SOXBLOX

There really isn't an economic reason for going to space. If there was profit to be made in space, governments would be regulating space a lot more. Now, on the serious side of things, modern economies don't run on raw materials. These are usually dirt cheap. The important step is turning raw materials into finished products. (Think about how much the materials in a cell phone cost compared to the phone itself.) This requires work, which people are paid for, and work needs energy. So you should use space energy to drive economic processes. Using a limited number of ships to haul raw materials is unlikely to be efficient, so use them for ferrying workers and prefab habitats. Use good ol' chemfuel rockets for hauling stuff. Then, set up orbital solar arrays, huge fission reactors on the moon, stuff like that to take advantage of the lack of environmental protection agencies. Beam energy to Terra, manufacture stuff in space, and supply your worker colonists with water and stuff. Over 25-50 years, you could profit doing this. Of course, of you're feeling Machiavellian, instigate a nuclear war on Earth. Then, many people will pay you to leave Earth and bring supplies to them from orbital farms. This is a...drastic...solution, though.

I want to see a New Horizons release along the lines of the ESA collab. A Juno equivalent would be awesome as well, and would be a great excuse for more solar panels. A SpaceX collab, though, just isn't worth it to me.

Doesn't feel very Kerbal. Nothing to build, really. And only the mass driver can put you in orbit.

Banned because you have an RTG.

Just remember that that unless you find a natural source of AM, any AM you use will be an energy transport mechanism, not a fuel. Putting it in a ship would be equivalent to buying batteries from the dollar store and putting them in a kid's toy. It's just that AM is even touchier to contain than, say, liquid nitroglycerin. Instant boom if it comes into contact with anything besides AM. Like atmosphere, the ship hull, or your face. So you need magnetic fields, which need constant power, which needs a nuclear reactor. So AM needs a lot more stuff in the ship to work. As you surely know, "Every gram counts"!

Storing AM is much more difficult than storing uranium. Antimatter engines will be more complicated than nuclear ones.

Cool! π/5, man!

Actually, although the actual RCS is classified, I'm pretty sure the F-22 has slightly better all-aspect stealth. F-117 was designed using equations modelling stealth with flat, planar surfaces. Modern (classified) techniques handle curves and more complex shapes. And threat receivers look for repeating patterns in radio wavelengths. By cycling and not repeating a pattern, LPI radars have a chance of not being detected by their target, so stealth fighters with these equipped can still track adversaries actively.

Hmm. So, since these are planes, they need to be aerodynamic. But stealth puts certain demands on the shape of the plane, right? Actually, not so much. It places constraints on the shape which is visible to radar. The F-35 uses an aerodynamic moldline made primarily of composites, which are transparent to radar. The radar sees the stealth shaping underneath. The stealth shaping is angular, to break up the signal, and the composite is coated in radar-absorbent paint to further reduce returns. So optimum stealth shaping seems to be angular, with very little exposed metal. The flying wing is also inherently stealthy, as it eliminates vertical surfaces.

Yeah, I tried telling them that before. They didn't like it. What I was trying to do with this was expand a toggle for tech X into a cool feature for customization, but your point is solid; this would be too complicated to implement. I will reconsider my opinion on this feature.

In other threads, some folks have voiced justifiable concerns about the presence of certain engine types in the game. I posted some ideas which I thought might be acceptable compromises for all involved. One of these ideas was that the game should include a tech progression editor, a tool used at the creation of a game to decide where, when, and whether the player unlocks certain parts, classes of technology, etc. This is essentially just turning a toggle for X propulsion system into a system for greater personalization. For example, one could remove all fusion drives, or make Vectors available early in the progression. Tweaks to the progression could push players to build SSTOs or reusable rockets earlier in the game by making other tech unavailable, or increasing cost, or whatever. The pros are that one does not have to use mods to alter the progression, one can easily remove unwanted tech from the game, and also more customization. The con, I believe, is that the community could lose a sense of a common gameplay progression. Although, this doesn't seem so negative, considering that any misconceptions could be resolved by a simple explanation to another player. "I'm playing with torch drives moved up to mid-game, and Orion drives removed" or something. So, I've got the poll for you guys. If you like parts of the idea, but not others, tell me down below. I expect someone will find whatever cons I overlooked, as well.

Pretty much correct. Nuclear weapons have drastically increased the cost of war. Without that increase, the superpowers would have had less aversion to conflict. Proxy wars, for example, *could* have escalated drastically. The common heritage of mankind, or something like that...

If it's gas core, you'll have no problems SSTO-ing the thing. Even liquid core can work, but you may want LH anyways, the lighter exhaust increases ISp compared to water. No comment on the safety or engineering feasibility of any designs using these.

Not always. Sometimes people don't listen to reason. Then they gain nothing.

Ahhh... Vegetatius. Dude had a wonderful name... But I agree with you!

The differences given are actually, upon closer analysis, trivial. E.g. Looking for logical flaws is by its nature, reflecting on the opponent's views. Also "set, clear" vs. "fluid". Can anyone consistently define "fluid" in this sense? Learning is winning. And when one loses, one can be rational, and learn from their mistakes by identifying the flaws their opponent exploited. So everyone can win. Whoever created this graphic seems to be trying to tilt the playing field. By casting "debate" in a negative light, they can argue that anyone debating them is being "bigoted" or "competitive" or whatever. Of course, anyone using this line of logic would also meet the criteria for "debating", but this would be conveniently ignored.

I believe any semblance of Cold War remaining is the fault of you-know-who. The Cold War has shifted to another certain other nation. Ahem.

So, you have ditched the Project Orion submarine part? Oh, good. OK. Do I care whether you care? And frankly, wouldn't you consider it a win to come out with more knowledge than before, regardless of the fate of your idea? Just wondering...

Sure. But, it takes energy to crack water into oxygen and hydrogen. You add the energy to the atoms themselves; they gain chemical potential energy. Imagine you have a bowling ball. It is sitting on the ground, in the bottom of a valley. You can roll it up the side of the valley, to the top, but you add energy to do so. (Please note that this energy comes from you, and thus from the food you eat. It does not come, and cannot come, from the motion of the ball over the ground.) This energy you add is converted to gravitational potential energy. Later, you can come along and roll it down. If you do that, you turn the grav. pot. energy into kinetic energy. The ball releases the grav. pot. energy until it uses it up when it reaches the bottom of the valley. After that, you cannot extract more energy from it; it has reached the lowest energy state possible for it. Also, some of this energy is lost as entropy, or waste heat, due to friction. Every time you convert between forms of energy, you lose some as entropy. We can come up with a rule of thumb; the process using fewer steps is more efficient. This is knowledge found in the first pages of any high school physics textbook. You can go read yours. Your schemes, ignoring your attempts to create energy ex nihilo , add more complexity, more steps, reduce efficiency, increase transit times for ships, increase maintenance, and serve no practical purpose. So in the real world, it is better just to use the system we are using, or an evolution of it. "Cold plasma" has no place in the energy industry. If you want a boat, just put solar panels on it with batteries for the nights. Of course, hydrogen could be a more energy-dense storage medium than batteries, so maybe you should sacrifice simplicity for compactness, and do like the folks in the above video. There! There's a taste of real life engineering! We also do not need to disinfect cargo. If we did, though, chemical sprays would have a better range and potency, and would not require massive transformers for voltage your plasma requires.

See, I don't like this. NASA and ESA collabs are fine; they're national agencies. But SpaceX is a private company, and SpaceX stuff is the IP of SpaceX. There could be legal problems with this sort of thing. I would like to see plain textures for fuel tanks and bigger landing legs, as well as clusterable engines and a bigger command pod, but I don't want duplicates of SpaceX stuff. No SpaceX advertisements in my game, thank you.

A torus world would be cool, but nasty to land on. Also exceptionally difficult to form naturally. I presume you've watched Artifexian's video on the subject?

Well, when Mr Musky founded SpaceX, he had to make the company make profit immediately; he couldn't have kept it afloat without launch contracts coming in near in the future. So he hurried along with the Falcon series, and used the destructive testing approach combined with a big PR effort. As he just demonstrated, Jeff Bezos does not have that problem. Hence, ferociter graditim.

Yep. The complexity of this system is so massive, and the requirements for it are sorta opposed to each other. So...at this point, you ARE making it all up. And one or two days can't be all that long compared to interstellar transit times. I see no reason the crew would need to hurry.

So now you want an air-augmented aerospike nuclear SSTO flying boat?!? What next, man? Hast thou gone mad?

Alright, here's what I see. Arugela wants to use "cold plasma" to crack water into oxygen and hydrogen. Then, he wants to burn it, to make water. This, he thinks, will power the boat forward in the water. Then, he will use the forward motion of the boat to make more energy and all this somehow ties in with Lebanon and COVID-19. The problem is, converting forms of energy is inherently inefficient, and energy is always lost to entropy. This cannot be circumvented, and the principle is, along with causality, a sacred pillar of physics. Of course, this energy has been partly converted into the kinetic energy of the ship. If Arugela tries to use the kinetic energy of the ship to increase the kinetic energy of the ship, he is trying to build a perpetual motion machine. His machine requires an efficiency of greater than 100%. This is nonsensical and impossible. As mikegarrison pointed out above, if Arugela can build this, we'll believe him, but we know he can't, of course. And if cold plasma is a true plasma, it can't exist in atmosphere, it will become de-ionized. *** Having watched the video, I see a fancy method of pasteurization. Not a magic propulsion tech. So no, your idea does not work, and electrified lunch meat has nothing to do with it.