Water, Mining, Asteroids, and Rockets: "Megasuggestion"

[ChrisPerson]

This post will comprise of multiple, smaller suggestions, but by the end, it'll all be bound into a big, really useful one. I've found nothing that says I can't do this, so on to the suggestions!

1. Nuclear engines [can] use different fuel

This one seems a bit far out there, but let me explain. Nuclear engines use either water for fuel, or oxygen/hydrogen. This simplifies a lot of things later on, but it does have an actual backing anyways. A lot of liquid fuel rockets are quite literally steam rockets. They burn oxygen and hydrogen together, producing thrust, and, as exhaust, water in the form of steam.

As for using water as fuel, there are some real-world ideas out there for rockets that can be effectively powered by water. Granted, these are all nuclear rockets, due to the way these rockets function. In short, the nuclear reactor superheats the propellant (in this case, water) which expands and provides the thrust to power the rocket. So really, this part isn't that far off.

2. Water/metal mining

Yes, the whole mining part has been suggested a lot, and by now reminds most people of the Kethane mod. This isn't like that. When you mine water, it goes directly into the tanks for your rocket, which, if it wants to use the water, needs to be nuclear powered. As for metal mining, it won't be used by the spacecraft for resource gain directly, but I'll come back to it.

3. Asteroid Belt

Again, another one that has probably been suggested a lot, but once again, there's a difference here. Asteroids in the belt would be small, maybe under a kilometer. These asteroids also have large supplies of frozen water (I believe the technical term is ice.) and metal, just waiting to be mined. These asteroids would be found either beyond Jool or between Jool and Duna.

4. Rockets move asteroids

Here's where stuff gets a little crazy. I am, in fact, suggesting the ability to move asteroids using rockets, although at a very slow pace. Let's assume that, since you have rockets, you can stop the rotation of the asteroid, or whatever you need to do. Using a ton of fuel, you can move an asteroid into a very different orbit. Now, how about that fuel? How are you going to get all the fuel you need to do that?

Simple. The fuel is in the asteroid. Seriously. You can mine the water in the asteroid and use it for fuel at the same time. Of course, the process would be long, so you'd need to have some way of "locking" your ship onto the asteroid so you can somehow use time-warp and burn engines at the same time. The entire asteroid+your ship could even be regarded as a single ship, in much the same way that docked ships are.

5. Career Mode Metal Mining

By now you must be wondering, "WHY WOULD I WANT TO DO THIS?! This sounds so tedious/annoying to do!". Well, you're right and wrong at the same time. First, some background info. It's well known that in the upcoming career mode, you'll have to actually pay for your rocket parts (costs are already shown on part information!), you can do R&D, you hire new astronauts, and to pay for it all, you accomplish missions and such. But who wants to do something like fly to Duna for the 18th time to make some extra bucks when there's real money to be made, out in the asteroid belt?

What I suggest is that by using your asteroid-on-a-rocket, you can move it into a new orbit to make it much easier to get to - maybe into an orbit similar to Kerbin's, if not actually in Kerbin orbit - because bigger rockets cost more money, right? Then, you send in your real mining ships. Of course, they're all of your design, so they may mine water, they may not. Point being, these are the metal miners. They mine metal and store the ore in some sort of cargo tank. Then, they fly it back to Kerbin. For every kilogram/ton/whatever of ore you return safely to Kerbin, you get money. As in, a LOT of money, because asteroid metal is expensive, seeing the investment you have to put into it. Of course, there would be a limit on how much you could mine from it, at which point the asteroid might break up or something. Just as long as it's not your infinite cash cow.

Now, in case anybody's thinking, "That sounds way too easy. First day of career mode and you do this, and who cares about flying to the planets anymore when you have an asteroid in orbit giving you all the money you need?". That's why this would have to be quite an investment. Something has to be expensive in there - heck, if you could give somebody 50 dollars to do this and give you the profits, we'd all be millionaires by now. So doing the whole mining-asteroids-for-money thing is quite expensive. Sending the rockets all the way out there, moving the asteroids into a more affordable orbit, it's all really expensive, not to mention the R&D costs required to be able to research how to do this in-game. This also has the side affect of preventing people from skipping all the other objectives that may or may not be in career mode - after all, you've gotta pay for this asteroid mining thing somehow, right?

Anyways, that's all my suggestions for today. Please tell me what you think of them, or how it could be improved.

[Fox62]

This sounds so genius I have a hard time thinking of how I never came up with this. Good job!

[Beeman]

Apparently asteroids are really dense. Especially if they've got metal in them. This was brought up in another topic about asteroids(not by me, I was just a casual onlooker) and apparently a ten meter asteroid would weigh a LOT. It makes sense, too...I mean, if you had ten meters of steel, it'd be extremely heavy

So we'd have to make something pretty extreme to be able to move a kilometer of asteroid about. Not that it'd be impossible, just difficult and expensive.

But anyways, mining and complex resource stuff has been planned by SQUAD. There was even a phenomenal flow chart shown(by them) to illustrate how resources would probably work in the stock game. I guess it was too complicated(but honestly not at all), so I've heard that they gave up on that amazingness. They've even considered leaving complex mining for an expansion pack after the release of KSP1.0 which made everyone very angry for a short while.

Of course, that doesn't mean that they're bad suggestions. I definitely would love to be able to do all sorts of fun mining, setting up processing facilities on celestial bodies and all this fun stuff. It wouldn't even be as complicated as it looked on that flow chart if they just introduced one or two elements in at a time THEN introduced processing parts later on in the tech tree. I mean, they've got idiots like me learning complicated rocket science(though not as complicated as real world science) without having to think about math or numbers at all. It's amazing what you can do with supposedly difficult information if you present it in a simplistic way.

But anyways, we'll just have to wait and see what their new plans are for resources, mining, life support and career mode. They haven't really revealed all that much yet for this stuff. Just a few things here and there(and a lot in the way of R&D 'cause that's the next big feature).

[Outlander4]

Don't want to sound as a moderator, but as one of the previous posters told you (in an ironical form), this has been suggested in some form or the other from the very beginning. From the day KSP went public, I believe. Your suggestions and the way you presented them are good; please consult

[thread]36863[/thread]

[thread]44952[/thread]

before posting any suggestions; and if you'll find anything you might want to add to the list then post a suggestion. If you want to discuss some specific details you'd like to see when those suggestions gets implemented start a discussion thread.

Edited August 19, 2013 by Outlander4

[MRab2]

A 1 kilometre diameter asteroid would weigh in at several dozen MILLION tonnes. The NEO Apophis, which caused some concern a while back is 600m long and roughly half that wide and it's weight estimate is around 26 million tonnes. Good luck trying to move that! I suspect asteroids will be on rails.

[CoriW]

But anyways, mining and complex resource stuff has been planned by SQUAD. There was even a phenomenal flow chart shown(by them) to illustrate how resources would probably work in the stock game. I guess it was too complicated(but honestly not at all), so I've heard that they gave up on that amazingness. They've even considered leaving complex mining for an expansion pack after the release of KSP1.0 which made everyone very angry for a short while.

Whoa wait, hold your horses there... What do you mean "gave up on that amazingness" and "leaving complex mining for an expansion pack after the release of KSP1.0"? This has to be just rumors, I would of heard of this if it was the case. What's your source? I thought they just pushed it back to a later version? (Sorry you've made me worry.)

As for an Asteroid Belt I've heard from a few places now that they're supposedly planning to have one somewhere around where Dres orbit is located.

Here's an unofficial list of all the planned stuff for development. (Planned Features)

[nhnifong]

Whoa wait, hold your horses there... What do you mean "gave up on that amazingness" and "leaving complex mining for an expansion pack after the release of KSP1.0"? This has to be just rumors, I would of heard of this if it was the case. What's your source? I thought they just pushed it back to a later version? (Sorry you've made me worry.)

As for an Asteroid Belt I've heard from a few places now that they're supposedly planning to have one somewhere around where Dres orbit is located.

Here's an unofficial list of all the planned stuff for development. (Planned Features)

Hey I'm dissapointed too, but really, we should consider ourselves lucky that such a talented and dedicated programmers such as Majiir has been working on Kethane. The material extractors are modular now so you can actually use them to extract anything! wanna make that resource char squad produced a reality? just duplicate a couple of kethane drills and change some cfg files! amazing!

In hindsight, I think it was fine that they opted to leave the resource mining to the Kethane plugin, because it's really good.

[CoriW]

Hey I'm dissapointed too, but really, we should consider ourselves lucky that such a talented and dedicated programmers such as Majiir has been working on Kethane. The material extractors are modular now so you can actually use them to extract anything! wanna make that resource char squad produced a reality? just duplicate a couple of kethane drills and change some cfg files! amazing!

In hindsight, I think it was fine that they opted to leave the resource mining to the Kethane plugin, because it's really good.

Indeed, I already actually use Kethane. But I never actually heard that they dropped resources, I thought they just pushed it back to a later date? I mean don't get me wrong I'm not calling anyone a liar or anything I'm just curious where it was announced that it was being completely dropped from the base game?

[Beeman]

I didn't say they dropped resouces, we're still going to get them. But the flow chart I was talking about was amazing, it had like eight resources and they all did different stuff and it was just this awesome-looking(though intimidating at first) flow chart.

What I said was they seem(as in, I've just heard people talking about it) to have given up on that complexity. Thus, the resources and/or mining we'll see in KSP1.0 will probably be...like two or three resources instead of like five to eight resources.

I mean, I"ll be happy to have any mining and resources in the game, but I'd have preferred the awesome flow chart they showed. It wouldn't even have been that complicated or confusing if they'd introduced one or two resources at a time THEN introduced drilling and processing >_>