KerikBalm

No, not in fact. Keeping surface gravity the same but increasing diameter increases orbital velocity (and thus dV, ignoring air resistance) by a factor of the square root of the rescale. Scaling kerbin up 10x results in √ 10 times the orbital velocity... 3.16x as much. Scaling it up 6.4 x increases it √ 6.4, which is 2.5x the orbital velocity of stock. 6.4x is 2.13x the size of 3x, and 2x the size of 3.2x so, √ 2. = 1.41x the orbital velocity. The total dV to orbit changes depending on a number of factors, air resistance is a big factor that increases it, because you lose a lot more to drag when your at an equivalent pressure to 30km altitude in stock, and going at 4km/sec instead of 2 km/sec.... for example. A rocket doing a gravity turn is less affected by this than a spaceplane that will be accelerating more deeper in the atmosphere. Yes, light clipping is fine with me... light being the key word But rapiers perform as if they already have precoolers, there's no other way they'd work to mach 5+ You are wrong. Those delta wings are the Big-S delta wings. There is only one stock wing that has more lift per part, and that is the FAT-455 wing. The FAT-455 wing has a much lower heat tolerance, and is not suitable for orbital use. Thats why those SSTOs I showed used the large delta wings, but the 2 stage recoverable designs uses mainly the FAT-455 wings. I would like procedural wings to reduce part counts, but I also like to see what others build, and compare what I'm able to do to others, so I use stock parts as a reference. An all stock design is sharable and comparable with no mods. So in addition to bigger engines, I'd also like bigger wings.

It hasn't be that way in a while. They do have the largest LF capacity though, which is something. What do you call this for spaceplane size though? I mean... it has a few mk3 parts, for that large LF fuel capacity, but.... I wouldn't call it a mk3 sized spaceplane I mean... what can I say... I like spaceplanes that can carry useful cargos... or pretty much anything I want, including other spaceplanes for use on duna or laythe.... and do so when kerbin is rescaled 3x. And what do you call this? its got no mk3 parts, and uses mainly 2.5m and 3.75m parts. The larger carrier plane issuborbital on 3x, but fully recoverable. Both the carrier and orbiter go to space, and are thus space planes Flying the carrier back to base: recovered orbiter:

Hey, I was able to get part count below 200, 180-something if I recall. That leaves about 100 parts for the payload (300 parts is about the limit my computer can handle). Time did move awefully slow. Getting to orbit was like a 30 minut endeavour. Well, I wasn't using a "standard" 3.2 config, but my own 3x config (I can do the math for rotation period changes), with a 1.25x atmosphere rescale (the stock atmosphere is proportionately way too thick). I'm not interested in part mods, I wanted the part mods to be limited to just Stock+DLC (even if the solar system was modded). I don't play with FAR, because I think if I did far, then I'd want to ditch the lego piece wings and go with some sort of procedural or mod wing set, when I want to keep my craft stock+DLC. The precoolers that you mentioned for instance... are probably OP'd. IRL Sabre engines would operate to mach 5.something. In KSP, rapiers do that. IRL, 1,600 m/s surface/1800 orbital is a small fraction of orbital velocity (nearly 8,000 m/s), in stock its almost all the way there, in 3x (or 3.2x), it gets you roughly half way to orbit... IRL to get half way there, you'd need to go at least 3,500 m/s in the atmosphere... so I don't think better jet performance is realistic for a 3.2 or 3x scale. I also don't want to part clip or exploit, and I want to be able to carry large and oversize payloads to orbit... so a 1.2 ton to orbit in a just slightly larger system doesn't impress me much (IIRC, I was the first, to post on the forums anyway, to break 30% payload fraction when 1.0 dropped and they changed the aero, and I did it with a massive SSTO capable of carrying oversized payloads). Still, with those contstraints in mind, I'm interested in hearing any improvements you could suggest to this sort of SSTO: I managed to get 17% payload fraction in 3x (1.25x atmosphere), with increasing use of nukes increasing my fraction... but making it take fooorrrrrreeeeevvvvveeeerrrr to get to orbit. That's why I switched to re-usable 2 stage designs... much faster time to orbit, and less time spent playing with a craft in the higher part counts.

I would also like larger engines. 8-12 engines is nothing though... when I make large cargo SSTOs for 3x kerbin... I'm looking at like 40 engines. A 2.5m rapier that replaces a quad cluster of 4 would massively help my part counts. Testing my 3x SSTO in 1x... it becomes able to deliver >100 tons to jool intercept (but getting the return trajectory and aerobraking to land back at Kerbin is tricky) I eventually changed to reusable 2 stage spaceplanes, which still have high engine counts, but do improve part count and performance a bit, but you can still see that I spam a lot of engines:

I only know how to add pre-existing scatters to a new planet (like making hte trees normally only found on Kerbin appear on Duna), but I know of at least one mod that adds entirely new terrain scatters (or are they BG surface features? I don't know) - and I do not know how to do that. And what I do know what to do, my understanding is a bit fuzzy on some points. I understood well enough for this though:

@prestja Not only did they say they were going to, they showed us.

So I guess 1.9 had a lot of changes that make it difficult to update kopernicus and iron out the bugs. I wouldn't be surprised if 1.10 comes out soon (did work on it stop,? it seems like its the sort of thing that could be accomplished by working from home), but I have no idea what changes 1.10 is bringing other than a texture upgrade for Jool. Any idea if we should expect that a lot of changes will be needed to update Kopernicus 1.9 to 1.10?

While waiting on Koperincus 1.9, I decided to make a fully reusable sytem for getting cargo to orbit of 3x Kerbin, although I've been testing it on 1x Kerbin, simply knowing approximately what it requires. I would like to do an Alien Space Program in 3x rescale, and thus getting too and from Kerbin orbit requires not just something that is recoverable, but reusable in the field with ISRU. My old 3x kerbin cargo SSTO used fairings (not reusable, even if the craft is recovered), and a significant amount of nukes (which I'd want to avoid for RP reasons), and had a >120 ton to orbit payload. I previously made all chemical rocket Mk3 cargobay and ramp using SSTOs for 3x, but their payload fraction was horrendous with the 10 tons just for the cargobays and the drag of the mk3 parts (try going 3km/sec while still low in the atmosphere, and needing 4,150 orbital velocity!). I had switched to using a recoverable 2 stage design with no nukes (much faster time to orbit), but it used decouplers and payload fairings. The 2 stage design has a high TWR rapier stage that climbs steeply and goes into rocket mode to get into a suborbital trajectory with a high Ap, so that the orbital stage can complete orbit and deliver a >120 ton payload to orbit before the 1st stage falls back into the atmosphere. The steep climb thus avoids most drag losses, so adopting mk3 bays aren't a problem. The mk3 bay realistically can only hold payloads on the order of 40 tons, so I went about downscaling the 2 stage system to deliver 40 tons to orbit, and then I redesigned the connections to connect using docking ports. Robotics were too weak for this task, and very good alignment is needed for aerodynamics. A single connection would be too floppy, so I painstakingly aligned a 2nd (shielded) docking port connection... and manage to make a system where the orbiter and 1st stage carrier plane can dock on the ground, first with an docking port aligned along the forward axis, then connecting a 2nd docking port on the top of the orbiter/bottom of the carrier (its important for alignment to first connect the forward docking port of the orbiter). The orbiter loads payloads via a Ro-Ro ramp.... The carrier lofts the orbiter to 120 km and 2000 m/s orbital velocity (will be less in 3x), while the orbiter has about 2,700 m/s with a 40 ton payload.

I'd say no to maxin the tech tree from just the kerbal system... the tech tree must be huge. You could basically recapitualte KSP 1 with the KSP1 tech level, Kerbin surface and orbit gives you appropriate tech to go to Mun and Minmus and you go to Duna, Eve, etc to get some better engines (LV-Ns, *ughhh* metallic hexdrogen, preferably liquid core and pebble bed NTRs in their place) and go to Jool+its moons+Moho+Eeloo. Then after getting science from most bodies in the Kerbin system, and establishing an offworld colony, you get an Orion drive to go interstellar to Proxima/Alpha Kerbtauri (a star system much closer than others), and going there can get you the next level of interstellar engine. We already know of Orion drives, ICF drives, and some torchship drive (probably antimatter). I would hope that you have to go interstellar once before unlocking the next interstellar drive, otherwise you just end up leaving the kerbin system with the best interstellar drive possible, and the intermediate ones are a bit useless (maybe just used for quickly zipping around other systems until your colonies can fuel a torchship7antimatter drive(

I started on .18, even when .21 was out... But I played a .13 version for a forum challenge. Maybe you should too, to really appreciate it

As they didn't see electrical conductivity when compressing it until it reached 430 GPa, with no observable hysteresis (dropping the pressure to 410 GPa resullted in a loss of metallic properties), I don't see how one can expect to have magnetic confinement of the exhaust without massive underexpansion and Isp losses that make it pointless

@Bingleberry *sigh*, this is getting really annoying. I think we need to clear up a few things/misunderstandings Then what are we arguing about? You said Considering I never said anything about it being a solid, and only stated that it was a metal, I don't know why you mentioned it being a solid. As far as I can tell you equated me mentioning it being a metal to it being solid. If that's not why you brough up solids, I have no idea why you did and it seems to come out of nowhere. Ok, you agree that removing an electron regardless of how many electrons an atom has, makes it ionized, which makes your statement: confusing to me... why does it matter how many electrons it has in total, all that matters is if its missing one. Your links are all well and good, but still no closer to the relevant question of if the relatively low pressure 6000K monatomic hydrogen exhaust (not the stored metallic hydrogen) would be ionized/able to be controlled by magnetic fields.

I haven't found anything except 10000k for ionization of hydrogen by temperature alone: http://www.wag.caltech.edu/home/jsu/Thesis/node31.html Sure, you can ionize it at lower temperatures. You can ionize gas at some pretty low temperatures, as in the lightening globe novelty lighting. But that ionization isn't achieved just by heating the gas. If you can provide a citation for denser hydrogen being ionized by temperature alone, please provide it.... Otherwise such a metallic hydrogen engine would need some external device requiring an additional energy output to ionize the hydrogen exhaust and allow for magnetic confinement of the rouchly 6000 K exhaust.

Physics says no. You can't just say "genetic engineering", and get little machines to do whatever you want. There are massive problems to solve. One is a lack of water, Venus has very little hydrogen. Life uses hydrocarbon chains, and the hydrogen bonding between is extremely important for all of life's processes. Life will not just subsist on Carbon and Oxygen. On top of that, you've got very little nitrogen... 3.5%... is that enough? 3.5% of 90 atm is, but if the life is going to be floating in the upper clouds around 1 atm... its not. Life needs CHONP in relatively high amounts and to a lesser amount S , plus trace amounts of metals for catalytic processes. In the atmosphere of Venus, you've got basically just C,O, and a little N. Life is not going to survive there, it needs to be able to get material from the surface, and the 20 ppm water vapor is not going to supply enough hydrogen... nor has any life ever been found to survive in a water activity so low. That is much lower than the putative brines that max transiently exist on Mars, and even those have water activities too low for any life we know... and there's plenty of selection for life that can reproduce in low water activity environments on Earth. It hasn't evolved on Earth despite 4 billion years or so of selection, so it seems very likely to be impossible. As already stated, Venus' atmosphere is already pretty reflective. The best bet (as suggested) would be a sunshade at the L1 point. Any gas will liquefy at lower temperatures, if you get the temp low enough (and have enough pressure for a liquid phase, otherwise it will do like dry ice and directly freeze and become solid). But what liquids will you get? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus Not very useful ones... liquid CO2... liquid nitrogen? 20 parts per million of the atmosphere is water. That is 0.002%. Compare that to Earth's 0.25%. Sure, Venus' atmosphere is about 93x more massive, so you might say that its equivalent to 0.186% water on Earth if you were to get rid of most of the other atmosphere constituents and bring the pressure down to 1 atm... So, now imagine we removed all the icecaps, oceans, and lakes from Earth, and the only water left was what was in the atmosphere... sure some of it would rain down.. but that would be insignficant. The mass of Earth's hydrosphere is about 1.4x1018 tonnes, of which only 2.0x1013 tonnes are in the atmosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrosphere Thats 1/70,000th the amount of water on Earth, and Venus has less than that. 70,000 *.25/.19 = 92,100. Earth has roughly 92,000x more water than Venus. That's nearly 6 orders of magnitude more. This poses a serious problem for any teraforming project for Venus, and a serious problem for putting any life as we know it on Venus.

See if I can mod it to 3x easily with just a text editor, or see if one needs something like Kopernicus. Then I'd want to see if planets from KSP 1 could be ported into KSP2, in which case I'd want to bring in my changes to the inner solar system (ie the stock solar system), and add OPM. Then, after establishing a colony, on Tekto, go interstellar.

@Bingleberry Being a metal does not mean it has to be a solid. Iron is still a metal when melted, as is mercury. Also, whether hydrogen has 1 electron or not is not relevant to being ionized. An Ion drive doesn't strip all the electrons from Xenon, just 1. Using your logic, all metals are ionized. You can't always think of electrons as distinct particle (good ol' wave-particle duality), its often better to think of them as clouds, and in the case of metals, the clouds go throughout the metal... as a biochemist, you should be familiar with the aromatic rings/ conjugated double, and how you can't treat the electrons as localized, but rather they must be considered delocalized over the whole conjugated system. Lastly, the ionization energy may be lower than the energy involved in generating mH, but not all the energy involved in generating mH goes towards ionization when released. You get about 50% ionization of hydrogen only at 10,000 K http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~townsend/resource/teaching/astro-310-F09/hydrogen-ionization.pdf Metallic hydrogen would only generate temperature of 6,000K when the energy from forming it is released: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#id--Chemical--Metastable--Metallic_Hydrogen So, no, its not significantly ionized, its not a plasma, its not confinable by magentic fields.

Its a metal, not a plasma. After the phase change, it would not even be a plasma (but it would be really hot, but not hot enough to ionize monatomic hydrogen), thus the exhaust could not be contained with a magnetic nozzle. Just how "doping" it with Cesium is supposed to allow a magnetic nozzle to work (which seems to be the technobabble explanation for KSP2), I have no idea... A lot of energy would be released upon expansion. 216 megajoules per kilogram. So much energy that without reacting with anything, it gets an Isp of 1700s in a vacuum. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#id--Chemical--Metastable--Metallic_Hydrogen Vacuum Isp is directly related to "energy density" of the propellent, density in this case refering to energy released per unit mass. Now reacting kerosene with Oxygen gets you a maximum Isp of about 360, reacting liquid hydrogen with oxygen gets you an Isp of about 500. Airbreathing engines beat standard rockets for 2 reasons. 1) They don't have to store the oxidizer, so the effective energy density of the propellent can basically be multiplied by: (Mass of fuel + Oxidizer)/ mass of fuel. 2) Simply using air as working mass to send more mass back at lower speed (same energy, more impulse). Turbofans are a great example of this, with their big fan sending air back with plenty of oxygen that wasn't used for combustion. Now a standard kerosene rocket has a fuel to oxidizer mixture of like 1:2.6 IIRC. So that allows reaching about 1285 effective Isp in an atmospheric engine - most jet engines use kerosene). Most jet engines get far far far better than 1285 effective Isp - the SR-71 for example got about 2,100 effective Isp around mach 3. So... any fuel allowing for 1285 Isp or better in a vacuum can get performance in an oxygenless atmosphere that is equal or better to a kerosene jet in an O2 atmosphere. Metallic hydrogen getting 1700s fits the bill It wouldn't outcompete liquid hydrogen in an oxygen atmosphere, since the fuel to oxidizer ratio there is about 8:1... but metallic hydrogen would do just fine as a jet fuel even in an argon/other noble gas atmosphere, if metallic hydrogen was metastable and thus suitable for use as a fuel at all.

Seriously, I'm 100% certain that they will add fuel types, no way is an Orion drive going to use the same fuel as an ICF drive, and neither will use the same fuel as a LV-N type engine, nor metallic hydrogen engines. Even the vacuum vs atmosphere metallic hydrogen engines won't use the same fuel. They are certainly going to make it more complicated with fuels and engines. I just think they are going to ignore chemical rockets and focus on future/magic tech. I don't expect anything except relabelling the LFO engines to methalox, and adding lH2 for LV-Ns and maybe some other nuclear thermal rockets.... Maybe... just maybe, they split chemical rockets into hydrocarbon+Ox vs lH2 + Ox

@Bingleberry Yes, and metallic hydrogen would also undergo a phase change which would release a lot of energy. Metallic hydrogen does not seem to metastable, so as soon as you stop compressing it sufficiently (ie >400 GPa), it releases a lot of energy. Also, yes, as the metallic hydrogen expands after the phase change, it will cool down... but it will still be much hotter than the air it interacts with, and hte air it interacts with will still be heated up. Let me rephrase: then you can simply use the heat from metallic hydrogen decompression phase change and decomposition to heat the atmosphere. As for decompress vs reacts. Its really a decomposition reaction. The phase change of metallic hydrogen to gaseous hydrogen is not like the phase change of ice to water or to water vapor. In the case of water phases, its still always H2O. Metallic hydrogen would be a single crystral(?) structure with electrons flowing freely between hydrogen atoms, to single H atoms, transitioning to H2 when the result cools enough. Its not the same molecule in different states as in water. This decomposition occurs once the metallic hydrogen is not sufficiently compressed, which is why I imprecisely refered to heating from decompression.

electric jet propulsion prototypes have been around a while... the question is how much power do they consume, how large is the generator, what does it generate the power from, and how do you fit that generator on the aircraft...

If they're going to stick with metallic hydrogen engines, then you can simply use metallic hydrogen decompression to heat the atmosphere. Or it could be an "air agumented rocket"/"ramrocket". It all comes down to the fact that for the same energy it takes to send 1kg of reaction mass back at 1000 m/s, you can send 100 kgs of reaction mass back at 100 m/s, for 10x the thrust. No matter what the fuel source, you can improve effective Isp through air augmentation just by increasing mass flow. KSP 1 could use ram rockets, KSP2 could make even better use of them when they have things like (*sigh*) metallic hydrogen that store so much energy that you'd stop caring if the air has O2 in it, just as long as there's air.

And why do you think that?

As for half in/half out of the atmosphere, in real life that makes no sense as there is no definite boundary. In KSP as it is, we have a precise boundry, but ships on rails can orbit inside the upper atmosphere drag free. I suspect KSP2 will have the same system. If the on rails orbit has a PE that goes too deep in the atmosphere, bye bye ship/station. If they allow hrusting on rails, they may allow drag on rails too though. Either way, I expect that either the craft is in the atmosphere, or its not.

KSP is not a survival game. Just because survival games have had a moment of popularity does not mean KSP2 needs to jump on that bandwagon. Indeed, its probably a very bad idea to do so, because there is a lot of competition in that field. Sometimes its better to go in a different direction. Consider the history of life on land... we came from fish... our ancestors didn't compete with the sharks to become the best swimmers with the biggest jaws, they went in an entirely new direction, on land, where they didn't compete with sharks and other large swimming predators. Anyway, it seems KSP2 will have a more complex resource system. They seem to say that we get metallic hydrogen (*vomits a little*) and water for an atmospheric engine, and cesium doped metallic hydrogen for a vacuum engine (*vomits some more*). Then we have orion nuclear pulse propulsion, some sort of fusion drive and collection of something from gas giants (He3?). The endgame torchship is probably an antimatter drive. All of these will clearly have different fuel types - so KSP2 almost certainly is going to get more complicated in that regard... I'm guessing you'll need to go to gas giants for some of the fusion fuel. They may have a few types of metals for constructing ships (and uranium for LV-Ns and Orion drives)... etc I don't think they'll go full periodic table, nor will they have the ability to craft items out of low or high quality materials... this is rocket science after all. If you're building a nuclear lightbulb, you can't really skimp on the materials, you need a very specific set of properties. Since they focus on high/future technology, there should only be one construction method.

As an aircraft enthusiast, wouldn't you want to call it a Pratt and Whitney F-100? But yea... that's clearly not a nuclear engine exhaust.It wouldn't look anything like that. As for fuel types. I think KSP2 is going to have many more fuel types. They seem to say that we get metallic hydrogen (*vomits a little*) and water for an atmospheric engine, and cesium doped metallic hydrogen for a vacuum engine (*vomits some more*). Then we have orion nuclear pulse propulsion, some sort of fusion drive and collection of something from gas giants (He3?). The endgame torchship is probably an antimatter drive. All of these will clearly have different fuel types - so KSP2 almost certainly is going to get more complicated in that regard... but given its future-tech focus, I'm not sure they are going to expand the chemical rocket fuel types. I have the impression that they are just calling it methalox and moving on.