Thor Wotansen

October 24, 2020

5 minutes ago, Scotius said:

Love the look of this booster. So sooty! You know this rocket did stuff and been places

It's a previously loved booster. :wink:

May 13, 2020

I'm currently trying to use this for a challenge involving Duna. I'm doing the challenge in a sandbox save, but it was launched legitimately, without cheats, and weighs in at a cool 1020ish tons. It's currently loaded up with various landers and base pieces, and has a ΔV of about 2300m/s (with the landers all fully fueled). On the launch pad, the part count was just shy of 1000 parts.

February 17, 2020

Can you fault a hard working booster for wanting a bit of R&R in the ocean after a job well done?

December 23, 2019

The following mission ideas can be taken as challenges, however I will not be scoring them. I will continue adding more missions to the series as time progresses. Feel free to follow the series from Mission 1 through numerically, or just pick one that sounds fun, just be forewarned that the later missions will be structured with the assumption that you have completed the previous missions. I am pulling inspiration from several real life mission proposals from various sources, as will be evident, and each Mission will have a few options for how to complete it. I won't put any mod restrictions on anything, since I won't be scoring anything, but I am designing the missions for stock KSP with DLCs. Feel free to use whatever mods, cheats, or divine rituals to the Kracken you wish. The only requirement is that you enjoy yourself. If you don't, the Fun Police will be administering Mandatory Fun according to Hilarity Protocol 365.7 subsection A.

Mission 1: Return to the Mun!

Spoiler

The goal of Mission 1 is to return Kerbals to the surface of the Mun. They will not, however, go unprepared, like last time. Instead, we will be be sending them with a way to get back to Kerbin, as well as reliable communications.

For this mission we need to design several things. We will need two launch vehicles, a Medium class and a Heavy class. The Medium class launch vehicle will be used for launching crew and supplies to low Munar orbit, and the Heavy class will be needed to launch some of the more bulky things. We will also need a survey satellite in a polar orbit of the Mun to survey for ore deposits, as well as at least three communications satellites so that we have constant communications with the brave Kerbonauts who will be setting foot upon the Mun. Lastly, we will need a reusable single stage Mun lander, capable of landing and returning to Mun orbit (or achieving Mun orbit and landing again) without refueling. This lander must be able to carry an external payload, which could be a base module, a rover, or a crew module.

There are two ways to go about satisfying the Mission 1 requirements.

Mission 1a: The Gateway

After designing your launch vehicles and launching the required satellites, construct a modular space station in Munar orbit. The station will need a station core, with power an propulsion, a science lab, and two habitation modules. It will also need space to dock at least three vehicles at any given time, and it must be able to fully refuel the reusable lander from either it's core, or from a fifth fuel storage module. The modules for this station are to be launched on the Heavy launch vehicle. The station is to be resupplied by crew and cargo vehicles launched by the Medium launch vehicle.

Mission 1b: Mun Direct

After designing your launch vehicles and launching the required satellites, construct a modular base on the Mun, at a place with lots of ore. The base will need a core, with power and a refinery, a science lab, and two habitation modules. The modules are to be launched by the Heavy launch vehicle, and delivered to the surface by the reusable lander. The base will also need a rover, for extended science trips. The base will be resupplied by crew and cargo vehicles launched by the Medium launch vehicle, to low Munar orbit. There, the reusable lander will rendezvous with the crew or cargo vehicle to ferry the crew or cargo down to the surface.

The Launch Vehicles:

The launch vehicles can be whatever you want, rocket, spaceplane, or some weird amalgamation with bits from both and solid rocket motors strapped to the side for good measure. They can be fully disposable, or fully reusable, whichever you wish. Make sure they are versatile, however, because we're going to be using them in future missions. I recommend designing the Heavy to be able to launch two station modules (or two base modules) at a time, and designing the Medium to be able to launch a full crew rotation, or a decent amount of cargo (probably fuel, unless you're using life support mods). If want, you could launch a reusable tug for moving things from LKO to LMO and make the Medium vehicle smaller or dedicate more of it to crew/cargo. This option might become increasingly attractive in future missions, and may even become a requirement. If you choose to use SSTO spaceplanes for your launch vehicles, a tug is strongly recommended for delivering modules from LKO to LMO, since designing a heavy lift SSTO spaceplane that can deliver cargo to the Mun and beyond is quite challenging.

I will be adding more missions as I complete them. Enjoy :cool:

November 11, 2019

That landing was epicly casual, lol. The booster was like "man, I got this."

October 17, 2019

Well, if you do design a separate service module for Dragon to dock to to go around the Moon, you could always add in a cabin, I mean, you're already docking to it. That way you wouldn't have to jeopardize the abort capabilities of the Dragon by loading the trunk with a full service module.

October 16, 2019

It would be easier to launch a separate service module on the FH and then launch a Dragon on a F9 to dock in LEO before going on to the Moon. The 30ish tons of payload should be enough for a service module to put a Dragon around the moon and back.

October 16, 2019

@kerbiloid and @Dragon01 what do you guys think about Thorium liquid sodium reactors? I know you guys have a lively discussion about nuclear treaties over in the SSTO thread, just thought I'd throw another element in the mix over here.

October 16, 2019

I'm starting this thread as a place to discuss ideas and nerdy details for all forms of alternative energy, from nuclear reactors providing electrical power, to linear generators powered by the movement of a human doing human things to power personal devices. It seems nerdy discussions of the merits of various energy sources and their carbon footprint pop up in various places, so why not condense them into one place?

To start off, I've had an idea kicking around in my head for a year or so now, for a linear permanent magnet generator built into something like a knapsack or backpack that charges a few 18650 cells for the purpose of recharging personal devices like cell phones and cameras. I've seen flashlights use these and achieve remarkable efficiency in the process. Something similar could also be built into a belt or something you can clip onto a belt, and your batteries could be arranged like the ammo belts of the wild west for that cyberpunk look.

Another idea I had is a collapsible vertical axis wind turbine that can fit in a bag like the ones you stuff camp chairs into. There's a lot of options for outdoorsy types to recharge things with solar, but solar doesn't work so well under trees or at night. I haven't done any 3D modeling, but the geometry should work.

October 15, 2019

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

That would be KSP level ISRU as in you get free energy.
In real world you have to use much more energy generating this methane than the energy in the methane.
This work at Mars as the cost of one liter of methane on Mars would cost as much as one liter of good cognac even if skipped in by starship.
Earth don't work like that, if you want to be carbon neutral you buy methane or LNG and sell clean power to compensate.

Add that Mars atmosphere is thin but its mostly co2, on earth its .4% who would complicate any process working on atmospheric co2 a lot.
In short any plan to capture co2 from the atmosphere is an scam, why not capture at the exhaust from an power plant or simply don't use it.
And no testing an Mars ISRU system on earth would be useless, test in in an low pressure mostly co2 atmosphere.

From Wikipedia:

Quote

The Sabatier reaction or Sabatier process was discovered by the French chemist Paul Sabatier and Senderens in 1897. It involves the reaction of hydrogen with carbon dioxide at elevated temperatures (optimally 300–400 °C) and pressures in the presence of a nickel catalyst to produce methane and water. Optionally, ruthenium on alumina (aluminium oxide) makes a more efficient catalyst. It is described by the following exothermic reaction.^[1]^[2]

CO2+4H2→pressure400 ∘CCH4+2H2O{\displaystyle {\ce {CO2{}+4H2->[{} \atop 400\ ^{\circ }{\ce {C}}][{\ce {pressure}}]CH4{}+2H2O}}} ${\ce {CO2{}+4H2->[{} \atop 400\ ^{\circ }{\ce {C}}][{\ce {pressure}}]CH4{}+2H2O}}$ ∆H = −165.0 kJ/mol

The reaction is exothermic, meaning it produces heat. This means you can remove heat while still maintaining the 300-400 °C needed for the optimal reaction. Heat can be used for all sorts of useful things, like powering a sterling engine to run a generator to electrolize water for hydrogen, or liquefy air to extract pure CO2, with a cryocooler. So yes, as long as you don't let any methane escape into the atmosphere, you can have some of your lunch for free.

October 15, 2019

1 hour ago, OOM said:

Find a Cheap Methane Source ...

I believe SpaceX is eventually planning to have a ISRU unit using the Sabatier process to make their own methane out of a bit of hydrogen and CO2 from the atmosphere. One benefit of this is that it creates a decent amount of excess energy that can be harnessed to do things like make electricity. I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX was carbon neutral by 2030.

October 14, 2019

5 minutes ago, tater said:

Boyle thinks the new owner is Northrop Grumman. Interesting...

I wonder if they're going to use the Roc to transport submarines or something....

I do hope it gets used for something, and doesn't just become another aviation record holder that slowly wastes away in a hangar somewhere where people pay $5 to see it.

October 13, 2019

Sounds like it might end up being a net loss then.... :cool:

October 13, 2019

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

First try to do that. It's protected by bioprotection (~6 m of concrete or corresponding amount of other materials.) and by the hull armor.

I have a very hard time imagining a serious spaceship design that includes 6 meter thick concrete anywhere, while still being something that can accelerate at multiple Gs. The reason we use concrete as radiation containment for reactors here on Earth is that it has a fairly high water content (hence hydrogen), it is a structural material that is easy to build with, it can be mixed with all sorts of things like pieces of lead, and it's very inexpensive compared to other alternatives. We also tend to worry about contamination of the surroundings of the reactor, something that's just not a concern in space. A spaceship with a fission or fusion reactor will have minimal radiation shielding compared to a ground based power plant, and it will not use 6 meters of concrete for any of it. There are plenty of materials and techniques for shielding reactors that are significantly lighter and more compact than concrete, not to mention easier to produce in places without limestone. A 10kg tungsten projectile traveling at 5km/s is remarkably good at poking holes in all sorts of things, since 10kg of tungsten is only 520 cubic centimeters, or a little more than half a liter (~1 quart, 22lbs).

October 13, 2019

35 minutes ago, Codraroll said:

And with that amount of energy poured into a projectile, it would be incredibly wasteful for it to be a simple hole puncher. If it doesn't lose speed traveling through its target, it means it fails to impart much of its kinetic energy onto it. Ideally, you want it to slow all the way down to zero, so the target has to deal with all that kinetic energy. The first impact of the projectile would start a cascade of shrapnel which would also travel at several kilometers per second, taking with it anything in its path and starting new cascades when the shrapnel hits something else. Essentially, a ship hit by a railgun round would turn into a giant shotgun aimed at itself. A hit at that speed would wring the ship inside out.

I you punch a neat hole in a nuclear reactor, how well does it work? Deigning armor to defeat a high energy projectile that shatters like that is challenging, but doable, especially if you use your armored outer hull as an oversized whipple shield and armor your reactor with a good slab of high strength ceramics with a reactive surface composite over top. It's much harder to design an armor system to defeat a solid slug that doesn't deform much on it's way through a nuclear reactor at a decent fraction of orbital velocity for LEO

I know the writers of The Expanse aren't science nerds to the level folks like us are, and therefore I forgive them for writing a railgun that fires projectiles at relativistic speeds that can be mounted to a ship or space station. Let's be real here, it doesn't matter if you're firing a one gram projectile, if it leaves your barrel at "near relativistic" speeds, your ship/space station is being flung in the other direction with some alacrity, that is if it hasn't turned itself to plasma in the process of accelerating that slug. 5-10km/s in a vacuum environment with near-ish future tech is believable, but nothing short of a massive mass driver built into a moon is going to get anything to near relativistic speeds without some serious issues. The Lorentz forces on the rails from the energy needed for that kind of speed would overcome any structural material we can imagine, not to mention the sheer amount of electrical energy you'd have to put through the rails to achieve those forces. You'd be better off using a nuke as propellant for a big slab of something. A more sensible solution would be a staged coilgun with a barrel a good 100km long accelerating a 500kg hunk of steel to 20km/s or something, maybe even 30km/s is believable for a mass driver of that size.

October 13, 2019

29 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Don't the rounds become pancakes in the barrel due to the accelerations and waste heat?

What's that railgun barrel length?

Tungsten is a remarkable material, it is incredibly dense and is one of the toughest metals we have. A solid slug of it won't really deform, even at thousands of Gs acceleration. The biggest problem with railguns is getting the slug to transmit all the power without welding itself to the rails. This is normally done by getting it going at a good clip before it reaches the rails. The other big problem is heat. This can be mitigated by using a high temperature superconductor like a Yttrium/Barium conductor at a temperature of around 77°K to transmit the power to the rails. We might even be able to use the superconductor as the rails, but I don't think that's been tried yet. Basically, with better materials and a longer barrel, as well as the fantastic thermal properties of a vacuum, it should be possible to make a railgun that fires a smallish tungsten projectile at a good 5km/s, more than enough to overcome whatever armor you'd be inclined to wrap your reactor in. Most reactor armor will be geared toward defending against more conventional guns, like PDCs, since they'll be more common in the battle space. If someone makes a railgun that can fire a 10kg slug at 5km/s there's really no point in trying to armor something to withstand it, especially if you want that something to move.

October 13, 2019

The form and organism takes is highly dependent on it's diet. For the most part, I would expect that most, if not all, species that achieve intelligence and sentience to be omnivores. Large carnivores are, by nature, very territorial, and they are unlikely to develop agriculture or fire, since evolution would have given them a digestive system that obviates the need for plant crops and cooking. Without agriculture or fire, the species won't advance to the stone age. A herbivore might be able to pull it off, but most herbivores go for either big herds for safety in numbers, or for large size (or both). They also tend to have no need of cooking, and will instinctively fear fire, as well as a lot of other things. Their digestive systems require a lot of intake to provide the energy they need, and in general, high energy foods like grains and starches, are quite unhealthy for them. Omnivores, on the other hand, aren't specialized in eating any particular thing, which means their digestive systems kinda sucks at a extracting energy from a good portion of their diet. This means that cooking is a massive advantage, and therefore, taming fire is more likely. This means that our species must have some way of easily manipulating things. Humans evolved from apes, who were optimized for life in trees, although the larger apes evolved to work better on the ground. Humans are the pinnacle of the ground apes, having evolved to have absurdly high stamina, which allowed our ancestors to chase down game like antelopes and deer until they literally died of exhaustion. Our ancestors that lived in trees gave us thumbs and an upright posture, as well as large brains and sharp eyes for calculating jumps between branches. This means that Humans are uniquely specialized in pretty much nothing, but our stamina allowed us to develop all sorts of things. Any technological race, therefore, will have a similarly convoluted evolutionary history, since evolution won't just crank out a big-brained creature that can eat just about anything, with huge stamina reserves and spare appendages for grabbing and carrying things. Instead it will tend to optimize for other things. The creatures that evolve to a technological level will come from tiny niche environments that are sufficiently isolated to allow time for evolution, and sufficiently rich in resources to allow a non-optimized creature to succeed. This rules out any extreme environments and probably also any large biomes. Essentially and technological species will be similar to humans in form, baring any variation in ancestral lineage regarding numbers of limbs and whatnot, although I'd expect four limbs to be pretty common, since more limbs means more muscle and bone for not that much more benefit. That's not to say they won't look really alien, they might have their noses in weird places, or have a prehensile tail. The largest variations will likely be from their planet's gravity and atmospheric density, as well as the nature of the environment they came from. On a planet with lighter gravity (unlikely because of a number of things, but not impossible) they may still live in forests to titanic trees and use their lower limbs as their "hands". On a planet with higher gravity, they might indeed have six limbs and be very squat and muscular. It is very unlikely, though, that any race from a planet with higher gravity achieves space flight. The gravity of Earth stretches the limits of what is possible with chemical fuels, and any planet with higher gravity will require too much ΔV to get any meaningful payload into space.

In summary, the most useful feature for a humanoid race of sentient, technological beings is probably a home planet with an orbital velocity of around 7km/s, an orange dwarf as a sun, and a large moon with a molten core that helps their planet maintain a very strong magnetic field to keep the solar wind of a more active star at bay. A thicker atmosphere might also help, but it could also be a hindrance.

October 13, 2019

10 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Agree with one exception, stripping down an cargo version to make an fuel and oxidizer storage makes plenty of sense.
Yes you have to insulate this but that is fairly easy for an static tank.
For hab modules and stuff no.

That's fair, although it might be more cost effective to just send 150t of starship ring sections curled up tighter in the cargo bay, and weld it in situ into whatever you need. Insulating it will consist of shading it from the sun and any reflected or re-radiated energy and sticking a little cryocooler on it with a big honking radiator. Even a fairly low powered unit would be very effective in an application like that. With 150t of soft landed cargo you'd be ale to get far more in the cargo then you'd get from the ship itself.

October 13, 2019

16 hours ago, Codraroll said:

They are also very fast projectiles. Then again, railguns in The Expanse have always been a little inconsistent, at least in the books. They're not mentioned at all in the first book, then in the next couple of books it's suggested they fire rounds at around five thousand meters per second - which would only make them useful at extremely close ranges, as at a modest 1000 km range it would take more than three minutes for the round to arrive at the place the target used to be. In the later books it's been suggested they fire rounds at "an appreciable fraction of the speed of light", which would make the rounds annihilate pretty much any ship they hit if they had a mininum of splintering capability. Heck, air resistance alone should be enough for them to flash-fry the rooms the rounds passed through, and they'd create pretty nasty shock waves in the process too.

But instead, railgun rounds in The Expanse seem designed to pass through the target with as little friction as possible, punching a small, clean hole through the entire ship and exiting on the other side almost without having slowed down at all. It seems like their primary purpose is exactly the type of behaviour you described - going cleanly through walls for narrative suspense. They provide the threat of a "hole puncher" that can make sudden holes appear in the ship, killing anything along the straight line between them, but sparing the guy who just happened to sit in the next chair over. If railguns had provided immediate destruction of the entire ship every time, those "dodged the bullet" moments couldn't happen.

The problem with railguns will always be that they punch neat holes through things. If I were designing a spaceship for the kind of combat we see in The Expanse, I would engineer the railgun projectiles to punch through the crew compartments exactly like you see in the show. The reason is that the railgun is meant to take out things like drive clusters and reactors, and seriously damage the structure of the vessel, and if it was built to shred the crew compartments, it wouldn't to squat to a reactor with it's heavy shielding and (presumably) armor. I would even go so far as to say that taking out the crew compartments isn't even a priority. Sure, the PDCs and railguns will poke holes in them, and any crew in the way, but the real targets in a fight like that are the crucial systems of the ship, not the crew. This is why I'd have the PDCs firing 20mm armor piercing incendiary rounds, so they wreck any surface mounted equipment like thruster clusters, PDCs and launch tubes, as well as doing damage to the underlying structure of the ship. Missiles would be either nukes or would be designed to take out the main drive systems. The railguns are to poke holes in the reactor(s) and reaction mass tanks from farther away then PDCs can do.

October 9, 2019

Regarding the complaint about ship densities, I can imagine some pretty awesome composite materials using honeycomb titanium alloys and Styrofoam, with carbon fiber outsides, reinforced with something like titanium chicken wire and kevlar. It would be expensive as hell to make right now, because we don't have any demand for such materials, but it would certainly be within possibility to manufacture such panels at high volume. We know that the ships in The Expanse are multi-hulled, like submarines, with the outer layer being armor and main structure, and the inner hulls being pressurized crew areas. I would fully expect all armor to be lightweight ceramics, and most of the frame might be as well, albeit reinforced with titanium and composites where necessary. The pressure vessel would be as light as possible while still supporting the weight and pressure it needs to at design limits plus margin. Inner walls would be just strong enough to support their expected loads at design limits, and would be akin to G tolerant paper walls with a bit of sound deadening. Any decks supporting heavy-ish equipment like reactors, storage lockers, or crew seats, would be reinforced with cross members that tie in with the outer hull and it's structure. The whole thing could be made incredibly durable and light to the point of the mass of the atmosphere inside increasing the density significantly.

October 9, 2019

It really depends on what you want to do with your ship. For the most part though, I think going "tall" is probably the best choice, since it's easier to account for variations in the center of mass in a "tall" ship than in something spread out wide around the engine. This can be somewhat mitigated by having multiple engines and using a combination of gimballing and differential throttle to keep your CoM going through your CoT, but in general, it will be easier to keep everything as close to the thrust axis as possible. The Expanse does a good job of designing believable ships, with the Epstein drive handwave in the mix.

October 9, 2019

8 hours ago, AngrybobH said:

Cooling and electricity is easy for mining equipment as long as you don't mind being on a tether of sorts. Just sink a bunch of pipe in the ground, fill it with coolant, pump it to the vehicle and back to the ground. You can run the electrical from the base power supply with (or in) the coolant tether. And then you don't even need batteries or power generation on the equipment except for emergency systems. Of course you don't even need actual people on the equipment so no need for safety systems. They could be in the base with a VR headset and a direct wired connection. I imagine any kind of mining equipment is much lighter without a battery, power generation, or life support/cockpit so, actually sending it to the moon/mars/wherever would be easier.

I suspect the first machines to be somewhat similar to what Andy Weir describes in his book Artemis. He's got some earth mover type machines picking up rocks for smelting in the base, and they dump their waste heat into a vat of wax with coolant lines running through it. When the machine returns to base with a full load, it hooks up to an external dock and runs coolant through the wax heatsink from the base, while it recharges it's batteries and unloads. The base will already have massive cooling needs, and will radiate the heat away with whatever it normally uses.

As far as building berms and earth structures with local regolith, laser sintering regolith into building blocks is a great option. We already use that technology here on Earth to 3D print metal and plastic, and adapting it to work with fine regolith dust should be fairly straightforward. A small device, maybe a meter cubed, could produce sintered bricks constantly, if at a slowish pace. You could even make it work, on the moon at least, with sunlight and a lens to focus it, although you'd be limited by the daylight cycle.

October 9, 2019

@kerbiloid and @YNM I'm assuming some gravity or facsimile thereof.

4 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

To feed tilapia we can pet mosquitoes. They will eat the crew and drop their eggs into water.

And once per season sacrifice to them the lowest KPI labourer during the country harvest festival.

Otherwise we need some another source of food for tilapia because even organic wastes don't appear themselves.
Does a rice field with tilapias exist anywhere without other plants and animals? At least, the buffalos.

***

Rabbits are probably one of the worst choices as they are highly volatile. They appear and disappear like an eared locust.
Something more predictable is required for a semi-closed ecoloop.

***

Human feces would be the least component of the ecosystem because a food pyramid has ~10:1 ratio of biomass between stages.
So, the human biomass would be just several percent of the total biomass, and its waste is much easier to burn in oxygen converting into water, carbon dioxide, then to carbamide.
Anyway there is a lot of other wastes to cremate in such base.

***

Also we should remember that the smaller is the beast (rabbit, tilapia, hen, etc), the more it gorges relative to its mass.
The smallest of them eat more per day than they mass themselves.
So, small creatures are less effective.

***

The entire system is a closed loop, with the only inputs and outputs being the humans traveling and whatever their digestive tracts contain, once it has fully matured.

Growing insects to supplement the fishes diet is a good idea, but I'd be more inclined to grow something like crickets or ants, that can live off of agricultural byproducts or food scraps. Flys are also a good option.

Rabbits are quite dependable when kept as livestock in a controlled space. Breeding and raising rabbits for food is already quite common in some health food circles, and it certainly isn't hard to encourage them to reproduce. Their low individual food needs are also a plus if the system gets shocked to a point of near failure. You could butcher all but a few breeding pairs and keep those few fed on stored feed until the crops can catch back up.

Human waste is pretty analogous to what is eaten as food, mass wise. Burning that waste is a potential way to get rid of it, but using it as fertilizer for further crops seems like a better option in my mind. Once a sustainable system is set up, the rate of growth of plants and animals will be fairly constant, since you'll want to be harvesting every day, and presumably pooping on a similar frequency. There might be an eventual need to add some biomass to the system, as a population grows by having babies, but that could also be accomplished by adding raw or processed regolith, after determining it's mineral content.

Yes, smaller animals do eat more of their body mass every day, but remember, they also poop more of their body mass every day. In general, small creatures like fish and rabbits are actually more efficient at converting a given quantity of calories into meat or milk. They also reach harvesting age much faster, so they provide a much quicker return on the calories, and also don't tie up tons of biomass over a long growing period. Dairy cows, for instance, require roughly ten times the food as dairy goats, but only produce four times the milk. They also take longer to reach maturity and generally weigh around 1000lbs, making them a significant concentration of calories that you can't tap into. For rabbits, they are happy eating mostly grass or other leafy things, and reach harvesting age in a matter of a couple months. Fish are actually the most impressive meat animal, since they have the highest percentage of body mass usable as food, since each fish is mostly just one huge swimming muscle with some bits to keep it working.

6 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

Research facilities will likely be established - but orbital settlements are so advantageous that planets and moons look pretty lackluster in comparison. The biggest advantage is probably ease. If we were to do an analysis of settlements on the Moon, Mars, and in orbital space (specifically Equatorial Low Earth Orbit (or ELEO) for now, but eventually we might be able to dispel the Van Allen radiation belts - freeing up a lot more orbital real estate...) we would likely find that the mass requirements for a given population size are pretty close - this is because the Moon and Mars settlements can use local regolith as radiation protection and the radiation doses in ELEO are actually pretty mild - as well as life support mass likely scaling with population more directly than other factors.

I would tend to disagree. The type of radiation we're concerned about on the moon, Mars and in LEO is the high energy galactic scale radiation. Producing a magnetic field strong enough to repel the ionizing particles in solar radiation isn't too demanding, compared to the kind of field you'd need to protect from the galactic scale stuff. Here on Earth, the atmosphere and it's ~100km of mass between space and us does a great job of intercepting the worst of it, but on the moon of Mars, we'd have half a sky raining radiation on us at roughly twice the level of the surface of Earth. The only way to really stop this is with a large mass of something. Hydrogen works the best, making water a good candidate, but on a planet or moon, you can bury your habitat under a few meters of regolith and be pretty safe. If you're building an orbital habitat, that mass will have to come from somewhere, and there's a good chance it will come from the moon, if you're building around Earth. Regardless, the same food requirements remain, whether you're on a planetary surface, or in an O'Neil cylinder. I can certainly see us building massive space habitats with spin gravity and strippers and blackjack, but the first steps are undoubtedly the moon and Mars. Figuring stuff out there, where you don't have to worry so much about structural support for your massive radiation shield is imperative to doing it for realzies on a fleet of O'Neil cylinders.

October 9, 2019

25 minutes ago, YNM said:

One of the problem with fishes is just the amount of water that they need. Plus we don't know whether they still work on reduced gravity or not.

Although it's possible to create a fish-hydro/aeroponic closed loop - there are installations on Earth that works this way already.

The cool thing about fish is that they don't care about gravity, they already live in what is effectively a 0G environment. We know that gravity is necessary for some stages of fetal development, and I assume the same is true for fish, but for the most part, they should do fine in low G.

October 9, 2019

51 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

Even if we can make a lot of food, probably a deciding factor on colonization is whether or not it tastes good.

I just do not see people lining up to go to space habitats en mass knowing full well they will be eating the same meal for weeks/months on end. Not for fun anyway. Only for professionals.

That exactly the point of space farming. With an aquaponics system, it is possible to grow everything from lettuce and spinach, to things like ginger and sweet potatoes, and everything in between. You could easily incorporate things like chickens and rabbits into the system for eggs and meat (rabbits are one of the most feed efficient sources of meat, as well as having almost entirely fat free meat). With a large enough colony, you could incorporate goats into the system for milk, and start making things like cheese and yogurt. Any crop you can grow here on earth, you could grow in a fairly simple space farm. In fact, I would hazard a guess that in a hundred years, life expectancy will be higher on Moon and Mars colonies simply due to a better diet and cleaner air, as well as possibly reduced radiation exposure, since we'll be building mostly under ground, and Earth has had a few nuclear accidents that have done a great job of distributing radioactive materials throughout the biosphere.

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