WestAir

The very first roadblock you'll encounter will be a legal one, then a logistical / contingency battle. 1.) Who will be at fault for accidents? (If your drone crashes into a newly made telephone wire because the telephone company is closed on weekends and didn't send the height restriction to your companies flightplan software department, and three people die, where is this litigation going?) 2.) What happens when the autopilot software fails? (I.E. the computer crashes, the computer no longer knows where it is, the consumer fails to maintain the product and aerodata is lost, or an emergencies caused by sudden hazardous weather or birdstrikes occurs?) 3.) Given that roads can have more vehicles per hundred feet than an airway, you will have a magnitude (or five) less capacity than a road. How will the capacity restriction on designated drone airways impact (or make impossible) the initial goal of replacing crowded highways? I've kept this fairly light with regards to the plethora of real issues that have already been brought up and are already being tackled by two or three companies fighting to get this very thing airborne (excuse the pun). Up until recently (May) I was an airline pilot and it is my personal / professional opinion that flying cars are in the same "two decades away" boat as fusion reactors, (and by that I mean we won't see them for a very long time), but I also don't want to deter you from the thought game.

If mass increases is it possible to induce a singularity by increasing the velocity of an object?

To add to the semantics, air is a fluid.

There's no reason why we couldn't. We could bioengineer someone to have, or lack, any feeling we want (If feelings are as cause and effect as we suspect.) I'd actually be surprised if, once we figure out how the brain works, we couldn't design entirely new feelings or traits. Though like others said, by the time we're far enough along to have transhuman designer babies like that, we'll be far enough along to make comfortable space stations.

Nanotube bones and nanites to maintain them as you age. Nanites to repair cellular damage from radiation and complex bio monitoring systems to detect issues before they become issues?

Wasn't starlite actually tested, though?

In reality, most airliners have the center of pressure behind the center of gravity which provides a nose-down pitch. To counter that, the horizontal stabilizers in the back have an upside-down cross-section, compared to the main wings, which provide a down-force that helps counter-act said nose-down pitch. I'm not sure you can flip wings upside-down in KSP to replicate this, but you can change the angle of attack of the horizontal stab to encourage down-force. (Angle the leading edge downwards. This will increase the lift of the side facing Kerbin and act as a counter-balance.)

What if an interstellar body - like a much smaller group of comets, or dust, or unbound planets, were trans-versing the empty space between our system and theirs, and just got in the way. It wouldn't have to be large to block that much light, and it could be a spherical body with planets or rings that could cause the (uneven at times) drops in light. I'm sure somebody more educated than I can deduce what it would take to give the same results using interstellar objects.

I'm trying but it's a lot to tank in.

I thought the exact same thing when I watched Ant Man. Moreover, once he dropped below the Planck Scale they said "Time and space have no meaning here!" yet there was obviously time and space - just the way we're used to - present. (Not to mention photons and other particles were working fine at that scale. Even with suspension of belief, he shouldn't have been able to see anything.)

I meant more of the traditional "The pilots are unconscious and Joe Hero just sat in the cockpit seat. He now has to pull us out of a dive and it takes him 5 minutes of screen time and all the muscle he can muster to do it." scenario that happens often in Hollywood. When I fly small Cessna's, Piper's or Cirrus' I use three fingers on the yoke and it's sufficient to do about anything. That's why I personally have a pet peeve with movies where Joe Hero pulls up for five straight minutes with all his (bulking) muscles to save the plane.

Another fantasy pet peeve has been people "bulking up" or transforming into stronger bodies - like the Hulk. Just where does the extra mass come from? Unless it's plant-man with the ability to rapidly absorb calories directly from sunlight, I don't get it.

I've been waiting for an issue where he runs so fast Lorentz contraction flattens him paper thin, and then all of his (now free floating) atoms rapidly cascade through the air as plasma. Hopefully he'll be going fast enough to launch chunks of the atmosphere away at escape velocity before he disintegrates.

A million years? By then we'll have invented a Matrix of our own and everyone will be living in the perfect simulated world without all the problems of the real world. By that measure, I'll vote Type 6, despite the fact that it's all a simulation.

1. Pilots struggle for five full minutes to pull a Jumbo Jet out of a dive. (If you're pulling back for five minutes, that's why you're in the dive to begin with.) 2. Enemy Marksmen miss every shot. And it's not like they only shot once or twice - they literally unloaded on our heroes. (Did I mention the untrained heroes kill all twelve enemies with precision?) 3. Nuclear Weapons. ("We've got 30 seconds to disarm the nuke!" - or "Russia's fired an ICBM. We have to hack it mid flight!") 4. Speaking of the above^ Super weapons. Because in Sci Fi like Star Trek, the base weapons of starships are often already superweapons. (A Quantum Torpedo literally has its yield select-able on launch and can destroy the surface of a planet. Why do we need super weapons, again, when we have 70 Quantum Torpedo planet killers sitting on B deck? And why don't these super weapon torpedoes, that can destroy planets, not destroy the enemy spaceship which is the size of a minibus?) 5. Car / Plane / Train / Spaceship crashes. If your wreck looks like the aftermath of a WW2 bombing, no actors should be crawling out of the rubble saying "That was close!" - The next scene should, instead, take place in a CSI lab with doctors comparing our heroes remains with dental records on file. 6. Finally - my biggest pet peeve with Hollywood: The reactions of Earth to events of the film. If you just Nuked Paris or an alien race just vaporized SF Bay, society won't just give the Klingons a "free pass". No body is going to Hakuna Matata a war act. It's silly when cities get vaporized and everyone is always so chill about it!

I'm going to try an attempt at a joke here. Typically doesn't go over well because people always want to take me seriously and at face value, but in lieu of anything substantial to add... Joke: "The cat is simultaneously both dead and alive. Glitch in the Matrix. Simulated reality confirmed."

Technically 3 seconds to Mars from the crews perspective is still within the realm of plausible physics. The crew would only experience the first milisecond, however, because they'd be dead after that.

He obviously meant 3 days, as per the Thread Title and the entire rest of his OP. No need to dig into an obvious mis-type. That said, I doubt we'll ever see 3 days to Mars. That's how long it takes to get to the moon.

Why is this a weapon and not a cool cylindrical space station?

I'm an idiot. (I might accidentally flip the wrong switch on an airlock door.) I'm lazy. (I might say "Eh, we've got 2 days until the air bleed becomes a problem. I'll fix it tomorrow...") I'm extremely introverted. (The Station Commander will learn about this through email, and I'll probably ignore his texts.) But most importantly, I'm brutally honest. (I'll tell the recruitment guys the above and they probably won't send me up to begin with.) Definitely not Space Colonist material.

A realistic ST series would be focused on the lavish lifestyle of the guy who discovers and mass produces negative mass. The season finale will end when he removes his virtual reality helmet snd returns to his real life writing science fiction novels. XD

I'm going to have to stop you right there. A lunar colony also deals with a vacuum and radiation. Mars doesn't have air or adequate air pressure, so again your colony needs to be air tight. The difference between these and a massive modular space station is that the later requires less Dv to build, and because soil and terrain are not an issue, there are fewer engineering concerns. Its easier to build a colony in orbit than it is on a foreign moon or planet. Period. It's not as enticing or romantic to the human psyche, but it's a lot easier to do. Also, to compare a "large modular space colony" with the ISS is like comparing the Apollo Lunar Module with a Lunar colony. Totally not the same, and you know it.

Wouldn't large, modular space stations be far more cost effective then a colony on land? Easier to get stuff around too because you're already in orbit. Something breaks? You're modular - replace it. You can even keep adding segments to accommodate the size of your population.

China Russia and I think South Korea

Tex, Your first comparison to use milimeters was wrong because the vvaluue was too small. To use kilometers is the same error except in the opposite direction. If I'm driving a boat and I want accurate clearance from a passing ship the most precise but manageable unit I'll use is feet or meters. Not 0.222 km or 2 million milimeters or whatever. Instead of being sensible and responsing like a decent person you went for the throat and the sad part is I wasn't even being serious with you.