Terwin

Speed itself is not the problem, it is relative speed that kills. Everyone going 80mph is much safer than everyone going back and forth between stopped and 30mph again and again due to speed bumps and other control measures. Adding in turns and swerves just adds lots of speed zero buildings, trees and pedestrians into the forward vector of the vehicle. This is not mentioning the possible loss of control due to hitting an unexpected curb or speed-bump.(or the additional wear that can cause a sudden mechanical loss of control) Also, reducing the maximum speed of a route only increases the numbers of cars on that route at a given point of time, and usually both the stress and fatigue levels of those drivers. The vast majority of US roads are in places where it is just not economical to have mass-transit in a useful form, and if it is not useful, then it will not be used enough to matter.

For the sake of intimidating other drivers, SUVs have nothing on SH

Looks like a hydrogen leak was detected when switching to fast-fill again...

How confident are you that an off-the-shelf industrial-strength fan would not have any catastrophic failure modes that could endanger the rocket? Steel fan-blades shooting through pipes or poking a hole in the fuel tank would be catastrophic, and I doubt many fans are rated to run while exposed to both evaporating liquid hydrogen and a hydrolox exhaust plume without any risk of throwing a blade. Putting a fan in a safety-bunker with an exhaust vent that has enough turns to ensure a RUD of the fan could not harm the rocket may be a little more than they are prepared to handle at the moment.

I might be misremembering the mechanics, but I am pretty sure that the throat turns the heat into pressure, and the nozzle turns the pressure into thrust. Heating up the exhaust after it leaves the nozzle is effectively heating up a near-by nebula that happens to be behind you. There might be a little something from the photon pressure, but nothing significant.

This would do nothing useful for the rocket propulsion wise. For dumping raw energy/heat into the exhaust to be useful, it needs to be before the throat of the engine, which in turn is before the nozzle. But you can only do this up to the point where the throat of your engine starts to melt, and this is a point that we already reach quite easily with just chemical combustion. Shooting a laser into the exhaust of your rocket is functionally equivalent to mounting a small, off-center photon engine next to your chemical engine: lots of complexity for no practical gain. If you are adding magical uber-power sources without associated magical uber-materials, and also constrain those uber-power sources with a destructively-high minimum functional output, then you have basically re-skinned the nuclear fission bomb. The only use-case where pusher-plates make sense is when you are limited to fission bombs or a close analog, with no materials or propulsion technologies significantly in advance of 50 years ago. Just remember: using an Orion engine in an atmosphere will cause significant damage to both the vehicle and the planet, so they are only of use once you are already in-orbit, where things like ion or plasma propulsion can get similar ISP with far less engineering and damage, even if the thrust is much lower.

It can be retro-active however. The easiest way to specify this without any problems with over-lapping reigns is to use the legal stance that the monarchy transfers instantly. Also, as far as I am aware, most monarchies have claimed or do claim a divine origin/mandate/blessing/etc.

I am being very careful to specify organization, as a corporation is only a sub-set of organizations. Even then, a corporation with with public stock is very different from most other organizations, and even most businesses. In the US non-profit organizations and what they can do are narrowly defined to prevent abuse of their tax-exempt status. If you prohibit all other organizations from doing anything non-profit motivated, then you have just banned people working together on a broad swath orf normal activites and placed a heavy regulatory burden on any group that is not seeking profit. Do you really thing that the chess-club at your local middle-school really needs to register with the federal government for non-profit status just so that they can reserve a space at the state-level championship? This is what you are advocating for by preventing any legally created entity without a federal tax exemption from participating in any activity that is not primarily profit based. You are also making trust funds and many other financial instruments illegal, as they are not seeking profit, but to distribute funds according to the instructions of their founding. Incidentally, the tools used by a grandparent creating a trust fund that will pay for the education of their grand-children, are not particularly distinct from the tools used by some other entity(possibly a corporation) putting money into a PAC to advocate for a particular bill/law/policy, or from a scholarship fund set up by an education-minded foundation. Also, you do not need to use commercial speech to limit the conduct of your employees, you publish a code of conduct and fire anyone that refuses to either agree to that code, or fails to abide by that code. This is a standard practice and is one of the ways an employer can fire someone who sexually harasses others without risking a law-suit from the harasser. It can also be used to fire someone who falsifies a time-card, is rude to customers, or causes other problems in the work-space. Putting non-tax laws in place that distinguish between taxable and non-taxable organizations is only asking for problems(and a prompt legal challenge).

No, the legal purpose of an organization is to assemble capitol(including people) into a legally distinct grouping. If a corporation has share-holders, then it often has a fiscal duty to those share-holders to provide a positive return on investment(which may or may not mean making a profit). If an organization does not have share-holders, then its only real organizational obligations involve following the law, including paying taxes and fees as applicable. Not all organizations are corporations, or even businesses. While it is often advantageous for organizations not seeking a profit to seek non-taxed(aka non-profit) status, many are too small to even bother with such a thing. I was a member of a hobby-group for multiple decades, and while it did successfully apply for non-profit status for part of that time, it was usually not worth the effort because the group just did not handle that much in the way of money, usually on the order of a few hundred dollars in dues a year. Your definitions would require that that hobby group be a purely profit-motivated organization just because it is too small to bother with the paperwork to be non-profit. Note: the main reasons for having an organization at all were so that we could rent out park meeting halls for events and people could point to this legal entity as the reason they were carrying a potentially illegal(looks like a knife/sword and > 6" long 'blade', even with no real edge) dress-sword in their trunk as part of their costume when traveling to said events. (the hobby group was defined as educational so we could have things like 'reenactment props' for a legitimate reason to carry around something that looks like a sword or dagger so long as that was all we used them for) There you go, a legal organization that did not have a profit motive and was too small to bother with the rules and paperwork to be tax-exempt. You would prohibit such organizations?

There are specific limits and requirements to be a non-profit, most notably the requirement to fall into one of several categories, each with their own limits and requirements. You would prohibit me from making a company who's primary purpose is to help people just because it does not fall neatly inside the requirements of one of the federally specified non-profit categories. Categories that have been specifically made narrow because of the tax-advantages conveyed upon non-profit entities(like tax exemptions and the ability to accept tax-deductible donations). In any-case, non-profit and for-profit are misleading. A more accurate description would be Tax Exempt and Taxed. Lots of tax-exempt organizations make massive tax-free profits, and many taxed organizations are primarily philanthropic in nature, it all depends on how willing the organizers are to tie themselves to this exemption in the federal tax code.

How do you identify if a given entity is specifically to make profits, or just happens to make profits due to the activities they engage in? Why is it impossible to have a company who wishes to 'do X but in a profitable way'? You seem to be engaging in absolutism, and while fun to think about, I have yet to find a non-physics based absolutism that actually works in the 'real world'

It looked to me like the ~2% SSTO payloads involved 0% reuse. If I remember correctly, getting to orbit with 2% payload on the SH would actually have a negative payload fraction if you subtracted enough fuel for SS to deorbit and land(ie not enough for SH, just the much smaller SS), not even including things like structural reinforcement and heat shielding. So the current comparison is: ~2% payload fraction for a single use SSTO (which is then space-trash) OR ~2% payload fraction for a fully reusable TSTO that might have a marginal cost to launch in the low tens of millions for > 100T of cargo. (perhaps $200/kg to orbit?)

Complexity is the enemy of reliability. Also, we are dealing with liquid hydrogen. I expect lots of potential moving parts start having problems when they need to regularly cycle between Florida Summers(~100f/~310K) and liquid hydrogen(~33 Kelvin). I also expect that icing may be a problem when you are operating at ~240 degrees below freezing in a swamp and within sight of the ocean. I find it pretty impressive that they can even get the accumulated ice to let go after pumping several hundred thousand gallons of liquid hydrogen into the rocket with humidity that is probably not often below 90%.

In StarTrek all weapons are blocked by the shield, and without shields any weapon attack will cause significant damage. Structural integrity fields are for things other than weapons that should rip the ship apart(including moving fast with big holes). So if the nuclear blast was part of a propulsion system or or the equivalent of a 'terrain hazard', then the structural integrity field will deal with it just fine, even if it is only powered by the energy-cell of a hand-phaser. On the other hand, if the shields are down and I try to attack the ship with my $5 laser pointer with half-dead batteries, then the ship will take significant damage regardless of how much power the structural integrity field has. StarTrek is narrative driven, so actual physics does not matter at all, and generally it is avoided to minimize plot holes. This is probably a big part of why it was so popular: Focus on the story and characters with only the occasional vague nod towards the pseudo-science. (they even had 'technobable' flags in the scripts so that the various script writers did not keep coming up with different terms)

Because Congress needs an excuse to keep funding SLS. As a government agency, the purpose of NASA is to address the priorities set out by the government. Launching rockets is part of how they do this, but is not the purpose of NASA. As the specific purpose of SLS is not to launch a rocket, but to maintain aerospace jobs in specific congressional districts, I would not be surprised to see several SLS launches, even if they only launch once every 5 years, and the payloads could easily be handled by other rockets.

Nope, Aerokinesis is very powerful if you have a very large area, if you try to use a small area you run into problems like the speed of sound and creating a vacuum above your intake so that it stops doing anything useful. If you want aerokinesis to work for a heavier than air craft(lighter than air craft are awful for space travel in every way, so yes you do), then your field *must* cover an area many times the area of your vessel. This means obviously magi-tech self-contained force-fields spanning hundreds of meters around your 10m ship(or several km around your 100m battleship), not magical ducted fans. You will not get a useful SSTO with a fuel ratio smaller than the SpaceX super-heavy that will not make a physicist roll their eyes. Just go the star trek route and make it a flying van with magical engines bolted onto the sides, and be done with it.

I have a sudden vision of a Canada-arm equipped starship dragging Hubble to ISS and using puppy-dog eyes to try to get the ISS astronauts to package up Hubble for return in it's cargo bay...

The solar panels on Hubble are not designed to retract, and at the very least would need to be removed. Also, Hubble was never designed for return, so it may not be able to survive even a 'gentle' reentry. Removing the solar panels and recovering Hubble would most likely require combined Starship and EVA activities, so it may be a while before there is an opportunity to even make the attempt.

According to https://github.com/UmbraSpaceIndustries/MKS/wiki/Parts-(WOLF)#harvesters You want 'WOLF MHU-100 Bulk Harvester' or 'WOLF MHU-500 Bulk Harvester' to collect resources available in a given biome. (I do not have access to my install at the moment, but I think they look a bit like the MKS 2.5m and 3.5m nuclear plants)

Take a look at the pressure suits worn during takeoff and landing, especially the tesla suits. If the helmet and gloves are sealed, then those suits should sustain a human in an airless environment so long as the life support resources hold-out. They are not designed for the wearers to be particularly useful, as the joints would be very stiff without external pressure, but they are intended to sustain life in the case of cabin pressure loss. With properly placed emergency controls, they could probably do things like initiate emergency re-entry should ground-control not be able to do so.

It sounds like you have not yet attached any harvesters to your WOLF depot. Depot is just a base-station with a little bit of power. To harvest resources you will need harvesters, which then make the resources available. Once they are available, you can send them to hoppers, other depots, or use them to supply something that further process the raw materials. Abundance just means how much you can harvest before the area is maxed out for that resource.

Want a better one? Don't write yourself into a corner to begin with. The more technical details you give to your audience, the more you tie your own hands behind your back with regards to creating and resolving drama. Examples: A) My ship has a Delta-V of X and a fuel fraction of Y, and I need to get this vaccine to the planet just hit by a plague within W hours or everyone there will die. he plague planet is Z distance away, I hope we can make it! B) A plague hit Planet X! We are the only ship with a hope of getting there in time, and only if we <Technobable> the <Technobable>, and then push the <Technobable> beyond safe levels! With A, anyone who knows enough to understand all the numbers you throw out about the ship will know right away if the ship can get there in time, and anything else will be obvious deus-ex-mahina. With B you can have <Technobable> break-down from pushing it too hard and lots of dramatic struggles and risks to make it on-time with no known outcome until the end. Not to mention, providing technical details does nothing productive with regards to building or maintaining dramatic tension. For the sake of your readers, do not make your story into a technical manual. Making a thrust shorter does not in any way make it more fuel efficient. Usually the inverse actually, as lower-thrust engines are usually more efficient, especially things like ion engines that run for days but could not lift a piece of paper off of a table on earth. Generally speaking, energy density is the antithesis of safety.

I believe that the max change in velocity that you can get from a fly-by/gravity assist is 2x the relative speed of the body in question. At best you are making a U-turn around the body where your relative velocity compared to the moon is the same when you leave as when you arrived, but with a reversed direction compared to the body in question. So, if you are approaching a body from behind with only 100m/s in relative velocity, then after the assist you will be going 100m/s slower than the body as opposed to 100m/s faster than the body when you started, for a total change of 200m/s. The size/mass of the body only affects how low you need to get to achieve this perfect U-turn for a given relative velocity. If it is a small/light body, you may not be able to get close enough without litho-breaking, and bodies with atmospheres increase your minimum altitude without aero-breaking. So choosing the correct moon is usually much more important than choosing the heaviest object available.

WOLF uses exactly the same resources and materials that the MKS system uses, it just uses WOLF-specific parts to extract and process them. The units represent materials over time instead of distinct chunks of something physical to avoid additional processing load, but that is the biggest difference between the two. (use hoppers to convert WOLF materials into MKS materials) KIS has been generally supplanted by the stock inventory system. I do not think that the actually conflict, but remembering what is in which sort of inventory and handling it appropriately could be a headache. I believe USI now has it's own in-situ vessel construction mechanic, making GC redundant, but once again, I do not believe that they actually conflict, it is just that trying to actually use both at the same time may cause more headaches than it is worth, at least long-term.

In the current version of MKS you can specify how much machinery is consumed, including setting machinery consumption to zero. To the best of my understanding zero machinery consumption is the primary difference between MKS and MKS lite, so this setting makes MKS lite redundant.