Seret

Ultimately no, you can't stimulate reality with prefect accuracy. But you can stimulate it with enough to fund it what you want to know. Your question was: "Why aren't we doing this?". People have answered your question. You don't seem to like the answer, but it's the only one you're going to get.

Within our solar system yes. Within the galaxy no. I was referring to Voyager myself when I mentioned that we've only just reached the edge of the solar system. As for why don't we send micro-organisms within our system, we actually go to great lengths to make sure we don't. Probes are thoroughly sterilised to make sure they don't contaminate the destination with Earth life. Doing so would invalidate anything they found there. We don't know much about the rest of the solar system, so we need to carefully study it in its natural state. If we found signs of life somewhere we'd need to be able to be sure it wasn't something we introduced by accident.

Well if you think about it, all power stations contain potentially dangerous levels of power. Kind of goes with the territory.

We've only just managed to have the first spacecraft leave the solar system. That's the galactic equivalent of the end of our street. The next star is like crossing an ocean compared to that. With our current technology reaching even the closest neighbouring star would take tens of thousands of years.

That's no more of a problem than any other generator going offline. Grids are generally run with enough spare capacity to deal with a major thermal plant dropping out without warning.

Base load requires a system that can generate very reliably for very low cost. Adding enough storage generally makes solar power uncompetitive except in areas with very high isolation and low land values, where solar thermal becomes viable.

Base load generators are on fixed price contracts Rakaydos, and it's a very low rate. That's why any space based power station will be uneconomic while the cost of lifting mass to orbit remains high. The extreme capital costs would put your cost per kWh well above what you could earn. That's why every time it's been looked at it's been decided against. As others have said, spending the same amount on a ground mounted array would generate a lot more power overall.

If it's implemented anything like the multiplayer mod you won't be able to interact with other players' ships unless they let you.

I don't think you want to get too hung up on the "massless" thing. Photons might technically have no rest mass, but they're never at rest anyway, so they always have momentum. Since they're always trucking along at the speed of light they always have significant momentum, so for your purposes you can just think of them like an object with mass. Some radiation is particles that genuinely do have mass btw. For example alpha particles which are neutrons and protons (basically a helium nucleus) and beta particles which are electrons.

Radiation is made up of particles like photons, so does have momentum.

Apples and oranges. Wind and solar don't compete directly with nuclear. The type of base load plants that are an alternative to nuclear are normally coal or gas, so if you're not building a nuke plant, that's probably what you're building. Nuclear is expensive but it's also the number one choice for low carbon base load. That might change if carbon capture picks up, but that's not for certain. As for geothermal and tidal, both of those are limited by the available resource. Japan should have a pretty respectable tidal resource in the south, but I've never seen any numbers on how much potential there is.

No it won't. Even projects that are fairly well along (such as Tokamaks like ITER) won't result in a commercial power plant in that timeframe, even if everything goes perfectly. That's Pelamis, it's being trialled up in Scotland. It's wave power though, not tidal. Different animals, wave power is similar to wind in that it's intermittent and difficult to predict. Tidal is intermittent but metronomically predictable, you can predict output years in advance so you can site your generators to smooth out the lumps.

It'll be part of the energy mix for those countries that have access to good tidal resources, but it will remain fairly niche. The available tidal resource just isn't enough to satisfy more than a small sliver of demand. I don't want to seem negative about it because in general I'm a big supporter of tidal power, but you have to be realistic.

It still has to be financially viable, or else they'll never be able to raise the money to build it.

Presumably they're looking for something to replace nuclear for base load generation. I remain unconvinced that SPSs can provide base load economically. Base load is a fixed contract, but the price per MWh is rock bottom. PV isn't economical for base load at ground level, and going to orbit only improves insolation by a bit over 30% per unit area, and a bit over double in terms of time. You just aren't going to get enough of a performance increase to make lifting all that mass into orbit economical. The cost of the receiver would be considerable too, due to the amount of area it would take up.

If something sounds too good to be true...

I think what confuses people is that it's conventional for pressure to be expressed as gauge pressure, rather than absolute.

Indeed. Realistically though you're probably going to want to reduce the humans down to a compact, lightweight form that can be stored for long periods. Even travelling at superluminal speeds the travel time is likely to be very long, possibly longer than a human lifespan. Candidates for that include things like frozen embryos and digitised brain scans. Another point to consider is that unmodified Earth humans are unlikely to be compatible with the environment of an exoplanet. Unless you fancy living in a bubble for all eternity you're likely to have to make modifications for things like gravity, atmospheric gas mix and the specific microbes and pathogens of your destination. Permanent settlement implies a genetically customised population (in the same way our current genome is customised for Earth). To pull this off would require considerable study of the destination, so there would likely be a fair amount of infrastructure already available at the other end.

Rough ballpark I'd say 10 years for a flight prototype. Wouldn't be surprised to see it stretch out to 15 or 20 though, as there would be a lot of oversight and they'd need to be quite conservative with their testing programme and any problems they encountered.

This is an important point. Combat in space won't exist for the sake of itself, it'll occur because it confers a tactical or strategic advantage on the ground. Even current combat doctrines urge senior commanders to consider themselves operating in a 3-dimensional battlespace that includes space. The main role of space assets in the near to medium future will remain the same as it is now: they're C4I assets. Their primary role is reconnaissance, navigation and comms. The main role for space combat vehicles would be to protect the satellites, and to destroy enemy satellites. The main threats against satellites will be ASAT weapons and interceptors in orbit. Ground fire can be mitigated by surface or atmospheric assets, or by a strike platform in orbit (as ASATs are likely to be deployed very deep) and orbital interceptors would have to be tackled by friendly ASATs or interceptors. When it comes to deployment ASATs would operate as point defences, but would probably only be effective against fairly low orbits. To protect or deny a low orbit or to go an get a satellite in a GEO orbit you'd need a combat vehicle capable of manoeuvring. You could deny a big chunk of useful low orbits by deploying interceptors into retrograde orbits so that they'd encounter anything in a prograde one quite quickly. They could just sit there orbiting indefinitely until they were required to engage. If approaching from interplanetary it wouldn't even be expensive to get them into those orbits, unlike the poor sods on the ground. Engaging targets in GEO orbits would have the advantage that if they manoeuvered to avoid you then that's a mission kill in your favour, so they'd be a sitting duck really.

I just rocked into Kerbin's atmosphere near-vertically on the way back from the Mun last night. Jeb was loving it. No problem there then.

Have you installed the proprietary drivers Psykikk, or are you using nouveau?

Do aircraft deal with heavy enemy air defences by stacking on armour? Weight is just as critical to spacecraft as it is to aircraft (probably moreso in fact). Spacecraft would deal with heavily defended points the same way aircraft would, using EW, tactics and specialised weapons that targeted defensive fire control sensors. SEAD is dangerous work, but totally doable by unarmoured vehicles.

Do they really need to be more realistic though? Adding simulation that only makes the game more frustrating to play is fine for a hardcore simulator, but I don't think KSP needs to go there.

You can spam sensors like the thermometer, you'll just get reducing returns. It's only the goo pods and the materials bay that are one-shot. The example you posted says: rerunnable = True