Scotius

Oh wow. ULA... invest in better onboard cameras please. That stage separation looked awful

Hey, this guy has some experience with the stuff you just described. Fits to a tee

Seriously? You want to scientifically analyze the substance that does anything writer requires? Excercise in futility, if i ever seen one...

Moar Science from the Moon. Go India

My jaw hit the floor when i noticed the trailer recommendation. And then i realised it's not a joke or fan made. And then music kicked in... now i will dream about building and flying rockets again

Play this song. It goes straight into any Slav's soul. We don't have to understand words to feel the sadness and overwhelming weariness of those poor peasants. It automatically makes us misty eyed

Aw, dangit! Now i have to do... this:

"If you successfuly launch Starship before 2022, you will get first dibs on Mars real estate in our first colony. Deal of the century, you guys!"

LOL So true! It boggles the mind that modern warship, bristling with radars, sonars, IR detectors etc. can so completely miss the presence of another ship. Equally big, or even much larger - on the open sea, in decent weather condition. Looks like all the advancements in technology do not matter much when eye and brain controlling them is fast asleep

Maybe "Of Course I Still Love YOU" is scheduled for maintenance? I wonder: How much Falcon Heavy could get into space if both boosters would go for barge landing instead of RTLS, with core expendable? Maybe SpaceX is hoping for a big, fat payload in the near future?

Could this "pulse laser" be used on ISS to destroy or repel dangerous pieces of debris? Or even deorbit bigger pieces? Probably power requirements are quite high, but station could trickle-charge this hypothetical capacitor over the course of couple of days.

Yes, those are all big, important heavy hitters. But those modern capital ships are also horrendously expensive - thus few in numbers. And every such ship automatically becomes prime target for enemy strike. Which means every Admiralty responsible gets very, very paranoid cautious when one of their golden toys needs to go anywhere near a conflict zone. And the end result is: and Destroyers, frigates, minesweepers and submarines do all the hard work, while flattops serve as mobile parade stands

That's 'regular' enough for ya? Courtesy of Juno probe.

Battlestars look cool in the cinema. But this sort of carrier-battleship would be very problematic to build, and even harder to use effectively in combat. There were attempts to build such things for bluewater Navies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise-class_battleship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSwMS_Gotland_(1933) But they remained only interesting footnotes as dead end in warships development. Why? Well. You want your battleship well armed with big guns. And well protected against enemy big guns (Otherwise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Hood). With high survivability, allowing it to get up close and personal with the enemy (for WW II time period it would mean up to 30 000 meters - usually less). Which means armor. Thick slabs of high quality, dense material protecting vital parts of the ship (engines, power plant, main guns, ammo magazines). Heavy stuff. For a carrier, you would want a ship able to carry a lot of planes, with spacious hangars and magazines for servicing and rearming your planes for the full duration of mission\battle being fought at distances of couple of hundreds of kilometers. Which require big hull - which would be difficult to protect with armor without eating into useable inner space too much. And this inner space is filled with highly combustible aircraft fuel and explosive ordnance for the planes. This tends to happen to unlucky carriers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Midway That's two opposable goals you would have to merge in one ship. Also, consider this: After even victorious battle, battleship (unless it was ridiculously, Hollywood-esque lucky) will need shipyard time, if not outright drydocking. Being hit by a fast flying, armor piercing several hundred kilograms of explosive projectile leads to much damage. Meanwhile, victorious carrier most likely won't get hit even once, and will need only to resupply spent fuel, ordnance and replace lost planes and crews. There are other important factors of course, but end result - extinction of battleships and domination of carriers (or rather carrier battle groups) will probably carry into space warfare as we can imagine it now.

During planetogenesis pre-Jupiter was basically the Kraken He rampaged across young Solar system, devouring unlucky planetesimals and throwing lucky ones into wildly perturbed orbits. Good thing nowadays Jupiter is dangerous mostly to comets and odd asteroid every so often.