DerekL1963

Working with high tech really isn't different than working with low tech - it's still work. (And not much at all like Star Trek.) And high tech or low, most of the work on Mars is going to be painstaking and repetitive and not much excitement to be had. It's not an adventure in any way, shape, or form. It's work, a metric crapload of it, and a return to cramped living quarters at the end of the day and almost certainly extremely boring and largely repetitive food and canned entertainment. With the exception of the food, which was actually pretty good, BTDT four times underneath the Atlantic. You couldn't pay me to do it on Mars. The people who think they want to are clueless as to what they're actually getting involved in.

- Study past missions. - Practice in the sandbox. - Take a look at recently completed Jool-5 runs. - Practice, practice, practice.

OK, the frame is Near Future... where did the crew compartment come from?

If that's true - then where are they today? If that's true - then why was there only one company building and operating passenger airships at the time of the Hindenburg's loss? Seriously, the facts do not support your assertions. Airships were abandoned because they're hideously inefficient and extraordinarily sensitive to wind and weather. Their niche, at the time, was long distance passenger transport (which they weren't very good at) and they were rapidly being supplanted in that niche by heavier than air aircraft. They've been all but gone in civilian service because there's essentially no demand for the two niches (extraordinary heavy lift, and marginal rough field capability) they have any hope of competing in.

Um, no. No amount of engineering is going to be able to 'negate' the equivalent of anything from couple hundred tons to a kiloton equivalent of TNT going off inside the hull and breaking it in twain. Speaking from experience, the US Navy's safety manuals for heavy ordinance pretty much all have the same summary for accidents which lead to mass detonation... "In the event of this accident occurring, loss of the vessel is considered probable or certain. This accident is to be avoided at all costs". (Emphasis mine.)

At the scale of the energies involved the difference between a soda can and a couple of feet of solid steel is essentially irrelevant. This is what was left after a magazine explosion inside a battlecruiser in WWI...

The other bombs would very likely go off (though far, far below nominal yield - essentially a fizzle). What everyone here is missing is the proximity of the other cores to the freakin' enormous neutron flux of the bomb that detonates. It's not often discussed in the open literature, but the 'popcorn effect' is very real. That's one of the reasons why nuclear tipped ABM's were a thing - the neutron flux from the defending warhead would kick off a chain reaction in the incoming warhead. Even if the reaction was insufficient to actually 'detonate' the warhead, there was a good chance it would get it hot enough to deform or to damage the explosive charge.

I don't know enough to say for certain... especially since there are so many feedback loops!

Yes.

Since I didn't mention MMO's, I completely fail to see your point. You're disagreeing with something I didn't say. From a pedantic point of view, you're correct... the new model has only really been around for a few years, so you could weasel and say "there is no permanent update model". Realistically, you're way off base - ongoing upgrades/updates and DLC for the life cycle of a game are steadily becoming far more common. Games and apps that are "once and done" are steadily becoming the oddballs.

You're writing on the forum of one such game right now... I know of at least one other (New MOO). So, yeah, you're wrong there. The model has changed, and there's no reason to foresee it going back unless we for some unknown reason abandon digital distribution and go back to physical media only. KSP isn't an A-list game. Apples and the thing least like apples you can imagine. (And even A-list games are going the route of permanent updating and DLC.)

I'll just leave this here.

If not in the dark, then staring straight into the sun...

Depends on the engine - Some of what looks like multiple engines are actually *one* engine, one pump assembly with multiple chambers.

No, you didn't do better. You did worse. The link I provided was to a google search - hundreds and thousands of resources. You looked at one resource. Twelve scopes listed on Wikipedia. Let's look at just some of the ones not listed on Wikipedia. SuperBIT, SPIDER, STO, EBEX, PILOT, TIGRE, GRAINE, FIRBE...(All of these were found on the first few pages of the Google search I linked.) Then there's EUSO and GRIPS.... That's ten projects not listed on Wikipedia. I suppose I could keep looking and make it an even twelve or more, but I'm done here. You're wrong, and that's that.

After seeing this thread earlier today, I came on to post just that... One locked thread, and no thread merges. Gotta be some kinda record... Not the kind you want to set actually though.

Of course!

Looks like something out of a 1930's pulp novel....

Yeah. A mining company with no mines plans to lease airships from an aviation company which doesn't own any airships but which plans to buy them from a company which hasn't built anything but a subscale demonstrator... No offense, but I've heard that story before. (Or it's equivalent, many times over the last forty years.) Let's wait and see if anything actually pans out.

Whatever. Here in the real world, balloon borne telescopes are useful and common. So how are those mines moving ore now?

That's a completely irrelevant question - what we're addressing here is your implied claim that balloon borne telescopes are not possible. Which claim you should address by simply googling "balloon borne telescope". That'll lead you to a ton of sites describing flown and flying systems, contact them and tell them they're lying and what they're doing is not possible.

Yeah. Unless they're mounted in an airplane. (And 2017 is in the 21st Century - so, you're way out of date. Seriously, the problems you list are long, long solved.)

0.o If the winds are strong enough to cause damage on the pad - that's called a hurricane, and they won't be launching.

Welcome to the 21st century - where telescope mounts that can trivially compensate for such things have been common for decades.

Only among people with the memory of a goldfish, the rest of us remember the last fifteen times companies were working on "new, modern" cargo airships of various kinds and how they went precisely nowhere. Every five to eight years since (roughly) the mid 60's, somebody with more money than sense discovers airships... With great fanfare they announce a new designs and there's tons of cool concept art of lovely silvery whales cruising serenely through the sky. Many of the even get so far as producing flying hardware... and then reality sets in. There's no market for them. They're a solution in search of a problem. Though they're compared to aircraft (because they fly), they're not actually competing in the same market. Aircraft handle cargos that are speed sensitive, a market segment airships cannot compete in. Cargos that aren't speed sensitive (and all bulk cargos) go via ships, trains, and trucks - and airships aren't particularly competitive in that market. There's significant capital investment plus considerable infrastructure investment... and airships are vulnerable to weather conditions that do no more than require the crews of competing modes to don a light jacket. They could compete in underdeveloped parts of the world, but those parts of the world have insufficient demand for cargo in the amounts airships carry to offset the entry costs. They could compete with heavy lift aircraft, but that market is pretty small and well served by existing vehicles. The low speed of the airship also means you'd need more of them to service the existing demand - running smack into the same entry cost wall. The DoD keeps looking at them, but they keep running into the same problems as commercial operators, they're insufficient replacements for existing modes while having significant vulnerabilities and a high entry cost.