Codraroll

It's been a while since I read the relevant book, but I seem to recall that it took several decades for them to spin up Ceres, and that it's been hailed as the greatest engineering achievement in history. And they started with it long after the Epstein drive was invented. Loving the book series so far, but I have no idea where to find the TV series to watch legally. Is it available in Europe at all?

Relevant? Well, it certainly links a relevant article, namely this one. It is about modding the flight sim X-Plane into Martian conditions, and then trying to fly something there. The problem seems to be inertia. To get the required amount of lift to stay airborne on Mars, you'd have to go fast (Mach 1 just to get off the ground). And at such speeds, all turns will have to be large and sweeping, so as not to crush the pilot, passenger or craft. Not that you'd be able to pull tight maneuvers at all, though, the atmosphere is thin enough and inertia high enough that a plane that tries to turn might find itself rotating, but continuing straight ahead. No yaw control for you. Also, landing. How the heck do you land an aircraft at a thousand kilometres per hour, with no air to slow you down once you hit the ground? You'd need a runway comparable to that of a large airport, outfitted with aircraft carrier-style arresting gear. Or a plain runway long enough to literally vanish over the horizon. A suborbital rocket hopper might be just as convenient as an airplane under such conditions.

World of Kerbal Tanks. With rocket engines, if you so wish.

But I've posted most of my peeves already! Oh well, there's always more (always). How about this? So... your average alien invasion. Or invasion from some other dimension, whatever works. A genocidal race of hyper-advanced or even magical beings is coming to Earth to destroy us all. Their chosen method of widespread destruction? Flying around downtown and zapping small objects. Maybe blowing up cars (one at a time), or single rooms in some unfortunate buildings. Zip-boom, zip-boom, panicked crowds running around, individual people being hunted down by death rays. All in all, less firepower going off than your typical New Year's Eve celebration. Wouldn't it take an awful lot of time to destroy humanity this way? I mean, depopulating the Earth using the explosive equivalent of hand grenades is an awfully tedious and inefficient process. Even in Independence Day, the aliens took out one city per ship per day or so, which seems rather modest too, considering the size of the Earth. But those aliens deserve credit for using a somewhat effective method, I mean, the guys in Avengers and Battle: Los Angeles and even TRON: Legacy decided to do the job with foot soldiers. The aliens in War of the Worlds had vechicles (or whatever the three-legged equivalent is called), as did the Galactic Empire in Star Wars Episode V (four legs), but they still packed a comparatively modest amount of firepower for their operations. Savvy aliens would realize they had the technology to accelerate tons of mass up to a significant fraction of light speed (that's what their ships are doing, after all), and instead play the orbital mechanics game with a big rock and a pair of engines. Instant extinction-level-event without the hassle of getting guys on flying scooters to fly around skyscrapers. Even Starship Troopers got this somewhat right. Then again, if the alien invaders knew what they were doing, most alien invasion movies would have been rather short and depressing, though...

Is it possible to create a forum mod that auto-merges all new threads in the Suggestions section that have the words "Mods" and "Stock" in the title, with the existing, stickied, official "Mods in Stock" thread?

I've been thinking about this for a while, maybe this is the thread to bring it up... Would it be possible to create a drone that is cheaper to launch than it is to shoot down? Something built out of bamboo and canvas like a WWI warplane, guided by a smartphone or something similar, launched from aircraft or by the aid of balloons, and with limited aerial reconnoisance abilities or some very simple ordnance? Just a piece of scrap built for one single mission, incapable of landing or returning to base, but with a payload that would be a nuisance to enemies if it wasn't shot down, and capable of flying high enough that you'd need a missile or an interceptor to shoot it down. In a sense, a slow, dirt-cheap missile with some loiter/recon capability, a simple guidance system and a small warhead, which could be churned out by the thousands and launched in wave after wave into enemy skies. The first few waves would be ignored, until they started falling down directly on top of field command centres, artillery guns, anti-air radars, aircraft hangars or other lightly protected, high-value targets. The next few waves would be shot down. Then the requests for more AA missiles would come flying in from all over the front, as much as the storages hold or the factories could produce. Then more cheap drones, and more, and more, taking their pictures and dropping their ordnance, flying straight into dangerous territory without fearing for their safety, or for that matter, caring at all about anything. Left to their own devices, they would pester the enemy. Shot down, they would still inflict losses, as missiles and flight hours don't come cheap. Canvas, wood, simple engines and rudimentary computers do, by comparison.

At the moment, I'm torn between two different scenarios: "We've been to the Moon and it was boring. Mars is more of the same. Let's rather save the cost, and get a lot of money left over we can use for tax breaks for billionaires". Or: "We're the friggin' USA and we can do anything! Let's go to the moon and erect a 150-foot golden statue of our President to show the world how great we are!"

The Mun is fine enough. It has procedurally generated craters everywhere, quite a few landmarks, and a variety of very distinct terrain features (the various named craters, the canyons, etc). For what it does, Minmus is fine too. Large, sweeping mountains broken up by frozen "seas", completely flat plains without any terrain scatter. It's unique and manages to be fundamentally different from the Mun in its visual style, giving early-game some great variety. And Kerbin, of course. Most varied body in the system right now. Could use a little attention here and there, but it's not pressing right now. Okay, the terrain seams maybe, but its visual style is, for the lack of a better term, OK. The rest of the bodies... ehh. They may be too rarely visited and little involved in gameplay compared to the Kerbin Three, but if any rock in the solar system needs attention, it's one of these. Duna is way too monotonous (but it has been revamped according to recent Devnotes). Moho is a big, hot rock, and has the Mohole as a great landmark, but is otherwise quite bland. Eve is fine, as is Gilly, both being rather unique and serve their role as mid-game destinations decently enough. One has a lot of atmosphere and a lot of gravity, the other has very little gravity and no atmosphere. That's variation, at least. I don't have any hands-on experience with the rest of the bodies. But if reputation is anything to go by, there's nothing to be seen on neither Dres nor Vall, and Bop and Pol seem like far-away Mohos for most practical purposes (that aren't temperature-related). I'd be willing to vote Duna based on its current state, but it seems like it has already got some attention to be implemented in the next update or so. Time will tell what it will end up looking like. After Duna, I guess a Dres revamp would be the most pressing.

Rocket part revamp clarification last week, console update this week... I wonder what we're going to talk about in the Devnotes thread now.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: This is the mod I'd like the most to be made into stock. It gives a purpose to building elaborate space stations and outfit them with ISS-style solar arrays and massive battery banks. It challenges players to come up with some really heavy lifters and orbital tugs, and learn to dock heavy modules. And in case of the larger experiments, to plan the station's layout in advance. It emulates real-world research in low orbit. It has a good payoff for the work of building a space station too, you don't just do it because it's cool. And you can use the science launches to resupply your station too if you want. Awesome mod, keep spreading the word about it!

Yay, console update news! Not that I own the game on console, or for that matter a console capable of playing it (or right at the moment, a computer capable of playing it fully), but I'm happy for the console owners anyway. Also, of course new releases are on Tuesdays. That gives you the week before to finish all the stuff, the weekend if absolutely needed, Monday to comb over everything, Tuesday Taco to celebrate the release, then the rest of the week to respond to any software-breaking bugs or issues that might arise. I believe it's industry standard (maybe apart from the tacos thing).

Speaking of searches, isn't it strange how characters in movies always find what they're looking for at the top of the search engine results, no matter what they search for? I've heard there's this movie where the main character searches for "file" and "computer" and gets three hits.

Speaking of constructions, this time buildings: Building collapses in movies are usually so many levels of wrong. In a movie, the structural integrity of a building is roughly comparable to that of a cardboard box. When a skyscraper collapses, a section will neatly topple over, retaining its shape all the while. Like a cardboard box falling off a stack of boxes. Or you can punch a hole right through the middle of a building, or a corner, over several floors, without affecting anything beyond the borders of the hole (worst example I can think of: New York's MetLife building in Godzilla). In reality, a skyscraper has a structural integrity comparable to a house of cards. The cards may be glued together somewhat, but their stiffness is rather small relative to their size. If you destroy one section of a skyscraper, the structure around it will come tumbling down, and the falling debris will probably destroy the rest of the building. 7 World Trade Center fell because one structural column buckled. Without that column, floor beams and plates across 40 floors lacked support, and they all fell into other building elements, which brought them down in turn, creating more debris that would fall and destroy more building elements. It's a cascade effect that's impossible to stop without an unrealistic amount of structural redundancy. Toppling a skyscraper is also impossible. If you try to "chop it down" like a tree, you won't get a neat hinge point where the two sections cleanly fall apart. Take out half of the columns of a building, and the other half will promptly fold in on themselves since they now have to carry twice the load. Besides, it would take a lot of force to tip over the top section of the building, above the impact. Gravity accelerates everything straight down, rather fast at that, and structural failures are near-instantaneous. Even if some horizontal force is present to push on the top of the building, the top section won't have time to topple over before it hits the ground and disintegrates after falling straight down. Then there's the dust. After Man of Steel, Metropolis would have been blanketed by smog for months. Half of the action in 2012 would have been invisible in reality, since dust and smoke will billow forth in large volumes whenever something collapses. Independence Day would have been all about people stumbling around in the dark, dying from lung cancer or obstructive lung diseases because they inhaled pulverized gypsum and concrete. The cloud from the collapsed stadium in The Dark knight rises would have been around until the end of the movie and then some, even though it takes place over a span of months. It's a minor nit to pick, perhaps, but the CGI required to portray large building collapses has only been existing for 15 years or so. And 15 years ago, the world had a very traumatic real-life example of what collapsing skyscrapers look like. Structural failure cascades, large building elements crumpling under overwhelming force, everything falling straight down, and thick dust clouds that stay around for months. So it's a little strange that film makers remain insistent of making large building collapses look like scaled-up versions of what happens if you knock a LEGO tower over.

I don't think global warming would be your first problem. Enough stuff would be kicked into the atmosphere to dim sunlight over a region - or globally - for a really long time (the dust from the WTC collapses took a year to settle, for instance). The dust would reflect more sunlight than the atmosphere normally does, and less energy would reach the ground. You would get global cooling instead (also known as a nuclear winter). Perhaps the impact would change the chemical composistion of the atmosphere somewhat, but it would take many years before those changes become more noticeable than the ones brought on by the dust.

Don't forget Sunshine, where a character is exposed to vacuum, dies instantly, floats gently away from the airlock and into an antenna over a few seconds, and shatters like glass. Even if the character did freeze that quickly, how fragile do the film makers think frozen meat is? He wasn't even going that fast. And then the pieces float out of the shadow of the spacecraft, and instantly combust and burn away to nothing. Perhaps justified, since they were really close to the Sun at that point.

Basically, in name only.

Of all the bad science in that movie, this is the one that bothers you? I saw that movie when I was doing my military service, and my biggest pet peeve was that the marines were sent out with weapons and tactics that clearly weren't suitable for the mission. Even during one of the "weapons test" scenes, they show that you have to empty the gun's entire clip into the bug at point blank range to kill it. They then proclaim the weapon to be successful. Even though it requires its wielder to get within the bug's attack range (roughly two metres) and then spend all of his ammunition to kill a single enemy. You know, this can even be expanded into a more general case: That battles in (non-historical) movies invariably feature foot soldiers alost exclusively, regardless of time period. In Star Wars Episode I, the warring armies set up infantry formations with shields and catapults and fire at each other at a few hundred paces. In TRON Legacy, the villain's plan involves an invasion of Earth - with an army of soldiers armed with spears. Starship Troopers, they deploy rifle-armed infantry against enemies with bulletproof exoskeletons. In the Hunger Games books (I haven't seen the last two movies), foot soldiers charge into a city they know to be rigged with traps, carrying nothing more than light rifles (or even bows and arrows). Even in the Avengers movies, everybody fights hand-to-hand on foot, despite being capable of levitation. In Edge of Tomorrow, the humans' entire battle plan consists of putting foot soldiers on a beach, without backup, and letting them duke it out against monsters that have no ranged attacks. Small firearms can't harm the monster in Jurassic World, but that doesn't encourage the security forces to bring anything more powerful. What happened to combat vehicles or tanks? You know, stuff that can survive small-arms fire with ease, and shoot back with guns that can kill entire squadrons of infantrymen with one shot, at ranges exceeding a kilometer? Or to ask the loaded question, where is the artillery? Even in WWI, machine gun fire, mines and bayonets were trivial dangers compared to incoming, high-speed, flying explosives. Artillery accounted for 70 % of all battle casualties in WWII. And that was before they figured out how to make the shells explode in mid-air, which multipled their lethality several times again. You might see the occasional dramatic explosion and subsequent smoke plume a few metres behind the hero as he runs for cover, but artillery will rarely be considered a threat. In reality, artillery is brutal, which is why it is so widely applied in warfare. The sound of the guns firing can kill you alone. The shells come flying in at speeds around a kilometer per second, you will neither see nor hear them come. The effective range of artillery is measured in dozens of kilometers, so you might not ever see the guns that ruin your day. For standard NATO ammunition, 155 mm, any shell landing within fifteen metres of the target is considered a direct hit - their lethal range of the shock wave over flat, open ground exceeds 70 metres, and within 400 metres infantry won't be able to function. Still, artillery is a very un-personal way to kill or die, so I can see why it isn't applied in movies. A sudden explosion out of nowhere that kills everybody would not make for very good cinema. But whenever the producers need to show how powerful some enemy is, and how little human technology can harm it, they send in a small squad of guys carrying small firearms, and let them get within a few paces of the enemy before they even consider firing them (upon which they are unceremoniously mauled/eaten/beaten). The only message that gets across to me isn't "Oh look, the military has no way to stand up against this", it's "These idiots brought pea shooters to a war, and did not even use them very wisely". What makes Starship Troopers exceptionally facepalm-worthy, though, is that the movie features a short scene where the bugs are bombed from aircraft - and helplessly killed by the thousands, with no chance to retaliate. If the humans could do that the entire time, why did they ever deploy infantry? And why did they go back to the infantry and abandon the aircraft strategy afterwards?

Hey, don't forget the cited range of these things: "15,000 kilometres". I don't know if it's even possible to burn 518 km/s of Delta-V and still end up less than 15,000 kilometres away, especially if you're firing into space. You'd have to force the missile to stand still and spin, or something like that. To be fair, it says "in excess of 15 000 kilometres", which I guess could mean "anything above 15,000 kilometres" if you're giving them a lot of slack. Or they could be talking about the effective range of the guidance system.

Enough kinetic energy to break a window, and enough fuel to start a fire.

This one is a little less epic and more mundane than previous stories, but it happened at my university some 15 years ago, so I have good faith in its accuracy. Our professor told us as a word of warning: One day, one of the researchers in the chemistry labs brought her early-teen son to work (as far as I can remember, it was during the "work week", where 9th-graders "apprentice" at some local workplace to get a taste of working life), where he helped with some experiments. Some of the experiments required liquid nitrogen, which was stored in a big tank in the Chemistry building. The mother gave him a set of keys to the room with the tank, and sent him across the building with insulated bottles to fill for her experiments. Liquid nitrogen's primary property is that it's really, really cold, which fascinated the boy. He decided to fill some in an empty Coke bottle and take it home, to pour on stuff and see what happened. We've all wanted to try that, right? However, liquid nitrogen isn't cold because it's liquid nitrogen. It's liquid nitrogen because it's cold. A coke bottle with a decilitre or two of liquid nitrogen will, given the temperature of an average backpack, and the time it takes to bring it home without one's mother noticing, turn into a coke bottle with half a decilitre of liquid nitrogen, and a few dozen litres of gaseous nitrogen. Since the bottle itself only held half a litre, the gaseous nitrogen built up enormous pressure. Back at home, the boy took the bottle to his room, held it the way you hold bottles when you open them, and unscrewed the cap. A few milliseconds later, the cap was embedded in his left eye. It had flown with such force that it destroyed his eye completely, and as far as I can remember he lost his vision on the other eye too. It was apparently a life-threatening injury, but he was taken to hospital and managed to recover. His blindness was permanent, though. Back at the university, procedures changed immediately. Since the accident, there has only been one set of keys to the nitrogen room, and only one responsible person allowed to have them. And no person without an extensive safety course is allowed to even enter a lab, unless dangerous equipment has been stoved and locked away. Bringing kids to work is completely out of the question.

"Use the force, Harry!" - Gandalf, played by Keanu Reeves in Stephenie Meyer's The Wizard of Oz, Marvel Motion pictures (1994)

You beat me to it, kerbiloid. I read this entire thread thinking "wait, haven't anybody thought about...", and then its very last post makes the same point I was going to make. Then again, it's been ten days, so I take the blame for being late. But since the thread is stickied, I hope it's OK for me to bump it? My stance on colonizing planets boils down to "You might as well colonize its orbit instead". In orbit, you can have big, spinny space stations giving you proper, terrestrial gravity, rather than spine-crushing high gravity, or spine-crumbling low gravity. For Mars in particular, your colony will have to be a pressurized vessel, with proper radiation shielding due to the lack of a magnetosphere. The outside of the base will be as deadly to humans as space itself is, so you might as well stay in space where there's less dust to clog your machinery, and less atmosphere to obstruct your solar panels. You also need a closed ecosystem, recycling of water, resupplies from Earth, and a rigorous policy on life support systems and hull integrity, whether you're in space or on Mars' surface. Help is far away, the outside is dangerous, and you'll be locked in a can anyway, so why add to the complexity by jumping down the gravity well? Any ship going to Mars would need artificial gravity and good radiation shielding, so the technology required to maintain a space station is required to complete the journey no matter what colonization concept you go for. But staying in space removes that pesky requirement of landing and ascending, so you'll save quite a bit on both mass and personnel risk. Resupply missions would also be easier since they won't have to land either, and you'll need a lot less Delta-V to get back to Earth. What I'd suggest would be to send construction robots to Mars. Large bulldozers or excavators, cranes, and other machinery required to drill the required dozens of metres below the surface where radiation-free surface colonies can be made. Or just to mine the damn planet, if a surface colony doesn't produce any comparable benefits. The operation would be controlled by astronauts in a spinning wheel or cylinder in Mars orbit, where light speed delay is negligible and gravity comfortable. In a longer perspective, the Mars colony would operate a lot like oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico or the North Sea; small outposts on the surface served by a rotating crew who live in the orbital colony, and commute via rockets. The surface would have mining outposts, refineries, landing- and launch pads, maybe even some factories, but the true colonies would remain in orbit, where it's easier to create and sustain suitable living conditions for humans. The one downside I can see for space bases over surface bases is expansion. It's a lot easier to expand a surface base than a space base, since you just need to dig out a new room or use on-site materials to build a new hut. But in space it's a lot harder to come across building materials, and you can't expand the base much radially before the centrifugal force becomes a problem.

I think it's also a case of anti-intellectualism. For instance, just ask a kid who's bored with maths about what he thinks of maths in general: "It's stupid and I'll never use it for anything." Objectively, that's pretty wrong, everybody could use at least some maths at some point, but it's a very comforting lie. "Don't worry, not knowing maths doesn't make you inferior. Actually, you're better than them for not wasting your time." You could say the same about history, social studies, cooking or most other academic studies, or even stuff like reading user manuals. Gaining knowledge and expertise is hard, often frustrating, and it's easy to give up. At those moments, it's comforting to be told that staying invested is a waste of time, that your intuition is the right answer anyway, and that people who know this better than you actually don't know anything at all. Academic degrees are just words on paper. And so Hollywood comes along with the idea that "Expert" = clueless idiot who doesn't understand anything. That knowledge itself is useless, that the pursuit of knowledge is dangerous, and that the only true virtue in face of danger is knowing how to shoot danger in the face. That the gut feeling of the uneducated is worth more than years of expertise. That a down-to-earth manual labourer can step into any role, and do it better than the guys who do it for a living, and the people who tells him otherwise are just elitists. See for instance Armageddon, where the chosen solution is to teach oil drillers how to be astronauts, rather than vice versa. Because anybody can learn how to operate spacecraft and work in zero G in a few days, but drilling is an art, which requires a specific mindset, nay, a lifestyle, to fully understand - or even functionally grasp. And where the mission planners of NASA apparently miss the fact that their chosen landing site is a kilometre-thick iron slab, which Bruce Willis' character can tell at a glance. And where the enormously complex space shuttle, with "a million moving parts", can be perfectly fixed by giving it a good whack. I can't remember many movies in recent years where the solution to a problem hasn't been "going primitive", digging up the Ancient Artifact (which of course is a lot more powerful, complex and fantastic than anything that can be created today) or otherwise returning to the traditions of old; rather than analyzing the problem, doing the calculations, and inventing something new. The Martian stands as a rare example, and even there much of Mark Watney's likeability comes from his tendency to tell the NASA experts to (expletive) themselves, and win the day with his intuition rather than trusting their expertise. In most situations, the new invention turns evil, showing that science is dangerous and not to be trusted (Angels and Demons, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Jurassic Park and all sequels, etc.). The problem isn't that the scientists have terrible security procedures, it's that science itself is inevitably evil. Or science is useless, the power of love is what trumps through in the end (Interstellar). Actually, just read this Cracked article rather than following my ramble.

My biggest gripe with science in movies is how science itself is treated. Specifically, how it is treated in relation to old-time, low-tech ideas, solutions or equipment. Many blockbusters feature some huge government or private agency, well-funded and full of incredibly smart people with long experience in the field, usually in a large and opulent headquarter (which for some reason is furnished more like a car mechanics shop than a lab - with chemistry/biology/engineering experiments being performed on small desks lining the edges of large halls, for instance). Then The Disaster happens. All the scientists and engineers are dumbfounded. But here comes The Protagonist, a down-to-earth man without academic credentials, whose work usually centers around physical labour (mining, farming, oil drilling, etc.). He walks up to the headquarter's big wall monitor, squints, and finds the solution immediately. All of the scientists are dumbstruck, they never thought of that obvious solution. They either argue against the idea (only to be proven wrong shortly after, possibly via a funny incident, like: "We always check all our numbers twice, we're never wrong" - cue something scientific exploding or falling apart in the background), enthusiastically agree and hail the protagonist as a genius, or just stand there looking stupid. Some scientists might even try to state some mathematical formula, or technobabble, only to be shut up with a quip from The Protagonist, after which they meekly slump back into a corner. The Solution invariably involves bringing out The Museum Piece. The advanced and modern technology failed, now we must go back to the Good Old Method! Roll out the WWII aircraft, or the "dumb" rocket, or a reliable firearm. In extreme cases, swords or bows and arrows. Rule of thumb: If any aspect of it is computer-controlled, or it was designed using computers, it's too modern, unreliable or flawed to work. The Museum Piece will somehow overcome some contrived obstacle with triviality, such that the antagonists can't detect/hack/shoot it, or it remains functional after The Disaster has blacked out all recent technology. Then The Protagonist turns out to be the best man for the mission and hand, rather than relevant pilots/soldiers/astronauts. The Protagonist tends to have some experience in the field himself, and even though he retired years ago, he can still do the job better than any people who have currently been working with it for years. This might extend to The Protagonist's friends (or crew), they are always the ideal people to bring along. As he/they is about to embark on the mission, some of the experts try to give last-second advice: "Remember to _____". The Protagonist replies with a quip whose meaning boils down to "You're an idiot, I know this a thousand times better than you do". A different spin, but with basically the same message, might involve a hyper-technological antagonist, whose futuristic soldiers and machinery are helpless against the wits of The Protagonist and his technologically outdated equipment. Rock beats laser and all that. The battle of Endor is the ultimate example here. Or The Doctors are helpless to save the Sick Little Child, but Grandma's or The Wise Old Man's ancient remedy proves to be a perfect and reliable cure overnight. Basically, science and engineering is seen as wasteful toying around, always producing ideas and products inferior to those in use back in some nostalgic period (usually, when the director/producer was in his early teens). Science never marches on, it strays away. Engineering even more so, any piece of equipment designed after 1970 can barely hold together against the force of gravity, and will break apart when you look at it funny. Experts with fancy degrees, or professionals with decades of experience, are morons, the common sense and intuition of your everyday rural worker is superior in every possible setting, situation or instance. In several cases, science or technology is even the cause of the problems, or stated/implied to be decadent or evil. Best-case scenario, the new science/technology is created by well-meaning "scientists" (there is only one science profession in movies), and initially appears superior, but comes with a horrible side effect or gains sentience and turns evil. So yeah, scientific inaccuracy isn't my biggest peeve in movies. It's the tendency to portray science as dumb, worthless and/or evil.

I guess the issue I want to get rid of is the endless tedium of having to start every mission fighting your way out of the Kerbin gravity well. Waiting for Kerbin to be aligned with the target planet. Heading back to Kerbin to terminate every mission and collect every piece of Science (unless you haul a large science lab along for the trip). And most of all, the other planets still being hours of gameplay away even late-game, no matter what you're trying to do there. The vast majority of the gameplay of KSP centers around one planet, with the other planets being far, far away, and remaining that way no matter what you do (unless you cheat, of course). In a way, you can say that Kerbin and its two moons are the only convenient locations in the game, all the others require a disproportionate amount of time to reach compared to what you can actually do there. If you could establish locations on the other planets as a starting point for new adventures, we would have a lot more incentive to actually visit them. For this reason, I believe ISRU or "mail-order delivery" of rocket parts on other planets is a crucial element of colonization. Having to haul stuff all the way from Kerbin every time you want to do something elsewhere is completely antithetical to the idea. I don't want to run a delivery service based on Kerbin, I want to be able to play in the variety of locations the game offers, without always spending most of my play time getting there. If you have to transport rocket parts to Duna in order to build rockets on Duna, your ability to build rockets on Duna is pointless in the first place. But I wouldn't mind if building a small rocket on Duna cost the equivalent of a VAB upgrade, the game gives us way more Funds than we need anyways. Off-Kerbin rocket building could stay tremendously expensive, at least until the Duna base itself is fully upgraded (which in itself would require several missions and some serious stacks of Funds). So basically: The idea of colonization is to allow players to "dick around" on other planets the same way they can do on Kerbin. Experiment a little. Take a plane or a suborbital hopper to see what's behind the mountains. Build rocket cars. Try to fly strange craft to a moon and back. See how close to the Space Center they can land. A need to run continuous supply missions from Kerbin to enable this gameplay, would ruin it completely. EDIT: Setting up these bases could be a task requiring a fair bit of work, with several missions from Kerbin (or fully upgraded KSCs elsewhere). You shouldn't be able to send Jeb in a can and a rover, and build a base from there. Establishing bases would have to be something you do as totally separate missions after you've completed the initial exploration of a planet, and gotten crew and Science safely back home from it. But once that work is over, you should be able to use the new Space Center just like you use the one on Kerbin.