InfinityArch

Orbiting Ike in a science station waiting for a transfer window to return the whole thing to Kerbin.

As kerbals do not seem to have mastered quantum teleportation, I have a feeling that wouldn't work.

Orbiting Ike I was getting about .6 science per day, and by the time a transfer window opened up back to Kerbin, I had already produced about 1200 science just letting them sit their researching.

Well, useful if you actually have any need to do research by the point in the game that you're reaching the outer planets.

Can confirm that with just OPM and AVP interstellar, I'm at 2.5 GB while running active texture management at aggressive. Actually scratch that, after reloading its down to something like 2.5 GB with that and a few other mods installed. Just make sure to install mods one at a time, run the game so it compresses the textures, and restart, otherwise you'll hit the memory limit almost immediately, since ATM seems use much more memory during the initial run than later runs.

Just popping in to say this is a fantastic mod; the logistics of getting something out to one of these planets while running remote tech and TAC life support are quite daunting for either a manned or unmanned mission, doubly so if installed alongside a mod that adds in RTG decay, since solar panels are effectively useless beyond the orbit of Jool.

Star Systems along with a more stockalike KSPI mod to give us a true endgame.

Given that the code for Kopernicus is freely available, you could try to figure out the problem yourself you know.

Billy-Hadrick fits quite nicely into the intermediate-mass black hole category, though those would generally be found at the center of globular clusters, which consist of low metallicity population-II stars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-mass_black_hole

Yeah. As for the actual task of getting between the stars, KSPI is well suited for that task.

Now, even though I'm probably off by a fairly sizable margin for a variety of regions, I went back and redid the numbers with even more liberal interpretations of the dialogue. For a model which assumes 1 hour on Mann's world is a day of Earth time, then we come up with an orbital velocity of 211,801,185 m/s, and a difference of a mere 184.095 Km/s. That's actually well within the realm of plausibility for electromagnetic propulsion systems. Of course, in that version, Mann's world has an SMA of 295,906.021 Km, which I have a sneaking suspicion might be too close to Miller's world for their orbits to be stable. Going down to 1 hour=12 hours on Earth, we're looking at a velocity difference of around 740 km/s, which is beyond the exhaust velocity of VASMIR (and mass ratios become unreasonably large after that point from what I know), but well within the reasonable limits of a helium-3/deuterium fusion based propulsion system (maximum exhaust velocity given as 7,840 km/s by Atomic Rockets). As far as the Ranger to Miller's world and back thing goes, I really don't have time to go through the math for that (and I've have to make even more assumptions that would probably f' up the final result even more), but I suspect you'd come up with something low enough that a fusion based nuclear thermal rocket could manage it.

So apparently there's some hard facts given about the Gargantua system in "The Science of Interstellar"; Gargantua itself is a supermassive black hole, weighing in at approximately 100 million solar masses, rotating with an angular velocity approaching the speed of light. While the required math to figure this out is not something I'm confident with, it's been determined that there do exist stable orbits around such an object where one would experience time dilation on par with what is seen in the movie. Whether or not it's at all plausible for a planet avoid being torn apart in such an orbit is another question, but IIRC, Kip Thorne seems to think the second planet they visit was the least plausible because the material strength of ice wouldn't allow the formation of the frozen clouds. The bigger problem, which Scott Manley points out in his review, is that at first glance, the required delta v's would be absolutely absurd. After derping around with the equations for gravitational time dilation for a while, assuming Miller's World has a mostly circular orbit, it would orbit about at a distance about 67 million kilometers greater than the semimajor axis of Mars, or 295,392,295 km. Using basic equations for orbital velocities, I'm coming up with an orbital velocity of 0.707106782 c (211,985,280 m/s) for Miller's World, where is definitely fast enough for relativistic effects to become "significant" though from what I recall, at such speeds the gravitational time dilation would still dwarf the speed induced dilation. Frame dragging from the black holes rotation probably comes into play as well, but I haven't even the foggiest idea how to estimate that. Now, it's stated that Mann's world doesn't experience significant time dilation from proximity to the black hole, and, taking that statement fairly liberally (every hour on Mann's world=1.5 hours on Earth) and assuming a circular orbit, Mann's world would orbit at around 527,486,241 kilometers above the singularity, which is between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. At this distance the orbital velocity of Mann's world would be around 158,635,258 m/s, or 0.529150263 c. I have no idea how to calculate the minimum delta v to transfer between two orbits, but based on the delta v costs to transfer to mars, it's similar to the difference between the two bodies' mean orbital velocities, which in this case is 211,985,280 m/s-158,635,258 m/s, or about 53,000 Km/s, which corresponds to 0.177956518 c. On the plus side, because the hypothetical orbital period of Mann's world would be around 6 hours, and Miller's world significantly less, transfer windows would appear all the time. On the less positive side, I suspect they'd be extremely short. Now, the Delta-V requirements for the Endurance mission (though not the design, which doesn't appear to have that great of a mass ratio) would be feasible with beamed core antimatter (exhaust velocity is something like 0.3 c), and maybe with extremely efficient nuclear fusion based propulsion if you squint at it the right way. That begs several questions however: A. If they have access to that kind of propulsion, wouldn't it be trivial to evacuate Earth even without discovering the secrets of gravity manipulation? B. Given that the mission is under significant time pressure, why wouldn't they opt for a more aggressive outbound flight? Using a 1g Brachistochrone trajectory, it would take about 17 days to reach Saturn and about 10 million km/s of delta V, which could be accommodated for in the delta V budget by some extra drop tanks.

The link I posted earlier in the thread proposed using an iridium-molybdenum electrode combination with a molten Silicon Dioxide electrolyte, and given that this plant would be designed to operate on the surface of Mars, you could potentially pump excess heat into subsurface (manmade) reservoirs of water, which could in turn conduct heat into the Martian crust.

Obviously the reaction would be occurring in a strictly controlled environment; but the free oxygen you're producing could potentially react with the purified metal, or the electrodes at the temperatures these systems would operate at. I must reiterate that inorganic chemistry and the material sciences are not my area of expertise, but my understanding is that the melting point of metals and ionic compounds aren't particularly sensitive to reduced pressure; it certainly wouldn't reduce the heating requirements that much.

From what I gathered, he was talking about going straight from Iron Oxide to usable iron and free oxygen however, and electrolysis would be the only way to do that in a single step, and it also has the advantage of outputting molten iron, which is separated from the electrolytes by its greater density. Given that you'd need to melt the resulting iron precipitate to its melting point to process it into steel or otherwise make it useful (for most purposes), electrolysis cuts out the middleman here. Now that said, the fact that the system I proposed uses rare-earth electrodes means that purely chemical extraction of iron might be more economical. Reading further, you have the "third option" of heating the oxide in the presence of hydrogen gas, which only requires temperatures of ~500ºC, though that's a "laboratory" method of producing metallic iron, and thus probably doesn't have the required yield to be useful on an industrial scale.

If you're looking for a purely spontaneous chemical process, I don't believe what you're asking for is possible, but you can use electrolysis to split oxides into the metal and oxygen gas. 2 Al23+O32+ (l)--> 4Al (l)+ 3O2 (g) which can be broken down into Al3++3e- --> Al and 2O2--4e- --> O2 Note that the Alumina must be in the liquid phase for this electrolysis to be possible, and the melting point of Alumina at atmospheric pressures is 2,072ºC, meaning this process will be taking place in a high temperature furnace. You'd be using graphite electrodes in a steel container in the setup I saw, and the free oxygen at that temperature would readily react with the graphite to produce carbon dioxide, meaning you'd need at least one addition step to extract the oxygen. Iron (II) Oxide melts at a "mere" 1,377ºC however, and searching around, I've found an MIT article on a process that uses and iridium-molybdenum electrode combination and various oxide slags as electrolytes to extract pure iron and pure oxygen from molten iron oxide. You'd need to be operating above the melting point of iron for this to work, which is 1,538ºC, and your options for electrodes becomes somewhat limited there. Which is where the Iridium comes in, serving as a high temperature anode in this process. 2 Fe23+O32+ (l)--> 4 Fe (l)+ 3O2 (g) Source: http://web.mit.edu/dsadoway/www/137.pdf Now, as far as the energy requirements for this go, a big energy cost is going to come from heating the entire system to the necessary temperature, and I honestly don't know how to calculate the relative masses of the Iron (II) Oxide, the Silicon Dioxide, and the electrodes that would be required for this.

Really now? A full reinstall of KSP did the trick for me.

A clean install of KSP or B9? I've done B9 multiple times to no avail. Attempting a full KSP reinstall now just in case, but I'm not optimistic, since none of the other mods I've used seem to be having these problems.

I'm starting to think something might be up with all of the parts with RCS and possibly electric charge.

I seem to be having similar issues with the current version of B9 Aerospace; my game won't load; it's not crashing, and the memory with just B9 and stock is well below the threshold that you'd expect to see a RAM crash. It just hangs indefinitely on the loading screen after getting through the majority of the process, which I'm guessing is the result of something in the cfg of those cockpits.

IIRC the Galileo probe would have gotten pretty deep into the atmosphere before completely melting (down to the supercritical hydrogen), even though it stopped transmitting from overheating long before then.

Mother of god Slimjim...Any chance you could list the mods used to create this thing? On a tangential note, what is it like playing KSP on a supercomputer and/or at 1 frame per second?

I'll have to go check that again; the tests I did were on extremely aggressive trajectories, and likely shot through the atmosphere's upper layers without me even registering the difference. I'm also not seeing the alternate launch sites and the full kerbin DSN, though I suspect that might be because I installed RSS incorrectly. This mod is a blast to play in career mode alongside KCT by the way; it's not effectively impossible to progress like in the x10 realism overhaul kerbol, but I actually have to think carefully about how much a launch costs vs what it will return. I'be only recently been able to get into orbit.

It would be nice to have a config set that brought the "power levels" of the KSPI tech back to the original mod's levels, for those of us playing RSS/realism overhaul. I only play 6.4x Kerbol, so it's not a big issue, since stock parts are still usable in 6.4x scale, but at full x10 size Kerbol or the real solar system, the KSPIL parts just don't cut it.

One other issue I've noticed is that Jool's atmosphere seems to start at about 125,000 meters above the "surface", which doesn't seem right.