vger

Wasn't that same kind of committee debate what resulted in the shuttle slowly evolving from a sleek 100% reusable space plane in early development into the "flying brick" we eventually wound up with? Unless there was a lot more he put on the table besides "rapid response missile interception," I don't think Reagan's idea classified as anything in the realm of a 6th branch of the military "Space Force."

Interesting thought. It gives me mixed feelings. I guess you could say that if it gets every competitive nation into dominating space, it can only serve to propel our science forward, and that's a good thing. On the other hand if a fight breaks out up there, Kessler Syndrome is going to transform LEO into a impenetrable blockade, and then nobody will be doing ANYTHING with space anymore.

In case you haven't heard about this...https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/06/18/its-official-trump-announces-space-force-6th-military-branch.html First, I don't want to talk about the moral implications, as this definitely isn't the place for it. I'm only interested in tossing ideas around about practicality and speculating on what the eventual project might end up looking like. We're not living in the Star Wars universe after all. Personally, I don't see any way this could "get off the ground." A lot of people already thumb their noses at NASA as a waste of taxpayer money, talking about how expensive it is and treating it like it provides little of value in return. A Space Force would be outrageously more expensive, unless some "officially-non-existent government agency" is about to announce they've developed a Kraken Drive. Just knowing how the President thinks, I'm pretty sure he's envisioning having a constant military presence in orbit. It feels reminiscent of Reagan's Star Wars project, but I just don't see the point. Space is pricey enough as it is, and now we'd be talking about adding ordinance to the weight of payloads, and that stuff is prohibitively heavy. Such a military craft would also need enough fuel to be able to switch orbits several times if they're going to be capable of intercepting/responding to threats. Is there something about this that I'm overlooking here? What could space ships do that we can't do just as easily (and much more cheaply) with missiles launched from the ground?

Oh, now it's there... that might've been the edit. Dang. Sorry for wasting everyone's time. I'll go into a fallout bunker now and stay there for a year.

It's there, wise guy, right in the screenshot. But anyway, now that we have the issue sorted out, nothing to see. I'm just purging the other post. Am I actually the only one who has ever asked about this? It was just very unexpected and ended up looking like a bug.

Where? I looked all over that thread for that specific piece of information.

Yeah, I was in the backup folder and didn't realize. But whatever, I'm taking this over to the SVE thread now.

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SvE was said to greatly enhance basic EVE, but aspects other than AVP. Are they not actually meant to work together.

I found out what was altering the config, but still don't see anything that would turn off the sunset. I can't even understand why someone would want to do that. Certainly the screenshots for AVP don't reflect what I'm witnessing. Looks like the culprit is the SVE configs for EVE.

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Can someone explain why I've lost access to the scatterer menu? It was working when I first installed it, but now I can't seem to bring it up. Something else appears to be keeping it suppressed. The mod is definitely working (partially) but I can't get to the menu to try and tweak it. I tried setting the menu to "true" in the config and it defaults back. Any other values in the config also get reset. Every single setting I've tried to adjust gets reset the moment I start a game. I'm guessing another mod is the culprit, but I can't understand why a mod would force it to those settings. Everything I have installed is part of AvP's "dependency chain." I haven't installed anything that AvP didn't require (or one of the mods AvP relies on required). ^^ Sunset. Note the rich color where the land block the sky vs where the sky is visible. From space, no sign of sunset color.

Even Star Wars technical stuff admits that blasters aren't actually laser guns. They actually fire blobs of plasma. Simplest way to look at it I guess would be a "ball lightning" cannon. Ball lightning has been known to explode on impact, leaving massive gaping holes. Of course, sometimes it also passes straight through objects, doing no damage at all. A laser, by comparison, if we were ever able to make them powerful enough, I guess could produce instantaneous explosions. But would using that much power really be worth it vs using it for a slower cutting/melting process. I guess it depends on what kind of fighting you wanted to use it for. But the damage would probably be comparable to a prolonged lightning strike, and would also look and sound like one too if it was hot enough to ionize the surrounding air. Just a straight white light instead of a zig-zaggy path to the target though. I've always imagined practical military applications of a laser (downing aircraft aside) to be an anti-personnel artillery weapon. Something that could mow down large groups of advancing troops like a ridiculously long chainsaw. But it also has anti-armor applications. It's not particularly humane, but just because you can't tear through a tanks armor, doesn't mean you can't heat it up and cook those inside like a potato wrapped in tin foil.

Dayum, those are massive. Fascinating how similar they all are in size.

Still an interesting challenge though if they made it work right. I could see fierce competition to be the record depth holder.

Very interested to see how this turns out.

Naa. If they drop it into the atmosphere at the end of its run, the ice giant wins.

Even if something could, getting a signal back out would still be a huge problem. And just for reference, here's the rundown on Galileo and Jupiter. Jupiter's radius is 70000 km. Jupiter's solid core, if it exists, probably has a 16000 km radius. Distance from the edge of the atmosphere to the surface: 54000 km. Assuming 54000 km from edge of space to the surface, Galileo bit the dust at 53844 km. That's 0.003% of the entire necessary trip. As of its final transmission, Galileo reported this: The heat shield's temperature reached around 15K C. The ambient temperature of Jupiter at that depth was 153 C. The pressure was 338 psi. The pressure at the surface is estimated to be 650,000,000 psi. The estimated temperature 24,000 C. That's hotter than the surface of the sun, folks. Good luck, engineers.

Well to be fair, the Kerbals don't care much about that. They'd throw as much money as they could burn into JUST a diving probe, just to see how far they could get, and possibly put some Kerbalnauts in there too because "Death for Science = honor" or whatever their Wile E. Coyote-esque ideology is. And no, I'm not expecting it to land. Someone further back suggested that because a manned-return mission from Venus would be almost infinitely hard, that Venus shouldn't have an surface. That's silly though because Kerbals are crazy. If money weren't an option, I'm sure we could get a probe back from Venus. Jupiter though? No frickin' way.

Ah, fudge. Sorry, guess I'm not awake enough. Please tell me someone didn't actually manage to land there. As an aside, I've been looking for the last 20 minutes for a drawing of the Galileo descent (which I'm sure I'd seen before), showing just how quickly it got crushed, without even scratching the "surface" of the atmosphere, relatively-speaking.

Jool is meant to be an analogue of Jupiter, therefore the prospect of landing there is wrong. Kerbol is an analogue of Earth. Our ability to land on Earth is not in question. It's not a relevant comparison.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/f6b2eda5-2359-33d0-97c2-e487d5231183/ss_space-corps%3A-lawmakers-lay.html

I like the idea of being able to do an analogue of the Galileo mission. I'm kind of surprised that wasn't already done, and they've missed an opportunity to release such content in with Cassini's final plunge. Come September, everybody is going to want to drop a probe into Jool. But is there a pressure mechanic in the game at all right now? I'm guessing no. Add a pressure system though and they could also add submersibles at the same time, and kill two birds with one stone.

Put a live kraken in the center that eats ships.

Realistically, gas giants may have oceans. If you compress a gas enough it'll turn into a liquid, so there could easily be a liquid core, possibly even a solid one. But it's not "rocky" in the way we think of it. If you took the pressure away, the material would become gaseous again.