MBobrik

Say you are doing hopping over 4 biomes. that is 4 x ( TR-2V + SC-9001 + Goo ) = 1.43 ton. and with each hop it becomes less by 0.365 ton. . Now the same with 1 x SC-9001 + 1 x Goo + MPL-LG-2 = 3.85 ton . But if you want to grind it for its worth and say take 4x samples from each biome, it is 16 x ( TR-2V + SC-9001 + Goo ) = 5.72 ton while the MPL weight stays the same. . I am going to use it now for my Duna-Ike mission where I've got 9 sample points ( 1x Kerbol orbit, 5x Duna 3x Ike, each 2+ samples ) and that would be w/o MPL 6.3+ ton.

Sent a large truck to Dres. Drove a few seconds down a slope and discovered it got batteries but no RTGs nor solar panels ... Fortunately managed to brake and exit before the batteries ran out.

Putting your missiles somewhere where they stay immobile visible, defenseless and several days of flight away from their targets makes no military sense. If someone wanted to have his stash of space nukes he would send them to randomly distributed wide chaotic orbits around the earth-moon system so that they stay mobile, invisible and their position unpredictable.

. Every animal bigger than a small dog can kill a human if it really gives all effort. And even a smaller animal can kill you if it is for example poisonous, lands a lucky hit on your carotid artery or a sting in your throat. And each and every organism can potentially evolve into something that drives your descendants to extinction. If you submit yourself to the logic "kill anything that can be potentially dangerous in the far future" then you have to kill literally everything.

. evidence ? and please real evidence, not some inane youtube video . . Did you already kill everything live in your vicinity, or are you just talking the talk ?

IMHO there are no rational reasons, leaving only various irrational motives like - territorial expansion for expansion's sake. want to have yet another planet, not caring about whether it is already occupied or not or whether it will be actually of some use to you - xenophobia - exterminate us because we are not them. - religious zeal (essentially the same as above, only with a lot god talk) - food harvesting/slave trade because some rich degenerates somewhere in the galaxy prefer "natural" flesh to identical grown in a test tube (or living slaves to robots )

. you don't need to know the absolute position, all information you need is the phase shift you have to add to the incoming signal. And that can be potentially inferred by letting other beams of known phase and multiple frequencies travel back and forth between parts of the interferometer. The engineering issues are going to be tremendous, though. just sending and receiving coherent laser light of several frequencies at once over hundreds of millions of kilometers would be tricky. not even mentioning the device that gathers this information and translates it into phase shift of the gathered signal...

First it does not depend on clean fusion nukes, it will fly exactly as well with plain old dirty nukes. Second, any nuke can be made cleaner. just remove the last fission stage from the conventional fission-fusion-fission design and make up by making the fusion stage bigger. you won't get the most yield per $ spent from it, but it will be a lot cleaner. and, as mentioned above, it was already tested in a quite spectacular manner. . . this is not very surprising given testing it has been made illegal. But each part of the design has either been tested separately (the nukes), or is rather unremarkable from technological point of view( pusher plate, shock absorbers, etc )

Sure. just add an exception to the partial nuclear test ban treaty and we can start building.

don't get the point. what is ridiculous about it ? it got both five digit ISP grotesquely high thrust, and can be built with 1950's technology... what's your problem with it ?

that possibility is always there. no point mentioning it explicitly. "If the apple is falling, it's either gravity or some unknown process"...etc.

. nice backpedaling. Now you aren't against it, now you just want the mankind do something else this, something else that first, oh, and look, something shiny over there ! excuses of a person who is wholeheartedly against something yet does not want to admit it openly... . . What other goals you have in mind ? Like caring only about immediate survival or hedonistic pleasure, not caring about the future of mankind at all ? Like eagerly awaiting the apocalypse ? What are the other, more popular alternate goals of the human race ?

If temperature rules out dry ice then water is really the best (perhaps only reasonable) explanation.

I use them on my more compact designs to get rid of empty later stages up where the atmosphere is too thin and the last stage has poor twr. I use them also to fly off chute sections of duna rovers and used them once as landing retro-rocket with moderate success ( timing is very critical - fraction of a second too early or too late = high velocity lithobraking ).

sorry to rain ehm .. snow some dry ice on your parade but this is most likely just sublimating carbon dioxide avalanches as it was the case with similar gullies before.

wrroooom-wrroooom goes the warp core and the goalposts start moving... . . well... nobody. except all space agencies, almost all people on this forum, all non-backwards segments of the population... My guess is, that the only one around there who is against a spacefaring civilization is you.

on airless worlds small rovers on top big rovers underneath. when there is an atmosphere, deploy chutes and separate before landing

In order to know why the universe exists, we would have to know what is outside and what outside process created it.

no clue saw it when returning from Minmus. Orbital speed lower hundreds m/s surface speed crazy five digit number. . EDIT: I believe I know what it is. they don't compute the surface velocity as velocity projected onto the actual surface of the body, but simply by subtracting the rotation velocity at current height, which, if you are significantly higher than the actual surface gives this ridiculous number.

because space programs in general are being phased out * so why to bother cooperating with others with something you don't intend to continue with ? . * notable exceptions china and India. but those countries do it just to prove to the others they can do it too, so cooperating with the others would be pointless.

Stupidity. gargantuan amounts of purified weapon-grade stupidity, hubris and hatred. Just scoop in and spray onto the enemy you wish to make self-destruct.

the only way to prevent combustion is to turn off somehow all fast gas phase exothermic reactions. which can not be achieved without turning off most of the reactions that happen in the liquid phase inside of a cell as well and thus ending all life instantaneously. or completely re-inventing a different chemistry and radically different laws of physics. you could as well as delete this universe and create another one...

Or the contrary. reduce the minimum wage bellow what is needed to stay alive... and then watch humans dying or stealing to survive, which in turn costs the society more and thus decreases wages even further...

.. and bring the magic boulder back

if you are forced to make choices like that, then you are already screwed and you will save neither.