KerikBalm

An approach that works on Eve, or even Kerbin, will not neccessarily work on Duna. You can basically come in perpendicular to the surface of Kerbin for a safe landing (given current game mechanics allow you to enter as steep as you want without burning up) - all it requires is deployment of chutes at the right time (set the full- deployment altitude low, so you don't rip your craft apart - give it more time to decelerate to terminal velocity). With Duna, you need to come in shallow, if you come in steep, you'll cut right through the atmosphere as if it wasn't even there (FYI, the real life Mars has an atmosphere 1/20th that of Duna's and ~25% higher gravity, hence the airbags and sky cranes and such). For your capture set your perapsis at about 13 km, I did another flight to duna last night, 13 km perapsis on the first go around, and then a 17km perapsis the second time, then ejected the lander, raised perapsis to 43km, and lowered the lander's perapsis to 7 km. You want to be coming in relatively slow (ie orbital velocity, not some high speed flyby trajectory launched outside a transfer window that relies on heavy aerobraking for capture), and shallow - you should still have a perapsis visible when you enter the atmosphere (your trajectory shouldn't intersect the surface prior to entering the atmosphere). My lander used 6 radial parachutes, and 2 drogue chutes (carrying basically 2 fl-800 tanks worth of fuel, and a 2 person lander cabin, 2 aerospikes, and a manned rover). The drogue chutes will semi deploy at 10km, I set them for a full deploy at 5km (beware opening shock - I used them because their fully deployed drag is smaller than any other chute), then I staged my remaining 6 to fully deploy at 2.5 2, and 1.5 km. I aimed for a low spot, atmospheric pressure at the landing site was .107 atmospheres, so if I had aimed better, I could have slowed the craft even more (its .2 at the lowest spots I believe). 6 chutes was a bit overkill, and the landing was survivable with no engine thrusting - the landing legs were all damaged, but I was able to repair them and right the craft for 0 fuel usage, I think I came in at 14 m/s? 16? eliminating some chutes might be better - spending 20 extra delta v for a soft touch down may be regained by reduced weight during the ascent (not to mention reduced weight getting the lander to Duna, but the chutes are pretty light, so I'm not sure, and I leave the lander in orbit - after refueling it - to be reused by the next craft coming to duna). So... shallow trajectories, low flat landing spot, staggered , high altitude full deployments - the first deployment is the most important, as that will be the most G load, so that chute/pair of chutes should be "well strutted", I again recommend drogues, as they slow you the most partially deployed, and generate the least force when fully deployed

I recently did my first stock mission to Duna (previous times, I was using self-modded parts to "simulate" a spacecraft with a 1 GW reactor -> 30 kn 7,000 ISP engines for interplanetary travel, 240 kn thermal engine with an 875 ISP, turbines that worked without oxygen - I did not wait for launch windows, and used extreme amounts of delta V, and very very deep aerobraking). I did it in sandbox (my career mod I'm sciencing as fast as I can at the Mun and Minmus for a Moho launch at day 6, since that is the first interplanetary launch window.) I then did it again slightly differently. I *hope* you are waiting for the launch window (first one is about days 57-62 with 59 being the optimal) - that helps a lot. Then go into your config file, and set your conics mode from 3 to 0. This helps a lot! Once you get your intercept, focus on duna, your trajectory (within duna's SOI) wil display there, and you can actually look at it well. Use RCS (or in my case, I used Ion engines) to set up your orbit to be prograde and equatorial, if you're coming in on a hohman trasfer from Kerbin, you'll want to set your perapsis at 12,000 to 12,000 - Remember not to time warp across SOI changes (ie during kerbin escape, and when entering Duna's SOI), otherwise you may find this changing significantly, of course, once you enter Duna's SOI, make sure to set it to 12,000-12,500 again, this allows you to spend very little fuel to circularize your orbit in a stable orbit with an apopsis between 50-100 km. One thing you can do, is avoid a "direct ascent" from Duna. I've gotten better at orbital rendevous (I don't use mech jeb, or any addons like that), there is no sense in taking the fuel you need to get from Duna's orbit to Kerbin, all the way down to Duna, and then back up again. Leave that fuel in orbit around duna, and simply link up with it again after getting back into duna orbit. What I did twice last night was not optimal - I had way more fuel than I needed (using 2x nuclear engines), and I took 2 command pods (the 3 person capsule, and then a 2 person lander) - extra weight, I could have eliminated the 3 person pod and put on a light probe core. You could easily just leave a fuel tank with a docking port - no need to make it a fully functioning ship like I did (with its own pod, engines, RCS, etc), or maybe a fuel tank with a small probe core and some fixed solar panels, and docking port. My 1st lander used 2x flt-400 tanks, and that flat rockomax tank (I think it holds the same amount as an FL-800?), and 3 aerospike engines with the two outer under the fl-400 tanks, feeding into the center (making it a 2 stage asparagus design). The aerospikes were not chosen because the atmosphere was any concern, but because they are short, they have a much better thrust to weight than the nuclear engines (which were left in orbit), and they have a good ISP (the highest non nuclear ISP is 390, which they have and they have the higher TWR of all the 390 ISP engines) I actually came in an aerobraked retrograde, and forgot to put separators, so I ended up taking the whole thing into orbit again as an SSTO - a retrograde orbit, because thats how my interplanetary stage was orbiting. It made it into orbit, despite carrying as deadweight 2x aerospikes (only the 3rd was going for the last part due to the fuel lines). So the 2nd time, I used only 2 aerospikes, and instead of the central aerospike, I put a little rover underneath for the kerbonauts to use (clearance was sufficient). It landed at a higher altitude (only used about 1 second of burn prior to touchdown), got into a prograde orbit without issue, linked with the interplanetary stage (nukes and ions), and since I had brought way more fuel than I needed, I refueled it, and left it in orbit, transfered the crew to my interplanetary stage, and waited for the return window. Now for all future launches, I won't bring a lander, I'll just bring fuel for my SSTO lander orbiting duna, and whatever payload I want to soft land. The 2nd time, I also launched my interplanetary stage, and lander stage seperately, and did a rendevous in kerbin orbit - no fuel savings there (its actually a bit of a waste), but the rocket launches were much more manageable than the very complex and high part count behemoth I launched the first time. Using this method, I need to scale down my launchers (7 large orange tanks, asparagus staged), as I basically brought over fullly fueled orange tank's worth of fuel all the way to duna - ie, my central orange tank - the orbital insertion stage had plenty of fuel left for both the lander and the interplanetary nuclear/ion "tug", so I shut off their main engines, and took them to duna too, I also left them there (like I've done with many fuel tanks around the mun and minmus), I'm now in the habit of over-building my rockets, and when its time to head back to Kerbin, I guess how much fuel I need to get back (ussually with a good margin, and my main stage normally has ions, so I can ussully get it home if I run out, though it may take a while), and leave the rest in orbit with a small docking port for future use.

I think for EVE, given both its atmosphere, which is very bad for the nuke, and its high gravity, which is again very bad for the nuke (its TWR is terrible), aerospikes are pretty much the only engine you'd want to use. I also figure that a mk1 command pod with an FL200 and an lv909 gets more dv than the same with a nuke (due to the nuke's weight). For upper stages of equal weight, the nuke doesn't seem to get more dv until you're feeding the lv909 with an fl800 tank. Realistically, all you want your craft to do is get to orbit around EVE. The upper stage, the one operating at low atmospheric pressure, should be so light, that I doubt its worth carrying a nuke up from the surface, because the nuke won't do much better for your stage that should just get a command pod/mk 1 lander can into orbit. Eve is so hard to get to and back from, that if you are trying the "direct ascent" approach, rather than the "oribital rendevous", you're a masochist. Heck.... you can even put on 2 RCS thrusters on the lander can, jettison everything and just push the lander can alone with RCS (you can get some significant dv from just 0.01 weight of RCS thrusters), and then bail out and jet pack your way into a stable orbit. Then you rendevous with your interplanetary stage that you left up there in orbit. Do not bring the interplanetary stage down to Eve's surface, its a huge waste.

You realize you get those 600 m/s back when you eject from the mun's orbit. When you fight gravity, that delta-V is *LOST* This is most obvious if you sit there, hovering over the mun, your tank could have 2km/s in it, but hover long enough, and you end up with *nothing*. fight gravity for half that time, and you've lost 1km/s When you thrust perpendicular to gravity, that delta V is stored, and eventually counts towards your escape velocity when you do your burn. *assuming you time your ejection burn right* No you aren't there is a big difference between thrusting opposite gravity, and thrusting perpendicular to it, as I mentioned above. Of course the lower gravity is, the less it matters. On Kerbin, you are losing nearly 10 m/s every second you thrust in opposition to gravity.... on Gilly, well, who cares?

I know KSPs aerodynamics models is still a WIP... and its also probably the least realistic part of KSP. So, question #1: I've heard that drag is proportional to mass - or rather mass is used as a stand in for its aerodynamic cross section - thus any part witha drag coeeficient of 0.2 will have the same terminal velocity.... But is the mass of fuel in a tank included? Ie does a full tank have the same terminal velocity of an empty tank. If the mass of the fuel is added to the tank before the drag is calculated, I guess it would be like that... but if the weight of fuel does not affect this (as it shouldn't... really), then fuel optimal ascents would generally be done at much higher velocities, no? Question #2: If drag is proportional to the part's mass, does it work the same way with lift? I saw a youtube video on making SSTs (ram air intake spamming, bassically), they recommended using swept wings because the lift rating/mass was higher than delta wings... but when I look at the stats (given that I fly and my dad is an aeronautical engineer), I look at the L/D, and that would imply that delta wings are best (at least within the atmosphere, I suppose there is a point where lighter wings are preferable for maunevers in space, even if they are aerodynamically less efficient - and getting to orbit uses ore fuel). I've also heard that lift increases linearly with velocity, not ^2 ... does it work like this with drag as well? If it was changed to exponential... would this allow control surfaces to work at higher altitudes (assuming you're going faster), or are they modeled in some funky way -perhaps like reaction wheel torque?

So I've added a resource "cooling", massless like electric charge, and various modules that consume it. I'd like to add radiators that produce this resource. So far I've just copied solar panels and made them produce this instead of electric charge.... However, its still far from what I want. Sun tracking would be fine, if I could get them to always orient 90 degrees to the sun. However, I want them to work even (especially) when there is no sun exposure. I don't want them to be "always active", as the radiators should need to be retracted during high speed atmospheric flight. On the one hand, we have generators like RTGs and launch clamps: MODULE { name = ModuleGenerator isAlwaysActive = true OUTPUT_RESOURCE { name = ElectricCharge rate = 1 } } Is there something like "isActiveWhenDeployed" Because... that would be ideal, much better than: MODULE { name = ModuleDeployableSolarPanel animationName = bigsolarpanel raycastTransformName = suncatcher resourceName = ElectricCharge chargeRate = 18 powerCurve { key = 206000000000 0 0 0 key = 13599840256 1 0 0 key = 68773560320 0.5 0 0 key = 0 10 0 0 } } Right now, I'm thinking that I may just have it always be active, and the animation is just for show... The last option is to make them into very very very low thrust engines with an alternator *sidenote, what is "raycastTransformName = suncatcher" I notice only the static solar panels, and the gigantor panels use that

I'm on Mac OSX 10.5.8, hence no updates. I added a ton of control surfaces... my earlier designs I thought this was a problem, as when the control surfaces were used for anything other than pitch (ie, roll), the nose dipped.... but now, when I need to hold the nose down... it makes no sense. I have tweaked some stats/added some mods (in particular, back porting many .22 parts to .19, but nothing that I can think of that would affect the SAS.

First off, due to my OS, I'm still on 0.19. I've made a number of spaceplanes that just didn't seem to fly, I'd get off the runway, pitch up, hit "t" to toggle SAS (with an ASAS module on the ship), only to see the nose swing down and the whole plane crash into the ground. I've since made craft that I could mannually fly, having to constantly pitch up to maintain attitude, but I could fly them past 20km just fine, while the SAS/autopilot always nosedives.... I even made craft that had the CoL ahead of the CoM by a bit, and the SAS in this case seemed to maintaine attitude for a bit, then slowly starts pitching down, and then after some more time... nose dives.... Has anyone else had this problem? This always seems to occur on my designs that have a spacecraft slung underneath a spaceplane - with an inverted gull wing, and engines inline with the craft slung underneath... the thrust lines and CoM match well, and its quite controllable without SAS. I've made some small spaceplanes that handle just fine, and all my rockets, the SAS seems to work fine on. I can't figure this one out.

Piggy backed, with only docking ports holding it, was far too unstable in my designs. So I tried slinging it underneath from a raised midwing, with most of the mass (engines, fuel, etc) on the sides - but this turned out to be rather flimsy, and I couldn't get it off the ground, or get SAS to keep it in a climb if I managed to get it off the ground (I hear SAS got better post version 0.19 ?) Impressive to be sure, but very complex, I'm looking for simple designs, preferably ones that don't exploit the game's partially developed physics model (ie excessive air hogging), or use clipping - but not so much that I'd call it a "rule" for what I want. Hrmmm.... My ultimate goal is to use one of these designs as inspiration for a design with non-stock parts. I would like to place one of these "lifters" in orbit around every planet with an atmosphere, as a re-usable descent and ascent stage (fueling will be difficult, but thats where non-stock parts come in :-) ) for nuclear/ion powered pure spacecraft I want to make every launch vehicle reusable (not just recoverable on Kerbin) - that mainsail launcher couldn't really be re used unless it somehow lands tail sitting, ready to launch again after being refueled.

I've been struggling to design a certain craft, so I'd like to see what others can come up with... only stock parts, of course.... What I've been trying to make is really two craft: 1) A SSTO space plane that can carry a 2) pure space craft using a nuclear engine and supplementary ion drives I want (1) and (2) to be joined by docking/clamp-o-trons Basically, I'm looking for a space launch system enabling 100% re-use/recovery, but one that doesn't require wings and jets to be attached to everything I launch into space. I tried having my spacecraft on the front, docked to the space plane behind, but it was unstable. I even capitualted and gave it some wings and wheels for support, but no jet engines), and used a decoupler to attach it... still couldn't even get it off the runway. I tried a lifter design like "White Knight" (The carrier for Rutan's Spaceship 1), can't get that off the ground either... for added stability, I had a fore and aft docking port, so it was attached by 2 docking ports. So, for a more formal set of rules: 1) Nothing may be discarded or lost, no strut/fuel line connections may be broken. After reaching orbit and undocking the spacecraft, it must be possible to redock and have the set be the same way it was as on takeoff (minus some fuel, of course) 2) The craft to be lifted into orbit must have: a capsule big enough for 1 Kerbonaut (such as a mk1 pod, but a mk1-2 pod is also acceptable), anything may be used on the lifter, including probe cores 3) The craft to be lifted into orbit must also have at least 1 nuclear engine, at least 1 FLt-8000 fuel tank, at least 1 reaction wheel, 2 ion engines and the equivalent of 2 radial xenon tanks worth of xenon propellant, and enough power generation/storage to run the ion engines at full throttle for 5 minutes 4) The craft to be lifted must get to orbit with a full fuel load, and no wings.control surfaces/jet engines. 5) The winner is the one with the simplest (fewest part #) lifter craft, only stock parts

Yea, I tried the edit, but it wasn't there, after your post, I went back and looked closer, selected "advanced", then I could edit that part. Also, I'd like to thank DMagic and RadHazard, most of the other posts... well... I wasn't looking for an explanation of using reaction wheels, but rather if the ASAS/AdvancedInline Stablizer was basically completely redundant.... which as I suspected, it is.

Ok, backwards compatibility is the purpose, I wasn't missing anything else, thanks (PS, how do I change the prefix to answered)

According to: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/SAS "All command modules, with the exception of the EAS-1 External Command Seat, include SAS capabilities." I'm still stuck on 0.19 but as I hope to upgrade my computer and OS soon, I have wonder.... Does this mean that there is no reason to use the ASAS module (now renamed to inline advanced stabilizer) except on vessels that only have the external command seat? Its got the same torque as the reaction wheel, and the SAS function is redundant, so, its just more mass for the same thing, no?

Hrmmm, lest someone read this and think its realistic, I realized I made a mistake. Reducing ISp by 10x increases the mass accelerated by 100x, but not the thrust, as you accelerate 100x as much mass per second to only 1/10th the velocity. The 7,000 ISP thruster would only get ~15 kN of thrust.... You'd need a 5 gigawatt reactor for that amount of thrust, a 500 megawatt one wouldn't be sufficient To get a mere 120 kN of thrust, it would be only 875 kN - not much better than the nuclear engine we've already got. Doube the thrust, sure (but I've set the weight to be nearly 2x higher for the reactor+ engine), and only ~10% more ISP... ah well, I'll go with it. A 5 gigawatt reactor weighing that little is not very realistic.

Couldn't you reduce that 4000 m/s a bit if you did some aerobraking? You don't need to go to a circular LEO, you just need your perapsis intersecting the upper atmosphere, a highly elliptical orbit should work

This is why median values are often worth talking about more than mean values. If you look at the median income, vs mean income of certain countries... you'll see some interesting things

Well, once is more or less accurate for Earth... the Homo lineage (neandertals and modern humans are more or less the same species... without getting into a discussion on what constitutes a species). We've been dominant for such a short time, I can't really imagine saying we're the reason that Earth has only produced 1 intelligent species in its nearly 4 billion years of harboring life. Apes for that matter, are also pretty recent, and I don't see any non-ape lineages showing much potential for becoming a technology using species (beyond very simple tools, like what crows have been shown to make with bendable wire to reach food placed out of reach). Toolmaking, intelligence, and *education* are a powerful combination. The ability to pass on ideas from one generation to the next, so each generation doesn't need to reinvent the wheel, etc. Humans aren't really smarter than we were 10,000 years ago, but our accumulated knowledge is. If you took a bunch of kids, had them sit around playing CoD all day, with zero education, then when they were adults, plopped them in the middle of the jurassiv... they would not survive. But if you took a bunch of people who had learned a trade, they'd quickly establish a society and become dominant. Considering that intelligence wouldn't increase overnight, nor would knowledge, it may be hard for intelligence to evolve at all. It seems we (Earth life) was stuck for a long time in the local optima of Brain vs Brawn, where brawn was favored, and decreasing brawn for a little more brain ended up being a worse condition.... the amount you'd need to go in the "brain" direction before being viable constituted a huge leap, that must also be done in tandem with the ability to manipulate objects (in our case, with prehensile hands). I can imagine a lot of worlds where the species at the top of the food chain is the species with the biggest teeth/claws.... not the one that uses tools. Few land animals in Earth's history could take on a group of humans with spears in a phalanx formation... and for those animals... a bit of rope/pits/traps would do the trick.

"even if intelligence only popped up every 1000 light years or so it would still be a rather large number of intelligences in just this galaxy, but it would be very difficult to find" 1000 light years.. the galaxy has a radius of 50,000 light years... the galactic habitable zone (this is not based on a specific life chemistry, but rather the presene of elements heavier than helium, vs intense radiation and such), is far smaller than that. Its between 4-10 kiloparsecs from the core. So thats between 13,000 and 32,000 lightyears from the core. Assuming its a flat disk(its about 1000 light years thick on average http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980317b.html) and since 1/2 pi cancels out, thats (32^2 - 13^2) = space for 855 intelligent species each with a 1000 light year zone around them (actually a cylinder rather than sphere with the "flat" approximation). Travelling at .1c, the galaxy would be "confluent" with life if those species spend even 10,000 years out of the last few billion years expanding. Again... there's been plenty of time for the galaxy to become full. They may not want earth, but there's no particular reason they wouldn't want to mine asteroids, or the Oort cloud. I'm assuming such a species wouldn't even particularly want to be planet bound. Why aren't they somewhere in our solar system already? If they were so close, it would be hard to miss.... So.... if there are billions and billions of "earths" in the galaxy, that would mean billions and billions of planets where one of the following is true: 1) Life doesn't evolve into a technology using species 2) A technology using species destroys itself before controlling fusion or 3) Does not use fusion to travel to nearby stars. You need less than 1000 of those billions and billions to decide to travel to nearby stars to fill up the galaxy in 10,000 years. Thats less than 1 in a million "Earths" producing a species a bit more technologically advanced than us, a tiny tiny tiny fraction of time sooner than us (If just a few took even 99% of the time it took us to get to this state, the galaxy would be full) To me it seems incredulous to say the galaxy is full of earth like planets, and full of intelligent species, but almost every single species comes to the same conclusion: don't expand. I think its far more likely some will decide that, and some won't - and with that idea, the Fermi paradox still stands very strong. That leaves us with the Rare Earth hypothesis (planets capable of supporting simple life may be common, but planets capable of *producing* *complex* life are very very rare), or some idea of a race of "First Ones" that have spread throughout the galaxy, but at low density, and they are actively limiting the expansion of other species, remaining silent and hidden until a newly evolved species has the capability to expand, at which point they assert themselves and tell the new species on the scene to follow their rules... *or else* The latter is pure speculation based on little evidence, while the Rare Earth hypothesis has much more evidence, but is still based upon speculation about what life needs, and what is conducive for evolution of advanced life.

So I found the problem... I made two types of jet engines, the standard and the turbojet... but only the standard was set to use "IntakeAirB" , and I used the turbojet version on my Duna plane.... I wondered why it still showed IntakeAir instead of IntakeAirB in the resources display (it now shows just fine) I just can't figure out how the engines worked at all on Kerbin, when the air intake should have only provided the "B" resource..... unless I don't remember right, and they didn't work at all. I'll zip off to Duna later today with an OP'd "lulz Drive" that runs on "lulz" to make it easier to test

"While the expansionist aliens may have spread, they're quite likely to have also been destroyed or collapsed due to natural disaster on a massive scale or just through mutation / evolution / loss of expansionist desire / stagnation or cultural drift." Once they've got the capability to move between stars (and actually used it), even a gamma ray burst wouldn't wipe them out. Even if they're still in their home system, if they've got self sustaining subterranean asteroid/moon/planets colonies (as is likely on bodies exposed to radiation belts already), they'd survive a gamma ray burst. And thats not even considering a "terminator" scenario where biological life is eclipsed by machines it creates. mutation/evolution would not lead to their extinction without an outside cause.

So if we have NERVA rockets, why not Nuclear jet engines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion Such an engine doesn't rely on combustion, and thus should work on Mars (or Duna)... so I set out to make one for KSP. I got to Duna... and found that my modded jet engines would not work, can anyone help? Here's what I've got: Added a resource: RESOURCE_DEFINITION { name = IntakeAirB density = 0.005 flowMode = ALL_VESSEL transfer = PUMP } Added an intake specifically for the Nuclear jet engine: MODULE { name = ModuleResourceIntake resourceName = IntakeAirB checkForOxygen = false area = 0.01 intakeSpeed = 10 intakeTransformName = Intake } RESOURCE { name = IntakeAirB amount = 0.2 maxAmount = 0.2 } added a nuclear jet engine: MODULE { name = ModuleEngines thrustVectorTransformName = thrustTransform exhaustDamage = True ignitionThreshold = 0.1 minThrust = 0 maxThrust = 150 heatProduction = 700 useEngineResponseTime = True engineAccelerationSpeed = 0.1 engineDecelerationSpeed = 0.42 useVelocityCurve = True fxOffset = 0, 0, 0.74 PROPELLANT { name = ElectricCharge ratio = 4 } PROPELLANT { name = IntakeAirB ratio = 1 DrawGauge = True } atmosphereCurve { key = 0 1000 key = 0.3 1800 key = 1 2000 } velocityCurve { key = 1000 0 0 0 key = 850 0.2 0 0 key = 0 1 0 0 } } (also added a power generating nuclear reactor, that is needed to keep that energy sucking engine working) Why won't it work on Duna.... I set the "check for oxygen" to false.... the intake should generate the resource "IntakeAirB", no?

One species may lose focus... but if they were all over the galaxy, it wouldn't take very long to fill up the galaxy. If I may make an analogy to microbiology here.... If you put one bacteria on an agarose plate, one colony forms, that gradually spreads... and takes a long long long time to cover the whole plate (its growth does not follow a simple exponential curve, as only those along the circumference grow, in which case its a much more linear growth) But if you plate about 1,000 bacteria on your plate (roughly equal distribution)... overnight you have a "lawn" of confluent colonies.... That we don't see "confluence" should mean that there aren't that many out there. And you're also assuming governments as fickle as the US government who can't agree on anything. If we have some sort of collective or single consciousness, then the time span is not such a big deal, and its likely the goal could be pursued longer, with a view towars the "bigger picture" It would also send out colonies to avoid using up all the resources, leaving the center to die while only the periphery is expanding. A more uniform expansion prevents the center from dying out so fast. I would say that generally speaking, life tends to spread... aggressively. Lets not just consider one case for one species (colonization of the Americas), but life in General... and even in the case of american colonization... they spread across the continent quite rapidly, and filled it in later. Like I think a species would do with our galaxy, before even considering an inter galactic expedition.

But do you need a station for that? what does it matter if you haul that fuel up in 1 trip or two? Doin it in one means no complicated docking maneuver and use of RCS. For that matter, you don't actually save any equipment or fuel if you do two trip and dock, or one staged trip. I see the point of landers for interplanetary craft.... so you don't have to decelerate your fuel and extra equipment down, and then lift it back up... Likewise i see the point of launching refueling craft from Kerbin to interplantary vessels.... At the moment, I'm using docking ports for pods/landers, and probe cores for my interplanetary nerva/ion vessels, so I just launch a pod up (and I browse the forums while SAS is on and physics warp to 4x on my ion burns...). I've thought about making stations, and bases on minmus... but I just can't see the point of having to dock my IP craft with a station, and then the "fuel truck" with the same station. At the moment, the only point I see is so that I don't have to have them in the same orbit at the same time, but either one can go up and just orbit while waiting for the other.... Twice as many dockings for the same effect. And of course... bases in grav wells.... ughhh....

Beyond looking cool... is there any purpose to bases in space/ other celestial bodies? The only resource one can extract... is electricity The closest thing to a station that makes sense to me... is having part of your ship stay in orbit when you send down a lander. Is there any real purpose to these bases? Something that can increase efficiency/effectiveness of the space program? If not.... Could anyone point me to a version 0.19 compatible mod pack (My mac is running Leopard, and no later version of KSP works on mine, but I've back ported some stock parts) that allows some resource gathering? I was thinking of something like Nuclear reactor module + atmosphre processor module + chemical lab + fuel storage tanks = a fuel producing station on planets with an atmosphere... or at least maybe something for Laythe that can convert intake air to oxidizer. Maybe a drill + refinery + chemical lab for solid bodies with no atmosphere?

As I already said.... "If its not one of 1-5, then there should be multitudes of technological civilizations with controlled fusion, whom can at least colonize their local solar system, and thus are likely to be extremely long lasting. It seems incredulous to me that of these multitudes, not one has embarked on an expansionist phase. Therefore I conclude the problem lies somewhere in 1-5." "it would also be conducive to defense... we'd start to establish a buffer zone between us an other potential alien civilizations... the best defense is a good offense and all that. If we start an expansion program, we're less likely to be swallowed by an alien's" "Survival of the fittest will surely operate galaxy wide (not that survival of the fittest = always war, there are many symbiotic relationships where each entity increases its fitness through cooperation). Species that expand will persist and become more prevalent, species that don't will disappear." If we assume technological civilizations are common, then it seems incredulous that not a single one has embarked on an expansionist phase. Also, add in the billions of years they have to change their mind, and potential advances beyond that (ramjets and Antimatter), that make it even easier and shorter to do so. If there are only a handful of such civilizations, this objection is reasonable... if there are millions of them... this is not reasonable. If there are millions across the galaxy, and they only spread locally, you'd still see the galaxy becoming pretty full, pretty fast. And there are strong incentives to expand locally... at least within the nearest 10 light years or so, where travel isn't *that* hard with sufficiently advanced slower than light travel. I don't buy the argument that the galaxy is packed full of technological civilizations, but not a single one has decided it would be a good idea to expand beyond their start system. Likewise, I don't buy the argument that the galaxy is packed full of technological civilizations, but every single one has decided to hide their existence or operates in a way that we can't detect them. These arguments can work if we assume only a few civilizations, but thats assuming some variant of Rare-Earth.