Winter Man

Well, it wouldn't. You'd be able to spend that cash on other stuff. Maybe both would be good? Get an option to sell for scrap value or reuse?

Thought it might come in handy once money and contracts are introduced. Vehicle sections recovered on Kerbin could be made available as a sub-assembly (maybe under a new tab for 'Recovered Stages' or something) with only a small 'refurbishment' cost of about a tenth of their value. It'd make building spaceplanes and reusable lower stages actually worth the effort, monetarily speaking. edit: Maybe a slight knock to max. engine temps to simulate wear and tear and part lifespan? Quite possible with tweakables.

The best defense is isolation. Stick themselves in a solar orbit then send telepresence robots to do their initial interaction.

Not the point though, we didn't take nukes to the moon. Could've been rock crabs there, we didn't know that.

You assume they're armed.

Strike a deal with them. They have spacefaring capability, we have two other worlds and a fair few moons in need of colonisation.

We already have the Galactic Coordinate System which places the sun at the centre and 0 degrees towards the true centre. Until FTL travel is invented, there's really no need to have it any other way as here is our only reference point on the universe.

I bet they want to, but it'd be Musk's MO to open a terrestrial mining company first to get experience or partner with someone that already has it.

The difference here is the empires of old travelled to get things they couldn't source locally, either through exhausted supply (gold) or insufficient climate (spices). No point mining aluminium or iron to bring it to Earth when we have plenty here already. Platinum group metals, maybe, but not from Venus.

Let's be honest, by the time either bispheres on Mars or flying cloud cities on Venus are feasible, we're going to do both because they're both incredibly cool.

For mining on Venus, you wouldn't need all that much cooling. Just dig down and insulate your tunnel with super duper space age aerogel which you totally have because you've got a freaking city on Venus, and you won't have a problem.

Wasn't going to comment, but as both of you said it... Get Google Sky Map, it's great. He said he used it in the OP.

Jesus, don't go then. You can do an awful lot with just a ground penetrating radar, and that doesn't need daylight.

Of course it's not flight ready, it's all too heavy and requires too much power. My point is if you don't care about weight and power requirements (not a very common trait in the spaceflight business) you can do it now. If you have the ability to get an enormous mining rig to the moon you've already got ample capability. It is indeed, but while both methods allow deterrence this allows permanence.

Other than, y'know, continuing to live.

If you can send the equipment to the moon to dig a hole big enough for a missile silo, you can certainly do closed loop life support. It's not that the techniques are beyond us, just that they use a prohibitive amount of power in their current states. So yeah, a few solar panels and a greenhouse would do it, they'd just have to be a really big few.

Because a nuclear submarine will run out of food and air. A moonbase that is, as I've already pointed out, advanced enough to launch interplanetary missiles won't.

So's the ability to build a bloody missile silo on the moon. If you can build a nuclear moonbase, you can build a greenhouse and a few solar panels.

I would forget Van der Waals, wouldn't I. Yeah I see where they're coming from now, for some reason I was imagining a room temperature solid. Assumptions'll be the death of me.

Exactly like that, yes, but with more survivability since by that point you likely have yourself a little self-sustaining moon colony.

I dunno, militarising the moon could work as some kind of MAD. Even if China were completely neutralised in a preemptive first strike, ignoring the fact that the fallout from that many bombs would probably do it for them, they could still launch 'revenge' nukes at their aggressors. Low visibility, low radar profile MIRVs. You could never get them all.

I think you're missing the point a little, he said they were trying to bond metastable with regular helium. I understand how bonds work (I have a very good knowledge of organic chemistry but not so much on the metallic side). My point was, the metastable component would have to be more electronegative than fluorine to actually get the standard helium atom to bond with it to the point of absurdity.

..how are they planning on bonding it? Helium's noble, so boosting the electrons to a higher state in one atom wouldn't somehow allow the other to bond, would it? I mean, unless your metastable helium is more electronegative than fluorine, then you've got a compound that will decompose more readily than the xenon fluorides. Horrible to store, no doubt.

I'd have thought that the portals would actually have to impart energy on you, what with moving you to a higher point in a gravity well. Either that or you have to force your own way through the portal with the same equivalent energy as physically raising yourself to the ceiling.

Y'know Randall Munroe's got an asteroid named after him? I'd name mine Scrambles. The Death Dealer.