Idobox

You can do reasonable asparagus, like Space X, which makes sense, and you can make Whackjob asparagus, and forfeit all claim of realism. A relatively simple game mechanic to limit asparagus would be to have fuel lines with limited throughput that also cost a lot. You know, like real turbopomps. That way, you couldn't build gigantic asparagus monstrosities until you unlocked end-game tech, while still allowing landers and stuff, and once money is implemented, you would have a good reason to stack stages.

I think it has to do with the position of the center of mass. With your rocket, your high drag thingie is in front of the centre of mass, and tries to get behind it. With the capsule, I think the centre of mass is very low, so the blunt end doesn't have a lot of fulcrum, and the rest still has significant drag and more fulcrum, acting like a tail fin.

That's what countries do when they have importations taxes, or VAT, and it is called protectionism. Artificially inflating the cost for the competition rather than lower you own. But honestly, AI smart enough to have a political party would out compete us on pretty much anything, and wouldn't need this kind of trick.

Thanks K^2, I was trying to find the slope to get 1/r², which is beyond what I can do in my head.

A better approximation is bearing balls in a funnel. If you happen to have a funnel with the right shape (it looks a bit like a trumpet, I 'm too lazy to find the equation), you can get a pretty good approx of the gravity of a planet. You can also use any conical shpae, or even a bowl, but you will loose the 1/r² relation, meaning stable orbits might not be possible.

oh, sorry, screwed up the vertices and faces on the icosahdron. I've done a little of topology, and know the difference between simply and doubly connected surfaces for example, and that kind of stuff, but I haven't ever touched Euler characteristic or curvature questions, I'll check that, it sounds fascinating. The 12 point thing, I assume, is only true for spheres in 3D. For a half-sphere, it is totally possible to have only one vertex with 5 edges. Dominatus, you can't use regular hexagons (6 times the same angle), or you'll end up with a flat surface. If you want on order of magnitude approximation, you can calculate the surface of a half-sphere 2*pi*r², and divide by the surface of your hexagons (don't know the formula, but you can find it on google). Unless you have a good reason to use hexagons, I advise using triangles. Making a flat triangle is easy, as long as the edges are straight. With other surfaces, it becomes much more difficult, and require higher precision.

A similar idea, although much easier, is to make charcoal. Take organic matter (made mostly of water and atmospheric CO2), heat it, and you get coal. It's been done for millennia, usually using fire as a heat source, and is a reasonable way to capture and fix CO2. Charcoal can then be burned for energy, or turned into gas and oil. An important point would be to retrieve other elements from the organic matter, especially phosphorus, otherwise we might But as it's been said, it would be far easier to use solar or nuclear energy for that purpose (solar heat is both cheaper and easier than photovoltacis, so I don't think nuclear thermal would be competitive). Or even better, make transgenic algae that directly produce what you need, and use them to turn solar power into fuel.

About the kinetic energy lost by the exhaust: The exhaust speed is the ISP divided by g0 (acceleration at Earth's surface). The faster your exhaust, the more deltaV you get per kg of fuel. The idea of having the exhaust at rest doesn't really mean anything, because there isn't a reference frame that is preferred. What you want is to move it as fast as possible from you, because you gain the same amount of momentum (speed times mass) in the reference frame of the rocket. Of course moving your exhaust twice as fast requires 4 times more energy, and that's why real rockets use highly energetic fuel. If you have constant power and a fixed amount of propellant, like with an ion engine, you will get the best deltaV by expelling a small trickle of propellant at max speed for a very long time (you also spend the most energy that way). If you have limited energy and fixed amount of propellant (chemical rockets), you will get the best efficiency by dumping all your fuel at once. In practice, you have also a limit on power (energy/time), so you burn as fast as you can without melting/destroying the engine or killing your crew with g force. And by the way, if your exhaust velocity is 1000m/s, and your orbital speed is higher than that (it almost always is if you have a stable orbit) when you burn, the propellant will move in the same direction as you, albeit slower, from the point of view of observers on the planet. It's like driving a motorbike on a train, when you accelerate, you make the train slow down a little, but to the cow looking at you, both the train and the bike go in the same direction.

K^2, you have 12 vertices with 5 neighbours if you start from a dodecahedron, and turn each pentagonal face into 5 triangles. If you use a different scheme, you will different numbers. For example, an icosahedron has 20 vertices, all connected to 5 neighbours. If you turn each triangle into 4 triangles (think triforce), you keep the 20 vertices with 5 edges, and add 30 new ones with 6 edges. Dominatus, What you're looking for is called a geodesic dome. If you don't want to solve the spatial geometry yourself, you can try to look for DIY projects, or alternatively use a 3D program, create a sphere with low polygon count, and extract the dimensions of each face. Be aware that the faces are not all the same, the triangles have different angles when you get closer to one of the 12 or 20 original vertices. If you want hexagons instead of triangles, you have to take the dual, ie take the center of each triangle and connect them. Of course, you will have a few (12 or 20) pentagons. Actually, if you start from a simpler solid, like a cube or tetrahedron, you would get less irregular faces (8 or 4) but they would be square or triangle.

I agree with metl, classes feel very gamey and constricting. I would prefer aa system like ultima, fallout or arcanum where you have a limited number of points you can spend on skills. Want to put everything in piloting, here you go, want to spend half on repairing, half on science, sure, etc.

There is also the Armstrong memorial, and every time they write Rockomax, I read Roskosmos.

Deep space Industries might not have any money, but Planetary resources have, and they've built space telescopes (still not in orbit though). Space mining is not science-fiction anymore, but it's still not a commercial reality (although it is a venture business), so, as the article said, it is moving from one to another.

French here, Either alone or as part of ESA I would put a lot of money on spaceplanes, with the target being SSTO, and nuclear thermal rockets. We could try to have our own manned program, but I don't think it's very useful to copy USA and USSR 70's programs, when we could instead go for breakthrough, and for once, be in advance. Oh, and big ass robotic probes to go see under Europa's ice sheet and take a closer look at Titan.

Humans are pretty resistant to extinction because of technology, that being said, if climate change severely impacts crop yield and we can feed only a billion people, the transition will be pretty horrible. Forcing a billion or so people to move because of the rising sea level would be pretty terrible too. Storms and hurricanes are, put simply, a consequence of the ocean cooling down. If the ocean gets warmer, and the air more humid, it will be more difficult for the ocean to cool down, ie, it will have to move more air and water around, and move it higher. Which means more powerful storms. On top of that, the climate is a very complex system with lots of feedback loops that can go haywire. For example, at the same latitude, the climate in Europe is much wilder than on the east coast of North America because of the gulf stream. If the gulf stream slows down, a possible consequence of global warming, Europe would get colder. Another example is the polar vortex, which from what I understand, keeps cold air from going south. With the ice cap melting, this vortex is supposed to somehow weaken, letting more blizzards in Northern Europe and Canada, resulting in stronger temperature variations. Ozone is unstable, and CFC are a source of free radicals that catalyse the reaction. Try putting some Iron oxide powder (rust) in peroxide, and you'll see you don't need a lot of pollutant to cause large effects. Using DDT would have severely damaged the ecosystem, which would have reduced crop yield by killing the birds that eat insects. It is also toxic to humans. It is difficult to tell the balance of people saved vs people killed by forbidding DDT, but we now have pesticides that are very efficient while being less toxic. If DDT was never forbidden, we might not have them today. There are many things mother Earth can't really process, at least not fast enough to compensate for 7 billion humans acting stupidly. You wouldn't pour toxic waste in your garden expecting nature to process it, or disperse plastic bags everywhere hoping for them to biodegrade or something. And lastly, climate is a choatic systems, which means it's difficult to predict what is going to happen, but it is not very difficult to see what has happened already. And since the industrial revolution, a very short time for this kind of things, CO2 levels have soared, temperature is rising, glaciers are melting and species move to places that used to be too cold for them. Experts don't agree on the consequences of rising CO2 levels, but they pretty much all say it's going to change stuff, which is a bad thing when our food depends on climatic conditions.

If you arrive radially and leave tangetially, like on the diagram by TouhouTorpedo, you will get about the orbital speed of the body you're using. In the case of the Mun, about 500m/s The idea is you're leaving with same speed you arrived in the Mun's frame of reference, but the Mun moves in Kerbin's frame, so you have to add that speed. A nice picture is to imagine throwing a bouncy ball at a truck. Let's assume the ball moves at 10m/s and the truck at 1. If the truck drives toward you, and you throw the ball, it is moving at 10+1=11m/s in the trucks reference frame, bounces at the same speed, so still at 11m/S for the truck, but for you, it's 10+1=12m/s. If the truck is driving away, your ball arrives at 9m/s for the truck, and with same math, moves at only 8m/s in your reference frame. And the use of bouncy balls is relevant. Gravity assist are technically perfectly elastic collisions, even if the force mediating it is gravity rather than electromagnetism (the force that keeps molecules binded)

Otis, we seriously damaged the ozone layer and caused massive acid rain (that damage crops, not your skin nor your car), but have reduced our emissions of harmful gases before it kiled us. And yes, you can buy farmed salmon, but many species of commercial fish are almost completely gone. In France we import tuna from the Pacific, and there isn't any sardines left west of Canada, etc... We haven't completely broken the ecosystem, but we have come pretty darn close several times. I didn't know that, and checked. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X08007711# 1 billion years ago, it was roughly 50% more, and today it's about .03% of the total budget, so it was negligible then too. According to wikipedia (not the best source, but still a source), we released about 40billion tons of CO2 in 2011, about half of it by burning fossil fuels (not sure where the rest comes from, concrete?biomass?). The quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased since the industrial revolution, and today increases by about 10 billion tons a year. Add to that the absorption by the ocean itself (not the life in it, just the gas dissolving in water), that causes measurable acidification, and I seriously doubt biomass takes more carbon than we emit. Photosynthesis might, but since a significant amount of plant matter is burned or metabolized, you can't use that figure. Also, nobody serious claims that carbon alone is enough to raise temperature by 5 or 10°C, but positive feedback loops can. Hotter weather means more humidity in the air, less ice, less permafrost and less methane clathrates. Methane released by intensive farming is an issue too, also of a much smaller scale. Finally, nobody thinks global warming will destroy all life on the planet. The worst case scenario would be the oceanic circulation stopping, causing massive anoxia and release of toxic gases by anaerobic bacteries on the bottom of the ocean, which is thought to have cause one or two extinction events, and life survived that. What people are worried about is extreme weather, and disruption of farming. Hotter weather means more and stronger storms and hurricanes. It also means the disappearance of the continental glaciers that regulates river flow, which would be devastating for agriculture in many areas. The Andes countries are the most concerned by that, especially Peru and Bolivia might see the first climatic refugees leave valleys in the next 10 to 20 years.

An interesting fact that is rarely pointed out: The sun is brighter today than in the past (normal for main sequences stars), it was about 10% dimmer 1 billion years ago, and by the beginning of the carboniferous, it was about 5% dimmer. But still, temperatures were quite warm on average. This is because CO2 concentration was much higher, and this CO2 was captured by the biomass and turned into fossil fuels. We burn massive amounts of the stuff, we burn oil as fast as we can extract it, and coal only slightly more slowly. We release about 20 billion tons of CO2 a year, growing fast. We're releasing in centuries what took half a billion year for the biosphere to capture and store underground. I don't think it's arrogant to think that dumping 20 billion tons of anything in the atmosphere every year for at least a century (okay, we dumped less, but for longer) can affect stuff. We are able to destroy the ozone layer and cause acid rains, fish all the fishes in the ocean, dig mountains, dry seas, etc. it's not difficult to imagine we can screw up the biosphere because we do it all the time. About your diagrams, the 'small peaks' you're talking about are on the maximum of Earth thermal radiation, where their variation has the most effect. Even without that, ground heat is lost a lot by conduction and convection, and a more opaque stratosphere means the troposphere will loose heat at a slower rate, slowing down the whole cooling.

A simple mechanic would be a to have a per mission budget, that starts pretty low, and accomplishing a certain number of missions or goals increases it. For example, you could start with just enough cash to put a parachute and capsule on top of a SRB, but once you reach altitude X, you get more money and can start to make a decent suborbital rocket, which gives you enough money to build a rocket able to achieve orbit, etc... if you just want to build a gigantic pile of boosters to send a 200 tons rover on Eeloo, there's always sandbox mode, but you will have the freedom to either send kerbals on the Mun or a probe around Eve for similar budgets. You could also have a dual mechanism, with missions giving you budget but no science, and free-flight with no clear objective, but that would give you science, or just be fun. Life support will be a very good reason to send probes. Right now, probes are sometimes more difficult than capsules because of the power drain. It would also encourage you to have supply caches prepared before your great Laythe trip. For mapping missions, I think we should also have seismic mapping. IE, land sensors on several points to get info on the internal geology (Kethane, I'm looking at you), the more you have (in sensible positions), the more accurate the info. In situ resources exploitation is also a great mechanic that would motivate players to go step by step, especially if the hardware is super difficult to get there in the first place (putting a fuel station on the Mun should be very difficult, at least more difficult than sending robot probes on Duna). Using the science would also be a great mechanic. I imagine something like Kerbal engineer giving you the TWR and drag coefficient vs altitude for any body you have sent the relevant probes to. It's obviously more complex, but having the map view able to calculate the aerobraking effects once you've dropped one probe with a barometer on it would be a very good incentive for me to send such a probe before a manned mission.

About the repetition thing: If I measure the temperature 3 times in one spot, or with 3 thermometers at the same time, I still have only one data point. Sure, I am now more sure my thermometer is not broken or badly calibrated, but that's it. Now, if I measure temperature every hour, or every km, I get more data points. If the developers really want to have a repetition mechanism, there are other means: -give science points only if the experiment is repeated far away. Biomes already do that, but with low precision. A sort of mapping, with a big array of booleans to store whether an experiment has been done in one place or not might be an idea. -upgrade science parts. The first thermometer could have a 10K precision, the second one 1K, and the third one .1K, giving you a reason to repeat the experiment once you have unlocked the new part. It could feel pretty grindy though. -special experiments. Once missions are implemented, you could have an "experiment part", always the same but with different text, that needs to be sent somewhere and used n times, depending on the mission you might have to bring it back or leave it there. Once the mission is over, you would get new missions to complete. Like mission 1, send these ants into orbit and watch them. Mission 2, send this ants into orbit, and then spin the craft really fast. Mission 3, observe these ants in LKO, HKO, Mun orbit and on the surface of the Mun. You now have a reason a good reason to do the same experiment half a dozen times. That being said, removing completely the diminishing returns mechanism means you will have no reason to go back to body X once you went there once with all the science parts. A good way to limit that is biomes. Another is to keep the dimishing return mechanism, but allow only one transmission by mission by part type and by biome. There would be no point in putting 3 goo canisters on your first rocket to reach orbit if you could only reap science once, but there would still be a reason to put a goo canister on your 4th rocket to reach orbit. The risk would be to have players forced to repeat the same mission a few times to get all the science. Another option Squad could have chosen but didn't was to go the old Japanese RPG way: killing a slime (or measuring temperature at KSC) gives you 10 points every time, but you need 7 000 000 points to reach level 62, so you rather try to kill a golem (or measure gravitrons on Moho) for 5 000 000 points. I think it's good thing they didn't, as we would have the option to measure temperature 700 000 times.

I checked the EuroHawk thing. Seriously, the global hawk has been a disaster, costing 8 times more than planned, and being inferior to the older U2, so blaming EADS (responsible for adding a radar array) for the failure of the euro hawk is a bit harsh. That being said, defence project are often more expensive than planned and run late.

Why use a satellite link? On board a plane, you have space and power, you could use normal radio links too. You might have to put a few automated relay buoys in the middle of the ocean, but if you only to transfer telemetry data, you don't need large bandwidth, and could deal with slow transmission, meaning you could use longwave radio, wchich works beyond the horizon.

It depends on what you want to do on the Moon. If you want to send much more stuff from the moon than you send there, a mass driver is the way to go. If you want to send a lot of stuff there, or roughly as much up and down, a rotovator is better. The idea is that you can slow down incoming crafts and accelerate outcoming ones at the same time, without spending energy. That way, you spend almost no energy on capture, landing, take off and transfer (if the mass going up and down are equal). A magrail can only help you on the take off and transfer part. If your main cargo is personnel and equipment that will stay on the moon, decelerating will be more important than accelerating, a store the energy you gave while landing and use it to send you back home, and if you land too much stuff, you can spend the excessive energy by sending rocks or dust at Earth (or somewhere else). There is actually a proposal for building two momentum exchange tethers, one in LEO and the other around the moon. The idea is to send rocks from the moon to Earth to provide energy to lift space craft from LEO or suborbital trajectories to the Moon and other places. That being said, if you build a fuel factory on the moon and just want to send tons of it to LEO without sending much there, a mass driver would be better.

On the Moon, the best option would be a rotovator: a long tether in orbit that's also spinning. With the right conditions, the tip would get very close to the surface with almost zero relative speed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum_exchange_tether#Rotavator I'm a big fan of momentum exchange tethers in general. They are an elegant solution, and sound feasible with budgets comparable to other big science or space projects.

I love KSP, but seriously, they could have at least used orbiter if they wanted to be considered seriously.

I think space tether to accelerate from sub-orbital to orbital velocities could happen within my lifetime. At least I hope. If your rockets only 2000m/s of deltaV, everything becomes much cheaper.