Nuke

i want a polywell running p-b11 fusion with direct conversion and an array of mpd thrusters, probibly running hydrogen for maximum isp.

i saw some awesome auroras last fall, at my sisters place in the bush, with zero light pollution. was awesome.

i dont think thats entirely accurate. you can turn them off, but i dont think you can get any throttle control. you might be able to control the flow of oxidizer into the engine, but i have a feeling that would greatly diminish its isp.

i kinda have a love hate relationship with those. sometimes its "hey cool i need that", and other times its just plain condescending and rude. so in those conversations what i do is just say that i already use those mods. so when someone quotes me with a mod suggestion, it just makes them look like an idiot that knows how to post, but is somehow incapable of reading anything but the thread title. the fact that a mod is available is a valid point in a discussion, but when that is all you have to add to the discussion, it just becomes clutter.

if we had this technology now we would be on mars already. that said a ready to test in space vasmir engine is sitting in a hanger waiting for a launch so it can be demoed in space. thats a lot closer than any fusion tech. polywells are a reactor of interest for space craft, since its small enough to be integrated into a space craft. you might use the iter timeline as an indication of when fusion will be ready for use in space, but that is a totally erroneous way of thinking. a tokamak will just be too damn heavy to use in space, and its not a machine you can miniaturize. the cross section of the toroid needs to be several meters across, and this is a constraint placed upon the design by the laws of physics. you cant just make it smaller (in fusion, it actually pays off to have a larger machine). since a polywell is spherical, the reactor only needs to be about 3 meters across, plus a little bit extra for the cages you need for direct conversion and your ion and electron guns. you can dispense with the heavy vacuum chamber for space applications. so its definitely something that would fit on a rocket stack. direct conversion also gets around the need to have a bunch of heavy thermodynamic equipment, such as turbines, radiators, pumps, and coolant (same stuff you have to have with a nuclear reactor). a tokamak also wont be compatible with direct conversion. i should also point out that the time to develop a demo polywell is less than 10 years, and would only cost a couple hundred million. i for one cant wait to see 100MW fusion-electric space craft.

saying that vasimr has an isp of 5000 is somewhat misleading. the whole point of vasimr is you can trade thrust for isp as mission needs dictate. its isp actually can be set i believe in the low 1000s to around 10000. with higher thrust being available at the lower end of that spectrum. you might use the low setting when you have a short window for a maneuver, or you need to power through a hazzard (such as the van allen radiation belts), but the rest of the time you will be using it at a high isp setting where its thrust will be very miniscule. of course the mission design becomes more complex because isp can change at the turn of a knob. its the perfect engine for unmanned operations, but i doubt it will be of much use a manned platform. if you are going through the trouble of having a nuclear reactor on board, you might as well just use an mpd thruster. a 1MW thruster might be able to push 100n @ 10000s. nobody has ever flown a reactor that powerful in space, but its not like we have been working on that problem since the 50s and 60s. http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/fs22grc.html one of the reasons i hope polywells make it is because it would give you a small (3 meters, mostly hollow) fusion reactor that could push 100MW. imagine what you can do with that and a cluster of those mpd thrusters. tldr: wikipedia is a horrible place to get engine stats.

bombardment may provide the neccisary means of heating the existing material in the crust, even if you are not dropping comets.

this is one of the reasons why i think it would be optimal to use an analog neural net rather than a computer.

well its a historical fact that the nazis pulled all kinds of propaganda stunts prior to ww2. one of which was a very high power tv broadcast (i believe this was when they hosted the olympics) that was bounced off of the ionosphere so that it would have very long range. the side effect of that transmission was that most of the radiation flew off into space. such powerful broadcasts mostly ceased by the 60s once we started putting up communications satellites and better electronics meant that lower power transmissions could do the same job. the german broadcast was certainly up there with the some highest powered transmissions into space (carl sagan's message on the arecibo radio telescope is probibly also on that list, though that was a more focused beam transmission and more likely to get through provided you were in the beam).

just fade out the other trajectories, your own, and that of your target if you have one are the only ones you are really concerned about.

hitler [/godwin's law] *note that this is a contact reference

im convinced you are going to need an instantaneous snapshot (il let the engineers figure this one out, im stumped). you not only need to know where the neurons are and whats connected to what, but also the electrical potential and neurotransmitter levels at each. if you sample the brain over time you are going to lead to all kinds of information skew. we dont know how much of our conscious is stored in the layout of neurons and how much is stored as electrical impulses. but if you dont have a consistent picture of both in a sufficiently small enough slice of time, your chances of the simulated brain starting up where it left off is going to be nil. this is a horrible analogy for many reasons, but if you try to copy the state of a running cpu the hard way (cpus actually have this functionality to facilitate multitasking oses, you can grab the state of all the registers and save them to ram), by looking at every transistor and recording its state, by the time you record the state of the last one, the cpu has gone through several cycles. you copy that state into a new cpu, and it will just spew out random garbage until the instruction cache runs dry. doing something similar to the human mind would be traumatic at best fatal at worst.

i have to agree there, were not going to even consider terraformimg mars until we have already colonized it and allowed the scientists to scour the planet for a few hundred years to study life and geology. if in that process if the colony expands such that it is impossible to relocate the population, then any teraforming that takes place will not involve planetary bombardment.

you could do this without a launcher. just store a mod manifest in the save. when a save is created, you can select what mods to use for that save, and those get stored to the manifest. when you load a save it would load only the mods in the manifest. you might make it possible to add new mods to or remove old mods from an existing save. all this stuff would be part of the main menu. it would take a little bit of gui for the mod select screen but you would have to add it somewhere anyway.

it becomes more efficient than any other engine at around 6000 meters. ive launched small nuke ships with just a few srbs and no other engines.

move it piece by piece or all at once, you are still moving it

if you are going to terraform it, you might as well go all the way.

i just realized that if you want to keep the plannet terraformed in the long term you are going to have to deal with phobos. you have to move it (its 10 trillion metric tons, so glhf). you only need to lower its periapsis to 2.1 martian radiuses to destroy it, that would probibly provide some heat. injecting heat energy into the planet is going to be good for terraforming. any nuclear winter as a result should speed up resolidification of the crust. it will spiral down on its own in 50 million years otherwise. its probibly better to deal with that first.

there are ways around it. first is always have something to draw. model data is so small you can just keep it all loaded and it has a negligible impact on memory. texture data, not so small. but if you keep only small versions of textures loaded at all times, say 128^2 textures in memory (about 50k each, uncompressed), then that too becomes negligible. that way there is always something to draw in memory. it might not look pretty but its there and you dont have to stop what you are doing to go get a higher quality version. if the texture is used a lot, such as its always on the screen, then load up some 512^2+ textures when you have some cpu time, and change the texture handle to point to the bigger version. this could be a few frames from when the engine decides it needs a higher res version of that texture, so a fraction of a second goes by and that thing you thought looked ugly now looks a whole lot better and your mind doubts that it ever looked ugly to begin with. you can also run texture streaming code asynchronously in another thread (though this is not a requirement you can do this in the same thread, just a possibility when threading comes into play), so it doesn't interfere with the game. its whole job is to load textures that are being used a lot and unload textures (to some minimum) that are hardly ever used. this kinda makes sense. the only time the game really has trouble is when dealing with a lot of mods. the stock game will always take priority for the devs. especially right now when the main focus is fleshing out the game.

what should be done is to load all the textures but at a lower mip level (resolution) that is negligible on memory usage. then you stream in and out the bigger mip levels based on usage. usage is fairly easy to track, since somewhere there will be calls to the graphics api to change the texture, each time this happens a counter (one for each bitmap) goes up, counters are also decremented over time to keep them from overflowing. the textures with the highest counters are the most used and should have high resolution versions in memory. the game would dedicate a slice of memory to textures and will load as many textures as can fit without ever going over. everything else when compared to textures is negligible. once parsed, cfgs take up very little space (on the order of a few KB), and model data (on the order of 10s to 100s of KB) is usually dwarfed by even 256^2 textures (uncompressed around 2MB), which are miniscule by today's standards.

i only found out a week ago that they remade the damn thing. i used to watch the tv series, and ive seen all the movies. needless to say i dont expect much from the remake.

math is second nature to me, work ethic on the other hand.

just use a mass driver. how to power it? we will have fusion long before we have terraforming.

i like the idea of leveling up individual kerbals. where they can learn skills after earning mission points. then do kerbal classes, pilot, scientist, engineer, eva expert, rover expert, etc. when you recruit a kerbal you can assign them a class, and then they level up within that class and can earn skills. these skills would eventually be pretty mundane, like being able to fix things, or hold an orientation, or do basic science, and move on to advanced stuff like plotting a course or manage isru operations. obviously this makes keeping your kerbals alive much more important. you loose one and you loose all the skills they have earned.

what i would do is grab a couple large asteroids and slam them into the ice caps. that should increase the heat of the surface and add some density to the atmosphere. but i have a feeling without a magnetosphere the atmosphere would get blasted away in time, so any terraforming would be temporary, but would give you enough time to build up infrastructure for a post atmospheric mars. you might be able to set up an artificial magnetosphere with a sufficiently large power source. the other option is to do a longer terraforming process (on the order of millennia), where larger asteroids, as well as deimos and phobos (they would spiral in eventually anyway), are slammed into mars until a dynamo effect is established. these would all be glancing blows to induce rotation of the core and possibly form a new moon. then you must wait for the crust to cool off sufficiently and begin bacterial (obviously genetically engineered mutant super germs) modification of the planet. slow but i figure its the best chance for a long term habitable mars. once the atmosphere is breathable then you begin engineering an artificial ecosystem and colonize.