Bay 12 Games Forum

Anyways...yeah, investigate the cylinders and their liquid.

1) Parachutes would only work on few places. Since you seem to consider the asteroid belt far enough from the sun to not be worth the effort due to less solar energy, lets exclude from the list all the gas giant moons. That leaves us with Earth ( and obviously we don't need rockets to make a colony there) and Venus. And you really don't want to land anything on Venus, unless you plan to lose it.
Mars has some thin atmosphere, but it is not going to be enough for big stuff.

Somehow, I had not considered that...Point to you.

2)when we speak about docking in the middle, we don't mean "close to the center". we mean IN the center of the station. Distance = 0. sure, it spins. but all you have to do then is spin the ship at the same rate, which is trivial. if ship and station are properly aligned, you don't need any odd trajectory.

...Okay, leaving the ship spinning around relative to the space station...should be workable...Another point to you.

3) Centrifugal is fine for the kind of effect you are seeing. The key is that centrifugal force only exists in the frame of reference of the people on the station. But if we are speaking about artificial gravity, felt by people inside the station and spinning with it... I don't see the point of calling it anything else than centrifugal force.

Now I have no idea if it's centrifugal or centripital!

4) Unlike what you previously stated, steel ( or, rather, iron; steel is an alloy) DOES grow in vacuum ( methaphorically. It is not a plant obviously). many asteroids are rich of iron. And if you don't feel like having a station at the asteroid belt, or moving metals back from there, I am sure Near Earth objects would be happy to provide the needed materials. Not all asteroids are in the asteroid belt.

Rather limited; even if we settled the Asteroid Belt, it's only 4% the mass of the Moon. Total. That means that if you could mine the entire asteroid belt, you'd still have less than 1/20th of the ore you would have from mining the whole Moon--which is easier than mining the whole Belt, because the Moon is all in one place.

5) solar panels are fine, but you would need some huge arrays. At some point, you might decide that you'd rather ferry some uranium ( or deuterium, if you have a fusion reactor) once in a while, rather than building an extra square mile of solar panels. Also, such a secondary power source allows the station to deal better with unexpected icnreases in power needs.
It should also be noted that radioactive materials are also used for X-ray generators for radiography. You might still get some radioactive waste even without using nuclear reactions as a power source.

As a backup or secondary source? Sure. As a primary source? No. Especially if we're planning long-term, which we really really should be.
Point on the X-Ray stuff, though.

Solar is going to be the best power source for a while, unless we can tap geothermal wherever we are (yet another reason not to rely on space stations) or somehow use some massive resource like gas giants to power power plants.

Sure, if we can. See if you can find some nice, complimentary skills.

Quote from: GreatWyrmGold on December 28, 2012, 09:06:55 pm

So...Toady adds in a creature from Dungeons of Dredmor to support cooperation between Bay12 and Gaslamp?

And in what way are plastic bolts in DF?

You follow the link and find out for yourself.

I haven't been able to make plastic bolts in DF, though.

I was planning to work for someone rather than being a clan head.

They're also very expensive.

...I have a +3?

Turn the phone into a time machine of some sort. Travel forward in time to right before Robama solved the fiscal cliff.

Oh god, I can't fail, but I've got a 50% chance of overshooting stuff...