wumpus

That was pretty much my point. If your business plan requires lots of cheap platinum, crashing the price of platinum isn't a problem (at which point selling raw ore is pointless, unless you need to stimulate the market of fuel cells). But Toyota is in a unique position of "needing" cheap platinum and having the deep pockets to really do asteroid mining (assuming you just need to send a probe to grab and return with a large asteroid, presumably using ion thrust, solar sails, albedo adjustment of said asteroid, or some combination of all the above).

To be honest, this is *exactly* the hope I had when reading the original post. Toyota has both the deep pockets and the face invested in fuel cells to actually go and do this to make fuel cells a reality. It may or may not make economic sense, but the real cost of such a project might be low enough that Toyota would rather do it than admit error. Also Elon Musk has had a lot of success in developing models that use a lot of vertical integration. There is a distinct transaction cost whenever one business buys from another, and avoiding this can greatly reduce costs. This seems to work at the size of Space-X and Tesla, but expect rival divisions to have similar transaction costs once you get to the size of Ford (at that size, it often makes sense to buy from *anyone* but your own company: the politics are too dangerous).

Who used base 8? Babylonians used base 60 (can't remember if they inherited from Sumer, but a *lot* more things than you would expect directly derive from this), and there are obvious remnants of base 12, 20, and 100 left in English (dozens, scores, and hundredcounts). Granted, "base" can be a pretty nebulous term without a zero place, but many cultures listed counts by common groupings and leftovers.

The rockets [well, liquid engines and their tanks] still have really bad mass ratio " (too heavy by a factor of 3 to 8)*". This is either poor kerbal engineering or simply more dense ore. * according to "False KSP lessons" on the RSS/RO webpage.

First, anything using GPU acceleration [for consumer use, not dedicated supercomputer hardware] has to limit itself to single point precision. If Squad wanted to re-write the entire physics engine (and replace Unity), they would likely want double precision. Also GPUs really don't support multi-threading well. I suspect that your "coders who live for that" would wind up making a custom way to send small snippets of code for each needed calculation in one (or two) big threads (I think the latest nvidia GPUs can handle two threads in hardware). Worst case will be "full-stop non-parallelizable" and it shouldn't be terribly hard to construct a craft that will come rather close to it (although doing that with the many parts needed to kill performance wouldn't be quite as easy). I'm not sure how bad the common case would be, and how hard it would be to come up with an algorithm that would break the rocket into subassemblies that would be useful to compute separately (remember that dealing with 64 or so parts in parallel is trivial (you can access all the memory - if it fits in the local memory)). Squad isn't going to do this. I'd be really impressed if it was possible to mod that deep. Unity *might* try something like this, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Yes, recoverable systems will keep most of your kerbucks intact. I got really into this and burned out before making it to Duna. I've since come back and avoid most recovery issues. Kickers (big SRBs in general) are your friends. They provide plenty of thrust and a good bit of delta-v for dirt cheap. Drop a bunch of kickers before even thinking about recovering the rest. There was a challenge for the cheapest kg to LKO called the "cheap and cheerful contest". Most of the links are dead, but you should get the basic idea of what the winners looked like :

I've been watching the Etherium ticker, waiting for a crash. The whole reason that the GPU market is out of whack is that etherium miners need GPUs (bitcoin miners use ASICs, but etherium needs the memory bandwidth such that it is only cost effective to use GPUs). Judging by the recent price drop, I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of idle rigs out there, waiting for the price to justify the electricity. Once that appears permanent, expect the GPU market to slowly regain sanity (and hopefully low prices on underclocked boards on the used market). (etherium ticker [I think I have the right one, I don't mine/trade the stuff]):https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/

Expect that ceramic capacitors beat electrolytics in W/kg and lose badly in J/kg (they should be even closer to "ideal" capacitors with less equivilent series resistance). In practice this is meaningless (matching the equations makes them great for filters and similar where you don't want resistance at all, but you want more capacitance and can easily eat the electrolytic's resistance). I've never heard of Li-ion capacitors. I want a hyrbrid car with them (plus LiFePO4 reserve), and I want it now! It would even let a Leaf-style battery system have Tesla-level pep (assuming you could afford the motors. But I suspect that the battery system is the the hard part right now). The wiki for Li-ion capacitors is pretty weak, and if those are the real applications (because of other issues with the things) then it is dead (many of those would be better suited for even lead-acid batteries).

That isn't quite accurate. *Ecology* is pretty critical in Dune and I doubt it was all that inaccurate in the 1960s (and probably isn't even detailed enough be shown wrong now, just enough to describe the effects of extremely limited moisture on an ecology). Physics was only touched on enough to establish the setting (remember, space and time are warped by the psychic effects of guild navigators. Absolutely no attempt at hard SF in the hard sciences is ever attempted). Swords in space isn't exactly limited to Space Opera, I think one of the last battles in Forever War involved pre-gunpowder tactics. I'm blanking on the rest. Cavalry charges in late history: Crimean war (1854) Light Brigade Charges for completely unclear reasons. It does not go well. US civil war(1860s) at least one cavalry vs. cavalry battle takes place with one side using sabres and the other using carbines. This likely marks the end of sabre use in said war. Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905) I wouldn't put it past the Czars to field classic cavalry. At least one high ranking supply officer wasn't worried about the distinct lack of gunpowder going into the Great War as "it will decided, as always, by lance and sabre".

While more Isp is better, don't overdo it. Ion engines don't exactly play nicely with the time acceleration system. Nuclear (LV-N) engines *are* that great, but fueling them can be a pain (insufficient fuel-only tanks) and you might want more than one for large vessels (or learn all about the Mangalyaan maneuver [sometimes called pe-kicking here]). I'd learn to use the terrier and poodle engines first (as second and/or third stages*). They still have reasonable thrust, low cost and the higher Isp of traditional rockets. Remember, you still need sufficient thrust when circularizing [you start coming down sooner than you might think] and I've found that the LV-N often can't get that job done. Once in orbit, while you don't have that issue, you lose efficiency as you have to burn long before and after your burn point (in near orbit of some body, out in deep space it doesn't matter). And consider the camel analogy. That is pretty much it. * while it isn't obvious from the equations that Isp matters more and more as you drop stages, you'll find that Isp doesn't matter as much for the first stage (I love big SRBs like kickers) and it becomes critical in your final stages (terriers work wonders thanks to how light they are). This is mostly because of all the stages above the first stage count as "dry mass" to that first stage: you are in the more linear regions of the exponential curve. As you have less and less dry mass above you, you go into the upper ranges of the exponential curve and Isp matters more and more.

Trans-Earth injection is equally "burn or die", but also used pressure-fed hypergolics (although possibly chosen to avoid cryogenic bleed-off). A high-power solid motor (to supply the majority of the thrust) followed by pressure fed systems should be sufficiently simple, but the LM ascent stage had an Isp of 311s. It would take some pretty extreme fear of evil chemicals to switch N2O4 - Aerozine 50 tanks out for an SRB. These were last used as shuttle maneuvering engines and scheduled for use in the Orion, so presumably they are somewhat available (you might have to scale them back down to LM size). Electrical pumps might have looked reasonably similar from the Tesla-Edison battles to the 1990s, but since then they have changed radically (ok, inductive motors might resemble Tesla's designs, but the power supplies typically supply a custom-created AC instead of what the power plant provides). Probably similar things could be said about radio transmission, but I suspect the changes started much earlier. No matter how old the tech, nobody is trusting an entirely new engine design never designed for crewed flight with a single successful flight.

Certainly there were plenty of engineers inspired by Star Trek, and certainly more few gimicks that they still want. I remember somebody selling a hand held oscilloscope under the tag "Mr. Sulu, I believe you dropped something." Between the original posting (2014) and now there have been multiple articles on creation of medical tricorders (sic*), and I'm sure there are efforts to copy even more of their toys. * the tricorder was a device Mr. Spock used to analyze the atmosphere and other planetary analysis. The device in the articles is either the thing attached to sick bay beds that displayed vital signs (presumably, never explained) in real time or the "23rd century stethoscope" that McCoy would wave over a patient to determine "he's dead, Jim".

More thoughts: Ideally, if the Merlins aren't enough to send the mass to lunar intercept, your first choice should be a RL-10 (hydrolox expander engine). Storing enough hydrogen for the return flight might be iffy, but it is ideal for leaving Earth. While pressure-fed hypergolics are nearly always the way to go for ascent/descent engines, Rocket Lab's new Rutherford engine are small and throttlable (and far too bleeding edge to trust with human life). If the rocket scientists need any "add magic to reduce mass", they might be a way out of a tight spot. A more kerbal design might include a powerful main engine that would suicide burn to some safe altitude (100m?) and use pressure fed engines for final landing (and similarly use the main engine for ascent and the pressure feds for docking). If you are bringing hydrogen to the moon, an RL-10 based system would make an ideal "main engine" for this (I'm no fan of hydrogen past Earth orbit). "Two launches with lunar rendezvous" implies a lot of the stack aren't two stock Dragons, but designed for lunar operations.

My copy (1.3.1) only allows flea engines for the first launch in career. If you are in sandbox, all bets are off and you can build an SSTO spaceplane if you want. Between the mass limit limiting the number of flea engines, the need for explosive staging, and "only' 400 m/s available by bailing out and using the jet pack in a last ditch circularization effort there simply isn't enough delta-v to orbit (actually the various inefficiencies are irrelevant, you can't even get the theoretical delta-v with the mass limits). I've had upgrading issues before, so my copy might not be fully functional.

You could hardly have a rocket that followed the "more boosters" school of rocket design better than the N1.

Considering that falcon 1 is canceled and reprieve has never been mentioned, it appears that spacex really isn't interested in moving downmarket. I'd still expect them to be an acquisition target, if only for the carbon tank tech. Of course, if somebody wanted to just buy the thing for any other tech, Bezos had sufficiently deep pockets.

My understanding is that lithium iron phosphate is where it is at if you want to pull out a lot of power quickly. They are even in mass production.

I'm equally impressed by the electric motors. Even if asparagus staging never happens on Earth, we can still expect "drop batteries" to replace "drop tanks". And while the engines might not be all that wildly efficient (thanks to the mass of the battery), I'm still curious if this can scale up to human throwing sizes. I'm also curious as to exactly what is included in the "lowest price to orbit": Orbital quoted a $6M price to orbit [absolutely bare bones] back in the 1990s for roughly four times the payload (or maybe not, 4x is current pegasus payload). But the "real price" is close to $40M (NASA is paying $60M for the latest flight, and it has been awhile since a Pegasus flight).

That is fine and dandy, but how does information have a charge? Another link: https://physics.illinois.edu/news/article/24114 This sounds remarkably like the pork futures storage unit in Ankh-Morpork, but appears much more confirmed than simple hype.

I'd really have to wonder if excitium only exists as some sort of ephemeral event, having electrons that are both there and not there, or somehow summoned out of the ether without producing a positron but instead a "hole". I've always assumed that "holes" were simply lack of electrons. Then again it took a lot of convincing to believe (well before learning Maxwell's equations) that fields were a thing as well.

From what I've heard, some of the "shuttle abort modes" were never successfully performed in the simulator. Even if you had an available abort mode, it doesn't mean that your chances of survival were all that high. In case anyone missed it, the procedure for an issue with the lunar ascent (one of the most likely points of failure IMHO) was to bang on the motor until it worked (see quote and followup to "this is how we repair Russian space station" in another thread). Just because you have other dangerous parts, it isn't a great idea to make ascent (and decent) any less safe. They are the most dangerous parts of any mission.

While I'm fairly sure prions can't survive the leathering process, I'd like to assume that the "don't feed cow to cow" laws are sufficiently stringent to ban ground shoe leather. Mad cow disease is not to be trifled with.

Shuttle Solid Boosters: 25MN thrust (125 seconds of thrust) SSME (all three engines) 5.25 MN thrust total (455 seconds of thrust) Not even close to the "bulk of the thrust". Even "bulk of the thrust*time" is about dead even. Certainly the SSME provided much more delta-v, but not by providing significantly more thrust. I wonder if this is a corollary to the "all spelling/grammar flames will contain spelling/grammar errors of their own". If you want thrust from hydrolox [from the pad] go with a delta heavy. Just don't expect to send any astronauts on it, nor get the price down anywhere near spacex. Hydrolox might be efficient, but fuel is cheap and optimizing for fuel is silly. Kerlox makes so much more sense for a first [especially expendable] stage that the Delta IV rocket's future is in doubt (NASA/DoD are replacing anything they can with Atlas).

PB666 wrote up an interesting article on why ion (more specifically electrical powered spacecraft) engines shouldn't use "spiral out" navigation but instead a "mangalyaan maneuver (Pe kicking)". He works out the math and shows that doing so can give twice the delta-v (at a cost of 100 times the time to reach escape velocity). I took the data to mean that I should bring enough reaction mass to spiral out (possibly switching from Xenon to Argon if I had to) as I don't expect to see ion engines increasing in thrust by a factor of 100 any time soon (and consider spiraling out already "slow enough"). As everywhere, it is a tradeoff and you can choose either way. Note that the problem is pretty moot if you aren't willing to stick around in the Van Allan belts (NASA uses big rockets to send ion engines out well past them, as the belts are harsh on everything, especially solar panels).

I'd at least assume they will finally get around to releasing the "making history" DLC, that appears to be much closer to a mod than a full game, and if that is profitable I'd expect them to try to milk as much DLC as possible. I'd expect KSP2 to ditch unity (especially for physics) and increase more microtransactions. While I'll agree that take2 will at least begin development of "KSP 2" (at least after KSP DLC appears unprofitable), I'm less convinced on its commercial success or even release (although the greed of being able to more easily shut out mods from competing with the DLC will certainly help drive the development, the same drive would hurt the uptake needed for success). KSP isn't dying anytime soon. Games with DRM can die when the publisher pulls the plug, games without DRM and a modding community simply don't die. Google civ forums for activity on Civilization II, a 20 year old game with 4 sequels (which are mostly preferred to civ 2). One huge advantage KSP has in any similar "immortality contests" is that KSP is in a basically unique genre: it only "competes" with Orbital (KSP was invisioned as "simple orbital") and "simple rockets" (presumably a "simple KSP" to KSP's "simple orbital"), so I suppose KSP2 would only have to compete with 3 programs (and having the most difficulty with the established base of KSP). I also can't imagine Take 2 making the same decisions Squad and Harvester did to make the immortal KSP, and thus I expect KSP to easily outlive any KSP 2. What would you want in KSP 2, anyway? Maybe a kerbal airplane program like simple planes (prequels are popular)? A colonization-specific game, building a kerbal colony on Duna (might be a mod, but a more sim-city like colony building game would want a different interface). Or just "rewrite everything with a fancier engine". That sounds more expensive than the original KSP, and most of your customers already own KSP: so Take 2 is expecting to spend more money than Squad did to make KSP2 *plus* whatever they already paid Squad for KSP. Then they have to sell the game to owners of KSP + whatever players are interested in a rocket science game that for whatever reason didn't buy KSP. This sounds like a difficult situation (whereas simply churning out more DLC for the unity-based game could easily be profitable).