Nuke

all i needed was the mythbusters moon landing hoax episode.

i kinda think he3 fusion is overrated. p-b11 fusion is better because more abundant fuel supply. both are aneutronic. but these are second generation fusion concepts. get first generation d-d and d-t reactors working first.

the only reason i see to send humans at all is permanent settlement (or to test our capabilities to do so). you can send them for a publicity stunt or a political penis measuring contest (apollo program). but the robots have told us more about the solar system than any astronaut. in the 60s the human was really the only way to reliably conduct science in space, robotics really didnt kick off till the 70s when computers started getting really small, light and many orders of magnitude faster than what apollo had to work with. colonization really isnt about science its about infrastructure, and that will be done jointly by robotics and humans as ive already discribed. this gives us a base of production and exploration outside of the gravity well, which is holding us back right now (for both human and robotic missions).

pretty sure lunar regolith is loaded with iron powder. it just takes a magnet to extract it, and you immediately have a medium for a direct metal laser sintering machine. in its raw form, it probibly wont make the highest quality parts (its just iron after all), but its a place to start. perhaps mix in some carbon powder for steel. real problem with a lunar foundry is adequate heat sources. burning fuel and oxygen would be wasteful. electric or microwave heating (i know for a fact you can smelt metal in a microwave oven) might work if you have a nuclear power source (or better yet an energy positive polywell). an electrode furnace would work if you could salvage space junk. you will need a reactor if you want to produce aluminum.

i could imagine other materials like lunacrete or lunar basalt sintering would produce neccisary materials to allow for additional structures to be built. ive seen plans for an automated solar powered sintering robot, which would produce modular bricks which could be used as building material almost right away (such a robot would probibly be landed for phase 1). lunacrete would be a bit more involved, but would allow for more complex construction. a metal foundry would probibly be the first extension to the colony, as it allows for the reinforcement of lunacrete structures, allowing larger buildings. since building materials are the heaviest to transport, manufacturing those on site is critical. manufacture of structural metals like steel and aluminum is just the tip of the iceberg. then comes other metals neccisary for technology, copper, carbon, silicon, glass lead, and chemical production. once you got that you can do production of electronic components. when you start manufacturing space craft you will need more advanced materials like titanium and tungsten. for propulsion and power mining of uranium helium3 and whatever propellants you need. i can see mission launched entirely from the moon to recover space debris for salvage. you would have to build an entire industrial complex to make the colony 100% self sustaining and productive. but i see it more as a progressive expansion of the colonies capabilities. initially it will need to be resupplied from earth and as the production capabilities of the colony increases the fewer supplies will be neccisary. by the time we do something like this we will likely have better launch systems, so the resupply aspects will be made less expensive (possibly to the point of allowing regular trade). would be nice to do it now, but i dont think its happening any time soon.

i can see a couple human technicians being present to oversee robotic construction in the initial phases. its certainly easier to keep 2 or 3 crew alive for 6 months than 3 dozen people alive for a week. but bulk habitation would be delayed until there are guarantees for the long term survival (on the scale of years) and potentially evacuation of the colony. just having full tanks of oxygen/fuel/water on the ground will help that along. you might also have gradual colonization, for example sending in farmers to grow and preserve foodstuffs ahead of full blown colonization. i figure it would be something like this: phase 1: send robots and tankage to harvest and store raw lunar materials neccisary for colonization (water, fuel, oxygen) and prep the colony landing site. phase 2: bring in the primary colonization structure(s), vehicles and machinery and land them robotically. phase 3: bring in a small technical crew to oversee pressurization of the colony, implementation of radiation shielding from local materials (regolith for example) and secondary construction (most of the labor would be robotic, crew only provides technical oversite). phase 4: bring in the farming crew (this crew might be initially small with robotic labor) to produce foodstuffs for full blown colonization. phase 5: begin colonization, starting with essential personnel (leadership, technical, engineering, medical), mission critical personnel (scientists) and then finally general colonists (laborers). what all this has to do with ion propulsion is beyond me.

i wouldn't use ceres as a gravity tractor and i would presume it would be simpler just to terraform other worlds than to move our own. ceres would be very useful as an intermediate colony during the gradual inflation of the sun, to allow us to survive till a jovian colony becomes possible. way i see it we would just planet hop as the sun expands. rising temperatures on mars will simplify terraforming operations there. but eventually mars will become the new mercury and habitation there would cease and move on to ceres. i could however see the moving of the moon and colliding it with ceres to increase its gravity and heat the planetoid, possibly creating a magnetic field like on earth. this would be done thousands of years before the habitable zone moves to the asteroid belt, to allow time for cooling, crust formation and teraforming. though the astroid belt will probibly need to be artificially cleared during this time. before that happens tunnel boring machines can be used to create habitable areas under the lunar surface, so the moon becomes the life boat for the bulk of terrestrial bound humans. it would be much easier to move the moon with ion propulsion than the earth. useful materials from earth (like water reserves and farming critical nutrients) would also be transfered to the moon to support life there. the earth itself would need to be completely stripmined of usable resources, some for terraforming but most of it going to manufacture launch vehicles to get humans and other resources out of the gravity well (at this point it becomes acceptable to use nuclear propulsion for launch applications, so the evacuation would be done with heavy lift reusable launch vehicles possibly using nswr engines). archives of genetic matrerials created to clone animals and engineer ecosystems on other worlds. all this will require humans to plan things ahead on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years, but we have how many billion years to figure that out? what kinda tech will we be using by then? also we may have already colonized a sizable portion of the galaxy by that point anyway.

id start a lunar colony robotically and only send humans after fuel, oxygen, water, power and possibly food reserves have been established. once there the primary jobs are farming, repairing stuff, and science. the crew would also bring their own escape solution should something go horribly wrong. once you got basic survival down comes mining, construction, and eventually permanent habitation. its completely doable. id use the same plan for mars, but that one would be launched from the moon, not earth.

while the liquid metal engines do have their issues, argon and hydrogen based ion engines are still viable alternatives. i was merely trying to point out that xenon is not the only option for ion propulsion. with a chemical rocket you do a fast burn and then wait for days/weeks/months/years for your next maneuver. if you are going to do all that waiting anyway why not use that time to increase your velocity slowly with an ion engine. then you whole ship get lighter, fuel tankage decreases in size. i think the hate comes from the fact that people dont like flying them in ksp. you spend hours transferring a small satellite from kerbin to mun. but in the real world you just let the computer do the flying and monitor the telemetry for anomalies, a job for the intern.

that would make the whole planet one big ball of fission reactor. the surface would probibly be completely molten.

except uranium makes things yellow.

while xenon is the preferable gas for current ion propulsion pretty much any noble gas will do. some engines like mpdt can run on hydrogen. engines such as LiLFA, hall effect, feep can run on metals like lithium, bismuth, and caesium, respectively. ion engines are diverse and very flexible in what kind of propellants they can use.

first attempt was a 4 section launch complex on wheels. after landing the whole kitten kaboodle on minmus and docking it all together, ive come to the conclusion to use as few parts as possible. so far i landed 4 sections, the launchpad, the smelter, the fuel truck and the parts storage platform. it just didnt work. there were so many complex vehicles all docked together it just made the game very slow. second attempt i toying with the idea of keeping the pad and the mining in seprate locations, and then using rovers and vtols to move rocket parts and fuel from the refinery and the smelter to the pad (all of which are spread out so they dont lag eachother). of course the time neccisary to move everything to the pad makes this a bad idea. now i have decided that it would just be better to make the smelter and the refinery into one platform. its not hard to stick the rocket workshop right on top of the smelter (if its the root part), then use larger than neccisary fuel tanks as the descent stage, and then repurpose those tanks as fuel storage. to make it more versitile it also carries kethane, monopropellant, and xenon tanks (which i used for all the orbital operations via mpd thrusters, saving the lf/oxy tanks for descent), and two large rocket parts bins. i landed it on mun in a spot where kethane co-exists with ore. i still need to land a launch pad next to it, but that should be trivial (i already did it with the lag-o-tron launch complex i built on minmus).

power requirements would be astronomical. so bring a 1MW nuclear reactor with you. at that point you are better off putting all the power into an mpd thruster array for several orders of magnitude more thrust over ion engines (in the ones to tens of newtons range, so its still a little slow, but not as much), with really high isp.

i dont think a tokamak based reactors will work very well. i think a polywell type reactor would be more viable (and a lot cheaper to build than a tokamak). Bussard explained it better:

totally think that a a shuttlebay type part would be ok if (and only if) you carry some full rocket part canisters, either launched from kerbin or from a remote mining base. the only fundamental difference is that the shuttle bay is on a ship as opposed to part of a surface base. you still would need to do all the mining and processing you do now, you are just launching from a mother ship instead of some dirtball. this would be totally awesome for a deep space missions. spare parts would be carried on board and could be built into whatever the mission requires. like if you destroy you refueling lander or your rover and need a replacement (and cant bother sending for a new one from kerbin), you can just build a substitute from your supply of rocket parts. certainly dont want zomg free parts! another idea would be ship recycling. where you can gather space debris into a recycler and generate new rocket parts (or perhaps scrap metal that can be converted to parts with some penalty). would definitely inspire more salvage operations. though perhaps a little bit out of the mod's scope. oc is nice and all, but i wish it integrated with kethane like your mod does.

its sort of like the math that is used in electronics engineering is technically wrong, but practically accurate, because of an early assumption on which direction the electrons were flowing that turned out to be completely backwards. nobody has had the heart to force the ee people to learn new physically accurate equations

i think uncompressed tga is (((w*h*bpp)/8)+18) bytes in size (unless its indexed color which requires space for a color table, probibly 256*32/8 bytes, but im not sure). compression is rle so its not very good with noisy textures, if you have a lot of contiguous colors it can take it down a lot, but if there is a lot of noise (like all my textures), compression suffers. but wherever there is compression there is the time neccisary to decompress it. im actually quite surprised that were not using dds textures with dxt1 compression, which makes smaller files and they can be used by the video hardware in their compressed state (so its just load and go).

a cheap temp fix for the invisible bins is just to stick this in the bin cfgs: MODEL { model = Squad/Parts/FuelTank/fuelTank1-2/model position = 0.0, 0.0, 0.0 scale = 0.65, 0.52, 0.65 rotation = 0, 0, 0 texture = model000 , Squad/Parts/FuelTank/fuelTank1-2/model000 texture = model001 , Squad/Parts/FuelTank/fuelTank1-2/model001 } this just uses the Rockomax X200-32 tank as a placeholder for the mesh. its scaled to fits between the nodes and is an approximate size, so our craft dont have phantom parts.

is it just me or do the ore/metal bin models show up invisible?

super awesome fun time! *builds imperial fleet*

for me the trek timeline was completely ruined when voyager came out.

use forward slashes in your paths.

i talk about space all the time, know what they say? "meow"

the ramjets are just a convenient way to reduce intake drag by burning up the surplus lh2 (the precooler needs more lh2 flow to work than the engine can consume) to accelerate any unused intake air (which bypasses the precooler) out the tail end. this just makes the intakes less draggy, as opposed to creating usable thrust, and its all powered by fuel you would have had to vent overboard anyway.