NGTOne

Given current materials, yes, absolutely, a vacuum airship is impossible. However, as has been said already, a vacuum airship, IF IT WERE POSSIBLE, would represent the ultimate in displacement-based lifting power, far greater than helium or even hydrogen. All that being said, though, it isn't inconceivable that, 20, 30, or even 50 years from now, someone will come up with a material that makes it possible, whether it's carbon nanotubes, spider silk (or some derivative), or something we haven't even thought of.

Your values are off, rather significantly. Most of the parts, even including the thruster and fuel, can be obtained for under $50K (in total). Launch costs for CubeSats, depending on exactly what else is going up and where it's going, range between $20-30K. I'm assuming that whoever is attempting to launch the thing has all the skills required to put the pieces together, and is willing to invest the time to do so. But I've seen (admittedly simplistic) CubeSat missions for as low as $50K. There was a successful Kickstarter a while back - dude launched a CubeSat that did nothing but tweet canned messages from contributors. The specifics may vary, but it's reasonably simple to design a 3U CubeSat mission for under $100K. My theoretical mission was for a lunar flyby from LEO (entirely possible, though the payload capacity shrinks rather significantly), and my estimated budget (given the research I did) came to about $130K, and that was with SIGNIFICANT padding. What I'm interested to see is the 6U (2x3) CubeSat standard I've heard about. That has some REAL potential (CubeSat Mars flyby, anyone?)

The power requirement was fairly modest - about 20W, I think.

I actually did the math - with one of the commercially available electric thrusters I looked at, and about 1.5kg of fuel, you could get ~5km/s of dV. And disposal from GEO is actually pretty easy - boosting it to a higher "graveyard" orbit takes less than 30 m/s.

The problem is, the thrust might be too low to resist atmospheric drag, even in LEO. The electric thrusters they sell develop tiny fractions of a newton of thrust. A lot of off-the-shelf components AREN'T rad-hardened, but I'd be very surprised if you couldn't find some. Besides, effective rad-shielding would weigh too much (a 3U CubeSat has a 4kg weight limit).

Is that round part at the front a Procedural Fairings part, or something else?

There's another thing as well - GEO, believe it or not, is regulated by the international community (specifically, the International Telecommunications Union). This is to prevent geosynchronous sats from, you guessed it, interfering with each other's radio signals (or smashing into each other). Any other orbits are fair game, though.

I like doing things ridiculously big. One of the things I do in a ridiculously big way is science. I load up my ship with far more science components than are actually necessary, and send it off to distant worlds. However, one thing I've noticed is that, when I toggle all my science components and try to transmit the data all at once, one dish ends up transmitting by itself, while the others transmit one or two items, then go dormant. This, naturally, makes science data transmission take several times longer than it should. This, to me at least, suggests that the means of queueing data transmission for a given dish should be tweaked, such that the load on each dish is as balanced as possible. What are your thoughts?

There are commercially available electric and monopropellant thrusters built for CubeSats - problem is, they don't produce a lot of thrust (naturally, right?), and they all need a 3U sat for any appreciable fuel/payload ratio (some don't even fit into a 1U unit).

Not quite. A RasPi isn't radiation-hardened - over time, cosmic rays striking the silicon chips will cause errors and damage, culminating in component failure.

I actually looked into building a CubeSat myself - based on the research I did, your available electrical power (on the order of, if you were lucky, about 20 watts) wouldn't be enough to run an omnidirectional transmitter that could actually get picked up against the background static. Best bet would be two dishes of some sort, one on the ground, and the other on your sat. I'd wager that the one on the ground would have to be rather large (think something along the lines of an old-school satellite TV dish). And keep in mind that even with cheap, off-the-shelf components, a CubeSat project will cost you on the order of roughly 80-100K. Anything more custom than that will likely push your costs higher.

Unfortunately, while you're right, I doubt any space agency would risk sending a billion-plus-dollar spacecraft underground, where it could lose signal or get smashed by a falling rock.

WHERE did you get that?

Well, why not something like the girder structures in KSP? Something that will "catch" on the spikes, possibly with levelling hydraulics, so that it can just land on them non-destructively?

Ehhhhh... not quite. Depending on how close you get TO the hole, it might (this, of course, assumes that you have sufficient energy to lower your PE to just outside the event horizon, and that your spacecraft is capable of withstanding the immense tidal forces of doing so). If you lower your PE to really close to the event horizon, you will very likely reach an appreciable fraction of c when you hit it. Now, naturally, you'll only be TRAVELLING at that appreciable fraction for a split second, but nonetheless, the principle holds. In the thread I mentioned earlier, someone suggested using a black hole as the ultimate grav-assist - sling through the black hole system near the event horizon, and you'll get a SIGNIFICANT boost to your speed (what that boost is, remains to be seen - see assumptions, above. Naturally, this is highly conjectural). Once you're inside the event horizon, the laws of physics (for lack of better understanding) start to break down. Kepler's laws no longer apply. SR likely doesn't apply. GR... MIGHT... apply. Any path you take through 4-dimensional spacetime will inevitably lead you towards the singularity. In short: no escape, not by conventional physical means at any rate. It might be possible to escape using spacetime warping (the operating principle of an Alcubierre drive), but this is conjecture at best, and even if someone DOES manage to develop an Alcubierre propulsion system, I doubt they'd find anyone foolhardy enough to dive into a black hole to test it there (except maybe Jeb).

Personally, I'm of the view that nationalism on the whole is idiotic. "Oh, hey, look, that guy over there speaks a different language than we do! BANG BANG BANG!". Co-operating on these sorts of projects is the ONLY way they will succeed, especially as it allows different agencies to share risk and costs. The era of competing space programs is, in a word, over - it was a ludicrous proposition then, and is even more so now. To be honest, I think that private industry will drive space technology in the next 30-50 years. They won't be the ones doing the EXPLORING, but they'll be the ones establishing infrastructures and developing new technologies, leaving the national space agencies (or even space nonprofits - who knows?) to do the exploring.

I like this idea. Turn disaster into massive profits for all

No magic, just sound engineering principles

Wait a second... are those CLOUDS on Duna???? If so, where did you get them??

I contributed to a topic a while back that examined the physics of black holes in some detail. Diverged a bit (FTL travel, all sorts of other good stuff) as it went on, but there's some decent explanations of black hole and space-time physics.

I heard somewhere about the Russkies and the Americans teaming up to send some of the old ISS components (and some new ISS-derived hardware - basically, the bits they didn't use for OPSEK) as a mothership to Mars. Not sure how far that got past conceptual, though. Not 100% sure where I heard it, though.

I imagine it being in a reconnaissance role, honestly - weapons DEPLOYMENT is impractical at hypersonic (what are you going to do? Carry the weapon outside? Open a hatch? Either way, too much drag, which means you either end up slowing WAY down or spinning out of control and disintegrating). But it can carry a massive load of camera gear, take off from a base or boat, snap some pics, then be gone before the enemy/not-an-enemy knows they were even spied on. Satellites are predictable, really freakin' fast planes aren't.

Perhaps more accurately, the ASAS module looks like it

Kerbol-rise over Twin Craters Outpost, my first major project in 0.22 and my first big all-stock construction project ever (Universe Replacer notwithstanding). Current crew of 6, current maximum crew of 44. Equipped with science module (massive amount of science equipment), solar farm, small hab block, and apartment block. Other planned features include a large mobile rover, and successively larger habitation facilities. The rover in the foreground is the assembly rover - it splits in half, and is used to manipulate the various modules during the construction process. I'm currently developing a better version. And, naturally, all of this is in career mode (why not, right?)

I think what he meant was that the paper blueprints were transferred to microfiche and THEN tossed in the shredder (to save space).