fireflower

To the host: I recommend just turning off the option to host signatures on your site. Asking people nicely won't work. To the users: There are dedicated image hosting sites that are free, fast, and popular. I recommend this one.

It's not their opinions I care about it's their fists, laws, and police.

Aeroscraft Cytherea Explorer Sample-return (ACES) Target: Venus Ground Activities: Drill samples for geological and isotope analysis and human retrieval. Propulsion: Solar electric turboprops for horizontal motion; helium-filled envelope for vertical. Goals: Determine the isotopic ratios Venus inherited from the solar nebula. Determine the age of Venus crust via isotope analysis. Find strata that reveal Venus past. Other: An aeroscraft is a new kind of aircraft that varies its bouyancy by converting helium from gas in its envelope to liquid in its tanks (to lose buoyancy) and back again (to raise buoyancy). At maximum buoyancy it is designed to cruise at 50 km altitude (1 bar pressure, 300 K temperature) to travel the world, charge its batteries, record meteorological information, and sample the clouds. It reduces bouyancy to descend to the surface, where it anchors itself, drills a sample, and re-routes its liquid helium for coolant. Upon sample retrieval it re-routes its liquid helium from cooling to bouyancy, re-inflates its envelope, returns to the temperate region at 50 km, and repeats the process, eventually taking samples from all across the planet. When the lander's storage bay is full, its mother ship descends into the upper atmosphere, rendezvous with ACES, retrieves the samples, and burns for orbital velocity, eventually returning to Earth.

A lot of people have a problem with prosthetic limbs in particular and disability in general. Prosthetic limbs are the butt of jokes in movies. Let me rephrase: Apes are squeamish about disabilities because they have an instinct to maul anyone who is different, smaller, competition, a potential mate, or running away. So of course entire groups like the disabled, the elderly, and the weak get regularly preyed upon, exactly those people to turn to cybernetic devices in time of need. Superadd classism for those apes who need health care and can't get it but your relations can, which can clearly be seen by their shiny bits. So of course voluntary adoption of cybernetic devices requires an element of tolerance and understanding completely foreign to most apes. Google Glass has been received with paranoia and suspicion and rightly so. Smartphones are derided for turning people into zombies. How do we expect the dumbest members of society to tell the difference, at a glance, between expensive and invasive toys for geeks and medically necessary devices? These are primates who become enraged to hear that you are enjoying the wrong video games, or enjoying the right video games the wrong way. I have a dim view of human nature as simian but with the ability to delude themselves and rationalize their monkey antics to others. I've watched too many nature documentaries and read too many ape studies and human studies to see it otherwise. We need to do a lot more as a society toward integrating the disabled and the elderly into mainstream society instead of making it an exclusive club for the beautiful people.

Unfortunately there's not much to debate. All the space agencies of the world have been studying the effects of µg on the human body for decades. It does a list of gnarly things, none of which we've been able to protect against, some of which we don't fully understand. Major health problems: -Handicaps the immune system and supercharges infectious disease. -Completely clogs the sinuses as they can no longer drain. -Permanent and irreversible premature bone loss. -Breaks down the muscles and heart unless you do hours of cardio every day. -Permanent and irreversible reduction in eyesight. For some reason this is more an issue with men, and one eye more than the other. Inconveniences: -The toilet is a vacuum cleaner you and everyone else are putting against your nether regions. -The food will make you lose the will to live within 3 days. -Dirt, dust, dead skin, eye boogers, and hair float around everywhere and clog instruments instead of disappearing into the carpet and thence into mom's vacuum cleaner or the dog's mouth like it does on Earth. Plants and animals don't have it much better. Plants don't know which direction to grow. As I said the debate isn't whether µg is livable. It isn't. The question is how much gequivalent is necessary to the human body and the living things humans want to carry with them. I recommend a new space station comprised of a spinning disc rather than a ring so there are multiple gequivalent sections. Experimental groups: 1.00 gequiv Earth 0.38 gequiv Mars/Mercury 0.16 gequiv Luna/Ganymede/Titan 0.03 gequiv Ceres 0.0006 gequiv Phobos µg control Ideally there will be two identical stations. One will be placed within Earth's magnetic field, perhaps LEO, and the other just outside it, perhaps at Lunar L2. Recruit some doctors to be 'nauts, seal them up there for a year, have them all monitoring each other's health, and then shuttle them back down to Earth to monitor their recovery. The knowledge will be immensely valuable as each of the planets and planetoids I've listed has been listed for colonization. It would be nice to see what exposure to their gravity fields will do before we go there and find out.

Nothing the wise and benevolent governments of the world haven't already done to various deserted regions for nuclear testing. Seriously though, that's the big question; the right answer immediately opens up the solar system. I'm looking into borrowing the designs of nuclear reactors for submarines. They're designed to shut down without leaking even in the event of catastrophic loss of the ship. I figure if you hit it with a torpedo and it doesn't leak that may just work for spacecraft safety. Though there is another question besides safety, and that is mass. Any NTR is already very heavy. Anyway, it's what's on my mind, I don't mean to take the thread on a tangent.

Target: Any icy moon. Ground Activities: Soft landing, melt through the ice, explore ocean. Propulsion: Bimodal nuclear thermal rocket; switches to electric generation to power propellers underwater. Goals: Characterize subsurface ocean. Find active geology. Sample and test water for microorganisms. Photograph macroorganisms. Other: Will need to leave a RTG-powered com relay at both the top and bottom of the melt-tube, as well as a com sat in orbit.

Ants, plants, worms, bacteria, lots of little things, including the accidental experiments like the common cold, which gets superpowers in µg. Compare to human lymphocytes for whom µg is like kryptonite. The common cold certainly has. Everyone got sick on Apollo 7. Biologically-based life-support systems? None that I know of. Other science has. It's where we've got one of the modern variations on the theory of panspermia. Basically, being hit by an asteroid so hard you're flung into space is not enough to sterilize Earth rocks, nor is the flight through space, nor is crashing into another planet. Bacteria are tenacious. It's why NASA has such stringent decontamination procedures for probes going to Mars. Not only would bacteria survive the flight, they would probably evolve to survive on Mars. A cosmonaut, 13 months iirc. It's really, really bad for you. The human body just can't handle µg, to say nothing of the rads beyond Earth's magnetosphere, or within it in the Van Allen belts. Note it's not "soil," it's "regolith." The special ingredient that regolith lacks is decaying organic matter. Anyway the answer is yes, both Lunar and Martian regolith has been simulated for growing things like potatoes. Thank the Incans, they bred a tuber hardy enough for a different planet.I think I can tell where you're going with this. Basically, in order to do things kerbals do all the time, humans will need to develop the following: 1. G-equivalent systems like a rotating torus that can be trusted not to break and fly apart. 2. Passive and/or active shielding systems to block the rads. 3. Closed-loop life-support systems, either mechanical or biological. Or just develop cryostasis. Then you get put in a meat locker, loaded onto the ship, and wake up on Mars. But that technology is even further down the line. KSR devised the concept of terrariums in his book 2312. They're asteroids hollowed-out and spun for gravity with whole ecosystems grown inside and placed into interplanetary transfer orbits. Their exteriors are excellent mass-shields against rads. The spinning prevents all the problems of µg. The biomes support human passengers physically as well as psychologically. A short-distance shuttle takes you from one planet to the terrarium and then, months later, from it to your destination planet. It's a brilliant if long-term solution. Building the prototype will take years. Zubrin's alternative is to not care about the rads and trust the lives of astronauts to a steel cable between the rotating crew module and spent 3rd stage. He's a crackpot. This isn't his only completely mad idea. I like the idea of a magnetic shielding system against rads because it can also be used for propulsion and to make aerocapture possible without the mass or the risk of an ablative shield. Your magnet can be in the form of a superconducting ring, which is incidentally a wonderful shape for a rotating spacecraft. If the whole thing is spinning rather than a single part that eliminates one or two joints between the rotating section and the stable section, which reduces mission risk. The maiden voyage of this technology is slated for a trip to Uranus.

It makes a liquid-core nuclear-thermal rocket SSTO sound perfectly safe in comparison. Being it has almost the exact same ISP and doesn't immediately explode above 0 K I'm going with the rocket that is literally a flying nuclear reactor in perpetual meltdown.

They will be beaten up and their lunch money taken for being nerds. It's already happened.I find legal guidance in the treatment of non-human animal persons. There is a short list of species that have independently developed language and/or culture and should be given rights. Which rights? All they can possibly avail themselves of. Voting would be difficult as it would be hard to explain to a chimp and as of yet impossible to explain to animals whose languages have not yet been translated. The basic right to life and freedom in the wild of both the intelligent species and individual members of said species would be a good start and has already begun to be implemented with Cetaceans and Great Apes. The klingons in Star Trek VI complained "human rights" were racist in concept. The non-human persons legal concept is an attempt to extend the concept of rights from "subjective to one species" to "any species that can avail itself of these rights." Any form of artificial intelligence would find themselves eligible alongside their biological counterparts. If the AI has the intellect of a child, bird, or dog, or that of a god, or is merged with a human, or is an alien machine built with hands other than our own, should not matter.

"Four times the thrust of the Merlin 1D vacuum engine." "Public information released in November 2012 indicates that SpaceX may have a family of Raptor-designated rocket engines in mind." "Design thrust of the Raptor engine: 2.94 meganewtons." I don't trust the press to report anything, let alone rocket science. From what they have reported SpaceX representatives as saying, and the nature of the fuel they're dealing with, it looks like they're replacing RP1 entirely. EDIT: RP1 is dirty. If the spacecraft and the launch site look sooty, imagine what the inside of the motor looks like. LNG technically doesn't have a carbon chain, as it's just the one atom. For reusability they're going to have to switch to a clean-burning fuel, not a postwar relic from before we figured out cryogenics.

One order of magnitude is ok though.Thanks for catching that, I was about to correct it myself.

SpaceX is replacing RP1 with clean-burning LNG. (Liquified Natural Gas, also known as methane, or CH4.) It's exhaust is just steam and CO2. Their in-development LNG/LOX motor is called "Raptor." LNG has higher specific energy, higher exhaust velocity, higher oxidizer ratio, and slightly less energy density than RP1. The only reason RP1 was developed as a fuel instead of using LNG was a military decision before NASA existed. Since Goddard, American rockets had used petroleum-based fuel propellants. There was already a supply chain for it. However there is no such petroleum infrastructure on Mars, whereas methane can be synthesized from the ambient atmosphere. Russia, China, and NASA are all trying to develop a rocket motor that uses it. Compare and contrast:RP1 Boiling point: 420 K Specific energy: 42.8 MJ/kg Energy density: 33 MJ/L Exhaust velocity: 3510 m/s Oxidizer ratio: 2.77 LNG Boiling point: 109 K Specific energy: 53.6 MJ/kg Energy density: 22.2 MJ/L Exhaust velocity: 3615 m/s Oxidizer ratio: 3.45 LH2 Boiling point: 20 K Specific energy: 141.86 MJ/kg Energy density: 8.491 MJ/L Exhaust velocity: 4462 m/s Oxidizer ratio: 4.83 It's the Mario of bipropellants. Neither best vac nor atm but good all-around with perqs like no boil-off, modest cryogenic, easily synthesized, abundant throughout the universe. You mean "specific energy." LH2 has a much higher specific energy. It's energy density is tiny, and energy density is more important in a first-stage engine than ISP. LH2 has such low energy density, and RP1 (and LNG for that matter) have such high energy density, they can store a lot more energy in the same volume pressure-vessel. At a certain point, the size of the vessel necessary to store the same mass of LH2 fuel literally outweighs the gain in exhaust velocity. You also have issues with LH2 being kept at 20 K and being so lightweight they "boil off" from whatever pressure-vessel you put them in. That is why many rockets use RP1/LOX first-stage and LH2/LOX second stage.You can look at the math in this NASA study. It is about energy density of propellant and its effect on the payload mass fraction of the rocket being just as important as the exhaust velocity of the propellant. Specifically, it's about tripropellants, which is a wonderful way of explaining how important energy density is, because both ISP and energy density are taken to extremes in tripropellant rockets. It's got math, derivation, porkchops, and is readable. Fascinating stuff, like how adding aluminum to LH2/LOX rockets increases ISP but decreases payload mass fraction because adding aluminum precipitously decreases energy density.

Dark is the only kind to pass my lips. I've found some cheap Belgian extra dark sold by the half-kilo from a local shop. Stays in the cupboard until a rainy day. I can't imagine how murkins can eat the "milk" chocolate. I certainly can't. There's a lot of instances where the FDA doesn't know what they're talking about. Knowledge is not geographic, so when we consider that so much of America's food and drug policy is at odds with the worldwide scientific consensus, we look to the FDA for explanation. And what do we see? An anti-vaxxer and a couple former Monsanto executives are the most recent additions to the FDA, and that's under Barry's administration. It's a political organization masquerading as a scientific committee. The decay of that great rotting empire of theirs has spread throughout its institutions. Even Russia isn't as bad.

TNG was so weird sometimes. TWR for each stage should be greater than 2 in the gravity well it is to operate in. Total ÃŽâ€v for the launcher should be equal to ÃŽâ€v budget for the mission plus a fudge factor. I like the diver's rule of thirds, when means I try to have 30% more ÃŽâ€v than I need. Do you need two, three, or four LV-T30's to make the stage in question have a TWR greater than 2? I programmed rocket equations into excel so now I just plug and grind. There are also cheat sheets available on the internet by googling "ksp delta v map." ÃŽâ€v requirements. Really the biggest difference in a mission to Eeloo and a mission to Mun is the former uses a LV-N. I even powered my Eeloo mission using solar! I use dozens of Mainsail engines staged asparagus. Or I dock the objects in Kerbin orbit. Or I dock them in orbit at their target destination. Or a combination of all three. Something I've noticed from your questions is that you're designing the rocket from the bottom-up. You need to design it from the top down. First, decide where you want to go. This will tell you what you want the rocket to do, and you can look up the ÃŽâ€v figures for the mission. Then create your payload. If you're going to have it land on Minmus for instance you'll notice you don't need a lot of thrust to have a TWR >2 nor will you need a lot of ÃŽâ€v in the lander itself, so you can make do with LT-5 Micro Struts. It'll also need a probe core, solar panels, and a battery. Maybe even lights. Then you design the stage that will perform the transfer burn. Then you design the stage that will get that out of the upper atmosphere. Then you design the biggest stage that will get it all off the surface. Once you've done it enough, it's entirely possible for complete mission architecture to appear in your mind fully-formed in a flash of inspiration, or to come to you in dreams. Be especially sure to check your dream-math while awake. Speaking of, some sort of flight computer is indispensable for designing your rocket in the VAB. You can't do rocket science by intuition. I don't calculate TWR and ÃŽâ€v manually every time I place a new part, MechJeb does that. I monitor its data to ensure the construction is proceeding to plan. I can also notice if there is a problem in staging that will end in tears if not corrected.