tater

Which is why no one goes up Everest… there's nothing to be gained, and we can fly up there and take pictures, right? People want adventure, and that is a useful thing to have in the world. The economics is trickier. If enough robots are sent out, costs can drop (say any sort of resource return, like rare earth elements is the model). Then all of a sudden it becomes relatively cheap to send people. Or even tourism. Any model that makes money might result in lowered costs, which starts changing the math. I'm happy to speculate, I'm just not sanguine about it.

^^^yep. They also need hatch systems that are fuel/oxidizer tight in the first place, presumably.

Are we discussing manned, or unmanned flight here? Unmanned flight has been ongoing, with huge strides. We have a %$#@%$#@% SUV driving around Mars right now, a probe about to reach Pluto, ESA put a probe (in somewhat kerbal fashion ) on a comet, among many other nifty programs. Unmanned can only improve as communications lags become less and less important due to more intelligent systems aboard. Manned flight is a stunt. Period. I love stunts, and I love manned spaceflight for the sheer adventure of it---but that is all it is for the near future, make no mistake. There needs to be a compelling economic reason to drive humans into space instead of expendable and cost effective robots. Human habitation for good is a distant dream, IMO, and stations probably make more sense than most planetary bodies, frankly. - - - Updated - - - LEO radiation hazards are real, but the Van Allen belt heavily mitigates the issue. We can certainly resupply, we'd have to. But LEO is the minimal ante in terms of dv budget.

In LEO, safe from radiation hazards. With constant resupply.

The people OP referred to here are not pessimists, they are realists. Optimists tend to be irrationally optimistic, pessimists tend to be irrationally pessimistic. Being optimistic is fine, but if you want to claim it is justified, you are making a positive claim that needs to be demonstrated. Track records are fine to use, as they are at least real data. Space is cool, and I even like manned space quite a lot, even though it is not actually useful compared to robots (a situation which will certainly get WORSE, not better if you are a fan of manned spaceflight as AI/learning systems give probes more autonomy). Irrational optimists simply make up economics. Politics is a constant, and if public money is involved the process is by definition political. The money must go to the right districts to buy votes, that's how it works, and has worked since the Washington Administration decided to spend the great bulk of the entire US budget on 6 medium sized warships.

That's like saying rationality is supposed to be in between happiness and sadness. Being realistic is not a value judgement, it is being rational, not emotional.

This title should be "space realists."

Corrugated metal. Like roofing in some places, or metal culverts. They did this to strengthen it (Apollo used a honeycomb substrate). I have to say, the 1.875m parts should be stock.

^^^ pretty country. I have to drive a few hours north to Colorado for anything like that.

They have messed with robotic rovers that scoop regolith, and dump them into a hopper/smelter I think. These are small, smaller would just mean longer time frames to make whatever you are making, I suppose. The first image is using concentrated solar (instead of a nuke). They have a heliostat on the hill directing to the rover. That rover in kerbal scale is not impossible I think, as a 3.75m part, maybe?

I was thinking less about the localized reduction (I'm fine with abstraction here, and lunar regolith would be everywhere, all the time, no reduction, anyway), I was thinking of abstracting the mass requirements for infrastructure. If the contract system allowed it, I might think about a mission to establish a fuel depot that requires a substantial base, and at least one rover with certain parts or something. Of course you're getting mostly O2 for your trouble with regolith (a LANL study I read suggested that such mining would basically mitigate landing costs to make sustaining a lunar facility more cost effective, not as a net gain in propellants in orbit). A way to work within the career system would be to put this ISRU stuff at the end of the tech tree---and make the cost impossible. Then, add some specific contracts that ask to test the part on the Mun, and you are given the part to work with, perhaps with another contract to build a mining base that must include parts X, Y, and Z, and house many kerbals.

I'm curious how abstracted this could be… lunar regolith mining (not polar ice, but cooking out O2, etc) would involve moving fairly substantial quantities of material. Short of somehow requiring a kerbal-frontloader, and the other infrastructure for moving large quantities of regolith, would you just make such a system really heavy, and very inefficient, such that the player must land several of them, and KAS them to a holding tank for the refined product? I have some old abstracts on lunar ISRU I will dig up.

The first RTG flew into space less than 2 months after Alan Shepard, not the 1970s (June 29, 1961 was the first RTG flight). Both the rtg and ntr are 1950s tech. The tech tree is absurd, frankly, and any attempt to make it flow as if one part develops another is silly since almost nothing in the tree actually follows from what precedes it, the stuff is pretty much concurrent.

I have the first paperback edition of that, I bought it new

A cargo section would be nice, but that wouldn't explain the weight Actually, a more serious issue, IMO, is poorly arranging the windows and hatches for RCS. Anyone building a pod of any kind should think about likely CMs, and make sure that a proper RCS arrangement is possible on the crew pod if that is where the CM will likely land. The mk 1 and 2 should both have the hatch offset.

I've lost a few things hanging off the sides, like solar panels, that's it.

PF does it better.

Or cal it a locking system, if it is reversible. Upon actual "hard dock" perhaps they lock together automatically. I just want the joint stronger. For a "fusing" option, perhaps 3 new parts, 1.25, 2.5, and 3.75 meter "construction linkage" parts. They can be VERY thin/unobtrusive, and ideally would snap precisely angle wise (rotate them within X degrees upon "docking" them, and they turn to align exactly with whatever the reference is on the 2d part (functionally you might dock, then q/e the smaller craft until within 1-2 degrees and they lock).

I read the Martian in one sitting, lol. I tend to do that as well (read fast, I read all the Patrick O'Brian sailing books in a month (21 books)---but I was reading late at night when I had time, and having to guzzle coffee during the day, lol. Usually I have a few non-fictions going at once. Fiction is a different matter, either it's not good, and I grab a different book, or I get engaged, then I have trouble doing anything else until I am done. Luckily there are places to escape (mostly kids watching youtube videos about minecraft) in my house, as it was built in the '70s, and added on over time in a sort of random, rambling way, and the walls are thick (adobe).

Yeah, used book stores are a menace to any attempt to manage clutter at my house The kids know we will buy them any book they like, too.

^^^Can't escape the Gell-Mann effect I never rationalized the kerbal universe that way, I assumed it was for technical or "beta" reasons that they made things the way they made them, not because ti was their goal. Generally, game designers tend to forget the good rule for science fiction, "break as few laws of physics as possible." This is useful because we know broadly what to expect, whereas when you do something like arbitrarily make a planet tiny, you don't know what will fall out of that, and everything needs to be "tweaked" arbitrarily. Have to say that I think that more focused ISRU would actually be better, not worse for gameplay. I think that any ISRU you want should need to be built to work only at a specific target world, or set of similar worlds based upon the required chemistry. That could be used to force some actually useful science into career mode (collect surface or atmospheric samples (or analysis with the right part) as a requisite to making ISRU that will work in that place). Gives the player more to do.

FWIW in 0.90 my career with KCT/FAR/DRE/etc was a 6.4x kerbol system, and I used mostly stock parts. I had PF in there, and I think I used procedural tanks as well on that install.

The US government didn't build anything at all, they just wrote checks. North American Aviation, Grumman, Boeing, etc built Apollo. Many of the contractors, or small groups could have done it alone, it was split up because that's what the government has done since the 6 frigates of the Washington administration---put spending in as many districts as possible to secure votes for funding.

The sad thing about e-readers is that you can no longer visit someone's house and peruse their books (or judge them for their lack of books ). I'm always surprised at how few books most people have. When I see period movies that show some English estate, the part of that house I always wish I had is the library with a 2d floor, or a ladder on a rail...

I prefer it in the game directory, as I have multiple installs for different mods.