Terwin

Because water is so much denser than air, you need much smaller 'wings' to deflect sufficient material to maneuver. That is why sub have much smaller wings than an airplane. Also, neutral buoyancy is very condition specific. With a rigid shell, you need more and more weight as you go deeper(due to lack of compression), with a flexible shell, you need more and more buoyancy as you go deeper(due to compression). This is why subs(rigid) have ballast tanks that can be filled with sea-water or air as the need arises. For example: a plastic bag filled with 1 liter of air at sea-level will compress to 500ml at a depth of 10m and 333ml at a depth of 20m. (Every ~10m of water adds one atmosphere of pressure, so at 30m of depth, you have ~4 atmospheres of pressure, making your bag only take 1/4 of it's volume at sea-level). So the deeper you go, the more air you need to put into the bag to displace 1 kg of water. Water also gets denser as you go deeper, but very slowly(~4.5% denser at 4000m I think)

Might this be the long awaited WOLF and domes release, or primarily a hot-fix for changes to other mods?

You're not quitting are you? I'm here to learn things and have an intellectual debate about theories. That does not work so well unless you come back and show me the mistakes in my arguments.

NASA air-ships: * Dirigibles of various sizes have and do exist on earth. They are easy enough to make that some exist primarily for advertising(ever seen the Goodyear blimp at a sporting event?) * if the 350 km/h winds at height have generally low turbulence, then the projected dirigibles should not care about the absolute wind-speed so long as they don't try to maintain a position relative to the ground(which would be impossible). * at human survivable temperatures and pressure, the acidity of the atmosphere is mostly at irritant levels and not hard to protect against 30 km tall pipe: * no vertical structure of even 1/30 this height has been constructed to date * these pipes would need to deal with the full energy of super-heated, acidic, super-dense 700km/h winds, something no structure on earth has even tried to deal with(even Cheyenne Mountain might not be able to handle those conditions) * at 90 atmospheres any atmospheric acid will be much more concentrated, and at 450 degrees c chemical reactions will be much more vigorous Comparison: NASA Dirigibles on Venus take something known to work and with which we have great practical experience and put them in a situation where they may or may not require additional assistance(a coating to resist the acid, and possibly something to deal with the turbulence, if any). Your 30km tall pipe is pure fantasy even on earth, so making it in the much harsher environment of Venus is a non-starter. Even so, The blimps seem only vaguely plausible, as I would expect turbulence in the 350 km/h winds which would quickly rip them to shreds.

As the tallest man-made structure(Burj Khalifa) is all of 830m tall, a 30km tall pipe seems more like a fantasy than a hypothesis, especially when you add in the 700km/hr winds, acidic atmosphere, and high temperatures. Without that pipe, your habitat AC unit will need to pump away your excess heat over a 430 degree gradient, sort of like pumping water out of a 430' deep well, and just like pumping water out of a well, there is a minimum amount of power it will take to pump that heat/water out of your habitat/well.(using two pumps to pump the water out in a couple of easier stages does not reduce the amount of potential energy being added to the water, and thus does not reduce the minimum energy to pump it out of the well)

I just do a lot of reading. Rapid jump-drives with large gravitational bodies used for velocity matching is a primary means of interstellar transport in the Curator series on the HFY sub-redit if I recall correctly.(might be a different series, but I think that is the one) Some possible limitations: portal diameter limitations(either an absolute limit, a limit based on exponential power requirements, a limit based on gravitational fields, or an easy to manufacture counter-measure that can disrupt jumps with a portal diameter beyond a certain size) Maximum portal transit mass is limited(any of the reasons for portal diameter could work for mass as well) Heat dissipation(opening/traversing a portal produces a lot of heat which must be dissipated, or power requirements for opening a portal means that you must vent a lot of waste heat for each jump)

There should not be any conflicts between Roverdude's USI collection and Allista's Ground construction.

There is a specific assembly line part in Global construction, RD saw no need to duplicate it when Allista has made a perfectly good model for this functionality.

If you have a working jump-drive with high accuracy, then you match velocities by jumping close to a large gravitational body(like Jupiter) such that your in-fall accelerates you in the correct direction. If your drive has a large spool-up(like hours or days) you just start that much farther out(having calculated how far you need to fall to be at the correct speed when you are ready to jump again). Advance users of the jump drive might even use black-holes for velocity matching to cut the time from minutes/hours to seconds or less. A rapid-recharge jump drive gives you a constant acceleration drive with an acceleration equal to the largest gravity well you have available, so no need to invent one seperatly. Artificial wormholes make for a good theoretically possible approach to jump drives, particularly in harder forms of science fiction. (Warp drives are theoretically possible as well, but the you will be accused of ripping of star-trek)

Any data we have on a pulsar in Andromeda is 2.5 million years old, as that is how long it took the light to reach us. If it has moved, had any collisions(possibly affecting it's period), or been swallowed by a black-hole since it emitted the last light we saw, then it will not be as useful for navigation. If we teleported in zero time to Andromeda, we would be getting light from that pulsar that was emitted millions of years after our reference information was collected, and as such, possibly out of date or inaccurate. (does a pulsar speed up or slow down as it converts it's mass to energy and sprays it around local space? What if it collides with/consumes a brown dwarf, how will that affect it's rotation? two million years has a lot of opportunities for something like that to cause the frequency of a pulsar to change. If Pulsars tend to change often enough, they might not even be useful for interstellar navigation like is currently hoped)

You have just made a 'long' jump and happened to end up in a galaxy of unknown size and composition. You have data on one Andromeda pulsar and lots of Milky-way pulsars. There is one strong near-by pulsar that is 'kind of' similar in frequency to the Andromeda pulsar, but all of that data is 2.5 million years old and it may have shifted. Are you in Andromeda? Some distant part of the milky-way where most of the known pulsars are not visible? Some other Galaxy? A Pulsar map is very helpful when you are in a known galaxy, but may not help a lot if you do not know which galactic cluster you are in, unless you have pulsar maps of lots of galaxies. There is also the issue that a given pulsar may only be visible along a specific plane(directly in the beam as it were) and highly prolific, making them less useful than currently hoped.

Milky-way pulsars don't help a lot in Andromeda, Also, the question seemed more about finding the current location of the place where you want to go, as opposed to finding out where you are at the moment.

I considered pulsars for determining where you currently are, but: Also, the question seemed more about how to get where you are going, so for pulsars to be useful for that purpose, you would also need a map of wherever you were going. Calculating current relative position and speed/direction of travel on the other hand are things we have been doing for quite some time and can be done(inefficiently) without any sort of prior setup.

Possibly, but those look a lot more like jet engines than rocket engines. Also, there is no indication that they are getting anywhere near orbital velocities as opposed to just climbing high in the sky to avoid bringing planetary chunks along for the ride. I have not seen that movie, so I can't speak for how a large flying vehicle like that one could travel at off-road bus speeds and stay in the air with little or no wing surface, but I am sure they are using the same space-magic to protect the gang-plank.

I would be more immediately concerned about the street in front of my house and the front half of my car both being semi-molten and no longer usable. Also, the front of my house (assuming it was not knocked over) has also been seriously eroded and is probably on fire. Plus the sheer volume of the noise caused by a rocket engine has rendered me deaf, and possibly dead(rocket engineers need to be careful to *not* knock over near-by buildings with sound alone, usually with active sound damping, such as all that water they spray at the base of the rockets they launch at KSC). Stray neutrons are *not* your major concern if you have a rocket launching or landing within half a mile of your house, and if it is not within half a mile, then you probably do not care about the stray neutrons anyway. Edit: The sound damping system at KSC uses 300,000 gallons of water, for a mass of ~3 million pounds; compared to 4.3 million pounds for the entire shuttle stack at lift-off. This is *not* something your delivery driver could carry with them.

If you are mining fuel from a natural body, you will need to refine it and remove any hazardous/toxic materials anyway, so even if you land directly on your only available fuel-source, you would probably only need to scrape off the surface material. After all, space is full or radiation, and your engine is hardly the most prolific source. (Spraying your tritium(h3) fuel source with extra neutrons is probably not a bad idea any way, as that can help convert deuterium(h2) into tritium(h3) and thus enrich your fuel.) Of course a stray neutron has a half-life of only about 10 minutes, so any of them that do not get bound up into an atom are probably not going to stick around very long anyway.

I do not see a problem with Jump drive 1. Generally speaking, we know how fast and in which direction a given star is moving, so there is no problem with making a jump to within a light-year of your estimated destination(less of you are traveling less than hundreds of LY for the first jump), then check where you expect it to be, and make your second jump to inside the system, at which point you are within light-hours of your destination(Pluto's orbit is all of 10 light hours across), and you can be pretty confident that things are roughly where you see them. If you(or another ship you have communicated with) has been to the system in the last year, you can even skip the first extra-system jump and just jump straight into the system. Star-systems do not tend to turn very quickly, so all you really need for navigation(in addition to your own location, which you presumably have before your first jump) is a 'last known time-space location' and a movement vector, and your computer can easily determine the position of the star and any planets of interest around it.

https://github.com/KSP-CKAN/CKAN/wiki/User-guide#choosing-compatible-game-versions if it says it need 1.6, then add 1.6 as a compatible version

IT is often not difficult to spot the path of a laser due to dust passing through it, but it is very difficult to get a non-coherent beam brighter than the 98 000 lux(lumens/m^2) of direct sunlight. According to this page, there is a LED flashlight that clocks in at 100,000 lumens, so in theory it should be able to produce crepuscular rays even in broad daylight(but the difference may be too faint to see).

Sounds like the metadata file needs to be updated, as I do not beleve there are any problems with running the latest version of MKS on 1.7.2 I suggest setting your compatible versions to include 1.7 for your 1.7.1/2 game.

You could still put several science labs in polar orbits and time-warp to science-tree completion, it is just a question of how many it takes. (Don't forget the Gravioli detectors, as those are per-biome and nake a good supplement to the eva reports, while goo and materials can each only provide one 'low in space'(plus a landed, flying low and flying high if you are clever about it))

Well, if you are on Easy, you can do it without really leaving the ground(but it may take fast clicking to get the 'while flying' during the short drop/bounce from deploying/undeploying landing legs https://imgur.com/a/DIRWQ In 1.0 it looks like I did indeed need to get both space low and space high science(but never achieved orbit nor unlocked surface samples): https://imgur.com/a/rat3O But if you allow for part testing contracts, then, in theory you can get unlimited science without even leaving the space center.

The hard part is collecting all the science. After that, you can send a kerbal out to grab a copy from the collection/holding vessel and store it in a container(like a pod or science box, probably something attached to the bottom of a booster and discarded at launch), then just tell the lab or another science storage container to 'collect all' and it should be stored safely until you need it.(but do not convert it into lab science until you reach orbit, as there is a penalty when converting experiments to lab-science when landed on Kerbin) I think I once used a rover to collect science from around the KSC for loading onto a lab I was going to launch, but it turned out not to be worthwhile, as the low orbit EVA and gravioli science is worth a lot more and takes a lot less effort than collecting data from KSC.

I am pretty sure that you can unlock all of the technology available in the level 1 science center without leaving the atmosphere. (Finding 'splashed down in the highlands' is a pain however). If you instead focus that science on getting the other science instruments, I would be surprised if you could not fill the entire tree without antering the Mun, Minmus, or Kerbol SOIs. (might take a lot of time in the science lab to manage it however). They may have been talking about putting one or more science labs in polar orbit, as each of those labs could give you quite a lot of science. Even more if you put all of the landed and in-flight science on-board to be loaded into the labs after achieving orbit. If I remember correctly, labs can give 5x the science an experiment is normally worth, and while a given experiment(like thermostat on launchpad) can only be loaded into a specific lab once, each lab can take advantage of each experiment, and recovering a given experiment does not reduce it's future value in labs.

Using inconsistent/impossible races in science fiction is a time-honored tradition, I was just pointing out a few of the more jarring impossibilities in the race you described so that you can either try to address them or try to keep them out of the spot-light to help readers maintain their suspension of disbelief.