p1t1o

Another alternative - build a swarm of standalone orbital colonies utilising the entire mass of the moon, ringing planet Earth. Still kinda falls in the category of "terraforming" but just a bit more...granular. No problem with asteroids due to distributed hardware. Only one or two colonies would be in peril at a time and they could be moved out of the way. No problem with atmosphere as there is plenty of oxygen in the moon to supply the billions of habitats with enough breathing gas. Gravity not a problem as now each colony is individually small enough to be spun up without requiring exotic materials to hold them together.

Finding several thousand billion tons of atmosphere from somewhere is hard enough...you want to...hollow it out and spin it? Before it immediately collapses and without it immediately flying apart like it was made of jelly? Is this before or after we deconstruct Jupiter to build a Dyson Sphere?

Did a search through archive.org, this was probably the most relevant hit, describes something akin to an air-augmented ion drive. Dont know anything about the author, though his credentials certainly sound legit. https://archive.org/details/ElectricHypersonicaircraft *edit* https://archive.org/details/NASA_NTRS_Archive_19930086366 Weirdly, the third type described (helium compressor cycle) looks schematically like a direct reversal of a SABRE-cycle engine.

Anything by Orbital (heh)

Because you need a TWR significantly greater than 1 to do it, whereas taking off horizontally, you can get away with TWRs that are much lower, 0.2-0.4 could be considered common. And when VTOL-ing, you need to be able to produce your >1TWR at zero velocity, with no airflow, and if a loss of power is encountered, you have no horizontal velocity with which to produce lift or safely glide it out. Basically you have to multiply your margins by some ungainly number, making it hugely inefficient. Frankly, if you have a fusion powered VTOL airliner, what is it doing having wings anyway? Why even have it land at all?

This was/is the first thing I thought/think on seeing the "kickback": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh-15 I was/am like "Cool missile, fast, ballistic, non-nonsense, big solid motor, how appropriate!"

I had a stint of applying to the RAF when I was younger (got mumps at university, which adversely affected my hearing, subtly but enough to fail the requirements) and was told that fighter pilots tend not to do much cardiovascular work in the gym but concentrated on strength and muscle building. Cardio/fitness/health was important of course, but a nice free-flowing bloodstream with a low resting pressure is not as amenable to resisting G, and increased muscle bulk allows you to do the "straining" maneuver more effectively. It might have been anecdotal, that didn't come from a medic or anything.

@VaPaL @DDE I figured it would be a closed loophole, dang gummint wanting to know where its money goes...

Cant see the pic but can deduce from title that it is a space marines battle barge? 9/10 for space marine cargo.

I've always wondered with budgetary situations like this why they dont "buy" some foregn currency, or gold bullion/oil/stocks/shares/other commodity, so that the money is not lost. One rainy day when they really need a lot of money above+beyond their budget, they just liquidate those resources for extra cash. Im guessing theres some obvious reason for not doing that.

I cant speak for everybody else, but would imagine that a lot of people agree with you. Though a lot of them, including me would add a caveat - that some of the more serious bugs, prevent the game from reaching its *true potential*, that without those deficiencies (whether or not one is happy with how the problems are being dealt with is apparently another debate, I for one am reasonably happy. One will always wish for good things to happen sooner.) it could approach to within an arbitrary distance of "perfection" indedd, approach the theoretical limits of what current software/hardware can give us. Paradoxically, this leads me to believe that if KSP was a bit worse, then the various problems would be easier for some people to bear. But it is this potential which seems to be always just out of reach which leads to increased frustration. Alas, KSPs quality works against it, socially. If that sounds weird, ask yourself this: Which is more frustrating: an 8/10 game, whose bugs bring it down to 7/10 or a 9.5/10 game whose bugs bring it down to 8/10

If you're amenable to mods, B9 includes (or is it a seperate download Im not sure) some procedural wings and you can define the thickness, I have used them successfully with FAR. You're probably better off asking about FAR specifics in the FAR thread however.

My gut says it would be a short-lived arrangement. The Moon is already close enough to be tidally-locked, if it were a binary pair, tidal effects would eventually (maybe even quickly) disrupt it. Possibly resulting in the destruction of one or both moons and possibly with catastrophic effects for us. Perhaps if the binary moon pair were much further away than our current moon it would have more chance of stability.

This is crazy, I actually know where that picture of the "infested" room came from! It was an "art" installation near the Southbank in London about 7 or 8 years ago. An artist filled an entire apartment with super-saturated copper-sulphate solution and seeded the surfaces as well. After some time the apartment was drained, and just like the experiment-in-a-jar Im sure a lot of us did, large copper sulphate crystals had grown on every surface. It was very cool actually, I visited it myself. Small freaking world! What is that website, like some kind of roleplay thing?

http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-022-j What the flip did I just read?

Wahahahaha! That is precisely what I was going for, Mission Accomplished For the record, it doesn't need forcefields, my standard package usually includes everything-proof armour made of "metal" (metal being infinitely strong to an 8 year old me).

All it says is that it recommends a "Landing Strip" hueheuhueheuhe

And that is what happens when a scientist tries to do art

It is listed on the BBC website section called "BBC Future". I clicked the "What is BBC Future?" button and saw, get this: Our mission statement is simple: "Making you smarter every day." Hopefully, not all their articles are as badly sourced. But science reporting in mainstream media has always been very patchy.

Its what happens when an artist tried to do science. All he has done is create an imaginative "fantasy" aircraft, and then like all of us did when we were drawing spaceships at the age of 8, come up with some fantastic details about it, "Its gonna have a nuclear reactor and an ice cream machine and beds with TVs and a sofa and vending machines and like it will be silver all over and it will have machine guns AND missiles and it will make a noise like CCCHRHHRCRHCHRHRHCCRHAAAAHAHRCH!!"

I forgot about synthetic hydrocarbons, but I still have high hopes for hydrogen. Not any time soon mind.

@DDE Ignition! is such a great book, it cant be quoted too often. You should check out how much a hardcopy goes for on Amazon...

@DDE "Gazelles" amIrite? Sure there are faster ones now, but Sprint had spunk back in the day. If speed is your thing, then even that teeny Saturn V in the Daedalus pic is faster than a Gazelle if a little less..."energetic"...at launch

Yup, that is exactly what the two papers on those things I found were about, there are probably multiple papers on those subjects. Astoundingly, the paper on Li-F-H makes it sound like totally ok to use, I guess it wasn't the purpose of that particular paper to discuss the relative dangers, but it does describe a series of practical experiments involving liquid fluorine, liquid lithium and liquid hydrogen, which must have been um "interesting" to work with... Specific impulse attained was quoted (in one experiment, but representative) as 4991 N/Kg/s The paper on uranium plasmas was about nuclear lightbulbs. I havn't read it cover-to-cover but I scanned it and one interesting takeaway was this: all current theory on gas-core nuclear lightbulbs operate the (theoretical) reactor in zero-g conditions. Under thrust, serious buoyancy issues would basically screw everything up (where you are very carefully running cooler gas between the uranium plasma and the reactor wall, for example). These things are basically the most tenuously restrained atomic dragons you could ever imagine. Seriously, search through that site, you will find something about almost anything. Alternate shuttles, SSTOs, aerospikes, hypersonic aerodynamics, Interstellar propulsion, Mars missions, you name it.

Sounds like you totally got this, good luck! You got a rough idea how far this could travel?