KerikBalm

I think you are misinterpreting what he said. There is no modern prediction of metastable mH. There is no experimental evidence of metastable mH. Its like an athiest taking the position "I don't believe in god", vs the position "I believe there is no god". The latter being an affirmative claim with a burden of proof. Until such time as there is a reason to believe in metastable metallic hydrogen, we should not believe it exists. An intellectually honest person wouldn't even say that they are certain there is no teapot orbiting between Earth and Mars... yes I am referring to Russel's Teapot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot No intellectually honest person can claim that Russel's Teapot claim is definitively false, but one is well within reason to reject the claim as being "unlikely to prove metastable [true]at this point." Until any evidence has been given for the possibility of a mH engine, it is reasonable to reject it. The burden of proof is not to show beyond a doubt that it is impossible. If that is the burden of proof, then we can just add in nearly whatever fantasy drive we want, with nearly whatever technobabble explanation that we want.

Well if they explicitly say it is electron beam ICF... then yea, if its instead a more generic ICF engine, I am fine with that. It seems clear that ICF can work, but it may need to be at a very large scale. Its a hard engineering problem, but some form of net energy from fusion is possible. We don't have anything right now with a power output less than an exploding nuke, but we do have ways of getting net energy from fusion. I'd rather have them be vague than wrong. If all they get wrong is the minimum engine size, I am ok with that. I am not ok with metallic hydrogen, given the current state of the research, with only very bad predictions from the 1970's to go on (they got the pressures required spectacularly wrong, why put any stock in their other predictions, when there isn't a shred of experimental evidence that agrees with or supports those predictions?)

I hate the promotion of pseudo science as real science, and that's why I wanted to rename it to liquid explodium - no one would mistake it for real science. I've previously suggested using pebble bed or liquid/gas core designs instead, but that should require more than a simple rename of the part. At this point, it is clear that they are heavily focused on mH engine gameplay, and it seems too late for them to change what would need to be changed if they substituted nuclear engines. It now seems that the choice of lolzKerbal gibberish, and promoting pseudo/ bad science. Between those two, I will take the lolzKerbal gibberish. Metallic hydrogen is nowhere close to being a torchship. It would take impulse trajectories, not brachistichrone. Orion is arguable. I would call anything taking a brachistichrone trajectory with an acceleration of better than 1cm/sec a torchship (so solar powered ion drives don't count), but from the video, I get the sense that they are talking about something that can get over 1 g constantly.

I'd be ok with those engines if they called it "liquid Explodium" or "Mystery Fuel", and didn't promote bad science.

For me, generally around 200 tons, but I fine that the dimension limits are often more problematic for payloads in this category. I have aroughly 200 ton limit for both stock Ksp (orbital vellocity of LKO ~2350 m/s or 3x Ksp at~4,100 m/s) I find it quite easy. Payload is anything that didn't have a functional role getting it to orbit. I do not think the whole craft counts as payload. Why couldn't you land at KSC without the Rapiers? Not very good at judging your deorbit and glide back to KSC? Your craft can't get to orbit without wings, the wings are not payload. It can't launch without the wheels, the wheels are not payload. The crew compartments could be removed, they are payload. The excess fuel+portion of tanks needed to hold that fuel did not help in getting to orbit, they are payload. So if I remove a decoupler, it counts as payload again? Your payload is: 2x crew cabins: 2x2 = 4 tons 1x mk2 cockpit (I'll count this even though it fills a reaction wheel, command, and aerodynamic purpose, see how generous I am?): 2 tons (6 total now) 1x inline mk2 docking port: 0.3 tons (6.3 total) 2936 units of LF: 14.68 tons (20.98 tons total) ~1.835 tons of tanks used to hold that fuel. (22.81 tons total) 90 units of monoprop: 0.36 tons (23.17 tons total) *IF* the LV-Ns weren't used in ascent (pretty sure they were though): 2 LV-Ns, 2x3=6 tons Total payload: 29.175 tons

Source? Also, "metastable" is an imprecise term. One of the papers I link to in my linked post speaks of possible metastability of metallic hydrogen on the order of picoseconds. Something that will remain metallic for even 10 seconds after pressure release would be several orders of magnitude more stable than the calculations, but yet would still be several orders of magnitude below what is needed. Given the huge energy difference, with our only example being the diamond-graphite transition (where the phase it would transition to is also stable) with a very low energy difference, I doubt that one can just "push harder" to get it to stay metallic. Paramagnetism is quite weak. O2 is paramagnetic for instance. I doubt this would be enough to contain such a high temperature/pressure fluid. Hmm, I suppose, but then you'd need a pretty beefy energy supply, and it wouldn't be operating like a chemical rocket where fuel and propellant are the same thing. You are right, that would be a problem, but the solution is very simple: Have 1 tank with liquid hydrogen, and 1 tank with metallic hydrogen. Mix and enjoy. Because its still a very interesting substance that dominates the bulk composition of gas giants like Jupiter, and has very interesting properties that depend on quantum stuff, and is needed to test various physics models. But realistically, Star theory is clearly too far along and has focused a lot on these engines... they won't get rid of them now. At this point the most I can hope for is that they do a quick rename of metallic hydrogen to "liquid explodium" or something like that. Plus, since Eve has Explodium seas, you can go there to extract it, but then you need to be able to do an Eve Ascent to make use of the extracted explodium (or make much bigger colonies elsewhere to synthesize explodium). Now that I think about it, I'm liking that idea even more... call it explodium, and have Eve be a good source of it... because... why not, no one will confuse Explodium for actual science.

Mystery Goo is vague, and doesn't have any gameplay effect other than science. You could easily replace it with a geiger counter, or spectrometer, or whatever, and it wouldn't matter. Its a science generating part. Its dry mass on your rocket... its a "kerbal" lulz version of some kind of generic biology experiment I guess. They are also very low profile. I'm fine with that. On the other hand, metallic hydrogen engines aren't just affecting a core gameplay mechanic (spaceflight, thrust, Isp), they are featured very prominently, seem to be intended as a core progression step, and are masquerading as hard-science. Mystery goo does not put on such a charade. Likewise, the chair thing: its not a core gameplay mechanic/progression step (I never do it, I've never heard of players saying they feel like the game pushes them to do that, the dev statements very much show an intent to push players to MH engines though.) Its also taking advantage of something not being simulated, lifesupport. Its not portraying this as realistic. I don't like when something pretends to be realistic when its not. I'd feel much better about this engine if they just called it the "liquid explodium drive", instead of promulgating bad science.

Then its a bad sign when the lead developer refers to "combustion products", would you agree? No, they may vaporize, but not necessarily ionize. http://www.wag.caltech.edu/home/jsu/Thesis/node31.html "In 1912, Langmuir [39] immersed a hot tungsten wire in a hydrogen atmosphere, and found that above 3000 K, heat was carried away from the wire at a rate much higher than would be expected by convection alone. The abnormally high conductivity appears because hydrogen molecules dissociate into atoms at that temperature, absorbing heat which is later released when the atoms recombine. At higher temperatures (10000 K), hydrogen atoms separate into protons and electrons." You need 10,000K to Ionize Hydrogen (turn it into a plasma). If it was a plasma anyway, magnetic nozzles would work and you wouldn't need to appeal to some "doping" for a magnetic nozzle to work. Seems to me that the colors from Oxygen vs Cesium are quite different... the plumes should reflect that When mixing with water, the point is to bring the temperature down just enough that the nozzle doesn't melt. The mixing ratio for mH and H20 would be about 11:1. So you have 11 units of 18 MW mass per unit of mH, your effective MW(same energy distributed over larger mass) is more like 200, and Isp becomes a modest 538 (good thrust though, and still better than chemical Isp). If you instead cooled exhaust with liquid hydrogen, you can get that to around 1,100 Isp) http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php Now if you get rid of the water, and throw in some Cesium... if the hydrogen is not bound to the cesium, how the heck is the cesium going to allow you to contain the hydrogen in the magnetic nozzle... it won't. If the hydrogen is bound to cesium, then your average MW goes way down, worse than what you'd get by just cooling with LH2. This tech makes no sense. If we were to grant metastable mH, then its 2 variants should be water cooled and lH2 cooled. Also, why wouldn't the magnetic nozzle work in the atmosphere? heat transfer by direct convection? Liquid H cooled gets you better Isp and doesn't have that problem. This tech makes no sense, again. It was not metastable. The most recent paper claiming metallic hydrogen also explicitly says " Upon pressure release, the metallic state transforms back to the C2/c-24 phase with almost no hysteresis" And it wasn't even predicted to be since the 1970's, see my post here:

In that case, I would only count the mass of the crew containing compartments, and the excess fuel (unless you have an engine for the ejection burn that was not also used to get to orbit) Consider this SSTO: Should I include the total mass in orbit? I think not. I count only the ore tanks and excess fuel. FWIW, the ore tanks weigh 187 tons, and the excess fuel is 267.9 tons, so call it 455 tons. It also has 44 rapiers (88 tons), and 8 LV-Ns (24 tons), and a significant mass of fuel tanks (easily over 50 tons), factor in gear, wheels, wings, etc. I wouldn't call these things payload. Also, an FYI, that design was my 3x kerbin SSTO, tested on standard kerbin. Here it is taking a payload to orbit over a 3x rescaled Kerbin (1.25x rescaled atmo height) In this scenario, it has much less excess fuel, and the payload is much smaller. Including the mass of the SSTO as payload clearly isn't valid in this case

Not too judge people too much by appearance, but "nerd beard" guys give me the fear of Trekkies and Star Wars nerds who deviate very far from hard-science fiction, into fictional science. They focused a lot on metallic hydrogen, still ignoring that the engine is based on speculation from the 1970s that has been nearly conclusively disproven. Furthermore, they contact an expert, and in the frames of the e-mail I can see the expert is addressing the plume color of metallic hydrogen mixed with water, yet they treat that plume color as applying both to Cesium doped vacuum metallic hydrogen exhaust, and the more conventional H20+mH exhaust. Furthermore, even granting metastable Hydrogen (already a bridge too far for me), I was wondering just how the heck they were going to propose magnetic confinement of something that would have diamagnetic exhaust. Tossing Cesium into the exhaust would allow magnetic manipulation of Cesium, but that's not going to be sufficient to contain the hydrogen. Then they refer to *combustion products* (around 2:35)... what... Cesium doesn't react with Hydrogen as far I I can tell. I guess it might at high temperature, but then we'd have CsH, which would have a terrible atomic mass of 133... Terrible, terrible, terrible molecular weight, good bye Isp... I'd like to see the e-mails between the science adviser and the team, because this sounds like a load of BS to me.

As far as I know, there are no scannable features in the desert... that isn't to say there's nothing to find, but nothing to use the arm on. Unless I am mistaken...

I normally design reusable launch vehicles, but I also have some expendable launch vehicles for small payloads, and once going beyond LKO, quite a lot of the payloads on reusable rockets are "expendable" or "single use".

Heck, if dry mass of the launcher counts too... My standard cargo sstos for 3x kerbin already have dry masses of around 200 tons, and take like 150 tons of real payload

@P_Durham yea, and I'm making a new tilt rotor crew shuttle, with just 1 pair of Servos, and even with no limiting, I can only get 1 to work (still on 1.8.1).

So right now, my planet "Rald" has the scaled space view working correctly, but the terrain is all black when I get close. It was working before the 1.8 update, so I'd like to know what I need to do to change it. My scaled space text looks like: And my PQS section looks like: In what way do I need to change PQS mods to have a ground texture show up again?

Is there any resource explaining how to make use of the new shaders for planets made via mods? I'd love to update Rald to make use of the new shaders

Version numbers don't work like that :p This time, I'm holding off on the KSP update until Kopernicus updates. KSP without Kopernicus is just not my thing anymore.

I don't know what parts of that were a joke, and what wasn't... Do you really think that was some Kraken effect? To me that looks like the eclipse effect from scatterer... that's simply Mun's shadow. Anyway, I continued a save I've had since 1.6, now that Kopernicus has updated, nothing broken, thankfully. I launcher my Duna Dropship that I previously showed on here. It was big, and getting it to orbit on 3x kerbin was a bit of a challenge, but only slight modification of my 2 stage reu-usable spaceplane launcher was required. The orbital stage was completely removed, and the 1st stage "carrier plane" was simply used to loft the dropship which then went to orbit on its own power: Then, I figured I'd take a look at Eve ascent vehicles: Now my standard setting is 3x SMA & planet radius, 1.25x atmosphere height, 1.5x terrain height. I then change some planets (Like duna's atmosphere is scaled to 1.8x to increase its scale height, and lower gravity leads to higher scale heights). When orbital velocity on Kerbin is over 4 km/s, Eve under this system is a b***h to get off of. So previously I lowered its gravity to 1.25 Gs, and increased its atmosphere from 5 atm at sea level to 10 atm at sea level > to make it more venus like. This really kills engine Isp, but thankfully making history came out, and we've got props. The increased sea level pressure with the same atmosphere height also has the effect of decreasing scale height, so when you get to 1 atm, there's less atmosphere above. Alas, I still could not climb high enough to SSTO, and while I had a proof of concept reusable 2 stage launcher for stock eve, I was having no luck in my modified eve. So, I changed parameters again to make Eve vs Kerbin more like Venus vs Earth. Venus' surface gravity is 0.904 G, my new Eve is 0.95 G. Venus' radius is 0.9499x that of Earth's, my new Eve is 0.95x that of Kerbin. Atmosphere stayed at 10 atm, I'm thinking of bumping it up to 20. With these settings, its orbital velocity came way down "just" 3,850 m/s. I was able to SSTO: and just a view of eve with its stat's window open: Although that one is from an attempt where I failed to truly attain orbit (was only able to raise my Pe to 70km), with a modified design with 4 nukes instead of 3, and 2 retractable panels instead of the fixed panels. None of the designs have landing gear (because of a bug with MH missions and rotors), and I think adding them will cost me the 14 m/s I had to spare when I did achieve orbit.

I'm glad that you're improving the solar panels, but I have a (minor, but also in a way major) issue with the solar panels. Basically, if I launch a craft from a Making history launch-site off-kerbin, or cheat into orbit of another planet, the solar panels won't work, or fixed solar panels will need to face the wrong way to produce power (and rotating ones won't rotate to that orientation). I'm also using an outdated version of Sigma-Dimensions, but this problem seems to have been around for a while. On the other hand, it works fine when I'm not cheating/using MH to test things, thus it hasn't affected my career game. Has anyone else experienced this?

We know orion drives are possible. Orion with a thermonuclear weapon is by definition a type of fusion drive... so we know fusion drives are possible. Now ICF drives... seems like it should be possible, but we don't have the tech yet to make them, but we could certainly make Orion drives. We know antimatter drives would work, what we don't know is how to make enough antimatter, and how to store it.

and a hefty amount of speculative physics... Warp drives generally are supposed to be able to allow faster than light travel, even if there is no local FTL. If your warp drive allows you to traverse 1 light year in less than 1 year, it allows for time travel. Yes, and I'm assuming we will get relativistic drives. There's the Orion drive that would allow for a fraction of c IRL, then they already showed some fusion drives, and we may get antimatter drives. I'm certain that interstellar travel will rely on very high ISP torchship designs that get relativistic velocities in KSP 2... we've seen the drives they've shown which suggest speeds >1% c, and they've already said no warp drive/FTL.

I confuse nothing of the sort. http://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2016/8/25/why-ftl-implies-time-travel You simply cannot have FTL without also allowing time travel *unless* you throw relativity out the window... the thing is without relativity, FTL doesn't really mean much, since light speed as a "speed limit" (or rather a causality limit) is inherently tied to relativity. So... in any scenario with FTL, you've also got a way to time travel.

They rely on somewhat speculative physics, and would allow time travel if they worked...

If you check the other thread, I think it was covered. So far adding other metals has decreased the pressure required to form it (also decreases energy stored, an decreases Isp), but it hasn't made it metastable

I addressed this paper months ago (when it was in pre-print): It wasn't even metastable at 415 GPa. It appeared to go metallic at 427 GPa, but when they dropped it to 410 and 415 GPa, it was no longer metallic. There were no intermediate datapoints between reaching 427 GPa, and when they lowered pressure to those lower numbers (the "410 and 415" I give is because they had two figures showing experimental results showing it reverted). So it seems it reverted somewhere between 427 GPa and 415 GPa... If I had to wager, I'd say it was probably non-metallic again at 425 GPa. They literally say the metallic state transforms back to the C2/c-24 phase with almost no hysteresis, so I think any dreams of using it as rocket fuel are dead. Now the only hope is that if you compress it even more, it will form a different state, that is metastable. After all, you can compress water into multiple forms of solid/there are multiple forms of "ice" depending on pressure. Likewise solid carbon can be compressed into solid diamond... I am aware of no case where something that was not stable was made stable by compressing it further... so I still think the dream is dead.