Nuke

if i cant taste its fear i dont want it.

there is this thing among some members of the extended family called "grease bread" which is pretty much dried bread or half cooked toast, dunked into the drippings of the thing you just fried in your skillet, browned up and served. no flavor no nothing. just bread soaked with fat to the point where it tastes like neither.

mashed potato pancakes. which i have made myself on occasion. are damn good when done right, but easy to screw up. mashed potatoes need to be no more than 24 hours old and should be real potatoes, not instant. it can be done but i find the texture horrific. mine are a pretty basic mix of butter, milk and salt. normal bacon, none of that maple crap. my sister once served a pizza with maple bacon on it and it was weird don't do that, if you want maple flavor dunk it in the syrup like normal people, there is no other reason for it to have maple flavor. doing something weird like roast garlic taters and it can ruin it. no garlic, nothing against it in particular, but there is a right way and a wrong way to use it. i usually chop my bacon then fry my onions and bacon together with some butter and bacon fat, drain and let cool. caramelized onions and crispy bacon are desired. i usually do a 60:40 split between taters and pancake batter (i usually use bisquick, but scratch works too). i also fry it in butter instead of oil because butter is good. since theres meat and taters in there a little salt and pepper never hurts. also consider doing a cheese layer. put down a hand full cheese, then the batter then another handful cheese its really good (if you have a pan that doesn't stick to cheese that is, otherwise you are in for a mess). sour creme may also be added, hell anything that goes good on a baked potato works.

any fast food.

i think women are actually better as space ship crew because of their smaller frames. less mass to move around. anyone with dwarfism as well. i figure if we ever get to the point of genetically engineering specifically for creating spaceship crews, you would want to find the way to stunt bodily growth without harming mental development as much as possible. perhaps having crews which are very child like in appearance but with an abnormally large head. your typical grey alien seems a plausible genetic engineering target.

seeing the amount of automation you usually find on a spacecraft i think the smaller crew wins out. a lot of the scifi series with big crews are really just taking the naval ship in space analogy a bit to far, star trek and star wars being the biggest offenders. and it usually goes against their own technology to have so many hands on deck. with so many droids in star wars you think they could handle much of the ship operations and maintenance. in a hard scifi setting crew is dead weight (mass) so you want a crew that is full of multi talented people who can be cross trained to maximize the knowledge base and experience while minimizing numbers. large crew also means a beefier life support system or a bigger pressure hull which is more mass to deal with. more provisions, more gear, space suits, etc. on a space ship less is more.

it does make some assumptions about relative age of civilizations in close proximity, and those arent the only ones. good scifi is built on assumptions. but its unrealistic that you would be able to make assumptions about how an alien biology works, at least not without collecting biological samples, which puts you in danger of being detected. genetic engineering is hard enough when you know how the biology works. our civilization would be writing papers on it for decades before they could apply that knowledge. even if you are working from your own biological stock, you couldn't know how your biology and their biology would interact. you would have to prove any bioweapon it in the lab before deployment, and thus require samples. if you have grey goop at your disposal then the premise of colonizing an existing biosphere would become rather dubious as you could just harvest the outer solar system and set up a space colony. why waste energy crawling down the solar gravity well for a few small rocky planets when you can build everything you need from the ground up? beyond pure technological progression its hard to predict how a species will advance over time. seems natural evolution stalls out when selection pressure is removed. further advancement would require active modification to all or part of the species through technological or biological means. a species might resist this change for cultural reasons. im assuming a species is still primarily a product of natural evolution and be no more or less capable than we are. an augmented species might have little use for an existing biosphere.

its an interesting analogy because spacescifi's scenario of a high tech but outnumbered number of invaders vs a large number of primitives. its an interesting first contact scenario. aliens (at a tech level about what you see in the expanse), put together an interstellar expedition (say a generation ship like the nauvoo) to a planet they believe harbors life. this might be a few hundred light years out. lets assume they detect life, but no technological signatures like radio emissions. if the target planet is earth today, they would have likely detected a pre-industrial earth with no signs of intelligent life. thus they may have deemed whatever weapons systems they have to be more than adequate to deal with whatever threats they faced. for argument lets say their ship goes 1c, though 0.1c might be more realistic. as they close in on earth it becomes evident that there have been some advancement, however turning around may not be feasible at this point. say they arrive in about our current time. they have one ship, are few number, with limited weapons, limited resources, and no capacity for mass production. orbital bombardment is probably not the answer because they were looking for a habitable planet to begin with. so they opt for a foothold on the ground and set up an outpost. humans would be able to wage an expensive but effective offensive to oust the aliens from their planet. also adding superiority to my read list that im never going to finish. winning a single battle is not the same as winning a war. in the long term and on an equal footing the more advanced empire usually wins. its possible to have a technological advantage but not a numbers advantage.

ever seen zulu dawn? english with bolt loading rifles vs a very large number of zulu warriors with spears and shields. of course the english lose that fight. historical analysis of the actual battle showed that the new breech loading rifles were actually a major draw back, as they were being fired frequently enough for heat to become an issue. a problem muzzle loaded rifles never had run into due to lower firing rates. the ammunition was also being found to be very low quality (very early cartridge rounds), and the ammo cases were so hard to open they were smashing them with their rifle butts to open them, damaging many rounds, which when combined with the excessive heating of the guns made the spent cartridges very hard to remove from the gun, effectively disabling it. and when faced with an unending assault the limitations of the new weapons were made quite clear. despite hundreds (possibly even thousands) of years of difference in tech level you still end up with the large primitive army the victor. zulu also used a pincer tactic in which they managed to completely surround the british making retreat impossible, while the british were overconfident in their abilities and technology.

star wars especially feels like all the battles are literally at walking pace. replace star destroyers with wooden sailing ships and it makes sense. though star wars takes a lot of inspiration from old skool swashbucklers and ww2 war films. hyperspace ramming for example, you have all these x-wings with hyperdrives, astromech droids, i dont see why the pilots just doing point their ship at the target, program the droid to hit the hyperdrive and punch out. does more damage than an x-wing using its blasters and proton torpedoes. sorry r2d2, you are now a guidance system. that kind of thing would make star wars interesting again.

i think its more of a problem with needing to focus on the space battle itself rather than what the crew is doing. i expanse book 6 (or 5, im not sure) had such a joust battle. while visually such a battle would look rather boring, i think the book did things right by focusing on what the crew were doing inside the ship rather than the exterior action. if they use this battle in future seasons of the show they could easily do a few beauty passes as the ships converge, then cut back to the crew planning out their next pass.

one of the pet peeves i have with a lot of sci-fi is that space battles are often conducted at speeds that are much too slow and at distances that are much too short for space combat. star wars is especially guilty of this, but star trek, stargate, battlestar galactica and even babylon 5 were guilty of it. even today many engagements are done beyond visual range. not to say cqb isnt ever going to happen but the way it is depicted is that all battles are cqb. the expanse (mainly the books) explained it pretty well and depicted battles at all ranges/speeds, though i admit some of the best ones depicted a boarding operation. the reason for that is that the director wanted to show the battle on the screen, put in a shot of both opponents before it goes down and then have all the action happening in subsequent shots. a space battle where all you are doing is watching a single ship doing maneuvers with no threat in sight is not interesting even though it may still be in danger of an incoming missile. i prefer to think tule of cool as a unnecessary shortcut in fiction. if a realistic space battle does not seem interesting its the job of the writer (also the director for tv/movies) to make it interesting. the expanse has shown it can be made interesting even if they dropped the ball on a couple episodes.

those guys probably found hairballs in their shoes later.

probably sandbags would be the best approach. if the sandbags have a mylar inner layer between 2 layers of heavier fabric it could contain the finer particles, getting them out of the way without wasting them. given the lower gravity larger bags than what you would use on earth could be employed. having astronauts in space suits fill them with shovels might be more wear and tear on the suits than would be acceptable. some kind of bristle drum like what you see on a street cleaner mounted on a rover could kick up the dust into an auger which would transfer the material into bags which would be automatically sealed and dropped off the back of the rover. the whole thing could be automated so you could clear the landing site prior to a manned presence. while leaving plenty of sand bags for shielding the habitat. astronauts would just have to round them up and stack them. i saw a paper on a lunar tunnel boring machine that got rid of its waste heat, by heating the resulting rubble, and physically removing it from the hole and dumping it on the surface taking the heat with it.

as much as i like kitties, i dont think id want to bet my life by giving them free run of the station. and they would always be meowing to go outside. of course if you can make provisions for safety why not. i think primates might do better in zero gravity. if you have a centrifuge i guess anything goes. and you would probably want to sedate them for zero g operations, launch and reentry.

with how they are able to grow laser diodes on a substrate its likely possible to be able to do the same with fully integrated optical components much the way a microprocessor is fabbed.

lets name some of them after well known kerbals.

thats why they are writers and not engineers.

same kind you get with any other reentry vehicle. fins could allow for last second course correction but you would probably be dependant on an inertial reference since getting targeting data through the wall of plasma is going to be difficult. laser guidence might be possible if you use a wavelength not being emitted or blocked by the plasma (do those even exist). the target would have to be laser designated from another satellite over the target area at the time of reentry. i don't know if machine vision systems would be reliable enough for ordinance delivery, but if a human can guide the weapon visually (assuming it had a cockpit and a kamikaze pilot) then you could probably train a neural net to do it.

i think the idea was that the satellite would be in a highly eccentric orbit. so only a small kick motor would be needed at appogee to intersect the earth. this also buys time for the rod to accelerate. however i think the real exaggeration is the yield of the impact, something achievable with more conventional ordinance.

this is why they used to charge per letter. it was kind of like twitter. wait what was this thread about? lol.

there were a couple we could use, but we used a terminal application that ran on an old skool mac.

the anchorage school district kept one around for historical reasons. my computer science class let us use it for programming if you asked nicely. they strung ethernet cable half way across the city so a few nerds could play with it. knowing the way the state of alaska does things its still running.

i dont think there is hardware support for that. honestly the last time i saw one of those was on a vax mainframe. the x87 could do an 80 bit data type. but you are going to lose performance due to the second register op even on a 64 bit system (on a 32 bit system it required 3). im not even sure if the x87 instruction set is still a thing anymore or if it was replaced by something else. theres avx but those are for vector types.

there was a reference to a capacitor bank in the paper, i presume you are going to charge it with solar, rtg, or some kind of fission reactor. looked like they were going to use some kind of inductive compression.