RocketSquid

On realizing that my spider-mech could not actually lift itself from the ground due to the limits of hinges and pistons, I decided to take matters into my own hands and make a module manager patch to increase the motor strengths of all robotic parts. My discoveries: 1. Hinges are very weak compared to pistons, even when increased beyond all reasonable limits. 2. At 10x the normal force, a piston can lift as much as the part itself can handle. Pistons lifted every load, right up until the ones that could force the piston through the foot and into the ground 3. Geometry is very, very important. While a vertically oriented piston can lift an enormous amount, one at an angle can have a hard time extending at all. 4. If a part clips into a piston, it will very likely stop the piston from working, regardless of the actual force of the piston. 5. Since power draw scales with absolute force, not force percent, it gets very intense. Easily seeing draw in the high hundreds for some of the heavy lift test. Tomorrow, I'm going to test with some even higher levels. There's a very good chance that all of them will just instantly destroy whatever they're attached to. I'll also see if it's possible to lash a bunch of pistons together with struts to serve as larger ones.

Okay, by looking at the main log, I've found that the culprit is... TAC-LS First step is a clean reinstall. If that doesn't work, either I'm looking around for a fix or I'm lobotomizing the mod.

It and KSPI-E ignore each other altogether. I ran them side by side for a while. Not sure about kerbalism as I have never used it.

Yeah, the main problem I’m having is that I can’t tell which mod is causing the problem. The first step, of course, is to make sure all my mods are as up to date as possible. The next step is to copy some craft files over to another save and see which craft (if any) makes the errors start. If I can’t reproduce the problem in another save or make it stop in the original one, I might just try copying the ships and science into a new save and seeing if that works.

I’ll try removing every reference to principia from the save, and also maybe trimming back on some of the mods to make the whole thing load faster.

Does the log have more information than the in-game debug screen?

Some of them doubtlessly aren't, but they haven't caused any problems in the other saves using those same mods. The persistent.sfs file is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TX30Zr5CX-TbZV_DJ_arOcJ5Ht3LPEn-/view?usp=sharing I have a lot of mods, but only a few (The WBI suite, the near future suite, Universal Storage, TAC-LS, Stockalike Station Parts Expansion, and tantares) see wide use. I've considered going through and removing any reference to mods I've deleted (principia and KSPI are the big ones), but given my poor skill at sfs editing I feel like that's likely to do something even worse and put me back to square one.

Modded to hell and back. When you say “post a copy” do you mean the whole thing or just the save?

One of my saves, but none of the others, has been brought to a state of unusability by an enormous number of Null Reference Exceptions. The main difference between it and the other saves is that it was originally a 1.6.1 save, while the others were all created in 1.7.1. I do not have to be focused on a craft for the NREs to occur. Is there any way for me to determine the specific cause of the NREs so I can try to fix it?

We don’t just see one bacteria. We see one species of bacteria, composed of a large number of individuals. Lichen don’t die slowly in a vacuum, that would be accompanied by a loss of fitness on revival. They don’t die. They wait. There’s no reason to think lack of sunlight limits it to microbes. We see a variety of multicellular organisms existing at hydrothermal vents in the deep sea.

Any other bacteria will eat them for breakfast, but a) that's how ecosystems work and b) it's in an environment highly hostile to other bacteria. And it can in fact survive depletion of local hot water, by encysting and waiting for there to be more. Depletion of local radioactive isotopes will reduce available energy but not remove it altogether. Whether or not algae are plants is up for debate depending on how narrow you choose to make the category of plant. However, cyanobacteria are commonly called blue-green algae even though they aren't technically algae, and most certainly aren't plants. These were most likely what Dragon01 was referring to. Lichens can hold true algae, cyanobacteria, or both. While cyanobacteria are somewhat less efficient at photosynthesis and need more water, they partially make up for this with their ability to fix nitrogen. Lichens can also survive in the vacuum of space with no reduction in reproductive ability, so it's safe to say they're quite hardy. And lastly, I'm not sure you get the point of bringing up the radiation as a source. It's not to suggest that it would be the basis of an ecosystem when sunlight is available. It's to suggest that an ecosystem can exist without sunlight, at least not sunlight in the conventional sense.

Next mission: build an autogyro so big it uses a Goliath

We don’t know. It’s very rare for humans to go that deep. However, its environment is incredibly stable.

It’s very likely that it will outlive all other life on earth, and a similar bacteria could easily serve as the food source for an ecosystem.

I think I’m just going to have to limit the thrust. One Wheesley is too much thrust, but a Juno on either side isn’t enough. The two-Juno design tends to take off, fly for a bit, then land (quite safely most of the time, it has that going for it) and roll on the ground until it has time for another takeoff.

Space Friend

Unfortunately, my very moniker on this fine website requires the regrettable, disappointing first letter. It forces me to weep when I think of it.

The heat would still be generated but less of it would be conducted into the body of the craft

As for the “how exotic can it get” debate, there is a species of bacteria (not archaea, bacteria) known as Desulforudis audaxviator. It lives at a depth of 2.8 kilometers below the ground, in groundwater. It is entirely isolated from the outside ecosystem, and has been for millions of years. It obtains 100% of its energy from ionizing radiation by way of radiolysis and subsequent chemical reaction and chemosynthesis.

The magnetic scoop is largely only activated at very high altitudes, where drag is less significant, the magnetic scoop is needed because the weight of a physical scoop would be immense and it would have no efficient way of decelerating the intake air without also generating immense amounts of heat. No scramjet aircraft has ever flown for more than three minutes under power.

The energy comes from the air, and ultimately from the engine. Since the intake scoop is decelerating the air, it generates large amounts of electricity, which is used to ionize the air and to re-accelerate it. The energy used to ionize the air is partially reused in that the ionized air is more chemically reactive than non-ionized air. The main advantage of this system over scramjets is that the use of a magnetic scoop extends the altitude ceiling of the air-breathing engines, and the use of turbojets means the air-breathing portion is even more efficient. As for scramjets and SABRE, I frankly don’t think either will be practical without either hydrocarbon fuel (for the scramjet) or slush hydrogen.

Glad I could be a help. My autogyros are still plagued with all manner of problems, unfortunately. They keep flipping.

There have been quite a few studies into the feasibility of the Ayaks concept, and the general conclusion is that it would work, though probably not as well as the russians say it would.

There are two vehicles I would like to call your attention to: 1. The SLAM/Flying Crowbar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_Low_Altitude_Missile This little terror would fly around at treetop heights using a nuclear ramjet, meaning the sonic boom it created would be actively dangerous. The engine was entirely unshielded, but chances are that wouldn't have mattered. If it crashed, or rather when it crashed, seeing as it couldn't land or be refueled, it would be a dirty bomb, spreading nuclear waste over a wide area as it collided into the ground at mach 4. The US abandoned the project, fortunately, but not before testing the nuclear ramjet using compressed air. So the idea of a nuclear ramjet is certainly not implausible. 2. The Ayaks Hypersonic Waverider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaks The Ayaks is a unique hypersonic craft that, rather than using ramjets or scramjets, can use modified turbojets even at high speeds, and can operate at altitudes beyond even that of scramjets. It does this by electromagnetically compressing the intake air beforehand, then electromagnetically accelerating the plasma exhaust afterwards. If you want maximum efficiency, you can use turbojets for most of the flight envelope and rockets at the very end, but for greater simplicity and lower mass you can use rockets for takeoff and getting up to sufficient speed for the ramjet to take over. In theory, you could combine these two ideas. However, I don't think the use of a nuclear engine in such a vehicle is practical. Other than the risk of crashing, there's the fact that most if not all hypersonic vehicles need active cooling, so that will always limit your flight time and eat up your mass budget.

Now, I'd gladly spend an hour or two poking holes in The Cold Equations, but first I'd like to address the original topic. In one story I'm working on, the constant acceleration/reactionless drives work using negative mass, in this case dark fluid contained by handwavey gravitational means. They're absurdly expensive, since they more-or-less have to be pilfered from a still-extant technologically advanced empire. The loss of the drive would likely be a far bigger concern than the loss of whatever it hit. There's also the fact that FTL is very limited, so there's no warping out and boosting back. In another, the drives run by moving our universe relative to a nearby parallel one, which works because the cosmology in that world is a bit different (lots of parallel universes exchanging energy, matter, and gravity). However, the means by which they do this is very strongly affected by disturbances in our world and is partially reversible, so trying to accelerate towards the planet at extremely high velocity will usually result in you bleeding energy/momentum into nearby parallel universes and thus slowing down.