SargeRho

Ships stopping when their engines shut off. Especially if it's done selectively. Stargate has instances of ships stopping when their engines go out, and instances of ships continuing to drift.

Ram heating would still occur. Reentry heat isn't from friction, but primarily due to ram heating.

Yes, it probably is. The Space Shuttle is a bad example of a reusable spacecraft. Because it really isn't. It's a refurbishable spacecraft. It also had a lot of stuff it didn't need. Big Dumb Booster is one way of doing it, but given the performance requirements, I'm not entirely sure that it's actually viable.

Several different laser weapons are already in development, some defensive and some offensive. Neutral Particle Beam cannons should be viable, too, but only in space or the upper atmosphere, so, several sci-fi weapons are certainly possible.

Not really. A gas giant wouldn't burn for very long. Very high mass brown dwarfs however, might have life-supporting companions. An ice-moon on an eccentric orbit might also allow life in its subsurface ocean, ie, Europa, Ganymede and Enceladus.

"Tuvalu, formerly known as the Ellice Islands, is a Polynesian island nation located in the Pacific Ocean, midway between Hawaii and Australia [...].The total land area of the islands of Tuvalu is 26 square kilometres (10 sq mi). "

There's no good reason not to have spinning colonies if you can build them. You can always have a zero-g shipyard/docking yard trailing behind or leading ahead of the station in an identical orbit. I have a sci-fi universe where zero-g shipyards anchored to the planet via space elevator are basically standard practice, and many have O'Neill cylinders trailing a few hundred kilometers behind them in their orbit. With more O'Neill cylinders and Stanford Toruses as space cities elsewhere.

@Andem Why would the be unable to go planetside? Spinning colonies would probably have close to 1g of gravity, maybe a bit less. There's no reason why the inhabitants shouldn't be able to walk on planets. The lighting would either come in the form of filtered sunlight, or artificial sunlight.

@SpaceceptionThen the size will depend entirely on the needs and engineering limits. Obviously, you won't build The Citadel in the middle of nowhere somewhere to the left of Tau Ceti. But I can easily see a 15km diameter torus orbiting outside of Jupiter's radiation belt, remotely orbiting Ammonia miners on Callisto, and serving as resting place for travelers to Ganymedean and Europan underwater/underice colonies, or large freighters waiting to refill their Antiproton Storage Rings. Toroidal colonies might also have a river/lake running all along the outer wall, used to stabilize the rotation of the station, and serving as fresh water reservoirs.

All of these depend on the size of the orbital habitat. Assuming it's big enough for all of these... 1: Hydroponic/Aeroponics for the most part, but also some normal farming. In a giant O'Neill cylinder, you could even have Earth-like farms lining the walls. 2: Sewage treatment plants. And oysters. 3: How many resources can you cough up? 4: Hundreds to tens of thousands, some of the larger ones might even hold millions. 5: They'd probably either orbit planetary L-points, to be able to easily trade with both the planet below, and other planets. L points are rather easy to reach in the Earth/Moon system. Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are also good spots to build one. I expect Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter to become very busy once we move into the outer solar system. Others might orbit near the Asteroid Belt. 6: I'm not sure I understand the question. But they will probably only be built in spots that offer some sort of economic incentive. Ice mining on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, Nitrogen mining around Uranus and Neptune, Helium 3 harvesting on Uranus, overseeing the Terraforming of Mars, or maybe some exoplanet? 7: Not much differently from us. Except the sky would be either the ceiling of the torus, or the opposite wall of the cylinder. This would be an amazing sight to see. I hope medical and technological advances will allow me to live long enough to see this. The more I think about orbital colonies, the more I like the idea. There are most likely going to be 3 types of orbital colonies. Luxury resorts and habitats, in the Cassini Division for example, exchange ports, in Low Earth Orbit, and built next to Phobos for example, and Space Cities, to allow the workforce and their family to be closer to the action. We might see something like the Coriolis Stations in Elite: Dangerous. Orbital trade and culture hubs, that might even allow smaller ships to dock inside, at some point, if we end up with small shuttle type spacecraft, with varied gravity levels, more on the outer parts of the station, less on the inner parts.

Dragon V2, unless there is some major safety concern that isn't present in CST-100.

Mars has a lot of frozen water, though. So, once it's warm enough, there'll be plenty of water to go around. That's no argument against crashin' some comets though

Probably not, but hopefully yes.

We should mine it. And build a space elevator out of it.

I'm overweight. But I'm in the process of fixing that. Other than that...oh, yeah, I dropped out of highschool because I loved developing video games too damn much. That might actually be a good thing, I suppose things will need programming on Mars?

Also note that, while the Galactica class Battlestars have retractable flight pods, the Mercury and Valkyrie type Battlestars have fixed pods. The reason for the Galactica's retractable pods is that the older jump drives wouldn't allow her to jump safely with extended pods. That issue was solved with newer FTL drives. During the assault on New Caprica, Galactica used one of its FTL drives to jump into NC's atmosphere to launch vipers, and then jumped back out using her second FTL drive, with retracted flight pods, and remained relatively unharmed. But in the final episode, she jumped with extended pods, and was severely damaged, not just because of having been under heavy fire previously.

I've used a 1 1/2 stage rocket, that drops 2 engines once it's light enough.

Aww. I bought KSP mere weeks late to transfer it to Steam D:

And again, because now my Kerbals are stuck in orbit around Duna:

I went to Duna. Again.

That's with current particle accelerators. Saturn is probably the best bet for harvesting antimatter, due to its large rings. Particles smashing into it produce quite a bit of antimatter, in addition to its magnetic field capturing extrasolar antimatter..

The Atlas drops 2 of its engines in flight, but it doesn't drop a full stage. Hence 1 1/2 stage.

If there was enough CO2 in the atmosphere, yes, it would sometimes snow CO2 at the south pole, and I would guess that in 2010, when it got to -94.7°C, quite a bit of CO2 did indeed freeze out.

True, however, for an initial settlement, these would be perfect. Later you can make your own tunnels more easily.

How about Lava tubes, then? They exist on both Mars and the Moon. Seal them, pressurize them, and you have a nice living space. Surface habitats can simply be buried in Martian and Lunar dirt.