KerikBalm

I don't think this can work the way you want it to. To drag something into place, you are essentially saying that you want a trajectory to intersect a given point... starting from a given point I assume. The problem is that there are potentially an infinite number of solutions to that intersect, all with varying dV requirements. Indeed, sometimes, there's simply no single maneuver that can give you the intersect. You have to choose a different start of the maneuver, or do 2 burn, etc. I don't see how this can work. Learn how to plan maneuvers, its the basis of the game

You would need to trap a lot of monatomic H in there, considering the molecular weight of the fullerene. I guess the energy output should be enough to crack open the bucky balls though.

Without going into detail, by adding a lot of energy to H2, and causing it to split. Heating H2 to 10,000K will do it. Cooling it down without it recombining is difficult though Sure, but you'd need to get the energy to do it first Definitely, keep in mind, you get energy out of monatomic H by having it recombine, both ways, you spit heated H2 out of the back. How can you do anything but lose efficiency by adding steps? Although you may be able to get a higher Isp, since stored monatomic H would be mixed with inert frozen H2 to keep it reacting, thus lowering Isp from 1500s or so down to the high 700s. A hot enough NTR can split the H2 and gain Isp simply by having a lower MW exhaust.

He said "any" There were no qualifiers or limiters for that. That implies that, for a given society (with no tech level specified), a sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. The key term here is sufficiently advanced. I would argue for a sufficiently advanced society, no technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thus in that case, we'd have to conclude that sufficiently advanced technology is impossible, and hence something indistinguishable from magic is impossible. If we just assume that a sufficiently advanced technology is possible, then the statement is a global statement of the sort I made. If we don't, then the statement is functionally identical to saying magic may or may not exist*, which is an asinine statement. * Well, really the conclusion is that something "indistinguishable from magic" may or may not exist, which I conclude to be functionally identical to saying magic may or may not exist.

Very interesting... do you have a citation for this?

A slightly less ridiculous alternative to metastable-metallic hydrogen, is monatomic hydrogen. Pure monatomic hydrogen is very reactive, and desperately wants to form H2. As a result, it can be a very energetic chemical reaction with a very low mass reaction product H + H> H2. This reaction can, in theory, produce an Isp > 1500s, which is comparable to that of decompression of metallic hydrogen. Like metallic hydrogen, the question becomes... how do you actually store the stuff. From what I've found, aside from very low density storage and low density complex storage using strong magnetic fields, the best way is to mix it with H2, and freeze it. I guess that in a matrix of solid H2, the single H's don't encounter each other and react. I've seen discussion of concepts using solid pellets of H2/H within liquid helium. So far it seems they haven't exceeded 2% by mass storage of H within H2, if that could be enhanced to 15%, an Isp of 750 is attainable. How likely is that to be attainable? Then the next question: how would you use it in a sci-fi setting such as a drop-ship and ISRU. Without ISRU from gas giants, you aren't going to be able to use much helium. How do you design a system that can: 1) Operate without a working fluid/ operate with a fluid that remains a fluid at temperatures low enough to stop H2/H from melting 2) Keep the H2/H pellets from melting 3) Do 1 and 2 without helium/ be able to be resupplied in situ, without requiring somehow mining helium from gas giants Liquid helium can act as a heat sink, with excess heat removed by boiling it off (the liquid will never be above about 4k). It also provides a working fluid - solving 1 and 2, but its virtually unobtainable from ISRU on rocky planets. I had thought about supercooling hydrogen, but if its incontact with frozen pellets, they will act as nucleating agents, and everything will freeze. Could we simply put some solvent in the H2 liquid to lower the freezing point, and be able to keep the "doped" H2 liquid cool enough that it doesn't melt the solid H2/H pellets? What about our heat sink? sure you could cool mass to nearly 0K, but that doesn't give you a lot of leeway. Warming less than 14 K results in the H2/H pellets melting, the H combining with H, and the whole thing exploding like a mini-nuke. I'd think that you'd really like to have some sort of phase change to keep temperature from rising. After helium and hydrogen, the next lowest freezing point is neon. Hydrogen melts at 14K, neon melts at 24.5K... that phase change won't help/ be much of a usable heat sink. As near as I can tell, this propellant isn't feasible. I'm imagining a drop ship with a helium/H2/H slush that descends, has a very limited time on the surface as the helium boils off, and ascends again before the whole thing blows up. It better have a mothership in orbit with cooling equipment for a quick rendezvous, or jettison all unused H2/H once reaching orbit... and that mothership better have more helium, and when it runs out, no more going back to the surface until you gt more helium from a gas giant... If we could use some doped H2 with a depressed freezing point, with some frozen so that the phase hcange provides a heat sink... we could at least perform ISRU anwhere that there is water/ammonia/hydrocarbons/any other hydrogen containing compound. Or we could just use nuclear power and deal with the radiation issue.... or beamed power (if you have a truly massive ground station or mothership), and drop the idea of some sort of advanced chemical-ish propellent.

I see craters, I see no way of establishing that they are impact craters. Many remind me of this: Which is most definitely not an impact crater.

I have commented on this before, I hate that quote. It presupposes that there is, and will alsways be, a sufficiently large gap in knowledge for "magic tech" to remain a possibility. That basically presupposes that the laws of physics are essentially unknowable. Sure that quote holds true for primitives with almost no knoweldge of how things work. It holds true to a lesser extent for people of the 17th century. As knowledge expands, the tech that would appear to be magic retracts. 500 years from now, there may be no possibly tech that would appear to be magic... or maybe 50,000 years from now, or maybe 50, or maybe now. This is essentially just a god of the gaps fallacy. In my view, magic tech is anything that conradicts known facts about the universe, or tech that just does whatever without even a hint of the mechanism at work. A fusion drive would not be magic tech, because it doesn't contradict known physics, and while the details aren't worked out, the mechanism is specified, and thus we can already make assumptions about how it works, its limitations, etc. When you don't specify a mechanism, implicit or explicit, then it can simply do whatever you want, without limitation, and can be overcome however you want, without limitation. Its function becomes arbitrary and random, depending only on the needs of the plot IMO, fictional magic stories that don't clearly define the rules for magic end up with just arbitrary outcomes, and I find its often just a cover for lazy writing. Superhero stories often have the same problems. I would say the star trek teleporter is magic tech, and probably the warp drive, because what stops them from working is basically just random and completely unpredictable. They will simply stop working for *insert technobabble reason" when the plot demands that the protaganist be trapped. Such things don't happen with non-magic sci-fi tech like a fusion drive... at least not to any extent greater than such things happen with real tech - like the horror movie cliche of a car failing to start after a couple attemps, as the killer closes in... etc

How long was it between vaccination and infection? When you say that you did a spike test, I assume that you mean a test for anti-spike antibodies/ spike-reactive antibodies? Did they sequence the variant to see if it had, for example, the E484K mutation? Ps, I also get neck pain-induced migranes, they suck, and my wife is always skeptical about it... She doesn't understand how neck pain can cause a headache

Assume 10x radii and SMAs... then its not so bad Pretty sure that discovery predates principia by a lot Well, Io gets hot enough for lava lakes... So its not that bad... The polar ice caps make no sense though. Tylo, laythe, vall, are all proportionately huge compared to jool vs the galilean moons to jupiter. If Io were much larger, nearly earth size instead of more Moon sized... that would be an interesting destination (ditto for Ganymede, Callisto, Europa) Im not sure how the tidal heating and temperature would scale though if those moons became >mars but <earth sized bodies...

Those are not the same thing

I'll grant rings being torus-like, but oceans are not, and are currently modelled as spheres. We can hope they allow for oblate spheroids in KSP2. Rings orbit a planet, oceans most certainly do not. fine Oceans apply one uniform physics effect (water simulation, with resistance, buoyancy, and pressure), whereas rings seem to cause the procedural generation of orbiting debris - likely similar to ground scatter (which already in KSP can be made collidable) To me, they are quite different

I use sun and Kerbol interchangeably - but the system is the kerbal system. Any star is a sun to its planets. If there is a specific planet of reference (implicit or implicit), then that start is the sun of that planet. Even in KSP2, I may still refer to Kerbol as the sun given the privileged status of Kerbin, and all the other stars are suns of their planets.. but if describing operations only within one of those solar systems, then I may also call those suns the sun. Similar logic should apply for solarsystems... but ofr some reason I'm more hung up on the solar system only referring to the solar system that Earth is in...

It is always good to read the thread before commenting. This question was answered on the first page. Certain other threads that often get locked here have a lot of commenters who do not read the thread before commenting. This behavior should be frowned upon. Anyway, your answer:

@starcaptain I think that is a different discussion. There have already been discussions about undersea exploration in KSP2, so different phases of liquid to explore would fit those threads, but I don't think it fits so much about simly having water at different/differing elevations. Well, I'd argue that they are more explorable in KSP 1 than Jool's atmosphere. Going down to 0 meters on Jool and coming up again is.... rough to say the least, its been made easier with robotics (using electric rotors to ascend to lower pressures), but robotics have opened up all the oceans in the game to exploration (Eve, Kerbin, Laythe, mod worl'd with oceans like Tekto, or my own duna with seas and Mars-derivative with seas mods). My custom system (3 or 4x ... I decided on 4x too later after I was heavily comitted to a 3x playthrough) has Jool's surface gravity at 2.5G like that of Jupiter... There's no getting out of the lower atmosphere of that Jool with stock parts (except using exploits such as kraken drives). Any hovering base dies as soon as it is put on rails...

Honestly, aside from antimatter production, its pretty hard to imagine what you would need something better than a fission reactor for. Of course, it may be a matter of what fuel type is available, and a massive fusion reactor may not produce so much more power from a compact fission reactor. Consider the 400,000 ton ITER is supposed to generate 450 MW net thermal power, and the 13 m diameter/2750 ton reactor of an Ohio class ssbn produces 220 Mw thermal power. Of course, the ITER figure includes the building and such, and a lot of stuff that wouldn't be there in an actual power plant (but at the same time it lacks stuff from an actual power plant) - the vacuum vessels alone (without magnets and other equipment) is over 5,000 tons. Having a hard time finding the diameter of the torus (just the figure for the cross section of one of the vacuum vessels He3 production can be done efficiently by fission power. In this case, you want neutron production (tritium decays into He3, a fusion reactor would consume tritium) Uranium enrichment/processing doesn't take that much energy, you'd easily get net power using a uranium reactor Metallic hydrogen production (ughhhhhhhhhhhh) shouldn't need more power than a fission reactor can give you. The specific impulse of undiluted mmH fuel would be less than you get from even a liquid core NTR, so even including efficiency losses, one reactor sufficient for use in an LV-N should provide similar amounts of power as what is needed for mmH production (ughhhhhhhhhhhhh) Could we have colonies supporting 100k kerbals? because that's what I imagine when I see a reactor that big, even with mining, manufacturing, and greenhouse power consumption factored together. Shouldn't take that much more energy than it does in real life, and in real life a few dozen fission plants is all you'd need for an entire country. When I think of giant power sucks, I think antimatter... and beamed power propulsion.. which I doubt will be in the game, but it would be so awesome if it was. Then I'd hook up one (or several) of those reactors to a giant capacitor bank, and a giant laser (oh,with say... a few peta watt output), and laser launch my way into space. It would also be a rather good planetary defense fortress should the need arise.....

Ummm, I see visual rings and buoyant water as very different features... can you elaborate?

Yes, but at least it would illustrate the basic principle, and tides are related to the motions of celestial bodies, so I would say that they fit the scope of the game a bit better than rivers and streams. As with many games, there are big limitations to just having water be some level or surface. The arma series always had one water level for the oceans, with all rivers and lakes being sea level... Until Arma 2, which had mountain lakes as well (all river-like features conveniently were dammed, so no sloped water features). Arma 3 went back to a single water level (dunno why), and the lakes in arma 2>3 ports don't quite work 100% right (3 reworked water interaction extensively) It seems like many games can't quite get water of different levels right... And all this is far from fluid flows. We wont be seeing anything like the tidal currents through narrow connections between the big mare on titan, ir the various strong tidal currents on Earth.

Interesting idea... If you could rotate the ocean independently of the ground, you could have tides, but this would screw up lakes and such. I guess you could have a heightmap that makes an oval shape (oblate spheroid) with a non-synchronous rotation for tides, and a heightmap with a synchronous rotation for lakes and rivers. Tides or (rivers and lakes) with such a system, but not both at the same time... Unless we have 2 water layers for one planet...

Just a little critique: It should be a symetrical oval, not egg shaped. Normally, tides should come nearly twice per day. It may seem counter intuitive, but there is a bulge toward the moon AND AWAY FROM the moon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide#Principal_lunar_semi-diurnal_constituent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide

@Pandaman09 'tis exactly what I just proposed :p

Yea, I do that on 3x games to improve payload fraction, otherwise on stock games, I have the mining equipment on my tanker: The force it applies is limited, if you have a weak piston and a massive craft, its fine. If your craft is on wheels, its fine. See below: Its also good to have a hotkey to turn off the motor on your robotic arm the moment it connects. I also use axis groups to make control of my arms easier, so I can use i/k to raise/lower it, j/l to rotate it or just move left/right, and h/n to extend/retract

I would also like this... and TBH, if the new planets don't add something new, why bother going to them? An interesting destination should be high on the list of game priorities. How good would KSP be if all the planets were simply perfect spheres of varying radii and surface gravities? I, for one, would love the ability to have different water levels, and sloped water surfaces. A very simply implementation could be an oblate ocean that doesn't rotate at the same rate as the terrain, to at least allow tides (and its slope would only be "level" at high and low tides)

Interesting... what is your power source for that thing, those look like electric rotors, not the LF and intake air consuming turbines... Anyway, have you considered a tilt rotor for easy operations on land or sea?

Its more likely to be like a mini neptune. From the link supplied: