DDE

Only one rover ever used a skycrane - Curiosity.

That's just gradual aerobrake; combined with the considerable lifting power of the huge empty fuselage, you should be able to skip quite a few times. 75% success rate during Zond. @mikegarrison

If we go by Soviet analogy? Several months to never. Hey! That’s MY shade of blue!

And that’s how the centuries-long Russo-Ukranian War for Ultima Thule began.

That’s what they want you to think (tm). Also, the beginning of a very interesting string of NROL-71 scrubs.

Stainless Steel Starship

https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://ria.ru/20190102/1548981297.html&xid=17259,15700023,15700124,15700126,15700186,15700190,15700201,15700237,15700242,15700248&usg=ALkJrhj7L-Ygsadlij2lVFrJFAI0vVhryQ Energomash and the Institute of Nuclear Physics are working on a test stand for an electrodeless plasma thruster, related to controlled nuclear fusion. I say we call it “Vasyamr”, but then I’m still somewhat drunk.

At surface level (of analysis), Titan's atmosphere would indeed flow INTO a breached Earth pressure volume. Initial intermixing might be troublesome, but combustion should happen quite splendidly anyway.

"They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Kopernicus. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." [snip]

It's also rather telling that, over time, resource exploitation has required less and less people. Western Siberia, for example, isn't exactly one giant megapolis.

At least the Alliance can become doomsday preppers right away.

Nope nope nope. After Space Engineers and its three-year-long detour into planets, I have a violent reaction towards any sort of scope creep.

Unlucky, you say?

The crazy Russian guy must already be up there. Done.

Grasers. Wait, that's an interplanetary weapon system, not a propulsion beam.

Only if you want to pay.

Yeah, I've given up and embraced that Cali school of missile defense. We shall not discuss this further, or else...

What @wumpus fails to add is that Newton's domain ends at about a few percent of C, and every additional m/s starts requiring more and more energy. The energy needed to accelerate any amount of mass to lightspeed equals infinity. Even with all the power in a billion universes, you won't have enough to reach C. To be exact, 1 N per 300 MW of energy input. Assuming perfect efficiency all around - whereas lasers tend to stay under 30% efficiency, et cetera.

My gut still says "dust cloud".

They aren’t. Mostly because they either were not intended to be scientifically accurate in the first place (Star Trek) or they got their science wrong - we don’t have 1700 t all-electric submarines with a maximum speed of 50 knots and operating depth of 16 km (nor is there even such depth to be found on Earth), not to mention the Nautilus would never submerge without approximately 21 m3 of lead ballast (cf. A. Grossman), just as the Stalin-era Soviet Union never built the Pioneer, a submarine with a supercavitating drive propelled by hydrolox rockets, armed with FLIR-enabled aerial scout drones and a sonic disintegrator beam that reduces Japanese cruisers to dust. It’s an oft-repeated, annoying myth that sci-fi has any more predictive power greater than astrology does.

Don’t you worry. https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=45734.0

That doesn’t quite describe it. Apparently the AI can be absolutely imbecilic. As an absolute rookie I’ve managed to play a Slow Breeder Fanatic Materialist Technocratic Dictatorship wide and still reduce every other power in the galaxy to Pathetic by 2360 without a fight (except conquer the poor sods with the Life-Seeded trait that spawned next to me). I’m planning to play as an actual trade league next. And when they fix the robots after NYE...

The Belt also has it, and you don’t need to play gymnastics with baloons to get it. dV costs probably end up lower. That’s a dangerous assumption to make. Permanent space exploitation will be dictated by resource gathering; it’s not immediately clear if permanent settlement would happen at all.

Which is a non-trivial affair. Makes me wonder if a runaway greenhouse would lead to a bubble of steam and gaseous methane instead of a water world. I’d look for potassium if I were you.

Try acid tank manufacture. IRFNA lasts for decades in stainless steel, but AFAIK the “inhibitor” (0.5% of hydrofluoric acid) accelerates corrosion of aluminium by a factor of 2000 and titanium by a factor of 5000. In the latter case the corroded material is spontaneously explosive, as learnt by the messy demise of a poor sod handling a few test sample strips at Edwards AFB. Thus military missileers have built load-bearing oxidizer tanks for missiles for decades; cryogens wouldn’t be a big leap.