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tater

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Everything posted by tater

  1. tater
    The poll is also useless, as you ask what it is, OR what it should be. How do you tell what vote is for which question?
  2. tater
    It almost doesn't matter as nearly everything in the tech tree is concurrent, anyway.
  3. tater
    Most people are not terribly smart, frankly. As I said someplace above, solar thermal is also an interesting option, though in the near term, I'd assume chemical makes more sense.
  4. tater
    Wow. OK. So Kerbin has a 14 month year, with a "holiday week" someplace in there? Strange. Since the month is arbitrarily defined in days (seconds?) how is it calibrated to Earth days? I can find it in here someplace, where roverdude listed some of his baseline assumptions regarding net consumables used per unit time... I wonder if it is roughly scale to kerbal size vs humans, and kerbal days standing in for Earth days. Ie: If a human uses a net 1.8 kg/24 hours, and kerbals are 40% of humans, would they use 0.72kg per 24 hours, or would they use 0.72kg per 6 hour day, instead? I'm asking with an eye towards scaled up games (k-365, SKY, 64X, RSS, etc). (I tried searching, but the new forum will not let me constrain the search to the add-ons under development section where I think I recall Roverdude making the post).
  5. tater
    This: SCENARIO { name = LifeSupportScenario scene = 5, 7, 6 LIFE_SUPPORT_SETTINGS { STATUS_DATA { KerbalName = Ribsy Kerman LastMeal = 44977776.7516371 LastOnKerbin = 44977772.3516364 MaxOffKerbinTime = 1016977772.35164 LastVesselId = 0cc1243c-29ea-4418-9ae1-342b40db4501 TimeInVessel = 0 IsGrouchy = False OldTrait = Scientist LastUpdate = 44977776.7516371 } STATUS_DATA { All the other kerbals look like the example above. } All the other KerbalNames until you get to the close } of this section (name = LifeSupportScenario) of SCENARIO. I know it's a Kerbin month... How long is a Kerbin month? An Earth month is defined (originally) by the Moon. Kerbin has 2 moons, so which month is it, or is it arbitrary? A Munar month is ~6 days. A Minmus month is around 50 days. If you divide the Kerbin year into equal sections, you can also get six 71 periods. Which is it?
  6. tater
    I asked this before, but the answer to my other issue derailed the answer. How long is a "month?" is it a 6 day munar month, or some other value?
  7. tater
    I think the tools was the issue, as well. The latest DL includes the tools, and the previous one (3.0.0) did not. As I was adding it to a new copy of KSP (modded), I didn't have any previous versions of the tools installed, just whatever came with the DL. Perhaps the lack of the tools somehow corrupted the SCENARIO data?
  8. tater
    This worked. Note for others that you delete only the block that starts exactly as above (the Life Support section of the SCENARIO section, not starting at the first instance of "SCENARIO {" (which starts with contract stuff). This is the last scenario stuff before the flight data as I remember.
  9. tater
    New career works fine.
  10. tater
    I already tried with the release from tonight, I'll start a new save and get right back to you.
  11. tater
    I was intentionally optimistic ('cause I think it's silly). Obviously I was also only talking about immediate costs, I wasn't amortizing the many billions required to create a destination---Mars is only someplace for people to visit if people build someplace for people to visit. Mars is no less a built envoronment for people than an O'neil colony would be. Every cubic meter of inhabited space on Mars will be... a space station, just on the ground (which has pluses, but also minuses).
  12. tater
    I know this, I was thinking he was talking about some magic fusion drive.
  13. tater
    I have the same issue as crash087, and I just checked with the brand new update as well.
  14. tater
    Wrong tab! Sorry!
  15. tater
    Recent DRAs for Mars have crew transit times about 6 months (bimodal NTR). A Hohmann transfer orbit is ~8.5 months. 2.5 months makes no difference, particularly if you spin the crew compartment.
  16. tater
    Bigelow would be happy to comply. Heck, they'll probably get chucked onto the Senate Launch System manifest just so they can fill out the schedule, anyway.
  17. tater
    BTW, solar-thermal is also an option for Mars I think.
  18. tater
    This makes no sense whatsoever. Are you proposing that travel to Mars requires 1g constant thrust for the entire trip, with a turn-around at midpoint? No one has proposed anything of the kind. Even NTR proposals are a brief boost phase, with a long coast. Modern mission plans can include spun habs.
  19. tater
    $250/kg? RT to Mars? If they quote "coach" then profit is built in... so it's actually less than that. All that means is that it would take MORE tourists to generate the needed billions. 500k and 1.5 years still means no one with a job can go, and now you need 10s of thousands to make your billion profit instead of just 1000s.
  20. tater
    I had to google MCT, lol. 100 tons landed on Mars. Tourism requires doubling that---they need to return. So even with their optimistic estimate, that's 1 million at cost, so 2 M retail (profit is paying for the colony). Also, if you want to use the MCT instead of a magic propulsion (fusion), then the mission goes from maybe 6 months to 1.5+ years. So for a million $ profit/person, they'd need 1000 of these tourists per year just to make a billion bucks. Seems like a bad business model to me.
  21. tater
    Tourism back of the envelope reality check: F9 Heavy is aiming for what, ~$3k/kg to LEO? Just lifting one person, plus 6 months of consumables (1.8kg/day) to LEO is 1.2M$. Double that as an absurdly optimistic ballpark figure (total, RT vacation is 6 months, because "magic"). Cost is 2.4 M$. The colony needs to make a profit, and likely requires many billions per year of revenue. A normal markup might be X2, so your "tourism" is counting on how many people with 5 million $ to burn on a vacation to Mars per year? Every 1000 tourists is 2.5 B$ profit. Are there really many, many 1000s of people on earth with 5M$ as "throw away" money? I think not.
  22. tater
    It should be relatively simple math to figure out what such a trip would cost (including X years food and lodging), then assume that a certain % of billionaires can "work from home" on their Mars trip. How many trips can you sell? 10? Oh, we're talking only several months? That increases the number, certainly. "Regular" people can't go on multi-month vacations, however, they have jobs. So you need to entirely fund a permanent colony with hundreds or thousands of vacations? I guess we can work out the costs and see what the profit might be. 100,000 tourists each at $100,000 is 10 billion a year... gross. What's the cost of transport for 100k people to Mars per year?
  23. tater
    Again, I'm not defending the choice of Mars, I'm more of an orbital colony person if it came down to it (you can control radiation shielding, g level, etc). Like I said above, anyplace is a "backup" if it has a critical mass of human beings, and is 100% self-sustaining. The rationales proposed are mostly silly, IMO. That said, I think that most arguments neglect the likely technologies that are somewhere on the distant horizon. Intelligent systems that can build, for example. If robots could build facilities someplace like Mars, then at least there's a destination to go to (Mars is no more a destination for humans than deep space is unless there is a 100% manufactured environment in place). Of course deep space still makes more sense The argument about preventing/mitigating disasters being cheaper is certainly true in a probabilistic sense, but there are certain plausible disasters that cannot be mitigated effectively. Certainly "extinction" level disasters are not impossible, and the only prevention is likely being elsewhere, and the warning timeframe could be too short to do anything about it. Also, it's fair to observe that cost sort of doesn't matter. People tend to discuss it as if the cost spent to colonize space could otherwise be spent on some program they happen to prefer. If it ever happens it will be because the people with the money prefer to spend it on space. It's their money to do with as they please. Anyone who prefers other spending options should pony up the money themselves. (edited to get it out of the quote)
  24. tater
    I agree, entirely, OP, and about 1.5 years ago, my first few posts were all very similar to this one. The number one issue with "career" is the lack of exploration due to everything being known. Science, instead of being points, should actually do something. Mappers that actually map (without them, your view of a given target world is what you'd see through a telescope on Kerbin), for example. Have some stunning, interesting stuff on some worlds. If generating planets that are really interesting is not possible as semi-random constructs, then set some standards, and let players submit new planets to be added to a database that the game pulls from. Such a database could also rescale them (as many mods rescale things) within some range such that even if you've see world X in a previous career, it's not going to be the same size. Once the pool of planets is large enough, you might not see repeats again.
  25. tater
    That is simply by definition not true. If humanity were to permanently colonize another world (or deep space) with a genetically viable number of people in a way that required no trade/connection to Earth, then by definition that is a backup of humanity. We can agree that Mars is not that place, and we can agree that it will not happen (be an actual "backup") in the next X hundred years. It is none the less not something that is fundamentally impossible. As it turns out, I think some of the required technology for real space colonization is also useful as a very cost-effective way to prevent or at least mitigate the risk of certain catastrophes (comet/asteroid impacts of the mass-extinction variety). Disease is another issue altogether (since if space travel were that cheap, we'd end up with some pathogens inoculating space travelers, then we have plague ships, in effect). I'm clearly not sanguine about Mars as a colony, but you dismiss the notion of humanity off Earth very categorically, which makes no sense to me.
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