Nuke

its a government thing. if nasa spent all its money trying put a giant ball of twine into orbit and only managed to blow it to bits, it would still look less stupid than the rest of the government.

you can do that, but thing is in space, stealth doesn't work.

i wont be happy till its tested in a magnetically shielded vacuum chamber, or space.

age differences like this aren't a big deal. its not even in the creepy zone. i think i have more in common with women a decade older than me than those of the same generation. in this case it seems like she doesn't know what she wants. you may have just been her attempt at trying something different.

ribeye steak, rare. with beans and baked tater (with everything on it) on the side.

i was quite fond of the dc-x vtvl ssto.

just ghost over your windows partiton. then either enlarge it or create a second partition in the remaining space. in theory your computer should boot into the new drive and not notice the difference.

il just get my shotgun. you can also live in a place with horrible weather.

it comes down to the fact that most of these laws were created by observing material objects in space (newton was looking at apples and planets, not weird quantum particles that dont make much sense) and it later turned out that those same laws apply to non-material things as well. conservation of momentum really boils down to conservation of energy. when thinking about rockets it pays to think in terms of momentum, because its a simplified understanding that works in the material universe. were throwing atoms out the tail pipe to make these other atoms go in the other direction, ignoring the energy that those particles that make up those atoms posses. but if conservation of momentum comes as a result of conservation of energy, then you get all kinds of fringe scenarios where energy from an external source, say a nuclear reactor, can be converted to kinetic energy with magic, and conservation of energy is going on, while making conservation of momentum look broke. just because correlation is not causation doesn't mean you cant have a correlation so tight that it looks like causation and because the math worked nobody ever questioned it, at least until nasa checks out a quack machine with positive results. its totally possible that the law can be modified without breaking hundreds of years of scientific progress. its also entirely possible that the law is completely correct and does not need to be re-written, and that us humans are just confused about what it means. either way something to think about. believing in em drive/qdrive/whatever puts me out of my scientific comfort zone, but that doesn't mean its wrong. and no im not on anything, though i may have missed my meds today and im a little sleep deprived.

same damn architecture, different freaking os. if i had either one it would be rooted and installed with linux proper, like i did with my ipod.

makes me wonder if em drive is really just an accidental q thruster. either way you are going to get more thrust by simply throwing the device out the back of your ship.

this looks useful.

i suppose you could bring in hydrogen and just burn it with the released oxygen. this would create that useful stuff called water. unfortunately it would probibly vaporize and make the runaway greenhouse conditions worse.

my brother used to sell those. impressive machine. too bad they rely on guerrilla marketing tactics to sell them. but frankly the vacuum cleaner should not be the most expensive thing in ones house.

i have a complete ch setup (or at least i do when i splice the cables where the kitten chewed them off, good thing i have all those ee skills) that i hardly ever use in ksp. of course i dont really fly a lot of space planes, im more of a navigator so i do most of my flying in space where precise analog control is quite unnecessary and often a hindrance.

i dont think the secondary loop is going to be a major point of failure. steam in the secondary is at a lower temperature and pressure than the primary loop (they feed low pressure turbines). this loop is isolated from the core by a heat exchanger and steam could be easily and safely vented into the environment an emergency (and likely equipped with emergency relief valves to prevent pressure runaways). you still need the loop to dispose of heat for you, so you can't really live without it, but its not the part of the reactor that goes boom when things get hot.

they didnt have any short range weapons either. eventually someone got smart and put a gatling gun in a cargo pod. it turned out to be so effective that every fighter since has included a gun of some sort. guns are pretty good for visual range combat. in space computer targeted guns could probibly extend that range considerably. making it so your bullets rendezvous with a target a few orbits later. sorta like how you can do amazing thing with artillery these days. bullets are kind of dumb and so i guess you would fire a burst that will spread out by the time it gets to the target, but increase the chance of impact by a huge factor. sorta like how a single gau8 round can kill a tank, but you usually fire a couple hundred of them just to be sure. in cases where your rounds would make escape velocity, just fire retrograde. then of course military doctrine would require you to make periodic course adjustments to avoid dumb rounds. you might be better off doing rail/coil gun launched missiles. this might be a lot more effective, you can dial in a velocity to some degree which will make the weapon more versatile. the missile's capacity for course correction comes in handy close in. doing a railgun launch, the full delta-v of the missile can be used for course correction close to the target. by the time the weapon is detected it can mach the target move for move, and out perform it because of high twr. for a warhead im thinking a small he charge (or perhaps highly volatile fuel which can double as a bomb) behind a kinetic penetrator. puncture the crew compartment or a fuel tank and detonate in the pressurized interior, would really mess up a targets day.

you just cant get enough delta-v into a space fighter to be an effective fighting machine. you might end up with a short range fighter with some not too useful weapons. with such short effective range, its better to just put better weapons on the thing the fighters would have launched from. if you are going to put fuel on a craft to intercept a target, you are better off having that craft be a missile, since can use all your delta-v for intercept changes and last second course corrections instead of having to bring back a fighter and pilot, alive. you end up with a weapon with greater lethality and lower cost.

even a gas giant has considerable rocky material at its core. on a smaller gas giant you might see a higher ratio of this material and the gases and ices that make up the rest of it. so essentially what you get is a super earth with a very thick atmosphere. the line between rocky and gas is kind of fuzzy.

yes but i think a containment building for a water/steam cooled plant needs to have a 400x the volume of the coolant within the reactor. if you eliminate the steam explosions, you can have a much smaller containment building.

i think this is the idea behind turbofan engines. most of the intake air doesn't even go into the combustion chamber, it just goes around it. it doesn't make your engine any faster but it pretty much halves fuel consumption.

arm really needs better floating point performance. a modern i7 (haswell) can do about 177 gflops. with arm you are lucky if you get 10 gflops. enjoy doing physics with that.

i say we build a large nuclear powered rail/coil gun in the outer solar system (perhaps on a kuiper belt obeject), which could hurl a small probe at fairly high velocities towards whatever star we wanted to probe. thing about this kind of structure is that it can be used again and again and again, you could do a thorough analysis of all nearby systems.

more research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_ioniser

the cpu they are using is a pentium d 940, which was manufactured from 2005-2008. so its pretty old skool by today's standard. if you built one of these today you would probibly use an ssd instead of the battery backed ram drives.