Finox

No, they really didn't have anything to sell in North America for decades. I read about the Virginia colony trying to export all sorts of stuff like clapboard and sasparella root to try to make money for the colony. Ultimately they found tobacco but it took decades for that to make a profit, and only for the southern colonies. The Mid-Atlantic and New England generated their wealth through trade, mostly by selling common items like food, construction materials, naval goods and similar such mundane articles to the Caribbean. Mars could do something similar with asteroid colonies as it would be far cheaper to lift common bulky goods like food and mining equipment from Mars then from Earth. I guess our viewpoints are totally different here, I regard Platinum or something similar as a bonus to colonization while others seem to see it as a prerequisite. As for why you would mine platinum on Mars as opposed to the asteroid belt... let me turn it around and ask why you wouldn't? One doesn't have to be the lowest cost producer to make a profit. I'm curious; do you regard the prospects of Mars colonization as impossible without an already existing business plan? I really don't think one is needed, Mars won't need much in the way of imports (some semiconductors and medicines) to survive, that's why its so attractive.

Is your entire reason for being in this thread to convince yourself or others that space colonization is a mistake? It just doesn't seem like you're willing to accept any view that colonizing Mars or anywhere else is possible. It's a point I rather strongly disagree with, sure the startup costs are enormous but they were for the Virginia Company as well. Sure the distances are far and the journey dangerous, but so it was for the Pilgrims. We can go back and forth over why this commodity may or may not be profitable, but the first pioneers won't go to Mars to make a buck, they'll go for the chance to settle a new world free from the old. Money would really just be the icing on the cake. Also; 95% of the worlds platinum comes from South Africa and production isn't great so if you found a decent deposit on Mars (the bar being quite low), it would be profitable today. Also, Also; the viking didn't fail to settle North America because they lacked the technology they failed because only the Greenland settlements knew about North America and they had less than 1000 people combined. There just weren't enough people available to settle the new world. Furthermore they didn't spread the word back to Europe, or Iceland for that matter of the existence of this new land. It's alot more complicated then just saying the viking didn't have the technology.

No I meant an actual Kerbal, like Jeb, what would a photo-realistic Jebadiah Kerman look like?

Has anyone here read "The Case for Mars" by Robert Zubrin? I would think with a group like the one surrounding KSP, with it's intense interest in space, that more people would have read that book. I bring this up because there is a section in the aforementioned book that answers this threads primary question. What can Mars export? Well any metal with a value to weight ratio equal to or better than silver will be profitable, which includes gold, all platinum group and the rare earths, just to mention a few. Also deuterium, essential in the future for fusion reactors and useful now in heavy water fission reactors. A material which is light, 5-6 times more abundant on Mars than Earth, and a byproduct of the water electrolysis a mars colony would need for its life support. Keep in mind you could export all the products I just mentioned profitably with current technology. I could go on but others like new innovations, and the fact that most products an asteroid mining operation will need can be launched more cheaply from Mars than Earth have already been covered by others. I'm just amazed that nobody else in this thread has brought that book up before me.

So what would a photo-realistic Kerbal look like anyway? We've really only ever seen them in the current cartoony form.

What a neat idea for a contest! Merry Christmas to all and especially to Squad!

Yeah, that's how I did it, although it took me about a dozen Kerbin-bound prototypes and I left 3 rovers flipped over on the Mun before I figured out the correct placement. I assume you tried something similar?

Rovers are useful, but they require you to know a thing or two about automobile design for them to really be worthwhile for science. If your rocket making skills are better than your rover making skills then you're naturally going to find that to be the easiest solution. It wasn't until I figured out how to make durable, self-righting rovers that I was able to use them on extended trips without getting bored. My old Munbuggy could survive any collision as long as it wasn't going much over 20 m/s and then it could flip itself back onto its wheels no matter its orientation, and all without thrusters! I really need to figure out how to post pictures, I have some great pics of it, and a hilarious one of my prototype getting stuck at an unforeseen angle.

This is an excellent idea! It would give us something to do with an outer-system flyby probe after it had completed it's primary mission. Plus, whatever instrument is used for deep space, could open up a new way of collecting science in general. I hope squad picks up on the idea.

There needs to be a "hit the ground to hard on landing" option, that would be my vote. Unless you count forgetting air intakes, I ALWAYS forget air intakes for some reason!

Hello from KOhio! Interesting, this thread...

I play both Minecraft and KSP, I thought them similar long before I saw this article. It's about the feel of each being similar not the flavor. Both games are fundamentally about building and exploring, sounds like a good comparison to me! Besides, being compared to Minecraft is high praise...

Agreed, the jump from 30 to 255 is way too much. I played KSP on an older laptop from versions 18.2 until 1.0, so being able to build a ship with unlimited parts wasn't much of a goal as my computer couldn't possibly handle much over 200 anyway. Heck, I haven't had more than a dozen craft with greater than 255 parts in the ENTIRE time I've played KSP and I've been to every planet by now. So unlocking the ability to have 255 parts is the equivalent of telling me "build whatever your system can handle", its not really a useful limit. A slower progression, like mayber; 30 to 75 to 150 to unlimited, would work much better from my perspective, but that's just me.

Wow! I thought it was special when I had a spent upper stage come within 11km of my station, it certainly surprised me! To have an actual collision is something else altogether. For my part, I haven't had a computer that could handle much debris until recently, so I've had to practice "eco-friendly" launches for performance reasons alone.

I docked it on Minmus after I mined the ore then transferred the premined ore to the return vehicle. The thing that occurrs to me is that the game probably tracks the ore's origin by part. Which is to say that if an ore tank is flagged in the program as "from Gilly" then your contract will complete. I transferred the ore while on Minmus, which is probably what causes KSP to flag an ore tanks contents as from that body to begin with. If you transfer after you leave then it might not carry that flag over, depending on how the devs wrote it. This seems like the kind of obscure question that either a dev needs to answer or you'll have to figure our experimentally. Good luck! I hope I was of some help anyway.

Hello, question: Are you transferring the ore from one tank to another after leaving Gilly? If so then I don't know and am curious as to the answer. However, If you mean that you are transferring it to a tanker while on Gilly then you should be ok. I did something exactly like this only on Minmus, basically I "pre-mined" a tank of ore (after accepting the contract, critically important) and transferred it to a tanker that had docked with my base on Minmus. The ore tanker then proceeded to its destination and the contract completed for me. So as long as the ore stays in the same tank from origin to destination the contract will complete.

Are you asking what you get with the first tracking station update? The one that makes patched conics visible? Assuming you are; basically it shows more than the basic information about your orbit, the basic information being the apoapsis, periapsis, and general path of your orbit. With patched conics visible you'll be able to see information about your orbit when it encounters the Mun or other bodies and you'll be able to make maneuver nodes, which help you plan flights and make maneuvers easier. It is an important upgrade, I don't go to the Mun without it. I hope that answers your question, if not could you clarify?

Has anyone thought that these perchlorates might be useful in agriculture? Naturally occurring deposits of nitrates often have perchlorates in them here on Earth, the same could be true of Mars. Furthermore ammonium perchlorate decomposes fairly easily when heated into Oxygen, Nitrogen, Chlorine and Water, each of which would be useful for farming on Mars, aside from the Chlorine anyway.

Nice! I love the fact that engines will be more than just a nozzle. Will an engines weight be distributed along its length or is it still concentrated in the nozzle?

It's an interesting idea, I can see how it would have been shoved aside for the simpler tokamak designs, hard to imagine anyone making a really effective stellarator using slide-rules and drafting tables. Interesting timing, The Economist had a recent article on stellarators: Warning! pay wall ahead. http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21676752-research-fusion-has-gone-down-blind-alley-means-escape-may-now-be

Welcome to the forums! I was a longtime lurker as well, 2 years, kind of nice to see I'm not that abnormal!

Yeah, but any newly founded base is not going to have much power to spare for quite sometime after its establishment. Even if you landed with a small nuclear reactor you're still only going to have at most a few MW of power available. Even with all the power in the world available it would still be much cheaper to recycle scrap aluminum. Your right that any base would want a foundry early on though, a small foundry and a machine shop are on my list of things to bring to Mars!

If the debris is aluminum then it might end up being more useful than nuisance. Aluminum would be hard to manufacture on a Mars or Moon base due to the large amounts of electrical power required. It's not likely that future astronauts will have much spare power for making raw aluminum, but recycling it is far cheaper in terms of power. Thus the debris problem could be self correcting due to the value a future base would place on debris as useful scrap.

Does anyone know the reason for the tanks being orange? Something to do with how its made I'd guess, but I know the early tanks weren't that color. I hope its not because someone thought it was a good idea to paint it that color. I mean its just kinda ugly, if it saves weight then ok I understand why, but the previous color scheme for SLS was better.

Well that will work, thank you!