cantab

I don't think the projectile would be obscured by plasma all the way, would it? So have the projectile rely on inertial guidance or even no guidance at all during the "blind zone", then activate a more capable system once sight and communication is restored. Getting into how ISIS should be fought will be considered too political for the forum, but how it is being fought by the USA and its allies is definitely not by levelling the entire cities they operate in.

It's very common at the cheap end of the market, especially in compact "2 in 1" laptop/tablets. Although on a second look, because you basically only see such eMMC storage paired with ultra-low-power CPUs and usually not enough RAM, it would be hard to isolate the impact of the individual components anyway. As well as making any buying decision even harder. I'm just *really* apprehensive about having the OS on a mechanical drive nowadays.

Granted. You're fired. I wish the forum software would crash if a thread reaches 530 pages.

Granted. But despite their seemingly peaceful nature, much of what the aliens teach us is the arts of warfare in the stars. The reason is made clear just a few weeks later when Second Contact is made with an advanced race of omnicidal aliens, or rather with their nuclear bombardment of Earth. I wish for a self-refilling glass.

I duck and cover. I throw a table at the next poster.

https://en.lichess.org/training If you're even vaguely into chess, at least.

It's a fair point. Physicists and engineers typically dream up space missions based on current human needs and limits, but it's wrong to assume those needs and limits will always be the same. I've previously raised a similar issue regarding the supposed difficulty of radiation shielding on interplanetary travel - if cancer becomes an easily treatable disease then modest amounts of radiation are no big deal.

At least in Britain N2O is going to get harder to get hold of, because it's become popular as - actually, as something I'll get a forum infraction for mentioning here.

As far as airbreathing engines go, I'd say a pulsejet offers one advantage - it's dirt cheap. The question is still whether it can provide enough performance to be worth it as a first stage or a booster. I don't know that much about how they perform, in particular how their thrust and efficiency vary with speed.

The probe does not survive re-entry. I drop the world's largest pumpkin on the next poster.

Kheap Stuff Productions, going by all the kerfuffle over Squad's pay. Krash System Program, on the consoles. No, I'm not jaded and disillusioned, why do you ask?

Yeah, the world's superpower, aspiring superpowers, and well-developed nations will nonetheless plan and invest for the possibility of a war against an equal or superior enemy. In the most recent such war, the Falklands conflict, one drawback of bombers was exposed - their limited range. It took multiple tankers and tanker-to-tanker refuelling just to get one or two Vulcan bombers per run from the nearest UK air base to strike the Falklands. Even an extensive network of overseas air bases cannot put everywhere within easy range of bombers, while aircraft carriers are expensive and relatively slow to reach a destination. An orbital bombardment satellite can strike anywhere in the world by itself on fairly short notice, though whether such a satellite would ever be cheaper than an aircraft carrier is an open question.

Does anyone know of any benchmarks or tests comparing performance of eMMC to mechanical hard drives and to proper SSDs. All I've been able to find by googling is vague statements and no real numbers. Myself and a family member might be getting a new laptop and I don't want it crippled by slow storage, but laptops with 'real' SSDs cost more than we'd like to spend.

*Crashes in* No. @goldenpeach ?

Well yeah, an impact equivalent to 10 tons of TNT isn't "small". It's on the level of the largest conventional bombs in history, such as that Grand Slam and the more recent MOAB. And there aren't any proper bombers that can deliver those bombs any more, only cargo aircraft, so an operational orbital bombardment satellite would be significantly more able to strike targets. On the other hand, it's no nuke, and it's certainly nothing like the Hollywood silliness.

For parts that *aren't* wings or control surfaces all you need to do is make sure it has a sensible collider, one that is accurate to the visible mesh and doesn't have any topological weirdness. But for wing and control surface parts my understanding is you do need to make a specific FAR configuration as well.

Granted. Their next launch goes boom. And the one after that. And the one after that. And then they go bankrupt. I wish the night was longer.

I would say because we know how much background noise known sources make. If we don't observe measurably more then we can be pretty confident there's no signal. If we do observe excess noise, it warrants investigating - that's how we discovered the Cosmic Microwave Background. (Which is a previously-unknown source of noise.) Practical communication signals are likely to have a finite bandwidth, because transmitters and receivers are built to work effectively across a certain frequency range and because the available frequency range is likely to need dividing up between various users. Even if the signal itself is indistinguishable from noise, the presence of *excess* noise across a limited frequency range tells us there's something interesting.

This is a really good insight into the feasibility (or lack thereof) of "rods of god" weapons. Of course it's circumvented if you can make the rods in space. Anyway, as for what it might look like, well it's a hypervelocity impact and there are many small-scale tests of those. A railgun round striking thin metal targets results in fireballs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2QqOvFMG_A A small projectile against a thicker metal target (an empty gas cylinder), again a fireball and a crater-like hole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqjq-LQgGDk An impact into sand gives a spectacularly large crater, but no fireball: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbkkMKkjx6k I don't know why the third result is. I might guess it's because the potential fireball is "snuffed out" by the projectile penetrating too deep; in the previous two tests it was metal-on-metal which will mean less penetration than metal-into-sand. On the other hand I've also read that it depends on speed. The scaling for this sort of impacts is fairly well known from simulations and experiments like these, and there's a rather nice website: http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/ Plugging some example numbers in: http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/cgi-bin/crater.cgi?dist=1&distanceUnits=1&diam=3&diameterUnits=1&pdens=&pdens_select=8000&vel=7.8&velocityUnits=1&theta=45&wdepth=&wdepthUnits=1&tdens=2500 The suggestion is that we can't get a decent fireball by just "dropping" something from LEO, it's actually not fast enough. And a fairly small object is only going to cause a fairly small crater. Basically I would imagine that sand video, but scaled up to knock cars and buildings flying. The impactor needs to pretty much bullseye it's target, and if it can do that then this is actually a relatively precise and restrained weapon. Though not covered by the calculator, I would speculate that the wider danger is of large pieces of debris - cars, chunks of buildings, body parts - creating secondary impacts. If the speed is increased, there's another problem - a small object is likely to break up. The airblast is similar to a bomb going off. For the 3 metre iron ball example that makes it potentially a *less* effective weapon because the blast happens too high up! Although fragments may still hit the ground.

You know, that might be a way for any modding site to bring in some revenue. Especially if it can do things like SMS alerts, and maybe secure a deal with leading modders to put new versions on that site first in exchange for a share of the revenue. /offtopic.

Granted. It hits you at 5 km/s. I wish to be immune to hypervelocity impacts.

I shoot down the missiles with 13 MW green lasers, then turn my 8 mm railguns against the next poster.

Granted. It's on the other side of the world. But legally, it's yours. I wish for peace.

Granted. They killed your puppy. What, you don't remember it? Your parents must never have told you the truth. I wish for a 12-inch pianist.

Granted. It amplifies your tabletop into a solid beam of wood that spears through the nearest aircraft. Unsurprisingly you get arrested for it. I wish Children of a Dead Earth had more engines.