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How about a hybrid? Use the nuke while orbiting smaller bodies and switch to ion when the sun takes over?

I do have to wonder what the benefits/drawbacks of each will be. It seems like those two engines are more or less suited to the same purpose. Both feel like 'end game' engines, both capable of taking you pretty much anywhere. Does it all just boil down to personal preference?

If, for instance, you looked into the future and saw you were going to die in a car crash, you would decide not to go for a drive that day. But now that you have made that decision, the future you saw in your vision never happened, so... how did you see the vision in the first place?

Yep. In Chapter 4, a Martian crawls out of the cylinder to take a peek at the surroundings, without any augmentation (the poor thing can also barely stand up). Later on, before the tripods mobilize, there's talk about jets of green plumes of gas shooting skywards, and industrial noise, implying that the tripods only get assembled after landing. But yeah, the symbiotic relationship between man and machine didn't fly over my head. Or the overall de-evolved bodies no longer being capable of digestion, leading to the Martians having to get their food intravenously. Wells wrote an article called 'The Man of the Year Million' which plainly spells out the human future that he hints at in WotW. I've never been able to find a copy of it anywhere though.

I don't know, but this mission is making me Jool.

I think what was meant was, that asteroids orbiting in the vicinity of the orbits of other worlds, should be more easily detected from those worlds. And the only asteroids you can find near Kerbin... are the ones that come near Kerbin. It's strictly a range-related thing between the detector and the asteroid. The orbit is irrelevant. I guess...

You can cut one of the polygons out of a terrain mesh though, yes? That way the only thing you need to cover up so that it doesn't look like a mess, is one triangle-shaped hole (or are they squares, can't remember now). The rest of the cave would be "beneath" the terrain.

Someone did it in the KerbTown mod. There's no reason this can't be done in the stock game though, but you couldn't do it through terrain generation. It would have to be modeled. Or it might be possible to use a procedural method to model a cave system that properly conforms to the terrain, if you want a planet that has so many tunnels that a cross-section would resemble an ant farm...

Well the purpose of this isn't to hide the craft (though it would work with this using your zoomout option). The idea is to automatically point the camera towards the planet at all times so you don't lose sight of it during half of the orbit.

Ever turn on NASA TV just so you could see some views of Earth? (you know you've done it) I'm sure I'm not the only one, who has just wanted to load up an orbiter in KSP and let it run, just so the scenery of the planet can roll by as if I were looking at a screensaver... I want a camera mode that is designed for this. Is it is now, all camera modes are relative to the craft. This means that the planet will fall out of view when the craft goes behind it. How about a 4th camera mode that always keeps the nearest space body visible behind the vessel at all times?

It's not literally an atmosphere. It's just that the atmosphere portion of KSP's systems could be re-purposed for comets. The coma and the tail, as far as the game is concerned, would function like an atmosphere.

Heh, Scotius, this is why the movie, "Explorers," regardless of how ridiculous it is, is one of my favorite films, ever.

I like Eeloo as a Pluto analogue though. I wouldn't want its orbit changed. Having a gas giant intersecting the orbit of another gas giant would seem a little excessive.

I've got a picture in my mind of how it could work. If I get REALLY bored later, maybe I'll post some pictures. I'll try to explain it in text though. #1. The 'biome map' spins independently of the nucleus, so that the 'tail' biomes always point away from the sun. #2. A duplicate of the biome map, serves as the spotlight mask. Where the ion and dust biomes are, you have holes cut in the mask (with slightly different colors if you wish) through which a light source at the center of the comet can shine. As long as the light mask and the biome map line up, you'll get your biomes exactly where they should be, relative to the tail effects. The H corona can just be done with the same FX that are used for atmospheres.

It's also how the Martians reached Earth in the original War of the Worlds. Massive cannon aimed at Earth, loaded with a cylindrical 'drop ship,' along with three war vehicles and crew/engineers. Bigger problem than making a cannon with enough power is figuring out how to survive the G's.

Even with our current tech though, keep in mind, we're still finding new moons around the gas giants.

I don't need to elaborate on it further. Though I must say that in the speculative discussions I've had about humanity's future in space, very few have happened where politics didn't come up. Space has the potential to destroy a lot of popular notions of how our civilization currently operates, so getting into social/political/economic discussions about what system would work best under such conditions, is 'almost' inevitable.

Well yeah, but.. it'll be Europa when we have 'plate tectonics' at work, and a way to burrow down into the theoretical seas beneath the ice.

They've already said they won't allow procedural star systems because they want the community to have common ground to talk about the worlds they visit. Of course... if someone wants to develop a mod for it... Not to mention wind... But having the planets to mess with gives us more opportunity to provide feedback to the devs about how we think it should behave.

I wouldn't mind there being an end-game planet of sorts though. A Nemesis of sorts, not that it's actually a threat to anything. But some large body out beyond the kuipur belt that only gets discovered after certain conditions are met, such as landing on all the worlds. Though, the idea isn't entirely far-fetched for moons. We're still discovering more around the gas giants these days.

How about this first though. A proper system for actually building and maintaining colonies (and giving them a purpose, one of which could be this asteroid tracking idea).

I was already somewhat concerned about that. From what I was seeing in vids, it looked like ARM was going to turn the game into uber easy-mode. It all depends on where in the tech tree those parts wind up too though. If they're near the end, it might be irrelevant. In the current build, I can already see being able to pull off an all-purpose ship that can go anywhere it wants ((and I haven't even finished the tech tree yet)) The stats on the parts might be getting tweaked yet too though, so who knows. There's still a lot of decimal places to go through before 1.0... Still, I'd like more challenges that come from BEING there, rather than just GETTING there.

lolololol

Aye, this is one of those things I would have liked to learn with science components. As it is now we can look at the Wiki and learn everything we can. But it'd be cool if statistics about planets started showing up in the science records as we recorded them. Gravity, atmo pressure, chemical composition, and so on.

It is when you consider that no corporation is happy unless it always sees an upward slope on a graph. Making profit is never good enough. One must always profit more in one quarter than the previous one. This kind of desperation for squeezing every last buck out of something, has a way of leading to destructive practices.