Geschosskopf

Well, the effort paid off. It looks good enough that I didn't notice

That could happen, although I do try to avoid such things. The higher castes in Circus management naturally view all workers as expendable but they also see astronauts as an investment (all the training, space suits, rations, etc.), which makes them slightly less expendable than normal. At least once they get a few stars. So generally, my Kerbals mostly die as deliberate plot devices, due to BARIS (which I'm not using in this game cuz it wasn't up to date), or the Kraken. Guslie was one of the rare operational accidents. Mission Control often requires Kerbals to do dangerous things (atmospheric EVAs, climbing the giant kerbaformer on Lua, etc.) but the Kerbals almost always get away with them. Besides, it's their job. The Kerbal scientific method has not evolved much beyond "poke the hornet nest with a stick and see what happens", and it's better that semi-expendable workers do the poking rather than important Scientists. To be honest, I was quite surprised that Guslie died, which is why I didn't get a pic of him popping. The thermometer was reading very cold temps, no heat bars were showing on anything, and Guslie had been standing there for 30 seconds or so. I took that shot of him in front of the rover with the focus on the rover and was in the process of switching back to Guslie and reorienting the camera when he popped with no warning. Oh well, the mills of Science! need to be lubed occasionally with Kerbal grease.

I dunno. It took me 10 episodes (including the 0th intro piece) to kill my 1st Kerbal, although 2 did get thrown into the oubliette somewhat earlier. That's hardly up to Circus standards

I dunno. New Glenn is only claiming 50 tons to LEO with a fully validated vehicle, rather less both earlier in the program and always for further afield. https://yellowdragonblogdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/new_glenn_payload_users_guide_rev_c.pdf But at least they have numbers solid enough to pitch to potential customers in official literature. BFR, or whatever Madman Musk is calling it today, is at present a moving target with a constantly changing baseline and a bunch of question marks. Nothing anywhere as solid as the Blue Origins brochure linked above, but more like just riding the hype train his hyperbole has engendered. Just 6 is more than enough to trigger Murphy's Law I thought the whole point of Shackleton Crater was the shade it provided from the Sun, both for various ices to exist and to shield crews from radiation. The mantra of NASA now is "we're going back to the Moon, this time to stay", and I've seen the plans (as shown on the NASA website) to live there. In any case, the shade in the crater seems a better place to hang out, radiologically speaking, than the Gateway station. Or maybe they can bury hab modules under piles of regolith. Either way, it beats "sitting in a tincan far above the world" As the Circus only relies on Kerbals when automation can't generate crew and EVA reports, I see no controversy with this Thanks for the explanation.

Seems rather strange. Repeated missions to the same crater are going to clutter the area up with dead descent stages. This will cause NASA all sorts of problems---excessive part count where they want to build a base eventually, difficulty in switching between EVA Kerbals astronauts, rovers, and the base due to focus having to cycle through all the old stages, etc. And more practically, Muphey's Law dictates that one of these stages will be sitting exactly where they'll need to place an ISRU plant or even the main base itself. The video didn't show you how you played "Tower of Hanoi" to reassemble the lander. I also didn't understand what the robot arm was doing in its brief appearance. As i see i, lander reconstrustion had to have gone like this... One one side, from the Gateway out, you have the ascent stage, the new fuel tank, and the new descent stage. On the other side, you have the transfer stage. First, the transfer stage flies around the station, grabs the new descent stage, and drags it a short distance away. Releasing the new descent stage, the transfer stage then grabs the new fuel tank and moves it to the other docking port where the transfer stage started. Transfer stage then goes back to the other side of the station, grabs the drifting new descent stage, and sticks it on the old ascent stage, which has remained in place the whole time. This whole dance would have to be repeated each time a new descent stage/fuel tank arrived. Is that about right?

You're making a lot of progress since last I was able to read this. I see production values have kept up with the bigger rockets and fancier probes. Very good show!

Good work with the shuttles and SSTO. I'll have to steal some of those ideas. I don't do well with such things.

Welcome to the forum and thanks for the Japanese lesson You're building some very impressive stuff here. I look forward to seeing more.

Very impressive program But yeah, I can see mission planning being a pain with all the mid-mission rendezvous.

@demon_313, you've got some impressive ships in the last few I especially like the seaplane and dock. I hope you show more of that. I'm surprised there are still rifts that big in the game. I thought they'd fixed all that. I haven't see one that big a quite a while.

EPISODE 9: Ashes to Ashes Tune in next time for more of the slow spiral into damnation.

I do like how you can fold up station arms these days Looks nice!

But this removes the consequences. If there are no consequences, there's no point in having the system. Really, there is no function difference in your method here and not having LS at all. You could fake this same system by flying an empty ship to the station, for all the impact it has on the player. Besides, it requires slavery. Nobody's going to volunteer for a job where you're away from home for decades, most of which you spend starved into a coma , and you only get paid for the brief intervals you're awake Just to be devil's advocate, orbital mechanics rely on gravity. But technically, gravity is speculative science because we really don't know how it works. We have several ideas. from relativity to dark matter to MoND but can't prove any of them, or explain why one's a better fit in than the other in some situations, but vice versa in others. Thus, every time you fly a conventional rocket, you're dabbling in speculative science This is the only way I can see to make it work. To accomplish a certain task, you have to satisfy a certain set of requirements. Once those conditions are met, the job is complete and stays that way, no further attention required. In the context of setting up a colony, I can imagine the requirements being some combination of modules that provide for the colonists needs. The exact combination depends on where you put the colony, which determines the local gravity, atmosphere, and available resources. The less hospitable the location, the more modules you need to maintain the environment and gather needed resources. Each module requires crew, which add to the resource demands, etc., just to keep everybody alive, let alone have surplus to build ships or even just produce fuel. Thus, some places will just be too hostile, at least initially. But I expect modules to improve with your tech so eventually you might be able to colonize that location. But anyway, you design all this (probably needing a spreadsheet) and decide what modules you need. Then you send them there. Once all are in place, boom, it's a done deal requiring no micromanagment. The Kerbals have all they need and are employed in public works growing the food, recycling the sewage, patching leaking domes, mining and trucking resources, etc. You don't have to personally control anybody to make things happen. But if you picked a good location, the population can grow, which will throw things out of balance until you increase your infrastructure (add more modules). I'm totally willing to accept self-sufficient colonies in the game. I WANT IT because it's fun to build space empires, even though I know it's never going to happen in real life. I only mentioned the lack of realism inherent in self-sufficient colonies as a counterpoint to the folks worried about fancy-shmancy spce drives. If you accept the colonies (which I do, PROVIDED there's no micromanagement of LS), then you also have to accept whatever magic carpet got all that stuff out there. Because I want the colonies, I'm not at all worried about space drives

The message spam from deployed science, whether it's working or because it isn't, is VERY annoying. I've edited the config file by adding about 8x zeros behind whatever was there to begin with. This helps sometimes. But mostly I just go to the tracking station and delete the whole package. Then swear never to use it again until another patch hopefully fixes the problem.

Yeah, I thought about 3D printing and tried to list some essentials I doubt that can ever make. But even if it can someday, the inputs to 3D printers are themselves the products of long, complex industrial processes, so 3D printing just slightly shifts the problem of needing a huge industrial base, it doesn't eliminate it. Without that base, you'd still have to truck in resupplies of 3D printer ammo. Plus, 3D printing is SLOW compared to conventional manufacturing techniques. I think it's already about as fast as it can go, as the previous bit of material cools just enough to take the weight of the next bit without deforming. This makes it unsuitable for mass-producing highly consumable items. It's more for durable goods or things you don't need many of. As to modifying ourselves, that's definitely going to go ahead full speed whether we like it or not. Not just genes but implanted machinery of all sorts. There are too many rich guys who want to live forever who will make this happen regardless of legality, and there are enough poor people who think it's cool to get the laws changed in hopes the tech trickles down to them eventually. So eventually, we'll become the Borg. Or even better, just pure machinery without all the messy organic luggage. This whole thing would solve a lot of problems all along the way to completion so I see it as a desirable outcome in general. I personally have no desire to live forever. Or even more than my 3 score and 10, if that long. I didn't ask to be here and in general, life sucks for the vast bulk of people the vast bulk of the time, so I see no reason to hang around any longer than necessary. I've flatlined a few times and it's not so bad, so I don't fear the darkness. But that's just me. If somebody else wants to turn us into the Borg, and that ends up making things suck a lot less for a lot more people, go for it Yeah, this is something we need more info about. My own thinking about the necessity of self-sufficiency for life support is that otherwise, it's micromanagement Hell. There is no middle ground. Either you don't have to worry about it at all (in which case, the whole system is pointless overhead), or you have to worry about it too much, at the expense of doing basically anything else. That has always been my personal experience with using all the LS mods (except Kerbalism) for many years, which is why I've recently decided the whole thing is counterproductive and have stopped using LS. I gave it a VERY good and thorough evaluation and I believe my conclusions are inescapable The only real variable that matters for a life support mechanic is how frequently you have to interact with it (by whatever means) to prevent disaster. If disasters can't ever occur, then LS is a complete waste of time, effort, and CPU cycles. Might as well not have it and get better FPS. So, for this discussion, we assume Kerbals will die unless the player makes periodic inputs to the LS system. But the more often the player has to make such inputs, the more the system is just annoying micromanagement, the less it's an interesting game mechanic, and the less other things the player can do in the limited interval of realtime the player has to indulge in KSP. And no matter what timescale you set the periodic inputs on, it will ALWAYS be too often at some point in the game, and so infrequent at others as to be utterly pointless. Consider this situation... You have configured your LS system so it only needs input once per game year. But you've got a ship that will be 20 years on passage to some distant location, and that's really all you care about right now. No other pressing business, so you just want to warp ahead 20 years to play the arrival of this ship. But you can't. You can warp ahead no more than 1 year at a time, fiddle with LS somewhere, repeat. 20 times minimum during the passage. More if you have several colonies/bases/long-term ships and their intervals of needing tweaking aren't in sync (which they probably won't be). So maybe 50-60 such interruptions during the trip. Each time you have to fiddle with LS, you have to go to 1:1 time, switch to the colony/base/ship that needs tweaking, and do what needs doing (which might involve flying a whole inter-moon trip to truck in some supplies from elsewhere). So lots of real time goes by without much game time elapsing, meaning your 20-year ship makes very little progress. This is similar to, but WAY worse, than having to deal with all the spam messages from deployed science in BG. The only way to avoid this problem is to increase the LS tweaking interval to the point that it never interrupts anything, which is the same as saying everything is self-sufficient, which makes the whole LS system a total waste. Which is why life support SHOULD NEVER BE STOCK (although it appears I've lost that argument). So getting back to orbital shipyards..... Obviously, something in orbit can't sponge up any resource other than sunlight. Everything else it needs has to trucked in. But (in most mods where you have more resources than just Ore), the same also goes for surface bases/colonies. You NEVER have all the resources you need right under the colony so you ALWAYS have to truck in the rest from elsewhere. Unless this process is automated (some mods support this to varying degrees), you have to take time out from your warping to do this trucking. So it seems to me that the least detrimentally impactful way to do any of this is to automate it all. Making a colony self-sufficient for LS means putting it where it can get all the resources it needs. If not all those resources are available on-site, add modules to the colony that automate harvesting and transporting the remaining resources. If you have that sort of system, then it should be no problem extending it to orbital colonies. They just need more resource-acquisition modules, or be near a surface colony that has such modules, plus another to export resources to the orbital station. Seriously, I'd MUCH rather have such automation than have to do all this menial labor myself when I have bigger fish to fry. My colony has a population of minions. I'm paying them (in food and air, at least) to do my bidding. So they'd better earn their paychecks and be productive when I'm not looking over their shoulders. Which is realistic. The whole idea of Kerbals standing completely still unless "The Spirit (me) moves them" just doesn't cut it in today's economy

SO MUCH this!

Whether or not something "has value" is entirely subjective. And the person whose subjective values alone matters is the one whose neck is on the line should things go badly as a result of the decision. So yes, just yes, for my argument By your statement above, you would fund Alchemist #1, the pure research option. Whatever he turns up, you'd consider it useful data. But that's not the world in which policy-makers live, even if they agree with you in their private thoughts. Their #1 goal, just as Machiavelli stated, is to stay in power,. Neither peasant revolts, nor pretenders to the throne, nor military coups, nor so-called democratic elections, shall unseat them, because they shall always retain the favor of those who vote for them (and they'll jigger the election rules as needed to ensure that remains the case). The bottom line, to the king, is that any alchemist wanting to study metallic hydrogen for purely research purposes has to compete with more important matters (to the king, in the key voting demographics) such as nuns wanting to build orphanages, peasants too stupid to move away from uninsurably flood-prone areas but who work in the nationally vital petrochemical industry, and all points in between and even further off this scale, depending on how much your sympathies lean left or right. Basically, when your request for funds comes up for decision, those who make that decision are only interested in 1 thing: the political ramifications to themselves. They will vote you up or down according to their perceived political benefit or fallout, regardless of the absolute merits of your case. That's all there is to it. That's why Sarbian god made Module Manager. And why anybody, in the privacy of his own game, can play by whatever rules suits his taste. Don't go forcing your views on anybody else. Others might not, and probably (given the size of the community) don't agree with your subjective vision of what KSP1 or KSP2 is or should be. What part of having substantial, self-sufficient colonies all over do you NOT consider as magic? If you accept the existence of KSP2 interplanetary colonies (not even considering interstellar), then you accept magic,. There is no middle ground for this in the human universe. For the purposes of my argument here, let us assume that a human colony on another world is totally self-sufficient in terms of basic life support via whatever ISRU you want to bring to the table. Thus, even the minimal, just barely-possible-with-current-tech, colony won't die if you don't micromanage it. The colonists will always have enough to eat, drink and breathe, even if most of that is recycled mulch plus whatever small gardens they can grow in artificially lighted and irrigated lava tubes. That's nowhere near all they need, however. There's a whole long shopping list of vital domestic consumables that the colony will be utterly incapable of producing for itself until it has an industrial base rivaling that of its homeworld. Not to mention the consumables of that industrial base, plus the workforce required to staff that industrial base will increase the need for domestic consumables. So until the colony is pretty much on an equal footing with the homeworld, it'll always be dependent on the homeworld for things like (off the top of my head) toilet paper and tampons toothpaste, toothbrushes, and dental floss razor blades (even for electric razors) or Nair to avoid shaving (although you might be able to find obsidian deposits, teach the colonists to knap microblades, and do things old-school for this) deodorant and mouthwash pharmaceuticals of all kinds from cough drops to aspirin to opiates to epinephrine, not to mention topical antibiotics new IVA clothing as clothes wear out even without having to deal with the ultra-abrasive regolith of vacuum worlds, not to mention going out of style spare parts for every piece of equipment, public or private, in the colony the latest versions of phones, tablets, and PCs to maintain contact with family back home or even to report progress (Mission Control can't even update if that would make it incompatible with the colony's systems) more stuff I don't have time to think of. The point is, there's no such thing as a self-sufficient colony unless either a) it's on the same order of magnitude as the homeworld, or b) the colonists are willing to revert to the Stone Age and build a civilization from there. But the latter course only works where the planet is in all respects identical to Earth. It won't happen for a few folks living in specially encapsulated segments of otherwise inhospitable lava tubes. Even obsidian microblade razors won't remove them from utter dependency on their homeworld for everything else. Therefore, accepting the colony aspects of KSP2 requires accepting magic and all that implies. Speculative, even pseudo-science stuff, is the very least of what you have to accept if you accept colonies. Thus, all arguments over the feasibility, let alone the specific properties, of this or that imagined future propulsion system, are moot. At least one of those unbelievable things has to happen at an acceptable price or the colonies wouldn't be there in the 1st place

Outstanding! I'm already looking forward to your mission reports a year or more hence. Implementation without instrumentation has long been the bane of KSP. In KSP1, there have been some admirable recent attempts to redress the karmic balance but there's still quite a long way to go. I hope KSP2 completely expurgates the sins of the past in this regard. I well remember your KRON mission to Plock with Kerbalism. Not a row I want to hoe. Even when not having other missions going on closer to home, it was still WAY more trouble than it was worth regarding LS. Even when you can make everything out of Ore, from fuel to all life support needs to every part of interplanetary/interstellar ships, it's ALWAYS micromanagement Hell. There is no middle ground as long as consumption, conversion, and whatnot are measured on any timescale shorter than decades. And given KSP2's interstellar possibilities, centuries might even be too short to avoid micromanagement Hell. This is why I say it's best to do without any stock life support system. There's no way to make it work on the short timescale of just colonizing Mun that doesn't make it impossible to deal with at the longer timespans involved in colonizing Duna. And that temporal unsuitability only gets worse the farther from home you go. What might be tolerable at Jool is WAY too micro at Sarnus (twice as far from the sun so things move way slower in comparison). And things only get worse by at least an order of magnitude (likely more) when you got interstellar. Stock life support bearing any resemblance AT ALL to ANY currently existing KSP1 LS mod is a BAD IDEA which KSP2 would do well to avoid completely, due to the micromanagement they all require in the short term. So that leaves only 2 options. #1 is to not worry about it at all. This is the best option, totally supported by Occam's Razor. Allowing large-scale, self-sufficient, economically and reproductively viable colonies which can materially contribute to, and be an active political part of, a burgeoning interplanetary/interstellar civilization, is already deep into the realm of fairy castles and rainbow-farting unicorns. If you have such magic at your disposal, there's no need at all to sweat such trivial details as day-to-day, or even century-to-century, life support. So just don't do it. #2 is is coming up with some bastid-ized system that makes nobody happy. If you can't pack enough supplies for even a sub-light interstellar trip plus however long it takes the colonists to get up and running, then you defeat the purpose of being able to go interstellar. But OTOH, if you CAN do that, then there's no sense AT ALL in worrying about life support AT ALL on shorter timespans than centuries. Which basically gets back to #1.

When was the last time you applied for government funding? I usually do it once or twice a year and rarely succeed. Believe me, they don't just give you money if they don't think the result will be of some practical benefit. And even if it might, you're not the only one asking for money so your project has to compete with the apples-and-oranges projects of everybody else with their hands out. Some of whom are probably in the district of one of the guys on the committee, and you're not. So a lot of it comes down to salesmanship. So, imagine yourself as the king. 2 alchemists come asking for funding. Each gives a different sales pitch. Alchemist #1: I want a gazillion dollars to try to produce metallic hydrogen. Just cuz it's cool to crush stuff at extreme pressures. I have no idea if this will provide any benefit, but we can at least show the world we can squeeze stuff the hardest. And the crushing machine might explode, which would be cool to see. Alchemist #2: I want a gazillion dollars to try to produce metallic hydrogen. This is because I believe it will be metastable. If so, then it will have all sorts of both practical uses and general scientific benefit. That will make you, Highness, even richer than you already are. While there is some debate amongst alchemists as to whether it will be metastable or not, the preponderance of the evidence leans in that direction (produces lots of papers on the subject; for you and your court magician to examine, which do indeed seem to show there's a better chance of success than failure). So, which one, or both, or neither will you fund? Your court magician is shrewd and will look around for more papers the 2nd guy might not have brought along, just to check his story. If the court magician finds a lot more negative papers, he'll recommend the 2nd guy get burned at the stake for attempted fraud. But if the 2nd guy's story checks out, then it's your call. EDIT: But you have to balance this against some nuns who want to build an orphanage and similarly unrelated but compelling projects all asking for your money. Which one(s) are most likely to keep the peasants from revolting? Which one(s) will generate the most tax revenue? Which one(s) are reasonable things nobody will argue about? Which one(s) appeal to your fancy and are cheap enough to slip in with nobody noticing after you've hit the high points? Who can say? But I got the opposite impression from watching that interview where the dev identified the metallic hydrogen engine as being on the Mun lander's transfer stage, whereas the ships seen in other solar systems had ginormous ICF-looking engines. So I was seeing metallic hydrogen as a sort of improved LFO, for like the landers of the colony stuff, whereas the interstellar motherships carrying all the colony stuff (and the landers for it) are of the torch ship variety, to reduce travel times.

That's why I analogize space opera as unicorns (interplanetary/interstellar ships) farting rainbows (speculative space drives) as they fly between fairy castles (major colonies all over the place). All staples of space operas are indistinguishable from magic. None can actually exist with foreseeable technology and even if the technology existed, if nobody can make money at it, it's not going to happen anyway. HOWEVER, I'm quite willing to suspend my disbelief because the concept is just as enjoyable to imagine as a swords-and-sorcery epic. I grew up during the height of the space race, watching it on a small B&W TV, and reading all the classic SF works by the great masters. I believed at the time I'd be living on a Jovian moon by now. So naturally I grew up into a bitter, disillusioned old man. CURSE YOU, PHYSICS! As such, I enjoy playing space games I know to be fantasy because they bring back the happily expectant mental state of my misspent youth. So basically, the announced features of KSP2 mean it's a given that there will be magic (speculative high-tech). So accept it as magic and don't look under the hood. Magic can't stand up to scientific scrutiny--no matter how far you dial it down, it's still magic. So, just as the author of The Expanse declines to say how his drive works, don't worry about how KSP2 drives will work. The whole idea of a meaningful interplanetary civilization, let alone interstellar, cannot exist without such magic. Otherwise, the Kerbals would be just as stuck on Kerbin as we are on Earth. Where's the fun in that?

Everybody ALREADY can make effortless returns from Eve (or anywhere else). Just open the cheat menu and select infinite fuel. Again, you have a perception that what other people do in the privacy of their own games somehow impacts you when it really doesn't. When folks talk of their missions, they explain how they did them (if it wasn't obvious from the pics). We've had a host of mods for years that allow Eve SSTOs, not to mention various conservation-breaking stock props and ladder drives. If somebody uses one of these (or just the fuel cheat), they know it and you know it. So how does that cheapen your accomplishment if you do things the hard way?

Well, if you read it, you misread and misinterpreted it. The laws of motion haven't changed in the last half-century or somebody would have told me But hey, you also misread/misinterpreted everything else you've gone on about, including asserting easily verifiable untruths. Your your ridiculous ideas about military operations here are just more of the same. And you have loudly trumpeted your utterly incorrect positions without any attempt at polite debate, leading off your posts with name-calling. So I'm done talking to you. It seems to be rather more likely than not. That's why they're trying to make it. If the anticipated outcome was that it wouldn't be stable, they wouldn't have gotten the funding. And from my understanding, they know about what pressure it would happen but just couldn't get there before. The question about pressure is whether it can be reduced later on with some clever manufacturing technique, or so I understand. But I readily admit I'm no expert on this subject, although I do watch with interest from the sidelines. Sure, your basic H-bomb eventually results in ICF but going that route is just Orion with different ammo. That's a rather different thing from the ICF drive concept, which is basically an open-cycle reactor. The "practical problems" of the ICF drive (or even just an ICF powerplant reactor) seem rather more difficult to solve than they are for Tokamaks, which is what everybody's betting on right now. And they're still saying it's several decades away. Nobody's that optimistic about ICF or they'd still be pursuing it. Nobody is going to hold a gun to your head and force you to SSTO from Eve to a distant star. If you don't want to do that, then don't. If others want to, and it's possible, then let them. It's really not your business how other people play their games.

Bad analogy I bet you've never been a war yourself, and been tasked with taking a hill. The thing about the Moon is that it's way up Earth's gravity well. It can easily bombard the whole planet while retaliating, or defending against that, is extremely difficult. Read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein. Anyway, the reason for not owning the Moon is specifically to prevent somebody turning it into an orbital fortress. So nobody's ever going to be able to establish anything there big enough, or permanent enough, to become a threat. You missed the point entirely. I was just noting that Orion isn't the only space drive capable of destroying civilization. They all can. Otherwise, they wouldn't work as space drives. So nobody should think that Drive X is any safer than Orion simply because it doesn't actually use nuclear bombs. I beg to differ. Metallic hydrogen can be shown to exist, and its properties anticipated, for exactly the same reasons as with neutronium. Or that various types of fusion, which we will never likely to be able to replicate, go on in the hearts of very large stars. They all play by the same rules. Also, NIF did not achieve breakeven as that has always been defined, and did not achieve actual ignition. It got closer than before, but it failed. And now they'd pretty much given up on the inertial confinement project. Go back and read about it. Here's the easy version. The most promising fusion thing currently in the pipeline is magnetic confinement, on which billions are currently being spent by pretty much everybody. Having a commercially viable system is still decades away, however.

And so what if they do? What business is it of yours what other people do in the privacy of their own single-player games? If they want to play the game as if set in the Star Wars universe (which is what you describe here), and you instead want to play it like it was 2020 here on Earth, and you both can fulfill your dreams and enjoy the game the way you want THAT'S A GOOD THING! Besides, even you might want to take a break from harsh reality someday, and will be glad you can I love this community. It's the friendliest, politest place on the whole web. Except for this 1 thing. This tendency to mind other peoples' business and trying to force their opinions of what the game should be on everybody else. I'm not ignoring any of that. I agree, we still don't know metallic hydrogen will work, but that also carries the caveat of "with current tech". This is something folks are going to keep chipping away at until they either succeed or totally dispell the possibility. That's going to take years and years either way. So in the meantime, we can have it in the game. And if it turns out, years down the road, to have all been a pipe dream, well.... certainly there will be something else generally similar on the horizon so we can just change the name of the part But really, I think metallic hydrogen is a lot easier to believe in than, say, inertial confinement fusion drives. I mean, look at the history of aerodynamic flight. There were toy airplanes and even helicopters, not to mention man-carrying gliders, long before the Wright Brothers. Everybody knew the principles involved, they just lacked a suitably light, powerful engine. Well, Orion is feasible, I'll grant you that, but I'm not at all sure about the other ideas. The math might work (depending on who you talk to) for NSWR but the practical problems of building it, and its reliability and safety issues, seem overwhelming, even with some additional tech than we have. The rest are even more speculative. Every speculative space drive has to be able to produce a godawful amount of energy and release it in the desired direction. Thus, they are all necessarily weapons of mass destruction. This is also why the Moon is off-limits for colonial purposes. It's the ultimate "high ground" in the military sense. The entities capable of settling there agree not to, to avoid fighting a war over it. If it turns out mining Helium-3 there is a thing, then maybe there'll be small, temporary, international, closely monitored, fully transparent mining trips there, with the product divvied up by some international organization. But that would make permanent colonies even less likely, because then there'd be an additional reason to fight over the Moon. And nobody's going to trust the others not to build a missile base there, or blockade the Helium-3 once the world's economy becomes dependent on it. Unicorns are rockets propelled by rainbow flatulence. Everybody knows wings don't work in space