/sci/ - Science & Math

>>14887988
Can confirm, used to live in the Valley of the Sun. You already have most of the Martian problems:
>massive temperature control needed to preserve human life
>expensive systems needed for water recycling/ISRU
>local ground is bare red rock or marginal for growing food
>these combine to make agriculture almost totally artificial
>depending on solar power seems to work at first glance but leaves you at the mercy of monstrous dust storms unless you quadruple-overprovision and make heavy use of battery storage

The only things better than Mars are the gravity and air.

Why are solar panels so inefficient and gay? If you doubled their kg/kW you could do so many cool solar electric designs, all the way out to Mars. Imagine this fucker with twice the thrust and the same mass of panels.

>>12261401
>some sort of ferry
How large are we talking about here? For a small crew mover I'd do something like pic related with CO2 HDLTs instead of Xenon thrusters. For something bigger, I'd use Pratt&Whitney's Triton trimodal design, fed with methane instead of LH2, and paired with HDLTs instead of ion thrusters.
>LANTR
>NTR
>electric power Brayton cycle

>>12243462
I really like the Deep Space Transport option if they could just replace the xenon-propellant ion thrusters with something capable of being refueled via Martian ISRU. It seems much more reusable.

Deep Space Transport edition

previous: >>12221661

>>12210264
Nautilus is designed to sit at the EML2 and used its plasma engines to get to high mars orbit (probably around Deimos). From there, you’d use a regular chemical rocket to ferry down to LMO. Once you reach the nautilus again (still orbiting Deimos), you power up your electric engines and fly back to the EML2.

Pic related is a more “modern” version of the nautilus. It takes 20 tons of chemical fuel (MMH+NTO) and 20 tons of Xenon to go from the EML2/DRO/NRHO to high mars orbit and back.