Antstar

This is kind of a question/comment. I can't use ksp at the moment, but when I was last running the NF solar (maybe a few months ago) I calculated the ec/mass of the panels and it was pretty close to the same for all. Has this changed? If not, shouldn't there be mass savings from more advanced solar panels? It seemed like there were surface area savings but this was less important to me as I was trying to make solar powered very low mass ion engined probes for the inner system... PS. If I'm wrong or this has been updated then yay. PPS. This is a great suite of mods and thanks for making them.

Very thorough, thank you. You have indeed mentioned that the temperature of space is hard to define. I was aware of some of the non insolar affects such as solar wind already. Still, these are not isotropic. From the wikipedia article you included: Because the "temperature" at Earth orbit is not isotropic, but depends which direction you are facing, we can see that matter can be held at <<100kelvin without active cooling, simply by blocking the influence of the sun... So I feel justified in my argument that space is cold, except in a few directions like towards the sun (ok 20k is not 3.5K, but its still cold).

Huh. Why do people keep thinking Edison invented things? He was a true capitalist. He stole what ideas he could, and bought what he could not. A smart businessman, could read the public and the market, sure, but I am not aware of a single thing he himself invented?

A trick I used on the Mun once was to launch up a crater wall. it does become unstable but since the ground is "rising" you can get a bit more speed. Yeah, you have a 10 fold error here. 2% of 1000kg is 20kg, not 200kg. then the masses and burn time get more reasonable (a bit) What is the equatorial velocity of Tylo?

You can have temperature without matter. It can be defined in many ways, but lets say for example, the temperatuer which a perfect black body would reach at equilibrium. So, 3.5K in empty space. Hotter near the sun. But as I said in earlier post there are ways of shielding against the sun. So lets call temperature a vector quantity, with a magnitude in each direction of 4pi solid angle... I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic? You have to use what you know works. I mean yes, innovation is good but building a good,fast, modern CPU and OS from scratch is as much of a challenge as building an orbital rocket in terms of investment $ and time. If we are using CPUs from the new millennium and rocket engines from the 1960s (ok, updated progressively a bit) then it makes more sense to look at rebuilding the rocket from scratch than concentrating on the computer...

Nope, space is cold. The sun is hot. The Earth is warm, the day side of the moon is warm etc... But mostly, the sun is hot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshield_(JWST) Yeah, SpaceX is innovating for sure. And Musk is a smart guy. But, I think he has had a lot of help from several US agencies, ever since a falling out in the Crimean peninsula led to a shortage of very excellent Russian rockets. The media however is making it out like he built all these himself with his bare hands, and that the next FH is going to take everyone to Mars. So yeah, mostly the stupid media's fault for talking out of their a$$ for sensationalism

Nice!! Interestingly enough, since I never paid attention in the pre 1.0 days or maybe it changed, I have played KSP for 4 years and never seen the upgraded SPH or admin building Is lounging in the pool another situation

Yes and no. This applies most for things that will spend a lot of time in the water. Galvanic corrosion almost always starts with pitting, which changes the composition of the alloy slightly and accelerates the corrosion. It also applies to things that were cheaply (badly) painted and then possibly scraped due to collisions with anything, including while docking or from tug-boats. Growing barnacles on the bottom and their excretions also plays a factor below the waterline EDIT- agreed about props. but i think this would not be a problem for rocket parts. However, getting the water out of all the mechanical bits and pieces would be a pain

As a non-American I can't see, why would anyone spend a cent on Detroit?? But if the US pres wanted, he could tell some people they are fired, make it a national priority, and it could be fixed in 12 months at huge expense to the rest of the country. Speaking of flim flam men, nice picture of another man who didn't invent a thing is his life I take your point that Musk is given a lot of credit by the public for things he didn't really do himself...

LOL space is cold. Just hide behind your solar panels and black body to space (I was joking by the way)

Or, we can just mine bitcoins in space. Because space

Yeah, this. I was going to say high drag to mass ratio Different metals can be passivated differently. Another nice thing that works on multiple metals (with not nice reagents) is to give it a quick dip in >10% hydrofluoric acid. The metal is oxidised to fluoride on the surface layer only and if you can get a coherent coating it is usually even better than the above method. Well, except for HF being well toxic and corrosive to almost everything EDIT - or you can just paint it, which it probably the most common solution?

@5thHorseman Are you planning to re-release the challenge for 1.4? I wont be starting a game until the release but I want to play the new release and this sounds like fun.

I had not seen this. Thanks... I'm a chemist. I promise you that 1) they are absolutely right: hard UV + perchlorate is bad for organic chemistry, let alone life. 2) perchlorates are not toxic to humans in multi gram amounts. In fact they used to be available as lozenges. As the article implies, UV is the killer here. And the right plastic is like SPF 10000+ Actually I was going to propose the same thing. Rings around the planet, made of superconducting magnets. Outrageous, but not impossible. And a CO2 atmosphere is a good start, at least you have pressure and rad protection. It is much easier to build a thick CO2 atmosphere. Just ask Venus

Of course. We are not talking about primitive stone age people bootstraping themselves to technology there. But IF we go to space, people gonna people. Hence, every bit of unclaimed land will have to eventually be colonised. Bacteria don't avoid the less nutritious places to grow, they just do worse there and have a hard life. Humans are less adaptable than bacteria, but follow the same basic pattern of colonisation. Plus we have technology. So, again I assert that eventually Mars will look attractive for colonisation - even if it is not easy, good, or the first place we go (and perhaps after we have overcrowded antarctica - the worst place on Earth??)

Well, take the "red mars" solution to radiation. A couple of meters of crappy dirt blocks a lot of rads. Filling the atmosphere with CO2 gives you pressure and heat (if you can be bothered, but more plausible than an O2 atmosphere). I dispute your assertion about the dirt however. They think that there are probably superoxides there and that these pose a long term (chronic) lung damage issue. Unless you are going somewhere else with this? The superoxides problem would resolve with a CO2 atmosphere, but anyway we use sticky mats for our cleanroom - they are hardly high tech. As for gravity - jury is most deffinately out on that - we have no idea what that gravity would do Of course it will. The arctic circle is a $hit place to live north of. But people do. If we don't extinct ourselves, and If we colonise space; and yes, if the gravity works out (although we will probably just GM ourselves if not), then Mars too will one day have people on it

This seems super, super dangerous. A smart (and completely rational but unemotional) person would have to conclude that in the long term Earth would be better off being deliberately destroyed and then reseeded from the superior breeding stock you are sending to Mars... Ahh, but humans are out-of-control exponential breeders. I'd wager that you can create additional hab space and life support on Mars quicker than you can on an asteroid. My answer is that we will colonise Mars eventually. Because we are humans and it is Mars. Once there, we will dig in and breed away. If we take as an axiom that preserving humans is a good thing, then colonising Mars is a good thing. Forget trade. Like the good old imperial days when Europeans spread out far beyond the distance they could supply, Earth will have to prop it up for a bit (perhaps it will be mostly assets owned by a corporation ) but people will become self sufficient there - by the time we are in a position to actually make a permanent settlement there they will have the capability

Scrap metal is one possibility. Or perhaps future America will find the idea of thinking long term culturally disgusting. Perhaps they will decide that the first 30 years of the third millennium were the most shameful and remove all traces of it from the Earth. Or a nationwide cult of technological regression. Or a hundred other things I can't even imagine... yup

Just LOL. When I first went to uni, we were shown around the place. I remember being shown the "unbreakable clock" build by a group of engineers. Apparently it took about 5 years before another group of engineers figured out how to break it. The rate of change in our culture is higher than ever in history, and accelerating. I put my money on it lasting less than 250 years. It only takes one generation to rip it down, it takes every generation to preserve it

I am not sure, but IIRC the problem with rare earths is not that they are rare - they are actually fairly common in the crust - but separation of these elements from each other is very laborious and resource intensive due to large overlaps in chemical behavior. I think you have to go through multiple oxidation states and use expensive ligands. Compare with gold- which is cyanide + air then electrolyse. If so, then the economics wouldn't be improved by bringing them from space?

The short answer is yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_the_Moon#Elemental_composition As for economics, like most space based industry it is only likely to be worth it for large projects. Ie. a huge ship for Mars, or a lot of them. The aluminum alone can be used for hulls, and while not as good as copper, can be used for wires. Depending on how much chemical processing you are willing to do, silicone is mostly Si and O by weight. Most glasses are doped SiO2, and most of the dopants can probably be found in the "other" shown in that chart. Of course, it would not be practical to produce for example a CPU on the moon, at least until there was heavy supporting industry there, but saving 90+% of the mass from needing to be launched from Earth would have huge benefits. EDIT- I should add that while I'm not an economist, I am a chemist. And on Earth, economics dictates construction. For example, copper is not the best material for wires. Silver and gold are both intrinsically better. Probably the best (room temperature, practical) conductor would be gold containing either a small amount of silver or copper. However this is not used for wiring your house for the obvious reason that it is too expensive. Any products manufactured on the moon would have different economics and hence use probably quite different materials than on Earth, but achieve the same electrical and material properties overall

Quite apart from the fact that if you want something on the moon, building it on the moon would be convenient due to launch costs- the moon is the high ground. It has low gravity and no atmosphere. For example, getting to Mars from the Lunar surface is dramatically easier than from Earth surface Getting to LEO means aerobraking or expending fuel, but for ANYWHERE else, you are far better on the moon than anywhere near Earth

I was just trying out some ideas. for the next 3 months I will be away from home so I can only really contribute in the forum, not with the mod itself or testing. btw, its something like 150 years, not days (probably a typo). The surface of Eve is well shielded, you can last there almost indefinitely. The problem I found with radiation was that it was too much to leave kerbals on Duna's surface through several Hohmann windows - and if a solar storm hits it can't be protected against. This is not realistic - if you are in space, well bad luck, but on the surface there would be options to survive this. Finally, when playing with Outer Planets Mod (which is explicity semi-supported in the OP) there is no realistic way to get to the outer planets without getting too much radiation, unless you use another mod like deepfreeze. Anyway, Thanks @HaullyGames and anyone else who is developing this mod. It is a great mod and it will only get better from more attention

This is an interesting topic. I think this is the most realistic reply so far. You do know that there are no lumps of platinum floating in space right? If you find one with 1% I would say that you have scored the find of a lifetime. However, where you find platinum, you will likely find high abundances of metals with similar chemistry. Metals with similar chemistry tend to be similarly rare on Earth (because they tend to the 0 oxidation state, and hence are lost into the core instead of forming "light" rocky oxides, sulphides, silicates etc) and because they have Z>26, hence can only be made by the neutron drip process in large stars (ie. low cosmic abundance - although I am simplifying, cosmic abundance and solar system abundance are very complicated). But like I said, they have similar chemistry, so they can potentially have similar applications. And fetch similar prices (like within an order of magnitude) So, realistically, you bring your enriched-in-precious-metals lump of iron/nickel back to Earth. Then what? Well probably you separate the iron and nickel out and use it for orbital construction. This could be easy as they are both magnetic metals (though Ni is not ferromagnetic). These metals are great for construction and would be great for space construction too if you don't have to pay to get them off the ground. This will be most of your profit. Then you send the "not-iron/nickel" back to ground for further processing, since it has enough value on the ground to be worth it. The premise of getting platinum from asteroids is flawed. The premise of producing platinum as a side product of asteroid mining industry is great!!

Yeah, radiation is a problem for long expeditions in this mod. Without having the game for reference, I think a kerbal would die from radiation after 150 yrs even on the surface of kerbin. I think we can improve shielding... with no shielding or during a solar storm they should take large doses but we should be able to do better with shielding. In particular, with nuclear engines, placing 2.5tons of water between the crew and engine should make a huge difference (though I am not suggesting this can be directly put into the game- we should have a way to temper radiation from a nuke reactor). I am also thinking if Kim Stanley robbinson's red mars, where they threw dirt on top of the habs for radiation protection. We should be able to make MUCH thicker, if inefficient, shielding once we make planetfall. I see no reason a kerbal can't spend 50 years on duna with this precaution (and limited eva time). Not an official request at the moment, just want to hear other peoples ideas on implementation and if it practical