Nuke

yay! direct metal laser sintering! these machines have actually been around for quite some time. problem is the part is pretty much just one big weld, and so your part is not as strong as it can be if it were machined from a block of <insert metal or alloy here>. there are parts you cant mill though, such as anything with internal voids. so the technology does have its purposes.

are you using old skool lead solder or the lead free stuff that manufacturers use. you might be creating a brittle alloy. the solution to this is to completely remove the part, clean the pads with some solder wick (do likewise for the part), flux and re solder. flux is your friend. every soldering tutorial ive seen says you should be liberal with the flux. i find that they are right. flux helps remove oxidization and will ensure a solid joint. is your iron clean? tip should be kept shinny. the best way to clean is is to add a bit of solder and remove the excess with a wet sponge. never shut it down without doing this and your tip will pretty much last forever. fail to do it once, and you will forever have a nasty tip. oxidized tip means oxidized joint and poor heat transfer. if its a surface mount part then that is a whole other level of hell. i wouldn't even touch it without a hot air rework station. some solderers would say you can do it with any professional iron (not a radioshack fire starter, something with temperature control), but i have a reflow station and like to use the right tool for the job.

you are going to need a combination of high speed and low speed lines. its a planet size city, if you happen to need to go to the other side of the planet, then a vactrain is exactly what you need. building of runways is going to be a prohibitively expensive use of the land, so air travel would be limited and also not very safe. if planes crash, and they do, its always going to be into densely populated areas, and that should be avoided. smaller vtols are probibly going to be used for police, fire, medivac and buisness uses mostly. general travel would best utilize vactrains. i imagine a system where you can drive your vehicle right onto a vactrain module, which gets loaded into the system and stops at stations every few hundred kilometers. some might be express routes to travel longer distances without all the stop and go. you could also theoretically drive anywhere on the low speed system, and the vactrains are just a means of saving time. you certainly wouldn't want a 4 hour commute. you might even dispense with personal vehicles all together and use a mass transit system on a planetary scale. again using a combination of high and low speed tubes. rather than having large trains, you can have smaller cars which can be called at a station. you punch in your destination and it will find the fastest route for you, working kind of like a big packet switched network. you might get routed through the high speed system if your destination is far away. you just sit and enjoy the ride. in theory you could go pretty much anywhere on the planet in a couple hours.

the problem with mpd is its not the mass of the thruster, its the mass of the power supply and the thrusters (clusters are preferable for fault tolerance). i think they would be most viable for use with a small scale fusion powerplant, preferably one with direct conversion. solar with a lot of panel area or fission/fusion with a lot of radiator area are also options, but not as good. solar/radiator panels and their support structures can get heavy and needlessly complicated.

games have actually gotten better for the most part. source avgn (google it) joking aside games have sort of an accumulated complexity that makes their continued production in lieu of advancing technology rather challenging. its hard to screw up a game like asteroids (i recently ported hackvision asteroids to an arduino with an lcd screen wired to it, hardly any code makes my incomplete 3d engine look like bloatware). there is only so much code you can fit on an antiquated rom chip. a hand full of vector images and algorithms found in every first year computer science book were all you needed. high school students who have had some programming experience can do likewise these days (i made several 2d shooters in highschool). now games are notoriously complicated. you have these massive dev teams (the dev team for quake fit on one screen!), terabytes of assets and millions of lines of code to deal with, and multimillion dollar budgets. a game engine by itself is a commodity, its easier to revamp an old one or lease one thats newer than it is to write a new one from scratch. of course you carry over all the unresolved bugs. then you got bugs in libraries, some of which are locked down as closed source and are outside of your control as a developer. its an impossible job. the fact that we still spend a lot of time playing games would indicate that its a job they are actually pulling off quite well. the fact that games have become such big buisness is the reason why you cant please everybody. its not like the 90s, where all the niche markets were found and exploited. dev teams were cheap then, games would pay for themselves over time eventually. you could shotgun money around and if a few of them were successes you paid the bill and created the next generation of games. you now have to make a game that will be guaranteed to sell to justify the budget. you need something that as wide a swath of players can play as possible. its the kind of industry which would have never made a newtonian space flight simulator with orbital mechanics and a complete solar system, because thats not the thing they expect teenagers to want to do. indie games bring back all the niche genres that have all but been stamped out by aaa titles and thats where i cast my dollar.

the only real requirement is you need to provide a biosphere through artificial means. this is going to utilize a lot of power. i figure the atmospheric reprocessors will be attached directly to the power stations, which would likely be fusion based (like the thing they had in aliens for terraforming). you also need to feed everyone. given enough power you can do hydroponic farming. this can be done in tall buildings and so would take up a lot less space than a traditional farming infrastructure. your main issue is you cant get any natural resources from the city planet, since every square kilometer if covered with buildings. so this kind of configuration probibly isn't viable unless there is an interplanetary economy to feed it. you are probibly better off doing a massive space colony and leave the planet there for mining.

ive done direct landings before. those odd occasions where my maneuvers were so precise my orbit intersected the object i was going to land on anyway. i figured the deltav cost to enter orbit from that point was greater than what it would have cost to land, so i landed instead to save fuel. i routinely aerocapture, but its still somewhat easier to come in with a little bit of wiggle room so that i remain in orbit after the maneuver. if i dont like where my periapsis is in relation to the surface, i can always do a small prograde burn at apoapsis to push the trajectory out of the atmosphere. i also have the option to continue aerobraking maneuvers to bring my orbit in closer if so desired.

there is no reason the exhaust need be radioactive. if the reactor is only providing the thermal energy neccisary to run the engine, it can be isolated from the propellant with a heat exchanger. you are going to loose some efficiency when you do that, but you get a safer engine. the engine also provides the cold side of a brayton cycle so you can use the engines in place of a radiator to generate power. so you might be able to augment the engine exhaust with an arcjet or ionic type device to increase the isp of the engine. if that is not viable, you have the power for other systems, such as life support. another thing you get is versatility as to where your thermal power winds up. if your engine is a stacked turbine/ram/scram/thermal configuration of sorts, you will likely need a number of different heat exchangers to deliver thermal power to the various stages of the engine. its beneficial to use as few heat exchangers as possible, because they are really heavy. you might combine the ram and scram portions of the engine into a dual mode system that only requires one heat exchanger for example. its hard to build a combined cycle engine around a solid core reactor. if your goal is to build an ssto that can fly from earth's surface to leo, you want clean exhaust the whole way. if you want an engine to use in space or on the surface of the moon, you are probibly better off with a more traditional nerva design.

after reading the first page, i spotted 5 things that were bogus, this isnt worth my time.

well i was going by this http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/airplane/specth.html i was tired and maybe didnt interpret the equations correctly.

i expect this will result in a new discovery channel reality show: deadliest catch europa

specific thrust is thrust/mass flow. how much thrust you get for each unit of propellant mass injected into the engine. this being high allows things like rockets that go up instead of just sit on the pad and go nowhere. source: google specific thrust and click the first link (its nasa).

and another http://www.adn.com/article/20140825/army-rocket-exploded-seconds-after-lift-kodiak-site it was more of a hypersonic weapon test, but the rocket still blew up on the pad and damaged the launch complex.

when you start doing ac, capacitors start looking like resistors. all kinds of weird stuff happens. you can plant florescent bulbs in the ground under high tension lines and get them to illuminate for example. the interaction between asteroids and spacecraft will mostly be dc. you can just use a resistor probe to safely equalize electric charges. much in the way you make a power supply or crt monitor safe to work on. does make me wonder if you cant use a bunch of insulated objects and tap power off of their electrical differential, mainly because objects of different sizes and shapes of objects will develop charges at different rates. might be a useful alternative to solar power in space stations.

in my experience: crowbar. get out all the screws you can to minimixe damage. some you might be able to cut wit a reciprocating saw. the crowbar would probibly do less damage. exploit metal fatigue whenever possible.

integrate all the things. just dont complain when the kracken hurls your homeworld on an escape trajectory into the universe.

i haven't anticipated a game for a very long time.

you need a couple nuclear reactors, but thats ok, carriers have those. then you need a laser, carriers probibly have these too. then you need an atmospheric laser thermal engine that is small enough to cram into a space shuttle and powerful enough to allow it to maintain altitude. ??? profit.

having horizontal landing capability pretty much doubles acceptable failure modes. no gliding, but if you have a fan or two you might make it. but of course that means you need tougher landing gear. one advantage of electric transmission is if you loose an engine, you have additional power available for the others. i actually rather like this kind of config. 2 sets of tandem props in horizontal flight, quad copter in vtol mode, horizontal landing capability (if you put wheels on it). of course this config introduces a bad failure mode if you loose a motor while in a hover. perhaps you can get two contra-rotating props in the same housing using independent motors. one fails the other can work double time.

they are electric ducted fans, you are going to need some thick cables for those but thats manageable. this actually gets around the issue of multiple engine vtols. normally you would need to shaft all the rotors together to compensate for loss of an engine. if you use ultra-reliable electric engine and an ultra-reliable generator(s), such as gas turbines. the motors will work so long as their bearings hold out (im assuming ac induction motors, maybe dc brushless). i really dont see needing 16 of them, 12 or 8 makes more sense. if motors can run at twice their lifting power in an emergency, then in an emergency on an 8 motor version you could loose 4 (one in each pod), or an entire pod and still land safely vertically, and you might be able to land horizontally if you loose more than that while in cruise. im actually worried more about loosing your generator.

if you can build a cubesat sized test rig (such as the one in the video), it would be fairly affordable to test it in space. not sure what nasa spent on its experiments but i doubt its cheap. you could even get over enthusiastic space geeks to pay for your launch costs.

you would need to stagger them. rear set would be mounted up higher than the front set. i do this in a lot of vtols i build in ksp. engine thrust can do a full traversal over 90 degrees without hitting any part of the ship. tandem props are a thing, but i dont think it works with ducted fans.

depends. newer games just get installed to the c: drive. if the game can run independant of being installed, it goes on the d drive and i never have to worry about installing it ever. i just rebuild new shortcuts, with a batch file when i re-install the os. needless to say most of those games are 90s titles that are very easy to make installer independent. ksp is on d:\. dont ever change.

my state has very few roads, light aircraft reign supreme here. i think we also have the highest aircraft ownership per capita. this kind of ship would work quite well here if it has any kind of range.

the only way you can get rid of loading screens is to generate everything procedurally. of course if you ever played something like kkreiger you know that content generation takes longer than loading. ssds have actually pretty much eliminated loading times for me. if you are still not happy with that, get several identical ssds and put them in a raid 0 array.