Nuke

i always figured a giant magnetic deflector station at the l1 lagrange point could do this. which would divert or slow down charged particles on non-mars-intersecting trajectories. another idea involves placing giant solenoids at the poles. the lagrange station makes a lot more sense. you would have considerable power from solar (unless you can power it from the charged particles directly). the station would be huge and you might as well have a habitable ring, an ag ring and an industrial hub. these facilities would take up a mere fraction of the station's mass.

i would like to thank everyone in the lower 48 for stealing all of our snow, i haven't had to shovel once this year. hottest ive seen is 115, while staying at my grandma's house in phoenix. of course that was a long time ago. my mom hated her mom so much she moved to a state with the opposite climate.

that's got to be a violation of the geneva convention.

i kind of doubt an engine failure, because the cascade failure would have been faster and a lot more dynamic. engines blinking out one by one indicates they were going out of spec and being shut down by the engine control system.

like scale the eht to have an aperture the size of the solar system. begin the space telescope spam. then you can start selling time on major space telescopes to amateur astronomers. i also like the idea of the shotgun flyby mission for distant objects. maximize chance of success and data collection.

so one. proportionality matters.

how many people has boeing killed recently? why do they get a pass? i really dont get the elon hate.

i seem to recall what they bought were exploration rigs, the floating type. nasa has killed what, 17 people. how many has elon killed? im not buying the whole government good rich guy bad narrative.

nerf can be dangerous if given to the correct grade schoolers. there was also the supersoaker shotgun, which i made out of my sister's broken super soaker. it would dump its entire tank in one shot. we postulated how cool it would be to fill up with gasoline, but being from a carless family i had little access.

i wouldn't completely write off plasma weapons at this point. there was some research into those in the 90s, which was successful enough to immediately classify. i believe it was featured in an episode of the robocop tv series from the '90s. the situation changes when you do combined arms warfare, as lasers are valid anti-missile systems (some already in use). electric guns are a near future possibility, in naval rail/coil guns. i think even as small arms it has potential for use in a stealth rifle that makes little noise, even less than a suppressed firearm (the cia may have used such weapons for espionage during the cold war). other electric rifle concepts include ceaseless laser initiated rounds, using a propellant that can flash sublimate given a moderate powered laser. if ammo is the concern, the reloading gear and supplies are small enough to pack, at least smaller that the battery pack or generator you would need to power electric weapons. dune goes the other way with a lot of spring powered weapons firing poison darts and slow pellet weapons that can pierce shields. things that pass as nerf darts now becoming leathal is a stretch. the nerf bow i had would be formidable if you stick a gom jabbar in the end, we only had nails unfortunately. i have doubts that electric arc weapons would hit their targets at all. if the ground is closer than the target, its finding ground. electric arcs like to follow the path of least resistance. unless of course you use a plasma bolt as the conductor for a high charge. you may be able to use some kind of beam to strip electrons from the air, and then you have a column of highly conductive plasma in which to move the current. but then again if these are common, then you could develop grounded armor that gives the arc a fast path to ground. i still think these would be finicky, dangerous to use, and easy to defeat.

if i have to choose between an assault rifle and a lighting gun, im picking the assault rifle. weapons should be more dangerous to the enemy than you. i got a black eye the first time i used a scoped rifle, but i also got 80 pounds of venison so it kind of worked out. still beats electrocuting yourself because there was a ground path you didnt see. there are better ways, like take a 40mm grenade launcher, and have a grenade with some electrodes and the tazer bits inside. you could probibly also fit that into a 12 gauge shell with a reduced powder charge. with how small/powerful laser tools have become, usually for rust removal or metal cutting, they would go through human flesh quite readily, probibly body armor too. the practicality of laser weaponry on the battlefield leaves something to be desired. if you can some how get rid of things like the geneva convention you still have to deal with the issue of potentially blinding everyone on the battlefield. the enemy, your own soldiers, civilians, the operator, etc. you could presumably see those with combat engineers as non-combat equipment and under some dire situations see them use it as a weapon (probibly be the last thing you see). i think the coolest scifi sidearm is probibly the ppg from babylon5. used explicitly because it can wound, kill and not penetrate the hull. i assume its a plasma weapon. the firearm equivalent is frangible ammo. but if you cannot penetrate hull, you will have little luck with body armor. so once again i am preferring slug throwers. now comes the problem with eye protection. lasers come in different wavelengths. this is usually fixed by the lasing medium, but its no quite that simple. when you use diode pumped solid state lasers, you get a bunch of ir that is converted to another color (in the case of yag, thats green), but not all the ir gets used up, some comes out the end, so you get a mix of ir and green. so you need glasses that can block both wavelengths. but presumably you would end up with a mix of common wavelengths and a few uncommon ones, and so you might as well just used blacked out goggles and feel your away around. you might be able to use some automatic filtering using augmented reality displays. lasers can also disable cameras, you might have a number of hot spares that you replace after the mission or use non-optical sensors, eg accoustic or radar. if you have the tech you could just replace all your soldier's eyes with laser hardened artificial eyes, good if you want a cyborg army.

another possibility, texas has a lot of abandoned off shore oil platforms. the type that anchor to the seafloor. maybe you can buy one of those.

from a safety standpoint you are better off recovering on the west coast, good luck finding a location that isnt on the elon hate bandwagon. alaska is the only one i can think of, lots of starlink fans here, but thats kind of out of the orbital plane, nothing less than 51 degrees north (that would be adak). spinlaunch tried to locate in unalaska, which is a native village, and the only complaint was that they wouldn't have brought enough jobs (spacex would probibly do better in that regard). even then the logistics in either the aleutians or the panhandle are practically non existent, limited to barge traffic with no roads (archipelago life) or deep water ports that im aware of. i think its all moot in that i dont think the starship has much in cross range capability. then you have the problem of shipping the ships around, and would probibly have to go through the panama canal or retrograde it for the reverse trip. have a base on the western coast of florida, then you have a lot better logistics. as much as having a starbase in my home state would be awesome, thats probibly the better option. otherwise you are potentially shotgunning debris across mexican airspace. then again you are more likely to overshoot in the event of an engine failure coming down from orbit and a breakup undershoots usually.

im well aware of that. it just marketing speak for 'it has a computer in it'. when you put computers in things then thing inherits computer problems in addition to the usual problems the thing has on its own. i shouldn't have to do the software update on the fridge every time i want a beer, and the internet doesn't need to know about my cat's litter box activities. then on top of that they use it as an excuse to charge subscription fees to fund software updates, which they in turn dont do and thing gets bricked when the company goes under.

we still havent had any major snowfall this year, and i live in alaska. some dustings, biggest snowfall melted after only 2 days. weather keeps alternating between wet+cold and dry+colder. this is playing havok with my sinuses. still haven't used my steam deck for anything more strenuous than super mario 3 (emulated) after one year of ownership. its a cool toy that i have had diminishingly little time to play with. most of that time goes to remapping controls. ive also had problems getting games with native linux builds to run on the thing, for lack of build infrastructure on the deck itself. ive also become extremely aware of my inability to use small format screens, even the fancy oled, without reading glasses.