Nuke

carrying munitions on a generation ship would greatly affect the efficiency of the ship. military hardware is heavy.

thats where you plug the line out jack into the line in jack and launch audacity.

i would actually worry about ecosystem cross contamination. the aliens would no doubt bring life forms with them that they depend on for survival. were not just talking livestock and crop strains but also things bacteria, insects, etc. needless to say you embark on such a generational voyage you will bring everything you need to engineer a new eco system. which might play havoc with our ecosystems if they get out of control.

they serve both purposes. you use the surplus hydrogen to reduce intake drag. any air that doesn't get fed into the compressor would cause some drag. by burning it with the surplus hydrogen from the cooling loop, the hydrogen is not wasted, and the drag is compensated. so its a good way to kill two birds with one stone.

yes, indeed so

nuke em and hork their stuff.

depends on the maturity of the user and how knowledgeable they are. this can range anywhere from lemmy from motorhead to my 5 year old neice. people who are obviously russian i imagine the voice from the russian cosmonaut from armageddon. if i think you are canadian, i add random ehs.

the irony is that sabre has ramjets in it (though they are more used for drag reduction than usefull thrust). ramjet tech is all over the place in high mach number capable engines, its a cheap and simple way to get thrust at mach>1.

i keep 2 installs, one stock one modded. i sometimes use the stock game to test my mods since it loads a lot faster.

watch out for revenuers

like i said it would be unlocked with science. it could be so expensive that you cant use it until near the end of the game (or rather the tech tree). also these facilities would be much more limited in the amount of tonnage you can deploy. you might be limited to < 25 ton payloads. and i can agree limiting the use of advanced parts. kerbals especially would need to be flown in. buildings would need to have a certain amount of crew and other supplies to function, so it gives you reason to constantly send support missions. im not totally against building them up to the point where they are totally self sufficient, but this should take a real long time and lots of missions. im thinking more along the lines of ksc eve or ksc tylo, than ksc minmus or ksc mun. obviously different planets would have different available resources. i dont see minmus as consisting of very much metal, so it may be impossible to build launch or construction facilities there, but perhaps a small refueling base (that can only produce monoprop and xenon fuels). mun might be metal rich but lacking fuel precursors so you might need to bring fuel over from minmus to fuel anything you build there. i wouldn't be much against having a vab and launchpad on tylo, or a runway and sph on eve, since thats actually harder than launching from kerbin. so obviously you would have limits on what facilities you can build where. the harder it is to get to or launch from a destination, the more stuff you can build there.

id do it like this 1. find a suitable site and land a construction beacon there. construction survey beacons are a part that you need to unlock with science. 2. the construction survey beacon will let you select what you want to build and tell you what you need (in terms of materials, vehicles, fuels, electricity and kerbalpower) to bring to the site to construct it. 3a. you land the required building materials near the beacon. 3b. you bring in whatever equipment is needed (such as a rover) near the beacon. 3c. you land the construction crew near the beacon. 4. when the requirements are met, construction begins automatically. 5. during construction resupply missions would need to be flown at a regular interval, construction will halt if you are overdue. the beacon then turns into a partially constructed building which could be animated to show the progress. 6. your building is unlocked. this also gives you access to any facilities that the building provides, such as launch facilities, vab, mining base, fuel refinery, launch pad, runway, mass driver, whatever. 7. building may need occasional resupply missions after construction to keep it operational (although other near by buildings can cover the supply requirements). yes, extraplanetary launchpads, kethane, and perhaps eventually kerb town could do all this for you. but the advantages of having static buildings that work sort of like the ones at ksc and dont slow down the game or cause your ship to explode when spawned, or have your extraplanetary launchpad fall through the planet's crust, would make the concept 10x better. furthermore this would require a large number of launches to pull off, so you spend less time doing ground operations and more time flying missions.

apparently you can use straight ammonia in an arcjet, and you get about 800s of isp @ 2n. http://www.astronautix.com/engines/esercjet.htm and this engine has been flown in space.

im not sure if anyone noticed but it seems tdp is on the decline (at least if you are on the intel bus). newer faster chips are using less and less power. as a result there is less heat to deal with. in fact this fall when i build a new computer im gonna go with a mini itx rig with a very modest cpu/gpu and im going to make it really quiet by not filling it up with high cfm fans. also heat has always been a scapegoat for more serious system problems.

i tried it but i wasnt very good. probibly because i had a hard time regulating the temperature of my garage.

heres my action group wishlist: i actually want more action groups. with the alt modifier you can double the count, but if the right side control and shift key are used in addition to alt, you can have have up to 8x the action groups. you could theoretically have a limitless number of action groups with additional input sources or defining additional modifier keys. i would also support analog and continuous actions as well. continuous actions are executed while the action group button is held down, rather than just being pressed. you could do things like turn on a thruster while a buttons is held down and turn it off when released. obviously this would be transparent to the user, so the thing being controlled decides whether to use a key down or key pressed event. analog actions (which are fundamentally different than continuous or what is currently used) pass a value from a joystick axis or other similar analog control to a module. you would have all the stock axes (roll, pitch yaw, throttle.. etc) available as action groups and if you have spare joystick axes you can bind them to additional analog action group slots in the control config menu. obviously you can only bind analog actions to analog groups. this mostly useful for things like trimming your controls by axis or controlling individual engine throttles (bind an engine throttle to an action group for example). all of this provides a mechanism for supporting all possible control interfaces used by mods, so mods that need to do stuff with input (infernal robotics, the gatling mod, to name a couple examples), can use a general purpose interface ranter than provide gui configuration, or worse, make you edit a file. i think this functionality may already be there but supporting more action group types would allow mods to have all their bases covered by the action group system.

im not sure what the current state of multiplayer is. i think the current focus is getting a new installer (which is in beta) working to make it a lot easier to install the retail files, and install/update the new engine, the graphics upgrade packs, and mods on all supported platforms. i think once thats going they will give input some love and then put more work into multiplayer. last time i played multi was years ago, and we were mostly using retail data. it probibly still works, but its kind of one of those old neglected things (like the ai) that never gets an overhaul. im not really interested in multiplayer (i played it to death in its prime and beyond), but its not hard to find players on hard light or its associated irc channels (#hard-light on irc.esper.net).

well i was going by the poorly sited articles on wikipedia instead of reading actual academic papers like i should have. thats still slightly better than lox/lh2 though, and hydrazine is a hell of a lot easier to store.

http://www.hard-light.net/ go get the scp, do it now! the engine is still being actively developed (ive even contributed a couple minor features myself). from the graphics you couldnt tell that this game came out in '99. the physics suck, yes, but it was always meant to be an arcade space shooter (it ended up being the best of its genre). the physics model has had some overhauls over the years, but its still mostly a space shooter. i actually tried to script in a orbital mechanics and atmospheric flight model, but the engine has numerical stability issues that cant be resolved without a major rewrite, so i pretty much abandoned that project. the important thing is that it has a strong modding community and new mods keep coming out to this day. now the game does require the retail content to play the original game (which you can get from gog for practically nothing), but there are a few stand alone total conversions that you can play for free.

if hydrazine is burned in an arcjet engine you get 1600 seconds of isp. so i like the idea of mining comets. they could become refueling stations for spacecraft. you could probibly even break off very large chunks of ammonia ice and move them into a more useful orbital trajectory.

heh cool, good to see better models. thats one thing thats always bugged me about this mod. shoddy graphics and things like poorly positioned nodes.

unless you can find an elevated target big enough to permit some error. but otherwise a missed target could be catastrophic in that situation. but i have the feeling the atmospheric density would allow for a far more controllable descent. you could have some deployable wings and glide to the target.

looks like a poor mans skylon. the first stage only gets you to the edge of space and around mach 2 (so it doesn't do a hot re-enter), but is completely reusable. after which you require an expendable booster for the rest of the orbital insertion. this looks like a reasonable cost reducing approach to putting things into space. its not as sexy as skylon, but it is a good intermediate design. and they painted it black so im all in, any space plane can fly if you paint it black.

does that pierce the sulfuric acid part of the atmosphere? if so you would need to add more robust corrosion resistance. still it could reduce the design tolerances for the rover by a large factor. from my very rough guesstimates were looking at 1/4 the pressure and about ~100c less temperature. which will certainly let you get more power out of an rtg. the low pressure, low temperature compartment can be made less robust, reducing total mass to venus. also the power requirements for the needed refrigeration can be reduced.

my computer is a freezer. many times ive owned laptops. and many times i realized that i never took advantage of the fact that it is portable. so these days i just stick to desktops, which have some room for some cooling hardware that doesnt suck. id also be somewhat concerned with condensation.