Why Laythe. Why does it have liquid water?

[Guest]

9 hours ago, JIMMY_the_DOG said:

Whoever said kerbals had to breath perfectly untoxic air?

Jet engines work there. 

[YNM]

5 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

Jet engines work there. 

That only goes to say that you can burn the air there, not that it's not toxic in any form to biological life (unless if they have a radically different metabolism than what most carbon-based earth-bound life have).

Edited February 13, 2021 by YNM

[magnemoe]

11 hours ago, YNM said:

That only goes to say that you can burn the air there, not that it's not toxic in any form to biological life (unless if they have a radically different metabolism than what most carbon-based earth-bound life have).

It has oxygen, this require life outside some edge cases who would not work on Laythe as the oxygen would oxidize stuff. 
Have the atmosphere being poisonous, sure one way to have lots of CO2 in the atmosphere, an engine would not care but our lungs would not work, it would help keep the temperature up too. 
You could add an real poison, but the source would likely be biologial. However kerbals can remove their helmets 

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, magnemoe said:

It has oxygen, this require life outside some edge cases who would not work on Laythe as the oxygen would oxidize stuff. 

Like the Early Earth did, when anaerobic bacteries were filling the air with useless oxygen waste.

So, presence of life which produces oxygeb does not mean the air is appropriate for the oxygen breathers.

[YNM]

5 hours ago, magnemoe said:

It has oxygen, this require life outside some edge cases who would not work on Laythe as the oxygen would oxidize stuff. 

Who says the kerbals are thriving on oxygen ? The fuel they use is "LiquidFuel" and "Oxidizer" which can be any combination of stuff, including hypergolic fuels if they want to... and the jet engines simply use that "LiquidFuel" to burn it with whatever is in the "IntakeAir", presumably also in the "Oxidizer"...

[Incarnation of Chaos]

23 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

Jet engines work there. 

It would be funny if a mod reduced the MTBF of any engines operating on laythe when combined with an appropriate failure mod, compressor stages of most jets are fairly fragile things (In the sense they're in this narrow band of parameters where they won't shake themselves out the other end). So i couldn't imagine taking a jet engine, and pushing potentially corrosive salts into it and lighting them on fire would be anything but bad ideas.

Would i use anything like that? Nope, but it would still be hilarious to see massive 40+ engine laythe planes just to have enough hot spares to cover the inevitable failures while flying. Bonus points if this hypothetical mod also animates the compressor bits coming out the back in a "Contained" failure.

Oh! And depending on the salts, the color of the flames should be different. (In Afterburning mode, normal operation shouldn't actually produce any visible flames).

[Brotoro]

2 hours ago, YNM said:

Who says the kerbals are thriving on oxygen ? The fuel they use is "LiquidFuel" and "Oxidizer" which can be any combination of stuff, including hypergolic fuels if they want to... and the jet engines simply use that "LiquidFuel" to burn it with whatever is in the "IntakeAir", presumably also in the "Oxidizer"...

Well, the Celestials part of the Kerbal wiki says that both Kerbin and Laythe have Oxygen present.

[kerbiloid]

But we can't see much any highly organized life on it, so maybe the oxygen is just in accumulation process.

Edited February 14, 2021 by kerbiloid

[YNM]

2 hours ago, Brotoro said:

Well, the Celestials part of the Kerbal wiki says that both Kerbin and Laythe have Oxygen present.

welp XD lots have changed since the game started...

[DDE]

And that's before we get into fanon like the bioluminescent clouds in some mods.

[KerikBalm]

On 2/12/2021 at 7:05 AM, razark said:

Go compute the density of Kerbin, and compare to known elements.

  Hide contents

It's a game.  Don't get too wrapped up in the questions of "Is <X> possible?"

 

Assume 10x radii and SMAs... then its not so bad

On 2/12/2021 at 3:53 PM, YNM said:

What the Principia mod devs found out I think, lots of the stock configuration aren't stable.

Pretty sure that discovery predates principia by a lot

On 2/12/2021 at 3:55 PM, lemon cup said:

This. The concept of Laythe is based around tidal heating as is evidenced on Jovian moons like Io and Europa. The idea  is that the sun is not the primary source of heating on a body like this, but instead gravitational energy is converted into thermal energy and heats the planet from the inside-out.

As far as Laythe goes, explaining the presence of liquid water on the surface would be challenging (a.k.a. Sci-fi) using the concept of tidal heating. But that did not stop the KSP devs from taking the idea and running with it, and for that we thank them 

Well, Io gets hot enough for lava lakes... So its not that bad...

The polar ice caps make no sense though.

Tylo, laythe, vall, are all proportionately huge compared to jool vs the galilean moons to jupiter.

If Io were much larger, nearly earth size instead of more Moon sized... that would be an interesting destination (ditto for Ganymede, Callisto, Europa)

Im not sure how the tidal heating and temperature would scale though if those moons became >mars but <earth sized bodies...

[jimmymcgoochie]

Looking at a map of Laythe’s surface, there are several very large impact craters. What if Laythe was once an icy world with a subsurface ocean, powered by the multitude of volcanoes which appear with Breaking Ground and also explain the thermal geysers on land, but then a huge impact or series of impacts shattered the ice and blasted most of it into space, exposing the subsurface ocean beneath and adding enough heat that some water was broken up into hydrogen (that was lost to space) and oxygen (that stayed put) and keeps the ocean liquid? All the volcanoes would produce an atmosphere rich in CO2 (keeping it warm) and sulphurous compounds which would probably be toxic to Kerbals; as I understand it the toxic gas in Pandora’s atmosphere in Avatar was probably sulphur hydride a.k.a rotten egg gas.

[KerikBalm]

On 2/21/2021 at 1:33 PM, jimmymcgoochie said:

Looking at a map of Laythe’s surface, there are several very large impact craters. 

I see craters, I see no way of establishing that they are impact craters. Many remind me of this:

Which is most definitely not an impact crater.