GreeningGalaxy

I was trying to treat your original post not so much as a "rebuttal that it can't happen" as a "crash-test to help find flaws and solidify the details more." Yes, I did respond rather snarkily to some parts that seemed unnecessarily contentious, but the whole 'pick apart detail by detail' bit helps a lot to figure out what would work the best. I think you're still making a lot of assumptions on what's possible, but I agree that, given the developers' limited time and funds, it's improbable that we'll see everything mentioned in this thread. Everything in here is highly speculative, just like all suggestion threads.

I support this. I've found myself reflexively hitting X to stop timewarp a lot - it's intuitive to have a universal "stop doing that!" key. Z to insta-jump to maximum timewarp (assuming you're not at 1x, in which case it would just do what it normally does) would be amusing as well, but probably unnecessary.

The feature he introduced looks more like you're going to find single rocket parts, or at least small bits of craft, with stranded kerbals. It'll pave the way to something like what I suggested here, but it's not really the same, since it only appears for contracts and the kinds of things which will show up are very limited.

I'm seeing two main camps here: People who don't like the idea of not being the first on [insert destination here], and people who like how very kerbal space races are. The solution is simple: to the difficulty options! There could be several settings: 0- No NPCs. The solar system is empty except for you. 1- Derelicts only. Spent stages, decrepit hulks with a few drops of fuel ripe for the taking, but no active craft besides yours. 2- Monkey-see/monkey-do. You'll always be the first to any given location, but the NPCs will follow in your footsteps. 3- Slow and steady NPCs. Beating them to places won't be hard, but they'll get there first if you let them. 4- Full-on space race. Maybe the game will calculate something like funds and other resources for the NPCs, and they'll be hot on your tail and possibly likely to beat you places if you delay getting off the ground. This could open the door to amusing little things like the Chinese spacecraft in 2010, which burned all of its fuel in its transfer burn to beat the already-departed Russians to Jupiter, relying on aerocapture on arrival and ISRU for the return flight. In addition to the 5 main activity settings, there could be a slider for max total NPC flights (similar to the Max Persistent Debris slider), and possibly one for NPC spawn rate and customizable craft type distribution (i.e. setting it to spawn more debris and less active flights). I'm sure developing this would be far too big an undertaking for the imminent 1.0 release, but I'd love to see it in any degree in one of the subsequent post-1.0 versions.

Nah. The Vista works by a process that wouldn't really work with antimatter - there'd be no point for all those lasers, anyway. If you're really concerned about game balance, I have another solution: the antimatter reactors in the basic KSPI have a little description, which calls the 1.25-meter one "solid core", the 2.5m one "gas core", and the 3.75m one "plasma core". This has implications for the performance - with the solid or gas core, you'll be driving a thermal rocket and see lower Isp (about what current thermal nozzles can manage), while the plasma core will be the one capable of driving the magnetic nozzle and achieving super-high Isps. I suggest you make two different kinds of antimatter reactors - the gas core ones, which produce all of their output as thermalpower (since the charged particles are instantly thermalized) and don't tweakscale above 3.75 meters or so, and the plasma core ones, which produce most (~80%) of their power as charged particles and don't scale below 3.75 meters. That way, the super-powerful antimatter engines have to be big, meaning they'll be very hard to lift and will use a lot more propellant and fuel to haul around the reactor. This sidesteps the issue in KSP where small rockets keep being overpowered (see the Rockomax 48-7S).

7000 seconds is still pretty small compared to the 17000 we used to get from those, and the 15500 you can get from the DT Vista. It makes sense that antimatter is more powerful than fusion, right? Also, 405 gigawatts / (7000 seconds * 9.81 * 0.5) =~ 12 meganewtons, which is the thrust you get from a large fusion reactor burning LFO. It's a little high, and, like dusty-plasma-powered thermal rockets, it begs the question of why you're thermalizing all those nice fast charged particles. As far as endgame tech goes at the tail end of the tech tree, very-high-Isp antimatter rockets make sense, especially given how hard it is to collect large amounts of antimatter.

To be clear... These things are not the point of my NPC spaceships suggestion: -Direct, ongoing competition to get places first. Yes, if you go 20 in-game years without ever aiming for Moho, someone might beat you there. Also, there could be specific isolated contracts that involve racing someone somewhere. If you make any effort to go somewhere, though, beating the NPCs would be trivial. If you like, maybe the NPCs will never land anywhere you haven't planted a flag, but that sounds boring. -Combat. Space combat is enormously complicated and wayyyy beyond the scope of KSP. Yes, people will do it. Yes, it will open up all kinds of doors for mods. However, it wouldn't be remotely mentioned in the stock game, and any stock weapons you built and fired at live NPCs would count the same as accidental collisions with NPCs in terms of reputation etc. -Having 'multiplayer' without real other players / Spore-style galactic empire stuff. I don't think KSP is a diplomacy game, and there's no real point in naming specific factions for NPC ships in any case. These things are the point of NPC spaceships: -Depicting the kerbal race as the space-fixated bunch they appear to be. There's no reason your space program should be the only one if kerbals are as excited about going to space as everything in the game thus far would lead you to believe. -Giving the game a more changeful element that improves the unknown factor with space exploration, even after you've explored all the planets. -Provide additional interesting game mechanics that operate nicely with the ones already in place (contracts, docking, etc). I realize that the devs have a vision here that doesn't involve combat or conflict. I don't mean to change that, only suggest something that would greatly expand it.

Sure, there would probably be some kind of notification system. And no, it wouldn't 'simulate in real time', especially when it's out of physics range, but there could easily be a moving blip on the map if a ship you've detected is doing maneuvers. That's a tossup, IMO. It seems like it would be trivial to make a map blip go through a few maneuvers, but some (particularly derelicts) could easily just spawn in place. The possibilities here are interesting - of course they're not going to simulate the same way player-controlled ships do, but they might do something far more lightweight and of similar end result. Mods such as MechJeb and KER are already quite good at figuring out which stages are which and calculating dV, and the latter is already a planned feature if I remember correctly. So all you need to do is to have your little map-blip keep track of how much dV it's using as it moves (not a very heavy operation) and then figure out which parts of itself (spent stages) it needs to delete whenever a certain stage runs out of fuel. The ships would never execute burns (apart from ones designed to flee or approach you) when inside physics range, so you could get away with instantaneous accelerations, too. It's not perfect, no, but it would be very computationally inexpensive (especially considering how infrequently it would occur) and would probably be relatively simple to add. Inland KSC, anyone? Nah. There's no reason they would need their own space center as of the current scope of the game. That keeps it ambiguous as to where the ships came from, and could also be a good case for having ships spawn randomly instead of having their launch and all their maneuvers actually traced. They probably won't advance at all. There might be derelict ships in LKO right from the start (the product of space exploration long before you started), but since the NPCs will be limited to your own craft and spawn very rarely, it's unlikely that you'll see running ships and ships capable of landing anywhere beat you there unless you let them. The 'difficulty' for the NPCs will presumably be constant and difficult - they won't launch things often, and they won't get further than you much because they're restricted to your designs. This latter feature means that they'll be seen to advance at about the same rate as you in terms of science and unlocked parts. No. More likely, there will be a random chance at any given point in time for a ship to launch. Determining factors in how likely it is will include the cost of the ship in question, transfer windows, and current number of NPC ships spawned, but there wouldn't need to be any money or resource calculation on the part of NPC agencies. Maybe, but not by default. A certain contract might be "Get there before [rivalcorp] does" and then a specific NPC ship would spawn for the duration of the contract and race you to the destination, but that's just a specific instance. Ordinarily, their contracts would be completely different from yours (aka nonexistent, there'd be no real 'contracts' for NPCs, only simple AI goals). Who knows? Presumably their goal is the same as yours.ISRU is planned for 1.0, but NPC ships wouldn't necessarily have to use it. Nah. Presumably they're not sharing their R&D knowledge etc. with you, so science found by you will always be new to you. This is probably beyond the scope at the moment, because you can't even scavenge your own ships for parts. That's to say nothing of mods, though. This has nothing to do with the subject of NPC spaceships, nor does the Outer Space Treaty necessarily mean anything in KSP. Docking with derelicts will immediately transfer ownership of them to you (right of salvage, if only because it would make a good game mechanic). Docking with live ships could work any number of ways - it might handle the docking node differently, so the ships continue to act as two separate entities with limited resource-transfer capabilities, or it could be impossible - after all, it is trivial for a ship that doesn't want to be docked with to avoid it. Use of launch facilities is probably out of scope. There could easily be towing/refueling contracts, though. Nope, they'll just flat-out steal your designs, slap a random flag on them, and launch them. As for use, "they'll figure it out," aka they'll just calculate the dV, cut loose the stages that will be expended, and spawn in place. This means they might get slightly varying performance out of your designs than you, but you can just handwave that away with 'modifications' - after all, you probably won't see more than the orbital transit stage of any of the NPC ships. Thanks. Several of those weren't even yes/no questions. Anyway, I totally bow down to you and your clearly superior and ultimate understanding of game design. Have mercy on us underlings, O Lord. Does it matter? That will be left up to the player's imagination. It's hard to imagine there will be any real-world representation (ie USA vs Russia), anyway. Don't worry, you've succeeded. I don't understand what you're saying here, but it sounds like politics, which is a banned topic. The exact mode of operation of the other space industries (whether they're private or belong to national governments) will be totally left to player speculation. - - - Updated - - - A waste of RAM? NPC ships would use practically no RAM at all, no more than having one of your own flights in progress uses. To make matters better, NPC ships will be rare, probably at a rough maximum at five or six in the entire solar system at any point in time, and they'll have a spawn chance inversely proportional to the cost, so big ships (which could lag out your game with their part count if allowed to come within physics range) will be rare. And yes, there will probably be an option to turn them off as well, if you really just can't stand not being the first to get anywhere.

I heard that too. Apparently it was announced on Reddit. [grumbles] Spore's content-sharing system would be absolutely perfect for KSP, but I don't know how hard it would be to implement (especially since it would require fast, high-capacity constantly-running servers on the developer's side). Mod craft would also be tricky. Anyway, that's beyond the scope of this particular thread, but it's a superb idea.

That would definitely suit the idea well. Non-ship, non-asteroid movable artifacts. As for the people who complain about not liking to be beat to destinations, I hear you, but at the same time, that race element is a huge part of space exploration in real life. However, it's likely that NPC ships able to land on surfaces of planets (or at least, ones that actually make successful landings) would be quite rare, thus giving you lots of time. Also, since the NPC ships will largely be only your own creations, it's probably your own fault if you have a rocket capable of going somewhere and someone else actually does it first.

Well, most smartphones don't get dust inside them, do they? They're mostly sealed shut, and, on occasion (such as some waterproof phones), solid all the way through. Of course, they do this at the expense of a) not being very modular or customizable (although this could change) and using the less-powerful ARM chip architecture. Soon, maybe advances in solid-state cooling methods, such as Peltier coolers, could allow computers with x86 chips to be built like smartphones, with no air gaps inside in which dust can collect. To some extent, liquid cooling could certainly help with this as well. Alternatively, someone might start marketing ARM laptops which trade some performance for long-term reliability and super-slim form factors - that's essentially what Microsoft has done with its Surface devices, but those are still rather ungainly for certain tasks that normal laptops are good at just because of how small and tabletey they are.

I've read over the What Not To Suggest and I think this doesn't fall into any of those categories, but stop me if I'm wrong about that. Anyway, there are lots of people on here who want aliens, right? Except aliens aren't really within the scope of the game, and are also on the list of things that won't be included/shouldn't be suggested. Sure, aliens might be a silly idea for KSP, but it would still be fun to have some other active force besides you in the game, wouldn't it? There's also people who like playing with weapons, right? BDA, Skillful, or even just detachable 'missiles' which are just fuel tanks and engines? Only problem is, there's nothing to shoot at but your own stuff. Enter randomly-placed, non-player-controllable spacecraft. They'd probably be mostly your own designs, maybe with a few "secret" stock designs that only show up as NPCs, and their position and state of stage attachment when found would be governed by how much delta-V they have (i.e. you wouldn't find a space shuttle orbiting Jool, but you could easily find one of your short-range landers on the surface of Minmus). I'd imagine they'd be relatively rare to find - space is a big place, and, particularly early in the game, I wouldn't expect many agencies to have the power of spaceflight. In fact, that might add something of a race element to the game - You might be the first off the ground, but you'll have to work some to be the first to any given destination. Ostensibly, they'd belong to rival space programs. The tracking station would be able to pick them up in the vicinity of Kerbin in much the same way as asteroids, but further out, you might only be able to detect them by flying there yourself. At that point, your ability to detect them might depend on a number of things, such as: -Operational state of the NPC (running ships containing live kerbals will be easier to find than derelicts, just because of radio traffic) -Antennae on your own ship (this could be a double function for resource scanners - finding other ships) -Skill level of crew members -Size of NPC ship Naturally, the NPCs would be in different states of repair. You could easily find crash debris or halves of ships that didn't make it down to the surface of a planet in one piece, orbiting derelicts with important parts missing, and, of course, fully-operational craft with missions of their own. These last ones might have variable behavior - they might, for instance: -Try to rendezvous with you once detected- after all, most kerbals are probably very curious by nature, and they'll want check out that weird blip on the radar just as much as you do. -Run away from you if you try to approach them. -Ignore you completely- they have more important business to attend to than your silliness. This would also give rise to a bunch of new options and gameplay mechanics: -You could dock to a derelict ship, assuming it has a docking port, and siphon off whatever resources are still left aboard. -You could also board a ship which is mostly functional but lacks crew and claim it for yourself, assuming the previous owners were so kind as to leave the door unlocked. -Contracts could require you to deliver supplies to a stranded ship, salvage a derelict, tow an NPC satellite or station into a new orbit, or otherwise help out spacecraft in need. Of course, combat will be something many people will be looking for. I don't think space combat, being as notoriously complex as it is, would find much of a place in stock KSP, but that won't stop people from mounting weapons on their craft anyway. In the stock game, I would imagine destroying (or colliding with) other people's ships would lower your reputation significantly, and they might start to run from you more often if your notoriety got particularly high. This would also, of course, open the door to all kinds of complicated combat-based mods - it wouldn't take much more than what you can already do with Mechjeb to make an NPC ship launch things at you, after all. In general, I think having NPC ships in the game would greatly improve its immersiveness in a way that wouldn't complicate the existing mechanics too much. It would also add a constantly-changing element to the gameplay, which would keep players interested for longer, and would further diversify contracts and make the game more exciting - who doesn't love finding strange ships? So, what does everyone think? Would NPC spaceships improve KSP?

Check the math again - I didn't, in fact, miss the division by 2 in any of the calculations I've done so far. I have installed the updated version (just now, as it happens). You're right, the power output I was giving for the particle bed reactor was pretty low, but, based on my own tests, I still don't believe that the engines are remotely under-performing. I've managed to redo my tests of the 2.5m thermoturbojets and still find them to be producing too much power at peak (I got exactly the same numbers as before). I also did tests of the 1.25m reactors, and everything I tested (particle bed, dusty plasma, and fusion) was producing almost equal thrust power to reactor power at peak performance. They probably need a significant nerf to account for the fact that you aren't going to get more than about 80% total efficiency out of that kind of engine, but they're at least not pulling power out of thin air. I would definitely still say that the thermal jets are in no way in need of a buff, though - they now have quite significant TWRs with small engines and are pushing the limits of theoretical efficiency, so increasing their power would benefit neither realism nor game balance. Justification? Well, collecting antimatter in the mod's current state is pretty much pointless, because there's no nice powerful propulsion system to use with it ever since Fractal nerfed thermal rockets. Just for gameplay reasons, a high-thrust high-ISP antimatter propulsion system would be great to have. As for numbers, I can probably help a little more with that. Project Rho's page on Exotic Weapons has a bit about the kinds of things antimatter gets up to during annihilation. Based on what I found there, it looks like approximately 55% of the energy from an antimatter reaction will show up as charged pions, while the rest is going to end up as gamma rays (which, for the sake of simplicity, I think the mod refers to as thermal power). Of course, there are other small details to consider as well - mainly, you're not going to thermalize all the gamma rays. What that means is that, say, the 405-gigawatt antimatter reactor, in order to produce 405 gigawatts of extractable power, might have to annihilate considerably more than 405 gigawatts' worth of antimatter. The gammas, particularly those formed as a result of neutral pion decay, probably are going to be tricky to trap. Project Rho seems to be of the impression that about 1/3 of the energy of the reaction will be from neutral pions, so if we assume that half the neutral pions and their subsequent decay-product gamma rays escape the reactor without providing useful heat, that means that only ~66% of the antimatter energy is captured. Furthermore, if we assume that all of the charged pions are captured, that means that our charged particle ratio relative to the total power is going to be something like 0.55/0.66, or about 83%. Assuming that from that point on, the charged pions are expelled from the magnetic nozzle with near-perfect efficiency (an assumption that the mod apparently does make for the other kinds of charged particles), then we'll see quite handsome engine performance (in the neighborhood of 320 gigawatts, if you make the same assumptions I did.) As of now, antimatter reactor consumption is a little strange. If we assume that the speed of light c is the same in KSP as it is for our universe, the 15 milligrams/second draw of the 405 GW reactor comes out to E=2*0.000015*299792458^2 or about 2.7 terawatts. That's a rather low efficiency, about 15%. However, that's forgetting one small detail: For the Alcubierre drives contained in the mod, the speed of light for the itty-bitty kerbal universe is assumed to be 1/10 of the one in our universe. Originally, this was just to keep the drives from being unreasonably fast relative to the system, but it also has the implication of reduced energy/mass equivalence. Using c*0.1 for our antimatter yield gives us E=2*0.000015*29979245.8^2, or only about 27 gigawatts! In short, that antimatter reactor is getting a lot of power out of nowhere if you assume that the speed of light is consistent between the antimatter reactors and the Alcubierre drives. To find the antimatter draw that would really be required for a 405 gigawatt reactor assuming the above 66% total efficiency, we could use M = E/2*c^2, so M = (405 GW/0.66 eff) / (2*29979245.8^2) = 0.000341 kg/s or 341 milligrams per second. It's a little high, but I think it's reasonable - if it's really an issue of game balance, the capacity of the antimatter containers could always be bumped up a bit. All this physics is making me hungry. --Addendum-- I just remembered - the differing value for c would also drastically affect the yield of fission and fusion reactions, because the energy released is due to the change in mass defect of the nuclei. Since it would probably wreck everything to try and fix all the reactors to account for this, it might make more sense to keep antimatter yield calculations using normal real-world c (in which case the antimatter draw to produce 405 gigawatts at 66% efficiency would drop to 0.0000034 kg/s or 3.4 milligrams per second). You're the modder, it's your call.

It only runs off of charged particles because that's the only form of power you can use to heat your propellant directly. The rest of the output comes in the form of neutrons which heat the solid portions of the reactor, thus the temperature you can heat your propellant to is limited by their failure point. Magnetic nozzles have always been a little strange in this mod, ever since their implementation. I think, in their most ideal sense, they're the answer to everyone asking about fission fragment rockets (which, at the expense of producing practically no thrust at all, could conceivably have Isps as high as 1.5 million seconds). In practice, though, they'd suffer the same exact problems as other realistically-low-thrust engines in KSP if they were proper fission fragment rockets: no one wants to sit around and wait for a 30-newton thruster to change the orbit on their 50-ton ship. Solar sails have partly addressed this problem by allowing your ship to experience forces while on rails (during timewarp), but there are problems with doing this for regular engines. Fractal seems to have done it by using liquidfuel to 'gear down' the engine - adding extra mass to the reaction, so the exhaust velocity drops and the thrust increases. The exact mechanics of how this works for the charged particles released by various reactions (ie fission vs. fusion) are a little dubious, but it's ostensibly valid physics, and suffers only from the fact that the <1 charged particle ratio of reactors means that the thrust power when using these engines is limited. I think they might see more usefulness if the 'gearing' were variable like on the DT Vista - keep the power consumption constant, and make lower throttle equal higher Isp and lower thrust. The other main problem with magnetic nozzles as implemented in KSPI, of course, is that they don't work on antimatter reactors. Ever since the thermal nozzle nerf (in which Fractal apparently decided that thermal nozzles are thermal nozzles only, and we can't pretend they're plasma-core rockets or other such things), antimatter propulsion has been all but useless- there's no way to get a decent Isp out of it, and thanks to some recent bugs, you can't even really get decent thrust out of it either (most of the power just vanishes into thin air). Antimatter reactors seem like they would be the best niche for magnetic nozzles - the huge power output means you can enjoy respectable thrust along with your very high Isp - but, for whatever reason, Fractal decided that antimatter won't work with magnetic nozzles, because apparently antimatter reactions don't produce charged particles that can be deflected with a magnetic field. Indeed, the antimatter reactors in the game don't produce charged particles, so on some level, it makes sense. Except it doesn't, because antimatter reactions do produce charged particles. The charged pions emitted from the reaction are short-lived and quickly decay into gamma rays, but not so quickly that redirecting them with powerful magnetic fields and gaining incredibly powerful propulsion at pretty good efficiencies isn't possible. Of course, if we're talking about direct-annihilation beam-core antimatter propulsion, we'll run into two main problems: one, the thrust will still be absolutely microscopic for the power levels in question ((405 GW / 100 Mm/s * 2)*60% eff =~ 1.2 kN, which is higher than a fission-fragment but still not a lot when you're pushing a giant reactor around), and two, you'll need prohibitive quantities of antimatter and no meaningful quantities of anything else, since your propellant is equal parts matter and antimatter - that's going to kill your mass ratio. Plus, your Isp is going to be so ludicrous as to be unbalanced. 10 million seconds? KSP doesn't have interstellar flight just yet! The obvious answer to both of these issues is the plasma-core antimatter engine. Just add more hydrogen - your thrust goes up, your Isp goes down, and you've got a useful and more or less game-balanced engine. Oh hey - adding hydrogen to fix the low thrust issue. Sound familiar? Ultimately, I'd be inclined to suggest that antimatter reactors be given a charged-particle ratio. It would make them work easily and realistically with magnetic nozzles, which would bring antimatter propulsion back to its former glory in this mod, and it would also be pretty true-to-life in how antimatter reactions would work.

Hmm. I don't know C# (yet ), so I'm not entirely sure what's going on there, but I'll play with the thermal jets some more and see if I can find anything that looks consistent with those numbers ...I guess. That's the best I can do, but hopefully someone who knows what that code does can provide a better answer.

I don't think I have any reason to believe that it would be linear - I haven't tested un-upgraded reactors, larger reactors, or different methods of power generation (antimatter, AIM, fission, etc), nor more/less intakes. I think what would be ideal is to find the formulas that govern thrust and Isp on thermal engines and change them to make them behave realistically to begin with, but as I've never worked with this kind of thing before, I have no idea how hard that would be. In the short run, some kind of adjustment to just make sure the thrust power of the engine doesn't go above the power of the reactor attached to it would be better than nothing, even if it acted as a hard limit. I'll do some more tests tomorrow and see if I can figure anything else out.

Here's how you get rid of cockroaches: EAT THEM ALL. I've not had the opportunity to try them, but I hear they can be quite tasty and nutritious.

Just taking a look at your screenshots, I think everything looks about right as-is. For the second picture, with the engine producing 136 kN at 195.5 s, sticking that into the thrust power equation gives a total thrust power of about 130 megawatts: (136,000 N * 195.5 s * 9.81 m/s/s) / 2 =~ 130,000,000 W = 130 MW Given that the fully-upgraded dusty-plasma reactor of that size puts out a max power of 142 megawatts, a 130-megawatt thrust power seems to suggest rather generous values for conversion efficiency, but it's at least within the realm of possibility, especially since you mentioned that was peak thrust. (It's also a little hard to nail down how the charged-particle portion of that power is making it into the exhaust - bremsstrahlung? Who knows, but also another thing that can be allowed to slide). Obviously, you won't see efficiencies nearly that high at sub-optimal conditions, like at very high altitude or especially high speed. There's some complexities regarding airflow volume and speed that aren't accounted for in the current model, but I think it's mostly accurate enough as it stands, and it certainly doesn't need to be given more thrust, since that would be pushing the limits of theoretical efficiency at best and pulling energy out of nowhere at worst (which is something we've seen in other parts of the mod, unfortunately.) Plus, those engines are generally enough to scream your way into orbit in a handful of minutes - Even if it were realistic to give them a buff, would they need it? --UPDATE-- I did a test: In that picture, you can see the thrust and Isp of the engine of the test vehicle, which are about 1500 kN and 820 s, respectively. That comes out to a thrust power of almost exactly 6 gigawatts, which is too bad, because the reactor the engine is attached to is only putting out 5.5 GW of thermal power: 0.5 * 1500 kN * 820 s * 9.81 m/s/s =~ 6,000,000,000 W = 6 GW (/ 5.5 GW = 110% conversion efficiency.) Looks like we've got bad math after all- these engines are putting out way too much thrust and Isp for the input power. The peak thrust of the engine (which I didn't catch with the screenshot) was more like 1550 kN at 850 seconds (6.6 GW) if you're keen for the record books. Upshot is, thermoturbojets need a little tweaking. The thrust power I saw at ground level was just fine (about 3 GW, which seems reasonable efficiency), but it quickly got ridiculous as I got a little higher in the atmosphere and moved a little faster. I'm not exactly sure what's wrong with KSPI's math, but it's clearly inconsistent.

SpaceY's combo sepratron/decouplers are a nice brute-force solution to this problem, as are the big beefy sepratrons that also come with the mod. I've personally never been terribly happy with decoupler forces - I don't have time for boosters that are just going to sort of slide off the edge of my ship, I generally need them gone now when I press the staging button. Stock sepratrons are okay, but I'm a much bigger fan of MRS Flingatrons or all the nifty things SpaceY has to offer.

72! That number is... significant somehow but I don't know how. Yay.

Even hydrogen-fueled scramjets (the most powerful airbreathing combustive engine design known) have a top speed of around Mach 17, or about 5000 m/s at 80,000 meters (assuming you can get it to run at full thrust that high) which is just over half the 8000 m/s you need to make Earth orbit. Scramjets are attractive, yes, but you're still going to need most of your vehicle to be rocket propellant.

In Interstellar, when the lander smacked into a giant levitating chunk of ice and they just went "huh, frozen cloud". I actually whispered "what???" in the theater.

#DCF3FF is one of my favorites. I don't know if this is weird, but I wouldn't mind having skin that color. Especially if it sort of fluoresced in sunlight. hmmmm. Other than that, I'm rather fond of #8000FF and other shades of blue-violet. Greens such as #60D731 are neat too, as is #9CB5C1.

Ionizing radiation (presumably in the form of charged particles, which can be blocked by spacecraft hulls (unlike gamma rays)) is almost the least of your worries. Sure, it'll shorten your life if you manage to make it back inside before you asphyxiate, but your main worries while you're out there will be lack of oxygen, all the little bits of your body having pressure issues, and thermal/ultraviolet radiation from the sun if you have the misfortune to be outside something's shadow when you fall out the airlock.

Our good friend Project Rho, as usual, has enough to say on the matter to lay most of it to rest. According to that, space might feel quite cold indeed at first, but after your skin water evaporated, you wouldn't feel much in the way of temperature unless unfiltered sunlight hit you, and then you'd certainly overheat quickly if you stayed in it for long (but probably not before the hypoxia got you). Oxygen masks would be entirely useless, as you wouldn't be able to exhale without pressure surrounding your lungs - in fact, if you had any air in your lungs when you found yourself in the vacuum, they would probably burst. Survival in a vacuum for very brief periods could be done, but I wouldn't make a habit of it.