Accelerando

A giant concrete cube. You can buy 80-lb bags of concrete at the Home Depot for about $3.30. You'd probably be able to do even better if you work something out with a bulk supplier. But let's say you go with Home Depot. You can buy about 360 bags, or 28800 pounds of concrete. That's a block of concrete about 1.75 meters on a side! I don't know what you would use it for, but I'm sure somebody would be impressed.

I don't know of games prior to the 2000s that allowed you to build your own space vehicles from scratch much - but Frontier: Elite 2 (same Elite as E:Dangerous) for the Amiga was relatively realistic in its spaceflight and combat model, to my knowledge. Km/s relative speeds, orbital mechanics, time-warp features, and the like.

There's no such thing as a project without vision. Any project that claims to be so just inherits its vision from whatever it's drawing its basic assumptions from - in this case, it's sfconsim/Atomic Rockets/the hard-SF fandom/etc. With that said, I'm very much looking forward to this. It'll be great to have a working game engine to test out various concepts/models/assumptions of space combat within, especially once modders get their hands on it. I just hope that when they start advertising to the public, they'll move the "Scientifically Accurate" bit from the tagline to somewhere less conspicuous (that's not how you sell copies of a game to people outside of the insular hard SF fandom!!) so that it doesn't disappear into obscurity or outright flop like the other half-dozen realistic spaceflight videogame projects I've seen floating around.

Nah. I choose you, @Sanic.

Your model looks crisp and gorgeous, unfinished or otherwise. If I'm to suggest anything, perhaps it could do with more prominent/more expansive yellow-orange-reddish detailing as you've already done with some of the structural trusswork, to help establish the color scheme to the viewer? And I'd assume you would want solar/radiator panels situated farther away from the reactor, in the shadow of the radiation shielding, unless the entire reactor is shielded. I personally usually try to keep panels of all kinds inside the shadow cone, although I don't know if it's absolutely necessary - but it looks cool! A preview to kick off my own contribution: The work in progress of 30 hours' painstaking labor! All by hand with some help from circle and line tools. Perspective faults abound. How I'd love to learn Blender! It's a fusion-powered laser battlestar, radiators and coolant vents lit up like a furnace. The Martin-Marietta Zenith Star was a significant inspiration. Most of my other space-related work is much sketchier, but I'm fairly proud of it nonetheless. A cityship Orion: Scenes from my hard SF universe I've been working on for the past 7 years:

the fact that it's still just an unoptimized movement engine with some shoehorned-in game elements and has hardly changed for the past two years despite rushing into "1.0" and three console release announcements

About 10-15 tries. My average track record is about 1/10.

Kinda funny how a calendar purporting to be of significance to people outside of Christianity would center the completely and totally European "rebirth of civilization" as its zero-date...

It's an engine without a game.

Congratulations, I guess

No, by a significant margin. To be more precise, achivement-oriented groups and more generally enjoyment-oriented groups of players are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's perhaps true that the achievements-oriented players tend to ask the majority of "is X cheating?" questions, but what people argue about in these threads, which forms the basis of contempt for the same threads, is, to my knowledge, whether or not it's okay to apply a certain definition of "fun" universally - "fun" based on achievements, "fun" based on exploding rockets, etc. Personally I set rules in my game (when I used to play) for myself. But I don't dictate to other people what rules they should play by. I could care less if someone plays "sandbox" or "achievements", just don't try to force me to do one or the other. The point of contention, at least historically, has been, "Does doing X thing in your singleplayer game make it a less worthy game experience for everyone?" with emphasis on that point, because various parties would make some big stink about how, to use the most common example, using MechJeb means you are an inferior pilot and, moreover, you are playing an inherently less "fun" (by a similarly narrow definition of the term as that which gets thrown around in the "realism vs. fun" garbage piles) and thus less valid game. Whether someone plays with infinite fuel all the time or restricts themselves entirely to Tier 1 parts in RSS is irrelevant to me so long as nobody's trying to force or shame people for playing their preferred way.

KSP is cheating unless you control everything using electrodes hot-glued to your nipples. ayy lmao

Carbon dioxide was first isolated in the 1700s, and was known to be exhaled by animals by the 1750s-70s. CO2 scrubbers, now that I'm reading further, have also existed since the 1800s, with Henry Fleuss's rebreather suit using rope yarn soaked in potash to remove CO2, effective for three hours. Lithium hydroxide/activated carbon gives around 8 hours. CO2 toxicity is also something you'd notice pretty quick in vacuum trials on Earth, I think. If your setting uses no electricity, then perhaps oxygen and CO2 levels could be monitored using a gas separator of some sort, but I'm not sure. However, it should still be possible to work out a reliable oxygen supply system, especially with electricity. Oxygen production from greenhouses should work the same way it does today. Light can be directed into dense greenery using a system of mirrors and/or prisms/light pipes to distribute light to the plants without allowing radiation into the greenhouse. Algae is especially good for life support purposes. Atomic Rockets specifies that around the order of 6 litres of algae, a cube of algae 20 centimeters on a side, should be enough to keep a human breathing, and perhaps fed. --- updated --- The basic reaction of photosynthesis was roughly known by the 1800s, as well, so it may well have been possible for steampunk scientists to develop a greenhouse life support system. I don't know enough about Penning traps to comment intelligently, but considering how challenging antimatter is to contain today I assume it would be very difficult for any steampunk society to extract power from antimatter in Earth orbit. --- With regards to the rangefinder, that is true, and parallax + angular diameter optical measurements are used to calculate planet sizes, see also here. I'm also slightly disappointed that KerikBalm's suggestion about using a Coincidence Rangefinder for landing wasn't included in the OP, because it satisfies exactly the need for judging short-range distance. Blah! Hary R's suggestion, earlier in this thread, that cannons may be used as a starting point for developing space travel is also worth note. (And why wasn't my post about worldbuilding concerns included, either?)

I appreciate the intent of including women, but I do want to quibble about this last part because it's extremely important. When it comes to historical accuracy you're writing about an alternate history where people went to space in the 1800s. I don't think we need to emphasize worrying too much about social accuracy, aside from making the world consistent with itself. But more than that, society isn't really the issue; it's actually more historically accurate to portray women in leading roles in exploration/engineering/military/etc, because they absolutely existed. There are scores of women who've explored the world before, much like there have been scores of women warriors; some "dressed as men", some not. But don't take it from me, Wikipedia as always has a whole list. And of course there are likely scads more that history (or Wikipedia in particular) has never bothered to remember. Or, to put it another way... ...it's okay! It's okay to write about Women doing Things in your stories set in premodern times, 1800s or otherwise, without worrying about historical accuracy. And you should, because we were there. --- As for CO2 scrubbers, rather, it seems that spacesuit rebreathers in particular depend on lithium hydroxide and activated charcoal, so if that can be produced using 19th-century techniques, it may be available. Activated charcoal seems simple enough; in the most basic way it is produced by making charcoal and then exposing it to oxygen during the process, in order to make it porous and adsorbing. Historically, charcoal was first confirmed to adsorb gases in 1773 by Carl Scheele, although charcoal filters had been used to filter water since antiquity. Lithium hydroxide is produced by reacting lithium carbonate and calcium hydroxide; lithium carbonate was used in medicine by the 1890s, while lithium medicine was used by the 1870s; and calcium hydroxide is prepared by mixing water with lime. So the chemicals for modern spacecraft air filtration, at least, seem to have been available to steampunk technologists. Specifically with regard to spacesuits, on the Apollo PLSS, the rebreathing system is combined with the cooling system, using a fan to circulate air through the suit's liquid cooling garment, along with a water pump for moving the water coolant around; the cooling system ultimately rejects heat to space by expelling steam through something called a porous-plate sublimator, which is made of sintered nickel. Sintering has been known since antiquity, and nickel was first purposefully isolated after the 18th century. So the mechanical/electric components of the LSS may also have been available. However, developing the flexible liquid cooling garment may be tricky. NASA's EMU Liquid Cooling and Venilation Garment is made of spandex and nylon tricot, at least according to Wikpedia and to HowStuffWorks, while the circulation tubes are made of PVC.

A seismic survey on the toilets

I'm not sure whether this is meant as an endorsement or a detraction, but it's spot-on. Also, 6. Quit the game. 1-5 is the entire game.

A "question about the way people use a feature in a video game" that in a thousand other threads, a thousand other times, has produced the exact same result: endless bickering over whether or not it's "legitimate" for people to use the features they want in their single-player game that they paid money for. You may not be shooting for that type of discussion, but that's exactly where it ends up, without fail. I'm sick of watching it happen, I'm sure it makes plenty of people feel like crap. So I'd rather those threads just disappear. I'd apologize for my harshness, but hey, why not compare an angry forum post to the institutions of an organization that slaughtered millions of Jewish people, among many others? I'm sure they appreciate the sympathy.

People like you making threads like these sap me of my will to play video games The entire gist of every single one of "is X cheating?" threads ends up being to/to not legitimize making other people feel bad about the way they play games. As if it's a question that needs debating. I hate every single one of these threads and I want them to end forever

Let's split it off into its own website and call it Spacebabbles.net

It's okay to express your intent to let your kids die and put thousands at risk for want of a vaccine, of course, as long as you qualify yourself with a condescending smiley face :-)

I don't understand any of that.

Speaking as one of those fabled "equality" people, I tend to think it's comments like yours that start wars far more than the names of rules in physics. Cut it out.

Badda boom

The Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across. Any signal from within our galaxy is going to reach us within that timeframe - not exactly "the-lifespan-of-human-industrial-civilization" timescales, but certainly within the bounds of human existence. At any rate, contacting these civilizations isn't necessarily the point, although it makes for good press. Importantly, locating other civilizations, especially those with the power to be noticed across hundreds or thousands of light-years, helps us establish a framework for where we're going to be headed, if we intend to become a spacefaring society (or at least long-lasting enough to be spacefaring). If we could learn something about the characteristics of sapient alien societies - what kinds of energies they're capable of employing, how much material they're capable of extracting from their systems and lobbing around are things I assume may be among the first things we learn, and then how all that stuff is distributed - it could contribute to a roadmap for our own development, and give some indication of what challenges and dangers we'll face in the future. CMB detections are far from useless. They help confirm or disprove, to my knowledge, fundamental theories of physics, which makes them particularly useful to extremely prevalent Earth tech that depends on such things like electronics (quantum physics, etc) and GPS (relativity) Similarly, if we could somehow find evidence of, say, extraterrestrials using a warp drive, that could similarly help develop our practical knowledge. That's probably a far-out example, so if anyone can correct me or suggest a more grounded one that'd be nice. We don't necessarily need to receive messages from the stars to see extraterrestrials, either (although it also makes good press). "Zen SETI", for instance, proposes looking for evidence of ETI activity by analyzing non-waterhole astronomical data for evidence of large-scale ETI involvement, a la searching for infrared emissions from Dyson spheres, or large solar power constellations in general, perhaps. Looking at concentrations of metal in other solar systems to determine whether an industrial civilization has lots of infrastructure out there is another idea. If we could get telescopes out to the sun's gravitational lens, it may even be possible to directly see other worlds with significant clarity. And if we do find something within a 200 light-year bubble, communicating with it (if desired) could be done within the time industrial society has lasted so far. They might not send signals out of fear, as you note, or perhaps simply because they don't want to spend the resources, but if the galaxy is indeed a quiet place, it'd definitely be worth looking out to see who we'll be dealing with should we ever leave the solar system. --- I don't personally think it's useless to search for life within our solar system. Enceladus and Titan stand out as good targets to me. And perhaps there is some planet out there in the far reaches of the solar system, but to my knowledge, people have been searching for a while and they have yet to find significant evidence of one, so people discredit others who insist that there must be a very specific planet there that is just being covered up/scientists are ignorant/etc. And there's a lot more stars and galaxies out there than there is currently estimated mass to form planets in the Oort Cloud, between 4 and 80 Earth masses. Doesn't mean that nobody is looking out for objects in the Kuiper Belt/Oort Cloud. Either way, there's no need to discredit either line of exploration, interstellar or in-solar-system.

ｎｅï½Âｅｓｉｓ　ï½Âï½Âï½â€Ã¯Â½â€¢Ã¯Â½â€™Ã¯Â½â€°Ã¯Â½â€Ã¯Â½â„¢Ã£â‚¬â‚¬Ã¯Â¼â€™Ã¯Â¼Â１５　 ｂï½Âï½’ï½Âｃｋ　ï½Âｂï½Âï½Âï½Â　ｉｓ　ï½â€Ã¯Â½Ë†Ã¯Â½â€¦Ã£â‚¬â‚¬ ｌｉｚï½Âｒｄ　 ｋｉｎｇ The idea of a "tenth planet" has been bandied around for a long time. Originally there was speculated to be a Neptune-mass-ish object out there; there have been other speculations over the decades. It's not an uncommon idea, although I know of no evidence personally