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The Minmus Thread.


Rage097

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Minmus is made of fantasy and gameplay considerations.

They aren't frozen lakes- its the same distance from the sun as Kerbin and Mun, the only place you could have ice is the poles, if there was a spot shielded from sunlight, there's not (minmus has no craters). Any ice on the surface would have sublimated away long ago.

They aren't salt-flats like on Earth, because those are formed from evaporating lakes. Minmus would not hold on to an atmosphere for long after formation at all. There'd be no time for lakes to flatten terrain like that and leave nearly perfectly flat terrain. 

Minmus has no craters! if we found this in real life, we'd say it means the surface is "young" and recently formed by continual activity (like Europa's crust, for example, or the nitrogen flows on Pluto). There's no plausible mechanism for this (especially given how far out it is, itsnot going to have a lot of tidal heating, and that wouldn't explain the formation of crater free mountain ranges and plateaus)

Then we also have to wonder... how did it even form? If Mun in an analogue for our moon, then it likely formed from a "giant impact" scenario too. This would not explain Minmus, which is much farther out and seems to be of a very weird composition.

 

There is simply no way to explain minmus that would stand up to scrutiny.

Its there for gameplay, as an easy destination to reach without worrying about transfer windows, easy terrain to land on with the benefit of low gravity.

 

 

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9 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

They aren't frozen lakes- its the same distance from the sun as Kerbin and Mun, the only place you could have ice is the poles, if there was a spot shielded from sunlight, there's not (minmus has no craters). Any ice on the surface would have sublimated away long ago.

There was a period of time called Snowball Earth. In this time period Earth was almost completely covered in ice. This lasted about 450 million years. How? Because ice reflects sunlight. Distance from the sun doesn't equal to temperature.

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