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Bill Phil

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Posts posted by Bill Phil

  1. It's a terrible concept. If you must use electric heating elements, then pass the hydrogen through a tungsten pipe that's been heated to thousands of kelvins or something, and have the benefit of your spacecraft not being under thousands of atmospheres of pressure. Failing that, build a Poodle Thruster. It's basically an NTR, but uses the waste heat from RTGs instead a full nuclear reactor. It should get about the same ISP as an NTR, but at far less thrust.

    I never said it was good, just that it's not a NERVA. Heck, a modern NTR wouldn't be a NERVA and would probably have an ISP advantage of 50 seconds or so.

  2. I'm fine with starting manned.

    If you think about it:

    There was a study in the late 1930s about landing on the Moon. An actual study! Of course it used solid rockets for main propulsion, but nonetheless...

    So the idea of a manned capsule came first, just no one had the guts to do it.

    Oh, and the British manned V-2 concept...

    Basically, it is realistic. Although choosing in the difficulty panel would be good.

  3. If its so terrible why is it used so much over methane or propane? As I understand methane would have higher ISP but as you say propane has higher density.

    None of the stuff is any problems storing or working with unlike hydrogen.

    Hydrogen is nice for upper stages where the low density is less of a problem as you need less but ISP is more important.

    You might want to make methane in space to avoid problems with storing hydrogen.

    yes, you could crack water into H2 and O2 before use but this takes lots of power and is better done over time.

    Because it's easily available. If you could choose in space, you should use propane. It's simple compared to kerosene and is much more efficient.

  4. RP-1 is a hydrocarbon. Why produce any hydrocarbon if you have the option of producing hydrogen? The higher density of hydrocarbons and higher thrust of hydrocarbon engines are a lot less useful when you're not starting in a deep gravity well.

    RP-1 is a terrible hydrocarbon though. Methane and lower 'anes are much more efficient. Propane is of special interest, because it has a decent ISP and has a similar density to RP-1.

    Hydrogen is difficult to store, and difficult to freeze, especially in space where there is often a lot of light and heat on one side and the opposite on the other side.

  5. i sometimes listen to classical music when i play KSP (i'm on a JS bach kick of late, maybe the technical nature of the music makes me a better engineer in the VAB, or not), but more often i run it without any music at all. the in-game soundtrack really annoys me after a couple of minutes, but that's not unique to KSP, it goes for just about every game i play (the only exception being doom).

    Come to think of it, Doom has a good soundtrack. So does Black Mesa, a Half Life remake.

    Surface Tension 1 and Questionable Ethics 1 are good.

    Links are really tough for me to figure out, sorry.

  6. Stop thinking like a human being. Physics doesn't care what humans think. The early universe might look random and disordered to you, but to the laws of physics, there was a lot of order to it. I'm not an expert on the birth of the universe, but stars are easy to explain. Fusion of hydrogen nuclei to helium (and eventually to iron) releases a lot of thermal energy to the environment. While the hydrogen nuclei are probably losing entropy from being stuck into heavier nuclei, the thermal energy this releases greatly increases the entropy of the surroundings. There may be other effects contributing to entropy: I'm a biochemist, not a physicist.

    If we didn't think like humans, we wouldn't have physics.

    Plus, it does look random, because how can it be ordered? I'm not much of a thermodynamics genius, so if wouldn't know.

  7. How exactly do you intend to mine something with an escape velocity on the order of just a few meters per second? Any drill would fling off bits and pieces of your favorite moonlet into an escape trajectory. Not only is it difficult to capture, you're also creating some dangerous Kessler bomb around your primary (i.e. Mars in this case).

    Drills are not practical in space. At least on very low gravity objects.

    First off, why would you assume we would use a drill? There's laser cutters now, although they have a big power requirement, but it's not impossible (in theory). Considering that there's a lot of empty space that we can put solar arrays at...

    Or we could use shovel-esque devices. Then you use various methods of seperating materials.

    The space shovels would need to be hard enough, and I don't know how hard Phobos or Deimos is. Probably not very, considering they have little gravity.

  8. Only if you get close or the black hole is very large, take a black hole with the mass of the sun, here orbital speeds would be just like in our solar system.

    Yes orbital speed close is large, just as around other massive bodies, try to do an science close to sun reading in KSP and watch the orbital speed.

    Yes, if the black hole had one solar mass, it would be the same. The black hole here, Gargantua, is more than one solar mass by at least a few orders of magnitude. Plus, orbital speeds wouldn't be "just" like our solar system, they would be more uniform.

    Btw, any object compressed can be a black hole...

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