NGTOne

From what I understand, you'd still need to burn the near-infinite amount of propellant to approach C any closer. While grav-assist from a black hole would put you very near C, and fling you out to wherever you wanted to go at what is likely a very appreciable fraction, you'd still be dealing with relativistic values. Infinity is, after all, a very big number.

I've never been accused of being afraid of lag. I've had other projects where the part count was somewhere into the 1500s, and I'm planning this thing such that the count doesn't grow supremely large for a structure of this size (for instance, there are almost no struts in the entire station thus far). With the 8 arm bases installed, it's only got 176 parts and weighs over 1100 tons. I'm counting mostly on inertia and sheer mass to serve as the structural reinforcement. I estimate that, with all 16 arm bases installed, it'll still be less than 250 parts. I use large frames attached to the rockets to keep the components stable and strong during launch, and then remove and scrap them once the module is installed. Means the final station will have no RCS ports, struts, or unnecessary/redundant parts, but I can still keep the RCS ports balanced and far away from CoM. It means my docking clearances are a little tighter, but I'm convinced it'll pay off in the long haul, as the project gets closer to completion. Here you can actually see the frame "sliding off" the end of arm base #8.

Bringing arm base #8 of my Stanford torus project in to dock with the station core. Space is beautiful. The goal of the project is to build a full-scale (radius = about 1.6km) Stanford torus over Kerbin.

Or powersats

I meant in the event that the land should become unsuitable for agriculture (for whatever reason). And I seem to recall reading some articles about groups and companies experimenting with large-scale hydroponic farming. I mean, you can't grow wheat hydroponically (the scale required for a reasonable yield is on the order of ludicrous), but a lot of other crops, you can.

KSP is running out of memory. This is a known issue (caused by KSP's 32-bit design causing a hard cap of 4GB of RAM usage, and there is no fix on the horizon), and can be resolved by removing some mods, especially large part mods. Or try removing some of the textures. Your call.

Humans haven't stopped looking up... the Communists stopped sending stuff to space, so there was nobody to compete with. Hopefully soon the political element of spaceflight will be a remnant of a bygone era, as private interests take over the arena where government agencies once held a monopoly.

Wow, talk about lithobraking. How much of it survived?

As mentioned above, both by other posters and the 70s-era NASA/DoE reference design (which is still the gold standard for powersat designs; nobody has, to my knowledge, come up with a more complete design - my own investigation into this is ongoing, please correct me if I'm mistaken on this), if you were using a straight microwave transmitter, your groundside energy density would be insufficient to cook a TV dinner, let alone people or other valuable stuff. Even as much as 5 GW, when spread over a 10km-diameter circle, isn't a hell of a lot per m^2. I wouldn't stand (fly? float? EVA, I guess) in front of the transmitter, but you'd be fine on the receiving end. Lasers and MASERs are a different story, though - there might be objections there, as the beam IS concentrated enough to do some damage. Not quite sure how MASERs would affect stuff/people (again, not a physicist), but I know a laser with a power of 5GW, even operating in a continuous mode (prototype military lasers operate in a high-power pulsed mode - greater energy delivered per time unit, but limited operational time) would be enough to do some damage. Upside is, when you're in GEO, it's hard to hit anything smaller than a building, even with a laser - your tracking has to be unbelievably precise, to very small fractions of a degree.

Newtonian/Einsteinian physics. It's theorized that you can exceed lightspeed (from the PoV of a stationary observer outside the bubble) by bending spacetime around your spacecraft - effectively, space moves and carries your ship with it, while the ship itself remains stationary (from the PoV of someone inside the bubble).

Wow, I never expected to cause a discussion this big. Anyways, here's my question: couldn't the haves use technology to compensate for changes in land fertility? For instance, I've read about a number of different initiatives to build automated, fully climate-controlled indoor farms. While our diets in the Western world might change, the end result might be that we muddle through, while other states have a chance to prosper.

I believe it does, but you need to use some combination of Hooligan balloons and KAS to get to it.

It's not a centrifuge, it's a large, awesome-looking fuel tank.

Started in on my full-scale Stanford torus build... Sigh... it's gonna be a LOOOOONG build...

Man... I've always seen those pictures of Earth from space, and they were beautiful... but seeing Kerbin the same way, with the starfield and clouds and HD textures is just... breathtaking all its own. Two thumbs up!

The funny bit is, this issue is actually resolved by one of the design constraints - under the designs studied by the Summer Study and others, the beam ends up being incredibly wide when it hits Earth, on the order of about 10km across (hence the giant receiving antenna). What I read was that, even in the middle of the beam, the power level would be far less than US dosage regulations allow, and at the edges it would be about 1/4 of the level that we receive from universal background. Even 4GW disperses to fairly little when it has to fill a circle 10km across. Not only that, but potential designs have been floated that would make beam-steering failure a literal impossibility, by making it physically impossible for the beam to go off course (using a pilot beam, such that the beam literally could not strike a location that didn't have a pilot beam receiver, or something to that effect - I'm not much of a physicist, so I can't claim to understand it particularly well).

So, back in the '70s, NASA and a bunch of space-exploration advocates proposed the idea of building solar power satellites ("powersats") - if memory serves, during the Summer Study. Fresh off the high of the Moon landings, the future of space exploration and exploitation looked bright. Basically, the premise was, put a bunch of solar panels (or a solar furnace) in geosynchronous orbit, and beam power down to the surface using microwaves (microwave power transmission over long distances is well-understood and well-demonstrated, and was that way at the time). You end up with clean, consequence-free power 24/7/365, no questions asked (with about a 75-minute-long "night" period when the powersat passes behind the Earth). Now, fast forward 40 years. Surface-based solar panels only collect power half the time at best (and aren't particularly efficient to boot), all the good rivers have been dammed, and wind turbines blow (pun intended). Nuclear fission plants are as popular as shag carpeting, and commercial fusion power is decades away. Even if you don't believe in peak oil or anthropogenic climate change, smog isn't much fun, so there's a big movement away from fossil fuel-based power generation. Now, a number of different multinational corporate conglomerations and national governments (the only organizations with enough resources) have proposed the construction of powersats as the solution to a power-hungry world. In particular, Mitsubishi (yes, THAT Mitsu, that makes everything from cars to cargo ships) and the Indian and Chinese governments have floated proposals to do just this. Now, the problem of powersats isn't a simple one: In order to achieve efficient, large-scale power transfer, you need an antenna about 1km across in space (and phased arrays won't cut it - the thinned-array curse makes certain of that) and a receiver about 10km across on the ground. Most conservative estimates put the cost of a single powersat, generating about 4GW of power, anywhere between US$11B and US$320B, depending on engineering constraints and decisions (decisions made by people much smarter than me), and would require a multitude of Earth-based launches and large-scale orbital construction. As a means of comparison, conventional power plants, whether coal or nuclear, cost anywhere between US$3B and US$6B per GW upfront. Now, the question I put to you, the KSP community, is thus: Is it worth it? What's a better hope for the future of our electrical grid? Space-based solar? Nuclear fusion? "Conventional" alternative energy sources? And will powersats ever have a piece of that grid at all?

Where on Earth did you get that beautiful Kerbin? o.O

You didn't... how did that even get into the air?

Oh, I think I understand... the game isn't visually rendering a seemingly invisible part (the CoM of the wheels is out of sight when the covers are on), so the vehicle seems to "hover" - meanwhile, the bug (feature? Intentional choice?) that prevents an object from colliding with itself prevents the whole thing from tearing itself apart... fascinating...

How does that work?

Those supports are temporary - a test, to see whether the structure could carry its own weight. As for mounting the engines on the outside, I'm not sure that's the best idea - struts are more rigid in tension than compression, and the whole thing is fundamentally a tension structure. I'm not even entirely sure how I'd go about rebuilding it into a compression structure (as would be required by mounting the engines on the ring). I might give it a try, though.

Completely in agreement. I can't remember the number of times I've had to send someone back to my junk station after evacuating it to rename it. I once had to make a 10km EVA jump in low Jool orbit to do just that after my science station was destroyed by a physics glitch.

No, the motors flex like any other part. As for part count, I passed the threshold of not caring at about 1500

The so-called "Trojan" asteroids are two clouds of asteroids that inhabit Jupiter's L4 and L5 points (60 degrees in front of and behind it along the same orbit, respectively), having collected there between the formation of the solar system and the present day. Because each asteroid has negligible mass relative to both the Sun and Jupiter, it stays at the Lagrange point, until some other sufficient force (collision, what have you) causes it to leave. While it's technically possible for ANY body to have Trojans (and a few Martian ones have been identified), Jupiter's sheer mass relative to the rest of the Solar System, and position close to the asteroid belt, ensure that it has the largest Trojan clouds. While, yes, the OP's original suggestion is correct, it would be possible to implement a field of Trojans without having to resort to N-body physics (the orbital properties of the Trojans are decently well-understood - giving them slightly different orbits with apside differences of a few tens or hundreds of km would be sufficient - this is how it works in reality, more or less, and is a decent approximation of the path the rock takes as it orbits the Lagrange, as the Lagrange "orbits" the Sun), I'm pretty sure this would be a low priority for the devs, possibly even having to wait until after the implementation of a proper asteroid belt (if THAT ever happens, naturally). Cool idea, though. Might make for some interesting missions (first Jool, then one of the Trojan clouds).