lajoswinkler

Mercury does not have an atmosphere. It has atoms of gas (mainly sodium) leaking into space like tiny canon balls, all because of the scorching heat of the Sun. Particle collision is extremely rare. Pressure is only theoretically determined. Atmosphere is a layer of gas in equilibrium. If you were on Mercury's surface and opened a hole in the can with nothing inside, it would not be filled with those atoms unless its opening is in a proper direction. It could remain perfectly void of matter. I've mentioned it once on this forum - Mercury is worse than a leather suitcase in space. The suitcase leaks way more particles per unit of surface. I said "probably barely diferentiated inside". It's certainly nothing like terrestrial planets. This is a body that barely managed to establish hydrostatic equilibrium.

In higher orbits? Thousands of years. Higher? Millions.

Surface brines are something even Mars probably doesn't have (or has sometimes for a brief time), and it has a relatively significant atmospheric pressure compared to Ceres. Ceres really has nothing except for lonesome gas particles jumping around. Normal liquids are actually a rare sight in the universe (unless we ignore hidden stuff under planetary crusts). They represent a tiny gap between solid and gas states and can exist only if there is sufficient pressure above them. There are certain liquids that would literally never evaporate (ionic liquids) but they aren't encountered in nature. Synthetic stuff.

OK, thx, I had 1.6.5. One or another... I'm walking on the thin line of KSP crashing due to lack of RAM. It seems it will be fine now. My GameData folder is at 630 MB. It usually crashes above 650.

Does the now required OPM+Kopernicus take more space than just old OPM? Also, I forgot what folders did older OPM include so now I don't know what to delete.

LOL god, no. Completely useless and perfectly nonrealistic. We do lack a 2.5 m nuclear thermal engine. KSPX has the first stockalike made ever, called LV-NB. You should check it out. Tiny nuclear engines can not exist if they use the same resources. There really is no need for smaller ones. If you need a high specific impulse engine for probes or tiny ships, you have the ion engine. Uranium can not be a propellant. Silliest suggestion I've encountered in a while. What could be used is hard to get uranium ore which can be turned into nuclear fuel (UO2) for powering LV-N reactor up if the thing ever gets a depletable one. It would be a good idea to make nuclear engines single-use-only, in a way that if you need to save money, you can land the thing and recover it for fuel recycling. BTW, nuclear reactor fuel looks like this. It's uranium(IV) oxide (chemically, pretty inert material) formed into a pellet which goes into zirconium tubes. It goes not glow. It never glows except if you heat it up. If it's spent and filled with fission products, it will make the surrounding water it's in glow blue.

Hardly anyone gave thought about it in the middle of 20th century. You'd build a house and that's it. Yes, in order to place the rods, you need to connect them to a fat copper ground (fat plate or a fat rod immersed into ground enhancement material) to get optimal results. If I was allowed, I'd do it, but it's not up to me.

It's a reasonable explanation. I see none to support an icy wonderland. I'm not sure what it is. It does look like a cryovolcano, but that doesn't mean it's active. The bright features on it can be created by regolith sliding down as volatiles from the rocks are lost during unimaginable long periods of time. Even if it could be water coming out, where would all that water come from? There can be no water cycle on Ceres. We're talking about at least 4 billions of years (several thousands millions!) old surface evident by its extreme errosion. Even with relatively weak activity, that's an awfully long amount of time for such a small body. There is no liquid water on Vesta's surface. It's one study that suggests possible brief flow of mud made by ices (ice = volatiles) right after one meteoroid impact. If these things happen on Ceres, they need a power source. Where is it? It seems lots of people see this body as very active. There is no evidence to support that idea and also no probable mechanism for it. This is not Triton which has the privilege to be far from Sun, squeezed by Neptune, with most of its volatiles intact. This is a much smaller body, perfectly alone, close enough to Sun that any surface volatiles (even water) will be gone in a short time. It's so incredibly old that it would be pretty bold to say it's doing something right now just to entertain us, a measly species that existed an unsignificant fraction of its lifetime. A real monkey behaviour, IMO. It is possible, but it's highly unlikely.

Eating/urinating/defecating are physiological needs. You don't perform them, you die. I don't believe it won't affect the development. I understand Harv and other developers are one thing and Squad is a company they work for. The company's PR department decides what to say and what not to say and they get directives from the jefes.

Public awareness - yes. Basically everything else - no. I'm not a filthy peasant so this will not bring any joy to me. It also means less development time spent on game content.

We accept him, we accept him, one of us, one of us, gooble gobble, gooble gobble!

My Jebediah is in the deep space ship Kron 4, waiting for departure.

Yes, it's supposed to be, but not everyone has a lightning rod system. I don't. Even with that, there will probably be a decent surge in the system when the lightning hits.

Liquid water can not exist in vacuum. It will partially turn to gas by boiling and one part will solidify. At temperatures encountered on Ceres, water ice will sublimate away in a matter of weeks. Phase equilibrium is totally shifted towards gas. That does look like a cryovolcano. Remember this is a very small body, with surface older than the Moon's. It's ancient. There is no tectonics, it's probably barely diferentiated inside. It is alone, nothing is squeezing it. There can not be much activity. Those flows are not lava, but ejecta sliding down. Nothing we haven't seen before. Similar thing in Tycho crater. http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/565812main_tycho_full_full.jpg

So I don't need a heat exchanger below every nuclear engine? I could just use the pipes to pump the heat which they dump into their tanks and divert it to the central heat exchanger? It makes a big difference because those things are heavy.

So, each engine should have an exchanger? Or only the middle one? Will it be enough if I use the pipes to connect lateral tanks to the exchanger?

NASA did not demote Pluto. NASA is one agency that does mainly astronautics, engineering and stuff. This is a matter of planetary astronomy. Hm OK, I will write a letter. Can't do any harm.

Is this that "cone" we've seen earlier?

This is basically (a bit earlier design but it's ok) what I'm dealing with. Yes, I know heat isn't sucked, I was just simplifying things. I need all of the engines and the electricity generating reactor to transfer heat to the radiator. Darth Lazarus, you can't connect nuclear engines to anything. They don't have a mesh for that. MaverickSawyer, yes, it breaks down.

Such information should be available under every photo. It's not that big of a deal. One sentence. "This image is a composite of false colored infrared and ultraviolet channels." - there. Done, problem solved. Nanometres optional. I don't have one, but I might write a letter to NASA. It's probably futile as I bet I'm not the only one concerned about this, and somebody must've wrote them a letter before me... Not this butthurt discussion again, please. Rocky/gas/ice is about dominant planetary constitution, not about the main class of the object. There are solid reasons why Pluto was demoted. It was never a proper planet in the first place and it was just listed because of historical reasons. However that does not make it less exciting.

If this is a typical construction of such cable, then it would be a good idea to have that protection. Remember, surges aren't the same as lightning strikes. Surge protector protects from voltage fluctuations. But if a lightning hits anything connected to your computer, bye bye, computer, no matter what surge protector you have.

a) Do both heat pipe endings need heat exchangers or just the heat destination? For example if there's an asparagus cluster of engines and I want to divert all heat to the central one where the main exchanger with radiators is - can I just use the pipes to transfer heat from lateral tanks holding the engines (because engines don't have mesh to attach stuff to) or do I need exchangers for them, too? Is the larger exchanger "sucking" heat faster or just has more heat capacity because it has more mass?

Maybe it's somewhere in the thread. I don't know the numbers, but I know they're tailored to fit their task. Here is Jeb, first time in the actual ship's command module. Bill immediately took the task of bringing ship's systems online. Here's one of the pilots that got them up there, slowly backing away as Bill is messing with the science module. Moments later, he's at the nuclear fission reactor designed to supply the ship with electricity, checking the huge radiators. That's the last time Kerbals will be anywhere near the thing. Time to get back to the ship and freeze Bill and Bob. Bob is having second thoughts about all this.

There you do it again. "A human". What does it mean? Scientifically, a human is Homo sapiens. Even a zygote is one.

It's not philosophy. It's a conversation filled with semantic errors. If you all used well defined terms, it would quickly boil down to science.