Ol’ Musky Boi

That's a very nice spot for a base!

I think my flag making skills have improved significantly since I last posted: It's based off this neat (unofficial) mission patch for the Juno mission, except I added the little red wing seen in NASA's meatball logo. I think I'll stick to this style in future! Edit: Made a variant that I think is a lot nicer: Edit: Changed the mission name and mixed up the colours a bit:

Are we sure some of these aren't just real rocket launches? I mean, wow guys. This is insane, I love this community. I'm not really sure what you mean by "should be", people have a right to do what they wish with their spare time, if you don't like the challenge, fine, don't submit anything. But there is no reason why everyone else should be demanding compensation if they are fine without it.

Yay! Now we can have proper shuttle replicas! Well, I still wouldn't mind the orange foam option for more tanks...

Steam works the same way, you can play your purchased games on any system you're logged into.

I'd be miffed if I couldn't play KSP 2 at launch not going to lie. But I do understand their reasoning.

I know the new Dev team hasn't confirmed or denied immediate Mac/Linux support. But I think it'd be a right shame if part of the established community couldn't play KSP 2, I'm no programmer though so there might be unforeseen obstacles that I don't understand. Thoughts?

Getting oxygen from the aluminium oxide in regolith instead of water is a lot more energy intensive. It takes 285.8 kJ/mol to split water, but 1675.5 kJ/mol to split Al2O3. I reckon you'd be better off extracting the water and shooting that up instead, at least if you're only trying to build a fuel depot and aren't doing any space manufacturing.

A strategy game where you manage interstellar Kerbal colonies might be interesting, but I'm not sure how well this fits into KSP's charm. Maybe it should stay in this genre.

That's the concept behind the lightcraft, and these engines have actually been flight tested: https://youtu.be/KtH-SxqdtaA?t=110 Not sure if they are still in development though.

New New York

Nice math! A good photon rocket is just about propellant mass fraction then, in which case you're not going to do much better than a quasar drive...

I like it, what about Cratertown?

I like "Untitled Spacecraft Landed on Moon" or USLM for short, it reveals nothing but makes it clear what it is at the same time. Perfect for a military base!

Theoretically, but not practically. You are going to have to lose some mass to generate power to run your lasers or whatever you're using to shoot photons out the back of your rocket. Unless you are using beamed power, as in lights sails, in which case you would have infinite Isp. I think the OP was talking about the first case.

True, I find ancient mythology quite interesting, there are some cool stories in there.

Thanks for the correction, I don't know much about relativity and all this wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff. Hurts me brain.

Things that go faster than light are supposed to go back in time according to special relativity.

You already proposed a moon God! Luna - the Roman goddess of the moon! I agree though, we've already used up too many deities in naming planets, they've become a bit cliche.

If the base is American and not international then perhaps they might call it Kennedy base? Although personally I think its best to keep base names apolitical, name them after Explorers and such. Alternatively, there are a lot of lunar deities to choose from, you could always name the base after one of those. Moon Base Diana has a nice ring to it.

Well, your rocket would violate causality for a start. If you were floating a few light years behind the craft you would see the engines fire, before they actually fired, because presumably your exhaust would travel back in time (I think?). Since we're assuming FTL particles I don't know wether we can still take into account modern physics, but assuming that everything we know now is more or less correct minus the fact that tachyons/quotons actually exist, then the rocket still wouldn't be able to reach >C, because the energy needed to speed it up will still rise to infinity and even tachyons/quotons don't have infinite energy. It would make a great propulsion system though.

You can say that again. I don't know if he's a genius or completely mad or a bit of both! I'm not sure SpaceX will go the direction of having a "mini starship" because the additional development costs would be financially prohibitive. Starship is very much designed to be a cheap jack of all trades rocket, and that works well for SpaceX's limited budget. If there is government interest in using Starship and they sink some money into it, then I imagine they might go the other route.

I'm a little confused by your question. How can you make light that goes faster than light? If a particle exists that could go faster than light, it's not going to be light is it?

1km/s sounds feasible, but I think the big hurdle might be economic. If you're a cubesat manufacturer (I'm assuming this will launch cubesats) you are probably have a small budget, so designing a satellite to survive high G-forces might be too prohibitive. I'll remain pretty skeptical until they produce results, but good luck to them.

I mean, if you could make FTL particles then sure, the higher the exhaust velocity the better your specific impulse. But that is a massive if.