KSK

No.

1g drive for the win. Why? Because it implies that in your fictional setting, conservation of momentum does not apply. So, by Noether’s Theorem, the laws of physics vary depending on your location in space. And at that point, pretty much anything goes.

Too many to link to but today I have a medley from The Rocky Horror Picture Show playing in my head. I’m not calling out the responsible person but you know who you are!

“I don’t like a chapter with too many references.” ”I didn’t write them for you!” Awww, shucks. Thank you.

Ship design could probably mitigate most plume impingement issues. If your drive is putting out charged particles to the sides then you’ll want some kind of shadow shield to protect the inhabited parts of the ship, which would also do a good job of protecting sensitive parts of the ship from the drive plume. Using your main drive nozzles for steering would be fine for maintaining heading during a burn but lousy for any sort of fine maneuvers, for at least the reasons @StrandedonEarth pointed out. You could try it in KSP - take a 3.75m tank, stick two Mainsails on one end and a capsule on the other. Turn off capsule reaction wheels, put the thrust limiters at 100% on both Mainsails. Now try rendezvousing with something. Then try docking with that something if you’re feeling cocky.

and....

Depending which version /mods you're playing, I have three words which may hasten that slow spiral: Boffins and robots.

It’s all lifted from the main story so it’s definitely canon (First Flight canon that is). It’s just a mashup of about four chapters and I’ve taken the opportunity to do a quick editing pass at the same time. I left out all the journey home stuff because that’s mostly main plot stuff that wouldn’t make much sense as part of a stand-alone story. Also spoilers. Thanks, @fulgur , @Jebediah Kerman Jr. and @CatastrophicFailure for the likes!

This is slightly off-topic (although the beastie involved does have very sci-fi suitable eyes) but, in support of my previous comments about terrestrial biology being as weird as anything in fiction, I give you - the Mary River (aka butt-breather) turtle.

There are no videos or Saturn V replicas here I'm afraid but this is my own personal tribute in words to Apollo 11. The original version was written quite a while ago as chapters in a much larger work, so there are some bits and pieces of background that might not make a lot of sense or, at least raise a couple of questions. Hopefully they won't detract from the main story which was - and still is - unashamedly inspired by the flight that first put men on the Moon. So, without further ado... On This Day A Kerbal Space Program short story By KSK Dedicated to the Apollo 11 flight and all the men and women who made it happen Prologue: Welcome Home Barkton Mission Control was packed with, and surrounded by, anxious figures listening to the flight updates from the Foxham Space Centre. Geneney sat bolt upright at his console, jaw clenched, hands crushing the armrests of his chair. Jeb paced back and forth behind him. “Control to Pioneer 3. Come in 3..." “Control to Pioneer 3. Come in 3..." “Reading you loud and clear, Control! Standing by for drogues." Distant cheering crackled over the speaker, together with snatches of voice chatter from the rescue boats. Geneney's grip relaxed a fraction. Come on, come on, come on… “Recovery 1, Control. We see them! We see the capsule!" “This is Recovery 2. We got all three chutes! Repeat, three chutes deployed!" Geneney sagged into his chair, a broad smile lighting up his face as the room around him erupted. Jeb squeezed his friend's shoulder briefly, then turned and walked away, picking his way through the exultant crowds around the consoles. He took a key out of his pocket, unlocked a small door in the corner of the room and slipped through, locking it again behind him. The old iron steps rang underfoot as Jeb climbed up onto the roof. He walked over to the rail and leaned against it, staring out to sea. Three flights. Three flights that had tested the mettle of spacecraft, crews, and flight controllers alike - and had not found them wanting. It was time. Pioneer 4 was going to the Mün. Part 1: All Systems Go Part 2: A Voyage for the Ages Part 3: On This Day Part 4: Walking into History

I would release a quirky cult film detailing how I gained my infinite knowledge by winning a sword fight. Then I would never, ever release a sequel. Do I win a Prize?

It’s an interesting problem though - how does a writer convey the sensation of relying on a completely (to humans) unknown sense input? I found a couple of solutions. One was the analogy ‘how do you move your arm’ You can get into as much biochemical detail as you like but there’s no good way (that I could think of) to describe the gap between a conscious decision of wanting to touch something and the subconscious process of physically reaching out to touch that thing. In the end the only answer my character could think of was ‘I don’t know, I just do’, which made the point well enough. The other solution was to cheat and rely on synaesthesia. A first character experienced the alien worldview of a second character via an interface that translated the alien sense data (which was heavily based on molecular recognition - basically a hyper-real sense of smell) into a visual equivalent that the first character could engage with and, more importantly, that I could describe in a meaningful way. I’m not saying they’re the best solutions though, or whether they’d be enough to keep @KerikBalm reading.

And from Scotland - something a bit more American. This has been stuck in my head all day.

Personally I find the armory mods depressing but each to their own.

Minmus, Duna and Ike could all work as propellant depots Duna has ice caps in-game. If you're using it as a strict Mars analogue then you could find water ice and dry ice there. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen - all the ingredients you need to manufacture propellant for hydrolox, methalox or kerolox engines. Minmus - well you need to do some handwaving but you could find all the ices there that you find on Duna. Possibly. Ike - plausibly has supplies of water ice in permanently shadowed craters. The same way that our Moon and Mercury do. Whether any of them would make sense as a 'Red Sea' is an interesting question and depends how necessary ISRU refueling is in your story. If Dres is your 'Red Sea' between Kerbin and Jool, do any of the alternatives even make sense, in terms of delta-V and journey times? Maybe there's simply no point going via Duna if you then need to twiddle your thumbs in orbit for six months waiting for the next transfer window. Maybe doing a direct injection from Kerbin to Jool would be acceptable, presumably at the expense of cargo per trip (since you'll presumably need more propellant?). Then you get into the economics of the whole thing. Maybe a trading venture only makes sense if you can ship x many tons of stuff, every y months, and is therefore effectively fixed to one route? Finally, what technology are you using. Maybe your kerbals are scooting about the system in fusion powered torch ships and look bemused at such quaint concepts as 'transfer windows' TL: DR. Interesting question, lots of factors to juggle, Minmus, Duna and Ike could all work as propellant depots.

Unless you insist on having kerbal pilots, I think HarvesteR might have you covered: https://store.steampowered.com/app/977920/BALSA_Model_Flight_Simulator/ I haven't checked but it wouldn't surprise me if someone had modded kerbals in somehow...

Umm, isn't that the other way around - chlorophyll appears green because it absorbs more strongly in the red and blue wavelengths and only absorbs green weakly? Unless I'm misreading your post. On the topic of infrared vision, I thought this paper might be of interest. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982215012464 Very quick summary - various species on Earth can fine tune their visual spectrum on-the-fly by dynamically modifying the photopigments in their retina. This can include shifting their vision into the infrared. One example of where this is useful - living in salt vs freshwater: As an aside - if the purpose for having your aliens come with infrared vision is to equip them for long nights, you could read up on what makes for good night vision instead? Or have your aliens use multispectral vision - low resolution infrared for tracking warm things in motion (to run away from or hunt) and low-light vision for detail work (is this fruit the right shape to eat?) As another aside - I reckon an interest in biology is extremely useful for aspiring science fiction writers. Expertise not required so much as a willingness to look stuff up on the internet You'd be really hard pressed to make your imaginary aliens any more weird or far-fetched than anything you'd find on Earth! Personal example - a significant part of my KSP fiction involves the Kerm, which are essentially sentient networks of trees that can deliberately manipulate their local soil ecology. Originally this was a mechanism for fighting other Kerm but the kerbals have long since learned to co-opt it to massively enhance their agriculture. I thought that was something suitably alien for my story and then, several years later, I find this article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-48257315

Leaving aside the fact that a superluminal photon is an oxymoron, I don’t see the logic behind faster = brighter. Assume for the sake of argument that solar radiation was emitted at superluminal speeds. There’s no obvious reason I can think of why the rate of production of those photons should correlate with their velocity. It seems more likely to me that you’d see the same brightness of sunlight but you’d be seeing the sun as it was, say 2 minutes ago rather than 9.

With current technology, an SSTO seems like a pretty pointless exercise unless you can return it. If you're using a disposable rocket you may as well use a more efficient one that can launch more payload for your money.

Less talk, more flight!

There’s no accounting for squirrels of course but I think they’ve had the rusty bolts thing figured out since the first Falcon 1 flight.

This just keeps getting better. I'd say you couldn't make it up but... From just over six years ago: Apologies for the plug but (as I may have mentioned before) I'm just tickled by the whole building-a-rocket-inna-field thing, for that reason.

No problem. In my experience, a lot of academics do tend to undervalue themselves financially. There's something endearingly modest about that, right up until the point when your top tier prof promises to do some work for somebody for a price that's substantially less than its actual cost to the university, leaving said university to take the hit. Mostly, I think it's a result of being around extremely smart people for your entire career and measuring yourself against them, rather than against the average layman. That's not intended to be disparaging - said layman may well be outstanding in their own walk of life - just not in the rather esoteric bits of science they're looking for a consultant to teach them about. That link is a case in point - to me as an outsider (or somewhat informed layman at best) that looks like some phenomenally high flying stuff - string theory, philosophical underpinnings of quantum mechanics, etc. etc. To the people involved it's probably just Tuesday.

Not in my experience. Nitpicking worldbuilding consistency and technical details is the favourite pastime of many a fan. See the 'bad science in science fiction' in this very forum, for an example. And a big part of manipulating reader focus and suspension of disbelief is about throwing in the right level of detail. If you do want to get into the technicalities, then make those technicalities self-consistent as far as you can and follow their implications logically. Examples: Joe Haldeman's Forever War. His spacecraft are powered by tachyon drives that let them accelerate at up to 30g (for later models of ship) and achieve relativistic velocities. Most of the story arises from the time-dilation that that causes and the space battles (such as they are) are basically one-off high speed drone passes, under computer control, whilst the meatbags spend the entire voyage in an acceleration tank praying that their skinsuits are fitted exactly right (because wrinkles cause nasty injuries at 30g). We're never once told what a tachyon drive actually is - we just know what it can do and everything follows logically from there. Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage II. Basic premise is that a crewed submarine is miniaturised and injected into a comatose scientist. Miniaturisation is achieved through a miniaturisation field which reduces the size of Planck’s constant for anything inside it. The field is metastable - the more energy you pump in, the smaller you can go but the higher the probability that the field will collapse, releasing its stored energy. Total made up science - but the implications of those field properties are followed through consistently and thus reader belief is happily suspended. The most plot critical point is that a collapsing miniaturisation field releases it’s energy as waste heat. Spontaneous deminiaturisation will quite literally cook you and controlled deminiaturisation has to proceed slowly enough that the heat can dissipate. Stuff like that. The story hinges on the technical details but they’re self consistent enough that you can overlook the entirely fictional science at the core of the story. On the other hand, the more edge cases and extra rules you need to invoke to make your fictional science work within your story, the less convincing it becomes and the more your readers will care.

Sometimes. More often than not their enthusiasm gets in the way of the required objectivity. As for $50 for 20 minutes. that sounds about right to me. $150 per hour, so call it a $1,200 a day. That's at the mid to lower end of the scale for an academic consultancy fee. Top tier professors would earn a lot more. Source - personal experience from six years in a university tech transfer department. Of course your target market for consultancy is rather different to your target market for tutoring but even so, as a gentle 'this is how much my time is worth' reminder, it seems perfectly reasonable. Edit: Probably stating the obvious but remember that the take-home salary that physicist is earning is rather less than the amount they'll be costing their institution or company to employ them. My ballpark figures for the UK won't work for the US though. Edit the 2nd. Just followed the actual link: So more actual consultants rather than tutors. At least that's how they're pitching themselves. And right at the bottom of the comments: And that, right there, is why they're charging a fee.