cubinator

Ah, but gravity pulls on everything equally, so you can just accelerate everyone in the ship to not squash them when going faster.

Most anything we scrape off a deep sea vent will thrive in any ice moon. The only "useful" reason I see for this would be putting algae in Venus' or Mars' air, followed by lichens to terraform them.

ASPARAGUS STARSHIP ASPARAGUS STARSHIP

ACTUAL wing design!!!!

SpaceX sending a Starship to land on the Moon requires orbital refueling, yeah? So they're going to top up a Starship fully as part of their refueling tests, and where else to send an uncrewed prototype Starship full of fuel?

"Maintain competitiveness" by making other companies build a lander that rivals SpaceX's.

Use layering to clean up the edges - I don't know if the tool you used has that function, but it really is a powerful one. For instance, you could draw the background first, and then draw the Kerbals over it. It also helps in implementing shading later.

Indeed. Or, alternatively, 3 chances for them to fix their damned rocket.

You'd DEFINITELY limit this to 1 g or so for crew, but I think 5 g would be manageable for many kinds of flat-packed inanimate objects.

Yes - it would require a ludicrous amount of propellant to do this type of flight by the options available today. Note that we do have some options (like ion propulsion) that could potentially do constant thrust to places like Mars and Venus, and would be faster than the minimum energy routes, but with very, very low thrust. For science-fiction worldbuilding purposes.

If you can make that happen, go right ahead. I believe we wouldn't know how to do that for a long time, even as other changes became possible. In fact, I believe it would be one of the last things we ever figure out how to do along these lines. So I think early stages of this research would be most unethical, rendering the later "everyone is happy" version not worth the monstrous practices required to achieve it.

6 days at 5 gees is not that much more than 2 days at 5 gees, though. You're two steps from constant thrust anyway. Does the engine get hot and need to cool down after two days? Or is there only enough boom juice to run it that long in total? With only three times the given limit, Neptune in a week becomes feasible. The farthest you could go with constant thrust for 48 hours is 366 million km. That'll get you to Mars at almost any phase, and in any case you'd only have to coast for about 60 million km. Venus and Mercury are constant thrust trips, and if you timed it right you could make it to Ceres and probably anything in the inner Main Belt. So only the outer solar system is really going to involve any sort of coasting.

What does it matter what the CEO thinks? These beings he's playing with like toys are living, breathing people! What do THEY think? Do they want to be what they are? Are they free to walk away and pursue a life, any life, of their own? Or will they forever be boxed in to some subset of human activities, societal roles, and jobs by the modifications imposed on them without their consent? Humans aren't eusocial animals, and we already have enough trouble helping people who don't feel right about their bodies. This would only amplify that problem catastrophically.

I think the better way is for people to choose this for themselves. Not even their own offspring. And, lo, it's far from conceivably possible.

Let's say you want to deliver some building supplies to Neptune. They are metal beams, panels, etc that can take the acceleration. They are the stage for a surprise birthday party for the Neptunian President, Mr. Joel Poseidon, and need to be delivered ASAP so that the birthday bash can begin on time. 5 gees for that amount of time is so high that we won't have to bother with orbital mechanics for the most part. Our path will be pretty much a straight line there and back. We need to accelerate forward for half the time, and then backward for the second half in order to not destroy a small moon by kinetic energy alone upon arrival. velocity: v= 5*9.81*t position: p=∫v dt = 5/2 * 9.81 * t2 distance: d = 4.3e12 m Integrating the velocity over half the time... p = 2.15e12 m 2.15e12 = 5/2 * g * (t/2)2 - 0 t = 592168 seconds. So you can make it to Neptune by flying for one week on 5 gees. Since the g load is just a multiplier, you can change it to see what the time is for other accelerations. In a more comfortable 1 g, it would take 34 days to reach Neptune. Not quite enough to deliver a warm pizza, even to Mars (10 hours, even at closest approach). Oops, I didn't read about the 48 hour limitation. That would change things up a little bit and make the integrals a little more curvy. I don't have time to do those calculations right now.

Satflare's map shows a US reentry to be unlikely:

And if it was possible, this would be the worst possible way in which to implement it.

So many Martian "minerals" are actual poison. I want them out of my water.

They're downright imaginary. Such a thing would be a glitch, a programming error in our universe. If you found a way to make one, you should also file a bug report to God. Otherwise, yes, Mr. Troll Face up there demonstrates the concept nicely.

On Earth that's used for artisanal desserts. On Mars it's a simple fact of life. But the ice is actually mostly water, so maybe it'd be more like Pop Rocks (candies that fizzle with dissolved CO2 in your mouth) I would never drink the groundwater without proper purification, but if the precipitation is anything like Earth's then I might feel safe licking up some frost if it didn't have any dust or sand in it.

Hmm. I suppose by KSP contract conventions, they would. So perhaps Blue gets the badge for 'first suborbital flight with a tourist that did NOT also go to orbit'. Which would not catch much attention from the Kerbin world record keeping organization.

Yes, there have been a few tourist astronauts in years past, mainly on Soyuz. There was even a schoolteacher on one Shuttle flight, but her rocket did not make it to space...

We've seen frost build up overnight and sublimate in the morning, you might be able to scrape that up off a rock and eat it.

in visible light, sure, but what would that do to the infrared?

I think BO would be the first suborbital spaceflight with a tourist.