qeveren

I'm not sure your portal-torch engine is going to work in this configuration. What is the solar plasma (in the Sun version) pushing against in order to drive the ship forward?

Photons, traveling at c, don't actually have a meaningful frame of reference: to them, all journeys take precisely zero time, regardless of distance, and all of spacetime is to them compressed to zero size. Not much to see, there.

I could be wrong about the supercav sub flying blind; apparently the later-generation Skhval supercav torpedoes are thought to have some form of terminal guidance, but I have no idea what the heck they would be using to pull it off. Anyone have an idea?

Surveillance satellites. I imagine your supercav sub is going to be leaving one heck of a contrail through the ocean. You could also use a SOSUS-type array to track its position; you wouldn't have real-time data on its exact position, but you could pin it down close enough to lob a MIRV nuke into the water to kill it/collapse its supercavitation sheath, since at those speeds it isn't going to be doing any hard maneuvers. Mind, the supercav sub is going to have problems of its own, primarily the fact that it's going to be flying pretty much blind down there: sonar isn't going to work through the cavitation sheath, not to mention it'd be outrunning its own sonar pulses and passive is right out, radar is out, etc.

Considering that ion cannons aren't a thing that exist, he's basically talking science fiction.

I assume the beam intensity inside the laser is kept to a level that its mirrors can handle (and I imagine active cooling comes into play here). Once you project the beam, you can then focus it onto the target at a high-enough intensity that they can't defend against it. That's going to murder the efficiency of your radiators, and then you'll cook in your own waste heat. XD

Again, mirrors won't do jack against a weaponized laser; it'll just burn clean on through. Heatsinks won't really do jack against a weaponized laser, either, because it'll burn through the heatsink faster than the heatsink can disperse the energy. Your only real defenses are 1) don't be there when the laser arrives, 2) get behind something, 3) destroy the laser before it fires. As for nukes, they're great space weapons, since you don't have to directly hit your target to mission-kill them. Even better are Casaba howitzers, for when you want to fire a beam of howling plasma death to ruin someone's day.

Oh, I gotcha. Yeah, you're not going to be able to beat a local beam of light to a finish line under any known circumstances. It cheats.

I'm not entirely sure what the objection here is. No object will ever measure its own velocity to be locally greater than c, because no object is actually moving in its own frame of reference in the first place.

Actually, from a distant observer's point of view it should be entirely possible for a spacecraft to exceed c; you've forgotten about the ergosphere. In the vicinity of a rotating black hole, spacetime itself is dragged around it; the ergosphere begins at the point where spacetime is rotating at such a rate that in order to remain 'stationary' with respect to the outside universe, you must travel at the speed of light. An object entering the ergosphere should appear superluminal to a distant observer.

Past a certain intensity, lasers will simply destroy mirrors (even ones perfectly tuned to their wavelength) due to non-linear optical effects. No idea how metamaterial cloaks would fare, but I would guess similarly. Your best bet is to get something between you and the emission source (particulate clouds, plasma, huge chunks of ice) or do random walks, if you're far-enough away...

I was wondering where that went! It would be very nice to have it back again, I agree.

Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence novels are basically set against a backdrop of two Type IV civs at war.

I'm wondering if certain MechJeb in-game settings should have their own window, instead of being scattered about the various other tool windows? For example, "Auto-Stage" on the Ascent Guidance tool, if checked, continues to operate even when the guidance isn't active, meaning it will just fire all your stages when you dock with another vessel (really annoying with my escape pod parachutes). Or "(Velocity) Tolerance" in the Maneuver Planner affecting basically every other tool, such as Rendezvous Guidance. Having all of these collected in their own small window one could leave open for easy access would be delightful.

Orion drive, obviously...

Couldn't you say that the direction that points toward the center of the expansion of the universe is called "the past"? Ie. if the stretching of the skin of the balloon is the metric expansion of space, then the increase in radius of the balloon is the progression of time.

So, just returned to KSP from a short hiatus, just in time to discover the wonders of 0.17! The problem is, using the new parts my rockets are floppier than an adult novelty item. The parts are so weakly-joined that the stock decouplers actually cause my rockets to disintegrate when fired. And of course you can't use struts on a linear rocket to shore them up, so... Help?

I managed to fly it to Mun orbit, hung out for a while, then returned to Kerbin orbit. Certainly didn\'t have enough fuel remaining to land safely, and since there\'s no parachute on the thing, I\'m afraid our brave crew is in for a lithobraking event. XD Oh, and then the program crashed. I guess it couldn\'t bear to see casualties. =P

Oh yeah, I remember exploiting Frontier\'s time accel glitches to dock at a station at about 1/3 lightspeed. ;D

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=8021.0

Oh man it really hates me. I get a buggy to the Mun, drop it off, send the Kerbals home... and the buggy vanishes without a trace. Arrrrgh.

Oh hey, that\'s clever. I\'ll give that a shot.

Well, the idea is I want to be able to jettison the buggies from the lander, with the buggies controlled by Mech-Jebs instead of the command pod. But the way they attach, the mech-jeb ends up intersecting the body of the rocket with... predictable results.

Anybody have any suggestions for side-mounting jettison-able mech-jeb equipped buggies for deployment upon the Mun? Give how the attach points are configured, any attempt I\'ve made at this promptly results in a large explosion. =P

My attempt at the Bill Challenge: +31.5G. That must\'ve sucked. ;D