Ralathon

The problem is that you need lots and lots of energy to accelerate mass. In a rocket you need to carry that energy on board, so you need some kind of high density energy storage. LH2-LOX is pretty close to the limit of chemical energy density, so changing fuels won't gain you much efficiency. The next step after chemical energy is nuclear. Nuclear has an energy density about a million times higher than chemical, but as you said it's pretty controversial. If you want higher efficiency than chemical but don't want to mess with nuclear you'll have to design your own energy storage. You'd need to build some kind of super capacitor bank or a massive superconducting coil. But current tech levels in those fields don't even get close to chemical energy densities. The only other way to get the energy you need is to send it to the ship. The only realistic way to build something with nuclear efficiency without the nuclear bits is to aim a giant laser or maser at your ship. That's the only feasible method I can see with our current technology. And it would still be a nightmare to build.

Out of EC's?

Yes, use the interstage part.

Does anyone know how to randomize the location of the flame sprites a bit more? Right now they all clump up in little puffs of fire while I'd like a more continuous flame.

Install the mod as usual. Go into your Gamedata folder. Find the VenStockRevamp folder and delete the Part Bin folder within it. That should remove all the new parts.

How long have you waited? First time you start ksp after installing this mod Kopernicus needs to rebuild scaled space meshes, which can take quite a while. I suggest you leave it running for 15 mins or so.

When we left Earth is a really good series about spaceflight. The whole thing is on youtube in 720p A bit of a taste for the series, the apollo 8 launch:

We don't even know for sure that it exists. Let alone know anything about its properties. In other words: nobody knows.

In crass terms, Pics or gtfo. It is definitely a possibility that there's another planet out there. But 3.5 sigma on 6 objects isn't a particularly high confidence rate. Especially since that only tells you "Hey, these inclinations aren't a coincidence!". It could be that they're the result of some planet that was expelled from the solar system during its formation. Or maybe a passing star, or something else. In other words, definitely interesting and worthy of further research. It's the best analysis we have so far suggesting another planet. But until we actually see a planet with our telescopes I'm not going to assume it exists.

Nah, they're just in the first part of the bathtub curve. We know how to build rockets that go into space. We aren't too sure how to build rockets that come back. Expect to see a few years of ever decreasing failure rates as they figure out the weak spots.

I'm not being pessimistic. I'd love to see martian bases and I'm a big supporter of making humanity multi planetary. But these things don't magically happen. There needs to be a reasonable financial roadmap without giant gaping holes plastered with "And here wishful thinking happens!". Arguments that appeal to our emotions are almost useless here, which is what that waitbutwhy article was using. The whims of the masses could easily flip as I showed and ruin our chances for martian bases for centuries.

Mass of the Moon: 7.34e22. Mass of Minmus: 2.6e19. So it would easily be stable in the lagrange points. But that would cut the main drawback of a Minmus trip: Travel time. Landing on minmus IRL would be easier on every front than a lunar landing. If you want to keep the tradeoff in challenges you need to put Minmus in a 3 to 1 resonance or something.

Note how much of that wait but why article is based on wishful thinking. I could easily rewrite that quote and paint a much bleaker picture: "And then, something will start to happen. The base realizes just how hard it is to bootstrap a complete industry, and funding starts to wane. The first return ships will come back with people complaining about miserable conditions, and it’ll remind everyone on Earth that Mars is an arid and boring desert. And less people will want to go. The people who come back to Earth will be bashed for their ignorance, some of the people on Mars will die, and others will film a little TV show about the early settlement and show the cramped and resource starved base. And less people will want to go. People on Earth will see boring photos of Martians doing backbreaking work in a endless cold desert—and less people will want to go. People will hear about spacesuit failures that make a simple stroll outside a deadly endeavour and watch viral YouTube clips on the effects of bone loss in Mars’ 38% gravity situation—and less people will want to go" Be careful in assuming that a Mars base will grow over time. Once the romance wears off I doubt many people want to go. Same reason that we aren't seeing mass migrations to the antarctic, even though that's doable for a much lower cost.

They estimated that debris would keep raining down for thousands of years. So space is the best option. If you manage to get into a high orbit the debris won't move that fast and you can easily expand your base by mining the former moon. If you go underground you'll get cooked after a few centuries and you have no way to expand your base (Where would you leave the excavated material without opening a hole to the surface?).

Hawking radiation (The thing that's giving off energy here) increases the smaller the black hole is. So while a conventional fire gives off more heat and light the bigger it is, a black hole gives of more energy the smaller it is. Since emitting energy makes it smaller and thus more energetic, things get explodey towards the last few hundred tons of matter. You don't want to be anywhere near a black hole that's tearing itself apart. Black hole drives are totally fail-deadly. If you screw up and can't feed it for a few months, you are royally boned. In the last second of its existence that black hole will pump out energy equivalent to 100.000 Tsar Bomb's.

While I agree with your "No colonization anytime soon" standpoint, you're strawmanning here. The argument in favor of colonization is mainly insurance for human made catastrophes and backing up our economy. If we had a nuclear exchange right now our post apocalypse descendents could get stuck on the tech level of the 1800's. Since we consumed all the easily accessible fossil fuels their economic recovery would be severely depressed. It could take a very long time before they crawl back towards our tech levels without a cheap and plentiful energy source. If you have several economies running in parallel (Read, self sufficient bases) you have a much better chance crawling back out of the post apocalypse hole. It is hard to have such parallel economies on earth, since they share the same biosphere. If we build a bunch of self sufficient colonies on Antarctica and proceed to nuke ourselves, the resulting fallout and climate change is going to ruin those economies as well. You need a good deal of isolation between the 2. So that means deep underground, deep underwater or space. Of those the latter is the easiest in terms of energy availability, engineering challenges and potential for growth.

I also doubt it'll happen in the near future. A Mars colony in a century? Sure, I can believe that. But within the next 35 years? No way. There are too many things working against it. A lack of economic incentives, robotics becoming better and better at science, the lack of experience on space colonization and the perceived pointlessness of it all. Maybe a small research outpost towards the 2050's, but even that is dubious. Nothing like the thousands of people Elon envisions. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I have yet to see a convincing argument.

I am currently trying to modify the fuel gauge from the FASA Gemini IVA update to show realfuels, but I can't fully figure it out. Can anyone see where I'm going wrong? The way I'm trying to do it, is to add a bunch of custom math variables that simply add all the common fuels used in RF. Like so: Then I go into the Fuelgauge config and adjust every reference to SYSR_LIQUIDFUEL to the appropriate custom variable. As far as I can see that should make the gauge operational again: But nope. Fuel gauge stubbornly refuses to detect the kerosene in my rocket: Anyone knows where I screwed up? Am I messing with the wrong prop or something silly like that?

Use a cryogenic tank if you want to store it for longer periods. The big orange tank should be cryogenic.

I noticed that the boiloff calculation excessively spams the debug console while flying a craft with cryogenic fuels: Only mods used are Realfuels, Realfuels-stockalike, Realplume and Ven's stock revamp. Is there any way to limit this? It slows down the game and prevents me from debugging some other mods. Thanks!

It has to do with the launch trajectory. If the payload needs a polar orbit you need to go north or south. If you do that from KSC you end up flying over populated areas. From vandenberg they can safely launch south and not endanger anyone.

Holy kraken they actually did it!

Why is this surprising? The ISS is already rather old: Zarya was launched more than 17 years ago. By 2028 the oldest parts of the space station would be 30 years old. Air Filters will get clogged, solar panels will lose efficiency, O-rings will start to leak etc. It would be a flying scrapyard, no wonder that they want out by then.

[quote name='S1gmoid']Hey, Most orbital maneuvering math kind of assumes high thrust, approximating maneuvers with instant velocity changes. According to the KSP wiki, this is a good approximation of high-thrust maneuvers, but not quite for low thrust, like under ion engines... I'm wondering if there's some good source of information on planning such low-thrust orbital transfers... :)[/QUOTE] Low thrust maneuvers are nasty and involve lots of calculus. If you want to give it a try I suggest you [URL="http://physicsware.net/pdf/Low-Thrust.pdf"]start here[/URL] on page 9.

[quote name='SargeRho'] As for getting Helium 3 for fusion: The Moon at first, and later on Uranus.[/QUOTE] Or, you know, just bombard Lithium with neutrons to produce He3.... That's a lot cheaper and easier.