Stargate525

So, I'm plotting out a semi-hard scifi setting, and I'm a little stumped on one aspect of the ship that this story is going to be revolving around. It's a survey ship... sort of. It needs to be able to locate and obtain at least general planetary characteristics (orbits, atmosphere or no, water or no, obvious life) from a dead start. It arrives at a random location within... lets say the orbit of neptune, at a non-relativistic but fast vector. It's not a dedicated scientific vessel, so advanced or very knowledge-intensive methods are out. Basically, it needs to identify the main bodies in the system (large moons would be great as well), select one that would be most like earth, and be able to navigate to it. How would you kit a ship to do that?

Yes, but they don't model multiple-body gravity. In the gravity calculations, there's only the active vessel and the SOI body. this is fine for a single body, but if you have two rotating around each other, that means the center of the SOI is in open space, the center of rotation between the two bodies. Also, since the SOI is in the middle of open space, you could go THROUGH it with your ship. The slingshot effect of such a thing would net you thousands of dV that shouldn't be available to you. In KSP, that means you'd orbit that center, despite being closer or further away from one of the moons. Orbiting just one of them would be impossible. There's some trickery you could do with sub-SOIs that would mitigate it, but orbits around something like that in KSP would never work as expected.

I agree with #2, but #1 is impossible with the way they model body gravity. Either they're two separate SOIs, or you have a naked point mass which will wreak havoc with orbits. For my own part, I want a moon that rotates extremely quickly, like 'just shy of tearing itself into debris' quickly. Bonus if its mass is very high. I'd love a body where the d/v to land on the pole versus the equater was a 1000 m/s difference.

You did manage to miss a pair of them, though. One of the side-effects of lag is that keystrokes sometimes don't register, or take a moment to do so. I know personally when I'm having key input lag, the spacebar is the one that suffers the most. having the delay allows a bit of a breather-room for someone who assumed that the first didn't register, pressed again, only to discover the first one hadn't fired yet.

Oh, I know there's ways to prevent it, just explaining what's currently happening to him.

Yes. If you have SAS and RCS lit up on the navball, you'll bleed monopropellant to the SAS stability systems.

Because of how the standard camera sits, your ship's 'up' and your VISUAL 'up' is very seldom the same thing. That's probably the issue that you're having. As far as them always firing slightly, do you have SAS on? If so, it will utilize the RCS system for stabilization. The result of this is typically a very slow bleed of your RCS as the system uses it to correct pitch/yaw/roll.

Eh... Still a pipe dream IMO. I think the first real extraterrestrial nation will be whichever lunar or martian colony decides to make a go of it on their lonesome. I'd be flabbergasted if that happened in my lifetime.

Did you guys read the article? There IS NO STATION. The entirety of the 'territory' this fictional nation will have is a commercial satellite. It makes less sense that claiming an unused oil rig is its own sovereign country.

Good luck. You can't deport them to their home country, their country has no judiciary, no executive, no legal system. They produce nothing for export, and have no diplomatic or real influence. Publicity stunt, or another thing I can add to the folder of 'evidence even scientists can be idiots'.

I can't be bothered to keep the 'clear context' of your discussion in mind throughout this entire thread. I have a right to make my arguments however I want, and including the dV to LEO when that is exactly what you're going to need for the first miner (Unless there's an orbital shipyard I'm unaware of) is not deceptive at all. "It will cost a lot to get there" Is not a distraction any more than "But the gas will be atrocious" is a distraction off of the argument of where one should drive. A straw man would also imply that I'm setting up a false argument YOU made. Since I'M the one who brought the fuel aspect up as a negative to the trillion+ dollar asteroids, it can't possibly be one. Further, YOU are the one who didn't bother looking at your sources, and assumed that the asteroid listing was all NEOs. YOU are the one who made the assumption here, and I don't appreciate being called out as deceptive and distracting when I am merely pointing out the flaw in your own argument. Good day.

There's several on the list in the 11-12k dV range. These aren't NEOs, they're in the main belt, and at a good 20-30% tilt to Earth. I'm also not privy to the calculations they're making for the change; somehow I doubt they're fast-forwarding 40 years to get the ideal rendezvous where a plane change won't be needed. I also don't know if they're including the 9k dV to get to orbit. And according to this dv map of the solar system, Venus takes almost 16k

It's extrapolated from public JPL and asteroid tracking data, and cross-inferred from known spectromety of asteroids onto other ones of similar brightness and characteristics. I presume the valuations are based on some fixed point of metals and materials indexes.

As the one who provided that initial link with the asteroid values, you clearly didn't look up the actual meteors in the listing. The ones with the trillion+ dollar value tag attached are MASSIVE, and largely nickel-iron. The cost estimate must be from the fact that they are representative of an absolutely massive amount of common materials. You then need to worry about the dV needed to get that back to earth (as most of those meteors also list dV requirements in the tens of thousands of m/s)

There is very little money to be made, nowadays, from raw materials. Your profit lies in bulk, and there's a reason that the wealthiest people aren't mining or farming magnates. People largely make money off of people. Either this changes, or the biggest profit from a martian colony is the increased consumer base. Or, if you want to be cynical about it, it's the perfect place to perform experimentation that is too dangerous or too illegal to perform on Earth, iron out the kinks, and then benefit from the finished product back here.

Dumping 3 tons of iridium on the market is almost a third of the entire planet's production. the sheer AMOUNT of it will crash the market, or at the very least make it dip significantly.

I suspect that the very first 'mining' operations are going to involve targeted impacts of the meteor (either in whole or in parts) onto designated zones. The resulting debris is then mined out and smelted as normal, and the process is repeated.

That's because when you cross over into the Mun's SOI, you'll find you're on a collision course with it.

If we assume 'a few tons' of iridium is 3, the market value for that is currently 56 million dollars. If the asteroid miner is reusable (ie, redirects, then moves to a different target, etc.), you can recoup that quickly. http://www.asterank.com/ has a listing of asteroids, and their estimated value in raw materials. There are hundreds that would, if mined, net hundreds of trillions of dollars in material.

It's going to be terrible for the first company to do it; there are asteroids that, if they're even partially made of what we think they are, will utterly crash the rare earths market. Iridium will, for a time, be as cheap as copper. Only way to keep making money is to cartelize it and release it a little at a time. That won't go over well with the public. I honestly think we'll need to have a permanent presence on a different system body for it to become viable; cheaper to mine the asteroid, drop the ore near the colony, refine, and build whatever, than ship the finished goods out of Earth's gravity well.

Honestly, there's not a huge amount of math involved unless you want to do things efficiently. It does take a while to get the 'hang' of orbital mechanics, but it's a system that's not impossible to intuit once you get it in your head.

This development model hasn't been extremely unusual for almost three years now. Early access, open betas, and perpetual development has been a growing norm since Minecraft.

What alshain said; a little turnover is good to cull stagnation. This was a gutting. I don't know of any game that's continued after more than half the dev team leaves in such a short period.

Well then. ...RIP KSP.

Isn't that... half the dev team?