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Warhorse

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Posts posted by Warhorse

  1. Looks very nice so far. I think the green CRT screen should probably be replaced with one of the black LCD screens, though. To me, it seems rather jarringly retro in an otherwise thoroughly modern cockpit. The procedure manuals should probably go somewhere else as well. As it is, they are perfectly placed to fall out and whack the poor pilot in the face during high-g maneuvers!  :-)

  2. optimism:

    fusion will become available sooner than expected, unfortunately the first reactors will be installed as part of the american war machine before being built and sold for domestic and international use.

    polywells <3

    Well, but that actually makes perfect sense. Military applications are a lot more forgiving of poor efficiency than commercial products can ever be, as long as the item in question works fairly reliably and gives an improved capability. Also, the way trends in science are going these days, there's a substantial possibility that this will be part of the Chinese war machine, rather than the American ... :(

  3. @Ralathon

    It's not particularly short distance but quite exactly the distance earth/sun

    ... which is actually a pretty short distance, even by solar system standards. And at that size and distance, even if it reflected no light whatsoever, it would regularly get noticed as it occluded other celestial objects, not to mention what it would do to the trajectories of various interplanetary probes ... Sadly, Ralathon's conclusions are spot on. :-(

  4. For some reason i see them all the time on old drawnings, these large fins, or are they wings already?

    There's probably two reasons for that - most artists aren't rocket scientists, so there's a tendency for the rockets to come out looking like whatever high-performance non-rocket vehicle happens to occupy the public's fantasy at the time; and perhaps more importantly, it took a while to develop a decent way to steer a rocket, and the first thing they tried was big fins in the airstream a la the V2.

  5. Unless the tiny supermassive star is going to wreck the sun, too, it would save a lot more people to build a bunch of space stations in solar orbit instead. If you can build the life support system for a generation ship, planets are redundant.

  6. Hey, I'm just talking possibilities. Considerations of why you'd want to do it or what it would cost are not relevant in this case. :-)

    ETA: Since the shuttle used an adapter in the cargo bay to dock to the ISS in any case, the weight and volume lost are unlikely to be an issue at all, although development cost might be if NASA did it.

  7. Don't mean to sound like an ass but telling people to look at a link that's broken then specifying later to look at another post (while yes on the same page) rather defeats the purpose. I'd think it'd be easier to either A) have the correct post number in the original link or B) post the corrected link in a more obvious format than at the end of a post in the middle of a page with an incorrect link. I was able to find the dll without issue without ever seeing the other post. Thank you for the clarification.

    *shrug* I couldn't edit the first link, it wasn't my post.

  8. In order: 1) Not sure, maybe with a large but low-gravity world?

    2) Should be possible with a high-gravity world that has either lost most of its atmo, or never had much of one to begin with.

    3) Probably not, due to the Roche Limit.

    4) Technically, the answer would be "we don't know;" theoretically, the only way to get significant amounts of O2 is to have it continually be produced by life. Initial supplies tend to get quickly used up by oxidizing the local rocks and such like.

  9. Well then how about a frozen ice world far away from the star with a thick dark ozone atmosphere.

    I think it would have to be a big enough planet to have vulcanism to replace the atmosphere and a strong magnetosphere to help keep it.

    Maybe a relatively warmer titan like world, but larger than Earth.

    If you want to add some SciFi elements to it, have very slow moving giant ice worms tunneling under the ice.

    Then have a whole ecosystem based around these ice tunnels like the under water black smokers in the oceans or cave systems.

    The colonist could even use these tunnels for building their settlements in and transportation.

    Sorry, not going to happen. The planet (if one could form) wouldn't have enough time to cool down and lose its initial heat of formation before the star went supernova!

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