Terwin

Hopefully we'll have fairly permanent 'anchor' parts and plenty of struts. Extra mass probably helps a building and probably only costs raw materials for simple struts/banked earth.

Building a plane I can easily land is a challenge, and I am not at all patient with planetary transfers(or even transfers between the Mun and Minus), so I tend to have long flight times and high dv usage. (this could be why I am so fond of ISRU with high efficiency engines(like nerva or the lithium fueled engines from near future). Usually starting departure burns with nearly full fuel/ore tanks and landing on Ike to refuel before landing for example)

You still have a point of closest approach, even if you are not in orbit. The pe is just used as short-hand for 'point of trajectory that is deepest inside the gravity well', with regards to Oberth, and any time you pass a body you will still have that, even if it has a different name.(and with a wonky-enough gravity map, it might not even be the pe in all cases)

While SLS is likely to be obsolete in the near future, it is not yet obsolete as neither New Glen nor Starship have finished development. (ie successful launch to orbit) There is legitimate value in NASA continuing to fund a rocket that they know will not be cancelled(so long as they keep paying) until there is at least one(and preferably more than one) existing commercial alternative. While the costs for SLS may boggle the mind, it is directed spending and NASA has little say over the matter. I personally hope that both Starship and New Glen launch soon so that SLS can be set aside as no longer worth-while, but for the time being, it is still better for the space program than the federal budget ear-marks that are likely to replace it.

I expect that if either SpaceX's Starship or Blue Origin's New Glen works as claimed, then there will be a lot of larger and lower priced missions proposed to ride on them. I can see why there might be a bit of a lull in mission designs with such a large jump in capability on the horizon. Planners are probably just waiting to make proposals based on the demonstrated capabilities of the first low-cost heavy launch vehicle to market. Delta heavy gets you 28.8t to LEO for $14/kg Falcon 9 gets you 15t to LEO for $4/kg (FT in operation since December 2015) Falcon Heavy gets you 64t to LEO for $3/kg (since Feb 2018) Space Ship is supposed to get you 100-150t to LEO for < $0.62/kg (possibly as soon as 2020) So it seems plausible that there might be a few up-coming proposals using Falcon 9 FT by the end of the year, but with the launch of the Falcon Heavy and development of Starship, it seems plausible that those are all still being re-worked to take advantage of the lower cost launch options that are now(and perhaps soon) available.

You can watch some live-streams of Elon playing KSP Right here: He just plays a more expensive version than most of us...

Perhaps one meal, but vultures are the only known vertebrate obligate scavenger(possibly some early proto-vultures as well), so scavenging monkeys does not seem like a sustainable ecological niche if no current or historical records indicate anything even vaguely similar. Scavenging or stealing kills is a great source of bonus calories, but only vultures managed to make it work well enough to sustain a vertebrate metabolism. (and I can't imagine that soaring from thermal to thermal is anywhere near as calorie intensive as running along the ground)

The bones of a 2-3 hour old carcass are not polished, they are covered with sinew, bits of flesh, tooth marks, claw marks, dirt, saliva, etc. If you want 'polished' bones, you need to wait for the ants to finish cleaning the surface, but ants are quite good at finding any sort of crack, r opening so that they can not only clean off the outside of the bone, but the inside as well. The animal I was arguing against being viable was a humanoid obligate scavenger with suction-cups on their hands to facilitate handling bones(as that was the only argument for suction-cups on a terrestrial animal). If you move away from the obligate scavenger who steals polished bones(which are somehow still filled with brains and marrow), then you lose the only utility for suction-cups on the hands and we move to just discussing early hominids. I will agree that early hominids seem to have proven quite successful, just not in any way that would have been facilitated by having suction-cups on their hands.

If you follow the wolves as they hunt, why would they not decide to eat you as easier prey? If you don't, how will you find the kill(assuming there is anything left) before the other scavengers do? Have you ever known a dog to ignore food, even after it just ate? They are happy to eat until they throw up, then eat some more. Lots of predators will also take their kill and hide it from scavengers to eat more later(or just stay there and guard it). Also, the lion does not leave it's kill to the hyenas, it scares off the hyenas so that it can eat their kill, then when it leaves the hyenas eat was the lion did not steal. Vultures tend to be successful because: a) they can easily watch a large area for kills while safe from ground animals b) they can wait for the predator to leave the kill while both near-by and safe from the predator(even 20' up tends to be pretty much out of reach for most land-based animals) c) they can quickly run away from the kill to a safe place where the original predator or it's competitors cannot reach.(it is very very hard for even a pack of ground animals to corner one that can fly). Without those, the vulture either starves or becomes lunch. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scavenger more: This strongly suggests to me that a terrestrial scavenger is not a viable option in an earth-like environment.

Not so much. Bones are porous and tend to have lots of things sticking to them, making it very hard to suckers to grasp them unless they have been fully cleaned and polished(at which point there is not likely to be anything left worth eating) Also, most predators don't have a lot of problems with cracking open bones to get at the fatty goodness inside. (ever see a dog crack open a bone? That is one of the reasons you don't give them cooked chicken bones, as the cooked hollow bones may splinter and cut the mouth or throat as opposed to raw bones(hollow or not) which are softer and not prone to splintering) Even heavy skulls with horns on top tend to have other parts that are much thinner and easier to open.

dv is short-hand for delta-v, or 'change in velocity' The reason a rocket burn is always referred to by dv is because that is the only relevant value: how much does/did this burn change the velocity of the vessel? (the number of newtons of force is useless without knowing the mass of the vessel, and even then you would need to calculate the acceleration based on the change of vessel mass as fuel is consumed; the rate of acceleration does not tell you much unless you also know the duration of that acceleration(and the rate of acceleration will generally change based on the change in vessel mass as fuel is consumed anyway) Finally, the change in velocity is a single number which can tell you where you can go as well as how long it will take to get there:

Assuming 'flying towards' is referring to the starting point of a sling-shot, that sounds about right, but in either case the sling-shot is not the only option, you can also use gravity directly to accelerate or decelerate to a velocity very close to a relative stop compared to your target. (appear close the the body with your velocity moving away would slow you down, while appearing ~ 1 hour away form the body but falling towards it to speed up; works better with a deeper gravity well). With accurate enough math and measurements you could theoretically teleport to several inches above the surface with a relative velocity of only a few cm per second, but that seems higher risk than having some means of slowing down and appearing a few hundred meters above the surface. If you have incredibly accurate/reliable sensors and teleportation, you don't need any other fuel/engine.

Yep, add one extra hour for the last jump, I was just giving an estimate of the time to velocity-match.

Supercavitation cannot be used when traveling faster than the speed of sound. Fortunately the speed of sound in water is faster than the speed of sound in air, so you can still approach Mach 1 with a supercavitating torpedo. It does not work above the speed of sound as the speed of sound is the propagation speed of pressure waves in the medium, and supercavitation relies on pressure waves to work. As per your link however, air resistance is no longer your biggest drag issue once super sonic, instead you have 'wave drag' as a much more important factor then just air-friction.

Why would it take very long? Most of the change in velocity takes place during the brief time when the vessel is closest to the body in question, and you can teleport every hour, so just do the most effective hour each jump and be done in hours or perhaps days. The space station orbits the earth every 90 minutes, so you could presumably manage 2/3 of an orbit each hour/jump, probably a bit more as you will likely be moving faster than orbital velocity. The 'u-turn' of the slingshot looks like ~1/2 of an orbit, so it looks like you could probably manage the majority of a slingshot maneuver each jump/hour, so long as you are above the orbital velocity of the body you are using to turn/slow down(if not, you might just do a 'falling' type trajectory: falling towards and jumping just before hitting the atmosphere to speed up, or appearing just above the atmosphere and let gravity slow you down if slowing down). So, using the moon you could probably manage 100km/s in less than 200 hours(0.5 km/s each jump due to assuming only half the benefit of the sling-shot for the sake of being conservative, 8.3 days), and using Jupiter, you could probably manage it in less than half a day(100/9 is just over 11), although you may need good radiation shielding. (presumably the sun would work even better, but you may not be set up to handle the radiation/heat-load that would entail)

What stops you from pooling up the jump drive while you are using your rocket engine? 1 hour of spool time is long enough to accelerate by 35kps at 1 g If you are spooling 67 times for an hour each, you can accelerate at less than 1m/s/s and still do all of your accelerating during your spool-up time. Also, you forgot sling-shots. Jump close to a planet/star and let it change your trajectory for you instead of burning fuel. Not a lot of need for the anti-matter drives aside from launch/landing if you can use falling/sling-shots for other velocity changes.(a gas giant may be more comfortable than a star, but a few jumps that sling-shot you around a near-by large mass can easily change your vector dramatically, including speeding up/slowing down by the relative orbital velocity of the body you are using compared to your target). It would take a long time, but this jump drive could also get you close enough to C that you cover 7 light years in only 1 subjective hour(ie recharge time) if you keep falling towards a black-hole only to jump backwards shortly before the tidal forces rip apart your vessel.(you would jump far enough that the next jump would also happen just before tidal forces became too much, and just keep repeating until your maximum jump of 7ly is not far enough away to let you charge up for your next jump before getting too close)

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet Not really feasible unless you seed the expected trajectory with fuel before hand, as space is really really empty. you mean push gas out of the front of your vehicle so that the air does not drag against the skin of your vessel? This just causes turbulence and even more air resistance You could even compress and purify the gasses so that you can fit more onto the vessel. Congratulations, you designed a hydrolox rocket. The Concord flew at 56,000 feet(~17 miles) The F-35 has a service ceiling of about 9 miles. The Karman Line is at 100km(62 miles) The Falcon 9 hits Mach 10 and drops the booster at 153 seconds(~2.6 min and 80km) and crosses the Karman line around 3.4 minute into it's flight. The world record for jet powered aircraft(a scramjet) was mach 9.6(3.3km/s) (this was an experimental engine that was initially accelerated by a rocket to above mach 5 and had zero payload) Low earth orbit(200-2,000 km) is ~7-8km/s So at best you could manage almost half of orbital velocity on air-breathing if it was your second stage and had no payload, as opposed to the Falcon 9 booster that tops mach 10 by itself in less than 3 minutes and also releases form the second stage at 80km. Since the Falcon 9 booster does a better job and is fully reusable, why bother with something more complex and thus more prone to failure? Perhaps once all rocket launches are fully reusable there will be pressure to reduce fuel costs, but for now, even a reusable booster is well ahead of the competition.

Relative humidity is the amount of water in the air compared to the maximum amount that can be held at the current temperature. Clouds, Fog and Dew are formed because the air cools off too much for the water currently in the air(> 100% humidity) and so it condenses. Generally speaking, if it is raining, then the humidity is at 100%. If the temperature rises and there is no source of moisture, then relative humidity goes down. While 0% relative humidity is theoretically possible, it is only ever achieved in controlled circumstances(air-tight chamber with pure nitrogen atmosphere for example).

MKS only has the 'GC core' piece, which is basically GC without some of the workshops(as MKS has its own), and may not have the recipe for making specialized parts out of ore.

If you need compressed air from a COPV to spin up the turbines, how many restarts can you get without an over-sized pressure vessel? Is this a case where a 5lb tank(when full) can provide dozens of restarts, or the sort of thing where you need to start sacrificing cargo space/mass for each additional restart? Is it plausible to re-pressurize the 'starter tank' after use? You could always send a fully fueled vessel inside a cargo starship and have that go to the moon/GTO if you only want to sent up something small, that way it only takes a single(cheaper than Falcon 9) starship launch.

I would suggest that submerging your spacecraft in a liquid is not a great idea, as ideally they will have just enough structural strength to not collapse under their own weigh in their expected operating environments. If they need to resist external pressures greater than 1 atmosphere(aka parity with the inside), then they need to be much stronger against crushing pressures(like a sub) as opposed to just containing pressure(like a balloon). If you are going to submerge it under multiple tons of mercury(a ton of mercury is about 18 gallons, so you would need a lot of tons for a pool to submerge a space ship). it will need a lot more structural strength to prevent being crushed, making your ship a lot heavier than it would otherwise need to be. Why not just keep most ships in an unpressurized dock(possibly with an airline-style pressurized walk-way) and only bring them in to an air-dock when they need massive repairs?(sort of like a navy dry-dock)

Due to the lack of twitch streams or a release announcement(I have been watching closely for this, last MKS release was 10-28 according to Git-hub), I suspect development is on hold while RoverDude works on something covered by a comprehensive NDA. My hope is that Star Theory looked at how highly-configurable USI-LS is and tapped him to update and clean-up the mod for inclusion as the stock life support system in KSP 2, but with just enough background processing/environment awareness to common points of confusion such as the remaining EC time dropping even though a base is staying fully charged. With any luck, many of the elements of MKS will also be part of base-building.

1) ckan can be wonky some times. Usually it works ok, but if you are having problems with CKAN installed mods, the first step to try and fix it is to uninstall the CKAN mods and install them manually(for MKS this involved downloading from github{the 'latest release' link https://github.com/UmbraSpaceIndustries/MKS/releases } then putting the contents of the zip file into your gameData folder) 2) the extraplanetary Launchpad models are no longer maintained and have been hidden/disabled so that they will not appear any more except on previously built vessels(to avoid breaking saves). I believe there is a mod out there that will re-enable them, but General Construction(Previously Ground Construction) has replaced extra-planetary launchpads as the recommended on-site building mod for MKS

Think of it as having a Pe of 20km in kerbal, but before hitting the atmosphere you angle up aerodynamically so that you do not go lower than 50km(at the cost of reducing your Ap). As you never got to the thicker atmosphere, you did not slow down as much as planned and will end up coming around for another pass(but this time with a Pe of ~50km, possibly needing yet another pass) If your Previous Ap was near Minmus, your current Ap may still be outside of the Mun, and if you ejected all of your life support before reentry, you may not have enough for that unplanned additional orbit. And if you were on a return from Duna, you may not even stay in the Kerbin SOI.

To me 'skipping' sounds like aerodynamically raising your periapsis with minimal loss of energy so that it gets a lot harder to reenter in a timely fashion. No need to go out to solar orbit if your periapsis is high enough that you will run out of life support before you reenter.