SuperBigD60

stripes for the flag

I meant to watch a particular launch from IVA, but instead of IVA, I hit EVA, and my poor kerbal never made it into space, even though his rocket did. That may have been fatal, but considering I've had kerbals land from interplanetary trajectories and survive, I just followed the ship and assumed he'd survive. I didn't care enough to make sure, though. It was super funny to watch, and I actually think I recorded it. I'll have to find that.

Nice, man. So basically, we'd be well on our way to being a tier 3 civilization by the time we've got access to this sort of cash as a society. We might visit another galaxy before that.

So, you'd see the thing being fired, but might not see much more, although, I'd believe the computer could extrapolate the projectile's course based on the limited measurements it could take. I guess it could just be a matter of calculation, then. Happy to help,

I was more speaking along the lines of this. Surviving g-forces are one thing, but surviving the core of a star? And as far as scanning the object, I was legitimately asking whether or not it would be physically possible to see (scan, detect, whatever) the object due to relativity without magic. Don't mistake my nitpicking for criticism, though. I've definitely watched/read far less realistic stuff and enjoyed it a lot. I was just giving you questions to ask yourself as you go forward, considering you stated you want realism. I feel like my ksp career has followed this piece of advice for a while, actually.

What about that lonely island just above the south pole on the right side? If you're playing risk, that could be your australia.

It's kind of a game of economics to make sure the bullet you shoot at your target is actually cheaper than the target. That's why the navy is funding this stuff, so that the cost to destroy a target isn't more than the target is worth in the first place.

Also, to put this into perspective, I seem to remember some Japanese company a couple years ago planning a space elevator for some remote future date. They seem to treat speculative, future engineering proposals as genuine business plans, or at least they talk about them as seriously as US businesses talk about what they're going to do for the next fiscal year.

I don't know that this is possible as long as humans retain their logical fallacies. I suspect we'll be, at least in some way, very competitive for a long time to come. And, I suspect that if we find some other form of life, especially another civilization, out there, I'd be very surprised if we ever stopped competing with them. Also, it could be argued that our competitive drive is what has produced much of the innovation that has brought society to where it is. If we are going to change the way we think, would we want to remove such a useful (if dangerous) trait? I do think, though, that we will always find competition among the stars, and hopefully we will try and rise to the challenge.

I think we need to start by getting some sort of manufacturing plant going on the moon. If we can build and launch our stuff from the moon (which takes less dV than Kerbin, mind you) we could start to make some headway on this and other orbital construction projects. Of course, setting up a space program from the moon is kind of another can of worms I don't want to get into.

This sounds kind of like some old red cross book I read about drowning from the 50s. Lots of conjecture, and even some valid points based on data, but considering I had 60 years on whoever came up with that book (and a ridiculous amount of studies have been done since then, especially recently), so I knew very precisely what happens when you drown and the book almost seemed laughable. I say that to point out that we just don't know how exactly our bodies will react to space, because it doesn't happen often enough to gather any meaningful data points or track someone's condition as it progresses. And we don't really have a line forming of volunteers to test this. As far as drowning goes, sometimes people go in the water and come out dead, sometimes dive teams pull kids out of the lake after 30 minutes and they get revived. There's just so many variables as far as the human body is concerned that trying to predict exactly how long it'll take someone to die, and exactly how they'll die, is statistically impossible, and in fact the only reason we even have a general idea as to what goes on during the drowning process is due to decades of research studying however many drowning cases there are per year. Now, move to space, where we only have a handful of people at any given time, and they are all trained in ways to avoid the effects of depressurization, anyway. I don't know, but off the top of my head I'd say the number of people who died due to exposure to space is 0. So we have no idea what will actually happen, because it's never happened. (Or I'm wrong and its happened a few times, but my point still stands). We can come up with good guesses as to what might happen, and who knows, maybe we could even be right. But I think that, because both space and the human body are such complex, chaotic systems, we could predict until we're blue in the face and not be right. I think that, in general, the human body tends to be more durable than we predict rather than less, so I'd probably agree more with people saying it's survivable for longer vs shorter periods of time. But that's just me.

I like it. Sounds like a good prologue Although, with a collision of such high energy, would 30 seconds be enough to escape the blast radius? And, would you be able to accurately scan something in real time moving towards you at .7c? Also, I hope that AI pulls a HAL and tries to murder everyone.

Jeb usually seems quite happy no matter who's flying the ship, as long as something crazy is going on. As for that video, my goodness, that's incredibly dark.

Me too. I'll get on that

All I'm thinking about is that, sure, maybe you can construct drones and train the pilots/drivers cheaper than training a marine, and it'd definitely be more expendable, but it won't be as functional. The physical human presence on the battlefield will inevitably scale back, but I can't imagine a sequence of events over the next 200-odd years that renders a human soldier completely obsolete in every possible manner. There's just too much people can do in a battlefield, and for us to come up with a machine for each thing, or even one machine that does everything is going to take a lot longer than the scope of this discussion.