InfinityArch

It's important to note that 6 to -40 Celsius is presumably Laythe's air temperature. On Earth, water temperatures tend to be "equalized" compared to air temperatures; in the arctic oceans, air temperatures may be around -30 while the water is around 0 Celsius. Conversely, at the equator, air temperatures might be around 50 degrees while the water remains a much more comfortable 25 Celsius. Thus, it's likely that Laythe's oceans are generally in between the two extremes of temperature, though I have no idea how to make an educated estimate at what it would be, and what additional possible compositions that allows for Laythe's oceans.

I would assume either A. Laythe is going through something akin to the oxygen revolution on Earth with it's environment being gradually altered by the presence of unicellular life. Or B. The ecosystem of Laythe is in equilibrium, with ammonia being produced by other organisms as fast as it is consumed.

But to be honest, the parachutes snapping off doesn't seem like it should really be that serious of a threat, at least compared to the g-forces and heat from reentry; as I said, I'm not sure about where I'd go to look this sort of thing up, but IRL don't parachutes gradually go from partially deployed to fully deployed, rather than suddenly snapping open fully? That's the main reason for G-force damage on craft reentering the atmosphere.

I think you people may be overestimating the strain this would put on CPU's. Not much more than weather I'd think.

I thought this mod was FAR compatible. That said, I don't know how this kind of stuff works in real life, but it seems a bit counteractive that parachutes would suddenly go from partially deployed to fully deployed, which basically guarantees they'll snap off in this mod when using FAR.

Nibb, unlike climate change, an imminent asteroid impact is something that the people in power today would see happening in their own lifetimes, hence they'd actually be motivated to do something about it rather than say "eh, leave it for another generation."

Hmmm, any data on whether Eeloo's SOI changes as it approaches the apo/periapsis of its orbit? I would think not if SOI is a fixed constant, but if it's calculated dynamically...

Do realize that Squad is an advertising company that randomly let a programmer who worked for them (Harv) pursue a project to make a game about a bunch of little green men making a space program because why not, only for the resulting game's popularity to explode. I'm not entirely sure how Squad is run and the actual scope of the larger company, and so far they've been pretty hands off with the games development. Of course, given that the company is probably publicly traded and appears to be fairly small, it would be trivial for EA to make a hostile takeover if they really wanted to for some reason, and since the rights to KSP don't belong the development team-unlike the rights to say Minecraft-the possibility of someone in the company's hierarchy getting greedy and selling them to a publisher for a quick buck and justifying it as "video games aren't our business" is a bit scary. Of course, that's all conjecture, since I have no idea how Squad is actually run/how much control the development team has over the rights to the IP, and since Squad's website is in Spanish, I really can't be sure about what I'm saying, since its been a while since I took a class in that language. I also take heart in the fact that big publishers aren't particularly interested in anything outside the "mainstream" dudebro crowd's choice of games, which mainly consist of shooters, casual games, and sports games.

The whole "real you or clone" question regarding brain uploading is complete hogwash. For one, the notion depends on the existence, immutability, and exclusivity to a particular medium of the self, of "you" or "I" as meaningful concepts, to use more approachable terms. Neurobiologists and other experts are somewhat split on this issue, but if the concept of self is merely an illusion, as some research suggests, the question of whether or not a digital recreation of your brain shares your consciousness and is "you" is meaningless, since there is no "you" to begin with. That said, if the definition of self allows for mutability, there is still room for a "core of being" in modern models of the brain, and ignoring the possibility of souls existing, such a self must be quantifiable. Given that most if not all higher animals are believed to be sentient, and presumably possessing a "self", and that the structure of such organisms' brains often differ quite dramatically from those of humans, and that the self appears to endure in spite of the exact atoms making up the brain's structure is in constant flux, it is almost certain that the mechanism that generates the self, assuming it exists at all, occurs at a level of abstraction above the actual physical composition of the brain, which in turn would indicate that the self is not necessarily exclusive to the architecture of the human brain. The most likely candidate for the "source of consciousness" seems to be the an emergent effect of the interactions occurring within the brain, which would not be by any means impossible to duplicate, which implies multiple instances of "the self" can exist. Thus, if your mind were to be copied to another brain or computer with or without the destruction of the original, it would still be you if such a term is actually meaningful (if the self exists). So I would be totally cool with mind uploading.

There's also the fact that the singularity model of a black hole violates the notion in quantum mechanics that states a particle cannot occupy a space smaller than its wavelength, one of the reasons most(? Correct me if I'm wrong here, high level QM has always made me "WUT") theories of quantum gravity do away with the singularity.

That's not as strange as it sounds, given that it's extremely difficult to eyeball the phase angles between planets in vanilla ksp.

@Whackjob: That rocket is way overbuilt. I imagine that thing is shaking itself to pieces shortly after launch, amirite?

Laythe's oceans are water dude.

Tidal heating doesn't contribute quite enough to keep Laythe's oceans liquid, as the moon has polar ice caps.

Earlier today, I was designing a SSTO based around the B9 aerospace pack's recently released SABRE engines. Everything was going reasonably well, but then I noticed something: The craft's canards would be in the path of the air intakes. In real life, I don't know how much of an issue this would be, but to me, it just didn't look right, and as such, I went ballistic altering the design to keep the canards out of the way of the intakes. Another thing that's always bothered me despite having no gameplay ramifications is RCS thrusters that would be blocked at certain angles in a real life spacecraft, which always seems to flare up when I'm designing landers. Has anyone else had interesting experiences like these when designing rockets/spaceplanes in KSP?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Newtonian-era physics establish that light had a finite speed, but just fail to realize the significance of the constant c? Infinite light speed would break many, many, things even if we take away relativity.

IMHO, if they used Helium-3 (or some kerbalized equivalent) in the reaction, fusion engines wouldn't break KSP since they'd require a resource not found in significant quantities on Kerbin, necessitating you to go mine the Mun for it, which requires a great deal of infrastructure to support even in sandbox mode, and depending on how scarce "Kelium-3" or whatever was on the Mun or other bodies, might not be enough for every flight to use it.

Well, I sorted out the problem, and tried to make a craft based off of this using firespitter props. Unfortunately, the electric props don't have a TWR nearly high enough to take off from Duna vertically, so it seems I've had to can it =(. Oh well, I've learned a lot from trying it.

Yeah, just a small problem with the craft for the vanilla VTOLSSTO: KSP says its incompatible with this (0.19) version of KSP...Could anyone possibly help me out with that?

Hmmm...How do you think this would perform if the jet engines were replaced with electric firespitter props for use on Duna?