Incarnation of Chaos

I'm going to be that guy; Why not both? Iv'e used stock wings even when iv'e had Procedural wings available, heck i had to use stock control surfaces because Procedural ones never worked reliably. And you can always tie Procedural parts to the progression system to avoid making bigger tankage/wings than you should be able to at that point in the game. The only thing not having Procedural Wings/Tanks/Fairings does is give the player less options, and it doesn't take away from the ones you already have in the slightest. Now Procedural Engines/Command Pods/etc. are completely out of the question; not just for balance reasons but because it's apperently rather difficult to code. So unless KSP2 is different in this regard i don't think it's happening.

Even if the pads are there on the PCB for the DRAM chips, apple normally has some firmware/BIOS loveery that will brick the machine if it detects a configuration that doesn't match what the machine had from the factory. Also there's not SO-DIMM slots on the MacBook; even their 2012 ones had soldered DRAM. New ones are even worse; the SSD is also soldered on them also. So basically any post 2017 MacBook is a paperweight if you want to go beyond whatever the shipped config was (They do allow you to use external GPU's and get half the performance of w/e chip you bought, so that's nice) Note this all only applies to their Laptops; their desktops still have replacable RAM if I recall.

While i agree with this sentiment; imagine a world after these basic reusable rockets make the cost of accessing space virtually nothing. A world where you can launch unmanned tugs to bring asteroids back and use them for their raw materials, water etc. Eventually you're going to want infrastructure to support these ships, and the people on them. It's just people tend to want to jump the gun, and build this infrastructure too soon.

The entire point of a skyhook is to allow more conventional or general-purpose ships to have access to space at insanely low cost; having to build them out of exotic materials that can withstand the docking completely defeats this goal. At that point you might as well use expendable rockets.

And that's the issue.....you can't just make a craft out of aluminum or steel and put a carbon nanotube hoop on it to engage the hook. Since it would just be torn from the weaker materials around it.

Near future has something like this; a scoop that only works in atmosphere that allows you to get the levels of Xenon and Krypton. And a small 1.25M IRSU device for them.

Also a hook has to grab something in the first place, so you end up with a situation where the intercepting ship has to be made of similar materials. Because otherwise the sheer force of making the connection would tear your ship in half.

If i remember correctly it's transfering RCS fuel (Hydrozine), so technically you're correct because i failed to further qualify my statement xD

It's just the classic mistake of throwing out a number without qualifying it; without knowing what kind of "Detail" 3% is looking for it's basically anyone's guess. However; our current maps of mars are pretty astonishing given we've only really been actively mapping it for a few decades. And they'd be plenty suited for directing a lander to a relatively clear spot; once people actually are on the surface and a colony is a permanant fixture then proper surveys could begin of the planet. Which would be really exciting; we've literally only scratched the surface of the Red Planet! Who knows what kinds of mineral deposits or geological formations it may yet yield; or what may be contained deep within long-dead lava tubes. There's still an incredible amount of information that we don't have on Mars and i think it's relatively easy to forget that when thinking of the "Big" picture sometimes. With all that being said; Earth still has plenty of secrets herself! And many are in pretty extreme enviroments such as the deep ocean, blue holes, caves,volcanos etc. So exploring some of these might be good practice before we decidgue to spelunk the caves of Mars, and may also lead to the discovery of new information also. And i'm aware there are plenty of people doing this actively as their job right now (Often using tools spun off or directly related to space), but i just wanted to remind people that there's still plenty of crossover between exploring our planet and others.

The advantage is that we could do this with current materials; space elevators would require the mass-production of flawless carbon nanotubes to get the borderline strength necessary. But neither will happen anytime soon anyway. We (humans) haven't even refueled a ship in orbit; let alone develop the needed infrastructure and organizational resources to build megastructures. No country or corporations are willing to assume that burden financially or the inherent risk with these projects. Baby steps are being taken through, and it's looking like all of the above may change in the coming decades.

Which i don't really mind; it's just nice to see that my suspicions confirmed xD

I remember seeing that.....i think Scott Manley talked about that; also pointing out that many of the ships of the expanse have no visible way to dump that heat.

Near Future Electrical has a reprocessor which takes DU and converts it into Xenon, it also can convert Ore into Enriched Uranium.

Hm.....they did have to pretty much craft each planet's anomaly map by hand for the stock KSP system; you make a great point here. But i find it very unlikely Star Theory will do anything beyond the standard patched conics implmentation and whatever "Solution" they have for rask and rusk. Just because of time, along with the possiblity it would throw newer players off.

Considering there's a mod for "Lumpy" gravity in KSP1; this will likely be modded in pretty quickly by someone. Since KSP2 will make it so much easier to do, and it's something realism freaks would want.

This is awesome.... Also we should totally get Spice Geysers from Spore because why not.

So they literally took an existing concept, and slapped a cool name on it just so they could fudge the ISP numbers and have cool-looking ships. Welp; not the worst iv'e ever seen in Science Fiction, but still kinda silly.

The other reason Xenon IRSU isn't really a thing is primarly the fact that it's a Noble Gas, and a rare one at that......So the concentrations of Xenon in planetary atmospheres are pitiful (1 part per 11 million). It almost makes me ask the question if using a Nuclear Reactor and somehow tapping off the Xenon-135 and intentionally bombarding it with neutrons to convert it to Xenon-136 (Half life is something around 2.165 X 10^21 years, so basically stable); this also would make your reactor harder to poison (Which makes me think this is difficult/impossible because otherwise it'd likely be done commercially). Though even the crazyness of intentionally poisoning a reactor to create and collect Xenon seems less of a challenge than seperating Xenon from an atmosphere; it's inert and basically not even there which makes chemically seperating it difficult (Nothing bonds with it so you have to filter everything else out, including other much more common Noble Gases like Argon and Krypton). Meaning your only "Real" option is cryogenic seperation; which requires entire industial parks and massive amounts of energy on earth. Perhaps you could use the Cryogenic LOX in some kind of heat exchanger on the ship to ingest and cool the surrounding air to it's liquid state, but even that would add an immense amount of mass for the needed radiators and loops. And it would result in the slow loss of your fuel (Though making Oxygen to liquify is muchhhhhhh easier than making Xenon). All of this though is assuming you have the sheer energy to run the various equipment needed to do this; all of which is on top of your normal life support and science equipment. And that's an assumption which also means you're using truckloads of solar (Which wouldn't fit on a reasonable sized lander) or you're using nuclear power (At which point perhaps). And all of the heat exchangers, compressors and other refigiration equipment also means your ship has to carry a massive amount of extra dry mass you may only use once or twice. But all of this is coming from a realism standpoint, which in KSP isn't really relevant since we mine generic "Ore" and convert it into a number of substances without any of this. I'll be interested to see if anyone knows of any realistic way to handle and manufacture cryogenic liquids in something that doesn't look like a floating industrial park xD

Welp that's one of the most honest answers i think i'm gonna get xD I'm actually a big fan of the expanse, but the hype around the epstein drive i couldn't ever understand.

I still don't understand the difference between an epstein drive and a fusion torch tbh

Awesome; thanks for the answer.

Fusion drives are also something that we know for sure are physically possible, so i would have to agree.

This is somewhat related to the thread at hand i guess; asking because you're the mods current maintainer and it's about reaction wheels. Does TweakScale actually scale the force applied by reaction wheels up or down when resizing? Couldn't really find a straight answer anywhere.

It's the fact that we haven't demonstrated it can ACTUALLY be metastable; meaning the properties of a Metallic Hydrogen Engine aren't known. It's basically all conjecture from estimates from the late 70's that have already been demonstrated to be off the mark numerous times. He continues to attempt to impart this information, but people either don't want to or fail to understand what he's saying. So lemme try to give the tl;dr. Metallic Hydrogen IS predicted by current physics, and we're rather close to creating in a lab setting (We may have already) However the discussion isn't about if Metallic Hydrogen exists or could be used as a fuel. The discussion is if Metastable Metallic Hydrogen exists. What is "Metastablity"? In general it's where a compound or substance is "Trapped" at a higher energy level than it's ground state, but for some reason cannot spontenously transition back to the lowest energy state (This gets REALLY complicated). So the substance appears stable for all intents and purposes, it can be handled and worked with fairly easily even. But once additional energy overcomes whatever funk is preventing transitioning; BAM! All that penned up energy is released as it reverts to the lowest energy state. Metallic Hydrogen was predicted to remain in a metallic state even after the immense pressures were released, this would make it much denser and easier to handle than H2 or LOX. It would also mean an immense amount of energy would be released upon reverting back to gas. However current experiments have not shown this to be the case, as it rapidly transitions back to a gas or liquid depending on temps. All of these are at much higher pressures than predicted it would take. NONE of this means that metastable Metallic Hydrogen CANNOT exist; it's simply that we haven't PROVEN it's existance and the calculations that appeared to show it were WRONG. EDIT: I decided to put my money where my mouth was and look at some actual papers on the subject, the ones from 1968, 1974 were strangely locked behind a account. But i found 3 papers from a russian nuclear resarch university from 2016-2017 detailing a mathmatical simulation predicting a metastable form of Metallic Hydrogen that could appear at 500 Gigapascals, along with it's superconducting transition. All current experiments have been well below this threshold. Star Theory could've talked to these authors for some kind of basis for their engines, that doesn't really change the current state of things. But it does mean there's at least active interest in the scientific community for Meta stable Metallic Hydrogen.

Yeah i wasn't planning on this approach when writing simple programs; the dynamic typing only becomes cumbersome with larger projects. It's not even a speed issue, more readiblity and debugging.