PB666

There is actually a way. Its akin to the star-trek single human probe. You create a spicule, its direction faces the detector. It emits heat to a very small foot print forward. Using this technique you could spread an attack over the sky and therefore lower the dTheta that the ememy can see, you can even them approach from the glare vector of large stars so that the craft is shrouded in reflections. Of course the only form of propulsion would be a photon drive, since all plums create signature. The target eventually detects the spicule but by that time the spicules are already very close and can engage the enemy in a basic one-off destruction and only works against single isolated ships. I could be a means of territorial defense, or could be used by a planet for targeting moon or asteroid based laser weapons. The spicules could be unmanned and in large number would communicate via close low intensity radio communications. The article basically argues that your footprint in space given the sun and internal heating is your signature. The only way to circumvent this is to reduce the crossectional area facing the target. By reducing that area and continually placing the most reduced area at the target you become invisible except at close range. Another technique is to bury your base so deeply in a asteroid that your heat signature and a normal asteroid heat signature are nearly indistinquishable. The heat signature of the asteroid can be drop by very slight changes in its surface structure and albedo.

Well nasa has done a crane landing and two inflatable bouncy ball landings. they want to have an inflatble low atmosphere drag shield but that is currently not working out fir them in testing. Thus it is science of a sort to do a fire retro landing. It kind of reminds me of Mech Jebs lander though. Anyway theres two years to add small sciens packages if they like. Might i recommend a small tethered crawler. Just land at the beagle site and pull open the solar panels for the brits, then give it a booster cable.

The stresses on the bottom of the launch will be roughly the same, but at the top of the launch phase at the close to the end of its burn it could see momentary g-forces as high as 5.

This is going to be the fate of any aggressor that is not directly in secured control of its resource base. Technnology in and of itself cannot win a war, certainly not keep the peace afterward.

Where is the not-like button?

Not three galaxies, the collision of three galaxies, I think we are getting galaxy size and black hole size confused. Big black holes need not be at the center of huge galaxies or mergent galaxies. And holes don't merge often until well after the galaxies have merged.

They don't own the land, but trying to move them would be a violation of the outer space treaty. The problem is inch mile, if we say X country can own a bit of celestial Y, then they come and stake the entire Y. We might do that but I can think of at least one country that might.

Then don't expect repeated recycling, at that margin level they will have a pretty rapid accumulation of stress. The FAA may mandate 1.5, the industry has higher standard on the core structural parts, such as wing and pressure hull, obviously some of the clear air sheer turbulance would have taken out the craft if it was1.5. CRS-8 i have fine captured the data, will present it soon, but a little story in that data, after Max-q, the ride becomes pretty bouncy, I captured momentary fluctuations over 2g on the second stage. Vibrations are not easily countered for, they can fall into black swan territory. Needs lots of emperical observations to determine a adequate safety margin. I wonder how ofter they are going to do xray scan of the frame.

Wow, we are in the rebellious mood today, we are trying to launch nuclear attacks on non-existance lunar colonies, now we are going to ignore the outer space treaty, hey lets get rid of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and just have personilzed nuclear weapons. You neighbor walks on your grass, kaboom.

Tidally locked earths would not have a protective magnetic feild, the dynamo would falter, and the atmosphere would diasappear. @Spaceception we first need to find an earth homologue, then we can discuss the potential multiple earth like planets in the core of thier respective habitable zones.

Tidal effects on binary earths would be horrenous, talking about the bay of fundy with 100 meter tides. Martitime cultures would be limited to well protected ports far from the ocean and several serial inlets inside serial bays. You guys love to fantasize. Too much of a good thing is still too much of a good thing.

And would need to be captured by a flyby and returned.

The ion drive in KSP is 1000 times more pwerful than RL, it delivers 2000 N of thrust, and the electrical generation capacity of KSP is nerfed. I have modeled my own drives based on the most high powered stuuf. Let me share my conclusions. 1. for human space travel, unless there are fusion drives that produce 10 to 100 times the power to weight ratio of solar electric power, the ion drive is nothing more than a interstellar ressuplly drone. 2. ISP is at the direct mercy of power consumption, for any given power absolute, increase of ISP cause an inverse reduction in thrust, increase in thrust causes a proprtionally rapid use of fuel. 3. If electric power is unlimited, that means if you could use matter, antimatter to power the ion drive, for every gram a mass consumed, it is efficient to propell also 1 gram of matter and 2 grams is not inefficient either. Thus the best you can hope for with a gram sized payload is something around 0.7c and start stop about 0.3 c. But acceleration is at the expense of payload, so ion drive can never be anything more than a genertaional ship propulsion system. And btw the most credible system at present.

Getting political the problem you have to consider that these asymmetrical powers had non-asymmetric fates (Keeping this as absolutely apolitical, in the post WWII context - Cho-san peninsula, Afghanistan, Indochina, East block) Aggressively applied military power, under a global world view, cannot by itself win conflicts, instead it breeds conflicts and antagonistic combatants. @todofwar Sending a man to the moon first, not because you could wipe your enemy off the face of the earth, but because you have not crippled yourself socially, economically and intellectually in some 19th/early 20th century process . . . . to a point that you cannot as a superpower compete on the world stage. Victory on the moon is building a better, more efficient, more self-sufficient base of operation, and then topping yourself doing another colony on the other pole better, its not exclusive or excluding others. That would be like blowing up ones own satellite. Victory is landing on a barge and failing, landing on land, and then nailing the landing on the barge. That's how you convince your global viewing detractors. This is why I disagree about the shuttle program, cancelling it without a suitable replacement, no matter how inefficient the highly awarded repetitious program was, was self-marginalizing progress. The process of designing an attack, Yamamoto, trained in the west, he did all too well, and then he told his leaders (Tojo emperial council) execution comes with grave warnings and he repeated these publically. While he was planning this, is primary opponent was planning its economic growth which included social modernization. But those leaders headed not his warning and grasp at his successes, many of those leaders survived at least a few year more (on until 1989). Yamamoto was taken out by his enemies over the Solomon Islands 2 years later. Conflict breeds its own self-destruction and designing for conflict creates a pretense for that; but the dogs never lose war's trail. It is something that Nagasaki-gen like to remind the Imperial government. The Greek tragedy that unveiled his weakness, after failing to convince his peers, the only viable choice is to not to participate in the design or execution further. See the qualifications for war crimes.

I think the implication is to read the original article, Space X is desirous of a 2026 manned mission, but until they actually start building a mars manned vehicle, best to keep it limited to the unmanned stuff. The 2018 is unmanned. Presumbably by then they will have the boca chica pad in operation and they can launch mulitple vehicles at once that can hook up in space. As for right now, its not a really special mission. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36155591 let me qoute this so that Spaception won't overlook it this time. L1 or L2 you are in orbit around a point on the line that the SOI intercepts. Theoretically, Part of the ship is thus in solar SOI and part in Earths SOI, though really it bobs in an out. Technically an L1 an L2 orbit is a satellite of the earth/moon//sun system (a binary in that context).

yeah and the moon was 1000 times closer and required half the dV to get on and off of. HUmans have this thing, don't know if you have heard of it, its called eating. Think of it as DoT if you don't have food, eventually its 3 humans, then 2 humans, then 1 and then a smelly capsule.

Ok now you are fatasizing. Its just a capsule, not like it hasn't been done before. Getting to mars, no problem, landing on mars, a problem, getting off of mars or getting humans on mars, bigger problem, getting 4 humans on mars, not yet doable. Getting them back to earth, r/futurology.

Well, it was afterall the desire of NASA for repetitive features to be privatized. I don't consider that subsidization, I call that looking at hapless Soyuz performance of late and having no shuttle and needing an alternative to at least get food and fuel to the ISS and collaborating. If we had a working shuttle program and we were still fueling space X development, then it would be a subsidy. Ah hah it works one out of 5 times, thanks I think.

But the problem is that the exit velocities for the moon are slightly faster than then trajectory velocities of a high powered weapon. Suppose you have a settled moon, many countries, prolly many living near the poles and sharing resources like power, etc. You then hit one of them, even with a conventional bomb, you are going to have projectiles flying out with zero atmospheric drag force and impacting these other nationalities at 1km/sec projectiles. Good luck with your foreign relationships. I have distilled my comments down, hopelessly to try to put an end to these childish threads. I have to make a point here, avoiding the forum no-nos. I going to do this by reduction-ad-absurbum. Obviously so because some lack a historic perspective. There was a time in pre-human and human warfare when destructive conflict made sense. During this time our natural environment posed most of our capacity, and thus the conflict did not degrade capacity. If chimp troupe A and B conflict, males are lost, females are exchanged, and the youngest are killed off, but the capacity remains undiminished. Since WWI, this is not the state of modern warfare, the winners often lost as much as the losers, and the war to end all wars was not an end (in fact it corruption of the Mandates that was the beginning to the major conflicts we see today). The further a combatant was from starting a war, and the smallest amount of time spent from the conflict generally translate to better circumstances after the war. An example is the Soviet Union, which invaded Poland, eventually on the winning side, lost 20,000,000 and the capacity of a large swath, e.g. Stalingrad, of land was lost and had to be rebuilt). Germany was split in half, optimum capacity was lost, lost a large proportion of males, and a substantial number of its intellectuals. Where did alot of the surviving intellectuals end up . . .in the place that avoided conflict. We can just follow one system, the 12 or so US submarines in the pacific in 1941, basically defensive information gathering, short range, low power, no deck gun, no radar, low quality sonar, 4 torpedos, within a year they were longer, had more torpedos, more powerful torpedos, within 2 had radar, deck guns, many more torpedos - many more accurate torpedos, within 3.5 years had sank the largest capital ship built in the war a few days on its maiden voyage, by wars end there was a saying you could walk from Singapore to Japan on the periscopes of US submarines. The maritime capacity of the initiating combatant was reduced by 70% by a system they did not even consider as a primary target wars start. Bombs, tanks, and pitched battles had less to do with wars end than two smart technologies, the smart-sub and the A-Bomb. Both of these made the wars end inevitable, and more to the point, the initiating combatants knew this before they knew the H-bomb even existed, because they could no longer control the seas nor could they could protect themselves from stealth attacks. This epitomizes modern conflict, you cannot assume in any attack that your target does not have a reserve capacity of resources (in the case of subs underdeveloped intellectual capacity), to do to you something a magnitude more degenerative than you did to them. In the modern period overt attacks are basically pluri-degenerative, in a lunar circumstance all of the capacity is in human construction, there is no dense forest to fall back onto (reduction ad adsubum - but in fact the baseline state is fully considerable). These are all 14-PSI balloons with a grand fear of needles. I think the movie Dr. Strangelove basically points out the ultimate outcome of a nuclear war is basically bunker warfare, a few who survive in bunkers that have no capacity to produce and so winning is absurd. Anywhere on the moon is a Strangelove War (the vacuum of the moon is comparable to the radiation of atomics), on the moon you go throwing needles around and they will all pop, the ones you want and those you don't want. Your bunker warfare precedes any conflict otherwise starting the conflict basically ends it and everyone loses everything. Not only that but those folks living in the balloons are the elite of the engineering, science and technology world, they have associates that can basically freeze any electronic system ever built, and if so, motivated to build and arm a better stealth weapon. There is an old saying, those who live in glass houses should not throw stones. The contra is also true, it is better to Conserve capacity and built an social/intellectual capacity that is primarily defensive, but can be converted to offensive, than to initiate conflict. It is not necessary for competitors to know all the reserve, but occasionally it should be made public a preventive show of capacity. The only reason to do this is to prevent a neophyte demagogue from rising up and mustering ignorance. This leaves only earth locked terrorist that have a belief that lunar colonization is bad, or earth or far off competitors that are suffering a decline of market share due to lunar capacity. Again if you are an earth bound terrorist group and you attack my group on the moon, with a space to GSO dV of 2500 m/s and no atmosphere, All I need is a few solar panels and a high output microwave laser and basically were you came from and your capacity is toast. There is no logic in attacking a space-based culture in the modern age, you may win in the end, it would be a hollow victory. We in this culture place a premium on games of war and warfare, hallway shoot-em ups and the like, but these technologies which allow the games also make the real-life warfare much more subject to intellectualism and less subject to animism, because ultimately the smarter the weapon the more obvious our ignorance.

Aside from the fact you are devolving into modern politics, historical i refer to the name cold and idea of surrogate combatants. The poles of the conflict are trying to divorce themselves from the two previous generations of global conflict for good reason, read the history and think about those reasons. The dogs of war bark, slash and gnarl as long as the combatants remain alive. This is why history repeats itself. If you are engaged in an intellectual combat, you want to demonstrate to the non-alligned that your system is better when not in conflict. For this reason i would argue that engaging in lunar wars and space wars immediately places the aggressor in a situation of now having to dispell the impression that it cannot succeed socially or intellectually so that it has to devolve into self destructive military combat. Militarism looks good internally, but almost always makes one look worse globally. I can give the example of the opinions that are created when one group blows their satellite into >3000 pieces and how this 'KSP' group of multinationals reflect on that act.

ICBMs are suborbital and you dont have to stop them before the hit the ground. Nose of the icbm is ball shaped to create drag with out creating alot of turbulence, you can create a less speedy rentry by launching an arc leaving the atmospher at 45 degrees or so. you can insulate under the cap to keep the heat on the surface.

@Nibb31 , I think you are being cynical for cynicisms sake, sure there are repaints and recycle, used equip checks, but once that is complete ther are the standard LP venue of strapping payloads and refuelings. It may only be a small proportion, and once they have the BC pad finished they could just fly their crew to Brownsville have them work on that for a few weeks then fly the crew back to canavarel. I know technicians thats all they do is fly from one place to the next and repair stuff. Think about oilfield specialist or drilling platform technicians and engineers. Lifes a beach, for the LP guys, literally.

In the replies already given it should be obvious.

Gas pipelines are marked every few hundred feet.

Seriously?