Terwin

If you only need 'gravity' for people, then just use steel plates on the floor and magnets in your boots. Simple, practical, and the energy requirements are low enough that it can be provided by the muscles of the person(mostly for lifting your foot away from the floor) You should even be able to tune the strength of the magnets to minimize or eliminate muscle atrophy in the legs(even if the muscles are likely to re-allocate a fair bit over time). This may even act as 'training wheels' for people not accustomed to microgravity for long duration flights on large vessels(like a starship to mars).

Looking at the roadmap, he might be putting a lot of it into the core KSP2 game. It might be more enlightening to ask if he intends to migrate his LS mod, as it sounds like that is less likely to be integrated into the core. That said, it may be a while before he has the free time to work on mods, as he is probably putting a lot of extra hours towards his day-job. I hear they just released a large product in early access and are working hard on supporting it.

"How many groups do you get if you take away zero at a time from your starting set?" Divide by zero is also something of a bug in math, as anything other than 0/0 is nonsensical. Computers operate on math, so when they try to perform an operation that should produce a nonsensical result, they have a problem because they cannot handle said nonsense. Computers are also not able to calculate infinity, and any attempt to do so will also result in problems due to limited computation/storage space. Division of floating point numbers is also the most difficult and time-consuming operation that computers perform, so optimizing those operations, especially pathological cases, can shorten the cycle time of the processor, allowing for an increase in clock speed. (that MHZ or GHZ number that they list for the CPU or GPU)

Steam says I have 2 minutes of play-time and I last played on Feb 24th. Why? Launching through steam does not work for me, so I run it with a short-cut to KSP2_x64.exe in my games folder. Remember all the advice about not playing from your steam directory because it will mess-up your mod installs? I expect that is also having quite a large impact on the steam statistics, even if there is not much in the way of mods just yet. Old habits die hard I can tell you that I have played KSP 2 a lot more than steam thinks I have, even if I am not playing as much as I will once there is some form of progression. I suspect that the launcher is having problems because of my multiple monitor set-up(3 monitors with two different sizes), but as the KSP 1 launcher did not work for me either, I just shrugged and created my own short-cut a few minutes after downloading the game. While I will likely leave a review once KSP 2 is more feature rich, I am not expecting any of my future play-time to be reflected on steam, especially considering how frequently I used mods in KSP 1. Edit: I got KSP1 from the squad store, so my only 'KSP' activity on steam shows me downloading KSP 2 and abandoning it in less than 5 minutes. Not sure how many hours I played KSP1, but my hours played would be at least 4 digits.

Perhaps the inevitable slips would go over better if they used a NET Date instead? Presumably everyone here would be familiar with the implications of that term as it is used for every future launch date, and those are frequently delayed with few or no recriminations...

Isn't that sort of the reason they set out the major features and the order in which they plan to implement them? 'These features are not yet present, but we plan to add them, if you deem one or more of them to be required before you want to buy the game, then just wait and buy it when those features have been added, and continue to enjoy KSP1 until then.' It just turns out that there are some less major mile-stones that are also needed for some players, but no one was aware of them in a time-frame to do anything about it.

Ah, that explains why I have not seen this issue, I was not able to launch using the launcher, I had to go to the KSP2 directory and run KSP2_x64.exe directly to get it to start.

I'm excited for stock interstellar colonies that can launch their own ships.

Every human in space comes equipped with a pair of bellows attached to an adjustable nozzle and a pair of paddles. So if needs be you could 'swim' or 'blow' your way towards a hand-hold. Not that it would be fast, but it would work.

The down-side of needing a combustion chamber that can handle properly mixing and expelling both combinations seems highly problematic. Even with a normal engine, you have space issues putting all the injectors you want where you want them, so having two sets would be very difficult(not to mention the space for piping), then you need the throat to be properly tuned to both sets of combustion, which seems unlikely to be an easy thing to manage, as well as putting substantial constraints on the relative fuel flow between the two reaction types(volume, temperature and pressure capabilities of the combustion chamber and throat will not change between fuels after all, and this may reduce isp to the point of making it worthless for many/most combinations)

Counting from the formation of the earth to when the sun expands to engulf the current earth orbit, we are less than half way along. To ensure that no life will evolve after a sterilizing event before the end of this epoch, would likely require the earth no longer be a planet in the goldilocks zone.(or any other 'zone' that turns out it can support the development of life) As such, hopefully we will have enough time to become multi-planetary before whatever comes and either turns the earth into an asteroid field or changes the orbit enough that it an never again sustain life.

If you hook the loose bit over the end, it should pull taught and thus extend the hook-part past the end of the tape, if you butt it up against an edge, it should push in so that the measured end is still accurate on the tape measure. Personally, I usually start measuring at the 6 or 12 inch point on the tape and subtract that from the end point when feasible, because the loose bit also bothers me...

As far as I can tell, the StarWars universe has anti-gravity tech that is pretty ubiquitous and used in everything from wheel-barrows to starships, with no real energy requirements. I do not believe that any StarWars vessels actually get up to orbital velocities, and just sit there on anti-grav instead. (this is why they can 'fall out of orbit' if they get too damaged, and also why a bomber can drop bombs on them from above) Hyperspace probably involves some sort of Albercurrie drive using the same tech. The 'engines' at the back are more akin to fairy-dust vents than actual engines, and may only be relevant for hyperspace.( perhaps venting something that helps prepare the area for hyperspace?) If you give me that magical anti-grav tech, I could get you a family-car sized vehicle that can SSTO to the moon and back, possibly using a compressed-gas thruster to ease the transition between the earth-dominated and moon-dominated gravitational domains.

If you have arbitrary amounts of power available, then this should be indistinguishable from an ion thruster(assuming that your magnetic thruster works at all). I do not think that an ion thruster requires a particularly large exhaust area per unit of thrust, just large amounts of power(a sizeable chunk of which is used for stripping electrons off of the reaction mass to turn it into ions which you can push with electromagnetism) As current ion engines have ISPs in the 2000-5000s range, that should be adequate for SSTO if you have arbitrary amounts of energy available without needing arbitrary amounts of weight to generate it. With 5K isp and >1g thrust, you should be able to get to earth orbit with only a ~20% fuel fraction(I think) So even if ~30% of your vessel is dry-weight(power/structure/engines), you could get 100t of cargo to orbit with a ~200t launch weight using a 5000s isp engine with sufficient thrust. The current problem with high-isp engines are the thrust-to-power ratio where you need at minimum of ~50kw per newton of thrust for a 100% efficient 10,000s isp engine, or ~25kw per newton of thrust for a 5000s isp engine. This means ~50w per gram at 10,000s or ~25w per gram at 5,000s to accelerate at 1m/s/s, so you would need at least 10 times that for launch. This means 500kw/s or 250 kw/s for each kg of launch weight. The SSTO above would require >50gw/s from a mass of less than 600kg(which also includes the engines and structure) for long enough to get to orbit(for more than 8 minutes), requiring an energy density of more than 40 giga-joules/kg. This is roughly 300 times the fuel density of hydrogen(not counting the weight of oxygen, I think) or only about 1/2000th the energy density of uranium. Clearly this would need a nuclear reaction to produce the power, but would require a 50gw nuclear plant at a mass of perhaps half a ton.(not something we can manage today, and would need massive heat-ejection capability)

Why would you use a heavy launch vehicle for people? (this topic is about a heavy SSTO) Unless and until you are sending thousands to mars in a single launch, there is not really any call for it, and it would probably be better to send a larger number of smaller vehicles(like SS) which can be proven reliable with non-human payloads(and thus not SSTO). In my opinion, unless you get some sort of space-magic that would let the family van go sub-orbital as a short-cut to visit a distant country, a fully reusable TSTO heavy-lift vehicle that can be refueled in orbit makes SSTOs obsolete.(for earth at least)

Probably the best reason for sea-launch of a SSTO, would be that it would need to be so massive that only specially made barges and super-freighters could handle the masses involved. You would probably need multiple super-tankers just to fill the fuel tanks. The rocket equation is so harsh for SSTO from earth, that a sea-based launch is probably the only real option(like sea-dragon, but with hundreds of large engines instead of one huge engine/bomb). Of course even if you had a SSTO heavy lift vehicle, fuel costs alone would probably make it less cost-effective than the current falcon 9 which discards the second stage. (and dumping that amount of energy into a chunk of ocean would no doubt do bad things to any local or down-stream life)

Most places less than a mile from the ocean tend to be pretty humid...

Makes sense, coral are mostly(all?) filter feeders, so some current would be required for them to survive and grow. Also, their pre-coral stage is a bit like a tiny jellyfish, floating around looking for something to latch on to, so having a current will allow more of them to find the lattice as well.

In theory, if you could somehow produce pure antimatter(not matter+antimatter like we do now, but just antimatter) with a high enough efficiency (more mass produced than energy wasted, so > 50% efficient) You could potentially end up with more energy from the matter+antimatter reaction than you put into producing the antimatter, because you get the full energy bound in both the matter and the antimatter, giving the reaction a 200% 'efficiency' compared to the mass of the antimatter. (you would also need to capture nearly 100% of the energy released and convert it into a more useable form, including the gamma rays and other forms of radiation that we cannot currently capture) Of course both the matter+antimatter and the energy-> antimatter reactions would both need to be highly efficient to give more energy than just using the energy you started with. I think star-trek does something like that, using dilithium crystals to control the reaction and convert some of the energy into thrust. I have difficulty seeing a society without similar levels of 'space magic' being able to pull this off however.

To grow coral, you just need a solid anchor(ie not sand) in a flow of nutrient rich water. Barnacles are an example of a hardy coral that is happy to attach to ships or docks, and then thrive as the movement of the ship or waves keeps it well-fed.(until they get forcibly removed, of course) So in theory, the idea of cement burial domes should work, but you would likely get a lot of push-back on turning the water just off of tourist-attracting beaches into cemeteries. Because you want surface exposed to the current to encourage coral growth, I think that a thin lattice would work better than a dome(like a garden trellis, but probably more sparse), and probably something other than cement. As this is something you want coated in coral, it should be ok if the skeleton is something that will rot a way after a time. Even wood might work, if you can get it to last long enough without being toxic.

That is what I was thinking. It would be awesome if they got the first booster to just hover in place at tower catch-height over the water for like 20-30 seconds until it runs out of fuel. Ideally this would be caught in high-def. This would be a very strong argument for allowing a tower catch attempt with the second launch...

Not the automated drills, but the automated processors(the ones that can turn harvested metal ore into metals) Also, only half of the contents of warehouse enabled storage will transfer at any one time, so you will want 12 hours of storage so you do not lose anything during the 6 hour catch-up processing chunks.

The MKS automated processors have unmanned logistics capabilities(push only), and that is what you need to push resources from an unmanned base. Normal logistics requires an appropriate kerbal(pilot or quartermaster, I think), and provides both push and pull, but automated processors can push without a kerbal.

How many scenarios will the helicopter mitigate and how long will it last before it fails, compared to increasing panel size by the same amount of weight? Sand storms don't just get the panels dirty, they also block light, Winter also reduces light, will there be enough power to fly your helicopter during that time? I expect that there are hundreds if not thousands of scenarios that will shorten or end the mission, how many of those can you mitigate with your helicopter? Is that more or less than the number that will be mitigated(and by how much) by using that weight for solar panels. You need to remember both the design constraints(very heavily mass constrained for example), and the project goals(Maximum planetary science/$). Every ounce of helicopter, or air bottle, or other mitigation plan will reduce the weight available for scientific experiments and solar panels. A rover designed for maximum life-span looks very different from a rover designed for maximum total science, and maximum total science is far more important for current rover designs than maximum life-span, especially as a longer life-span requires increased ground-support costs, and that will only be paid for if the science/$ is worth while.

Producing highly energetic fuel/oxidizer for a flame thrower requires a lot of energy, and every time you use it, you are prone to destroy the local plant life(you know, those things that collect energy from the sun, which is then consumed by animals for energy) I think that the greater adaptation to natural fire breathing would be what is required to live in a scorched wasteland. Lithovore perhaps? Either that or you need something that would harm individual animals but would not harm plants. Of course if you are talking about a 'flamethrower that does not hurt plants' then you are back to spitting venom.