Stargate525

If you launch it sitting on its engine vertically, it ought to take off the pad slowly, and then you can slowly turn the sideslip into proper flight.

You know, it's funny. In my head, I realize that thing's stupidly huge. But LOOKING at it... It doesn't look big enough, somehow, to hold 72 tie fighters... @.@

Well yes. But it's less the fuel and more 'my plane will burn to a crisp at about 4 minutes.' xD

When you say it needs to be able to fly for fifteen minutes, is that at full burn, or can we ramp up to speed, then pull back for the duration portion?

My quick and dirty way to design a Duna lander is that if it can hit space on Kerbin using a standard ascent profile, it's got plenty of juice to make Duna. That usually overengineers the lander by quite a margin, but I prefer having surplus fuel. They make for great emergency fuel deposits in case I'm not as efficient for later missions.

So, an SSTO, that's only SRBs? Or do you also allow us to manually stage since there's no way to automate that in stock?

Am I missing crew quarters, or do the escape pods have more crew capacity than the rest of the station?

Oh for the love of... DID YOU WATCH THE MOVIE?! At the end, She is SPEAKING to them, and they are replying with their circlebits. THEY UNDERSTAND THE LANGUAGE. What they lack is bloody VOCAL CORDS TO REPLICATE IT... And have you learned a different language? It starts with 'childish' words and concepts, because that's the base everything else is built on. When trying to communicate with a completely different species, from a completely different BIOSPHERE, even those base concepts could be RADICALLY different. How do you explain the concept of 'red' to them if they see only in shades of grey? Or in UV? What about the difference between happiness and sadness, if they don't have the same emotional range? What about the concept of war and anger, if they're a prey species and have only a flight response?

It's not to prove that we're intelligent; there is a theory that mathematics would be an easier shared 'language' between disparate species, as they're both supposedly describing the same universal concepts.

As far as the physicist thing, I assumed that the army had watched Contact. He and the Aussie one-liner do mention trying binary, primes, and Fibonacci sequences to try and establish communication, as well as trying to teach them algebra. And the later part of the movie shows they DO understand spoken English, at least, and presumably the writing as that's how they were gathering their lexicon. I imagine that the writing issue is a biological limitation on their part, being unable to form the shapes. "What do you mean it's not as long as Contact..." "We need to cut FORTY FIVE MINUTES?!"

Hadn't read the story. But the ending was HORRIBLE. I did not sign up for the wibbly-wobbly lunacy that it devolved into.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAP-10A Given that this was built in the 60s, I'm pretty certain we could make it smaller. Granted, this is just the reactor. Including all the cooling and shielding is a different question; it's like asking what the smallest internal combustion engine you can build is, but then also including the transmission, exhaust, and car electrics as well.

Are you talking about the most recent one? That big one was coming in INCREDIBLY fast. It looked slow because the thing was the size of half the planet.

*waggles hand* I work with modern computers on a daily basis taking their guts apart. Cheaper manufacturing, yes, because they only expect or WANT the device to last about 3-5 years at most. Many products are optimized for cost (in theory), instead of longevity. This results in a $100 purchase every three years instead of a $200 purchase every five. But back on topic... one of my big pet peeves is limited tool use; for instance, that lightsaber can cut through a reinforced blast door, but you'll still sit and wait for the troopers to come to you instead of cutting the bridge off.

To be fair to the trope, most movie producers, scriptwriters, and moviegoers are primarily consumers of smaller engineering products. For most of their adult lives, or the entirety of their adult lives, they've purchased and used products with planned lifespans and intentional obsolescence. Cars built in the sixties will still run, with care. I don't think anyone is going to be saying that in 2076 about modern cars. There is a perception that stuff build before 1970 is more reliable than stuff after it because, in a WIDE array of consumer-level products, it's ACCURATE.

I haven't played much with the new version, but wouldn't you be able to auto-strut across the ports now, thereby locking them down more securely?

I've only ever managed to get them to glow when I cluster them in big arrays of 5-10. the one or two parts leading to the rest of the ship can't wick the heat away quite quickly enough.

Assuming we'll keep our bodies at all. It's entirely possible we'll be able to upload a map of our consciousness for the journey, make the trip either in standby or playing War Thunder, and then get downloaded into a freshly-grown tank child during the last fifteen years of the trip. Forget the space dwarves; a zygote is much, much smaller.

Thanks a ton for the all the input guys. This is basically what I've got sketched out - -Ship arrives with a predicted starfield map, does a full circular visual image to correlate and identify anomalies and any planets visible. -Locates and pings the system's sun for distance within the system. -Visual anomalies / visual planets are scanned with radar/radio telescope arrays to determine distance and emissions spectra. -Probes are fired at 3-5 more promising targets for closer scan and insertion into orbit around the body. Their telemetry is used to more accurately triangulate position, and their flight time is used to observe and map orbital parameters. -Ship selects most promising candidate and plots intercept course. ...Did I miss anything?

The massive array would be at the home system. Because of how the FTL works, going back isn't an option; you're in the system, and you either spend the time and resources to build back, or you die. Galileo also knew where Jupiter was in relation to himself. This thing doesn't know where it's sitting in the system.

Why per second? Why can't you nab 24-48 hours of telemetry, ship the hard drives to a central location, then stitch them together after the fact?

Aha. Figured there'd be some issue like that. Thanks.

That's another question I had, but wasn't quite related to this one. I know that using an array gives the same resolution as a single dish as big as the two most distant pieces of the array. What I -don't- know is whether there is a practical limit to this. Could you, for instance, have scopes on Mars, Earth, and in orbit around Jupiter, for an effective telescope 11au across? What about linked telescopes in different solar systems entirely?

Ooh yes, that site. I know it well. It's about ten times harder than I intend to go (I mean, this hypothetical ship is essentially warping into the system), but I'll definitely take a look at it.

That's the main problem that I'm having. You'd need to track it. This ship is dropping in at a random point in the system; it could be significantly above or below the system's orbital plane. You'd need to be able to run a 360/360 scan. (Though, I suppose, an optical track would be able to discern the relative distance from the sun, and once you pinpoint one planet, you can narrow your search.) Launching probes is fine. I had this odd notion of firing small probes at cardinal directions off of the main ship, then tracing their trajectory to get a gravitional map of the system as they're deflected by the various planets. I have a feeling that the deflection you'd have to measure would be so tiny that it's indecipherable from noise, though. Is that correct?