SOXBLOX

Hah! I agree. They'd have to make a very convincing argument to get me to live on a red rock with 1/3 Earth gravity and a limited air supply. Is human life, long term, even possible in 1/3 g? This, plus the fact that there's no economic reason to put a colony on Mars. I guess we just have to wait for global land prices to go through the stratosphere....

LD50 of......water. *shakes head* Only on the KSP forums... Still, I'll avoid drinking more than 15 bottles.

*Runs away in panic* That...sounds really cool! Out of curiosity, how would you, assuming this were possible, detect the bubble at the destination? Could it carry a flash of light within it? Or would you have to use something like LIGO, to pick up the distortions?

Reality doesn't fit the narrative? Just get the Ministry of Truth to adjust it. I've only watched a couple of reviews. From those, I gathered the only worthy aspect of the entire show was the modern Sea Dragon render at the end of Season whatever.

So what do you call this? Anyways, supercool, and great explanation! I enjoyed the hypercylinder description; it feels exactly like proving things in geometry. (Hey, I guess it is.) Is there a paper on these issues with the concept? I'd read it.

So, the universe IS deterministic? Awesome! I hated the concept of randomness.

I guess it's partly because the frames which would benefit from this are nearing the end of their lives, and we really need to replace them, or that other frames durable enough to last were designed specifically around one engine's structural loads. But I don't think it's fallen out of favor; the B-52 is scheduled to get a reengine soon, to serve till 2050ish, and there was a proposal to reengine the F-35. IDK.

"We do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other." And good luck using it. Exactly this. This confused me when I first read about nuclear engines, until I realized that all a reaction engine is is a way to spit hot gas in one direction.

Actually, there are four. Your two, plus 3) he doesn't care whether some guy on the internet thinks the "misconception" needs to be remedied, admitted, or otherwise acknowledged, or 4) he cares more about having a playable game than having a perfectly scientifically accurate game, and included this because it was fairly plausible. (There are probably even more we both missed.) 3 is perfectly acceptable and well within human rights. 4 is a good sign that the devs are concerned with balance and engaging gameplay. (And it certainly isn't an excuse to include things like reactionless drives or technobabble garbage.) If you don't want mmH in your game, you can certainly just not use it. (Like how I played a career save sans reaction wheels.) Or, use it, but call it a liquid-core nuclear engine or whatever. You can do whatever you like; that's the point of the game.

Wow. And nothing says he has to "admit" anything to us. [snip]

I like that definition, too. It just needs to distinguish between major planets, sevenperforces' "irregular planets" and moons. Then I'm happy.

Perhaps I'm not following you, but what I think you're proposing can be achieved just as easily with a small burst from the thrusters many minutes, or even hours, before collision. Unless you just want to wait until the last minute to dodge, which is silly. When it's that close, you can shoot it. (And if you can't, your warship + drone swarm should be resilient enough to handle it.) Depends on what you're trying to do. My idea was for a terminal phase high-g vector change, to make it difficult to hit. The high ∆v part would have been the first stage. All that said, if you're working on worldbuilding or something, and you want space destroyers maneuvering hard to dodge huge swarms of missiles, totally go for it. As long as you're internally consistent, anything works.

Maneuverability is basically unimportant. It's great if you're engaging a target more than a few light-minutes away, but the "maneuverability" you would need in order to dodge there would be your normal RCS thrusters. No optimization required. More crucial is the issue of expanding your effective combat radius. You need to spread assets out over a large area volume, to control it. To do this, you should use attritable drone swarms, either functioning as glorified kamikaze drones or carrying missiles, railguns, etc. One of the most interesting ideas I've seen is equipping a missile with a small one-shot railgun. The missile lofts the gun to a suitable position, from which it fires it's railgun, thus circumventing any point defenses. This has an equivalent in the Casaba-Howitzer missile on AR. Alternatively, use a missile, but put on a Sprint-esque second stage to do a high-g terminal phase. The most crucial is having the maximum possible ∆v budgets, and survivability. So, lots of point defence grids spread between multiple platforms, sorta like Aegis, except most of those platforms are drones.

Here's the big question. Since the ships will not be getting close at all, and since sensor range is infinite, compared to a star system, space war will look like a missile and railgun slugfest. Since humans are bags of wet meat, and can't endure high g's, autonomous drones will be popular. Ships will not need tactical maneuverability, but they may possess defensive maneuverability. (i.e. Closing for an attack vs. dodging) So space warfare might look like swarms of low ∆v budget drones screening a fleet, acting as sensor platforms, and shooting. You'll need a mothership for the drones, and a ship which can defend itself to carry humans. Also, check out Atomic Rockets. I think it covers space warfare.

Gosh, sounds like our old telephones we had to rent. That was a long time ago...

I think it's pure fantasy, especially for a manned version. Just think about all the work that goes into making airliners run. And airliners don't do 6 g belly flops, don't get cooked by reentry, and don't use highly refined rocket engines which experience some of the most difficult environments for materials to survive in. And what kind of payload would we launch three times a day, or more? Starlink would be finished in the blink of an eye at that rate.

Me too, to be sure! They can fill the same performance regime, but I bet they'll be bulkier, and, of course, they'll need shielding. I think... Maybe mmH will be the fuel of choice for surface-to-orbit, and nuclear will be better for orbit-to-orbit? And is mmH going to be transferable through regular docking ports, or even at all? If it weren't, it would nerf it significantly. Maybe @Nate Simpson can say?

An "All-Body Crumple Zone"!

You aren't being forced to post here, right? If you are, we can help. Its called "Suspension of Disbelief", and is a necessary component for all fiction. And even if KSP was perfectly, exactly scientifically accurate (it isn't and can't be) then it would still be fiction. Why? The rockets you are "building" don't exist. They're fiction. As for lore, just say that the Kerbal universe is just slightly different from our own, and mmH works there.

We don't even have KSP2 yet, and you want to talk about "KSP3"? And seriously, what could they do in a "KSP3" that they aren't doing in KSP2?

I agree. Organic is usually worse for the environment, anyways. And less healthy; not as many nutrients.

*blinks* Uhh, whaddya plan to do with the heat when the engine warms back up?

In other words, a compressed gas gun. Like this one? So you can increase the efficiency. Great. But the efficiency can't go over 100%. That would mean that you were getting more work out of the system than you put in. If you did capture your rocket exhausts, and somehow avoided slowing down (maybe a wizard did it), then your rocket would be >100% efficient. You would be getting free work. Incredibly useful, if it were possible. A shame it has been disproven. Of course, there are no wizards. When you do catch the exhaust, it slows you back down. So, there is no reason to capture the exhausts. The other direction I see you going is saying "Well, can't we add more things to the equipment to make it more efficient?" The answer is yes, to an extent. Adding grease to ball bearings reduces friction. Adding high-quality fuel to an engine makes it more efficient. But, adding massive, complicated steps where forms of energy are converted multiple times decreases efficiency. Every time you change between one form of energy and another (say, the potential chemical energy in gunpowder, and the kinetic energy of the bullet, combined with the light and sound energy of the fire), you lose some energy as heat, aka entropy. Fact of life: all physical processes are less than 100% efficient.

Say, do you mind not posting in all-caps and huge bold fonts? My eyeballs hurt. And I agree that new solar panels will be fantastic.

Starship is looking good. Now, it's a fancy grain silo with a fancy dome. Anyone know what that white-painted NASA nosecone is for? I heard it was probably a mockup; do we know anything about the manned interior?