hms_warrior

While using the cheat-menu is most likely the easiest way, you CAN simulate a Duna landing on Kerbin. Step 1: adjust the fuel-level/payload of your lander so that it weights about 38% of it's "real weight". You just have simulated the lower gravity on Duna! Step 2: The atmospheric pressure of Kerbin at 20 km height is comparable to the atmospheric pressure of Duna at sea-level. So if you want to test if your parachutes(for example) are enough for a soft duna landing, just put your weight-reduced lander on some SRBs, go straight up to 25-30km, activate your parachutes and see what your speed is at 20 km height.

Look them up once, write on a sticky note, stick onto your PC ;-) It's the Kerbal way! Just take a close look in those IVAs^^

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator#Multi-Mission_Radioisotope_Thermoelectric_Generator so NASA is anybody now? :-P But i guess you mean nobody trying to make money with it...and on that i agree, there are far better options here on earth.

You mean solar cells? Don't get me wrong fusion is awesome specialy for things in space, submarines, big transport ships everything where you need a independent, 100% uptime, high powerdensity source AND have tonns of money to spend....but fur pure everyday power-generation, fusionreactors will be super expansive to produce and maintain....while solarcells on rooftops are getting cheaper and more powerfull every day.

you could boost the deltaV by flying in a close formation with one icbm trailing behind and triggering the warhead... primitive orion drive anyone?^^

Well i am not saying that emDrive is true but: the effect is created by high-frequency, high power em-Waves.... the first dips into this area are only 70 years old. Remember how long it took humanity to go from focusing light by lenses to a full theory of what photons are? Personaly i would not find it too suprising to find out we have not a complete understanding of what high power em-waves are/can do. I tried to read into the whole radio-technology stuff when i first heard of emDrive and it is ... complicated. Complex. lot's of maths....the difficult ones. I wouldn't be suprised to find out there are more people with a deep understanding of relativity theory than with the same knowlege-level of radiotechnology.

Sorry but this is repurposed bovine waste. The whole purpose of the lander was to test a landing technique. TESTING! And yes if you test something it can go wrong. Actualy it is a lot better if something go wrong becaues now you have data on how to avoid said mistake in the future. That's a lot more helpful than to skip the mistake this time and than loose your multi-million euro rover to it. So yes this was a sucessfull mission. Landing this thing sucessfully by skiping the failuremode by luck would actualy have been a failed mission.

My first rocket: Up! My first plane: flyme! Allways....it's like some kind of reflex.

I like the idea...here is how i would do it (just my personal idea, opinion. Take it, ignore it, whatever pleases you :-) ) : You get to build your bases in steps: General workflow: -There are Parts (heavy, big) you need to have on a vessel together with a container-part with X amount of supplies. This ship needs to be landed on a planet/moon. If you fullfill these conditions you get a button where your recovery button normaly would be: build base. - Your Vessel get removed - depending on the parts you had on the vessel, a new base-building is build. Possible Buildings: - ISRU (step one) Parts needed: something like mining equipment, smelters, 3D Printers. Creates a "mining rig" this does nothing by itself, but every next building needs to be created inside X meters of this. look: some drills, huge tanks, squad buildings packed together. Some solarcells. - Landing Pad (needs ISRU): Parts needed: no idea. Maybe a bulldozer?^^ Radar equipment?. Once build, if you land a vessel on the pad, you get a button "refill". Refills all fuel, oxider, monoprop, electricity. - Crew complex (needs ISRU): parts needed: Enviroment control. some other stuff. Once build, if you click recover on a vessel/eva'ed Kerbal all Crew get transfered into this building. XP are rewarded and Science recovered. Extra crew rooster tab for each of these buildings: clicking on Kerbal will eva him next to building entrance. Level two: - Construction building (requires ISRU, landing Pad) : allows you to launch constructed ships from the Lading Pad instead of KSC Landing Pad. Costs increase (depending on distance...mun is cheaper than duna) If you have a crew Complex, you can put crew in it. Allows you to recover Stuff for credits when in range. Because you can't transfer crew between the outposts you will be forced to do some KSC-to-base flights wich, together with the increased build costs, will prevent bases to become your new "one solution for everything", but they will hopefully add some extra options to your gameplay. Well just my 2 cents ^^

Forget about mars... that thing is an awesome rocket in itself. Just think about the volume/weight dimensions a modified upper stage can put into leo and think about what this will do to kg-to-LEO costs. You want to know where the money for the mars stuff comes from? I guess it is simply "farmed" in the two years between mars launch windows by totaly dominating the whole space-launch market. And i mean the " massively boomed space market due to zero-g production of nano-tubes, asteroid mining..." thing, not this feeble " send some TV sats now and then" market we have now. Elons strategy: Make 2 Billions in the two years between windows, put one Billion aside, invest the other into Mars development. (Just to clarify: He didn't said anything of this^^ this is just my overhyped mind garbage^^)

We will know for sure tomorrow, but what i have read so far they will lift the methane the same way we lift everything: with rockets!^^ Basicly the Ship that lands on Mars has enough delta V that, once refilled via ISRU it can do single-stage-from-Mars-to-earth (SSMTE?^^)

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?board=72.0 imho the best source for anything spaceX - Mars related. There is an extensive MCT speculation thread (actualy allready the 4th of it).

Well...actualy rockets are, even in RL, far more easy than planes. A rocket is a brute force solution. It is not the concept "rocket" that is hard, humanity builds them since the invention of black powder. It is the fact that what we want to achieve with the rocket (Orbit at 7.8 km/s) that makes all that engineering and expensive stuff necessary. A Plane on the other hand is a finely tuned instrument that basicly has to little thrust to go upward and instead used 1000 little tricks working in concert to turn "falling forward" into "falling forward with a little upward falling". In KSP, everything that turns rocketry into mad science/engineering in RL is either not implemented (keep your engine from melting for example) or made a lot easier (orbital speed down from 7.8km/h to 2.4km/h). But you still need all the tricks to turn your plane from falling forward and down to falling forward and up. (To prove this: build a plane with TWr >1 and you will see it get's very easy to fly)

Oh awesome! big thanks :-)

Since search in the Mods section came up empty: I would like to request a mod that allowes me to name my ships! Nooooo not in the Mapview...i want a way to have the name displayed in big letters on the shiphull! Let's ne honest here: the Enterprise would be half as awesome whitout the big NCC 1701 Letters on the hull. So that's what we (i) need: A way to get either the vesselname or, even better, a freely customizable text on the hull. A 'simple' (as in, i hope not to difficult to make, but far more complicated than i can handle) way to do this would be to have a name-badge part in different sizes that you could simply radial attach (basicly a solarpanel whit different texture). That panel would than have the vesselname/text imported into it's texture. bonus: a option for different textstyles/colors. double bonus: Lights that illuminate the panel. (just to be clear: this is just a modidea/request. Since i am non-native to english i have no idea how demanding/arrogant that text up there sounds^^)

True but...use wings as legs (less complicated construction -> easier evolutionary path), use legs as hands (they allready have a oposable digit) Of course flying would suffer from that, but if we have to give up/restrict flying to gliding anyway because of brainmass than this is less of a problem.

Maybe you should look up current research regards intelligent of birds (especially ravens). Things they do allready now: -not only tool use but tool manufacture tool manufacture -logical thinking and understanding of mechanical "laws" (like "if i roll this ball down that slope, it will hit the nut wich will than drop down onto the other slope and roll to the exit where i can pick it up and eat it"). understanding of physical laws -There are birds that have a language including different words for different kind of situations (like enemy on the ground, enemy in the air, food source south/north/west/east), and they can form a wide variarity of sounds (there are birds which can basicly mimic ANY type of sound). Honestly, give them something like a hand with a thump and in a 10.000 years they will have rockets and fly to the moon.

thank you.

Hey just a short question...the wiki says that the laboratory can generate antimatter...however, placing a lab on a rover and driving it out of KSP, i don't have any option in the right-click menu of the laboratory. Could it be you need to place it in orbit for the anti-matter production to be available?

Shielding is actually a small problem whit nuclear reactors in space....trying to keep a 50 MW reactor from melting if you do not have a nice ocean around to dump heat into is the real problem ...that and public relations of course. That's one of the nicer parts of this engine...the hot stuff get ejected to space.

Or we could simply stop eating meat...

Now that is something to write on a gravestone. "Here lies Mike Brown. The guy who killed Pluto."

keep in mind that a good percentage (to sleepy to search for exact numbers, but something like 2/3 or even higher) of traffic-jams are a consequence of human behaviour, either direct (crashing your car) or indirect (bad driving make others need to break, causing a disturbtion in flow). We can expect that traffic gets a lot better once the human factor is out of the equotation... and whit a more efficent flow of traffic, you don't need to go airborne to avoid it (which, if i read your post right, was the starting idea behind). edit: wow the software replaces not-so-nice-words? ^^ awesome! edit for nicer language^^

uhm....imho the gravity is to low to keep a breathable atmosphere in place. Sooooo ... not at all? You want to live on the moon, go whit subsurface-complexes/dome-cities.

Still a RTG that produces what? 8 times the electrical power for the same amount of termal power, is lighter and has less challenging cooling (since core-temperature needs only to be half as high) is a GOOD thing. Very good. Not everything in spaceexploration can use solar-power. Think about it. What could curiosity do whit 800 Watt instead of that meager 125 ? What about outher solar system probes? solar-power sucks there. Heck, if it realy reaches 45% conversion rate than you can replace all those 19th century steam-generators in nuclear/coal powerplants whit it and improve their efficency by 5% while removing a load of moving parts (more robust).