cantab

It won't help. The theoretical maximum speed increase from a single gravity assist is twice the speed of the assisting body. A practical number of gravity assists won't get anywhere near what is required.

Alpha Persei Association

Without mods, cheats, or glitches, it's just not happening. Period. You're looking at 3 *thousand* km/s of delta-V. Using the ion engine with its 4200 s ISP, to get a 0.04 ton OKTO2 to 1% of the speed of light would take a ship massing 2 x 1030 tonnes. That's a hundred thousand times the mass of Kerbol. And that's if your engines and fuel tanks were all massless.

Alkaid

5/10 default rating, I don't know who that is. I know it looks like some sort of radio dish - because it is. A weaponised radio dish.

Same way - some of the material explodes and it blows the rest apart. It might make less practical difference though, since flying antimatter is itself pretty hazardous. As for sci-fi weapons in general, well anything in sufficiently hard sci-fi is viable by definition. Movie energy weapons are probably not plausible as depicted mainly because a real energy weapon isn't going to produce a slow-moving glowing blob. But if we consider that as a cinematic convention - just like how bullets get depicted as sparking on impact - then things look more plausible. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsed_energy_projectile comes to mind. It's probably the closest thing to a Star Trek Phaser that can be built. Like the phaser, the PEP can have selectable "stun" or "kill" power, and could be useful for heating things and making holes. The PEP though is a vehicle-mounted weapon, a long way from pistol-sized.

Amalthea

New Amsterdam

I read the title and thought of the financial sort of inflation

North Star

Albeiro

Gloucester

Dubhe

9/10. I had to dock a point for being an acronym not really allowed on the forum.

I want my, I want my, I want my ... GIVE YOU UP!

S0-2

Ashford

Happy in my current region I'm afraid.

Encamp

9/10. OK, 100 g, yeah, insane. Jump to 37s for the best shot:

They probably just want as little outside interference as possible. Vertical integration - and I mean the business strategy not the rocket assembly method - seems to be SpaceX's thing.

Eston

0/10. Very powerful but single use only, and that one's already been used

I dunno, I'll bet you've had people saying you should have an i5. (They'd be wrong IMHO, most games will run great on an i3 and a 970.) Oh, and another funny thing about my own build: I don't have the power or drive LEDs hooked up. You can't even tell by looking at the tower whether it's on or not. I do this so there aren't annoying lights if I have to leave the PC on while I sleep in the same room.

My view is that a "kill switch" won't work for the exact opposite reason - that the nanobot replication inevitably will occasionally make new mutations. For the nanobot to make its killswitch necessarily requires some resources, and so a mutant nanobot that loses the killswitch will have a competitive advantage and reproduce more successfully that the original design. It could be that long before you ever try using the killswitch, the nanobot population already evolved away. Worse, this argument applies to *any* attempted method of controlling the things. You also might think that some sort of cryptography could prevent the mutants from operating, but the cryptographic 'lock' will itself evolve away.