Nuke

im pretty sure you can use them in such intense light that they would fail to ablation of material from the surface. but so long as you limit the current (and you can just use a resistor for that) they shouldnt burn out due to pushing too much current through them. a panel is really an array of smaller units, use a row of cells in series till you get a voltage that you want, then connect a bunch of rows in parallel till you get the current you want. then just keep the sun on it. put the output through a switch mode supply and onto the mains.

i got this: etched the board myself, never finished the firmware though. its a 2313 so i dont have much flash, my code doesnt fit so i need to refactor all the things. its not the display code its the serial/i2c inteface that needs to be reduced. it needs to connect to an arduino over i2c for the pc interface. and this would make a pretty good gauge display: this screen cost me $9 on ebay and has a very easy to use arduino library. catch is its a 3.3v screen so you need a bunch of resistor dividers or zener diods or n-channel mosfets to drop the signal level. its not as fast as a parallel display but its fast enough to draw a basic gauge on it (or asteroids).

oh its possible, its just going to be very limited. textures will need to be compressed and reduced (not with mods). physics will probibly need to be simplified (primitive based collision detection for example). part limits are going to be an issue. mod support may need to be disabled. not to mention new interface code. it would be different enough to completely change the look and feel of the game.

my 3770k can barely handle some of the ships i build, i dont think an arm processor would do very well. i personally wouldn't want to play ksp on a touch screen though.

iter/demo wont give us anything we can use in space. tokamaks have a minimum size that is a major physical limit to how small you can make a reactor. it might generate data that is useful in other lines of reactor research, and may produce breakeven terrestrial power reactors in time. its the compact reactor designs you really want to place your bets on for use in space. dense plasma focus fusion would be a very small sized reactor. a polywell (its supporters are a little less radical than the dpf croud, which is a good sign) would be small enough to put in a space craft (3 meters for the polywell), its also going to be capable of direct conversion under the p-b11 reaction, thus removing heavy thermodynamic engine: pumps, coolant loops, radiators, turbines, generators, etc, from the reactor (you might still have one to eliminate and utilize reactor waste heat, but not as big).

we could probibly launch a dry reactor and fuel it in space. spread out the launch of fuel rods across multiple missions. these would accompany missions to launch the hydrogen propellant and other consumables. much of the mother ship would be launched on one rocket, and you might launch the lander and crew on another. 1 put nerva mothership in orbit unfueled 2 several robotic fueling/stocking missions (reactor fuel rods are placed in protective casks for launch, and could be ejected and parachuted down if a problem is detected) 3 launch landing package and crew (they can ride up in the lander)

we are already printing in concrete at a very large scale. and there are shipyard scale cnc machines for building carbon fiber composite boat hulls. so i can imagine our first extra planetary bases might be 3d printed by robots long before humans get there. lunacrete and bricks (made using lunar basalt sintering robots) would be fairly good materials. im actually looking forward to seeing swarm robotic based 3d printing systems.

mpd is pretty effective. but they are power hungry, you need a 1MW reactor minimum. molten salt reactors (the ones we tested in the 50s for aircraft reactor experiments) are pretty compact and have been operated before. lftr on the other hand hasn't even been made to work on the ground yet. we also dont have a very long track record for running space capable reactors. there have been a few, but never has one operated at 1MW (the russian reactor did 3kw). these reactors were liquid metal cooled, so i can imagine it shouldn't be to hard to get a molten salt reactor (not lftr) to work in space right now. the real problem isnt the reactor itself those are well understood. the problem has always been its hard to convert heat to electricity in space. obvious way is to use the reactor as the hot side of a brayton cycle, and a radiator as the cold side. you need really large radiators, but it can work (the down side is your space ship gets heavy). there are also thermionic converters, which were actually used in the russian space reactors, but these converters have horrible efficiency (5-20%). you can make it work but it wont be pretty. polywells would be nice if they work. you could get a theoretical 100gw out of a polywell, and thats doing direct conversion on the p-b11 reaction. so you could run large mpd thrusters off of that (well beyond the theoretical designs we have now, so potentially enough thrust for a moon launch). its also small enough to stick the polywell (sans the heavy vacuum system you dont really need in space) on a rocket and launch to space. problem then comes how do you start the thing when you are not on the power grid anymore. there are other small reactors, like dpf, and the thing being worked on at the skunkworks that would fit on a rocket. you will never see a tokamak on a space ship, they are just too freaking heavy. this is years down the pipe if we have to wait for fusion. we could do it now on nuclear but we would have to overthrow all the governments first.

im not really much of a gamer these days, i might play ksp maybe for a couple days a week, and thats my most played game. i do go outside during hunting and fishing season though. i get to play with sharp things, guns, blood, and talk about redneck stuff.

either need more money or some technology that doesn't exist yet or a rapid change in people's opinions about nuclear. even then its iffy.

id like them to work the way control surfaces do, where we can restrict their use to particular axes (both tanslation and rotation), and kinda work like engines where we can tweak their thrust levels too.

du isn't very radioactive. it is however very toxic chemically.

using antimatter in a power system would likely use significantly less antimatter than using it for propulsion. you wouldn't use vasimr in that case, you would have the power supply to use much better engines than vasmir. like mpd thruster arrays. but you are right if you can carry antimatter, you might as well go big.

i wouldnt go as far as calling vasimr a hoax but it is certainly not the right engine to fly men to mars. face it the problem with high isp, high thrust electrical propulsion is you need a lot of freaking power (tens of megawatts to gigawatts). maybe in the future when we got a lightweight fission, fusion or even possibly an antimater reactor to provide the gigawatts neccisary for vasmir (and there are better options available as far as electric thrusters go), then we will see electric propulsion really emerge. we could just go on chemical engines. or skip mars entirely until we have a moon base and some infrastructure. we can completely circumvent the political aspects of nuclear if can do lunar uranium mining and processing. we can launch an un-fueled reactor or nerva, fuel it at the moon base and then go to mars. of course none of these options would fit the rules layed out in the op (frankly its a little ambitious).

this makes me wonder why we cant just do the same thing but make it more reliable. if you can get the reliability up to 90% then you would have something. if you mass produce these things, you can always fix problems as they present themselves. figure out whats going wrong 1/3 of the time and fix it. you still have an assembly line turning these things out like crazy, so its still cheap.

switching game engines isnt the answer, development is too far along for such nonsense. but i hope that when ksp2 comes around, that they would either go with a more advanced engine, or take the plunge and write their own. as far as modding goes, any game engine can be modded, even reluctant ones (i remember having to hex edit on a few games). if you use an out of box engine, then dev tools will already exist for it. a custom engine would require mod support, perhaps with members of the community making modding tools. game engine design is a well understood science and code is very malleable.

i dont think the issue is the size of the collider. its the very miniscule half lives of some of the precursors thats the issue. i read about one issue trying to create and detect ununseptium where the fusion target consisting of berkelium-249 (which only lives 330 days which needed 90 days of cooling and 90 days of chemical purification) was held up in russian customs do to lack of paperwork. it actually crossed the atlantic 5 times before it was allowed entry. this is the kinda stuff you have to deal with. i think things would be easier if we had a consolidated super heavy elements lab where elements could both be produced and tested.

i assume you are looking to produce island of stability elements? the kind which would probibly make it possible to make really tiny primaries for nuclear weapons and other cool things.

rtgs are shielded well enough you can stand next to them without a rad suit. long term exposure may be an issue though.

sparkfun is a little expensive. i usually go check ebay first to see if i cant get something for less. im up to my eyeballs in prototyping stuffs so i dont need to buy anything, i just need to allocate time to playing around with this.

you must get horrible ping times.

this has been a major pet peeve of mine for at least 10 years. back then, i got my first 64 bit machine. i made the early leap to 64 bit operating systems (starting with xp pro 64). i thought, now i just got to wait for 64 bit software. thing is im still waiting. ive gone through 3 or 4 machines during that wait, but still over half the software i use is still 32 bit. it has taken some developers far too long to take the plunge. unity has the same problem.

this thread made me think of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx4oWVw0lI4

what you do is slam all the asteroids into ceres, this should heat up the planet (it wont be an asteroid anymore if we clear its orbit) somewhat to make settling it a little bit easier.

what good is it to cross the atlantic in 2 hours if you spend 4 hours at airports. there is of course the this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_Engines_A2 its a derivative of the skylon/sabre tech. it will have the precoolers and run on lh2, but the rocket bits will be replaced with a more conventional turbofan bits. it would be able to push mach 5.