KSK

Not sure if this has been posted before, and apologies if this is a duplicate thread, but I figured some folks here would probably enjoy this.. https://twitter.com/apollo_50th?lang=en Basically a live recreation of the Apollo program told via tweets. It's all about Apollo 7 (CSM shakedown mission in LEO) at the moment, which is pretty cool although personally I'm looking forward a flurry of updates starting December 21st...

Like the 20 odd years of source material that the Battletech 2018 game was based on. Still - all the pieces are coming together. BFR is intended to land what, 100 tons on Mars? Not quite enough for a lance of scout ‘Mechs but enough for landing one of all but the largest assault ‘Mech. Not quite a Leopard but getting there! Neurohelmet research is underway too but Musk had better get cracking on those miniature fusion reactors if he wants to build a proper Battlemech. Although if he does pull that off and anyone spots some anomalous power outputs from them... well it could be time to invest in germanium.

I used to do quite a lot of roleplaying but then I took a D20 to the knee, went to university. And, whilst I wouldn’t have had any problems finding some like minded people there too, there was also a bunch of other stuff to get involved with, so I never got around to pen and paper gaming again. Favoured systems back in the day - mainly Iron Crown stuff: Middle-Earth Roleplaying System and Rolemaster. Fast-forward a decade or two and I’m finally back into another game! As in, the first session was last night, the party has just met up and we’re all (GM included) kinda fumbling through the rules (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, new edition) and getting into the swing of things. And it’s an absolute blast! Good GM, a solid story (not that we really got through much of it) and some very interesting characters in the party. Speaking of which, whilst it’s not quite up in the ‘getting involved in a land war in Asia’ ranks of Classic Blunders, ‘handing a character sheet to a wannabe writer with a penchant for backstories and world building’ surely counts at some level. Yeah - I may have gotten a little bit carried away with my character biography. Last night’s tale of fire and fish also turned out to be a fun writing prompt and as the OP was asking for stories if anyone cared to share...

I’m about to get some sleep after a very long day but just wanted to thank @Snark for the second data plot! Looks interesting but further comment will need to wait till I’ve got half a functioning brain. G’night folks.

That large brown square in the middle seems to suggest otherwise. But in any case I was thinking more about the comparatively small number of posts to the Daily Kerbal, Announcements, anything Making History related and, to a lesser extent, Welcome Aboard. In other words, the sub forums at least notionally associated with news from Squad, new players and new official content. It would be interesting to see a similar breakdown of posts from 2018 only but regardless, I was quite startled by the volume of posts to the off-topic or mod related sub-forums.

Very interesting but ouch, that bottom right corner. And that's an impressive number of posts on the two sub-forums that are explicitly set aside for non-KSP stuff.

I thought it was, hence the rebuttal. As for Kerman being meaningless? *shrug* It makes sense in my headcanon, other folks have suggested some interesting alternatives here - that’s good enough for me. I particularly liked @MedwedianPresident‘s idea of ‘von’ as an honorific denoting an older Kerbal!

Practice does that. I wouldn’t like to comment on anyone else’s writing but I’ve certainly noticed the changes in mine over time. I think they’ve been changes for the better but others might reasonably disagree. But back on topic, since folks have been kind enough to mention me. There’s a few reasons why I haven’t been around as much lately and thinking about it, they all kind of feed off each other. The main one is that I haven’t actually played KSP for ages and I don’t really have much of an urge to pick it up again. For me, the fun was in the learning to play - it turns out I’m not as into the sandbox elements of the game as I thought I’d be, which limited its replayability once I got to a certain level of competence. I’ve tried career mode several times but that’s never really clicked for me either. Making History seems to be largely aimed at players who enjoy the forum Challenges and those who like building replica craft. Neither of those are aspects of the game that have really appealed to me. So it goes. It’s been fun, I regret nothing, but nothing lasts forever either. Not playing the game has made it that bit harder to engage with the forum in general and, on a number of topics, I think I’ve said everything I want to say anyway. Plus, regrettably, there have been a number of threads which I’ve found personally depressing and which, to me, exposed an uglier side to the community which I don’t like or wish to engage with. That’s a personal opinion only of course and this certainly isn’t the place to elaborate or name names. Finally, my personal life over the last couple of years has been rather stressful for a number of reasons and, as you’ll probably have gathered by now, KSP hasn’t really been my game of choice for unwinding with of an evening. Hence the urge to ‘pick it up and give it another try’ hasn’t really been there. Edit: And last but not least, I’ve also seen the forum change and players that I had a lot of respect for and/or enjoyed what they brought to the community, have now gone. That takes its toll after a while too.

Even in these more enlightened times... this we do not speak of.

I see what you did there. Nice interlude though - and only on your particular Kerbin would you find mountaineer-dudes!

Not sure if it’s exactly what you had in mind but this sounds a bit like supercavitation. From the Wikipedia article, it’s been shown to work with torpedoes and in principle could be used on larger vessels too. I don’t think it would be practical for vertically launched buoyancy rockets, simply because you run out of water too quickly at the speeds needed to sustain the supercavitated bubble. But the basic idea of using a bubble to reduce drag is sound, so far as I know.

Oh definitely. The Mars simulant they used was also chosen for chemical similarity - there's no guarantee at all that its microstructure (which is quite important here ) will bear any resemblance to actual Martian soil. On the other hand, you can just imagine the conversation over the radio from the first space travellers tasked with doing the actual surface experiment: "Negative, Capcom. We're not building a sandcastle - we're running an extended version of the In-situ Construction and Building Material Evaluation Experiment." Maybe cosmonauts can haul themselves up by their own bootstraps?

It's not that hard to look these things up you know. Early space suits featured leather boots and leather-palmed gloves. More interestingly, the Strizh-ESO suit was apparently intended to have a leather outer layer. The Strizh suit was intended for Buran pilots and I think it's safe to say that the Strizh-ESO suit would have been used by particularly badS Buran pilots since the leather layer was intended to "protect the pilot from the enormous heat generated during a supersonic free-fall from the stratosphere." On the other hand, leather isn't particularly elastic, so I wouldn't imagine it would be much good for making the inner, pressure maintaining layer of a spacesuit.

From the actual publication rather than the pop-sci articles: “Upon a high-pressure compression, Mars-1a particles form a strong solid at ambient, with resultant flexural strengths exceeding that of typical steel-reinforced concrete or many in situ resource utilization (ISRU) created materials formed by adding binders.” So I’m guessing it’s as strong in compression and bending? No idea about tension but if you want to dig into the details, the article is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-01157-w Or search for Martian brick nature.

Speaking of stone masonry... https://phys.org/news/2017-04-simple-no-bake-recipe-bricks-martian.html TL: DR. Making small test bricks which are stronger than reinforced concrete by moderate compression of simulated Martian soil (as in pressures created by a decent blow from a hammer). Popular Mechanics has a similar article pointing out a number of caveats. If it does work though, I think there's something rather appealing about using one of our oldest construction techniques to build Mars habitats. Not to mention its potential simplicity - it really doesn't get a lot simpler than hitting dirt with a hammer. And from the same site: https://phys.org/news/2016-03-tomatoes-peas-harvested-mars-moon.html#nRlv Again, some obvious caveats, and currently the crops being grown are thought to be inedible due to heavy metal uptake. An interesting work in progress though, given some of the commentary on this thread!

Speaking of one of those happy few, I concur.

Short answer Why not both? At our current technology levels neither growth nor recycling alone is going to be a one size fits all solution to a Mars colony's needs. Longer answer Expanding consumes space and energy too. As does replacing anything that you're not recycling. It'll be a balance for the colonists - recycle nothing and they'll be using time and resources to replace their losses that could be put into expanding. Likewise, if they try to recycle everything, they could end up devoting too much time and resources that could be more usefully spent on replacing their losses or expanding. As a deliberately stupid example, consider a hypothetical air maintenance system. Oxygen is produced from water by electrolysis. Carbon dioxide is absorbed using lithium hydroxide canisters. Every second week, someone replaces the spent canisters with fresh ones and chucks the spent ones out of the airlock. In principle it could work. But you (the colonists that is - not you personally) are using up water to make new oxygen and using up lithium hydroxide (plus whatever other materials are in your canister) to make new carbon dioxide scrubbers. You're also wasting a lot of carbon by locking it up as lithium carbonate and throwing it away. Unless you're obtaining your new canisters from off-world, you're also spending time and resources in digging up and processing new raw materials (which may not be particularly abundant or easy to obtain) to make them on-site. Given all of that, it would seem more sensible to figure out a way of turning carbon dioxide back into oxygen (or at least using it to make something useful) than to set up an elaborate and inefficient lithium carbonate production line. Conversely, as a more interesting example, consider the paper that Kerbiloid linked to on the use of bacterial proteins to get rid of perchlorates. My first thought was that using the bacteria themselves (cultured on Mars) would be more efficient than using purified protein. But it may well not be, certainly not in the short term. Culturing bacteria on Mars requires resources and may not be particularly easy - not all bacteria are amenable to culturing. On the other hand, a kilogram or two of purified proteins would last an awful long time (the proteins are catalysts so aren't used up directly during the perchlorate treatment reactions, although they'll degrade over time), and a kilogram or two of protein isn't too much mass to ship out from Earth. Likewise, manufacturing those proteins on Earth isn't dirt cheap or trivial but neither would it be a ridiculous cost in the context of setting up a Mars colony. Thinking about it in more detail, I'm not at all sure what the better answer is here. As I said, it'll be a balance. It'll make sense to recycle some resources, no sense to recycle others, and others you could make a case for either way. That balance will also shift as the colony expands and develops. My gut feeling is that recycling will eventually prove to be more efficient for most things, your gut feeling seems to be that expansion will be the better option. There, I think, we'll have to agree to disagree. Edit: First paragraph corrected to 'neither growth nor recycling alone...' Hopefully this was clear anyway.

Personal opinion but sci-fi can be as much about the social changes that technology enables or prevents, or about hard decisions that are imposed by technology, rather than the technology itself. Tech for tech's sake is fairly dull, the human story behind that tech, or their struggle to create it, makes for a much more interesting story. Embrace the BFR. You have a very-near-to-future, plausible way of travelling to almost anywhere in the Solar System. For a hard sci-fi story that's an absolute gift because it gives you realism and scope for story telling. Plus the design for the actual BFR (as opposed to its proposed mission architectures) is still in flux, so you don't have to stick to the SpaceX renders for inspiration as to what your BFR-alike looks like. If it really doesn't fit with your projects, I vote for rocketpunk and NERVAs

I think Emiko has slowed down now that Just Jim has joined the Squad team. But yeah, there's not much chatter around the Fan Works these days. I think part of that is just that KSP is pretty old and has been a released game for quite a while. The old guard have moved on, the medium guard are moving on and the new guard have different priorities in a gaming forum. Community participation - outside of rehashing the same old stuff in the Suggestions subforum and nitpicking Squad updates - seems to have been in a downward spiral for a while now, and this is reflected in the token level of of interest and participation in Forum Thread of the Month and Mission of the Week (which also seems to have died a death). Mind you, Squad engagement with the community has been declining too - witness how we've gone from the Daily Kerbal to a weekly update (with occasional JoolTubes) and now we're apparently moving to a quarterly update. It's a vicious spiral I think - community works aren't showcased as much as they were, so folks don't take the time to check them out, so content creators get discouraged, so there's less work to showcase... Which is a little ironic given that the central plank of Making History was a set of tools for players to create new game content. That has also been a problem I think - KSP has been pretty stagnant for years as far as I can tell and Making History didn't do much to address that beyond a scattering of new parts. Sure there have been bug fixes here, an art pass there, an(other) attempt at fixing wheel physics there - but the core gameplay hasn't changed much at all. And without new gameplay stuff to discuss, the community discussions have largely devolved to the aforementioned nitpicking and rehashing. Or maybe I'm just a crusty (and slightly bitter) member of the old guard at this point, who has a boatload of house chores to do to get the place ready for sale, and is contemplating a return to work tomorrow after a week off. YMMV.

Well that was... no it was... nope, not that either. Okay - I give up. What the heck just happened there?! Edit - I laughed at the blowing up/inflating liferaft though.

Nice article - thanks! I particularly liked the emergency oxygen generator. For a colony, using the actual bacteria rather than the purified bacterial enzymes might be more useful because the bacteria will replicate themselves, thus saving the colonists the trouble of acquiring purified enzymes. But yeah - I like that concept a lot for decontamination. Hose down the suits of returning EVA crews, use bacteria or enzymes to treat the perchlorate containing run-off. I leave the engineering details as an exercise for somebody else. If something goes wrong and the bacteria need to be re-established then thermal decomposition could be a backup system but I think the bacteria, with their lower energy use, would be a better primary system. Martian dust would still be nasty stuff but it looks like it could at least be a manageable problem.

Switching topics a little, I've been doing a bit of reading up on perchlorates, since they've been identified as a component of Martian soil and are toxic, so being able to get rid of them would be helpful for a Mars colony hoping to utilise Martian soil for anything. Turns out that magnesium perchlorate (a signficant perchlorate in Martian soil) undergoes thermal decomposition to magnesium oxide, oxygen and chlorine. That chlorine can then be reacted with water (possibly obtained from drying the perchlorate before decomposition since magnesium perchlorate is likely to be found in one of several hydration states) to form hydrochloric acid. Carrying out that process in bulk would require some care but it might be a useful way of decontaminating Martian soil using nothing but water (used to rinse the perchlorate out of the soil) and heat, and generating three useful materials in the process. Magnesium oxide is a refractory ceramic, hydrochloric acid is generally useful for all sorts of chemistry (if all else fails use it to make salt to cure that deer meat. ) and I don't think I need point out why oxygen would be useful.

Hang on a minute. Haven’t you just described a recycling process? Take the waste from one farm, use it for raising animals and then use their waste to create more crop land. Or, if you don’t have the rest of the infrastructure set up to create that extra cropland, you could equally well use that animal waste to return nutrients to your first farm. I agree that a 100% closed environment isn’t possible. Putting arguments based on perpetual motion machines to one side, a colony is going to require an external source of energy and/or will consume resources to generate energy. Likewise there will be inevitable mass losses to the environment that will need to be replaced. Similarly, unless you start positing some pretty far out sci-fi scenarios (such as nanoassemblers or using living organisms for absolutely everything), there will come a point where recycling isn’t feasible and additional raw materials are required. As other folks have pointed out on this thread, in the end it boils down to economics. If I need another kilogram of raw material (doesn’t matter which raw material we’re talking about) then I need to consider whether it’s cheaper to get that material from an off-world source, to obtain it from a Martian source or to obtain it via recycling. Cheaper in this context isn’t necessarily referring to a financial cost, it could be an opportunity cost too. Given the challenges of developing an entirely built infrastructure where doing anything outside that infrastructure requires technological assistance (even digging up a kilo of regolith requires machinery or an EVA suit), I think that recycling will be the most attractive option in many cases. TL: DR. Just because recycling everything isn’t possible that doesn’t mean that recycling as much as you can is a bad idea.

Picking this up again after a friendly private messge. You know who you are - thanks. @Cassel Yep - good points and you’re right about the error in my calculation - thanks. I could maybe debate the exact numbers but that’s just nitpicking for the sake of it. Your point still stands - that’s a hefty amount of resources to find. I think it can be - and will need to be - substantially reduced by recycling though. To a decent approximation (and it is only an approximation) whatever nutrients an adult consumes are eventually excreted in one form or another. That’s obviously not true of growing children where nutrients consumed go to make more child. But even so, in principle, a lot of that 540kg of micronutrients should be recoverable from sewage and that green waste you mention. The big trick of course is designing a system that combines reasonably efficient recovery with reasonable simplicity. KISS is going to be an important factor in running a Mars colony I think, given that any technology used needs to be imported from Earth or manufactured onsite - which brings its own set of problems. That’s why I liked your post above about using the whole animal. I’ll not bore you (again ) with my thoughts on Martian livestock but your general point about efficient use of all resources - or at least that’s how I read it - I completely agree with. It’s also why I think that some form of plant farming on Mars is going to feature in any colonisation efforts. Plants are pretty good at recovering trace elements from their environment and packaging them up in a convenient, more-or-less ready to eat package. Yes, biology is messy and yes, growing plants comes with its own set of problems to solve but, to me, their effectiveness and potential simplicity (compared to a more technological solution) as nutrient recyclers is quite compelling.

@kerbiloid. I am clearly wasting my time here. I try to have a constructive discussion based on available facts, an acknowledgement of where I'm getting those facts from and an acknowledgement of potential problems and/or questions to which I don't have an answer. In return I receive a dismissive reply based on exaggeration, numbers presented without justification and which is apparently ignoring the points I've made. For example, I describe a soil (with a definition of what I mean by soil) in which a large number of agriculturally relevant elements are present at anywhere between 1 and 10% by weight. You respond by describing it as a 'sand / gravel with traces of useful minerals here and there'. Those two descriptions are not consistent. It's possible that I'm not explaining myself very well. It's also possible that I'm not fully understanding your reply. However, given the hostile and dismissive tone of that reply, I have no further interest in taking the time to contribute to this discussion. Good day. I can't honestly say that this has been a pleasure, so I feel no need to thank you for our 'discussion.'