Hyperspace Industries

On the way home from Sunday school (ironically located on a Wednesday night) the power was (and still is) out in the neighborhood we live in, we were driving through the dark streets, and in a fit of outrageous irony, when I turned the radio on it was playing blinding lights! Needless to say this has only increased my dad’s intent to get a solar power system and thereby stop having to put up with load shedding (controlled power outages to reduce load on the power stations), without having to pay for petrol to power a generator. Edit: Something funnier just happened, I played 'all systems to go' by man or astroman, and directly after the song completed the first "all systems to go" the power came back!

And I thought my home language was complicated.

Maybe it will crash?

Yeah, I probably should have added more indication that this is speculation. But then, what does that end scene mean? And why does the chapter say "something more?"?

Yup, you're right, I mistook its solar panels for windows and thought the tank was a tourist pod.

Someone probably realized this before me, but I think I know what the ship at the end is for. It's a countdown, and it's at T-2. Every showcase video contains the same ship, going through a mission, every time we see it, the ship is later in its mission, which is a mun trip. The latest part had it staging away all its boosters on what I have concluded is most likely a munar impact trajectory (due to it looking like one, and crashing being common in ksp). It has no landing fuel tanks that I can see, so it almost certainly won't be decelerating, let alone returning. It is "falling" towards the mun, or in other words, dropping. I hearby speculate that when it hits the ground, ksp 2 will drop.

I read on a university website that deuterium fusion needs 50 million degrees of temperature and 2 atmospheres of pressure. A Farnsworth fusor from the 60's can get 100 million degrees. So, why can't we just pump 2 atmospheres of deuterium in? Unless the reactor is actively reducing the pressure inside it, this should allow for sustained fusion from low power (a Farnsworth fusor can run on mains power).

Sorry about all that, I did that bit of coding for the mod, and it was the first time I ever worked with cfg files, so I had no idea what most of those things did.

Unfortunately not, they're not available anywhere over here, and believe me, I've looked. (Except maybe for some specialized fertilizers, which I can pretty much only get by spending quite a bit buying them online. I could probably afford it but I hate spending money. (I'm what we call "seinig" which apparently translates to frugal.))

Nope, I'm on vacation. I've been trying to build a rocket engine for the entire vacation, I've once again given up on trying to make or get oxidizer. (You can't buy it and making sodium chlorate from salt water is pitifully slow, not to mention the fact that I don't have a variable power supply for electrolysis.) So I've done some math and a steam rocket at 10 bar of pressure can (if I used the right equation and did it right) get around 200 seconds of isp. With the rocket equation, this works out to a mass ratio of around 3 for suborbital flight. That results in a wet + dry mass of (I think) 4 kg for a dry mass of 1 kg. To get 10 kg of thrust with around that exhaust velocity you need to shoot 50 grams of steam out of the back per second. (This is all rough approximations based on an equation for pressure driven rockets working in vacuum I found on atomic rockets.) I can't find the steam generation equations I need (the classic problem of Google thinking you want to hear about something else) so could anyone send the required equations, no answers necessary, just the equations. (Also, we haven't done any equations even close to related to this yet.)

How much heat is needed to turn 50 grams of water into steam per second?

Gorgeous!!!!!!! Also, when I saw that V-shaped radiator I squealed with glee! I am definitely making a book accurate discovery replica! Also, this will make that practically every reasonable ship (given this is kerbal, I doubt well have too many of those) has only a max of 4 radiators, no matter its size! High part counts no more! Edit: I just noticed that the first part was done by Chris Adderley, aka: Nertea!!!!!!!!

What are the necessary conditions for energy positive fusion? As in, if you used the best fusion fuel we have, what would you need to do to get it fusing? How strong a magnetic field would you need for magnetic confinement fusion?

Probably the least would be air, because you only have atmospheric drag, and no ground friction. Probably the most would be either submarine, with lots of water drag, or land, because sailing ships can use hydrofoils, but on land you either have wheels, which will tear themselves to pieces with centrifugal force, or skids, which will be eaten through like a belt sander eats through a cookie.

The gains are probably meaningless, but it is an idea, and I like to think and figure stuff out. The main benefit would be probably just fuel costs, and even that is minor.

Could you make a hot air balloon which was painted black, or transparent and working like a car in the sun, that heated itself with sunlight? (This might be able to reduce the mass of hot air balloons, allowing more payload.)

Our first colonist was named Jan, we are the only country to make our own nukes, and then abandon them, and from here the moon's dark spots look like a bunny with two ears sticking up instead of what most pictures show on google, which are taken in the northern hemisphere.

The one which was colonized (relatively) peacefully by one nation/company, then that colony was colonized by force by the British. Also, in the mining days we dug a really, really big hole because we wanted diamonds and tunnel mining hadn't been invented yet. We also have 23 or so uranium mines. Also, since that is probably insufficient: we have over 9 national languages, and we are the only nation to make our own nukes and then abandon them.

Well, she either made a typo, or she adds an inordinate amount of bonus points. If she made a typo, I sure hope she made that typo when she typed it into the computer. In bad news: we went to Clarens, and the alarm went off back home. It's been over half an hour, and we haven't heard a peep out of the security company. Thank goodness I brought my laptop with me. I hope it's a false alarm and not a robbery. Edit: It appears it was a false alarm! Hallelujah! Apparently they went to (redacted) street instead of (redacted) street.

Still have a bunch of rocket scientist's block (ideas for stuff to do very welcome), but I changed the usi life support settings so that once you have above 2 years of hab time anyone can stay indefinitely. This is both to make it easier and because I've always found it a little ridiculous that they can stay on a ship for three years, and only then get cabin fever. I also flew a jet plane, unfortunately the game crashed.

Good news: First day of vacation baby! Even better news: My physics teacher posted the results for my physics (or in this case practically just chemistry) exam on the class group. I did the best in my grade, with a staggering 118% (our physics teacher adds bonus questions).

Thanks! That's probably the biggest compliment I've gotten in a while. If I may ask, posit that we were capable of accelerating the charged particles that way, how fast could we reasonably get them going? By the way, the main benefit of this would actually not be thrust, but rather steering. The classic sail version gets more than enough thrust for pretty much every place where the solar wind is strong enough for it to work, but, since the field is spherical and kilometers wide, the only way to go anywhere else than directly away from the sun is to put two magnets tens of kilometers away from each other. The goal with this is to be able to have a sanely sized drive which can thrust in more useful directions, in this case by accelerating charged particles in the opposite direction. Edit: It seems that this drive is impossible, or at least impractical. It seems that every single thing about plasma magnet propulsion forgot one thing mentioned on the side in the original paper, The thing takes 1.5 YEARS to get the magnetic field going!

Could you use a series of magnetic coils to accelerate solar wind like a mass driver or coil gun while having them create a rotating magnetic field (like a plasma magnet sail) which (exactly like a plasma magnet sail) uses the charged plasma to create a larger magnetic field which captures and throws even more solar wind plasma out the back as reaction mass? (By the way, @K^2, while the solar wind has less impulse than light, the plasma magnet gets more twr, the reason why plasma magnets have much better twr than solar sails, and ion engines, is that the plasma makes more magnetic fields which make more magnetic fields allowing for a tiny, and super simple, coil fed with 10 kw of power to generate a 30 km or so (actually the size depends on the density of the solar wind so the field gets larger the farther away from the sun you are) magnetosphere that captures the solar wind. This sounds ridiculous but apparently the university of Washington did tests in a vacuum chamber and math and plasma sails work.)