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1. This is more a financial question than a practical one, I think either would be capable of the design and engineering. Since the two entities are funded and run in very different ways, its very hard to say. Some have suggested a joint effort. This seems a pretty good guess, look at the ISS. The two organisations also have very different skillsets, yeah I see a joint effort as likely, and not just between those two companies. 2. Honestly, I am an unusual camp for KSPers. I do not see manned exploration of the solar system as anything particularly urgent. People wrangle about "Why havnt we been back to the moon?" and "Man must reach for the stars to survive!" but no one ever talks about "why". Because there isnt a "why". We do not need to colonise Mars within the next few decades, or even centuries. It would be great to do it, and we'd get loads of science done, but that is not enough. Until projects are not constrained by cost, profit, or investment risk, there is little reason to expend the resources and risk the stakes. I put 2036-2045 merely because I dont think prediction further ahead are worth much, but it is technically feasible. Certainly it wont happen within a decade, I've said it before, but I dont even think we could get the paperwork done in a decade. 3. Terraforming a whole planet is a project multiple orders of magnitude harder and more significant than anything mankind has done before (unless you regard anthropogenic climate change as a successful "terraforming"). Its also many, many steps down the line in terms of mars exploration. I dont think it really belongs in the poll. Its like having "Will we ever return to the moon?" and "When will the first casino open on the Moon?" in the same poll.

@MatterBeam It doesnt matter if it stays in orbit indefinitely, you still have to send another ship up, which is exactly what you wanted to avoid. Radiation environment is a good point, but do I need to start listing probes that have failed in LEO or due to human error? Galileo's main antenna got fouled up because they stored it wrongly on the ground! Totally get it, its a great topic for a blog and its not really fair to expect it to come as a fully-realised project proposal, this would of course take one person years. But, to take it to a serious discussion, one cant just guesstimate away huge facets of a problem, unless you are specifically recognise that you are making success an assumption for the sake of argument. This is perfectly valid, but it means that no meaningful comparisons can be drawn versus other solutions. In my opinion, if it were to work perfectly, according to all your hypotheses, then yeah, these scoops are great. But also in my opinion, it'd have to be attached to something like the ISS, which means its way too expensive and Im back to boosting propellant up from the surface. Mass produced, cheap, heavy lifters are a deceptively tough solution to beat. The scoops can wait until we are post-scarcity, and then we'll have the tech to allow them to take care of themselves.

Precisely

There is also the matter that if a moon based mining plant suffers a failure, it wont destroy itself completely. I do think the *quoted* figures sound good, but apart from the minutae of its operation (everything seems to be assumed to work at 100% efficiency, with infinite mean-time-to-failure for every component), my main concern is reliability. The machinery required to process atmospheric gaws is non-trivial, and not only does it need to be 100% automated but also operated without mechanical intervention for years. Nothing about human achievements says to me that that will be anywhere near as easy as it sounds, and it doesnt sound easy. The long range space probes are probably more stable than an atmospheric processing plant in terms of reliability (things mostly being solid state, no cryogenic plumbing operating continuously, not in an unstable orbit etc) and have broadly the same "level" of complexity, and more importantly, are expected to operate independantly for comparable terms. And they do fail catastrophically with alarming regularity, considering the time, money and effort that goes into preventing that.Replacements are rarely, if ever, launched. All those cool stories about missions being saved by clever reprogramming usually involve severely curtailed mission capability. What this whole debate boils down to, in my opinion, is that the scientific principles, and rough modes of operation, ARE in fact rather trivial to work out. There's no maths on this thread that a highschool student couldnt follow (another thing which makes me suspicious). What IS difficult, is the economics and engineering. Will anyone insure it? Can you garuantee customers willing to use your service (not necessarily a given)? What *exactly* are these "development" and "operating" costs? Those are not insignificant questions, the entire success of the venture might hinge on the answer to just one of them. Absolutely nobody will invest based simply on a statement that "It will be cheaper I think" If anyone has ever worked on budgeting complex projects, one knows that it can rapidly match the complexity of any scientific or engineering study. Price, not engineering principles or technological limits, is what has kept us away from the Moon, from Mars, for this long. We dont need Musk to *show us how* to get to Mars, any decent rocket scientist can do that. We need Musk to pay for it. If someone only stumped up the cash, we'd have boots on Mars quicker than you can say "ACK-ACK. ACKACKACK. AAAAACK!"

Just popped into my head - a sufficient quantity of EM radiation in a volume has zero mass but *does* exert gravity (see: Kugelblitz, a hypothetical black hole formed purely from EM radiation). How does that change things?

Yeah, almost certainly, its a new machine after all. Naturally "be able to run" is a rather subjective endpoint. The number of mods you can run, and the amount of hi-res textures you install, are limited by RAM. 16GB should buy you a lot of headspace (since people, myself included, were in the past running heavy mod loads, RSS and HD textures squeezed into the 32bit version limited to 3-ish GB [available] RAM.) The actual "quality" (ie: framerate) you can achieve is more limited by how many parts your current ship is made out of, and how many ship are currently active, CPU limited. But its quite a high spec machine so you shouldnt have any problems out of the box, unless thousand-part ships are the norm for you

"Good. The slow blade penetrates the shield..." - Gurney Halleck

I went to a lecture once at the Royal Academy by some eminent physiscist or other, and if I remember it correctly, it talked about (under certain theories or hypotheses) how gravity is so "weak" because it is capable of "leaking" into other universes or "branes". Its strength is effectively diluted between multiple layers. Hence, dark matter is us detecting the gravity of masses in other universes. And further, this could be harnessed to communicate between universes in a real way. There you go, discuss!

Well it depends on where in your list of priorities the carbon balance goes, but dude! It was a hypothetical question lol! I said more than once it wasnt necessarily a practical solution "What are your ideas for bio-friendly fuels?" not "Construct a viable plan for the carbon-neutral replacement of all mankinds energy uses with exhaustive socio-economic analyses." I always liked wood as an example of this as most people start to think of exotic things like an all-electric economy, hydrogen fuel cells or esoteric tidal power stations, that sort of thing. People dont always think about the fact that burning something can be carbon neutral, or that good old fashioned wood can possibly be on the same list as advanced technological solutions. You are of course correct in all of your points, as far as solutions and counterpoints are not addressed, but... ...I heartily agree sir!

Im not saying its necessarily an industrially viable solution, or that it can save the world, Im just saying that carefully managed, wood can be a renewable, carbon-neutral fuel. If I went out now and cut down a (young-ish, for the sake of argument) tree and burned it for fuel, the only carbon that would need offsetting would be that produced making the food that provided the calories I need to cut and dress the tree myself. But I kinda lump that carbon into another category because its roughly a constant no matter what fuel I use. Yes, a large plantation to be managed long-term would require significant infrastructure, but at smaller scale there is little problem. Besides, there are solutions to the machinery/infrastructure issues too. Like I said - and it may not be the cheapest, or practical yet on any very significant scale, but - there are pathways to carbon neutral fuels.

"What if they what?" "What if they miss?" "Its Mrs. What if they what?" hueheuheuheuehue

However, 20kg of propellant on the launchpad is easy and cheap to achieve. It is not important to minimise your tsiolkovsky-based losses, it is important to minimise the cost. But anyway, I fear I am getting a little pessimistic, it is very difficult to say no to nearly 800 tons of LOX in LEO per year, that is for sure. Even 100 tons.

There are so-called "data recovery" services around that offer various things. I know that merely "deleted" data can easily be recovered, but I have also heard of overwritten data being recovered from hard discs, and I have even heard of data being recovered from unpowered RAM, depending on the circumstances. Anyone have any good experiences with this sort of thing? Or are these companies a little bit overhyped?

Just stopped by to say I picked up Cosmoteer on your recommendation and it is seriously addictive! Im impressed and it is developing well too!

The advantages of on-orbit refueling depots are well understood, but this study lacks information on why/if an atmospheric scoop is better than simply shipping resources to orbit. Especially since only oxidiser can be collected from the atmosphere. Quick back-of-the-napkin suggests that a buzzard scoop 10km across would take 10 orbits (~15 hours) at 400km to collect 1g of monoatomic hydrogen. Mind you, that is assuming that the volume swept is: a) 100% scoured clean of particles in one pass; b) every particle is a hydrogen atom; and c) the volume swept is instantly replenished at the same concentration(~5 atoms per cm3). **edit** Another quick back-of-napkin - within the spherical space bounded by the moons orbit (~400000km radius) there exists approx 2200tons hydrogen. (32 x SaturnV second stage)

Not for nothing but you know whats a great source of phosphate and lime? Wood ash!

KeyPoint: It doesnt say KSP is looking for a lead developer, it says Squad is. /thread

I dunno, here you appear to be describing a Maxwell's Demon. All diffusion in either direction works to drop the temperature of the combustion zone, not conserve it. Also, some of what you say directly disagrees with NASA research on the topic. For example, the slow spread of the flame and limited diffusion promotes CO production. And ummmm...thats not how explosions work.

This is about where my farming knowledge ends. But as I understood it, the old way was 3 years growing whatever, then a year growing beans, which are plowed directly back into the soil, rinse and repeat. There are pathways available for carbon-neutral fuels, it might not be able to meet industrial outputs, but it can be done.

Good point. However there are solutions, nitrogen-fixing plants are an ancient one. There are even some tree that are capable of this.

Yeah, thats the caveat for all of these things. Even down to staff driving to work in their petrol-fired cars.

If you grow wood specifically for fuel, then it is perfectly carbon-neutral. You grow trees, which sequester carbon form the CO2 in the air. You burn the wood which releases this CO2. Zero net increase in atmospheric CO2. Wood-fired cars FTW.

Precisely, 100% agree. But it contradicts what you just said:

Nevermind, I was being obtuse. What I was getting at, was a feature missing from KSP is not a "rule". My car does not come with a blood alcohol readout either, but if I install one, Im not breaking any rules. Implied or explicit.

Criminy! How does that change the multiplayer argument?!