>>14252254>>14252276>>14252302Titan doesn't have enough methane in its atmosphere to support combustion no matter how much oxygen you add, it's too diluted by nitrogen. Luckily it's easy to collect significant masses of methane from the atmosphere with a relatively low powered cryocooler setup, because the atmosphere is so cold already. Chemically powered aircraft on Titan need to carry both their fuel and their oxygen to burn it with, but since jet engines gain their efficiency from using free reaction mass from the air and not simply from avoiding carrying one of the two reactants, high Isp jet propulsion on Titan would still be easily attainable. Also given that Titan has less than 2 m/s^2 of gravity and an atmosphere with a sea level density about 4x greater than Earth's, powered flight is laughably easy, so the increased propellant mass necessary really doesn't matter.
>>14252322This doesn't really matter because Titan's surface is mostly composed of water ice, so there's an unlimited source of feedstock to electrolyse into oxygen globally. Yes this requires energy, but electrically-powered chemical synthesis is a fundamental part of colonizing space anyway so it won't be a big deal by then.
I'll add that colonizing Titan 100% requires nuclear power for everything, solar is not an option except for in high orbits where you can have square kilometers of mirrors focusing sunlight onto massive solar arrays, and even that's not going to net you much power per kilogram invested. Titan's thick and hazy atmosphere also precludes most beamed power options anyway. If we are comfortable enough with space based nuclear power systems to go ahead with actual colonization of Titan in the first place, then we will have relatively high power to mass ratio nuclear reactors, which makes nuclear thermal aircraft an obvious choice on Titan. Nuclear thermal aircraft have been operated on Earth, so on Titan they would be a cakewalk, and they offer ridiculous range.
