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Yeah, as I said you're right, sadly, as much as we might dream of a decent career system I proposed something fairly similar, but instead of pigeon-holing them into X categories, perhaps a set of sliders that balance each program as to what % of contracts they see from each category? I lumped them based on broad contract type: Science, commercial, passenger, exploitation (resources). So you could set passenger to 0 and not see any VIP/Tourist/Rescue contracts. Set commercial to 25%, then you'd see 25% placing satellites or building stations, and 75% to science and see that % of survey, etc, contracts. Maybe another would need to be there for grand tours---they are fairly pointless from a science standpoint, it's more bragging rights than anything else. I wonder if funding could be removed as a reward (or seriously reduced) from milestones, etc, then have the contracts pay everything up front (they can still hit rep/funds if you fail). So you get a contract to do science around Jool, and you are put in a position where (unless you do something else to have excess cash) you have to build it within budget. Then, if you took contracts for other worlds it might end up a money-maker if you could combine missions into one craft. Say you do a Duna flyby to take science around Duna otw to Jool, and you also take a Laythe contract as well. 3 budgets, 1 craft.

No, the Oberth effect says that such maneuvers are more effective when the craft is moving faster. In an orbit (even if it intersects the atmosphere somewhat) that point is at periapsis. It is NOT moving faster at the launchpad. KE goes as v2, so when you square 0+dv (at pad) it's vastly smaller than (orbital_velocity_at_periapsis + dv)2.

Any "space warfare" discussion really needs to entirely describe the tech level and background situation involved, or it is pretty much a non-starter, IMO.

While I might adjust the categories, I agree with the concept. Still, it fails to address the underlying problem with career, or the fact that the contracts it uses to populate the "mission control" center are still mostly lousy---of course you are likely right to assume that we're stuck with those problems, and a solution "within the system" is more likely to actually be considered.

I did say "for many of the claims." For their 3 month trip, they require a 4kg/kW reactor of 12MWe. That, they say (adastra) would take "moderately aggressive reactor development." The benchmark would be that we currently have either moderately, or aggressive non-development of such reactors . The 39 day trip takes a 200MWe reactors, with lower power densities than the other one. It's not impossible, so I suppose pixie dust is an overstatement, but it's not likely to happen any time in the foreseeable future, frankly. The 12MW version is hard, but at least it could possibly happen before I'm dead.

The problem with VASIMR is not the ion drive, it's POWER. Their fanciful fast flight times to Mars are based on a TWR that requires reactors no one is close to being able to build. Solar can work closer in, but again, for the required power they need large (heavy) arrays. It's not impossible to make new space reactor designs, but it's not even close to off the shelf.

Point blank in the archaic/modern gun sense doesn't really apply. Still, we're talking about hundreds or thousands of km, not vast distances. A couple thousand km is "point blank" compared to travel distances in space. Modern directed energy weapons looked into for SDI were certainly on the 100km order of magnitude. That's a minimum baseline. Of course at short ranges like that, directed energy weapons cannot possibly ever miss, and that includes missiles as targets as their targets cannot move even 1/2 cross-sectional radius during the time of flight of the weapon (at or near c for directed energy weapons).

I agree with this WRT "career" play. If the player is to "manage" a space program, he needs his staff to do, well, something. It would make multiple things in flight easier to deal with. The player sets up the maneuver nodes (which is functionally the real "piloting" we are mostly interested in), and the crews execute them (unless the player choses to do it himself). Certain types of missions might be set up as recurring (station resupplies and crew transfers). If the AI did things, there might be a tiny chance of failures/accidents (hard docking that might break something, creating a need for a new repair mission, for example). I'd still do many burns myself, and would likely do loads of docking and virtually all landings (because I like them), but this would actually make the career game feel right to me. Note that such capability would make a new game mode with a foil possible, as well (a competing space program). We could then play a 60s type space race, or a current SpaceX vs Blue Origin version if we liked. In the latter case, commercial contracts would actually be more meaningful, since both sides would be offered the same contracts. heck, they could add bidding. Put a satellite in a certain orbit? We'll do it for X! The AI program decides to do it for Y (where Y<X) and they get it. Could be cool.

Great story. If I was in the heart of Europe, I'd try to find out how to buy you a few beers. BTW, the title of this thread is completely wrong. It should read "InterCity is helping people... with some help from KSP."

Ranking things is always fraught, IMO. It's like those terrible TV shows that have "top 10 fighters of ww2" then don't rank them by some objective criteria. You could look at warmest temp in the middle of the region in the pacific, or the highest precipitation anomaly at some point, etc. In the other ocean, the biggest hurricane ever might never hit land, for example, and be sort of meaningless historically.

How about renaming the buildings as well? "Mission Control" isn't. It's a contract office. The Tracking Station... is what Mission Control (in RL) actually is.

If that were the goal of career, it would be much better. It would be nice if it was designed with more "fog of war" that required exploration to open---science as useful stuff for the player, not "points."

It was not predicted any farther in advance than regular weather forecasting at all. That article is from 1 year before this manifested itself. It then cites 2 "super" el Niño events about 15 years apart. This one is overdue on that n of 3 time scale, not "increasing." Screaming "global warming" about every weather event is why they are losing the PR battle, it's like doomsday cults waking up the day after and the world is still there. It's not a "hard year for el Niño," it's just a strong el Niño---which is good right now. The pattern oscillates with periods of one or the other dominating. There's good data for the last 20 years, OK data for the 10 years before that, then "meh" data going back under 100 years, then lousy data farther back than that. The entirety of the range of available data (even bad) is geologically tiny. How was the pattern 100,000 years ago? No idea, maybe it didn't even exist. The Earth is not s steady state thing. Never was, never will be. I'll add that I don;t really have a dog in the fight one way or another, I just don't like they hyperbole I always hear around any issue involving weather. The weather and climate are without any question poorly understood. Any predictions made that are not very conditional at this point are highly dubious to me. Climate "science" (adding science to a discipline is odd, since it's usually done with things that are not actually sciences) had its financial resources vastly multiplied once it became political. It reminds me of SDI in the 80s. Everyone started doing SDI stuff, because it was a cash cow---even when they thought that even the premise of an effective "missile shield" was rubbish.

Solar thermal doesn't require inventing new reactors, though. VASIMR is pixie dust right now for many of the claims.

This. Dole out funding per "month" of 30 days, or whatever. This all of a sudden makes time a thing. Warping forward to get another handout is not a bad mechanic. Why? Because it moves time forward! Without doing this, you only move forward in time while in flight. I honestly think that they need to start with a real conversation about what the point of career is supposed to be, and how they expect it to be played. I imagine people who hate warping at the KSC probably launch a Jool mission, they fly it to completion before doing their next mission. If you do this, then time does move forward, but in odd increments. If you play with multiple missions in flight, then you might launch your Jool mission, then work on your Mun base, then launch a Dres mission, getting that started, then check out an asteroid, then do a midcourse correction on your new Duna habitat, and not get back to the course correction for the Jool flight until half a year has passed as you never jump more than a few weeks at a time. Parallel vs serial mission play makes a huge difference in how career works. I would have the player drive missions more, ideally, then have the mission you design generate a budget. The rep reward for completion of that mission might be scaled to what you spend vs the max budget as well as science return. Select manned/unmanned. Select body (or multiples). Select orbit/landing. The game generates a budget/timeframe. You get paid in advance, but over time---so much every 30 days for X months.

I was talking about the Moon, not Mars. For Mars, I think that orbiting and then operating robots would still deliver "more science." as for the same mass as a human facility dropped to the surface you could land multiple ROVs. You could also possibly land places you would never risk people. Even if we were to land people, it would make sense to piggyback probes that we could put places on Mars that are very interesting, but not "safe" even for a robot.

They did not return more science than robots would given the same amount of money spent. Take sample return as an example. Apollo brought back hundreds of kgs. People often compare the tiny amount returned by robots as a "gotcha!" If we could return the mass of 2 people, plus all their gear, LS, and redundant systems for their safety, PLUS a few hundred kg of samples, a robot could have delivered the same mass of samples PLUS the mass of all the systems that were only there to keep the people alive (plus the people). The sample return would have at least doubled, I'd bet. Assuming you need a robot rover to drive around, and it masses the same as 2 astronauts or more, then maybe you approach breaking even, but you approach that from the "better" side, not the worse side. Bottom line is that the only reason Apollo did so much science was that it had a huge budget both in terms of cash, and in terms of mass delivered and returned from the lunar surface. The same budget in both would give the win to robots. I'm not super happy to say this, BTW, Jack Schmitt taught a section of a class I took on lunar geology, and it was cool to sit in a room with maybe 15 other people and a geologist who had been on the Moon and get to pick his brain . With modern technology, the geologist could have a remote presence that would be far better than real time TV in 1970 could do.

You cannot demonstrate that it does at all. It might, might not. There is a post on NOAA's own ENSO site (at climate.gov) regarding uncertainty in the temperature measurements within the area of the ocean in question. It's +-0.3 °C. That's more than the claimed (not even observed, which is lower) average temperature anomaly in a few decades. So you have an entirely reasonable ENSO event (a couple in the 80s and 90s were stronger), and the temperature measurements of the ocean involved cannot be said to be higher within uncertainty in any case. There is no link. Crying "global warming" with each weather event doesn't make the point, it looks like hyperbole. Note also that the number of such sea temperature observations is currently twice the number of such observations 10 years ago (current approaches 35,000 measurements), and 3 times higher than the 1990s. Before 1990, such observations were effectively random (ships measuring water temperature that happened to be passing by the region, it's under 1000 in the 80s, and before that its below 100 per year back as far as there is any data at all. So basically you can talk about ENSO events before the '80s, but it could have been much stronger, or the sea temp much higher, and no one would really know well. That's the problem with comparing to any old climate data, there is not good data. Get before the age of sail, and it's proxy data, which is so uncertain the error bars are larger than the signal.

This el Niño is entirely within the range of normal ENSO events. Weather != climate.

As you accelerate at a tangent, you can visualize the craft moving in the straight path a very tiny amount, vs the circular orbit. As it does this, it is very slightly farther away from the planet, right? (the circular orbit is the place where it is equally far from the center of the planet, so any deviation at a tangent is higher) Gravitational acceleration is then lowered due to this distance (and it's an inverse square). You've just changed the curve of the orbit because the craft is ever so slightly farther away so the force pulling the craft down is lower. Keep doing this, and the ellipse gets larger and larger.

Nils, RoverDude has substantially updated USILS, including a new (optional) system that weights habitats based upon habitability (kerbals need some room to live, which this mod provides nicely!). It also adds wear and tear as a thing (also optional).

This is quite true. The solution to an awful career system, with awful contracts has been for Squad to just add more bad contracts as the solution. I don't think they have any intention of fixing the fundamental flaw as career was just tacked on, IMO.

To be fair the primary "Case for Mars" is the case for NASA to visit Mars, that's entirely different than colonizing Mars. As to the science... any science we can do in the solar system via landing humans is better done by robots (except for the science of how humans function in whatever environment, obviously). The reason to send people to Mars (which I'm fine with, BTW) is honestly psychological more than anything else, and any science that is accelerated by having a geologist on-site is just gravy. There is real value to humanity at large in exploring, and from seeing human beings walking on other worlds. I'm all-in for manned spaceflight to do something inspiring, just because.

World power growth is at least somewhat predictable, though terrestrial solar while less efficient is so much cheaper space doesn't look good. I'm trying to find something that looks plausible GEO is about as far as you can go for that.

Yeah, just as much of a pipe dream as it was then. I was just pointing out that an economy has always been the problem For Earth SoI, solar power is the best bet, still. But while in the 70s they imagined colonies full of people to make solar power stations, it would be robots, and far fewer people involved, instead.