KSK

So I make that $778 per kilogram of propellant, rounding up or $354 per pound. For comparison, Iberico ham, at 2016 prices, comes in at $140 per pound. That was the most expensive pork I could find online - but it ain't got nothing on SLS pork!

Your setting, your rules of course - and the way your setting is turning out sounds pretty cool. But in general, I'd say that keeping magic relevant, even in an 18th-19th century context isn't too hard. It just depends what your magic can do and how advanced your technology is. Rifles for everyone might well beat fireballs from a highly trained few in terms of shooting at the enemy but there's more to warfare than that as I'm sure you'll know. Some ideas off the top of my head. Scrying. Being able to keep tabs on your enemy from afar has obvious tactical advantages. For that matter it makes coordinating your own forces a lot easier. Invisibility. A potential boon for spies and assassins. Illusions. Terrify your opponents, confuse enemy scryers, keep your enemies distracted investigating things which they know are probably illusions - but might not be. Weather alteration. Obvious advantages even if that's only tiring your enemies out by forcing them to march through foot deep mud on the way to the battlefield Healing. Enough said. Armour. I don't care about your double line of riflemen - my six handpicked commandoes are bulletproof. Create water. Clean water on demand for a marching army? Yes please said the the quartermaster! Technology enhancements. Gun barrels that don't burst, unbreakable saddle straps, boots that remain waterproof without dubbin or wax, being able to reliably light a fire, or get a stove working even in the wind and rain? The little things that make logistics easier and keep morale that bit higher. Far-speaking. Giving orders at a distance before the advent of easily portable radios. Teleportation. Move your troops faster than the enemy can move theirs. Then there are the civilian applications of course. Edit: All in all, I'd say that the problem with magic is not keeping it relevant but keeping it consistent and balanced for your setting. My opinion only of course.

Time to break the forum filter. Everyone sing along now. ”I’m just a sweet...“

I guess this shouldn't come as a surprise but the build quality on SN6 seems to be noticeably improved from SN5, at least judging from the pictures that @tater linked. Or maybe that was just SN6 showing us her good side.

And he knows his Ghostbusters! This man can do no wrong. "Where do those rockets go?" "They go up."

Thanks! Some of it just happened as part of the story but the bits I wrote to answer questions from people were the most fun. Impromptu worldbuilding - you can’t beat it.

Okay then. I have quite a lot of KSP headcanon, so I'll try and keep this to the Cliff's Notes version. Like @jimmymcgoochie, I've chosen to ignore the lack of in-game cities on Kerbin as a limitation of the game engine rather than trying to explain it in my headcanon. Likewise, I've ignored the small size and high density of the in-game planets and the Easter Eggs. So my version of Kerbin is approximately Earth sized (with distances to the Mun and Minmus scaled appropriately), with towns, villages, farms and all the rest of it, on the surface. In my headcanon, kerbal technology is roughly on a par with human technology of the 80s and 90s. They have decent computers, fairly advanced manufacturing and materials technology, and air travel is common. What my kerbals didn't have is a Cold War and all the other human-style geopolitics that kicked off our Space Race. As a result, rocketry was pretty much an academic curiosity and no sane kerbal had seriously contemplated the idea of spaceflight. Until, that is, a researcher at the Kerbin Aeronautical Institute, one Wernher Kerman, decided to show his hobby project rocket engine to his graduate student, one Jebediah Kerman. Realising what Wernher's toy rocket engine could become, Jeb founded the Kerbin Interplanetary Society; a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs who set themselves the grandiose goal of putting a kerbal into space. The difficulties though, as the KIS quickly found, were formidable. After many years of repeated failures, most of the KIS members gradually drifted away leaving a stubborn core of six who refused to let their dream of spaceflight die. They were: Jeb, Bill, Bob, Wernher, Lucan, and Geneney and they finally built and flew a cobbled together, crewed suborbital capsule on top of an equally cobbled together rocket. Bill had the presence of mind to take his camera along and his photographs of Kerbin from 35 kilometres up fired the imaginations of an entire generation. Kerbin's Space Age had begun. And not a moment too soon. My version of Kerbin is inhabited by two sentient species - the kerbals and the Kerm trees. The Kerm are key to everything about kerbal society, its organisation, its institutions, its past, its present... and its future. Very briefly, the Kerm can manipulate their local ecology to protect themselves much as plants do on Earth. They can communicate with their kerbals via a form of contact telepathy and they've developed a symbiotic relationship with them in which they provide very efficient, very 'green' agriculture, in exchange for protection, seed carrying, and companionship. After all, without eyes, you miss out on a lot of the world and its wonders. However, that symbiotic relationship comes with a price. Two ancient laws: the Law of Territory and the Law of Thirty Seven were codified in the aftermath of Kerbin's greatest disaster. They form the bedrock of all kerbal society, the consequences for breaching them are extreme, and ultimately, they were responsible for driving kerbalkind to the stars. For their part, through their long and turbulent history with the Kerm, the kerbals have developed into two loose castes: the agrarian Kermol who do most of the farming and tend to the Kerm, and the urbanite Kerman, who are more technologically inclined. Relationships between the two castes are cordial, not least because any kerbal wishing to raise a family will need to 'go Kermol' at some point during his or her life. And that's my KSP novel in a nutshell - the story of how telepathic trees drove a space program. Along the way there are bits and pieces on kerbal daily life, architecture, food and drink, medicine, funeral rites, socioeconomics, language, sporting events and much more. And of course, the Space Program itself, from its humble origins to its greatest triumphs.

Soooo - it's playing chicken with your cigar...? I'll show myself out.

Apart from the 6th landing. That was pushing the envelope a bit and why the nice slow-paced ride to orbit makes perfect sense. *knocks on wood* They're certainly starting to creep up on that 10x reuse goal!

Maybe its just me not having watched a landing for a while but that one seemed especially smooth with very little use of the cold-gas thrusters on the way back down.

It's like one of those early nineties real-time strategy games where all sorts of vehicles magically spawn from a too-small building. "Need more Vespene gas... methane."

That’s what I tell myself when I look in the mirror. I don’t think I’m convincing myself though.

I'm not sure it does. From a very quick read on Wikipedia (so treat this with the requisite pinch of salt and feel free to come back with better sources) a gas core engine uses the propellant to shield the reactor walls from the gaseous nuclear fuel at the engine core. Which means there's going to be some mixing between the fuel and the propellant and, since you're using an open-core design, that mixing means that some of your nuclear fuel is ejected with the propellant. I'm not sure how boosted fission gets around that problem. It might mean that the gas core is smaller because it needs less fissionable mass to remain self-sustaining but that mass still needs to be in contact with the shielding propellant, so suffers from the same loss-of-fuel problem. As an aside, I'm not even sure how antimatter boosted fission would work, although I'm happy for more knowledgeable folks to weigh in here. A fission reactor is all about maintaining and controlling a chain reaction. Naturally radioactive atom (lets go with uranium here for convenience) splits, spitting out multiple neutrons which can then be absorbed by other uranium atoms, causing them to split, which then releases more neutrons... There's only a certain probability of a neutron causing a uranium atom to undergo fission. Leaving out any complicated nuclear physics, most of a uranium atom is empty space with a very small nucleus in the middle. Chances are that the neutron is just going to sail right through it without ever hitting the nucleus. Therefore, there's a so-called mean-free-path at work which is the distance that a given neutron has to travel before splitting another uranium atom and continuing the chain reaction. If the mean-free path is too long, the neutron escapes. If too many neutrons escape, the chain reaction stops. So boosting fission yield is all about reducing that mean free path and there are a few ways to do it: Use more fissile material. Equivalently, for uranium, use enriched fuel (higher proportion of fissile U235 to non-fissile U238). Use slower neutrons Use more neutrons. If your neutrons from the fission reaction aren't enough to keep a chain reaction going, use an external source of neutrons as well. Compress your fissile material. Or in other words, use more targets, use slower bullets so that your targets have time to wobble into their way before they go speeding past (remember that atoms aren't stationary even in a solid), use more bullets, or put your targets closer together so that your bullets have more chance of hitting a target. Options 1 and 2 are the nuclear power plant options. Use enough nuclear material (exact amount will depend on enrichment level) and use a moderator to slow the neutrons down*. Option 4 is (I believe) how nuclear weapons work. Set off a carefully shaped set of explosive charges around your fissile core and if you've calculated everything just right and gotten your timing exactly so, then you squash a sub-critical lump of nuclear material to a sufficient density that it goes critical. The timers for such things used to be (and probably still are) beyond top secret. The only way I can see antimatter helping with any of the above is if annihilation produces neutrons. So far as I'm aware it doesn't but I could well be wrong. * I recommend not using a KSP forum moderator - they're too darn good at containing runaway chain reactions.

Ahhh man. I was having such a good day until you craned on my parade. I'll get my coat... Clever boy...

And the more they get right, the more the mistakes stand out.

Lots to dig into here. Lets start with the nuclear pulse propulsion (NPP) system. Project Orion did a lot of solid work on this (as folks here probably know) but there's still a long way between 'works on paper and no, lighting a nuke off under the spaceship won't actually vaporize it' and a working system. Building a shock absorber that can handle being repeatedly whacked with a kiloton atomic hammer remains an engineering challenge, as does designing a system capable of firing out the pulse units (bombs) at the required speed and accuracy and reliability. NPP drives are not famed for their engine-out capability and having a pulse unit jam in the first few moments of flight is likely to be a Bad Thing that means you will Not be Going to Space Today. For that matter, building a system that can recoat the pusher plate with ablative grease after every few detonations (as a number of Orion designs required) doesn't strike me as an easy problem to solve, especially for large pusher plates. Then there's the fairly fundamental question of whether the basic physics of an NPP drive will actually hold underwater. I honestly don't know the answer to that but I can imagine that a nuclear explosion propagating underwater is a very different beast to a nuclear explosion propagating through air. Then there's the follow up question of whether all the moving parts of that NPP drive will work properly underwater. Firing a pulse unit through air is considerably easier than firing it through water for example, and a shock absorber that's tuned to work in air might not work so well in a more viscous environment. Incidentally, I would think that you have to fire the pulse units - just dropping them out the back of the ship wouldn't be fast enough, given that you'll be lighting one off every few seconds or less. But lets assume that the NPP drive really is the easy bit. What next? In no particular order, I can think of at least the following challenges. They may all be solvable (again, I don't know, not being an Actual Engineer) but I imagine that they're challenges nonetheless. Making your NPP drive seaworthy. Is dousing those moving parts in salt water going to damage them? Will the climb to orbit give the drive time to dry out? If not, what happens when the trapped water freezes when the ship gets high enough? Making your ship controllable as a submarine. An NPP drive strikes me as being approximately as seaworthy as a brick and a brick with a decidedly skewed mass distribution at that. Getting the ship to point its nose at the sky before launch might not be a problem compared to stopping it sinking like a rock and/or being steerable on the way to the launch site. It's not even so much that making something work like a submarine is difficult in principle, it's more that the ballast and/or flotation systems add another layer of complexity to the design. For an NPP powered ship with nuclear-thermal landing engines - where do you put the engines? It's unlikely that you're going to be putting them at the bottom because that's where the pusher plate goes. Unless you're going full crazy with a Medusa sail of course, but that adds a whole bunch of other problems. Wherever you put the engines, you need to make sure that their exhaust isn't impinging on the rest of the ship (please do not fire rocket at the nuclear veapons!), which means they're likely to be pointing out an angle. Which means cosine losses for reduced efficiency (yay!) and bits sticking out from your ship that won't do much to improve its already lackluster aerodynamics. More to the point, for an NPP powered ship that's intended to land, how does that work? Are you relying on aerobraking, in which case how does your thermal protection system work? Are you using the pusher plate as a heatshield and does that work? Most heatshields that I'm aware of are convex in the direction of travel. A pusher plate might be flat or even concave in the direction of travel (since it's designed as a reflector). Does this matter? Can you even design a pusher plate that also works as a heat shield? If you're relying on a powered descent instead then you're using a lot of propellant and possibly doing some of the braking with your NPP drive. Now, I don't know about you, but to my mind, riding an NPP drive to space requires a certain amount of faith in your engineering. However, at least you're flying away from the nuclear explosions! Flying backwards into the explosions takes that faith to a whole other level. As for propellant for your NTR landing engines, let's put the mass requirement to one side for the moment and consider where we're actually going to put the propellant tanks. Again, putting them at the bottom of the ship doesn't work so well because that part is full of pusher-plate and shock absorber. Putting them higher up might work but what does that do to your center-of-mass and aerodynamic stability during reentry. Flying backwards into the nuclear explosions isn't terribly appealing but it beats flying the Great Atomic Lawn Dart. Also bear in mind that even with that shock absorber, you've still been whacking on your landing engines and propellant tanks with that aforementioned kiloton atomic hammer, which is a very different kind of dynamic load than rocket engines and propellant tanks are normally required to deal with. Now, all of this might be solvable, or I might be blowing some parts (hah) out of all proportion. But I figure that this is pretty top-level stuff and, as with most things about spaceflight, the more you get into the details, the more challenges you'll find.

Yep! We’re a long way from Starhopper in that regard. I guess the manufacturing process is sharpening up too. ”Cos Elon Musk’s crazy bout a sharp-dressed can.”

After watching the SpaceX test this morning, there really was only one choice. Take a rocket - we just gotta fly...

Knows how to use 'em... Is that what they call 'puck'er factor?

Godspeed Endeavour. Bob and Doug - we'll see you on the ground, yeah? This armchair astronaut is keeping his fingers firmly crossed.

The Trouble with Tribbles Nose Cones.

I spotted this a while back but didn't quite like to answer until now, being as this is an Emiko thread. Short answer - I'd be absolutely delighted and if anyone could do it, Oraldo could. Although I'm thinking that Emiko Station will keep him busy for a good long while yet! Longer answer - it's a seriously big ask and (or so I imagine) a technically difficult one. A lot of First Flight happens away from the Space Center and, even allowing for some creative storyboarding to minimize the non-spaceflight stuff, it would need a lot of visual assets that would be hard to create using KSP parts. Not to mention that, to borrow Jim's wording from this thread, the story itself would need some pretty brutal chopping to turn it into a decent screenplay. Still (may as well put the plug in ) if anyone is interested, please do ping me a PM, or kick off a discussion on the First Flight thread. Cheers, KSK.

Of course - I can totally understand that. Heck, it’s not dissimilar to one of my character’s attitude in one of my short stories, in which he was strongly motivated by getting out there on EVA and exploring space in person rather than sitting in a nice cosy spacecraft and experiencing everything through augmented reality. But that wasn’t the point you were making in your previous post in which you objected to artificial field gravity as unnecessary or arbitrary when there were more realistic alternatives.

How are you deciding what is realistic though? Genuine question, not intended to be a snark. For me 'realistic' implies that it has to have at least some grounding in what we understand now and are technologically capable of now. But what we're capable of now isn't necessarily what's possible in a science fiction setting and a technology that's not realistic now might be entirely realistic in that setting. So 'where necessary make stuff up, where reality does a good job... KEEP IT' becomes 'where necessary make stuff up, where reality - as we understand it NOW - does a good job... KEEP IT.' That's not necessarily a problem in a sci-fi setting. Maybe there are good reasons in that setting for holding on to old technologies. Maybe the old adage of 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' is relevant. Maybe the new technology is only just being developed - great for cutting edge experimental applications but not so good if you want a solid, reliable system that you know is going to work. But handled badly, you can end up with an anachronism stew of concepts from different eras and different technology levels that don't really make much sense together. The further apart those eras are, the worse it can get. To use a slightly facetious example, we wouldn't normally use stone or bone tools in the 21st century. I mean sure, they would work for some applications, they're certainly a tried-and-true technology that served our distant ancestors well, but on the whole we have better options available these days. Artificial gravity fields are another, more sci-fi example. They're not strictly necessary but they're certainly useful and, depending on the technology available within your sci-fi setting, might be the natural way to solve certain problems, or be so routine that that there's no good reason not to use them. For example, if you're writing in a setting where Alcubierre style warp drive is possible. You have a drive that's capable of expanding space on one side of a spaceship and contracting it on the other. In other words you have the technology to change the curvature of space to suit your needs, that is, to create artificial gravity fields - or antigravity fields for that matter. Which are potentially useful for all sorts of things, from not having to worry about zero-g conditions onboard starships, to creating tractor beams (which themselves could be enormously useful for large scale construction projects), to antigravity drives, to shields capable deflecting space rocks, or even laser beams. Of course, you the author might choose to impose some limits that rule out one or more of those applications but that's another conversation altogether. The point is that you now have a bunch of completely sci-fi technologies that are not realistic now but might be entirely realistic in a setting where warp drive is a reality. Even better, (to my mind) all those technologies depend on the same underlying principles to work, so putting them together gives that setting a nice consistent feel.