Ralathon

There are several possible extinction scenarios even if we get colonies on nearby planets. We could get hit by a gamma ray burst. Contact with an advanced and unfriendly alien species would be an extinction event. If we manage to make superintelligent AI but screw up the "BecomeSkynet.Cost = 9999999999" we're toast. A vacuum metastability event would wipe out the entire universe, regardless of how many planets we colonize. But yea. Once we get a few colonies running our chances of long term survival increase dramatically. That's the reason many people are in favor of manned spaceflight, even though robots are much more cost effective.

Well, if you don't have a log what do you expect us to do about it? Without a log we don't know what's causing it, could be the phase of venus for all we know.

Here you go. This site is like the bible for hard SF writers and spaceflight enthusiasts. Section on solar sails starts here. Right after the antiproton catalyzed fusion.

You are vastly underestimating the time spans we're talking about here. Sure, interest and funding might fall. But society is not stagnant. Even if it takes 1000 years before people are interested in colonization again, that's still fast enough to colonize the galaxy in a dozen million years. And 1000 years is more than enough for the colony to grow strong enough to launch its own missions. It took us just a few centuries to go from farms to the space age, and we had to do that from scratch. A colony should have a decent industry in a few decades, and a civilization rivaling its parent after 1k years. And this is assuming alien civilizations are sending out colonists. As far as we know Von Neuman probes are entirely possible to build. Once a civilization sends out one of those it would colonized the galaxy even if its parent lost interest. So nobody has build a single one of those probes for the past 10 billion years?

Mars is actually much better for long term habitation. The martian atmosphere gives an easy source of carbon and oxygen. Dust on Mars is smoothed thanks to the wind while moon dust is very jagged and wreaks havoc on your vacuum seals. The 24.5 hour rotation simplifies heat management (atmosphere also helps a lot here). The short day cycle also lowers the battery capacity needed to survive the night. If you land at the poles you also have relatively easy access to hydrogen. The atmosphere also minimizes micrometeorite impacts and allows you to reach the surface from orbit for negligible dV. The major downside behind Mars is that it takes so long to get there, and you can't easily abort in case of an emergency.

Sounds about right yea. It has to patch loads of parts for all sorts of different things.

The reason we do this is because we have to start looking somewhere. We know for sure that Carbon based chemical life can exist, so that's as good a place as any to start looking. Sure, there could be intelligent plasma based worms in the outer corona of stars. But if we start looking specifically for those we will miss out on the sapient gas clouds. And if we look for those maybe we'll miss the strong force mediated chemistry on the surface of neutron stars. If we don't make at least some assumptions on the kind of life we're intending to find we may as well stop looking altogether, else we have no idea where to even start.

But being united in 1 big empire doesn't matter for colonization. Say a civilization has a small chance every 500 years for the right social and economical circumstances to arise to make colonization possible. It doesn't matter if those new colonies are part of one big empire, or scattered fragments of the original empire, or separatist rebels that hate the original star. They'll have the same chance to start their own colonies. It is still an exponential process that will colonize the milky way very rapidly. The only way to not have a runaway exponential colonization effort is if the odds of colonization drop to 0% very very early in the process. And this had to happen to all civilizations that ever arose in the milky way for the past 4 billion years. If even one slipped past this filter we would notice their remains. For this reason I'm tending towards the great filter hypothesis. It becomes a lot more likely that every civilization ever decided to hang out in cyberspace instead of colonizing if there have only been 3 technological civilizations in the past 4 billion years.

The problem is that if even 1 of those thousands of cyber hippies decides to stop being cyber hippies and do something cool we'd notice them. If even 1 species decided to start expanding their empire. Either for exploration or conquest, they'd colonize the entire milky way within a few million years. Since our star system isn't currently littered with extraterrestrial remains (cities, asteroid miners etc) that means this has never happened in the history of the solar system. Seems pretty unlikely that you are able to make sweeping generalizations that apply to millions of species.

Shouldn't be that difficult. While in interplanetary space there isn't anything to block your sunlight. And RTG's are independent of your trajectory. Anyway, very interesting little mod. I really hope you'll get ion engines to work though, looking forward to a realistic ion engine mission.

What is there to tell you? Make something resembling a biped with IR hinges as joints...

Worked just fine for the Mars Global Surveyor, Mars odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Last post before you was nearly 3/4th of a year ago Anyway, tails here.

You could improve the payload by aerobraking at Mars. That way you can shave a few hundred dV of the journey, since you only need to put yourself into a highly eccentric Mars orbit, instead of LMO.

For the reactors, would it be an idea to base the electricity production of the reactor on the heat flow out of the reactor? That's how it works IRL and it provides a much deeper link between temperature management and electricity production.

Would it be possible to disable the distant object enhancement flare even when the target body is off screen? When I was trying to snap a picture of Laythe I zoomed in to the point that Tylo went offscreen. This re-enabled Tylo's flare and thus drowned out my entire screen.

Absolutely noone would care because almost no game gets close to those. Besides, general relativity isn't that computationally demanding to program. Take a look at this. Not that hard to program a shader that would do the same for KSP. But unless you are cheating you would never even notice it. It takes 34 days of constant thrust to get to 0.1c at 10G of acceleration. You would only ever notice it if you used some warp drive mod.

Read the last 5 posts in the thread or so. Learn to help yourself.

Depends on how big your feet are. We can separate 2 different pressures via plasma windows. So lets say that this technology matures to the point that we can do this experiment. Now everything depends on the size of your feet. Pressure is force per unit of area, and we need to generate about 700 newtons of force to keep the average human standing. Lets say that the pressure difference is 1 atmosphere. So 1e5 newtons per square meter. Then your feet would need to have a surface area of 7e-3 m2 = 70 cm2. My feet are about 26cm long and 10 wide. I estimate that my feet have about 60% of the surface area of a 26x10cm rectangle. So my feet have a surface area of about 26*10*2*0.6 = 312 cm2. More than enough to avoid falling through the plasma window. In fact, the pressure difference could go all the way down to a quarter of an atmosphere and I'd still be fine.

You could just copy the stock part.cfg that you want to keep and change the name within the config right? That way you have a duplicate part that isn't touched by MM.

But most of the missing planets aren't that memory intensive. Neptune doesn't have a surface, so no heightmaps or normal maps. And since it's a pretty boring blue sphere you don't need a 8k color map either. Most of the missing moons and minor planets are really small, so you can get away with low res height and color maps without it looking bad. So we can probably have a pretty complete solar system once Kopernicus-RSS gets up and running.

If anyone knew the 'secret to popularity' they wouldn't be on the KSP forum. They'd be sipping martini's from the deck of some private yacht.

That article explains it quite well. The idea is that the radiators are reflective in the visible spectrum while opaque in the infrared spectrum. The color only matters for the wavelengths the radiator is emitting. So it doesn't really matter for the radiation efficiency what color your paint them in the visible spectrum, since they'll never get so hot that they'll start to glow. Since they're still exposed to visible light from the sun and the earth you might as well paint them white or metallic so they reflect as much as possible. Else you have to deal with that energy in addition to the heat you're trying to radiate away. This means that the color of the radiator depends on how much heat it is designed to radiate. So normal every day radiators should be colored white. But radiators for high energy applications (Like in the interstellar mod, or the near future mod) should be blueish. That way they'll radiate efficiently in red wavelengths while reflecting incoming blue radiation.

Translation: "If we had magic, could we do magic?" Storing matter in a hard drive doesn't even make sense. That's not how they work.

I think what's happening is that Squad messed up and instead of the external temperature you're seeing part velocity. Thanks to Adiabatic compression the external air is heated by some function of velocity and is convecting heat into the part. Post it in the bug report forums as a minor display bug and be done with it.