Winter Man

This right here. You don't need a full g, because when you get to Mars you're only going to have 0.36g to play with anyway. I mean, you could go the Ares 1 route and start at 1g and slowing down along the trip, but there's little point. edit: While I'm thinking about the Ares 1, those gravity rings were made of 8 spent Shuttle fuel tanks each. Those things have about 25T dry mass, so we could realistically make a 100m ring with only 4 Falcon Heavy launches.

Yeah that won't be built this year. Maybe a small scale test aircraft by next year since the precooler's done, but not a full Skylon. These things take time. I know the guy's been designing it since the Space Shuttle was a baby, but still. Things crop up in development that don't in even the most rigorous planning.

The turnaround on a Falcon Heavy is much much better than an SLS though. You only have to build one and you get multiple launches per week. You could build something dwarfing the ISS in a fortnight for a fraction of the cost, then send it on its way to Mars the following week.

Moving an entire planet? Worked on Invader Zim, so it must work IRL. I'm on board. Although a little more seriously, I think that Mars might get flung back out towards it's current location.

Thing is with non-relativistic sublight interstellar travel, if your journey is longer than 40 years the technological advances made back on Earth make your craft pretty redundant. It's always worth waiting that little bit longer for that extra bit of tech, and it never goes ahead.

Do we really need *another* thread about this? One side agrees, the other disagrees, someone comes along and posts a wall of text that no one bothers to read all the way through, etc.

No you don't. The process of solar wind stripping an atmosphere away takes thousands if not tens of thousands of years. If you can build an entire atmosphere in human timescales, you can certainly keep it topped up on entirety-of-civilisation timescales. Not how gravity inside a planet works. The deeper you go, the more mass there is above you pulling you back up (assuming uniform density, otherwise there's a sweet spot a couple hundred km below the surface which is marginally higher).

Anyone know what the insolation is at ~50km? The clouds are thick but it's that much closer to the sun.

I reckon it'll look something like that. Yeah, Pluto's pretty much Minmus.

An aircraft carrier the size of a city that moves with air currents like your plane does. Wouldn't be that difficult.

Few little robot arm things and some spare parts in that cargo bay and you could use it to modify satellites. I'd imagine there's a billion and one uses for a little circuit bending on foreign nations' spy satellites.

Probably, he's here somewhere.

Kerbals are one unified race though, they wouldn't have two space agencies.

This'd be great to include on later-tiered rover wheels (maybe not the first one).

It comes from http://xkcd.com/285/ , now people do it to look clever because xkcd is clever so logic. But yeah, that was a damn cool computer and pretty much the entire reason we look into fusion at all. Pure fusion has been done in the lab, the issue is it currently takes more energy to create than we get out of it. If you're not worried about containing it and using its energy, it's relatively easy.

Not a solution.

Other than rovers would be made available in the VAB once built for their inclusion as payloads. Copying and pasting around the directories isn't a permanent solution by any means.

To start, you wouldn't have to begin at the launch pad. What space agency worth its salt tests a rover on a launch pad (or for that matter, builds them on the VAB floor)? Might as well for the little trouble it's worth. Another is easier positioning of parts with a more appropriate snapping and zoom level, like how the SPH has the side-by-side symmetry.

I'd actually like a rover building, where you can only build rovers to add to your rockets later. The 'launch' button would bung it into the test track, maybe at a 'KSC West' or something, out near the desert.

I mentioned in my thread below somewhere about reusing landed sections that you could implement subassemblies in the VAB view as uneditable. That'd solve that pretty easily. And I think this is the perfect time for these types of suggestions as contracts are starting to be implemented now, so money won't be far behind. Better to suggest these things before certain relevant sections are already implemented than after a point that would require too much code to be changed (rather than just added), otherwise what's the point in suggestions at all?

It wouldn't have to happen the first time you build something. All it'd take would be a little counter saying how many times a subassembly had been launched and to work out the discount from that.

That's not so much of an issue. If you're not dropping boosters left right and centre you'll only really be losing your first stage. If you make orbit with your second and separate your orbiter, you can then land the second stage (if you remembered to stick a probe core on it!). Not being able to recover your massive first stage (unless you SSTO, like a madman) and a whole ton of spent boosters would stop it being overpowered. edit: I mean, you could say anything that gets deleted was on a ballistic path to its own destruction, so maybe every one that gets deleted in Kerbin's atmosphere returns a small (smaller than if you were to land it) percentage of the scrap value if it's over the ocean where it won't be completely destroyed.

No, he's not on about introducing subassemblies, but reducing cost for them because they're 'mass produced' in effect.

Having one the same length but 1.25m diameter for two Kerbals would be cool too.

That'd be harder to implement, and quite a bit less realistic. It'd cost more to refurb the parts like that, they'd either need to be cash or an uneditable lump.