It's a completely non-realistic game. It's lacking of duct tape is inexcusable.

There's not a duct tape mod?

Darth Bubba: "I find your lack of duct tape disturbing."

If only Curiosity were as fast as the KSP rovers... top speed is somewhere around 100 meters/hour, and usually more like 40!

The flip side is that Curiosity has never, to my knowledge, flipped over and tumbled at near-escape-velocity, shedding solar panels and scientific instruments as it goes.

Should have strapped an SRB on the rover.

Reminds me; I wonder just how much ion engines are overpowered in KSP compared to their real-life equivalents. Or, put differently, if one could replicate a hovering Minmus rover I made in KSP (which used ion engines to stay afloat for a long time).

KSP: 4200s Isp, 2000 N thrust

Real life: 2000-20000s Isp, 0.01-2.5 N thrust

KSP's ion engines are hilariously overpowered in terms of thrust (and thrust-to-weight ratio) and power efficiency. It's a necessary change, however, since KSP is ill-suited for transfer burns several months long.

Minmus surface gravity is 0.491 m/s^2; current ion drives thrust with a couple hundred millinewtons, so I don't think a drive could even support itself against that level of gravity let alone with power and a ship attached.

However, we currently design our ion drives for power-to-thrust efficiency and long-term effectiveness. I'm not sure what we could get if we designed them for maximal thrust. Especially since in real life, right now the answer to "Do you want a 'maximal thrust' ion drive?" is pretty much "Well, have you considered using... not an ion drive?", so I'm not sure I've ever seen a treatment of that question based on current tech.

> I'm not sure what we could get if we designed them for maximal thrust.

Probably something with a worse specific impulse than a chemical engine.

The problem is less our ability to make the drives themselves have a high TWR (thrust to weight ratio) so much as that the power generation necessarily required to run them is very heavy. See here:

http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2015/03/rockets-elec...

The VASIMR engine is sort of that - an ion engine designed to be able to increase thrust when needed.

That really is slow. My brain interpreted that as 100 m/s, and then 40 m/s, and I read the sentence a few times trying to figure out if you meant that rovers go that fast in KSP before I figured out it said 100 m/hour.

The KSP subthread makes every space article twice as much fun :)

That's funny. It's taught me that if you make a rocket long enough, no amount of struts will prevent it from wobbling itself completely apart within 60 seconds of blast off.

Struts won't, but turning off automatic stability 'assistance' will!