todofwar

We would definitely sudy it, but would have to be very careful to sterilize everything we launch to that place. And no, we can't assume a trip through space is good enough. Life is notoriously resilient. I wonder what the rules on bringing it here would be. Maybe not to the surface, but maybe an LEO research station, with special containment units and enough fuel to launch into the sun if need be. Not that anything we find is actually likely to be harmful to us.

Oh, and it's impossible to have floating balloons on Jupiter.

OK there are a few issues with this. First, a teleport gate is probably not actually possible. Second, the reaction to produce carbonic acid isn't exactly spontaneous. There is an equilibrium between carbonic acid and free co2, but it's very pH dependent and the more acidic you get the more co2 you expel. You can see this by adding vinegar to baking soda. So even if you did add that much water it would more likely fully react with all the SO2 forming sulfuric acid. So really, not much of a change from Venus today. There might be some carbonate formation but I doubt it would be nearly enough to cause the kind of change you describe. Also, that process of hydrogen loss has been going on for millions of years, hence why we need hydrogen in the first place.

But ammonia is terribly corrosive. I'm surprised at that jump in ISP, then again water is weird for so many reasons. You will still need to keep it cold, but that is less of a problem in the vacuum of space. As for the weight of water, that is actually a benefit because it means your tanks can be smaller for the same amount of propellant mass.

This could be very interesting. I think if you're going to buy craft designs, it would be more useful with a more complete overhaul. You design a rocket, but before you use it you pay its design fee. Once you pay it once you can use it again much more cheaply, but any additional things on top of it (your actual probes) will require another design fee. This would leave you with a fleet of launch vehicles that you use regularly, with updated designs coming at a price. Premade crafts could maybe be more expensive? It would be a level of realism, and would add more complexity to career mode. Bonus idea if multiplayer becomes a thing: sell your craft designs on an exchange, you get money every time someone uses your design. The amount would not be one to one with what the purchaser spends to preserve balance, probably as low as 5%.

But if ISP tracks with molecular weight, you're not likely to do much better. Not allot of light compounds to choose from. Methane is lighter, but I would imagine it breaks down worse than water, and at least all your water break down products are gasses. Maybe supplement your stream with some hydrogen, so that the oxygen is more likely to go after it than your engines. From what I understand people have been talking about storage, and water is pretty unusual in its stability, high boiling point, and density for such a small moletcule. Really, I can't imagine a better small molecule if long term storage is your concern.

Not sure if you can split atoms down to protons. It may be possible, but the energy involved would be extreme. This could be feasible but I'm thinking the payoff would be small. If we have that kind of tech we probably can grab a large comet and start running a fusion drive to bring it to Venus.

I really think the two best options are water and hydrogen. These Be and other light element ideas sound great in theory, but they suck to work with in practice cause of cost, reactivity towards your components, etc. Hydrogen has the best isp (helium is good but don't you dare waste a vanishing resource like that unless it's to get us more helium from somewhere) but it has storage problems. Water is abundant, light in terms of molecular weight but dense so easier to store. And it's not likely to decompose.

@kunok actually, one could come in to Jupiter with an aero capture like maneuver but maintain escape velocity. So you never have to be trapped by Jupiter at all. Still, I'm starting to get convinced that any hydrogen you harness this way will get used up on the return voyage and your net gain will be low. @rodrigoelp I happen to be an optimist when it comes to space colonization, some day we'll have civilisations on every body in the system. So, what about a colony on Europa? They could send probes with hydrogen to Venus so you only need a one way trip. What's the dv situation like for a return from Europa vs getting all your hydrogen from Earth?

You don't have to land with a Jupiter scoop maneuver, as I am now calling it. So you save some dv there. And I think of Jupiter as being an easier target to hit then the belt.

Yes, it would be fairly elliptical. My thinking is you aim for a region where the pressure is extremely low, maybe 10^-3 bar or so, but you compress the air in front of your ship with some kind of funnel, such that the final pressure ends up being pretty high. The heated hydrogen could potentially serve as an energy source if you bring along some thermoelectrics, actually. The atmosphere of the planet does provide plenty of shielding, and the water that arrives won't be immediately dumped back into space of course. Still, if the population is to grow to the level of hundreds of millions of people, you're going to need to import more and more hydrogen. So even in the case of a perfectly closed loop, you will need exponentially more to handle the growth in population.

There was this post I saw elsewhere on the internet talking about crashing comets into Venus to simultaneously strip away some atmo, give it more hydrogen, and speed up its rotation. Seemed plausible, but a bit drastic. I'm talking more city in the clouds type civilization. As for Jupiter, my thought was you get into orbit around Jupiter, then you drop your periapse just low enough such that you just barely enter the upper atmosphere and your speed compresses the hydrogen in front of you enough to start pumping it into storage tanks. Of course, this will also heat the hydrogen so you will need a way to deal with that, and the maneuver will lower your apoapse so you will be limited to a certain number of sweeps. Once your apoapse is starting to get a bit too low, or your tanks are full, you raise your periapse to circularize. No landing required.

I wonder if they will still have water that close to the sun though.

Makes me question how true this is.

So let's say we decide to colonize Venus.* One of the major problems with long term civilization scale settlement is the lack of hydrogen, I did the math once and found you have enough water to fill a sphere roughly 12 miles across. Probably enough for a few million people, but you're going to start having more and more difficulty harnessing it from the air as time goes on. So, where is the best place to get some hydrogen? Earth? Intercept a comet and bring it to Venus? Europa? The rings of Saturn? One idea I had was to swing into Jupiter's upper atmosphere with a specialized nose that would collect hydrogen, either as a flyby or from orbit. I would say orbit is probably better, you can do a few passes until you fill up then boost your periapse to a more stable level. *Note: This is not meant to be an argument over why we want to settle Venus. For that I direct you to: Edit: Let's go ahead and put all feasible rocket tech on the table, this scenario is probably a couple hundred years in the future. If it doesn't defy the laws of physics, you can use it.

I would say it's possible. But nanobots are far more complicated than people think. They will require energy, computing power, the ability to communicate, etc. Nature gave us bacteria, which are almost nanoscale. You'd probably need analogies of most of the systems in a bacterial cell. Still, it could work. They form biofilms, which may be engineerable into specialized materials.

I used to think this kind of thing was the future, but honestly the laws of chemistry just don't work that way. Molecules don't know what they're part of, they just are. A set of molecules ready to assemble on command and self repair already exists, it's called life. Biological systems are extremely complicated because they are maintaining this high level of sophisticated control at all times. So, any kind of programmable matter either needs us to be misunderstanding some laws of physics at the moment, or will be limited to a set of conformations.

What about hydroxylamine? Solid, stable enough, happy to decompose at high temps.

I think whoever said cat videos and porn is probably right. Just some of the problems we could solve: Protein folding, perfect drug interaction simulations giving us all the cures to all the diseases, perfect simulations of the human body so that we know all the side effects and how to mitigate them. Honestly, I think biology has more use of supercomputers than physicists do, biological systems are way more complicated. Still, this wouldn't actually instantly advance our science capabilities. We are limited by our equations and ability to understand said equations. So, in the end we would progress through theoretical physics and computational biology much faster, but it would still take time.

That picture is fine art by scientist standards. They cite Georgia Tech, so it was probably made by a grad student that got roped into being the designated lab graphic designer despite having zero design experience.

This, a thousand times this.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=4086 It all makes sense now!

I will say that while there are benefits to this always developing model, at times the whole "sword over my head" thing does start to become annoying. I stopped playing EA games a while ago because of this (and Electronic Arts games for different reasons), since I burnt out on a few of them before they were done and now I can't even play half of them since all my old strategies became obsolete because of new features and tweaks. This is why I support the idea of having some (not all) older versions supported. So, you can continue playing KSP 1 if you're happy with your feature set and just want occasional bug fixes, or you can play KSP 1.x until 2.0 with the EA mindset, since you are now looking at the development of a sequel in a sense. Edit: I would actually argue for only KSP 1.05 to be supported, since that is the most bug free version after EA and before the engine upgrade. I find it harder to make an argument for supporting alpha versions.

Move to Venus

I really like this. Especially if they introduce more interesting IVA environments. I'm picturing you go to the viewpoint of one of the kerbals at the station and see the other kerbals floating around between stations.