Imagining a Kerbal Future: What Would the Future of Kerbals Look Like? (Chapter XLIII: Epilogue)

[Kosmonaut]

1 hour ago, SaturnianBlue said:

you did get the Isp thing mixed up in the engine section

rip

1 hour ago, SaturnianBlue said:

Nice report! The effort really shows

1 hour ago, SaturnianBlue said:

I quite enjoyed the crew member files. 

thanks!

[SaturnianBlue]

Sorry about the lack of progress with the next chapter—school work made me a bit busy this week.

I'm currently testing a variant of the passenger ship with the VISTA engine, to see if it performs better. After that, I will test the ship by sending out to different planets, other applications for the ship, so on. 

Once complete, I will give the ship a proper thread of it's own for downloading.

[SaturnianBlue]

I am finally back with the second part of the Ship Design chapter! This time, we improve the ship design.

The Ship Design Process II

As it turns out, the ship we left in part one doesn’t actually work in KSP—the “shadow shield” part blocks the flow of propellant from the tanks into the reactor. However, the annular truss segment from NFT has two nodes to place parts, so I just move the MHD generator to one node, and the shield to another, while sticking the reactor to the generator. That fixes our problems, and we can actually commence testing.

I also enlarge the arcjets, since I realized they would be way too small to be useful. I also mount four dual-nozzle thrusters for forward and backward motion, as well as a few more fuel tanks of hydrogen gas for the thrusters.

A close-up of one of the arc jet mounts

Our spaceliner has been commissioned in orbit of Kerbin, at Kerbostationary orbit. Using resources brought from Kerbin via space elevator, and from the Mun via mass driver, the ship has been constructed at an orbital space station. After a light push from the arcjets to distance the vessel from nearby ships, the fusion engine is ready.

The target is Duna. With this design, it is hoped that the higher Isp will result in a quicker arrival time, despite the low thrust. The fusion engine is ignited, and the radiators heat up. The engine is run in the high-thrust configuration in order to depart Kerbin. 491 kilonewtons of thrust accelerate the 5,700 ton vessel at 0.09 m/s2.

After leaving Kerbin, the engine thrust is lowered to 118 kilonewtons to increase the Isp to 51,000. Unfortunately, the acceleration of the ship proves to not be enough—it misses Duna and crosses the orbit in 70 days with plenty of fuel left, and this was without trying to slow down! This isn’t particularly impressive, and while I could increase the thrust, this would just make the VISTA objectively better with an even higher thrust for higher Isp. For now I choose to increase the size of the reactor even more, closer to the proportion the test ship from the Fusion Propulsion chapter had, approximately 1/10th of the ship’s mass. This means that the radiators and the shadow shield has to be even larger. Additionally, I enlarged the nozzle size—this was the main problem relating to low thrust.

I was fairly convinced that this would be the end of my troubles. Alas, this was not to be, as the reactor would die within seconds of the main engine activating. For some reason, the charged particle count would drop to zero, and I’m not exactly sure why. The solution seems to be swapping out the MHD for a charged particle electric generator part, for whatever reason. There also seems to be an issue with the ship spontaneously exploding in spectacular fashion on the launch pad, though this issue appears intermittently. Finally, the ship was good to go, and produced much higher thrust with a gigantic 15 meter wide reactor. The target for this test run is Jool, which is thankfully located in a rather convenient position, with the terminus at one of the great orbital habitats of Tylo, home to many thousands of residents and visitors.

Note the enlarged magnetic nozzle

This time, the vessel accelerates out of Kerbin’s gravity with no issue, with an Isp of 51,000 and a thrust of 870 kilonewtons. I continue to accelerate the ship towards Jool, until a little past the midpoint, where the vessel is flipped to begin the deceleration. Why did I not do a flip and burn at the midpoint? I was accounting for the consumption of the liquid hydrogen propellant—as the ship spent fuel, the acceleration would increase, so the same amount of burn time would be more effective. At the flip point, the ship reached a top speed of 117 kilometers per second.

61 days after departing Kerbin, the vessel arrives at Jool. I set up the trajectory in a way that allowed the ship to reach Tylo on the first pass, especially since the acceleration of the ship at full thrust would easily allow this. A few hours after the Joolian periapsis, the ship arrives in orbit around Tylo, with a rather significant margin of fuel left. With a more effective commander, I believe that an arrival in 55 days is possible in the same circumstances.

Inertial Confinement Fusion Version

In the previous chapter, I dismissed the D-T VISTA engine as being less effective, with the lower exhaust velocity and high neutron radiation, but the high thrust of the engine would mean that the acceleration burns could be done quicker, which would be better for nearby planets, where much of the traffic would be.

The shape of the engine is supposed to protect from the radiation, so I make a smaller shadow shield reserved for the reactor, which is used primarily to power the lasers on the fusion drive.

I first conduct a test without the shadow shield, since I occasionally misplace it, and it blocks the propellant flow. Of course, this would be a bad idea in real-life, but ignoring that, I fire up the engine. It accelerates magnificently, with even the low end doing so at 1.57m/s2, and the  low end at about three times that. Examining the Kerbal engineer display, I realize an issue—after raising the Isp to a certain point, the delta-V doesn’t improve! The issue? A lack of deuterium and tritium tanks for the fusion reaction itself to take place—the amount of deuterium and tritium doesn’t change, but the amount of hydrogen propellant does, and so proportionally, more of the fusion fuel is used, and so at a certain point, all of it is used up.

The solution? Just add more deuterium and tritium.

    After checking out all systems onboard, and retreating from the spaceport, the once-a-day transfer window to Jool is here. The spacecraft, powered by a powerful inertial confinement fusion rocket, is ready. 175 km/s of delta-V is available, with a total burn time of 3 days and 4.5 hours. The departure burn will use 80 km/s of that, in order to leave a significant margin for emergencies, inefficiencies, and in-system maneuvering.

Perhaps the interior of the ship is temporarily converted to a configuration more like a space elevator or a Kerbin-Mun ferry, with seats arranged for gravity.

    Though the fact that there is no on-rails acceleration time warp for the VISTA is quite annoying, I manage to cope with it, and after shooting out of the Kerbin system in mere hours, the departure burn ends with a predicted arrival at Jool in a mere 35 or so days.

You sure that isn't made of 2 km sized blocks?

    After a short, but comfortable journey, the spin gravity is disabled as the fusion engine is reactivated. Once again, operations go rather smoothly, until I realize that the periapsis of the ship would probably be well within the radiation belts! Presumably the radiation shielding is not thick enough to withstand this in order to save mass, so I revert to an earlier point in the burn.

I enter a retrograde orbit around Jool, but this is fine, because the delta-V reserved on the ship are more than enough to handle this. The orbit is actually beneficial, because it allows us to reach Tylo much faster than playing catch-up with orbits would’ve been. The result? An arrival in Tylo orbit a mere 35 days after that very same ship departed from Kerbin. Clearly, this version of the fusion rocket is better.

Kerbin-Duna Run

    I used Jool because I have in past tests, and it serves as a mid-point between the distant outer planets and the closer inner planets. Though many would be attracted to the Joolian system by Laythe, it is not the only major interplanetary target. That would be Duna, much closer than Jool ever gets. Though transfer windows are fairly rare, this matters not to a rocket with this much delta-V. That said, Duna is also in a fairly decent position as well.

    After two days of orbiting Kerbin (the first day, I wasn’t in the right place to start with, and the second day I missed the launch opportunity because I time warped a bit too much), the Duna vessel is ready. The vessel achieves a velocity of 90 km/s after the burn, which lasted over two Kerbin days. Only five days would pass before the vessel would be flipped for a deceleration burn.

The burn goes according to plan, and the vessel speeds into orbit only 9 days and 4 hours after the initial burn was started. In fact, there were times during the deceleration burn that I had to cut the engines because I was decelerating quicker than I thought I would, so this could probably be cut by a few hours.

Flying this vessel, I realized that due to the shorter flight time on the Duna run, there was very little need for a centrifuge, and the vessel would be burning and therefore providing gravity for a significant percentage of the flight time. The ship capacity could probably be doubled—the flight time isn’t actually much longer than flying on a low delta-V trajectory to Minmus is. If put into service, we might see two versions of the ship, with one suited for shorter trips, and one for longer trips. These could be interchangeable, in order to adapt the ships according to shifting demands.

It also occurs to me that on all flights, the VISTA is not running for a significant portion of the flight, freeing up a lot of electricity. The reactor could be utilized for beaming power, whether it be to nearby ships or even to some small space stations scattered across the Kerbol system. This may be handy during emergencies on other ships, in the case that their source of power generation is lost. It could also be used purely for money-making purposes as well.

Conclusion

While I cannot be certain of how economical this ship is, it is certainly an excellent, high performance craft. Looking back at the goals, this ship does extremely well—we exceeded the goal of reaching Jool in 75 days by such a wide margin, that ½ of the fuel could probably be removed, and the ship could still achieve that. The vessels definitely have enough thrust to operate inside planetary systems—from a performance basis, they would even make travel in the systems very fast, though admittedly it isn’t too cost effective.

Most certainly can it carry 1000 passengers. Whether the use of particularly expensive materials applies to our ship may be rather subjective—highly expensive tritium was used in the reactor, which will require constant refuelling at the each end of a run, since it is radioactive. The ship probably can be set up for freight—the long truss section provides plenty of space to put cargo.

One last thing—I forgot to name it! I had called it an “Interplanetary Spaceliner” but perhaps a catchier name is required. How about the “Uncatchable Swift”?

Thanks for Reading!

Next: TBD

 

Edited September 26, 2017 by SaturnianBlue

[MatterBeam]

I will introduce you to the wonders of 'optimal exhaust velocity': http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/engines.php#id--Delta-V--Delta-V_Implications and to TRANSIT TIME given distance and desired acceleration: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/torchships.php#id--Constant_Acceleration_Equations.

You want Jool in 75 days? That's 51.7 billion meters in 6480000 seconds. 

Travel time = 2 * (Distance/ Acceleration)^0.5
6480000 = 2 * (51.7e9/ Acceleration)^0.5
Acceleration = 51.7e9/(6480000/2)^2/= 4.9mm/s^2
Acceleration = (4 * Distance) / (Travel Time ^2)

The minimum acceleration required for your Jool mission is 4.9 millimeters per second squared, which is equivalent to half a milligee. The deltaV expended during this Brachistochrone transit is 31.7km/s. The optimal exhaust velocity is therefore 22.8km/s for a mass ratio 4 rocket. If you want tiny propellant tanks that represent only 20% of the spaceship's mass, so mass ratio 1.25, the the optimal exhaust velocity is 31.7*(1/ln(1.25)): 142km/s.

Higher exhaust velocities are wasted. Lower mass ratio gives pitiful practical savings in propellant mass, the cheapest part of a spaceship, while multiplying exponentially the power output of the engines required, the most expensive part of a spaceship. Finally, halving the transit time quadruples the acceleration required.

Taking all these into account, high Isp fusion rockets for the tiny distances in the stock Kerbal system are pretty pointless. You want a powerful reactor not to create enough thrust out of engines with Isps of tens of thousands of seconds, but to push massive payloads at the optimal exhaust velocity. Or, for very small transit times.

Say I want to reach Jool in an week. 7 days: 604800
Acceleration = (4* 51.7e9)/(604800^2) = 0.56m/s^2
Total deltaV = 0.56 * 604800 = 341.9km/s. 
Optimal exhaust velocity for mass ratio 2 = 493km/s.
If the vessel's dry mass is 1000 tons, its wet mass will be 2000 tons. Average mass is 1500 tons. 
Using 50% reactor to engines efficiency, I'll need a fusion rocket capable of 414GW. 

That's how you design a spaceship torchship!

[NotAgain]

17 hours ago, SaturnianBlue said:

How about the “Uncatchable Swift”?

I like it.

[SaturnianBlue]

5 hours ago, MatterBeam said:

I will introduce you to the wonders of 'optimal exhaust velocity': http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/engines.php#id--Delta-V--Delta-V_Implications and to TRANSIT TIME given distance and desired acceleration: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/torchships.php#id--Constant_Acceleration_Equations.

You want Jool in 75 days? That's 51.7 billion meters in 6480000 seconds. 

Travel time = 2 * (Distance/ Acceleration)^0.5
6480000 = 2 * (51.7e9/ Acceleration)^0.5
Acceleration = 51.7e9/(6480000/2)^2/= 4.9mm/s^2
Acceleration = (4 * Distance) / (Travel Time ^2)

The minimum acceleration required for your Jool mission is 4.9 millimeters per second squared, which is equivalent to half a milligee. The deltaV expended during this Brachistochrone transit is 31.7km/s. The optimal exhaust velocity is therefore 22.8km/s for a mass ratio 4 rocket. If you want tiny propellant tanks that represent only 20% of the spaceship's mass, so mass ratio 1.25, the the optimal exhaust velocity is 31.7*(1/ln(1.25)): 142km/s.

Higher exhaust velocities are wasted. Lower mass ratio gives pitiful practical savings in propellant mass, the cheapest part of a spaceship, while multiplying exponentially the power output of the engines required, the most expensive part of a spaceship. Finally, halving the transit time quadruples the acceleration required.

Taking all these into account, high Isp fusion rockets for the tiny distances in the stock Kerbal system are pretty pointless. You want a powerful reactor not to create enough thrust out of engines with Isps of tens of thousands of seconds, but to push massive payloads at the optimal exhaust velocity. Or, for very small transit times.

Say I want to reach Jool in an week. 7 days: 604800
Acceleration = (4* 51.7e9)/(604800^2) = 0.56m/s^2
Total deltaV = 0.56 * 604800 = 341.9km/s. 
Optimal exhaust velocity for mass ratio 2 = 493km/s.
If the vessel's dry mass is 1000 tons, its wet mass will be 2000 tons. Average mass is 1500 tons. 
Using 50% reactor to engines efficiency, I'll need a fusion rocket capable of 414GW. 

That's how you design a spaceship torchship!

The mass ratio on my own ship is rather low, so following this, I could probably get away with using the VISTA on the lowest setting if I bumped up the mass ratio to around 2.

[SaturnianBlue]

For the next chapter, I will be covering the ways the Kerbal future could be depicted, whether it be by writing, doing it in-game, or drawing. I'll also get the craft file for the Uncatchable Swift released in the next few days, and see for yourselves the capabilities of the vessel.

[Pipcard]

That has got to be most epic ship I have ever seen in KSP with those 50-kerbal apartment complexes from the Civilian Population mod.

Edited September 28, 2017 by Pipcard

[SaturnianBlue]

Depicting the Future In KSP

You’ve got a great idea for a story in KSP, but you aren’t quite sure how you would depict it. Hopefully, this chapter will help you. I’ll assess the benefits and negatives of each method, and try using this very method for an example. This is of course my opinion, and isn’t necessarily true—it’s best to find what works best for each story or chapter.

Write it!

    The simplest option—write the story, purely textual. Often times it simply isn’t worth making everything in the story in KSP, especially if it isn’t going to be used much. It doesn’t require footage from KSP to be a KSP story, after all. Especially in a futuristic setting, like the ones I cover, this is quite helpful, since vast space colonies will probably make an appearance.

    However, I must argue that it’s not the most eye-catching to see a wall of text. I will admit, I’m rather quickly attracted to pictures.

Examples

1.

    “From the view of the plane, Duna-Equatorial sprawled below. Several massive domes, each spanning a kilometer or so, were placed around one transparent dome, revealing a few dozen towers crammed inside. Pools of blue-tinted green crowded together—algae ponds, supplying the city with food. The surrounding domes—some complete, others mere scaffolding—were mostly covered—there was hardly a need for a transparent dome when digital screens could provide a view just the same.

    Dark, thin lines spread across the Dunan red—trains, which could no doubt travel across the deserts in mere minutes. A thin line elevated itself on an incline to space—the mass driver, with a massive processing station at a terminal at the far end of the city. Another one shot itself vertically into the air—as an equatorial location, the location was an ideal place to not only build a mass driver, but more especially a space elevator, which extended all the way to the orbit of Ike.

    As the plane drew ever closer to the city, smaller profiles became visible—tanks and long tubular structures. Though the tanks were still in use, the tubes were not. They were the remains of the first generation of settlement here, where there was a need to utilize the surrounding regolith for radiation shielding.

The nuclear-powered machine pitched towards the runway—at the end, a giant descending ramp, leading to a protected underground terminal, which applied just the same to vertical launch systems as well.”
2.

    “The command ship’s Combat Information Center—the brains of the ship—was located at the center of the light command ship, where quick maneuvers would exert fairly little force on the dozen or so people there, which was most of the ship’s crew complement, always shrinking due to the advancements in automation.

    The wall was a dark, metallic color, yet brightly lit on the various corners. At the center of the room, which was perhaps 10 meters wide, two comfortable flight chairs in the center—one for the captain, one for the fleet commander. The outer rim of the room had more stations, for the various other operations of the ship. All of them were equipped with a desk and a display, though only a few were actually on, since most of the crew preferred to use the AR. The notable exception was a large holographic sphere, showing the ship and the surrounding vessels.”

Admittedly, this isn’t a perfect example—an actual story would probably involve some more dialogue, and would probably not bother with listing everything.

In-game

    Taking screenshots in-game allows you to play with various camera angles, mods, and more. Once you have a set of sorts, you can move the camera to any angle you desire, presenting great flexibility. This works out well for props like meeting rooms or the bridge of a spaceship, and especially for the flying of actual ships, since that is what KSP does best. The pictures can also be edited for a few effects.

    The disadvantage is that KSP and various mods can only go so far, and so there will be some certain objects where an alternative must be sought instead. An example of this might be Kerbpaint, which allowed me to make rather colorful rooms in the Asteroid Sentinels, but it hasn’t been updated since at least 1.0.5 for OSX. However, the biggest disadvantage would have to be how time-consuming it can be, which is especially true of the Asteroid Sentinels, which was a graphic novel, so I needed images all the time.

    My example of this method is the Combat Information Center. For the construction of the “set”, I used a fair few mods—the most important is tweakscale, which makes detailing things at a “kerbal” scale much easier, since the parts can be shrunk down.

    I found a valuable mod while constructing the set, DCK. Most stock parts can have their texture switched. This is how I was able to obtain the dark color of the structural panels.

    Finally, I used a variety of parts, from various mods with “cool” parts, especially the DMagic science mod, and the KSP Interstellar spherical receiver, to approximate a “holographic sphere”.

The CIC in the VAB.

    Building the room probably took a couple of hours, but if the story follows the crew of that warship, and if the room is featured frequently in the story, this is very much worth it. However, for a thing that will only feature briefly, the same cannot be said. A much more efficient course of action is to write the passage instead, especially if creating a decent set will take especially long.

The CIC as seen in-flight.

    Models

    One way to depict especially large structures is to build small-scale versions of them. This is helpful when there are certain parts that cannot be used in the option that will be covered next, welding and rescaling. Models also tend to be far more reliable than building a full scale representation, whether they be welded or not, since most scale models will probably have fairly low part counts and not utilize welding, the opposite of what can result in inconvenient issues like explosions, craft ripping themselves to shreds, or basically things that will need cheats to solve, if not redesigning.

    Models are obviously best used for large things, but more specifically things in orbit, since it is much harder to get a sense of scale without hills and mountains. Models are therefore a good option for building giant space stations.

A model of an O'Neill Cylinder, if a large one.

    However, I will choose to depict the Duna city as the main subject of this section, since we’ve already “seen” it in writing. Utilizing some parts from Civilian Population and tweakscaling some parts, I manage to make the central transparent dome, complete with skyscrapers… Well, not complete—half-complete, since in this example I only added buildings where I deemed them necessary to have—a model that would be reused should probably be complete.

    I was able to utilize the DCK mod to substitute Kerbpaint for some functions, such as giving the domes some color. As for the other emplacements, they were fairly basic. In the end, the result was fairly convincing, though the clouds look out of place. Additionally, flying a plane like was described in the text would be… Awkward to say the least, since the plane would probably be even bigger than the model parts.

   Welding and Rescaling

        A more specific method of depicting the world may be to utilize the welding mod, which can be seen in the many videos SW_Dennis posts, like the Star Destroyer. Especially for colossal, “static” objects like space stations and bases, welding allows objects to be built at real scales. Apparently, the loading limits don’t seem to affect giant constructions, so if you manage to build a real-size space elevator, you shouldn’t have any problems with only parts of it loading. However, the welding function can often be rather messy with certain parts, which are not recommended. It also makes sharing ships a little difficult, since I assume one must have access to the welded parts.

    It doesn’t make much sense to weld smaller scale things like the CIC seen earlier, unless you are looking mainly to reduce part count and therefore game performance. Rather, the Duna city is a perfect task for welding.

    Before that though, I mess around a bit and see if I can go big—very big. A perfect example—an O’Neill Cylinder. While the individual components of the city are perhaps just over a kilometer in diameter, the cylinder is on the scale of a couple dozen—32 kilometers in length, to be precise. I take the model of the cylinder seen above, and hope that the welding will not seriously disfigure the cylinder. The result went surprisingly well—at least in terms of appearance, the cylinder was completely intact!

    So suddenly, an enormous structure materializes above the Kerbal Space Center. Stretching nearly half-way through the atmosphere, it… Begins to spin, at the kind of rate that would surely tear apart the cylinder, or at least create an unnecessary amount of spin gravity. Regardless, the O’Neill Cylinder is teleported to Gilly.

    And that, everyone, is not a clever camera trick—the cylinder is almost as big as Gilly! Conclusion? Yes, you can make things absolutely enormous with welding!

    How do you do it though? First, you copy

MODULE
{
 name = TweakScale
 type = free
}

and put it at the end of the part file. This will allow you to change the size of the part if you want to.

Second, you find a bit in the beginning that says “rescale factor”. This is what will use to make the actual part much bigger or smaller, depending on the number you choose. You can also increase the range of tweakscalibility, which was what I did for low part count models.

    For the Duna city, I took the models from earlier and took them through the process of rescaling them. The models survived mostly intact, though DCK stops working and the transparent dome was “covered” in a sense.

    Unfortunately, when I load the vessels, they tend to explode. To resolve this, I turned on no maximum temperature, unbreakable joints, and no crash damage, and even then, there would still be the occasional explosion, or ship shooting into interplanetary space at a significant fraction of light speed.

    After much struggle, I was able to put it all together. A particularly annoying part was the runway, which tended to spin erratically when the vessel mover “place vessel” option was clicked, before the part settled down in some unsatisfactory position.

You can also configure tweakscale to allow for a higher range of scaling, which is what I did for some of the simpler domes.

    Mod It!

        For anyone with significant modding experience (not myself), this option gives you more choice. An example of this when applied to the Duna city might be to make your own model of the city, and utilize them through Kerbal Konstructs to place the city wherever you’d like on Duna, without any concerns of the city mysteriously exploding and such. In subsequent chapters, you'll find that I later managed to utilize this technique to place a city on Eve, using assets included in Kerbinside.

Draw It!

    Another option is to draw the scenes. This could be combined with a screenshot from the game, or be completely original. This allows you to depict the scene you’d want to exactly how you thought of it. Once again, the main disadvantage with this is the time needed, and perhaps the skill required. You must also redraw the scene for a different shot (though 3D models would remove much of this issue).

    Drawing was the technique I used for much of the colonization series, including the drawing of the Duna city. That wasn’t a completely original drawing—the surface and sky are from a screenshot. However, the city buildings were.

    The next example of a drawing is of the CIC. In this example, I’ve only added a few accessories—the holographic sphere that was mentioned in the written version, and a few activated displays. I would probably have the kerbals with headsets for displays, but in this shot, none of them are facing the camera.

That about wraps it up—if you’ve got any other ideas for depicting things in a story, let me know, and I’ll add that section.

Thanks for Reading!

Next: TBD

Edited July 27, 2018 by SaturnianBlue

[Kosmonaut]

nice

[SaturnianBlue]

The next topic is: The Dynamics of Power in the Kerbol System. Or to put it another way, discussing the politics, trade, and economics or the solar system while avoiding a violation of the rules. While I do have quite a few ideas for other topics, such as terraforming, the anomalies, and a big series on space warfare, I have few reasons for why I don't want to do them yet. I could do terraforming, but I'd like to read Green Mars a little before doing that. For the second, I'm not sure what to do exactly with it, and the last is pretty restricted by my KSP not being able to use the exact mods I need.

[Kosmonaut]

The Expanse

[SaturnianBlue]

What may be some valid points for colonizing space?

[MatterBeam]

10 hours ago, SaturnianBlue said:

What may be some valid points for colonizing space?

Who are you asking? 
It is such a vast topic with no clear answers, with the majority of 'solutions' based mostly on how much you believe they are realizable. 
 

[Kosmonaut]

Helium-3 from the mün

[Pipcard]

Sera-Fim (or Serafim) is an alternate history map maker from Russia. This kind of map depicting various space colonies can be an inspiration if your headcanon is that Kerbin is and will be divided into various competing nation-states (or at least, competing space agencies). (yes, I know roleplaying is not allowed on this forum; let's also not get into a flame war over current and/or hypothetical political ideologies)

Edited October 18, 2017 by Pipcard

[SaturnianBlue]

8 hours ago, MatterBeam said:

Who are you asking? 
It is such a vast topic with no clear answers, with the majority of 'solutions' based mostly on how much you believe they are realizable. 
 

True—I should've put a bit more thought into that statement. That said, I'm curious about as to what you think is the answer.

[MatterBeam]

1 hour ago, SaturnianBlue said:

True—I should've put a bit more thought into that statement. That said, I'm curious about as to what you think is the answer.

I'm a bit of a pessimist in this regard. I think the 'answer' is time. Eventually we'll start start suffocating for new resources and openings for our increasingly educated population. Eventually technology will advance so that high energy propulsion becomes available, even if it was not the primary direction of research. Eventually... we'll reach a position where moving off-world is more a question of 'why not' and we'll think of it as no different than being asked to take a job in another country. 

[Kosmonaut]

@Pipcard that's pretty cool

Kinda inaccurate when it comes to Canada, as if there was to be an Inuit secession, it would include the Yukon and the other half of the Northwest Territories, not just Nunavut. Our relations with the Indigenous people here needs quite a bit of work, but I have hope for the future and I don't think that the Inuit population would be dissatisfied enough to leave. Also, the age of Quebecois dissatisfaction is pretty much over, and even if they were to leave, they wouldn't take Newfoundland and Labrador with them. Even if they did leave, they would pretty quickly want to come back, as Quebec would not be able to be self-sufficient. As a province, once it was stolen from the indigenous peoples colonized, it was either reliant on France, or when France traded it to England for some tiny island in the Caribbean (Guadeloupe), reliant on England, or after 1867, and more so after 1913 and then 1967, confederation and then or distancing ourselves from Great Britain. Even with the fishing from Newfoundland and Labrador, it wouldn't be able to support itself. The same goes for the aforementioned Inuit State. The Subarctic and the Arctic are pretty barren. It was only able to support its Inuit residents when they lived in tiny settlements, nomadic and 100 people at most. When the Europeans brought their lifestyle, the arctic became reliant on mostly Ontario and Quebec (Upper and Lower Canada and previously British North America and French North America back then) and the prairies (previously the Red River Settlement) and BC for resources.

Anyway, that's my off-topic rambling about Canadian History. Pretty cool maps. 

EDIT: Nova Scotia becomes a country too? Hmmmm... that might actually work

Edited October 20, 2017 by Kosmonaut

[Pipcard]

Here are two other maps (they take place in a different universe, unrelated to the previous map) by Sera-Fim for

Mercury with several space habitats and an antimatter production facility in the L1 Lagrange point (ULA in this case is the "United Lunar Agency")

and Venus with even more space habitats as well as clusters of floating cities in the atmosphere

Edited October 19, 2017 by Pipcard

[SaturnianBlue]

Well, it has been a while since I've posted here. School has kept me a bit busy, and to top it off, my Macbook Pro experiences some graphical glitches when booting up KSP, before shutting down. However, I have finished writing the chapter.

[SaturnianBlue]

My laptop still seems to be undergoing trouble. So while I wait to get a chance to fix the issue, I decided I would spend a bit of time on the chapters after. Those chapters will explore how the motivations and the environment of the various location in the Kerbin system affect the future of the Kerbol system—specifically in the factors of trade, politics, society, demographics, business, millitary, and infrastructure. I'd like to take suggestions for how I should organize the chapters. For example, should I go through each category one by one, or should I instead go world by world, or a completely different way?

[JK_Kerbineer]

10 minutes ago, SaturnianBlue said:

My laptop still seems to be undergoing trouble. So while I wait to get a chance to fix the issue, I decided I would spend a bit of time on the chapters after. Those chapters will explore how the motivations and the environment of the various location in the Kerbin system affect the future of the Kerbol system—specifically in the factors of trade, politics, society, demographics, business, millitary, and infrastructure. I'd like to take suggestions for how I should organize the chapters. For example, should I go through each category one by one, or should I instead go world by world, or a completely different way?

Probably by planet.

[MatterBeam]

50 minutes ago, SaturnianBlue said:

My laptop still seems to be undergoing trouble. So while I wait to get a chance to fix the issue, I decided I would spend a bit of time on the chapters after. Those chapters will explore how the motivations and the environment of the various location in the Kerbin system affect the future of the Kerbol system—specifically in the factors of trade, politics, society, demographics, business, millitary, and infrastructure. I'd like to take suggestions for how I should organize the chapters. For example, should I go through each category one by one, or should I instead go world by world, or a completely different way?

What is the issue?

Instead of dividing the topics or going planet by planet, why not just tell us history of Kerbal expansion through the solar system? It would give you a natural progression to structure exposition and you won't necessarily have to have everything from A-Z ready and prepared before you start. 

[SaturnianBlue]

21 minutes ago, MatterBeam said:

What is the issue?

Instead of dividing the topics or going planet by planet, why not just tell us history of Kerbal expansion through the solar system? It would give you a natural progression to structure exposition and you won't necessarily have to have everything from A-Z ready and prepared before you start. 

The Macbook Pro I happen to own tends to make a very loud sound, accompanied with temporary "greenish-glitchy" screen, with the computer freezing, before crashing completely.

I want to try and avoid promoting a certain viewpoint of a Kerbal history, since there would probably be quite a few assumptions to make.