RuBisCO

Well cooling is fine and all but keeping it cool with arm and leg joints is simply not possible. The exposed outer-joints have to operate at 450°C, then there would need to be dewar vacuum insulator and an inner joint cooled. I don't think we have the technology for such an outerjoint: it will expand upon heating, it will buckle. Certainly 20-1 hour times are real-ish in that they take into account the insanity of trying to function at those temperatures. All the probes landed on venus were pre-cooled and operated until "melting down" for about 1 hour. Either we would need some kind of amazing heat pump that can pump out heat over a 430°C differential or we would need electronics that can operate at very high temperatures, and that is just for a sustained robotics presence of more then 1 hour!

Explain "see that it works before taking it", what would you need to see? I would take it without knowing if it works or not if people around me were spewing blood out of ever orifice, curling up and dying. Exactly what alternatives are there?

My Spider here is stripped down to just SQUIED Wheels and MechJeb as modded parts. With the inner wheels set to 50 and the outwheels set to 10 squid factor it managed to do the whole course in 15:50 (950 s), EHL was 8:08 (488 s) and HHL was 7:42 (462 s). It can withstand very hard falls with no permanent damage, but those wheels will pop! When that happens I hit the breaks, stop, get out, fix the wheels, thankfully all the wheels can be fixed from the door. The best run time I'm presenting is when I managed not to pop the wheels (and not had to jump out and fix them). It weighs 3.95 t so that is 3752.5 s*t total, EHL: 1927.6 s*t, HHL: 1824.9 s*t http://www./download/59ggxnksfuzn3od/Spider+%28basic%29.zip My scorpion was not intended for racing but rather as a fuel shuttle for the Mun and Minmus as well as a crane, but it turns out to be the fastest thing I got at least on a straight run, it turns like a shopping cart missing a wheel though so you got to be gentle on the turns, real gentle. I got 14:51 (891 s) total, 7:37 (457 s) for the EHL and 7:14 (434 s) for the HHL. It has NearFutureSpacecraft mod for the command pod, KW for the tanks, KSPX and RLA_Stockalike for the little tanks and engine mounts and little SAS, AIES for the engines, MagicSmokeIndustries for the retractable suspension (for reduced profile to fit in aeroshell) as well as optional crane, KAS for carrying cargo and doing what ever else, Mechjeb for stability control and setting it to run at max speed (set rover speed to 100 m/s even though it never gets much above 40 m/s) Bill-Jeb 9000 for beautified mechjeb parts, some HullCameraVDS cameras for the forward and back view, and of course SQUIDED wheels. I locked the center wheels and set them to 50 Squiding, the outwheels were set to 10. It can't stand hard falls so I needed to slow down at the edge of the crater to prevent it flying down or out and falling hundred of meters away at smashing speeds. The tanks were empty so I could not use RCS or the engines (that would be cheating) but those could cushion suicidal falls in theory. Weighing in at 12.14 tons empty it could not and never would compete for time*mass ratio. http://www./download/nau3e99lsbvnzpv/Scorpion+%28Retractable+Suspension%29.zip

WOW those times are awesome, I thought I would blow everyone away with my little spider and SQUIDED wheels but dam, I'm slow! Darren9 if you could post all 3 times and the design, as well as the design from you Kasuha, then I think I could put you guys up on the score board.

Yeah because it not like vaccines have been the primary means of stopping and fighting these disease off, no no we killed of small pox off with homeopathy, we bet polio to near death with Ayurveda! I don't see how a world wide pandemic of Ebola would lead to questions against vaccinations. Let me make the questions more specific: if the vaccine was to have say a 90% efficacy and no known side-effects verses dying horribly of ebola, which would you take? How people would "react" (what does that even mean?) verse millions of people dying horribly, melting from the inside out, is more important to you?

I have a problem with the idea of EVA on venus. First of all the surface gravity means a spacesuit that weights 100 kg on earth is going to feel like a spacesuit the weighs 90 kg, it going to be really heavy! On the moon or mars with the weight cut down to 1/6 or 1/3 even there space suit weight is a concern, on Venus it would be less of a concern and just plan devastating. Imagine walking around in 4 suits of armor on top of each other here on earth! Atmospheric diving suit here on earth that can handle half those pressures, they weigh nearly 500 kg! I don't know can someone calculate out the density of the atmosphere on venus's surface, maybe the suit can be made buoyant. Second how do you make a pressure suit that can handle 450°C AND 92 atm of pressure. That temperature is going to buckle the joints! Technologically even robots that can operate on Venus are beyond bleeding edge technology, its still theoretical that we could even build electronics that can operate at 450°C... a space suit that can do it is simply unreal!

If a human magically appeared on the surface of venus they would be dead mad quick, like splat splat! Chemically what would happen is a process called pyrolysis: a person would carbonize, Biomass -> C + CH4 + CO2 + H2O + N2 + other elemental solids. The surface winds speeds are pretty low but I would figure the carbonized body would puff into coal dust and blow away.

Lets say Ebola broke out across the world and they came out with a vaccine, who would not take it? Come on, be honest.

Yes as long as thrust is coming from something pushing against the ground.

Sure, but I don't want anyone staying on a fixed track, they can go where ever as long as they make it through those 8 checkpoints (in order). I'll try it but I don't want anyone to think they have to follow my path. I see nothing wrong with challengers showing the exact path they took though.

The armstrong race is designed to test your rover design against each other. The race consists of 7 crossing lines marked out with flags on the mun. The course has a minimum length of ~24 km, ~12 km per half lap. What you need: The race track is provided here: http://www./download/s95p6ue2y9p5faw/KSP+Armstrong+Race.zip Just install it in your KSP folder, it will put in the Armstrong Race savegame and the flags. Rules Run the Course, Present Your Times, Present Rover Mass: Start from the center start-finish line through 1 through 3 back through the start-finish line, through 4 through 6 and back to the start-finish. Record and present your time to finish each half lap and the total summed time of both. So that should be three times presented, one of which being the sum of the other two, all times in seconds. You can do just one half lap and present the time for just that, but to be considered competitive for total time you need to finish the whole track. You can also present your rover's mass to compete for lightest-fastest rover, your time will be multiplied by the mass of your landed rover (not include launch/landing vehicle mass) to determine who has got the fasted rover by mass. Rover mass should be in tons down to second decimal point. No Flying, You Know What I Mean! : You can't use thrusters or anything that uses fuel. Your rover needs to push against the ground to move. The principle of this race is to test rover designs against each other in public so as to provide a public knowledge in how to make better rovers and how they perform in KSP. Mod Away, But Why? : You can use mods but explain why you used those mods. How does it improve rover performance? Fly it, Land it: All rovers must be land-able, sure you can hyper-edit your rover there for testing but your rover should be able to be launched from Kerbin and land on the Mun. Present and Share: You need to post your rover design, either here or linked here to it on The Spacecraft Exchange (I don't know, I'll let a moderator chime in on how that is done), your rover design does not need to include the launch vehicle, unless someone raises the challenge that your rover could not have been landed on the Mun, then you need to provide the rover with launch vehicle to prove it can be landed. If it can't be landed no place on the score board for you! No Lying: If others can't get your rover design to achieve anything near the time you claim, and you can't provide definitive evidence of your claimed times you will be stricken from the score board. SCORE BOARD Time Categories Best Total Time: Kasuha's "Armstrong Rover Racer" 942 s , RuBisCO's "Spider" 950 s Best Easy Half Lap Time: Kasuha's "Armstrong Rover Racer" 490 s , RuBisCO's "Spider" 488 s Best Hard Half Lap Time: Kasuha's "Armstrong Rover Racer" 452 s, RuBisCO's "Spider" 462 s Time X Mass of Rover Ratio Categories Best Total Ratio: RuBisCO's "Spider" 3752.5 s*t, Kasuha's "Armstrong Rover Racer" 4597 s*t Best Easy Half Lap Ratio: RuBisCO's "Spider" 1927.6 s*t, Kasuha's "Armstrong Rover Racer" 2391.2 s*t Best Hard Half Lap Ratio: RuBisCO's "Spider" 1824.9 s*t, Kasuha's "Armstrong Rover Racer" 2205.8 s*t There are some easter eggs hidden by me in those savegames, can you find them?

I'm all for this. In sandbox we could test how much science and how well a design or flight system performs per contract, but we can't because we can't see how much science we could get or access contracts.

I want a new planet, a Neptune like world.

Yes that was taken into account but sequestration models only account for tiny fraction of the loss.

Well consider this study on terraform the moon, yep THE MOON: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002iaf..confE.230R If you want a magnetic field we could do it with an orbital ring. I'm tired of people claiming that the gravity or lack of magnetic field makes terraforming mars impossible, show me the calculations, what is the rate of lose? Calculate out how many mbars would be lost per year, show me that calculation, then I'll believe you. As for mars atmospheric losses 4 billion years ago: IMPACTS, impacts can account for most of atmosphere loss, not solar winds. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v338/n6215/abs/338487a0.html http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/98JE02074/pdf "Based on tabulated crater densities, the process of atmospheric cratering can account for a loss of 50–90% of the Martian atmosphere since the onset of the geologic record. Stable isotope fractionation measurements suggest that loss of ∼90% of atmospheric species to space has occurred via solar wind pick-up-ion sputtering [Jakosky and Jones, 1997]. Combined, ∼95–99% of Mars' atmosphere could have been lost to space." So that means the impactors took out 50-90% of the atmosphere and since then solar wind as taken out 90% of what remained. That a solar wind loss rate of less then 1 mbar per 1 million years.

Atmospheric loses from Mars are over millions of years not thousands. So I see no difficulty in maintaining habitability of a Terraformed Mars.

Maybe, Zubrin calculates that out verse orbital mirrors and super green house gas production, super green house gasses is the easiest solution of the 3 in know how. Zubrin did not calculate for it but I'm a big fan of Sulfur hexafluoride (huffing it is fun too) its very stable, very dense and the most powerful greenhouse gas known to man. All we need is automated mines to mine up Martian sulphur and fluoride salts, and manufacture a couple of gigatons of the stuff.

Yeah we would need a little more then that... we need to raise the temperature enough to start off a runway greenhouse to melts out all the CO2 and water permafrost.

Well we don't know how much water is on mars now, there could be a lot of ice and permafrost, so it hard to tell how much water Mars will need if any.

Zubrin Does a very detailed breakdown on what can be done and how long and how much energy it would take: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~mfogg/zubrin.htm We could with existing technology, a few dozen GW of resources on Mars mass producing super-greenhouse gases, we could bring mars up to habitable pressures and temperatures less then 100 years assuming there is enough CO2 in the Martian soil to bring up pressure and temperature. Oxygenating mars's atmosphere though would require much more power, 300 TW over 900 years would be needed, plants alone could do it in 1-2 thousand years. This does not answer the problems of nitrogen and water though, and we really don't know how much water and nitrates are on mars. If we have to import nitrogen and water with comets that going to require a space armada of comet tugs and hundreds of years of tugging assuming realistic near term technologies like nuclear fusion engines. A magnetosphere is unnecessary, a thick atmosphere stops radiation, solar wind striping is a problem that would require periodic bombardments to top up on more gas ever few million years. The low gravity is we all hope not a problem to human life, honestly we all would like to be 3 times stronger, but perhaps Martian humans will atrophy, good chance Martian humans will require genetic engineering, heck engineer humans with unidirectional bird lungs and they would live fine on half the oxygen partial pressure we live on, cutting time and energy needed to oxygenate the atmosphere. While we are at it lets engineer them with fur so they don't need cloths, hermaphroditism so they don't have gender and all the social problems that come with it, oh and horns, horns would look wicked awesome.

Get coffee, watch a movie, work, great thing about electric engines is those hour long burns, have mechjeb keep the panels pointed at the sun and leave.

Thanks for the work on the free moving parts, but that lack of motion limits is a pain.

Could all parts, not just the docking washer, have a free-moving option?

Woooo semantics: Dead men don't "stand". I'm pretty sure I pointed that out to begin with: "So then the theoretical minimum amount of energy needed to hold up something, as in no change in height, is zero" Anyways back to the subject, 'Red Iron Crown' claimed that 3.3 kN (?) from 1 kW is beyond 100% efficiency, all I'm asking is how he figures that? Is it a newton to watt direct conversion? That is kind of flawed reasoning. Just as a rock expends no energy to "push" against the ground and not fall to the center of the earth, it is not expending a watt for every tenth of a kilo it weighs.

The body does need to waste energy because skeletal muscles must spend energy to remain contracted. Likewise just to keep a flying car hovering must consume energy somehow.