Terwin

Why? Starship is designed to land on earth after launching SSTO from mars(where SSTO is much more reasonable). Launching from earth requires a SH first stage, but Starship is fine making orbit from mars or the moon, and even has dv left for going somewhere. If you want Star Trek type adventures, your engines(and shuttle craft/transporters) will need to be fantasy, not hard sci-fi. Nothing realistic can manage Star Trek, even in a size-constrained multi-system like the 'verse from Firefly.

The 'difficulty' is more expense and mass fraction than anything else. If you want a realistic vehicle using all of these wiz-bang ideas without ignoring realism, you should expect your 8kiloton STO to have a useable payload of perhaps 50 tons, and costs that might bankrupt a level 3 civilization with each launch.

This does not in any way reduce the force that the ramp would need to apply to the space ship, nor the forces that the ramp would need to undergo during a launch. If anything, this makes the problem harder as you no longer have anything keeping your vessel from sliding off to the side of the ramp and greatly limits the strength of the materials you can use for the surface of the ramp. You would also need a magnetic field strong enough to hold up that 8 kiloton vehicle, and I have serious doubts that a fixed magnet can manage that much force in the area available.(and if it can, it may be a bigger hazard than the engines. Such a strong magnet right next to the engines would also likely cause problems with your magnetic nozzle. This also does not in any way address the issue of losses due to high speeds low in the atmosphere nor the need to make a 90 degree turn so to change the rocket from horizonal to vertical(Rear engines with no wings = falling with a high horizontal velocity unless you are vertical)

The whole point of fusion over fission is that fusion scales down. Fission requires critical mass, providing a minimum possible blast, while fusion scales down to levels that are insufficient to even melt an entire snow flake. Also, you are using fantasy engines, so they have whatever properties you want them to have.

If you are using fantasy drives, why not just assume that you can use them for VTOL as well? Star trek and star wars do not even bother to put engines other than the ones at the rear, yet they still more or less VTOL.

Sounds like the 'deep space' biome. Not many would care about what demarks the difference, but Deep Space is a biome I would expect in KSP2 between the star systems.

A nuclear reaction has three possible states: Sub-critical: The reaction will peter-out and die without external support/neutrons Critical: the reaction is exactly maintaining itself with excess neutrons being removed form the reaction to maintain this state Super-Critical: the reaction is accelerating, usually in an exponential fashion A nuclear reactor wants to maintain a critical state long-term, and switches to sub-critical to 'shut down'. A nuclear bomb wants to initiate a super-critical state until the energy release blows the weapon into pieces too small for the reaction to continue. The faster the reaction, the more energy it can release before it gets blown to pieces. If you want to use the heat from an on-going critical reaction, that would be a Nuclear thermal deign or perhaps some sort of ion engine powered by a nuclear reactor. If you want to slow down a nuclear bomb, that is called a misfire or a 'dud' and may not release even as much energy as a similar mass of TNT.

You are conflating two things: 1) SSTO is inefficient for anything* 2) Chemical rockets are the only thing that is currently useful for achieving orbit *) But science fiction ignores this for the sake of the story and you keep ignoring that Bigger is Better when it comes to chemical rockets, and huge** is the only way to get chemical rockets to SSTO. **) While SH+SS is huge for a TSTO, it *might* be big enough for a reusable SSTO that can actually do something useful, even if it would be terribly inefficient compared to the existing TSTO.

Wiki indicates that 70-90% is good for a turbopump: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbopump#:~:text=Turbopumps have a reputation for,this is a severe problem. It looks like the efficiency problems are more with the fluid-handling side as opposed to the gas-turbine side(or at least all the listed issues seem to be related to fluid handling). Also, the 99% includes not just two gas turbines, but also the two pumps, the combustion chamber and the rest of the engine. Even if both turbines are at 99.9% that still means that the rest of the bits combined lose less than 0.9% total efficiency.

CKAN can be kind of Jankey, it is recommended to manually install. As RoverDude no longer supports CKAN, it is possible that whoever made the latest changes left out something important(like USItools or firespitter) and so CKAN is seeing a missing dependency.

I think that if there were known technologies that could make a useful SSTO, we would have one by now. Generally speaking you will not find a plausible engine that can give you the dv to get to orbit with a useful cargo fraction in one stage and still have enough thrust to get off the ground. Staging is a way to 'cheat' the rocket equation posted above, by discarding dry-mass that is no longer needed, letting you have multiple stages that each have a high fuel fraction. Each stage you add, just adds another chunk of dv to the existing rocket when you add it to the bottom. The trade-off is that each additional stage counts all later stages as part of it's dry-mass, but a SSTO would need to be much larger than any multi-stage rocket for the same task, so even with huge early stages, staging still makes an over-all smaller rocket.

Looking in GameData\UmbraSpaceIndustries\MKS\ResourceConfigs\water.cfg I see entries like: PLANETARY_RESOURCE { ResourceName = Water ResourceType = 0 PlanetName = Kerbin Distribution { PresenceChance = 100 MinAbundance = 1 MaxAbundance = 50 Variance = 20 Dispersal = 3 } } So if you just duplicated this entry and changed the planet name from Kerbin to Iota (or however it is named in the other config files) then it seems like that should add water to iota with an abundance similar to what you find on the land parts of Kerbin. Be sure to check for a similar config entry in the Galileo planet pack however, as if there are two, I would expect the last one loaded to over-write the previous one, and as the default water is not zero, I am pretty sure the iota water config already exists somewhere.

You need to start with the depot, but aside from that you only need to add enough modules in a chunk to not have any deficiencies. Improving a depot/biome in stages is the intended usage as far as I am aware.

That is only the heat that is deliberately generated by the repulsors, there is generally also waste heat generated by pushing a current through a wire, friction from moving parts, etc (like how computer processor chips need a heat-sink because they produce a lot of waste heat) Unless you are using an open-circuit cooling process, you are probably not ejecting it as part of your thrust pulses. Also, if you are only heating up the air outside of any sort of containment, how are you keeping that heated air from rushing back over your limbs as it expands? How are you getting thrust from the expansion of an external bubble of gas unless it pushes against you(and thus conducts the heat to your suit)?

The problem with this is the price of entry: Self-driving car: someone needs to pay for a bunch of hardware and software development, total cost: similar to the expenditures of a mid-sized business Profit: could be similar to the cost of a full-time driver per-vehicle and still save the customer money(less the cost of hardware) For each car/truck on the road Reformatting urban infrastructure: cost of all existing urban infrastructure to be reformatted+ costs of demolition + costs of construction, total cost: more than the GDP of the entire US for a large town/small city Profit: value of the re-formatted infrastructure - a hefty percentage because the layout is new and the specific property values are unproven For that one urban area. One of these can be afforded by a single medium to large business(or even a focused start-up) with a potentially huge profit margin once it is working. The other is outside of the fiscal capabilities of any individual, small group, or even the US government for each re-formatted urban area, and most of the projects will likely end up having a loss of total value, at least in the short-term. And that is without the on-going costs of public transportation or the problems of 'nail houses/properties'(where the owner refuses to sell or move out)

This is less a suit and more a small pod with arm and leg waldos. Not sure if you can pull your legs into the pod, but clearly you can pull your arms into the pod for operating controls or the like.

For a chemical rocket, the larger the better. The fuel mas increases based on volume, and tank mass only increases based on area, giving a higher fuel fraction the larger you go. While available thrust is also limited based on area, you can always go with a wider diameter to mitigate this. Side-mounted boosters are also a good way to increase thrust-area, even if they may not have as much of a benefit as increasing the diameter. (Falcon heavy shows a good example of this) I am pretty sure that the only reason to have a first stage the burns out within a few hundred feet of the launchpad is if you are limited to pre-existing rocket parts assembled in a lego fashion(like KSP) and your vessel is on a much larger scale than the parts. While w have not yet figured out how to make engines larger than a specific size(thus limiting per-engine output), SpaceX is a good example of using lots of reliable engines in tandem for huge thrust. There may come a point where engine reliability limits your ability to increase the TWR of the engine section of a given stage, but increasing engine reliability can push that point out to ridiculous extremes. No, if you want a pulsed fusion powered engine, you want to make every pulse relatively small(as in grams of TNT equivalent per pulse per engine), so that you can have chamber walls of a reasonable thickness and thus a reasonable twr.

In the release version, you need to have specific transport containers to count for vessel transport capacity.

Compared to a pure-fusion Orion as advocated by that article, a fission Orion is likely a better choice, as it is much simpler. On the other hand, the article was advocating for a deep-space fusion Orion because it could refuel from ice or any other hydrogen source. Should the technical hurdles be over-come, there is the argument to be made that a pure-fusion Orion would be superior to a fission Orion with regards to ISRU. On the other hand, compared to a more realistic use of fusion for propulsion(mini-mag, fusion torch, micro-pulses, etc.) any form of Orion is the lesser choice. A 50g fusion pellet will not have the same out-put as a 100lb fission bomb. Then again, a 100lb fission bomb weighs more than 900 50g pellets, so even if the pellet has two orders of magnitude less impulse, it may still have a higher isp. To the best of my understanding, we have not yet successfully demonstrated a sustained reaction in a tokamak style reactor, but we have demonstrated fusion pulses(NIF). While it would be an awful design, we could theoretically put a NIF style ignition, powered by an on-board fission reactor, to super-heat the reaction mass for a deep space(low-thrust, high ISP) vessel. This would not require anything we cannot do today, so I would argue that a fusion micro-pulse propelled spacecraft is possible with today's technology, but a continuous fusion torch is not yet in our grasp.

Sort of replacing the combustion of a chemical rocket with little bits of fusion? If you have sufficiently rapid small-scale fusion events, that sounds a bit like a fuel-rich fusion torch set-up when running. When using an actively cooled chamber/nozzle, I do not think that the heat is the greatest problem, but the pressure-wave caused by the fusion blast would very much be a limiting factor, as the stronger the blast, the thicker everything needs to be to contain it without popping like an over-filled balloon. Ablative cooling works, so long as you have ablative left, but it does not help much against pressure waves. I think pressure waves would be a bigger issue than straight-up heating.

Fission does not scale down below critical mass, while fusion can scale all the way down to 17.6 MeV (2.8 x 10^-12 joules). The only reason to use a pusher-plate is if you have no materials that can contain/redirect the blast out of a nozzle. As a thin layer of balsa-wood is plenty strong enough to contain the 'blast' from a single pair of hydrogens fusing into a helium, you would need some serious handwavium going on for a fusion powered pusher-plate vessel to make any sense. Because anything less than 42 gigajoules(10 tons of TNT, aka smallest fission bomb yield and roughly 2x10^13 times the size of the smallest workable fusion yield) will attract the giant space-beavers that will eat your crew-cabin, then use the rest of the rocket to build their space-dams.

Why? This gives you all the complexity of pure fusion(which can scale down to single fusion events) with the scaling problems of fission(minimum impulse size limited by critical mass). Instead of a single large impulse every X seconds, do 100 impulses of 1% of the large impulse at a rate of 100 per x seconds. This lets you reduce the strength of just about everything involved by at least two orders of magnitude, greatly reducing engine weight and improving TWR. Take this to the logical extreme and you have a drive that is either continuous or has very small discrete fuel 'pellets' igniting many times per second. Also, with fusion, you do not need pre-packaged pure-fusion bombs, but can instead use the same ignition source and just pump in the hydrogen you want to ignite(possibly in a magnetic bottle or some such). Why would this form of engine create mushroom clouds when other engines that also shoot out super-hot gas do not? There is no huge fireball to ascend into the sky and provide that mushroom shape(unless something goes very wrong, and at that point your ship is no longer reusable). With fusion, you do not want discrete bombs, you have a single reusable means of igniting the fusion that you use either continuously for a torch drive, or for small discrete packages of fuel for a pulse drive. Ideally, your fuel is a large tank of hydrogen that you can refuel anywhere with easily accessible hydrogen.

Also, all of that extra detail is something that should only even exist if it will be a significant plot point. With science fiction, the needs of the story drive everything else. Everyone needs air to live, but how often does a story mention a character breathing? Only when it illustrates or extends something directly important for the story, the rest of the time, it is a useless side-bar that usually detracts from the story as a whole. If pusher-plates come up as a critical dramatic point in the story, then you have pusher-plates, even if they make no technical sense. If they do not serve as a critical dramatic point, then the reader should be completely ignorant of those drive details. If the story requires that an apollo stack can get to alpha centari in less than 5 years, then it can. If the story does not come first, then nothing else matters because no one will read it.

Orion only works in atmosphere if you are ok with melting the whole thing and irradiating your cargo while you do so. (Atmosphere can reflect both heat and radiation, space not so much. This is not even considering the atmospheric shock-waves) All of the hardest parts of fusion rocketry are also required for a pure fusion orion. If anything they are made harder by having more space and an extended pusher-plate between the ignition sources and the ignition target. Fission is generally safer then fission, yes, but you may still have more radiation because your nuclear reaction is not inside of any sort of containment vessel.

I was referring to liftoff, but an atmospheric retro-burn would likely be at least as bad, especially once you get sub-sonic.