matter of materials, well, that's simply an engineering problem- if it requires you build it bigger, well, space is big- it's not like you need to park it anywhere.

So I just recently found that a website I thought had been defunct for a few years actually moved their updates to facebook, and the program is still alive and well. I haven't seen any sign of awareness of it here, though, so I thought I'd bring it up for discussion. The biggest problem with space travel is taking that first step into orbit- between gravity and atmosphere, earth is one of the hardest celestial bodies in our solar system to lift off from, and one of the most expensive. There have been various ideas for how to reduce the cost of getting to orbit, the most commonly known of which is the Clark Elevator. But JP aerospace is working on what I believe to be a much more practical option than dangling a cable from geosynch- instead of fighting atmo and gravity both, use one against the other. The Airship to Orbit program is a tiered set of airships, each designed for a different level of the atmosphere. The Ascender takes cargo through the turbulent atmosphere near the surface to the edge of the atmosphere, almost entirely by buoyancy control- the mass of the cargo is almost irrelevant, except as it requires a larger gasbag that may be more difficult to control going through, for instance, the jet stream and other currents. Once at the edge of space (100,000 to 120,000 feet, I believe), it transfers cargo (by a dedicated high atmosphere rig they call the Dark Sky Station) to another airship- the Orbital Airship. Built at 100,000 feet and never intended to operate below that height, concerns of turbulence and gas pressure can be thrown out the window. A multi-kilometer aerodynamic lifting body filled with just enough hydrogen or helium to equalize the miniscule pressures at that altitude, the airship once again makes the mass of the cargo almost irrelevant. When the orbital airship launches, it works something like this- it's propelled by high ISP, low thrust motors (they're testing MHD rigs now). As the airship moves, the huge gasbag interacts with the thin atmosphere, generating aerodynamic lift to carry the airship higher than buoyancy alone could manage. As the airship gets higher, the atmosphere thins, reducing drag and enabling the airship to go even faster, which loops back to more altitude and still more speed. After about a week, near orbital velocity is generating as much lift as the remaining atmosphere, and in a few more days, the airship is solidly in low earth orbit. It's not fast, but compared to lifting into orbit aboard a stack of high explosive, it's incredibly cheap, reliable, and as reusable as a semi truck, able to conduct multiple launches and landings between routine maintenance. That's the theory. Apparently the math checks out. All that remains are the engineering details- which the JP Aerospace team have been working out as they've got the funding to work on it. Their current projects are MHD testing, working out how the upper atmosphere rig will maneuver, and building a submarine to test life support and buoyancy control. Oh, and while they're sending tests to the edge of space anyway, they rent advertizing space and set aside experimental payload volume to schools and colleges. https://www.facebook.com/jpaerospace?sk=wall http://jpaerospace.com/ Thoughts?