Kerbart

You mean a modern PC? The ones that rival a 1980s Cray supercomputer in calculating power? Yeah, it's hard to believe they can do the calculations, that Newton did with pen and paper, fast enough...

Without the intention of derailing the thread but your life will be a lot easier if you store velocities and positions through a vector class that takes care of all the drudgery of adding vectors together and multiplying them with scalars. First of all you won't have all the .x .y clutter and second of all it will make it easier when you decide to switch from two to three dimensions. I would not be shocked if the language of your choice has such class somewhere in a standard library for starters.

Antimatter, just like in Larry Niven's story flatlander.

What I remember from Elite is that you had to make hundreds of flights to make any money. Of course there was plenty of action within those flights but that's with a highly simplified "battlestar galactica" flight model. It will be a challenge to come up with an economic model that requires fewer flights (to prevent the game from getting grindy) without opening up the opportunity to "use loopholes" and rake in millions in ways that weren't intended, or by running one particular kind of mission. I can see the potential though. The Space Station Contract Pack is taking things in the direction I'd like to see, giving you the ability to make serious money without grinding too much and at the same time keep the challenges fun.

In space is not the issue. The public has an issue with the process of getting it into space, aka "launch" This may seem haggling over semantics but it's not. If you can launch the dry reactor in a normal way, and send up the fuel in an extra secure launch (likely with the director of NASA and the CEO of the nuclear contractor on board, to make sure they don't say they take safety seriously, but they actualy do) you could deal with that. After that, not too many* people will be worried if the reactor has a meltdown halfway between mars and earth (until at least they find out that without the injection burn around mars the vessel *will* eventually meet up with earth again, I assume) * Excluding the obvious one like crew, family of crew, nasa directors, etc.

These handy little devices allow you to make any calculation you want.

In fairness the OP mentioned boot time and nothing else. That's where the ram disk will fly. Of course you will have to copy content TO the ramdrive but modern ramdrive drivers can take care of those little details.

When you watch "Das Boot" (and many other submarine war movies I guess) you'll see that for emergency dives most crew had to collect at the front of the ship to help it dive. More related to the topic, I know that the Concorde pumped full between the various tanks as a way to trim the airplaine. Moving passengers around to counter actions by the pilot -- I doubt that's going to work in a jetliner. Passengers weigh not that much. And even if you succeed, you can't control roll that way, so the pilot would simply bank into a 90° turn and crash the plane that way.

I doubt that, with the same specifications, it would be commercially viable, which is what "a company" suggests to be a crucial condition for such a venture.

I dare say that the volatility of helium is likely a lot less that you're suggesting here.

I have a hard time wrapping my mind around this. How could math be wrong? Can you give an example of something (that we know is right, but for arguments sake let's assume it's not) that is wrong? Would you mean something elemental like 3 + 4 = 7? Or something a bit more advanced like f(x) = 2x3 + 5x2 -3x + 5; f'(x) = 6x2 + 10x - 3? Or do you mean something like the Poincaré conjecture? (Which, being a conjecture, is something mathematicians do not have proof for, but assume it's true) Math is the only science where "hard proof" is really, really, really hard proof. Not as in "beyond reasonable doubt" but as in "without doubt". So I have a hard time imagining it would be wrong.

But there is on the land side. In many cases the customer can choose between Rail Combined or Truck Only, with the latter being the faster option. And I can assure you that rarely ever that option is executed where there exists a choice between rail/truck and truck only. Time critically is like being pregnant: either it's time critical, or it's not. There is no little ground, as there is not "little bit pregnant." And if it's not time critical it will be shipped with the cheapest mode the market has to offer. There are the occasional shipments that need a little bit of rushing (to make a vessel cutoff, or to make it to the store before christmas, etc) without the need for extremely expensive (and high speed) jet transport but those are far and in between. That's the market the aeroships would operate in. If I extrapolate how many times truck only is chosen on rail/truck corridors, I'd say that is an extremely small market and highly seasonal as well.

Disclosure: I work for a shipping company. Obviously, I'm biassed. With that out of the way, if there were a "most efficient" way of shipping, the market would have decided to use that mode. The fact that "the market" doesn't, is an indication that there really isn't. For cost per ton it's hard to beat deep ocean vessels. But indeed, you're limited to the ports you can use. In fact, the most efficient (=largest) vessels cannot enter ports in the US because the water isn't deep enough, and even if it is, the gantry cranes aren't large enough to handle modern 15000+ TEU vessels. Which brings me to a second point: size. If you're not familiar with them it's hard to appreciate the actual size of large container ships. Theoretically it will take three of our largest ships, only three, to provide everyone in the USA with a pair of sneakers. Boxed. Vessels unload in the US and Europe on a daily basis. It's an illusion those transportation needs can be served by airships. Suppose you could but 500 containers on such an airship, and that is a ridiculous optimistic assumption. To compete with a moderate sized post-panamax vessel, of say, 8000 TEU (a very common size and up to the late nineties the largest container ships in the world, but now considered "medium") you'd have to make 16 flights per day. Assuming it takes 5 days to fly from China to the US, you'd need 160 of them for a sustained daily service (trust me, i can do math. They need to fly back, too). Of course things get more complicated because you wouldn't fly them to a single large airport, you'd have delivery to every city. The sky would be covered with all these airships. People would complain! As mentioned before, each transport mode has its strengths and weaknesses. Trucks can deliver anywhere, but trucking is freakishly expensive. Trains are a lot cheaper, but slower, and don't go everywhere. So where cost is the primary concern, you'll see ship-train-truck. And as mentioned before, the intermodal container makes that possible and has changed the world in more ways than we're usually aware of (thank you, Malcolm McLean). Sometimes speed is important. Flowers, fresh seafood, parcels... That's where airplanes come in. If speed, at any cost, is important, the jet reigns supreme. That leaves the zeppelin based solutions in an odd spot. They are too slow for perishable goods. They offer a speed advantage over intermodal transport. But the price elasticity for non-time critical freight is not very proportional; I can assure you that nobody is willing to pay twice as much for twice the speed. Maybe 10% at best. They will claim they are, but when push comes to shove the cheapest price will get the freight. Which means you'll get maybe $2000 for airlifting that container from Shanghai to Kalamazoo, Michigan (remember city-to-city without intermodal is the selling point of these airvessels). With maybe ten containers on board. That's $20,000 revenue. While you're flying for ten days (5 to Shanghai, and 5 back -- you cannot base a service on one-way traffic). So you're operating cost better be less than $2,000 per day or you go bankrupt. What does $2,000 get you? Well, you will need at least a 4-head crew. Two pilots to fly the ship (the FAA is amazingly uncool with letting one pilot fly by himself) and since you're flying 5 days non-stop they'll need to rest. Let's assume you can pay them $25 per hour and you only pay them for the shifts they work (I'd love to see the union negotiations. Remember you need a lot of these ships so yes, the pilots are going to be unionized. More bad news...) -- that's 25 × 4 × 12 = $1,200 per day on labor. That leaves you with $800 per day for running cost. Now let's say that maintenance & repair will cost you a friendly $50 on a daily average. If you've ever seen the price of aeronautical equipment you'll know that is really lowballing it, but let's assume. And another $50 per day on average for things like landing rights, permits, training, ground crew, offices, sales, etc. Good luck with that, but let's amuse our selves. That leaves you with $700 per day available for depreciation, or around $250,000 per year. And lets say that you write off your airlifter after 20 years. Which, with all this based on pretty much non-stop service, sounds pretty reasonable to me, but let's be even more optimistic and assume it still has 50% of the new value at that point (who wants to fly a rig that has probably literally been flown into the ground. That means that 50% of the new value was $5,000,000. I don't think that it is likely that an airlifter with a ten-container capacity (let's put the payload at a maximum of 200 tons) will be sold new for only $10,000,000. I'm sure there's a niche market for it but I simply don't see how it could compete with current modes of transportation. DISCLAIMER: there's a lot of assumptions in these numbers, but I don't think that they are THAT far off -- if anything I think I'm erring on the optimistic side.

I completely agree. There's this SDHI mod made by some guy that shows exactly how it should be done.* * Yes, I know...

So you think it's not a big deal if the pilots of your plane can't see anymore? How about hearing an announcement during a flight? “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your flight crew. I lost a bar bet yesterday so the copilot and I are going to finish the rest of the flight blindfolded. The landing may be a bit rougher than usual†will get a Steve Jobesque no biggie from you? I think that trying to blind the crew of an airplane (even a helicopter) is effectively an attempt to kill them. And yes, attempted murder should be punished harder than "regular" car theft.

I like your attitude. I want to get there and I want to get there NOW! I tend to think of the Kerbodyne parts as Saturn V equivalents. It's good to see them in a launch configuration where they are packed together like a bunch of straws. Please tell me that all this is just to get Jeb mounted on an external command seat to Ike.

Top off at Minmus, a light burn to get out of the minmus SOI into a large circular orbit around Kerbin, burn from there? Has the advantage that you don't need 1000m/s dV to escape Kerbin. Given the long period of the orbit transferring to other planets may be tricky though. But as Red Iron Crown mentioned, returning full tanks to Kerbin (with some aerobraking to save even more fuel) is probably the more practical approach.

There, I fixed it.

The only virtue, but I'll admit it's a magnificent one, is that it's already in orbit, which is half the way of getting there (insert mandatory Heinlein quote). Aside from that it's about the opposite of what you want: Build a large station in LKO without any regards for ever flying it. Asymmetric, long parts sticking out in every direction. And then add a few mainsails (or as Whackjob calls, them, "seperatrons") and try to fly the friggin' thing to Duna. 'Nuff said. The weight mass! So many parts you don't need, and they all need to be propelled to Mars! So many things missing! Extended life support (can't really rely on those regular Progress deliveries). Shielding against radiation. Long range radio systems. Shuttles And last but not least. You've owned a car for twenty years. You've come to that point where the recurring costs of repairs to keep it running starts to become higher than the cost of leasing a brand new car. And just when the garage tells you the timing belt needs to be replaced, what's your reaction? ROAD TRIP! LET'S RIDE IT COAST TO COAST BABY! If I were a professional astronaut I'd politely decline to step into that death trap to mars. But there's always the Mars One people of course...

Not really. You had me at "mainsail seperatron"

All I know is that there is a restaurant at the end of the universe.

With a diameter of 1,200 km, the circumference of Kerbin is 3,781 km and the rotation period is 6hr. That means the surface velocity at the equator (which is pretty much where KSC is at) is around 175 m/s. Normally you get that for free, but now you have to overcome that instead; so I'd say the penalty is 350 m/s.

Well if we're splitting hairs over semantics let me know you intend to drive from New York to Paris, if it's on the ground, after all. That boeing did not break the sound barrier; "breaking the sound barrier" suggests moving beyond mach 1 indicated air speed (and "indicated" is important as, by virtue of the way it's measured, it "magically" takes things like air pressure into account). What that boeing did was moving at a ground speed that exceeded the speed of sound at sea level. Which is pretty impressive, and sometimes convenient*, but in the end just means "moving faster than a fairly arbritary speed." Breaking the sound barrier on the other hand is a physical barrier to overcome that can destroy the aircraft if it's not constructed for it. * Then again, most of my translatlantic EB flights where we had a good tailwind and arrived 2 hours early ended up with 2 hours in a waiting pattern, "there are no landing slots available except our original one"

Actually, only one crashed. Now that did push the Concorde from the top of the safety list (zero fatal incidents) to pretty much the bottom (because these lists are "per passenger km" and the Concorde simply didn't transport that many people in its lifetime) of the list. The incident was caused by a piece of metal left by a previous plane on the runway (I think the lawsuit over that is still going on) piercing a fuel tank as it was kicked up by the landing gear. What really shut the program down was that this was a pretty good excuse to shut the program down; the reasons had more to do with economics than anything else. As Kryten pointed out, when you take into account all the security checks (which might have been more extended with a high-profile plane like the Concorde) you lose a lot of the shorter travel time. Another way of cutting your transatlantic travel time down is hiring a business jet (bypassing most of the time-consuming BS at an airport). You'll get a similar door-to-door time, for probably a comparable price, with a much better experience. I work in the transport industry. Customers will always tell you that shipping speed is of the utmost importance to them. When it's time to pull the wallet, they'll pick the slowest (cheapest) option anyway, with the exception of a very, very select few.

We know it can be done, so what I really expect is a VAB-sized boulder landed right next to the launch site in Cape Canaveral