Nuke

i think proton-boron11 fusion is more viable than he3. if you are doing he3+deuterium you can lose energy to d-d side reactions, creating neutrons. so not 100% aneutronic. and boron is pretty damn abundant on earth. though if you are going to build a moon base its probably better to source the fuel locally, and you don't need a whole lot. but i like to point out that we are talking about second-third gen fusion reactors. the first reactors are going to target the fuels with the biggest cross sections as they are easier to fuse, and that's d-t and d-d.

who knows what we will find when we start stripping away the regolith.

i thought we were building a fleet of orions? the only propellant you need is uranium, which i believe has been found on the moon. you would probably need to refine that, burn it in a reactor to produce plutonium and refine it further to make it weapons grade. what other consumables you need for that process, im not sure which could be locally sourced. but they are certainly safer to stick on a rocket bound for the moon than nuclear pulse units. as for antimatter, thats certainly not something i want to mass produce on earth or anywhere near it.

im for a moon colony because that's is the best place for placing the infrastructure needed for large scale solar system exploration and colonization. mars is significantly harder to get to from earth.

at some point you are going to need the logistic infrastructure large scale colonization efforts will require. doing that sooner rather than later is going to have considerable long term payout. shipping the large number of nuclear pulse units alone would require a perfect success rate, as any mishap there will be a huge ecological disaster. thats really something that should be manufactured on the moon. besides when everyone and their mother has their own orion ship, you are going to need gas stations in as many places as possible.

you dont ship an orion, you ship orion parts, or make them in situ. logistics dictate whether they are built on the lunar surface or in orbit depending on where the bulk of the materials are sourced. building it in earth orbit might be possible, but i would use something other than the orion to get it a safe distance from the planet. and launching the first orion from earth is probably fine, but if you are going to have a fleet of them the moon is a more sensible and practical place. doing an antarctic launch is probably fine if you don't do a gravity turn and just go for escape velocity (i usually do this when launching an orion in ksp). so load your foundry, mining equipment, base modules and portable uranium processing plant on that first orion to bootstrap your moon base. do it on a regular basis though and you might run out of penguins. i also don't think we have reached the theoretical maximum that is possible from a chemical rocket. i dont even think we are in diminishing returns territory yet. its just we dont currently have a need for anything larger than our current launch vehicles. but in the future when you are building your star fleet, then you definitely have a need for another tier of heavy lift rockets. if starship turns out to be the c-130 of rockets, then what will our an225 of rockets look like? rather than send a single big delivery it might be better to do it like a colony of ants would go about building an ant hill, which wouldn't be too unfeasible if we have fully reusable launch vehicles.

i dont think you would need pulse detonation with an antimatter engine, a steady state engine would be better (mostly because you are not dependant on a large mechanical shock absorber to not die). airbreathing antimatter engines may also be possible. though i think if we were going to have fleets of orion/antimatter/torch ships, it might be a good idea to launch them from a moon base. slow plasma tugs can handle the earth orbit <-> lunar orbit cargo transport and reusable chemical rockets can do the launching (say starships or skylons). i think its a lot more economical to keep the reactor on the ground making chem fuel than it is to put it on the ship for some kind of exotic propulsion, and if you are using hydrolox you have a more or less closed fuel cycle that is environmentally friendly (no carbon, no nuclear waste products). while it might be a good idea to keep your expensive antimatter motherships in space, and rely on reusable shuttles for planetary operations, landing them on planets and moons with no existing population should be ok so long as its safe and practical for the ship to do so.

i don't expect to see aneutronic fuels coming into play until second and third generation power reactors. you need about 10x breakeven for a viable power reactor, but i think aneutronics need 100x or greater. but they do stand to come with efficiency gains do to the fact you can use direct conversion which might make up for some of the gap there.

put the guinness down, you have had too many already.

brushless motors cram a lot of power into a little motor. so provided you have a lot of power to work with, say a fusion reactor, then an array of small ducted fans would work on planets with suitable atmosphere. any other planet, probably some kind of nerva or fusion rocket, any life forms are likely protected by domes anyway. me personally i think i would differentiate my atmospheric shuttles from non-atmo shuttles. former would likely be shuttle-like belly landers with air breathing engines. maybe some kind of multi-propellant thermal engines, which can run off the local atmosphere, or internal tankage. the latter would be much more simple craft likely with a small number of main engines in a nozzle down config. mothership would be equipped with whatever shuttles it would need for its mission. exploration type ships (sort of like the enterprise) would likely carry both and maybe other more specialized craft (like inter-vessel shuttles, gas giant fuel skimmers or sun divers that can operate close to a star or on hot planets like venus).

you could probably construct cellular machinery to constantly scan dna and error correct it every time it splits, spewing out a corrected strand. perhaps have a little self destruct gene that gets triggered if an error is detected. such that a bacterium with good code can split, and one with bad code can not. so either the cell does its job or it dies.

i do kind of like general fusion's "you are all overthinking this" approach. it also solves the problem of getting heat out of the reactor. the steam to drive the pistons can also be sourced from the secondary water loop, meaning you can operate much of the high energy components directly on the thermal output, hell even the liquid metal pumps could be steam driven. having to convert all that thermal energy to electricity before using it to power reactor components would make the whole thing less efficient. then you got my favorite, the polywell. they dont release much information or very often but the last word was they are doing the design work on their demo reactor now, using a lot of really high end supercomputer simulations to optimize and verify the final design. dr bussard just wanted to do a big (if you call 3-meter big) reactor but didn't get the funding before he died. his successor dr park is taking a more conservative route. i kind of which they would do more public outreach. they only seem to come out of the woodwork when they need funding, get it, and then get back to work. and to be fair it likely costs less than iter's public outreach program.

aren't those already a thing? i mean is a very rare structure but they exist. you can usually get around those with a vpn. just bounce off of a us server.

anyone who doesn't believe in evolution hasn't had to put down an insect infestation. them critters will evolve faster than you can counter. poison one works great at first, but subsequent generations will rapidly grow resistance. so you deploy poison number 2. a couple generations later that stops working, you go back to number 1 and nothing happens. so you bring in poison 3. after a long campaign of chemical warfare you might actually succeed at putting them down. and thats nothing compared to what people who work with germs can observe on even shorter timescales. as for the whole documentry i could have summed it up here:

if we could move atoms around we could make really fast computers one atom at a time. that or really small movies.

that could be a sign that its only downhill from here.

i liked that there were some hard sci-fi elements in the design of the ships. despite the fact that the jupiters are all belly landers (which i consider acceptable because space shuttle with the jupiters being treated as shuttles), they dock with the resolute in an up is forward orientation. but they seemed to forget that pretty damn fast. but season 2 went and dumbed it all down even worse.

today's star trek picard episode had one of the worst space battles in star trek history. so sick of seeing the cut your throttle maneuver they stole from top gun where inertia is immediately forgotten. only reason that worked in top gun was because of the lift induced drag. the mandalorian did it too, but in a much less lame way. and the crew acting out the slowness of the inertial dampeners seemed overly exaggerated from usual.

binged holocaust movies, listen to angel of death on a loop, had a bagel, didn't forget.

we had some nice weather last month, and by nice i mean absolutely fridged. as the sky tends to clear when its really cold out. you could see the stars, but if you look too long your eyeballs would freeze in place. then it warmed up and started snowing. even in this little rural alaskan town there is still enough light pollution to be problem, but go 10 miles out of city limits and you get a good view.

i dont think these funding bills tell us anything of value. most of the interesting stuff requires long term planning that exceeds the length of any one funding bill, or administration. things are constantly being defunded to get votes around election time. sometimes i think they set up pork early on so they can cancel it later on to make them look like a hero to the tax payer, a process that likely wastes more money than it saves.

can we move europa so that it orbits the super earth? the merged jupiter-saturn's moon system is a little crowded. maybe we can keep urannus, but as a moon of same, or just tilt jupiter-saturn 90 degrees and add its mass to the whole shebang. makes me wonder if we merged all the gas giants if we can haz a second star.

i do think picard was jumping to conclusions a little too quickly, which i felt was out of character. but i guess that was done to move the plot along. otherwise the entire episode would have been picard second guessing himself and we would have to wait till next episode to get the action sequence.

i kind of thought it felt like trek again, after so many things that did not. its full of subtle easter eggs. for example when dahj sees the vision of picard the first time, THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!

i think he needs altitude control for his balloon. probably a ballast system of sorts. or perhaps a small hydrogen/helium tank and release valve to control the volume of lifting gas. problem with those systems is thay require consumables which would limit flight time. another option might be a small heater for the gas bag, get a small amount of buoyancy control.