NGTOne

Build something big, complex, and ridiculously over-engineered, larger than you've ever built before. Then send it to space, and land it on another planet.

My current project is to build a fully-fledged colony on Tylo. Doesn't sound too impressive until you take into account the fact that the colony core (which is likely to be one of the SMALLER structures) clocks in at 170 tons. Big, complex colonization missions are always fun, because of the amount of engineering and planning you have to do to pull it off even halfway successfully (i.e. not smashing millions of Kredits' worth of colonization hardware into the surface of another planet). KSP becomes a totally different game once you cross the 1000-part mark (and leave your sanity behind somewhere in the process). My goal for the first Jool window is to set up and expand the colony to 1000 Kerbals. Not having my computer melt down into slag is a secondary objective.

What you're after is a skycrane. Basically, design a small rocket package using symmetry that has a reversed stack decoupler (so it now decouples up, rather than down like normal) in the middle, then paste your rover onto that decoupler. Make sure your rocket package has a TWR of greater than 1 on your destination body, that the engines are clear of the rover body (or else they won't produce any thrust), build a launch system, and you're good to go. You can use this technique to deliver anything from rovers to buildings to multi-hundred-ton mobile bases to any body you can think of. It's usually better to build the skycrane around the rover, rather than building the rover as a subassembly. That lets you surface-attach decouplers to your rover, which gives you a lot more flexibility in designing it, and greater margin for change if you need it.

I'd think ants wouldn't be a bad bet - give them some food (Jell-O or anything sugary isn't a bad bet, they go nuts for it), enough air, and a bit of dirt to dig in, and they'll be happy almost regardless of what else you do to them. Upside is that dirt acts as a natural insulator, so if they're not up there too long, they won't even feel the cold outside. A possible experiment design: 1. Build/buy a sheet metal box with sealed corners and a sealable lid. Fill with dirt. 2. Buy a commercially available ant-farm kit. They're not hard to find, and pretty cheap. 3. About a week before launch, pour ants into container, to give them time to develop their colony. Feed regularly (see above). 4. Just before launch, seal the box, attach it to the balloon, and send them off. 5. Find the box after impact. The dirt should actually help cushion the impact (though the ants might not be too happy about having to dig themselves out). If you're really ambitious, give it a small parachute or something before launch so they don't have to. 6. Make quip about ants from outer space.

I've hit this bug a few times myself - the only correlation I ever saw was in ships where I abused the "symmetry of symmetry" effect (where I created a symmetrical object, then used symmetry to copy it). Might just be because the ships that I did that with were huge to begin with, I dunno.

Actually, one of the requests I'd like to make is for the MkV set, which I think I did make in this thread to the original author. Basically, can you make the two individual treads on the MkV turn like wheels, i.e. their direction of rotation when turning is relative to CoM rather than fixed? I built some rather large vehicles using them that were prone to tearing apart because the tracks kept trying to turn in random directions.

Well, the devs once mentioned that Eve's oceans are made up of rocket fuel. If it's something like the fuels used in the first stage of the Saturn V, we're effectively talking about a hydrocarbon-based atmosphere and fluid cycle, a la Titan. While Titan has a methane cycle, it's not inconceivable to think that Eve might have a kerosene cycle, with some interesting lifeforms developing out of that.

An RTG-powered electric propellor plane with a large wingspan could conceivably fly for months, or even years, on Titan (assuming it wasn't wrecked by a weather system or something). Naturally, with a couple hours' speed-of-light delay, it would need some pretty decent autonomous flight systems (anyone want to refit a Predator drone with an RTG?), but I don't see it not being doable. Maybe use Cassini as a data uplink (like Curiosity uses the assorted Mars orbital probes today).

The bigger problem, in my view, is keeping the damn thing stationary - Venus has some nasty wind systems at all levels of the atmosphere. Your colony would need either a) an active propulsion system, or some form of tether. An active propulsion system isn't very flexible unless you've got basically a ring of engines pointing in all directions around your structure, and that isn't terribly practical. Tethers are a problem because they have to reach the surface, which is damn hot and under a lot of pressure, which means they'd have to be really strong and likely actively cooled as well (which presents its own set of issues, naturally). If you want it to be useful for any sort of economic activity, keeping Cloud City stationary relative to the surface is likely to be pretty important. On the flipside, though, if it is the base for a space elevator, it may be more useful to just let it drift, and use the elevator itself as a guide (i.e. it "pulls" Cloud City along with it, like a ship towing a sonar pod). That would, however, significantly restrict surface activity (either you only go down for a short period, or you have to have sufficiently robust equipment that you can wait for Cloud City to drift back over your position to pick you up).

Someone posted a forum thread on this topic a while back. Wonder if Randall read it, or it's just coincidence?

T.A. Heppenheimer's Colonies In Space is a cool look at how they thought space exploration would look in the post-Apollo era (warning: it's almost 40 years old), and really inspired me when I was a kid (still 30 years after it was published). Not sure how likely you are to run across it though; I've never seen another copy in a bookstore (not 100% sure where I got mine, and it was already kinda well-used when I did).

Well, depends on what you mean. I don't see why you couldn't copy the connection network (While it's too complex for today's computers, it's certainly possible), but you'd have to copy the current state of the brain as well, at a given time, or you'd end up with what was basically a dead network. If you had a sufficiently powerful computer, I don't see why it couldn't be fully sentient.

Or you could just do this (my experiment in stock-only manned electric craft, built for an upcoming Moho window): Showing off the engine array. 64 PB-IONs at full bore, pushing just shy of 100 tons of spaceship. 240,000 liters of xenon. Hope it's enough (Kerbal Engineer did NOT play nice, so I don't actually know how much dV this thing has). This mission is for a manned, close-range flyby of Moho, to grab the high- and low-orbit science points and return to Kerbin.

This particular probe has 247 parts in flight, and 332 parts on the pad. The vast majority are xenon tanks.

I read a Deep Space 9 book at some point that dealt with a similar premise (except that the planet was uninhabited, and there were A LOT more aliens than 250,000). A group of aliens had come from a faraway galaxy, travelling over some ungodly amount of time, and they arrived at a habitable planet in the Milky Way. Problem is, over so long in their generation ships, they had developed an intense, crippling agoraphobia. Generation upon generation of living inside a closed environment with no large open spaces? The aliens might not want to come off their ship just for that reason.

Ah, my bad then

Ramjets are a much older idea, and are likely to (in my view at least) die a painful death after the SABRE variants are ready to fly.

You might want to look into the K-drive (Kraken drive, there's a thread around here somewhere).

I'm studying Computer Science, with a minor in GIS (Geographical Information Systems). Not sure if I'm gonna pursue higher degrees, but I know I don't want to do the "corporate grind" thing. I'd rather start a business.

You're overlooking the fact that it would need an equivalent cache of the appropriate materials - for instance, unless you fed it a 1-ton lump of iron, you wouldn't get a car out of it.

Well, you've got a few different options. I've seen mining rigs using modified versions of KAS, or you could just submerge and surface the whole bloody thing like a submarine using Hooligan Labs' buoyancy parts (be careful - crush depth is 500m BSL). Alternatively (though I'm really just joking) try flipping the rig on its back, and extending the pistons into the air - maybe they'll push it underwater!

The goal is actually recovery, rather than transmission (I don't do transmission missions if I can help it). There's a docking port on the nose of the ship, where it's meant to dock with a manned craft on return to Kerbin.

I toyed with using solar arrays, but they didn't actually contribute much during ground testing, and having them permanently attached added an extra 1.5 tons (and dropped my dV by 700 m/s).

The "adapter" is just a Rockomax short adapter with some Clamp-o-tron Jr. docking ports surface-attached to it at 8x symmetry (there are, in fact, 16 of them), with the engines attached to those. I could probably have crammed in another 8, but I knew this thing would be a massive energy sucker as it was. As for mass, the fully fuelled probe clocks in at about 22.7 tons, with a TWR just below 0.04. It can burn for about 55 seconds at a stretch using the two Z-4Ks in the top section, and then it needs to wait about 8 minutes to recharge fully. Here's a better view of the engine section: And a view of how the engines are attached:

I started experimenting with electric propulsion for my spacecraft, and a probe I launched to Jool has me toying with electric-only designs for manned missions.