PB666

Orion fusion is untested. there have been tests of the principle, same as fusion but not full scale operational testing.

ION drives imo would only be used for transfer and insertion of staged vehicles. At LMO they could be used for station keeping,,there is no need however because post insertion the could just be allowed drift untill the Manned transfer reaches mars. A direct mars is possible, a full go and return is not. Its not necessary to have a separate return if you have a refueled E to M vessel. Again a space tug could provide that fuel. Theres alot of thinks that spaceX could do, one is to provide the fuel the second is to transport the lander to Mars and or at the same time refuel the M to E vessel.

There should be a space war and weapons forum separate from a science forum.. i could not figure out why the OP thought a venusian war........meaning a war in a enviroment that is completely hostile to humans, was something that might be desirous.. Its sort of like asking how would you fight a war at the bottom of mariannas trench, answer, first evolve backwards and become a shrimp or squid, where that trench might be a useful resource. How to fight a battle on the top of mount everest? If you can manage these issues in a cogent manner you can ask the question of why fight a war on venus. To have a reason to fight a war you have to be hourding a resource in which two competing entities would like access. i pointed out in an old thread there is a redundancy of resources in our solar system. There is a much better availability of the rarest elements in the asteroid belt because true siderophilic elements have not undergone heat induced phase separation. Humans could not possibly deplete these. If we came to that point Venus would not be habitable unless you sheilded from the sun, in which case if you wanted to kill off a race just wait till they are facing the sun for several hundred days and remove the shield.

The human mind is not a computer like any electronic computer. Things humans a good at computers are poor at and vice versa. You could probably printout a brood mother for growing frozen embryos to human.

In general your systems blow up in KSP before you need to monitor them. -3, -2, -1, 0 [Ka boom] [Big orange tank spiraling out of a flame ball]. Or [launch from VAB] . . . . .[Placing launch on Pad][Ka-boom] . . .wth Or how about suicide burn on a hilly planet, you have 16, 12, 0, -2, -13 seconds [crash]

I see you are going for realism.

Not to worry, human flesh is more vulnerable than nuclear missles. Btw i'm burnt orange in your war, examining the warring factions i moved to the oort belt, built myself an interstellar space craft, before i left i sent out a singlal alerting all sentients in the vicinity that several predatory creatures might be expanding soon, that they were preparing for war on 2nd planet. Alas as i reached my destination i watched venus being destroyed by a vogon constructor fleet. Easy venus solution, build a super sunscreen park it on venusian L1-sun, block all radiation from hitting venus,mthe atmosphere collapses abd recombines withbthe rocks. Any ship that tries to leave i blast it. War over. Starting conflicts in space is not nearly as productive as cooperating with others in space. How many space stations does china have?

I think they should have released it as normal. I count on a bunch of obsessive gamers will always be at the site waiting for the update to come out, and they also obsessively find every bug and complain about it. So after the dust settles and they are at 1.1.4 or so i will download. Giving quite thanks to the obsessives, but remembering to look both directions when crossing intersections on the day after the new android galaxy 23 is released.

Mach II Cobra, Its more or less a powered down strip racer, not very stabke in hilly terraine or curvacious roads. The topic of conversation on monday morning at my highschool,was who rolled their jacked up bronco (i know its a chevy) over the weekend. I once rode a jacked up F350 tow truck, it had to be the most unconfortable ride, you feel every bump in three dimensions, which basically describes were you lunch is going to come out.

You would not be doing it out of Jebs backyard junkyard.

Ionized hydrogen is nasty, no doubt, it blackens just about everything in space, but at its ionization temperature its less nasty than heating oxygen or carbon up to achieve the same exhaust velocity. It allows thise engines to run cooler to get the equivilant ISP, thats why hydrogen is used. You can get the same thrust/ISP with O, but you would have to allow the core to get many times hotter. Its not that hydrogen is good, its that the other choices are bad, lithium borohydride LiBH4 is an alternative, Lithium hydride or ammonia are other choices, none are specifically known for their safety or stability. The key point about hydrogen is that you want it to ionize and accelerate before it recombines, which will happen as atomic velocities laminarize in the nozzle, once along in the bell it can recombine. So you have to have a core, exhaust nozzle and most of the bell stable to the temperatures of ionized hydrogen.

I will beat him to it. Nope. reasons. 1. Kerbins surface gravity while similar to Earths drops out with distance about 10 times as fast. 2. The orbital velocity of kerbin is about 1/3 of earths at minimum orbit. This means kerbin has less harsh reentries. 3. Kerbins atmospheric scale is about half of earths,mthe atmosphere drips ou more quickly. 4. Kerbins dont eat or excrement. 5. There moon is 30 times closer than ours. The other moon is eight times closer but barely constitutes as a gravity well compared to our moon KSP is real-life Nerfed.

You could have a brood lineage and a liquid helium surrounding liquid nitrogen freezer filled with human embryo's. The brood stock of females would be replished from the freezer until they reached their destination at which point they would expand the population with males and females. Cyrogenic storage of post-embryonic is not viable and will never be viable means of keeping humans alive, even coma/cool storage for 5 years like Avatar results in cachexia.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science_and_environment American myself, distrust the hell out of US media so I use the Beeb and NPR/PBS (but they do not have as broad of scope in international news as BBC). They have been popping headlines for a couple of months about a reusable launch, this is the first article that mentions it by name. See SSTO galore thread, the discussion was already open there about the full scale version. r/EverythingScience has had a bunch of threads about this. Caveot Emptor on anything reddit, if you want quantity, its the place, if you want quality, you have to filter. These are from reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/everythingscience/new http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/india-all-set-to-launch-its-own-space-shuttle-today-1408943?pfrom=home-lateststories http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/science/india-all-set-to-launch-its-own-space-shuttle-tomorrow/articleshow/52389095.cms http://www.firstpost.com/india/isro-set-to-make-history-india-to-be-fifth-nation-to-launch-its-own-space-shuttle-2785156.html?utm_source=fp_hp http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/isro-embarks-on-launching-indian-space-shuttle-1406368 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/Isros-big-leap-embarks-on-launching-Indian-space-shuttle/articleshow/52276174.cms http://qz.com/684828/india-will-soon-take-the-first-steps-to-launch-its-own-indigenous-space-shuttle/ and many more: https://www.reddit.com/r/EverythingScience/search?q=India+shuttle

Yes but oxygen can be more densely packed. I wont argue for use of Oxygen in the NTR, hydrogen IMO is the best for a variety of reasons. The real gains in Isp for H come with very high core temperatures, however the dramatically shortens the life of the core. " 8300 ft/sec,” a hydrogen-fueled nuclear engine would “attain an exhaust velocity of 22,700 ft/sec " ft per sec can be converted by 0.302 meters per second. 8300 * 0.302 = 2506.6 (very poor for a modern rocket engine). 22,700 * 0.302 = 6856 (ISPg of about 690) would not justify the use of this NTR under any circumstance because chemical rockets, given the storage tax of Liquid H2, is higher. To make NTRs really useful you either need to switch to a different propellant or raise the temperature of the gas core interface. What you really want to achieve is the cracking of H2 into hydrogen that occurs between 1500 and 3000k at the same time you increase the chamber pressure to neat maximum.

Its a good thing I pay taxes, lol. Hubbles latest view of Mars. You can sort of match it with the OPs photos. Public domain image NASA/ESA.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-36355842 Mad dash to reinvent the wheel. Sorry, didn't see taters post.

Because there are two different operations going on to get to mars and back. One operation is to get people into Martian SOI The second operation is to take people from Martian SOI, land them and then return them to Martian SOI. It could be further broken down into getting people into Terran SOI, transporting them from Terran SOI to Martians SOI, Landing them on Mars, Housing them on Mars, Returning them to Martian SOI, Transferring them back to Terran SOI, and then landing them. Technically you only have to worry about getting them from the ISS to Martian SOI, since SOPs can be used to get them to the ISS, the same is true for Landing. We can just forget about these two since we expect the cost to go down on these in the future. The return vessel can be remotely stationed by a space tug around mars, its not that cost intensive to have a heat shield since the shield can be used to aerobrake at earth. The landing vessel can be stations around Martian SOI, if you are very efficient you can used the same heatshield for landing on mars and aerobraking to earth. Thats one vessel, a Mars landing and return and dV is virtually capped a maximum if you use ION drives to station that vessel around mars. The first vessel then goes from Earth to Mars and then transfers to the second vessels orbit, the crew transfer. For design purpose it simply easier to stations many (land, relaunch, and earth return) vessels around Mars, the cost may be an issue. Its seems that a direct earth Mars vessel is possible, but the safest option is a vessel built in space for the purposes of having fuel reserves and crew protection again, that would drive up cost. There are many possible combinations of missions Mission impossible - the whole thing Take off and earth return split by martian landing and return LMO. mission Take off and enter martian SOI ended by Martian landing and full earth return. Take off and enter martian SOI, refuel vessel mission, martian landing and return to LMO. Take off and assemble martian station, station around mars mission, land and return to martian station mission, leave earth and martian to earth return. etc.

why? What would be the need for war around Venus?

Fusion of course is not currently viable. The other issue is there is no idea what the fusion power conversion efficiency is. The fins on the side of the vessel are primarily radiant energy deflectors for IR drive, any actual power goes to ship systems and what is left over goes into High ISP helium ion accelerators. If Cannae proves out I could dump helium in back of the drives and potentially push off the helium using that microwave resonance. Look at the acceleration also and the dV it would get to it destinations, but in generations. I should also point out that as an interstellar space craft, the moment it turns to its destination to slow down, at its highest speeds it will be bombarded with cosmic radiation from atoms and molecules that begin striking the unshielded parts of the ship. The fusion reactors (in the cells), cooling system/IR drives and the ion drives would be immediately exposed to damaging particulate radiation. A ship undertaking a voyage would have to seek out interstellar space were the density of damaging molecules and dust were lower, one would not want to begin a reversal in a nebula.

I should point out, that in this ship there is a cylindrical living quarter, suspended and turned by electromagnets that outside spins at 0.5g. In habitants enter via the top or bottom center.

Having read all the orevious post i am going to recapitulate several dozen posts of disicusiion from our past. This gets quirky. The cheapest source of energy in space is stellar radiation, locally known as insolance it is basically power = 1350 A / r^2 where r is distance from the sun in atomic units, A = area of panels. so Interstellarly we call that ISP = exhaust velocity, you csn also reflect, it does not help much/ although k2 uses for attitude control since all but 1.5 of its manuever gyros are broken. forget about g, it does you no good in deep space. N = 2 * eff * power/ ISP If your isp is as low as 1350 (135g) then you get a newton of thrust per meter squared at 50% efficiency. And the lightest weight panels are about a kilo per meter. As we can see, we can never realy get accelerations greater than 1 m/s with solar (0.1 g). And you will be hideously underpowered in deep space (r > 1AU). If you have ISP in the millions of meters per second, to conserve the amount reaction mass taken and ultimately used, you need power and lots of it. One way is to kill orbital velocity and straif a star at close range, in a series of kicks keep kicking the orbit out at the apogee until finally the orbit exits the system, this unfortunatly has the ship spending years doing nothing in intrastellar space, and ultimately requires both conventional thrusters and solar power to get apoor interstellar velocity. If properlybtimed though remote power could aid in a few months of acceleration, but then again it will drift in space for eons. Solar ships are essentially flat. A rectangular-like frame surrounds a long core and huge panels are attached to the rectangle. This type of ship offers one advantage though, it has the potential of stopping itself at its destination. by turning sideways on approach it can use stellar winds inside the pause to slow itself down, and in addition it can brake by inverted kicks at the perigee, it has power on arrival, howver the panels eventually decay with high radiation so they would have to periodically be removed and recycled. Another benefit of solar is that there is no active, only passive cosmic potential, so you dont need hideous forward shielding from space dust. As discussed here and in starship initiative remote laser (indirectly solar on whatever station it is position in the inner solar system and fusion power in the outer solar system) is a choice but only with very small light objects. Its completely useless in deep space and can only accelerate away from or decellerate in approach to establish bases in space. Basically solar for interstellar excepting remote powered gram weight vessels is a no-go This leaves all variances of nuclear. Right off the bat, fission energy under the best circumstance maybe slightly better than chemical rockets. It is hampered by low mass/energy efficiency and poor heat /power conversion efficiency, with this you might expect velocities in the 200 km/sec. Everything else is fusion, right now only Orion h-bomb design is the only plausibly working example. These however do not have efficient reaction mass directors and so about 40 % of the power is wasted, it may not ultimately be suitable for manned missions and violates the current treaties so . . . . . Assuming fusion can be workable you have generational ships that have huge fins for cooling and accelerate at the milli or micro newton rates. These two are the only viable near future. The ships also run into the active cosmic potentials past 0.1c, and may not be able to stop approaching their destinations. My fusion power ship can travel in and around any solar system, to get to the next star requires something factor 10 greater, and 1000 times more mass.

I sorry, no, I had the same idea about using remote laser propulsion for a 1g drive system 2 decades ago, you simply cannot control light to that degree, it violates the uncertainty principle. The central issue is d = 1/2 a t^2. By the time you are even 0.2 c, the debroglie wavelength, brownian motion of components in your laser are going to throw your beam of the target, even if you place the lasers in a solid block of lead with titanium mounts on a nuclear powered base at the heliopause, to take something, even 500 meter across at 1.5 trillion kms from the remote base. Think about it its width 90 / pi * 1.5 e 15 .....100 x 10-12 degrees. You have two basic problewsvthat we do not know to solve. 1. how to target given you are several light days from the target, and the error tolerance is less than 10-9 2. How to prevent things like scattering, diffusion, etc from spreading the beam. And I say this having studied the problem, we aren't even close to solving this problem. The type of foil you are talking about would have to be 100s of kilometers in diameter.

Well if a parachute for braking adds too much mass a laser sail that still does its job 1.5 trillion km form the source focused enough to reach at again 1.5 trillion km, the we should be able to build parachutes with the same technology capable on Mars with a downy feathers lightness. You might has have said infinite improbability drive.

http://www.americaspace.com/?p=93557 Io's thin crust and volcanism result in some bizarre behaviors not seen on other moons.