Scotius

Fission-fragment rocket is a very hot idea , but have you heard about Fusion Driven Rocket? This puppy can get the ship to Mars in 30 day. http://msnwllc.com/Papers/FDR_JPC_2012.pdf Here's the link. It's good to see smart people working on something other than big, chemicals burning rockets to get us to other planets.

Of course i was not suggesting looking for multicellular plants and animals But life is life - finding extraterrestial fungi or lichen would (or will, hopefully) be a big deal in itself. As for evolution: life spreads. Even if life on Laythe began in the depths of the ocean, shielded from deadly radiation, there is still probability some organisms found their way to upper layers of the water. Most of them of course died fast, but some of more radiation-resistant survived long enough to give birth to even more sturdy offspring - and so on, and so on. Again, i don't expect to find Laythan lions and antelopes - but simple organisms like fungi, algae and lichen can be expected.

You sir are a genius, and totally should be a member of development team - then we all would have insanely awesome looking parts to play with.

Very cool looking engine. I've downloaded it, and will give it a spin when i get to my gaming rig. I'm kinda sad it can't be refueled, but i have an idea for hybrid engine: just run a stream of regular fuel through the heat shield It will both cool it, and provide some additional thrust. I'm jesting of course, but on the other hand it could be useful for quick maneuvers etc.

Keep it up, and soon this thing will have its own gravitation And heat radiated by your compter will be detectable from the orbit

Wouldn't such anomaly be easily detectable? We have satellites in orbit mapping Earth for such things, because magnetic anomalies might be indicators of ancient impact sites etc.

RoboRay's Delta Clipper was what i'm looking for Could you please post it on Spaceport when you finish testing it, Ray? I'd love to get my hands on such fully reuseable design, because i don't like cluttering my orbits with spent upper stages and junk. And i suck at piloting planes , all my attempts at building plane SSTOs ended in spectacular, uncontrolled dives from upper stages of the atmosphere.

Well, it's an interesting choice: send ships to other planets straight from Kerbin, or assembly refuelling station in LKO first and use it as a hub of your interplanetary activities? Also, you might play with Kethane mod on Kerbin's moons, build refuelling station in moon orbit and thus create industry network that will keep you occupied for a long time.

Invented it was Now we have to find if it's works as intended, and how to build full sized one.

Brotoro, you are my hero. This is what i was looking for for my reuseable LKO light launcher\space taxi. And apparently you have a whole family of crafts tailored to many needs on space program - awesome! Could you post craft files please? P.S. In case you don't mind using mods, KSPX has some radially mounted tanks storing only fuel or oxidiser. I suspect it might be possible to use them to tweak fuel loadout to eliminate this excess oxidiser leftover.

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/features/silent-spring_2/ Read and rejoice According to this article life will find a way to thrive - everywhere. If fungi can grow and thrive inside heavily contaminated bowels of Chernobyl reactor, Laythe should be piece of cake. Give evolution whole planet to play with, and enough time and it will pop some seriously sturdy organisms. And, oh yeah - they will be dark brown to pitch black in color due to lots of radiation soaking melanin in their cells.

Very cool indeed. I love the Papillion. Simple, elegant and well thought out. Anyone have a project of VSTOL SSTO? I remember one being shown couple of days before The Crash, but i did not thought to copy it in any way

Just couple of days ago i've tested my new lander/space taxi project. Two launches of two identical ships went out without a hitch, 6 kerbals total sat on a neatly circularised orbit ready to dock...And only then i noticed distinct lack of any RCS modules on my ships. D'oh! *cue headdesk and a string of colorful language*

You would need one heck of a wheel. Water falling down continuously in closed loop would eventually hit terminal velocity. And you are not the first man to come up with such idea. Terry Pratchett in one of his Rincewind novels described similiar, magically created setup.

Another thing: either something is wrong with Kepler's optics, our methods of data analysis or our Earth is a rare case of Goldilock planet on the smallish size of the spectrum. Smallest Earth-like planet found so far is 40% bigger than our homeworld. And it can't be observation bias, because Kepler already found couple of planets smaller than Earth. What gives?

Something occured to me: Kepler-62f (this smaller, colder world) should be named Hoth! Covered in ice, but still habitable...no-brainer

*Gives a standing ovation to Brotoro* Man, that was HILARIOUS! Do you write fanfics by chance? Because i would totally read them. LOL.

One year's worth of USA military budget i way bigger than ALL the money NASA got since it's been created. Damn shame, it's all i have to say.

Absolutely. I would love to have crewmembers with some basic stats, that could be improved first by training (to a degree), and experience gained in space. And a bit of randomisation of their faces wouldn't hurt too (just small things like hair, shape of the eyes etc). This way if someone dies it would be harder to just shrug and say "Oh well. Back to the VAB." Loss of experienced, highly trained crew should really hurt your program. Also, to be on-topic: adding a scientist to the crew could give you bonus to research points, or improve chances of making important discovery during the mission.

Let's not forget that newly established colony for a looong time will be dependant on the homeworld for...well, about everything. Sure, you can get plenty of energy and water on Eve (probably), but the cost of shipping everything from clothes to medicines to computers from Kerbin would break the back of every space program. You would have to be insanely desperate to continuously sink ships and crews into hole-without-return. Duna is less demanding in this matter.

Oh Gawd...the possibilities...Mind. Explodes. Two habitable, life bearing worlds in one system - lucky E.T.'s. So far we've seen things like this only in sci-fi shows - now we know it might very well be reality. What we need now is working Warp Drive - destination is known

Hurry up mods! I've seen some pretty diagrams from Kepler on Planet Hunters website - there are new planets, yay!

Holy impact Batman! That is very impressive, but i agree with Rune - it's not very feasible. Civilisation advanced enough to build such system should have much more "imminent" ways to vaporise a chunk of the terrain. Weapon is best when you can use it wherever you want, whenever you want. Weapon that you have to launch 6 months or more prior to attack is best suited for terrorists, or Bond-style supervillain.

Prototype 200 kW VASIMR engine is scheduled to be installed and tried on ISS in 2015.

Samples, science data from probes, mapping other bodies - these should be sources of research progress. And maybe missions for science teams and manufacturers. For example company XYZ wants to test new engine - your mission is to install it on one of your craft, fly it around Jool and be backin given time. It can fail along the way, and you will lose the ship and crew, or maybe just a mission if you are lucky - but if you succeed you will get permanent access to this part.