Rakaydos

But I sent TWO ships! Does that count?

so I just got back from a 2 part Dres sample return mission using leftover Duna Explorer hardware. (with no nuclear engines, because nukes are bad m'kay) I sent two of my (slightly overbuilt) duna-landing-and-return craft to dres, with arrival times about a month apart. The first one just barely captures at the flyby and spends most of the month waiting to come around for another pass, then lands at next periapse. When the second ship flies past dres, the lander (having gotten all the science it can), launched straight into atempting to match the flyby's trjectory. It lacked the Dv... but I knew that alreay. It did bring the difference in DV down to the high 3-digit m/s, though,and by switching to the flyby craft, I managed an intercept, science transfer, and kerbin return with hardware never designed to go past Duna. My next mission is a Jool flyby with the same hardware.

The link sounded like an attempt was made to detect EM bleed from Microwave Thermal Rockets and their transmitters, though it's hard to make out over this distance.

" This rules out omnidirectional transmitters of less than approximately 100 times today’s total terrestrial energy usage in the case of the narrow-band signals, and ten million times that usage for broad band emissions." Yea, we cant see crap.

The way the signal brakes up, the obstruction is asymmetric, which rules out any singular source bound by gravity. But the shere size of the obstruction is enough to rule out most other explanatins.

You dont use a SSTO to go beyond low orbit. You lose the advantages of the air breathing engine by bringing extra dead weight. Skylon + an ion tug, operating as a relay, however...

Totality Solar Eclipses on the seurface of a habitable planet are a seasonal tourist attaction unavailable anywhere else in the galaxy. (statistically speaking)

What's the lightspeed latency from Calisto to Europa? Could a manned mission on Calisto (low rad shielding) teleoperate a robotic exploration mission on ganamede and Europa?

Why would it need it? it was a routine 0G science mission- empty cargo bay, low inclination orbit, saving as much rocket fuel as possible. Robot arm's just extra weight.

I heard one argument that any particle attempting to go backward in time would destructively interfere with itself, and therefor time travel would only result i the liberation of the time traveler's mass energy, not a potential time paradox. Causality is preserved despite the theoretical possibility of time travel, because nothing can actually REACH the past without being canceled out completely..

The first option doesnt actually sound that bad, if the machining is done at a permanant site and not required to be produced onboard the rocket. A Lunar mining base that machnes alunimum "fuel grains" for hybrid landers to shuttle resources into orbit?

Saw this on that page, thought it would be interesting to discuss... "In some late-breaking news, physicists Daniel Greenberger and Karl Svozil have shown that the laws of quantum mechanics enforces Consistency Protection. You can read their paper here, but it makes my brain hurt. Translated into English, they maintain that time travellers going back into the past cannot alter the past (i.e., the past is deterministic). This is because quantum objects can act sometimes as a wave. When they go back in time, the various probabilities interfere destructively, thus preventing anything from happening differently from that which has already taken place." So, if FTL was possible, and you could go back a few seconds of time with massive energy use... it still wouldnt do anything useful. Or am I reading that wrong?

I'm using 3 duna landers to cobble together a manned Dres sample return- One goes, lands, and reaches orbit. The second one reaches orbit, docks, and waits for the third one to flyby, then the two docked craft burns all it;s DV trying to catch the flyby. Once their DV is spent, the flyby matches velocity, picks them up, then tries to limp home. That's the plan, anyway...

This feels like an artifact of a particular calculation technique. What is the Dv costs of going back, say, 1 second? how much do you need to accelerate, and how long would you need to jumpp for?

There's a lot of stars in a thousand lightyear bubble. (500 light-local-year, for them) Perhaps they simply havnt gotten around to it yet.

Depends on the vessel's real velocity. If you gave the vessel just enough real velocity to escape intervening gravity wells, you could warp across them freely, and any debris would only have relative speed equal to yor real velocity. Your "Warp factor" has nothing to do with it.

SpaceX is the right choice, Boeing is the conservative choice.

SpaceX and Boeing.

I believe that was part of the argument as to why nasa managament kept their heads in the sand. "If there's something wrong, there's nothing we can do about it. Investigating will just bring out a public pressure to do the impossible. We can better afford another shuttle loss then the loss of confidence of knowing the problem and failing to save them... AND a shuttle loss.

So, even if it's a collecter array that size, if they didnt need a significant portion of it to power their civilization, they could launch interstellar colonization missions with some regularity. Is that correct?

But these people (if they really exist) dont have a FULL dysn sphere. They have a collection array that obscures 25% of an F class star's disk when transiting. How big is that in megameters? How far is it orbiting? it's in a 750 day orbit of an F class star... is that habitable zone? How much energy can an array that size collect?

I'm looking into comparative scales here. How many tons could that much light energy accelerate at 1g, with a perfect light sail?

The recent discovery of what -might- be a partial dyson sphere has piqued my interest. We know the object(s) orbits an F class star every 750 days and obscures 25% of the star's disk when it does transit. How much light energy does the "structure" receve? How long would it take to fuel an antimatter poweres starship, if the hypothertical aliens can produce antimatter at the theoretical limit of efficiency? How does the energy generation compare to the energy requirements of a Abercrombe Warp Drive? (assuming the theory works out)

Considering how many kerbal SSTOs use air breathing first stages, I'm not sure your logic is sound. Oh, sure, the kerbal turbojet is OP, but the Rapier is supposed to be a direct expy of the Saber engine.

if I understand the argument correctly, they're not saying Skylon shoud BE an upper stage, the're saying it should HAVE an upper stage.