IncongruousGoat

Well... actually, historically, most colonies were founded with short-term profit in mind. The only big exception I can think of is most of the original English colonies in North America, where the expectation of profit was so low that England didn't seriously try and pump them for revenue until over a century and a half after they were founded. There are examples of colonies not founded for national profit, and history shows that model can work out quite well, but they are the exception in the colony game rather than the rule.

Even if ice is more prevalent than we currently think it is, you're still going to run into problems finding carbon. As far as I know, the moon doesn't have any usable sources, if it has any in the first place.

No clue. Nothing's changed that would make the Moon make any sense. It'd be great if it did, but it just doesn't work out.

Wait, 100x100 km? Nothing orbits that low. Even 200 km is low enough that anything you throw up there will deorbit in a month or so-Apollo used it as a parking orbit, and had to use S-IVb hydrogen off-gassing as a thruster to combat drag. Anything important is at least 400 km up, if not higher. Yes, the Karman Line is at 100 km, but that doesn't mean there's no drag at that altitude.

I was just re-reading Shadows, when I noticed something. In chapter nine, Edgas muses about getting reassigned to a polar research outpost, since it never gets dark up there. And here, a whole book plus some later, we have Edgas, reassigned to a polar research outpost. The level of continuity here is impressive, to say the least.

Here's Hawk, a medium lift LV I've been working on for my current RP-0 save. Think of it as Soyuz, built using American engines and a Centaur-ish hydrolox upper stage. Payload capacity ~12.5t to LEO, cost 15,324 funds. The boosters use H1-Saturn1 engines, since I haven't gotten the 1B variant yet, and the sustainer is an LR-79-NA-13 due to TestFlight's limits on burn times. Upper stage uses 3 RL-10-A-3-3 engines. Pretty pictures & info: So far, I'm only using this for manned launches, but I plan to use it in a similar capacity to Titan III-E later. Hopefully. Sometimes I worry I've gone and built an LV without a payload. Oh, and the name? I've been naming my boosters after birds of prey in this save.

This is unlikely. SpaceX have been very careful to keep the fine details of their technology secret. In fact, they've gone so far as to take out no patents on their technology, because they know Chinese companies have been known to have low regard for U.S. patent law. I mean, sure, LinkSpace can copy some superficial stuff-but there's more to rocket science than booster layouts, and knowing what SpaceX has done is not the same as knowing how they did it.

So. Realism Overhaul, by default, comes with MM configs that add CO2 scrubbers to various capsules when TACLS is installed. This would be fine, except they don't actually seem to scrub meaningful amounts of CO2. More specifically, I load up KSP with only RO, TACLS, and RSS installed (plus dependencies). I grab a Mk1 capsule, shove a pilot inside, console it into orbit, and turn on the scrubber. And CO2 throughput stays at the -0.01 units it was at before I turned the scrubber on. Lithium hydroxide drain is also way lower than it should be, assuming the scrubbers aren't supposed to last any longer than any of the other life support. Unless an engineer is aboard, in which case the scrubbers scrub just fine. The question then becomes, is it intentional that scrubbers only work if an engineer is present, or are they supposed to work regardless of who's aboard?

Point(s) of order, Mr. Chairman... I've already done Dres and Eeloo, and my entry should be marked as a combo with the caveman challenge since I didn't upgrade any facilities until after unlocking the full T1 R&D tech tree. Also (obviously) combo Jool 5.

Wait a minute... his? Are you sure about that? From the crew portrait it looks like Silong is female.

I parsed the OP as: I want to do a grand tour, and get surface samples from every body in the process. Actually trying to build an SSTE is something completely different, and (in my opinion) only worth it for the Rule of Cool. In any setup where you want regular transport, the tedious gravity assist and mining-filled flights of an SSTE are no good, and anywhere else a one-shot mission is all that's required.

All right, speaking as someone who's actually flown such a mission (and, yes, it's completely possible): All these people conjecturing are planning their missions around some assumptions that are, if you plan well, completely wrong. These assumptions are: 1. Landers are heavy. No, they really aren't. You can get a lander capable of handling Moho, Gilly, Mun, Minmus, Ike, Dres, Bop, Pol, and Eeloo below 1 ton, and reusable to boot, if you build it using ion engines and a command chair. The landers for Vall and Duna need to be liquid-fueled due to delta-V and TWR limits, but they shouldn't weigh more than a ton either. Tylo and Laythe landers can be built in under 3 tons, and the Eve lander should weight at most 20. None of these (except Eve) is particularly heavy, With that in mind, let's look at some more bad assumptions: 2. You can't build a transfer stage big enough to schlep all these heavy landers everywhere. As we've already seen, landers aren't heavy. It is possible to build a transfer stage big enough to move light landers around, but a better idea is to build a modular craft, i.e. one that can reconfigure itself depending on how much fuel is needed for a particular leg of the journey. Better yet, make your craft multiple craft, and only send each lander exactly as far as it strictly needs to go in order to fulfill its purpose. 3. You need ISRU to refuel your big landers and big, inadequate transfer stage. You don't need ISRU, because landers aren't big and the transfer stages needed to move them are adequate. 4. You need SSTOs, orbital assembly, and other complications to move your heavy ISRU rig and inadequate heavy transfer stage and heavy landers to LKO, because efficiency. Since you don't need ISRU, heavy landers or super-heavy transfer stages to move those landers, you don't need SSTOs (or orbital assembly, for that matter) either. The trick is learning to build things that are only as heavy as they absolutely need to be. Figure out this, and the system is your oyster (or mollusk of choice). Oh, and if you're curious here's the album of my attempt: https://imgur.com/a/SFUuC

More progress has been made. Today, I conclude the Jool 5 that I've been doing to knock out the Jool system. The album for that can be found here: https://imgur.com/a/HVhL4 Some small updates have also been made to the main album detailing the immediate aftermath of that mission. No summary this time, because the screenshots for this mission comprise half of all the screenshots I've taken so far for this challenge. I think the dedicated album does a better job.

Seems I've done it again. I'm back with a level 2 submission, with a bit of a twist. Like a couple of other people, I've been doing the Caveman Extended challenge, and thought it was a good opportunity to do a Jool 5. The result of this, of course, is a limited tech tree, including nothing in any node worth more than 500 science. So, while I did have nuclear engines, I didn't have any jet engines worth mentioning, no 3.75m parts, no ion engines, no ISRU (although I wouldn't have used that anyways), and no long-range antennae, which means no probe control. Despite these limits, and a couple of unforeseen hijinks, the mission went well, accomplishing all of its intended goals. Album: https://imgur.com/a/HVhL4 This was done on version 1.3. The only mods installed were visuals.

Honestly, I have no idea. I've only ever tried to keep LH2 using radiators for a couple of weeks, and that was to run some fuel cells. I suspect, however, that radiators can be used to keep LH2 from boiling off indefinitely, as long as they have power. It's the power that would be tricky, what with inverse square laws making solar power worthless much past Mars.

I do believe radiators help mitigate/prevent cryogenic boiloff. Now, I'm not certain, since I've only tested with the full Realism Overhaul suite, but I don't think RO changes heat mechanics. On the subject of radiators in the sunlight, yes, it makes a difference. The stock heat model accounts for radiative heating from the Sun. Oh, and more radiators should be more effective than less radiators. I don't know if the effect is linear-you'd probably have to do some empirical testing.

No. SpaceX cancelled development of propulsive landing for Dragon V2, which means that not only are they not going to do it, they can't do it because they haven't developed the technology necessary. Sure, they've been doing propulsive landings with Falcon 9 first stages, but a first stage is not a capsule. Plus, all the things that make propulsive landing dangerous for Crew Dragon make it orders of magnitude more dangerous for Gray Dragon, simply due to the differences between LEO re-entry and trans-lunar re-entry.

Solar power. During a major storm, when the sun is behind dense clouds for days at a time. The batteries on that thing must be quite impressive.

I stand corrected.

No, it goes to a whole bunch of stuff, but mostly CO2 and H20. Honestly, I think the answer here is just that chemical rocket launch cadences will never be high enough to have a major environmental impact. By the time we're launching enough things that it's a problem, we'll have come up with something cleaner. EDIT: And, honestly, just emitting CO2 is remarkably clean for a rocket. Kerosene produces CO2, as well as CO and probably some fun sulfur compounds. Storables, of course, are a mess of exhaust products, as are solids. The only thing cleaner than methalox that I can think of is hydrolox, and SpaceX has no intention of using hydrolox.

Because there isn't much environmental impact right now, and kerosene is cheap and easy to handle, unlike any other fuel you could care to name. Plus, he doesn't plan to use it forever-as far as anyone can tell, he plans to switch to methalox for SpaceX's next LV family (whatever that may end up being).

I'll take a different tack: Cheating constitutes any action taken in such a way as to intentionally make a task whose completion could have been fun not fun. The purpose of rules in multiplayer games is to keep the experience as fun as possible for as many people as possible. Mapping these rules onto a single-player game, you get the purpose of rules being to make the game as fun as possible for as long as possible. Therefore, cheating is any action that turns something that could have been fun into not-fun. This does mean that everyone is going to have a different set of rules, but that's okay. The point is to have fun, and within the context of a single-player environment there's no "wrong" way to do that. Any quibbling about "developer intent" and "rules" is moot.

IMO, stock and stock-ish parts work just fine in 3.2x scale. You just need to use bigger rockets. Stock parts aren't exactly balanced for stock scale-they're actually quite overpowered for the stock solar system. Upping the scale to 3.2x doesn't ruin the balance-it just brings it closer in line with the way real life tends to work out.

Wait. Plausible? And here I was thinking you were trying to achieve some kind of maximum camp density...

Using a SL-optimized Merlin on the second stage would be simple-but pointless. You'd lose ~50 seconds of Isp, and the penalty that would incur to dV and payload capacity just isn't worth it. The other things are anything but simple. Remember, real life is not KSP. Adding a heatshield and landing legs is a non-trivial challenge, especially since the heat shield would change the load upon the stage significantly. As for adding engines? They actually do have a SL-optimized appropriately-sized hypergolic engine: SuperDraco. But this doesn't make just adding it easy. You'd need new fuel tanks, more control systems, probably different materials engineering due to the... colorful chemistries of the propellants used (MMH/NTO)... all of which are complicated, difficult to engineer into an already built stage, and heavy (in that they cut directly into payload capacity). I highly doubt SpaceX is going to go for second-stage reuse with the Falcon family. It makes much more sense for them to go for it with mini-ITS, since there second-stage reuse is an integral part of the design. Whether they'll succeed is a whole nother matter entirely...