tater

Yep, as a few have said (myself included), the exact universe/scenario needs to be specified since technologies don't exist in a vacuum. Measures, and countermeasures, etc, as nauseum.

I fail to see how this reduces grinding. Grinding is the requirement to do small reward things to gain needed "stuff" in a game. KSP wrongly ties technology advancement to planetary science, and now I'd have to do even more to get rocket parts that should not be separated from each other, anyway? RTGs are at the end of the KSP tree, but predate manned spaceflight in reality.

It doesn't really matter, but as the game minus the mod randomly assigns them, the mod is clearly breaking the game.

I never did, either, until I added the Asteroid Day mod, and my new career had zero males, ever, for rescues/ferry/tourist contracts. - - - Updated - - - Each event is unrelated to the others. Normal distributions are not the issue. Some people have had multiple carers with zero males offered. Not low numbers, zero, and not just one career. I did, even after making a point of tiring my wrist by declining hundreds of rescue/ferry VIP/tourist contracts, without a single male.

All true. Later versions of the rpg hand-waved some sort of "gravtic" control of the cloud to maintain it (like a tractor beam) since they had artificial gravity (they wanted Star Wars-like ships where you can walk the decks under acceleration). I read a few papers last night on High Energy Lasers... the Navy is doing a lot of work on these. Looks like delivered power (simulations and tests tend to standardize on a 5km range, and look at a 100cm^2 target area for the beam) is about 1/2 to 1/3 of transmitted power in both a maritime and desert environment. The latter includes dust, but not a "sandstorm." This shows how profound even nominal atmospheric effects are on laser weapons. At 5km in space, this would be mostly diffraction and jitter limited, instead (there is a small particle density, obviously). A huge difference, right off the bat. Their description of dust vs water vapor or other aerosols suggests that the dust is a problem because the beam doesn't vaporize it, but heats the particles which heat the surrounding air, causing thermal blooming. In space, the particles are heated, but there is no air to heat and cause the blooming. Interestingly, they also did simulations from a 5km altitude firing DOWN through maritime and desert conditions, and the delivered power ration is somewhat better, as you would expect (shorter path-length through the higher density air/dust near the surface). They approached 60% of the power delivered to the target in that regime. In general in the atmosphere (sea level), propagation efficiency plummets after 3-5km (the latter with adaptive optics). By 12-15km, it's well under 20%, and effectively zero for non-adaptive optics. Without question, atmospheric densities of gases and aerosols over kms would seriously hamper laser weapons, but you need reasonable path-lengths though those areas. If a ship needs to haul around thousands of tons of gas/dust/sand to have the system work, it doesn't make much sense. It would also pose a navigational hazard (hitting it with any decent closing velocity would scrub your hull for you).

Ah, but can you prove that? Remember, they want more believers... Remember to tip your waitress!

Lag is a really bad idea without the mechanisms used on real spacecraft to deal with this. Probes need to be able to execute nodes, basically. Landing ops require far more predictive node creation (since in RL you can calculate pretty well where things will end up, even in atmospheres), and/or specialized node types for certain functions. This is where "real" science would be a great addition. Have something akin to scansat, where you generate maps based upon passes by instruments of different resolutions (orbital mappers, crasher probes like Ranger, landers, and manned missions, etc). Then allow map mode zoom based upon the level of scanning done for that area. If you can zoom down near 1:1, then perhaps any maneuver node placed within XX meters of the surface is automatically changed to a surface, "landing node." Stretching retrograde then has the surface velocity decrease that you can see. Set it to 1 m/s or whatever, and you've made a landing node (you'll be at 1m/s upon hitting the node, these nodes would assume that the burn starts at the exact time indicated, which will be set back from the landing, so if it is a 1 minute, 37 second burn, the timer clicks down to "0," and you hit Z (or the probe core does automatically), and at t=+1:37 you are at 1m/s and on the ground). It might be set such that t=0 (landed) is actually a few meters above the surface, or that can be a setting.

I'm not talking even little like them. The prerequisite for a violent response is for THEM to initiate violence, and the OP said they are motivated to proactively attack peaceful worlds solely to spread their nonsensical religious beliefs (I realize that is a redundant statement). I'm perfectly happy to coexist with them as long as there is no violent compulsion on their part. If they cross that line and attack/kill whole worlds, they need to go away, they've demonstrated they are too dangerous to have around.

Shhh! You are correct if the goal is just the power. If the goal is a sustainable % of humanity living off the earth (eggs out of 1 basket), just in case, then you make a colony with the same, or possibly lower cost than Mars, and put them to work using their ability to make stuff to make useful things (like power generation) to offset some of the cost. So the cost benefit might be: Mars: Humanity safe from earth killing disaster. O'Neil colony: Humanity safe from earth killing disaster. Maybe some power given back to earth.

Abdoment on her is bigger than my thumbnail. The picture above is old, but her grandchild(?) has a web now against the same viga but behind my car instead of my wife's.

It;s not the least irrelevant. You are now saying the effects of sand and atmosphere on earth on a laser are IDENTICAL to just sand/dust in space, regardless of the density of the latter? If that is NOT the case, explain what you mean. Be precise. Nope, you are doing it to yourself by "doubling down" on an analogy that is somewhat useful as a baseline, but entirely different in specifics. You have 50 kg of sand/dust/whatever to spread. Make it equal a sandstorm in space. How big is the cloud? Show your work.

The Jovians are welcome to do as they wish among themselves, the scenario is them invading/killing anyone who won't convert, that pretty much means they need to go, or their set of ideas needs to be 100% expunged, as it's incompatible with the rest of us living our lives as we see fit.

My daughter loves huge orb weavers.

One side is already set as irrational in the given, though. There are a few reasons nukes are not used on earth, one is MAD, the other is that even with enemies that cannot retaliate meaningfully, there are effects outside the target areas (fallout). If religious nuts were hell-bent on converting me via force of arms, I'd be entirely fine with wiping them (all of them) off the map, I hold my freedom of thought to be more important then their existence.

Maneuver nodes in KSP really take the place of kerbals with slide rules and computers figuring out the maneuvers, and typing them out for distribution (or downloading them) to the spacecraft. We'd need more robust nodes, that include atmospheric effects, and are accurate down to X meters. Note that "X" could be a function of the amount and type of "science" you have generated on the target world. Send a hi-res mapper to get better elevation data, for example (science that would actually be useful, go figure). You could then place a "landing" node for the craft, etc. I think it's totally doable with the UI we have, but with some specific enhancements. There could also be new parts, like "Landertron" that provide radar-altimeter based retrorocket fire. Perhaps with the ability to "fire until X m/s decent rate" and various altitude toggles as well (drop to 10m/s at 1000m, then 5 m/s at 10m, etc.

3 years is not an impossible rise time for a disease, but it IS impossible for a disease that everyone knows will wipe out humanity at the beginning of the 3 years. Anything with that sort of lethality would have already spread everywhere.

Seems like this "war" would require capturing things intact on the part of the jovians, by definition. The belters would have no such limitations. If you switch it to a genocidal war, then they all either throw KE weapons or nukes at each other. Like most "SDI" scenarios, the defender pretty much needs to be 100%, else pretty serious consequences.

That buys you a few months until the supplies run out, seems like you could do more assuming you have the 10s of millions you'd need to buy a ride up there.

So it's a vast cost for "Earth" with only the abstract benefit being one of humanity surviving a rogue planet hitting Earth or something equally catastrophic. Power generation from orbit (build the infrastructure to do this in situ, which gives the colony as an added benefit) at least might have some mitigating economics, vs a well to throw money down (Mars).

The OP was explicitly political, which sorta makes it hard not to go that direction.

You think you'd have been so much better off under a totalitarian state? Wow, just wow.

It's not a later step, that's the thing. You either bring everything to the "destination" from Earth, in which case a planetary surface is not easier, or you have to set up an entire manufacturing and resource extraction system to make even the most basic raw materials from ISRU. In the latter case, you can just as well use small bodies already in space, as the "factory" you are going to send is already in space, since you need to send that from earth regardless. The moon is likely too small for people to live long periods (low gravity). Mars gravity is an unknown WRT human physiology, right now we have 2 data points, microgravity, and 1g. Mars is not worth considering unless we have some ISS-like durations in a spinning hab at 1/3g. Assuming 1/3 is enough for people long-term, only then does Mars make any sense, and even that is somewhat dubious as Mars has all the disadvantages of deep space, with almost none of the advantages of Earth. People will still live underground, in 100% constructed environments. An advantage of Earth system, orbital colonies is economics, IMO. Mars would never have a trade economy with Earth, it's a fairly silly idea short of SF spaceships that pop back and forth in hours, at costs below rail or sea shipping on earth. Orbital colonies can beam power to earth, OTOH. 24/7/365 solar in a world that ups it's electrical power demands by TWh per year. Just to meet annual demand increases you need to add about 0.3-0.4 TW of power production every year. As a reality check that's just about what the entire wind-generated supply of the planet is---add the current number of windmills on earth to the earth, every single year. Beaming solar power from space would be far better that covering the planet with ugly windmills to harvest secondary solar energy, and unlike Mars, there is a nonzero chance that this might actually be feasible as an economy (note I say "might," it might not be, but Mars certainly has no possible economic rationale).

"Programming a robot" in KSP should be trivial. 1. Make a maneuver node (with light delay, if that was a thing, the node would need to be no sooner to current position than the lag). 2. Done, as the probe, being a probe, would simply execute the node when it gets to it.

Nethack Definitely not a graphics issue there. Got vt102?

Nibb31 is entirely correct, it's pretty absurd. In general, the ideal of colonizing Mars makes no sense. Humans in this solar system, outside of where we sit right now, required 100% built environments. This is true regardless of the location, be it, Earth orbit or Lagrange points, the lunar surface, or Mars. There is no place to go that we don't build from scratch. That is a given. The question becomes which would be the most cost-effective choice for colonization... I'll assume that the rationale is simply "not all eggs in one basket." I tend to think that something more like an O'Neil colony makes the most sense. The gravity on the Moon is likely too small to be useful for human physiology, and there is some question that this might also be true of Mars. If 1/3g is insufficient for humans over lifetime time spans, then Mars is not viable, regardless of what is available locally (interesting new find regarding large amounts of ice well below the poles, BTW).