SlyReaper

If there's one thing guaranteed to cajole the US into sending another manned mission to the moon, it'll be China announcing their intention to send a manned mission to the moon.

I'd like to show off my latest Kerbal video. I think it's my best so far. My channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/SlyRoapa/videos

I never did understand the reasoning behind that one. In my view, Europa is far more interesting than Ganymede, which appears to be little more than an inert lump of rock and ice. I have to wonder if the reasoning didn't just boil down to "biggest moon is best moon". Given this news, I wonder if the JUICE guys have time to do a slight redesign to include a sample collector, and re-write the mission profile to do a few orbits of Europa, hopefully timed well to fly through one of these plumes.

The universe's biggest stargate.

Doesn't work. Laythe's orbit is perfectly circular, and is tidally locked to Jool. The only possible tidal heating would be via interactions from the other moons, which would be incredibly weak. Nowhere near enough to warm up Laythe.

Yep, and I'm proud to say it's a British project... until we sell it to the Americans for two dollars and a Hershey bar like we did with the jet engine.

I honestly struggle to think of any material goods an alien would want from us. They have vessels capable of traversing the immense void between stars, so any raw materials they need, they can get from any of the uninhabited planets, moons, or asteroids of this solar system, without having to deal with a planet full of angry belligerent ape people with nukes. Which is actually quite scary if you think about it - they could strip mine the entire solar system, leaving only the Earth, sun and moon untouched. We'd have no way to stop them, and it would permanently cripple any ambitions we have as a species of ever becoming interstellar ourselves. I think the only thing they might be interested in from Earth are cultural exports. Music, literature, art, all that jazz. They might give us a few trinkets for these things, then leave the solar system while the human race starts tearing itself to pieces for access to this technology.

Voted Pol just because it's the most recent one I visited and returned from. Gravity is low enough that you can jetpack down from an orbiting craft and return again via jetpack.

I like my solution better: The ship doesn't need to land on Pol. The kerbal just jetpacks down to the surface and jetpacks back up again.

And if I recall correctly, the ion engines in game have about 100 times more thrust than real ion engines.

He's an astronaut and generally awesome dude. As astronauts go, this guy is a celebrity. .

The word is faze.

Interesting that one of the other contenders is X Rebirth. That game isn't even out yet, how can it be nominated?

I hope so. Sending stuff into space has, historically, pretty much always turned out to be a sound investment. This Indian mission also happens to be the cheapest interplanetary mission in history. By quite a large margin, if I understand correctly. The price of sending this probe on its merry way was somewhere in the region of $75mil. Now imagine taking that money and converting it into food for the entire population of India which lives in poverty. How long do you imagine that food would last? How many crumbs do you think each person would receive? Spend 75mil to provide a few crumbs to the poor, or spend 75mil on a project which may eventually help lift those people out of poverty.

Visited the Jool system: Pol orbit: Pol landing: The spacecraft itself was still in orbit - Jeb jetpacked down to the surface, and returned to the orbiting spacecraft with about 13% jetpack fuel left. I don't think the ship would have had enough thrust to lift off again.

Jool, when I wanted to get an . Gave myself an epic facepalm later when I realised it would have been more efficient to just aerobrake on Laythe itself.

They're really not. I put drogue chutes at the very least on all my Duna landers, because even the little bit of drag you get out of it is free delta-v at the end of the day. It also makes landing a lot easier because it kills all your lateral velocity and keeps your rocket oriented upwards, so all you have to worry about is your descent speed.

Sitting in a capsule with Bob and Bill, waiting for the planets to align so they can go to Duna.

It's got to be Laythe. It has large amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere as evidenced by air-breathing engines working there. That's extremely compelling. It's also a big enough challenge to do a manned landing and return mission without being ridiculously hard like Tylo and Eve.

The most popular character of course would be Jeb Herman.

The entry visa says male, but the face looks female. I'd reject that one if I'd already gone through my two allowed mistakes that day.

Hardly incognito. He used his real name.

So, remember when we were told they were going to be releasing smaller, more frequent updates?

I have done this.