NERVAfan

Thank you!

I see that the stock craft have descriptions in 0.21, but how do I add descriptions to my own craft?

The Kerbals' extreme willingness to risk their lives seems completely maladaptive for conventional organisms... so I think Kerbin's whole biosphere is a single intelligence, and the Kerbals are actually its mobile, information-gathering units ... thus explaining their extreme drive to explore space, to the point that they seem to have no other activities -- they're literally grown for that purpose and no other, so the Kerbin-Gaia entity can learn about the rest of the universe beyond itself.

Meteors travel WAY faster than bullets... and kinetic energy goes up as the square of velocity, so a 40 km/s meteor (not exceptional) which delivers the same energy as a 1 km/s bullet will be 1600 times smaller.

No, but Jeb died on Kerbin reentry because I'd forgotten to add a parachute (and I'd saved and loaded, so no 'revert flight' option).

WOW. Impressive!

All the major planets and their orbits were known before the Space Age. There were very small discrepancies in Mercury's orbit that were resolved by Einstein's theory of relativity, so even at the beginning of the 20th century the orbits were very precisely known.

Sure there are! Probably not with current launch costs, but with 10x lower (which SpaceX might well be able to achieve quite soon), yes. There's no way to make profits mining Mars or the Moon and shipping the products to Earth (near-earth asteroids, maybe*), but there are lots of other possibilities. MarsOne is planning to do a colony on Mars funded by media profits - primarily a TV show. I don't at all believe this can work by the timeline they state (first human landing 2023), but if SpaceX's reusability works as well and lowers costs as well as hoped, it should be able to work once those lowered costs are established. There are all sorts of similar possibilities. Sarah Brightman is supposed to perform from the ISS in a couple years, be interesting to see how much of a splash that makes (yes it's LEO, but in the general "space media" field, still relevant)... And if SpaceX's stuff doesn't work out, I believe Blue Origin is working on similar stuff (not nearly so far along), and Reaction Engines Limited thinks they can make the SABRE engine that allows Skylon - a single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane that is also supposed to drastically lower launch costs (though that one's not very far along at all, they haven't made a complete engine much less a vehicle). It all depends on launch costs, but I think in the modern world, for media type stuff to be profitable, they don't have to be AS low as many would think. *If you can find a way to make heat shields from the non-valuable asteroid material, allowing aerobraking, then getting near-earth asteroid materials to Earth has a very low delta-V requirement.

No pressure vessels needed - it takes 10 meters of depth in water to raise the pressure by one atmosphere, so at 3.5 meters, you can just raise the pressure of the inside to match the outside. 1.35 atmospheres pressure is totally breathable - you may want to lower the oxygen concentration a bit, I see different numbers for when oxygen issues start happening. Isn't that largely because submarines go way deeper than 10 meters?

No pressure vessels needed - it takes 10 meters of depth in water to raise the pressure by one atmosphere, so at 3.5 meters, you can just raise the pressure of the inside to match the outside. 1.35 atmospheres pressure is totally breathable - you may want to lower the oxygen concentration a bit, I see different numbers for when oxygen issues start happening.

Eh, there are plenty of ways to accomplish way more in space than we have so far. The problem isn't technology, it's politics. IF SpaceX's reusability works out, launch costs will probably drop enough in the next decade to start seeing major space projects happening. If the US devoted, say, 10% of its budget to colonizing space, we would have colonies on Mars and the Moon by now. It's not beyond our technology at all, just expensive.

How do I make my EVA kerbal use his jetpack? He just floated away helplessly despite my pressing w/a/s/d.

Even with the super-light ultra-thin-film solar panels that exist these days? Supposedly (Wikipedia) IKAROS has 25-micrometer-thick solar panels. Could a nuclear reactor really get better specific power (watts per kilogram) than something like that?

I'd much rather have Kerbol become part of a multi-star system, with reasonable-without-FTL distances between the parts. If more gas giants are to be added... say the outermost is 20 times Kerbin's distance from Kerbol* ... maybe make the nearest companion star 100 or 150 times Kerbin's distance. There would be a Kerbol SOI and a companion star SOI, and outside those either a "galaxy" SOI, or the SOI of a black hole, massive neutron star, supergiant, or something else cool that the Kerbol + companion system is orbiting... it would be much farther away, but still not light year distances, maybe 1000-2000x Kerbin's distance. *yeah, Neptune is farther, but IMO Uranus and Neptune are similar enough that there could be just one KSP analog for both... all we really need is one gas giant with major rings (Saturn analog) and one "small" gas/ice giant.

Now, this is true. But for interstellar travel we're talkig centuries in the future... it probably would have gone over in the 50s, so we can't say that that sort of attitudes aren't possible. And before we do anything interstellar, we'll likely have the solar system industrialized ... moving asteroids and stuff... which implies kinetic energies bigger than a nuclear explosion. Once such energies are "normal" (and, airplanes for example have an insane amount of energy compared to what anybody could control in say 1600, and they're used by normal people, not just governments) the only different thing about nuclear is the radiation, and that won't matter in open space millions of km from any biosphere. And you wouldn't launch the Orion spacecraft from Earth, you'd build it in the asteroid belt with asteroid-mined uranium. This is a project for a solar system when Earth is no longer the industrial and economic center...

When people say/write "antimatter engine" they mean one using antimatter/matter annihilation for power (or antimatter catalyzed nuclear engines maybe) not an engine actually made out of antimatter.

I don't think Eve's surface is hot enough for liquid lead. Is Eeloo THAT cold? It crosses the orbit of Jool, and Titan (orbiting Saturn) in real life has a nitrogen gas atmosphere. I don't think nitrogen would freeze on Eeloo.

Yeah. The only reasonable explanation (if we found something like this in the real world) is that the Kerbol system planets are artificially constructed. They might even be "mini Dyson Spheres" around a planetary-mass black hole, with the interior (deeper than the oceans/canyons/etc) being vacuum. (EDIT: Then the 'shells', the visible parts of the planets, could be entirely ordinary rock/metal/ice/etc.)

I understand why the game doesn't let you time warp while you're in atmosphere or low enough to hit mountains, but why is the time warp limited once you're above 70km (for Kerbin) or whatever?

This would be great. Even with the small acceleration applied by an ion engine? Or could there be an 'activate higher warp' option you had to go into the options menu and check off, so that people who didn't want to deal with it wouldn't have to or run into it by accident, but we could take the risk of weirder things happening if we wanted to try it?

Could KSP's physics allow for Trojan asteroids in Jool's orbit? Since celestial bodies are "on rails" the lack of actual lagrange points shouldn't be a problem... unless I'm misunderstanding how it works.

Small amounts of free oxygen can be generated by other processes, sure, like breaking up water molecules by electrolysis (lightning) or by radiation (as on Europa - an incredibly tenuous "atmosphere" of oxygen has been found around Europa). But high partial pressures of free oxygen, as in Earth's atmosphere, need something producing it at a very high rate since it is so reactive. And there aren't really many other possibilities - radiation and lightning won't do it, the radiation environment at Europa is pretty intense and it's like a hundred billion times less oxygen partial pressure than Earth.

Interesting that they're that heavy... but I guess, without spacesuit, they'd still be significantly smaller than humans...

More going on on planets, eg clouds on Kerbin, cryovolcanoes on Eeloo...

Oh, we could probably have missed the remains of a low-tech (preindustrial) and localized civilization, if it was a long time ago... say Mesozoic... The problem is that humans spread across the world while still Paleolithic, so keeping it localized is nontrivial. An even bigger problem, though, is that there's nothing for them to have evolved from really. There were no really intelligent dinosaurs, judged by their brain sizes relative to body size - the smartest were IIRC about ostrich level. So we'd have to have missed not only the civilization-building species, but all the ancestors back to the equivalent of maybe when the monkey-ape-human line split from the other primates... several tens of millions of years at least. "Ghost lineages" that long do exist for some groups, and small arboreal animals are not good fossilizers, so it's not impossible... but it does increase the odds against it. The best bet would probably be a freakish island species that evolved on some Mesozoic island that was really far from anywhere and didn't survive to our day to have fossils, though it's hard to see a population that small and geographically restricted developing civilization. Or a smaller-than-human entirely arboreal species that lived in the canopies of Mesozoic rainforests ... they could still make tools from wood and bone and build treehouse-huts and stuff. But, yeah, it's pretty unlikely. Humans have become so dominant so fast...