Duxwing

Astronauts living aboard the ISS can help improve future spacecraft designs by telling us about the long-term microgravity and isolation that future explorers will endure. ISS astronauts also can instruct future ones about the finer points of orbital maneuvering and science. Future starshipwrights can study the ISS for examples of sound design and craftsmanship. These and other lessons would be invaluable once vessels were beyond easy rescue and therefore needed reliable, comfortable ways of doing mundane tasks and avoiding danger. I see no reason to stop learning now. -Duxwing

He now plays it, too! -Duxwing

Safety first! I love my Kerbals and would be heartbroken should they die. Among my measures are: -Rounding all dV costs up to the nearest hundred -Launching in proven, reusable vehicles with escape systems -Orbiting and ascending prograde to planetary rotation -Quicksaving and quickloading -Listening to or humming only soothing music during tense maneuvers -Deactivating probe core battery until emergency use -Omnidirectional solar panel coverage -Large emergency budgets for rescue craft -Duxwing

Science-fiction speculation: -Star Trek: Other civilizations exist and follow the Prime Directive of non-interference. -Mass Effect: BioWare's fiction is horribly accurate and we are the first intelligent life arising after the last Reaper cycle. -Star Wars: Other civilizations exist, use nigh-invisible power sources, and simply do not bother contacting us. -Duxwing

Three cheers for Ol' Boom-Boom! A nuclear pulse drive, especially one launched from a graphite barge in the Arctic, would enable missions well-worth their risk and expense. -Duxwing

To say we are undergoing a mass extinction is to stretch the term beyond usefulness: the Great Dying was a mass extinction, the Yucutan Impact was a mass extinction, the Ice Ages were mass extinctions. The horrors we see today are not of that scale. -Duxwing

Humanity will survive what it has wrought. -Duxwing

Nitpick: Infinitesimal volume. -Duxwing

China has the most resources and experience necessary to land on Mars. -Duxwing

And have you not found us? -Duxwing

To give "dating advice" is to falsely imply that, by doing what one likes not, one will meet another who likes what one does. Almost all people thus met do not, and whoever thus meets them endures the triple miseries of bad times, bad relationships, and bad breakups. The correct inference from general frustration with dating instead should be of such a deep or general problem as a wrong social environment, wrong idea of good partners, or wrong idea of self. -Duxwing

Too complicated and expensive: it probably just has a passive RFID (like your car's remote start sensor) and waits for a very-short-range transmitter on the barge to set it off. -Duxwing

Wow! Nice! Dirt-cheap-platinum, here we come! -Duxwing

Time for another survey probe! -- A two-billion dollar loan should cover initial expenses. The first billion would be spent to establish the company and develop the tug and mining rig. The second billion would be spent on two launches, the first with the two craft, the second with propellant for the first payload trip. The business would become very profitable after a few years. -Duxwing

Is your life not fun? --- Aerodynamic realism preferences seem distributed among three large groups: stock aerodynamics users, NEAR users, and FAR users. Many of each group have likely considered each option and chosen the one they most prefer, making all universal plans inconvenience some players. The question therefore is utilitarian: "What stock aerodynamic system would create the greatest good for the greatest many?" From a recent forum poll we can infer that almost all players would prefer such a realistic aerodynamic system as FAR--even if it broke backward compatibility. I argue that we should do their will for not only their sake but that of future KSP players, who would know only realistic aerodynamics. These aerodynamics and their implications would need only such brief explanation as in KSP's v0.13 tutorial; e.g., "Turning a swiftly-climbing rocket will expose to the air its side, which will turn the rocket like a rudder turns a boat." when the player first achieves high dynamic pressure. Players wanting simple, intuitive aerodynamics should consider that realistic ones usually are simple and intuitive. Sleek things slip through the air whereas fat things drag like boulders; payload fairings and heat shields protect delicate payloads; cargo bays and inline parts let air smoothly pass. The only complex or counterintuitive mechanics I have observed involved exotic flight regimes, which should be strange, or became intuitive once experienced; e.g., in flight, the center of lift tries to follow the center of mass. Realistic aerodynamics, I therefore further argue, are simple and intuitive during normal flight and offer whoever ventures beyond it fascinating challenges. Dynamic instability would be among these challenges. It involves putting the center of lift before the center of mass, which the center of lift will try to follow whenever the craft turns, making tiny control inputs very powerful. The challenge is controlling the instability lest the craft should turn uncontrollably--and the challenge is optional! Putting the center of mass before the center of lift tames maneuvering enough for peaceful, steady flight. -Duxwing

Darn. -Duxwing

Wikipedia disagrees: "In the laboratory, platinum wire is used for electrodes; platinum pans and supports are used in thermogravimetric analysis because of the stringent requirements of chemical inertness upon heating to high temperatures (~1000 °C). Platinum is used as an alloying agent for various metal products, including fine wires, noncorrosive laboratory containers, medical instruments, dental prostheses, electrical contacts, and thermocouples. Platinum-cobalt, an alloy of roughly three parts platinum and one part cobalt, is used to make relatively strong permanent magnets.[25] Platinum-based anodes are used in ships, pipelines, and steel piers." And you are assuming demand will remain constant. It might grow with supply (like demand for digital music with the iPod) and thereby maintain price. Obviously, supplying enough platinum would reduce its price, but everything orbiting is precious. SLS payload, for example, costs about 3.8 million dollars per ton. Cheap space travelers would rather buy propellant in space, even for 3.5 million dollars per ton, than lift it from Earth's gravity well. Also, a mining company could reduce propellant costs or increase payloads by mining itself propellant. Bringing no return propellant would reduce outbound propellant to thirty-three tons per trip, reducing of refueling launches from one every trip to one every four trips, enormously reducing costs. Further, mineral payload would be limited only by how much propellant the tug could take from the mines, enormously increasing revenue. Last, the tug could periodically return propellant instead of minerals, completely replacing Earth-based refueling and its enormous costs. Bringing even more propellant would enable orbital propellant vending. The market is rich! I am assuming a round trip to the asteroid belt. I am assuming it because it would enable mining only the richest asteroids, some whereof might be pure platinum. -Duxwing

Ooh, could this infinity make them transmit information faster than light? -Duxwing

I disagree because development has slowed, halted, and reversed population growth in the United States and European Union. --- Should developing Earth require more minerals than it has, we might get them from asteroids. Finding, studying, returning, and landing these enormous stones would be so hard as to necessitate some combination of new technologies and epic, brute-force efforts. Consider for example a traditional NERVA-powered tug, which would need about six kilometers-per-second delta-V and mass eighty-six tons just to retrieve a one-ton asteroid. For five hundred million dollars, a block II SLS could lift it to low earth orbit. Recovering the investment would require, for further example, about a kilogram of platinum. The enormous cost of launch and recovery would make on-site refining and orbital refueling of mining rigs imperative: one one-ton payload of pure platinum would be worth only forty-million dollars. A break-even payload therefore would 12.5 tons. If the engine massed thirty-five and the gear five, then the inbound trip would require about twenty tons of propellant. Moving about fifty tons of mass into the asteroid belt (no payload) would require about sixty tons of propellant. The overall non-payload-mass would be about one-hundred-ten tons--a respectable ~1/10 payload fraction. Refueling in low-earth-orbit would enable even greater payloads by permitting every SLS launch to be propellant alone. Were the refueling tanks' mass fraction a handy 1/13, the refueled tug would have 40 tons dry mass and 160 tons wet mass, granting an empty delta-V of over nine thousaaaaand (~10km/s). Forty-seven tons could be used to bring the tug to the belt, leaving seventy-three to move up to about thirty-six tons of platinum home, thereby tripling revenue and generating a per-trip profit of about a billion dollars. The necessary investment for commercial production is beyond me. If the tug and mining equipment cost half a billion each, establishing and maintaining the company another billion, and two launches done before first revenue, then it would be five-billion dollars. With constant platinum prices and a one-year setup and launch every year, the business would pay for itself in eight years. So, who's ready to make some money? -Duxwing

Kerbin! I value being near its intelligent life, space program, and beautiful biomes much more than I do being in the barren, hostile Joolean system. -Duxwing

I meant that the mod makes RCS ports loudly bang shut however-open they were and that the loudness of the ports' closing should comport to their prior openness; e.g., shutting a port at full thrust should be loud whereas shutting one barely thrusting should be almost-silent. EDIT: I misheard the video: what I thought was a bang is a puff-hiss. -Duxwing

kww.kikipedia.org The sum total of kerbal knowledge--free for everyone to edit! -Duxwing

It comes with an artificial general intelligence!* -Duxwing *Friendliness not guaranteed. Do not instruct to make paperclips.

Nicely-done! To Mars! -Duxwing

@Nibb @MBobrik I think you each misunderstand the other's point: Nibb wants to have probes study the universe for us, and MBobrik wants to humanity to expand into space. These two ideas are not mutually-exclusive. -Duxwing