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Terwin

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  1. I had hoped that following the flight path all the way to the end might not count as a mishap, but at least the additional hazard should be close to zero. I expect that most of the mitigation is to improve control, which SpaceX wants to do anyway.
  2. Not at all, a rocket is a controlled conflagration(just like a lighter, gas stove, gas water heater, fire place, coal power plant, etc.). There is research into continuous detonation engines, but it is very difficult to maintain the continuous detonation(but would greatly increase ISP) The reaction mass carries away the heat, and generating the heat to heat up the reaction mass is the entire reason you have the antimatter on board, this is a benefit, not a cost. Orion has much more of a heat problem than a rocket because the pusher plate absorbs some of the heat and you have no productive way to get rid of that heat, more over, the further you get form the explosion(and the heat) the worse you thrust and isp get. The best option to manage for the heat for Orion that I have seen is to coat your pusher pate with some sort of liquid, cutting down on how much of your pusher plate gets vaporized with each bomb, but this is only a partial option as running the Orion continuously will still heat up the plate until it finally gets soft enough to get splattered by the next bomb. Nope, Unless you are using some sub-optimal configuration to avoid destroying your launch mount, you always use the same bomb, the largest you can safely use for propulsion. This maximum safe size may go down as your pusher plate gets eroded, but it will never go up. (moving the bomb further away has the same effect as using a smaller bomb, so using a larger bomb further away just wastes materials) Sort of, as you will have the non-charged particles wearing away at your nozzle hardware, giving you the life-span limitations of Orion, combined with the massive energy requirements of an ion engine because you need to generate the magnetic fields to push away the charged particles(but much less efficient than an ion engine because the particles are much further way from the field), giving you the combined draw-backs of Orion and ion engines.
  3. I would appreciate you explaining the physics of this to me, because everything I know about rocketry says that antimatter pulse is stupidly wasteful and inefficient compared to thermal antimatter rocketry, for both ISP and TWR. Are you assuming that pulse propulsion does not need reaction mass? Nuclear pulse requires a tungsten plug to work as the reaction mass that hits the pusher-plate, and antimatter pulse would also require a large amount of reaction mass to throw against the pusher-plate, much of which would miss and be wasted, along with > 90% of the energy in the antimatter explosion, much like nuclear pulse. The only difference is that a nuculear pulse is ~ 1,000,000 times as energy dense as chemical reactions, letting you get 100 times the push with only 0.1% of the efficiency. (antimatter pulse does *not* have this advantage over antimatter thermal, because they both have the same energy density)
  4. Um, no. Consider a regeneratively cooled rocket nozzle. It is able to withstand great temperatures and a lot of well-controlled pressure coming in an easy to predict way. Now design something that can withstand highly variable temperatures and pressures with the ability to change rapidly, both in intensity and direction, with much tighter weight restrictions because it can only harness a fraction of the energy it is being battered with, as most of it is pushing the wrong way. Note: temperatures and pressures can get much higher than the nozzle interacts with. You are suggesting that it is easier to design and build a mobile structure to resist tornadoes than it is to build a stationary, reinforced wind-break that only needs to survive 1% of the wind-speed of a tornado, from one direction. For the same energy release, a rocket is always better than external combustion. Always. Thermal antimatter will always be more efficient in both TWR and ISP than any sort of external combustion antimatter. * If your materials can withstand a temperature of X, then running your thermal antimatter at (x-safety margin) will always equal or beat being far enough away form an explosion so that it cools down to (x-safety margin) as you will, at best, get the same result, but only by benefitting from a small fraction of your fuel and reaction mass. * Anything you can do to get a better result from your am-pusher plate, can also be done to get the same benefits(or more) in a thermal rocket. * A rocket gets to benefit from roughly 100% of the pressure from the heated reaction mass, while any sort of pusher-plate will, at best, get less than half of the pressure from an external combustion event(because to get any more, it would need to be inside your reaction chamber, even 50% would require half of the event be inside of a chamber of some sort, but much of that would be laterally focused and thus lost), usually only a small fraction of 1% because being any closer means your vessel gets vaporized by the explosion if you make it large enough to be a useful external reaction.
  5. It seems reasonable that SpaceX may include starlinks as payload on attempts 4+ They may wait until 5, but loading 4 seems plausible
  6. External combustion is the *least* efficient option. Not even modern trains use external combustion any more. External combustion is only viable if there is no other option. Thermal antimatter is entirely doable as a rocket, so external antimatter reactions can never be within an order of magnitude of the most efficient option. Not unless we learn something that would re-write every physics textbook from jr high on up
  7. I am guessing that the faa only cares if the hazard is increased by a given action, or if something done without informing them The fact that a booster splashing down in an exclusion zone might only be destroyed by water turbulence instead of a hard splash-down(or disintegrating as it falls), does not seem like it would be of interest unless it might stay afloat for an extended period.(Probably why they need a guy with a rifle on-hand for starship, In case it does not sink on its own) The faa might not even care to be informed of the type of splash-down, so long as it is in the designated area.(Such as landing on an unmanned barge as opposed to slamming into the waves, letting the owner risk non-human assets as much as they want, so long as it goes where they were told it would go)
  8. I remember reading that if you used antimatter as the energy source for your rocket, you could use the same reaction mass tank(possibly water?) regardless of your destination, you just use a higher energy mix by adding a higher proportion of antimatter to energies your reaction mass before you shoot it through the nozzle. And no, antimatter is not your reaction mass, it serves the same function as the nuclear reactor in a Nerva engine, just (presumably) lighter
  9. I thought that was just having a conductive path through the silver of the fillings that was the right length to pick up radio waves of the right frequency (possibly conducting it to the nerve for lots of fun) So both radio and solar storms would just add an electric charge to part of the tooth. Solar storms received by radios sound like louder static if I recall correctly.
  10. Sort of like the Spanish inquisition? If you disagree with our morals we 'put you to the question '? How do you have a character based solution to self-published phone recordings of a newsworthy event when the citizen journalist has no history, just luck? Also, how do you identity which of the conflicting accounts should be considered truthful or criminal when they primarily differ in definition and framing? How about the same source video cut and framed by two different providers, giving widely different understanding of the situation based on framing? We know that governments will eagerly abuse such authority, and any other organization will likely start out corrupted and favor one set of views over others Multiple independent organizations gives us the current splintered view of 'truth' based on your source. I see lots of issues, but not a lot of solutions, especially considering our current status and lack of agreement on things as simple and basic as gender.
  11. Adding insulation on the inside is probably cheaper and can be just as effective, if not more effective if you need it. Structural components are very expensive and require maintenance, but insulation is cheap and only requires care if it gets wet in most cases.
  12. Even assuming that they are not some sort of insect that communicates through pheromones, and they have the capacity to perceive your attempts to communicate as such, why would you depend on the intellectual and computational capacity of a presumably more primitive society to decide and understand your message which presumably has a finite and thus limited body to work on (and no doubt includes ideas for which they do not even have words) As opposed to having as much time and computational capacity as you can cram on your ship to decide the more primitive words and ideas of the culture you intend to contact? Someone very lazy could do as you describe, but it would not make a very good impression, and may only be worked on by crazies if everyone else thinks it is a hoax
  13. This is a reaction less drive, so inverting it seems like it would reverse the direction of thrust. Then again this is a magic drive, so if you want it to, inverting the thrust could cause daisies to sprout from the control console.
  14. I can easily see smart-speaker systems besting humans at a range of tasks. Setting up alarms and calendar reminders would be a fairly low bar, but remember the tropes about people not able to set the clock on their VCR. Other tasks, such as adding an item to a specific list in a proprietary system(such as whatever app Google is currently using to story my shopping list) could even stymie relatively bright people if it has a poor UI. Adding appointments to other peoples calendars could be particularly difficult depending on your security set-up. My wife has a masters and regularly uses our smart-speakers as a calculator.(if I am in the room, I often supply the answer first though)
  15. If time-ports can be blocked by things other than destruction of the pad, it becomes easy to ask questions of the future by just arranging for temporary blocks based on the answer of the question. If only destruction of the timeport will block it, it is still possible, just more expensive
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