tater

Yeah, I've said before that the obvious precursor mission to anyone claiming "colonization" needs to be long-term testing of gravity values above 0, and below 1.

Gene drives seem to be an application of crispr. The idea above is putting crispr inside the cells of the target as I understood the ted talk (beat me up if I'm wrong). Meaning putting the the molecular machinery to cut and paste your desired genes an animal that will target any cells it comes in contact with via sexual reproduction. So that with a small % of these individuals introduced to a population, you can rapidly (for things like insects) change the entire population. Add 1% mosquitos that cannot carry malaria to the general population, and in a year no mosquitos carry malaria any more. That was my take away, anyway, that you could change an entire species with this technique over fairly short time intervals (basically X generations, so it's more effective when the generation time is short). My neighbor is a molecular biologist, I'll ask him about it next time we're having cocktails, we talked about crispr a while ago, and he was pretty excited about it as a tool. Like I said, I welcome our new masters

Seems like the best geometry would have to put the alien craft between us and their homeworld. The signal strength would otherwise be terrible... all that is aside from the usual Drake issues (that we happen to be looking at a time period when a signal could possibly arrive. It's so much harder than even paleontology, where taphonomy can tell us at least where to look to get that tiny window into the past (places where critters happened to die that also happened to be just right for fossilization).

Think of the geometry required. We look at a candidate, and then we will need to be on a line between their craft using a DSN and their world as the communications both directions will be directional. There is beam slop, and of course the spacecraft moves (sweeping the beam over a wider area), but the transmissions are not constant... Seems considerably worse that a needle in a haystack. It's not impossible, I'm just thinking it's really, really unlikely.

The idea of finding broadcasts is pretty far-fetched, IMHO. Any such signal would need to be beamed to get the S/N ratio up, and then we'd have to happen to look at the right target star as the transmission came during whatever time interval they sent it. The chances seem vanishingly small that we'd happen to look at the time a signal happened to arrive. Targeting via something like Keplar is sort of pointless, as we're looking at the small subset of stars where a transit is possible from out POV. Then of course there are the usual Drake equation sort of variables like do our civilizations even overlap, etc. The chance of contact, ever, seems unlikely, IMO. Note that the above statement says nothing at all about the existence of other civilizations, it only addresses the likelihood of making contact with them.

You in ABQ?

No, it's in their makeup to be... not terribly smart. (is that diplomatic enough? ) The one political thing that is likely safe to say, since no one likes politicians, lol.

So up the post, your answer to my second question as to what the point is, would include "to create a solar-faring civilization." I'd like that game, but I think that;s more like KSP 2.0 (for money), and it seems beyond the scope of current KSP. To really do that, I think we'd need more robust bases, indeed built in-situ, likely (more like colonies, than early, scientific outposts). I'm not bashing it, I think it would be cool, but I think we'd need way more "stuff," and it would require even more autonomy on the part of kerbals (so I don;t have to personally micromanage every single supply ship, etc).

This is interesting, and being based on game time adds meaningful time progression. Warping would clearly be required, unless the time frame you consider is measured in hours, though. I tend to agree, but the counter argument is that the players then have no choice about what they do. What if this idea was combined with ideas above in the thread, that the player sets the "programs" (i.e.: Explore the Mun), but then the game generates "contracts" appropriate to those programs. So to get the munar landing science... you land where the survey "contract" says to land (I'd prefer the contract language to go away, that would not be a 3d party contract, it would be internal to my space program). Ie: I set the goal of landing a kerbal on the Mun, and my science guys then tell me what my choices are for landing spots. This I don't care about even a little. I could possibly see some sort of market for rare earth elements from asteroids, I suppose. This could be OK, though all are really concurrent.

I don't see them as "strategies" and I never bother with them.

It's kind of funny to see Congress demanding SLS/Orion, then simultaneously removing one of the only missions that they had for the stupid thing.

Tying planetary science to the tech tree is part of the problem, frankly. The entire science as points stuff would ideally go away. There is a mod that shows the spacecraft;s path through atmosphere, allowing much better landing site prediction. How about they include that mod, but it is redone so that the prediction can be more or less accurate (add an "error" fudge factor). The error is set high as a default, little better than what we have no without the mod. As you do various atmospheric science on a given world, the error for that world is decreased. Launching anything at all, improves error for Kerbin. Using a barometer at various altitudes improves it. A reentry at various velocities also improves it. The same is true of Duna. If you want to send 3 craft, and land them next to each other, you'd best send a couple probes first to test the atmosphere so you can accurately land. You could do all sorts of "real" science that doesn't give points for buying tech, but that actually does something useful in gameplay. What about the "gravoli" detector? Perhaps places like the Mun can be given mascons, in which case mapping the Mun gives the player some information about where stable LMOs might exist. There are other options.

ARM was not a test of anything that would be used to prevent an extinction level event. Sampling a nearly co-orbital rock is not at all the same as being able to redirect something in an eccentric trajectory. Yeah, instead of lifting a boulder-ish sized chunk, then making people poke at it, because SLS/Orion, they could simply grab a smaller sample, then go directly to earth.

You know that they abandoned moving an entire asteroid a long time ago, right? The last iteration of ARM had a robot probe taking a small rock (a couple hundred kg?) off the surface of the asteroid, then bringing THAT to the L point (think that was the plan), then they send Orion up to pick up the tiny rock. It is no more moving a celestial body into orbit than any single rock sample collected by Apollo was then put into orbit around the Moon by the LEM. There is nothing about ARM that could not have been done by a robot, sending people was make-work for Orion, nothing more.

The manned aspect of ARM was profoundly dumb in its final form, frankly. Do an asteroid sample return, but instead of just returning it, make it needlessly complex to pick up the sample. Brilliant! Always thought the mission profile was awful, and I'm happy to see it go. Instead of the picture above, I'd be more likely to comment that a stopped watch is right twice a day.

It's not just that you land on the Mun on Day 4, it's everything that goes with that fact. To the player, it would not matter of that day 4 was day 4000, because time could simply progress in a way that they don't see. Come out of the VAB, and it's a year later, that doesn't bother me, it's functionally no different than popping out and it being morning, or the same time I went in. The Two questions to ask about career are: Whose career is it? and What's the point of career? I think the first question has to be the agency director, or the agency itself, and they are fundamentally the same thing. The second question is critical, and drives everything else. If the primary goal is management of a space program, then other things need to happen for management to be a thing---including kerbals doing what they are told without the player literally taking every step for them. If my craft execute their programmed nodes on time, or they can fly routine resupply missions by themselves, because I have set that up (as an act of management), then it makes no difference if my time in the VAB designing a craft gets folded in such that when I hit launch, if the craft took 9 months to build, my time jumps forward 9 months. I have no worries, my program did what it was supposed to do while I was working on the next big thing. What if the answer to the second question is different? IN games like the above-mentioned SH4, my goal was to present the player with realistic, but novel encounters/patrols. I didn't want every patrol to feel the same, I wanted a sense of the hunt, and in a combat context, that's sort of "exploration." So in KSP the answer might be "a real sense of exploration." It also might be "I want to have to solve interesting problems that I would not otherwise. Those answers end up with an entirely different career mode design, IMO. It could also be an admixture of all of those and more.

Yeah, I'm that tater. I also was a campaign modder, and worked with lurker on RSRDC (and Real Fleet Boat, and a small contribution to TMO) as well. SH4 had decent bones, but the campaign game (career, here) was abysmal. So I fixed it up to the limits of what was possible. I had a pseudo-realistic campaign (rough numbers of the rough types of ships in the right sorts of places, without scripting the RL movement of every IJN ship and convoy). Lurker and I worked together on making zig-zagging work as well, and I modded a large number of small warships to get the proper balance of escorts. Lurker took the "real" route, and used the Tabular Records of Movement for the IJN (and a convoy doc we found) and made every real group of ships leave the right port at the right time. Both systems work, but in the fantasy world where the player is the skipper, I liked the replay value of it being random, vs knowing that on a certain date the Tokyo Express will be barreling down the Slot. That's a gameplay choice, though.

NASA can't do what it wants. It does what Congress wants. It's come up before, but I have no idea why Europe doesn't spend more when they mostly don't even pay their fair share of NATO. The funny thing is that there is a lot of overlap with contractors, so space spending tends to keep defense industries more robust (and space programs are more technical jobs programs than anything else).

I'm fine with a prize, heck, I might be fine with that as a mechanism for all manned flight, frankly---"We have 20 Billion in escrow for the first company to provide us with an installation we can then rent for X million per month on the Moon. We guarantee to rent at least 6 months a year for 5 years." The taxpayer than does't spend a penny until the first astronaut can arrive at the base (transportation included from the provider). There would be certain minimal standards set for safety, obviously.

The discussion is about a market, not exploration/science. Science/exploration will be done as they always have, with the money being spent "just because." Markets require the economics to work. The (meh) thread title is about what "space programs" haven't done. Right now, that means NASA/ESA, etc. They are not in the "business" of space, they are in the business of exploration/science. Markets are not their role, and I'm not arguing that it should be, in fact I'm arguing exactly the opposite. Private "space programs" either need huge amounts of walking around money to be burnt basically as a hobby *cough*Bezos*cough*, or they need to actually provide a meaningful return on investment.

@fredinno, sorta. It comes down to there actually being a need to be filled, though. Servicing a remote military base is a sort of economy, but it would always remain tethered to the needs of that one customer. Unless there is a "real" market, I'm not seeing it. Perhaps rare earths might be a thing at some point (mined from stuff dragged to Lagrange points), but either that;s a real market, or it isn't.

I still think that for skills to actually be meaningful, the kerbals need autonomy.

@DBowman, excellent points. The quote from Squyres is particularly useful as it actually characterizes what someone in the rover community thinks their data acquisition rate is compared to a person on the ground. The first reasonable "data" I've seen here on that subject.

I want them to time warp through research upgrades. That's the point of making research take time. If research happened in units of 2 weeks, I'd add a button to quickly warp 2 weeks at a time, if it was months... then I'd have that button be months. KAC. Warp is killed when it needs to be killed. Aside from that, I don't see anything to balance. I'd add a few labeled warp buttons. Warp to next fiscal month, or next research milestone or something. It would automatically stop X minutes before any maneuver node that is set. Otherwise you're just in real time. I'd tend to have any time in the VAB/SPH automatically warp till dawn. That's not much, but but noodling around in the VAB should kill time.

The only reason for crew to go in that flyby is to shorten the time lag for telepresence. As time goes forward, the ability to have more autonomous robots only increases. No one has yet sent anything remotely as capable of self-driving as a google car, for example. Once we have something like that, then the ground crew is picking a target, and perhaps a guesstimate route, then the vehicle just drives there, and perhaps at a substantially higher speed than cm/min. A robot that could move at a slow walking pace autonomously would cover vastly more ground than anything we have ever sent.