Nathair

I don't even think they should be contracts as such. Everything on the World's First list should be available all the time as a kind of checklist.

The problem is not producing oxygen. Oxygen is the third most common element in the universe! The problem is in ending up with substantial free oxygen remaining in the atmosphere.

Certainly possible, look at HAT-P-6b.

Maybe a profoundly radioactive planet would get the job done. A youngish planet made entirely of the right radioactive elements with a heavy greenhouse atmosphere might do it?

I hate to quibble but... OK, I love to quibble but just because something does not exist or has not been found does not mean it's not possible.

Eh, sort of. Rendezvous near Mun then dock two vessels near Mun then transfer crew near Mun then rendezvous near Minmus then dock two vessels near Minmus then transfer crew near Minmus... There is a certain logic to them but it's painfully simplistic and rather grindy in spots.

That's what I find. I confess I do dream of a day when there's a proper career mode. Sadly, I don't think that Squad has any interest at all in redoing it and I don't think it's something mods can achieve.

The range of the best antenna on the craft is unmodified by the multiple antenna multiplier. Take all the other antennae on that craft, add their ranges together and multiply that total by the multiplier you set. Add that result to the best antenna range and that's your total range. With a multiplier of 0.5; If you had 2 identical omnis with a range of 10, the total craft range would be 10 + (10 * 0.5) = 15 If you had 3 identical omnis with a range of 10, the total craft range would be 10 + ((10+10)*0.5) = 20 I think of the new stock comm system as RT-Lite

This. It'd be a deal breaker for me.

Like a Doodlebug how?

It really depends on the density of the matter we'd need to plow through. Is interstellar space is as empty as it seems? There's one good way to find out!

No, you said words to the effect that a recruitment policy which takes gender into account is a demonstration of widespread female privilege. I can't quote it directly because you have deleted the original remarks and substituted something entirely new above my response. Treating people equally is a nonsense goal. Working towards equality of opportunity in broader society is a much more rational approach but we are not talking about that here. NASA is working towards a particular outcome. What you are asking is that NASA implement a recruitment policy which pays attention to, and only to, the particular criteria which you think are important and has as its only goal the outcome which you prefer. Gender balance, quite obviously, not being one of those criteria in either methodology nor desired outcome. NASA, equally obviously, completely disagrees with your preferences. Either way, it is obvious that "No women would volunteer" is simply wrong. How can the gender ratio of applicants to the CSA possibly represent preferential treatment for women? Regardless, the point is that a substantial number of women do, did and would volunteer. I am not going to get into a full-on debate about entitlement vs desert here nor about the ethical status of inclusivity policies or the myths of meritocracy, the KSP forums are emphatically not the place for that. We have, I believe, quite clearly established that the idea that any component or aspect of space exploration or colonization would or should just naturally or statistically be one hundred percent male is flatly incorrect. If you need a more complete explanation of why it is also pernicious and offensive another venue would be more appropriate.

If you believe that equal gender representation in this arena is a demonstration of widespread female privilege then you are not calling out sexism, you are demonstrating it.

Without a roof, yes. As I said the dense-enough atmosphere would expand into a huge "bubble" of rarefied gas pretty much instantly. It would then rapidly blow away, but the instant rarefaction makes it useless for our purposes immediately. Since roofing the planet is an impractical notion (to say the least) we would just roof the areas in which we actually need to have an atmosphere. It's not like we'd colonize the Moon or Mars and instantly need to climate control every square centimetre of the surface, just enough of it to live and work in. There's really no escaping (escaping, get it?) the fact that it's gravity that holds the air down and Moon or Mun there just isn't enough G to do the job.

I'm not sure how you have moved this into the past tense, there are women astronauts today who want to go into space today. But you are correct in one thing, the fact that there are women who want to go into space doesn't mean that the general female population feels the same. Of course, the fact that there are men who want to go into space doesn't mean that the general male population feels the same way either. If we were talking about grabbing random people off the street and shipping them as colonists then that might matter but that's not what we are talking about. We are talking about volunteers and so the fact that there are both men and women who want to go is all that matters here. We know this to be true. The Mars One project called for volunteers and received hundreds of thousands of application from men and women. Your speculations about an all-male volunteer cohort completely ignore the fact that as long as we've been doing this we have always had volunteers of both genders. Probably, but the exact ratio isn't the issue here. NASA's current class is 50/50, CSA's most recent ratio was 70/30, Mars One's first round selection ratio was 55/45. Nowhere is there any justification whatsoever to even suggest that in the actual event of a colonization mission the gender ratio of volunteers would suddenly change to become 100% male. I'm sure you didn't intend to be quite as thoroughly offensive as you just were.

Even if it would take about a thousand years to go from an Earth style atmosphere to the current Lunar exosphere, that's not the problem. Even though we would find the atmosphere useless to our purposes long before it reached current conditions, that's not the problem. (Half an atmosphere isn't going to help us much.) Even though the rate at which the atmosphere bled away would be highest at the start and so the breaking point for our purposes would be quite early in that curve rather than dozens or hundreds of years down the road, that is still not the problem. Even though the elements of the atmosphere would vanish at different rates, changing the composition as it went, that's still not the biggest problem. The problem is that if you installed, somehow, an Earth style atmosphere on the Moon it would take (without some sort of roof to hold it in) a matter of minutes (or seconds) for it to inflate to the point that the surface conditions were comparable to standing at the top of Everest. So although it might take a hundred years to blow off enough atmosphere to make it completely useless for our purposes the fairly rapid loss of atmosphere would not be as important as the almost instant rarefaction of the atmosphere.

It is but, in this case, I lament more about the wasted opportunities. What would things look like today if they had said "Hell, yes!" to Jerrie Cobb?

Did it just get very 1958 in here? There are plenty of women astronauts, sixty (60) of whom have been to space. As I mentioned above, women make up fully half of the NASA's current class. In the CSA's most recent recruiting effort the balance was not quite as equitable but was still a seventy/thirty split. The only way you can think that all the colonists would end up being male for statistical reasons is if you only plan on having a colony of two or three people. Or (and this is much more likely) if the people making the selections have some of the quaint ideas about gender that have popped up in this thread.

You are joking, right? This is 2017 you must be joking, right? The only, ONLY, reason there have not been women astronauts from day one is that the women were turned away from the program. Even when women went so far as to privately fund recruiting and testing procedures to parallel the male astronaut program the qualified women were still refused entry. They took the fight all the way to the U.S. House of Representatives and were again refused entry. The only inclination issue there was an inclination towards sexism and male privilege. As it stands today NASA's current class of astronauts is fifty percent female and I can think of no reason to expect otherwise.

Technically the Moon has a surface boundary exosphere the molecules of which are basically each following their own free path around the moon as dictated by gravity. It's not an atmosphere in the sense we are discussing. An actual atmosphere would blow away in very short order leaving things very much as they are now.

I've got three in Munar orbit, does that count? Other than that Mun is just a quick, early career stop-off before doing real the work.

Um? How exactly does gender enter into this?

Is being elected the same thing as being bitten back?

There should be a law under which you have to define the word "energy" before you use it in a discussion. This could also apply to "Quantum", "Theory", "Entropy"... It would help to localize confusion.

If the moon could hold onto an atmosphere it would have one.