Terwin

I will admit that if the government just wants to spend a lot of money on a jobs program, I am not adverse to that program being in the space sector. It would be nice if they would produce some sort of value with those job dollars however.

To not have the rails degrade from friction, you will need to use plasma for the projectile, at which point you are pushing a self-repulsive gas out of your barrel at high speed where it will immediately disperse into a (possibly strong) breeze as it distributes it's energy to the surrounding air. If you are talking about using a dense plasma buffer to protect the rail, then you are talking about using incredibly powerful magnetic fields to contain the plasma between two electrical conductors trying to use their own magnetic fields to push against each other. Sounds like the sort of thing that might be possible as a vanity project in a type 3 civilization by using a majority of the energy output of a star, but would not be nearly as effective as just using your power source to power a big laser or something.

Didn't the FAA issue a license for multiple launches including Flights 7 and 8? Unless the license was violated, why would the FAA object to continuing use of that license? It took multiple mishaps before the MAX jet got grounded, and those involved loss of life for example. A New license might get delayed for a mishap, but I suspect that the bar is higher to stop/revoke an existing/ongoing license

@Spacescifi Instead of asking questions to which you really do not want the answers, perhaps you should include: a) an outline of how you want the story to go and b) if you want a realistic examination of your scenario if it does not match the provided story outline. Currently you are just posting lots of unrealistic scenarios and then changing them again and again when a realistic analysis goes against your imagined(but never stated) narrative. Also, if you are not looking for a technical analysis on why your hoped-for scenario is completely implausible, The Lounge might be a better place to post your story seeds. (they might even fit into the Forum Games if you are looking for a collaborative story telling type of activity)

Giving additional options to people who already have options while only making things worse for those without options is not the most effective use of public funds.

Is there any indication that the ISS retirement schedule has changed in any way in the last several months?

Moving the cost-burden of storage to the homeowner does not make a storage solution more affordable, if anything it will only increase total costs due to the need for so much redundant hardware and smaller scales. At best it just provides more options for those that can already afford alternate power sources when the grid goes down.

Most nuclear plants are much more rapidly cycle able than coal or nat gas, you just dump the steam.(Coal can often do this as well but the fuel cost is sufficiently higher that it is rarely done) But you do not save much, if anything on fuel by doing so, so it is ultimately cheaper to just run the nuke plant and save money by not building the solar capacity.

Either you have: a) a flashlight that applies less pressure than direct sunlight on a white piece of paper or b) you have the main component of a perpetual motion machine In either case, you have not really given enough information about your magi-tech tool to answer any of your questions. If anything, I would expect your force-gun to have a range of perhaps a couple cm under water as it uses all of its force to push against the water in question(which would then pull you along with the generated flow) Even in air, I would expect the range to be less than a meter, as it pushes against the air(which has mass, and is thus a valid target by your description), so in-short you have a very high-tech fan/propeller blade that breaks the 3rd law of motion(action/reaction), making it much less useful for providing propulsion(unless you are blowing air into a sail).

How quickly can you get > 3 million of these heater/tank units to New York during a power outage? How long will those tanks last when most of those users have little idea how this thing works? And those will do nothing to prevent pipes from bursting unless you have one for every kitchen and bathroom in the city in addition to the > 3M needed for 1/residence

Are you willing to shut off your heating for a week or two in the middle of winter in sub-freezing temperatures? (no wind, minimal solar) How about turning off your cooling systems in the middle of summer when it is consistently 110+f during the day and 90+f at night for a week or more? (possibly some wind, too hot for solar) Would you be be ok eating meat from a freezer that has been shut off an unknown number of times for unknown durations before it even gets to your door? Without very stringent laws and a significant loss of quality of life(and lives in general) you will not get demand varying to meet supply any more than we already get with variable pricing. Variable power supplies may be a viable supplement when your have an adjustable supply that has a capped annual output(like hydro that no longer gets enough annual in-flow to handle annual demand), but they can never be more than a supplement to support short-falls in the existing base power. Grid-scale energy storage is completely unrealistic for anything beyond power smoothing and allowing for plant ramp-up time, both of which are measured in seconds or minutes, not days and weeks like you would need for covering variable power supplies.

Are you suggesting that zero-boiloff technology has advanced to the point that we can store an unpowered, liquid hydrogen fueled vehicle in an unair-conditioned garage in a southern state for days without a need to vent? That should make storing cryogenic hydrogen all the way to Mars pretty simple in comparison.

Nuclear plants Are cost-prohibitive in the US because the department of energy is both authorized and encouraged to tighten safety requirements any time nuclear becomes cost-competitive with any other power generation system in common use(like when fuel prices spike for existing plants of other types) And they cling to their no-threshold metrics in spite of the substantial and confirmed evidence against them. If the department regulating nuclear power were not incentivized to block future development, it would be much more affordable (but that could undermine the stock value of important donors) CO2 and nitrogen are frozen at MRI temperatures. You need something that can get much colder than those can. You suggest that a hydrogen fueled motorway is not full of ignition sources? How about the enclosed garage where the car is stored over night or while the family is away on holiday? Does hydrogen have a strong scent like spilled petrol does to warn away from turning on the lights?

A few points: Renewables are not 'free once set up' and you would need grid-scale storage of hydrogen. Hydrogen storage is notoriously difficult even for short-term usage(like single-use rockets) Hydrogen quickly destroys any container that holds it through embrittlelment, and is hard to store long-term because it can slip between the atoms of the storage container. Hydrogen is highly flammable and can explode when mixed with air. In short, even using 'cheap' petroleum sourced hydrogen is completely untenable for consumer use. Hydrogen is a (very bad) storage medium, not an energy source. Even in rocketry, hydrogen is only used by the government and only because it is easier to throw money at the problem instead of finding other solutions. Evidence: MRI machines could be cooled by hydrogen just as well as very expensive helium, but hydrogen just causes too many problems to be cost-effective.

That is only if you go slow.(like 0.1c or less) Sort of like going over a speed bump at 2mph vs 60mph. The first you might barely notice, and the second could break your axle or your spine. Every body is at the bottom of a well, and if you have no inertial dampeners, then zipping past ceres at near-light speeds might break bones and break off pieces of your ship just due to the rapidly shifting gravity. Fly past a real planet and you can get everyone smeared against the starboard wall of their current room as the ship gets jerks to port because of the the 'gravity pot-hole' created by the planet. And if any other ship uses the same sort of drive, then they might well fling your ship into a star anyway, just because you are unanchored to local space while they are moving in a different direction..

Except the corporations with the most money to spend on AI will not want any of those pesky ethics or morals you mentioned.

The resources themselves never run out, but you can only harvest it so quickly based on how rich it is. Think of it as having a limited number of useful mining sites in the biome for that resource. The mines never run dry, but you can only build so many of them before you run out of veins.

Don't forget Sturgeon's law. Only the best of the best survives the dust-bin of history.

Without magical inertial dampening(probably an instant reverse gravity effect to counter any impacts, or just a low-level warp effect that dampens inertia directly), you risk having your entire crew being turned to goo any time you pass too close to a nebula at warp speed(or pass through any other significant change in the density of the interstellar medium). This sort of effect would be needed for any sort of super-luminal travel that passes through real space.

99.86% of the mass of our solar system is in the sun. The remaining 0.14% is orbiting the sun using the net orbital momentum of the starting material. When you only need to orbit 0.14% and you are pulling in particles from thousands of au away, a tiny amount of initial momentum is all you really need. Light pressure from distant stars may well be all it takes. Anything not in the orbital disk will collide with something in the disk and either move closer to the disk, or closer to the sun/escape velocity. Only things with very few chances to interact with the orbital disk will be notably eccentric (like long period commets), as many interactions (collisions or gravitational interactions) will get them lined up with the disk.

When a photon hits a particle, the particle can absorb the photon, thus increasing the energy level of the particle(such as an electron). If a particle is in an excited state(such has having recently absorbed a photon), then it can emit a new photon as it returns to a lower energy state. (this new photon will often be at a different frequency depending on the particle that emitted it) If you are talking about a photon 'disappearing' during something like the double-slit experiment, then it does not disappear, it was never there, that location was just inside the probability area where the photon might have been.

True, any sorts of details that might help non-US interests in developing similar rocket capabilities might be illegal for SpaceX to share. Might be why there are lots of FOA requests and it has not been released: the US gov says 'No'

Kind of makes you wonder if 'dark energy' is just the consequence of a plank-length type limitation on gravitational waves, limiting the effect of gravity at longer ranges much like the plank length prevents the 'ultraviolet catastrophe' with very short EM waves. Then that might suggest that 'dark matter' is a consequence of something akin to emission spectra, but with a spectra specific to our galaxy/universal constants/etc. Then again, that may not provide any testable predictions, making it a rather useless interpretation.

light waves also get stretched in the same manner(called red-shift), but as the amount of space between here and there grows faster than what could be covered when traveling at the speed of light, it can never get here. Those stars are not moving compared to the local space, it is just that there is more space being created between here and there than could be covered if you were moving at the speed of light. If there is more space-time, then both gravity and light must travel the same distance and would get 'stretched' the same amount. Unless gravity waves can travel faster then the local speed of light, they can never 'pass' light that is traveling through a vacuum, and have the same range limit due to the expansion of space-time. Just because the speed of sound may be higher in a stretched rubber sheet than in a relaxed rubber sheet, does not mean that gravity waves can travel faster than a photon in a vacuum, regardless of how that space is stretched or warped.

I see no reason that gravity waves would not have the same limitation. Gravity waves do not get to exceed C just because the points they are traveling between are further apart than they were at some point in the past. They may get to stay at C instead of occasionally getting absorbed and re-emitted like EM waves, but that is the only difference I see between their travel speeds. Perhaps you can explain how a gravity wave travelling in a straight line can get ahead of a laser traveling parallel to that wave through a perfect vacuum without breaking relativity? Without this, gravity waves are stuck in the same light cone as EM radiation, and only have greater coverage within that cone because it is much easier to shield a region from light than it is to shield it from gravity. A light-wave and a gravity wave traveling through 'stretched' space would travel at the same speed unless blocked by other obstacles, and both would get frequency-shifted by the same amount by the expansion of the universe. Perhaps you could argue that gravity waves of a high enough frequency and amplitude could be detected more easily at a certain distance than light of the same frequency and amplitude, but the light would still be there, just less of it because light is easier to block or re-direct.