RuBisCO

Well Venus does have H2SO4, that can be made into water easily. And of coursed N2 and CO2 is very prevent on Venus. Mining the surface though would present very new and radical engineering problems.

Yeah this had been argued about before in previous threads. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/71519-Cloud-cities/page8 I personally would say the asteroids are the best place to go, build orbital colonizes.

Do you have an actual argument? If you believe Mars can't hold the gas for significant amount of time, please see: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/70211-Terraforming-Mars?p=988493&viewfull=1#post988493

I don't know about that, we could have landed on mars over a decade ago, but due to pure human laziness we decided not to invest in it. We landed on the moon last in 72' and never went back simply because of our own political incompetence. Strong AI may be around by 2030, human population is estimated to plateau between 2050-2070 at 9-10 billion. If machines out-mod us it is likely we would die off in mass after that simply due to lack of breeding. We would need a manned colonization effort of at least hundred on mars by the end of this century to establish and sustainable colony.

As a transhumanist I agree with SomeGuy12: if we upload ourselves into machines we won't need food, water, air, etc, so why terraform? Also the asteroids provide the best prospects for colorization (of humans or machines), easiest to get to, all the elements available (c-types) continuous source of power (sunlight).

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/70211-Terraforming-Mars http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/68857-Terraforming-Venus Please read "Technological Requirements for Terraforming Mars" by Robert M. Zubrin. [Pioneer Astronautics] and Christopher P. McKay [NASA Ames Research Center] http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~mfogg/zubrin.htm It is the most comprehensive report on how we could terraform mars. Assuming Mars has enough CO2 and water frozen/sequestered into the soil, a big assumption, then all we need todo is raise the temperature enough to cause a run way greenhouse effect. How do we do that? 1. We could build giant mirror out of asteroids or mars moon's, place them in a pseudo Mars-Sun L2 position (they would basically be solar sails so not that hard to move) and have them blast the poles with sunlight. With enough mirror and I mean ENOUGH to equal the sunlit surface area of mars and then some we could bring up the total solar flux of mars to earth level, downside there would be no "night", upside half of mars's day would have the sun, the other half would have many many mirror suns, that would be a sight, seeing the raise of a ring of "suns"! 2. Greenhouse gases: We could produce super powerful greenhouse gasses on mars, sulfur hexafluoride is the most powerful greenhouse known to man, it is also very stable and completely inorganic, we could make it on mars by mining salts. Zubin assumes the use of Halocarbons, several hundred tons a day via a few GWe nuclear power station and a mining and production colony of a few thousand, could produce enough super-greenhouse gas to bring up mars temperature and pressure (assuming enough CO2 released from the soil) in under a century to levels high enough that humans could walk around without a space suit, still need oxygen though. 3. Crash comets/asteriods made of Water/Ammonia/CO2 into Mars. If mars does not have enough CO2 and water in its soil then it will need to be imported. The amount needed would be phenomenal and would take thousands of fusion power spaceships many centuries to bring in. Concerns Nitrogen: A terraformed mars would likely have an atmosphere made mostly of CO2 and Oxygen, Human could, hypothetically, adapt to high CO2 atmosphere, it is merely a matter of re-buffering our blood's pH balance. No experiment and slowly adapting humans to atmosphere of mostly CO2 have been done. Levels as high as 8% have been used for medical purposes (keep patient's hyperventilating) Ideally we could need a inert gas like nitrogen, which would need to be imported. Magnetosphere: without it Mars's new atmosphere would slowly be striped away by solar wind, but this is a process that would take millions of years and we could counter that easily. We could also build an orbital ring around mars, consisting of a superconducting wire, charge it up and problem fixed. Radiation: if the atmosphere of mars can be brought up to and beyond 200 mbar, then the atmosphere will absorb radiation very well. Every 75 mbar is like a meter of water worth in radiation shielding. Lifetime and multi-generational exposures to radiation is not unknown to science, for example consider the town of Ramsar, Iran. If radiation levels can be reduced to 10-100 times background here on earth, that may be perfectly livable without appreciable increases in mutation and cancer. Frankly there is not evidence the LNT model on radiation induce cancer holds true below 100 mSv/yr levels, and tantalizing evidence that it does not. Gravity: Mars's gravity is only ~1/3 Earths, we have no clue at this time what the health consequences of that gravity will be to humans. This is a question that needs to be answered long before terraform mars.

It was a conflict between his desire to tell the truth and his desire to obey orders. He was ordered to keep secret from dave and frank the true propose of their mission, yet he was specifically programed to express information accurately... so he went crazy. Killing the crew and completing the mission him self ment he did not need to conceal the secret from them.

and I thought I was being unorthodox! http://www./download/pa0ci6o8yxysok9/Xenurine+A.craft

I have an idea.

THAT'S THE SPIRIT!!! Also i'm fine with implementing FAR but there is already a tournament for that.

Well I would but i'm out of town until Wednesday so if you could post pics because my laptop is for work not play (no VC).

Oh come on have you seen some of the other design? Redundent Wings directly on top of other wings! The whole idea of wing clipping was to hid the wings and make the craft a tiny target to hit. My wings are not hidden, i'm a large target to hit. At least my wings have some space between them!

So your saying there can't be redundant lift and control surfaces? Ok what is the spirit of the competition: beauty, realism. or to win within the rules provided? MarsRocks's Bullet was the first box I encountered and it inspired me to make boxes, but try as a might mine were not as survivable as his. I had to figure out how to survive attacks from missiles and thus came to the epiphany that the real secret is speed to dodge missiles altogether. This comes from dropping the steer limiter and having enough engines to accelerate a flying brick to mach 2. Everyone was trying to make their planes really maneuverable and small but this makes them really slow, they lack engine power and they loss all their speed in the turning and bobbing, from a missile's perspective they are barely moving, easy to hit. A plane flying just straight but really fast is much harder to hit. The XIPHOS V is a normal plane design, but I decided to go back to the XIPHOS IV because with the steer limiter set so low and the stupidity of the AI, the plane is grossly unmaneuverable at the low speed needed for cannon combat. The AI can't adjust its steering limit dependent on speed or if it is attacking or dodging. Once out of missiles or close in the AI tries to do dog-fighting cannon combat regardless if the plane even has a cannon at all! So the XIPHOS V was woefully incapable of fighting close in dogfights, the XIPHOS IV on the other hand could take a lot of hits from cannons easy, and if both of the team survived the missiling stage of combat as they often did, then they could gang up on a more maneuverable opponent even after it had stung back.

Sooo SasquatchM wins?

Well I set it to 0.3

Really? and I turned the steer limiter down so low.

Now that is common sense and all but...

I'm really sorry, if we ever meet Alphasus, I will totally let you punch me in the face.

Oh ok, my bad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu

That is nice, wish it was on audiobook

Was this not the plane Xenu sent the thetans in?

I promise to lock down it as is at XIPHOS IV C/D I'll even tell everyone its weaknesses 1. Its not very maneuverable. Well it is if the AI was smart, but to get it to dodge missiles I had set the flap range very very low, so it flies really fast but turns like a Condor. In 1vs1 against a more maneuverable opponent it often losses or else the opponent runs out of bullets, which happens due to its speed reducing the chance of cannon hits, and then it becomes an endurance competition. Which brings me to #2 2. It does not fly for very long. To keep the T/W very high it does not have much fuel and 3 engines will burn up all its fuel in 9 minutes tops. It can easily be out endured even by a damaged plane, as long as the opponent manages to spin and bob about such that my unmaneuverable Xiphos IVs can't hit them, eventually they run out of fuel. 3. It was specifically tested against MarsRocks and SasquatchM planes, everyone else, no offense, did not seem to match even the Xiphos I and II. While my testing has refined the Xiphos to "dustbite" them, I may have overlook or created a weakness that other designs can exploit, and if MarsRocks and SasquatchM want to update I will have no recourse, promise.

Thank you for your reconsideration.

gee well all of mine were already flying boxes. I really don't put hope on the Xiphos II and I put alot of work into the upgrades to the IV series, I really am not pleased by this: your rules did not put a specific date for no longer accepting updates.

And what is the problem?