Nuke

obvious question, how does pointing a laser at a solar sail and bouncing it off differ from just pointing the laser out the back? seems either way would give you the same thrust (practically nothing).

you know linux suffers from the same problem. if its not configured right, you are going to have a very crappy experience. of course you can always try various distros till you find one you like and if you are really really good you can get any linux to do what you want. i cant recall ever using an os where i didnt need to tweak something so that it does what i want it to do.

feep could do 10000s, and is flown on science sats. but you will need to wait a very very long time (micronewton thrust).

pyrolytic carbon electrodes might be the answer, its already used in a lot of medical applications. blood does not clot on its surface and should be conductive enough to make a neural interface.

windows is fine when properly configured.

i think the idea is you damage the forward compartment or two and they flood, but the rest of the ship remains intact. there have been head on collisions between ships where both ships managed to crawl their way to the nearest dry dock on their own power. a glancing blow on the other hand spread the damage out to enough compartments to flood the whole ship. but think about it, its your watch, you dont want to break your boss's new ship, so you try to evade (ignoring the fact that it was a new ship with a new crew who are unfamiliar with its performance), and excrement hits the ventilation apparatus.

just use a high speed serial bus (one or two differential pairs). run it through each chip in the network. with a host chip that provides a hypodermal interface (probibly optical, electromagnetic, or short range rf directly through the skin), and the electrode grids placed atop relevant parts of the brain. it will also be the most expensive cable laying project ever in terms of cost per inch, and will require removing large bits of skull. power everything with an implanted glucose fuel cell (they run on blood sugar). the procedure needs a top notch neurosurgeon and is non trivial. it will be very expensive, so only the rich and powerful will have them. once it is installed you must learn to use the new interface. the brain needs to re-wire itself to use the new implants (but it will eventually be as trivial as moving a finger). early implantation in adolescence or early adulthood would probibly yeild the best results (you want it in there when the brain stops physically growing, but while the brain is still young and pliable). then comes the problems, if you need to upgrade or if your chip network breaks down or they need to be removed for any reason, your brain might be so used to the implants that you might have a trouble functioning without them. if you swap to a new set of chips you will need to go through the same relearning process again. you could probibly add chemical detectors as well as electrodes to detect chemical messages and measure neurotransmitter levels.

thats why ive nicknamed my chopper the decapitron. its a chinese made trex 400 clone. it came with plastic linkages and tail but i replaced them with aluminum bits as they broke. and then i swapped out my fiberglass blades with carbon fiber blades. only other thing she needs is a new battery and the autopilot board (which i am designing on eagle cad). at first i will just stick to telemetry, which i will output to a monocle hud of my own design. mount an lcd screen at a 45 degree angle to a piece of dark plexiglass, makes a really good hud. i havent actually built it as i dont have an appropriately sized display (i saw a small, bright, oled display on ebay that will work quite well), but i know it will work. just knowing how level i am and my heading will help me fly it a little better. i wont have to break eye contact to look at a screen. i was looking at rf modules, seen a long range nRF24L01+ based radio with a 1000 meter range and a 1-2 megabit data rate (though i will probibly run it at a lower data rate to play it safe), and about $20 each. i have the much cheaper $2 version that only does about 10 meters, which i got for surface r/c applications. i looked at xbees and other radios and i didnt like them, xbee in particular has too many pins, where as a nordic only needs 7 (its an 8-10 pin header, but only some of them are connected), and is a lot smaller and lighter of a module, and has a very easy to use library. initially this will be a separate link from the control radio, and then later on (when i verify reliability) i will send the control data though that link as well. i still want to fly it mostly on manual and have the autopilot try to level out and hover if i flip a panic switch. its one of those big long term projects (which i never finish).

apparently the titanic got its metal from the same foundry as hms hood. of course the titanic didnt need to be shot at by nazis to sink.

its not the maths, its the integration. i know enough linear algebra and trig to get by, then you have filtering algorithms (ive tried several), physics (good enough here), neumerical stability (hint: you dont have an fpu, but i know fixed point). the problems are mind boggling. i get hadaches just thinking about it. big coding projects like this never get done, ive got 3 game engines, countless other slabs of code that sit on my drive and are never done. this would just be another one of those.

someone has been playing too much contra. i wouldnt do it. i view life as an iterative process. a fractal structure that splits off in several ways. some branch out and grow, others fizzle out and die. but if it stops iterating then the fractal stagnates. infinite possibilities are reduced to a few. i suppose you could live forever and then watch the slow death of the universe. but what would be the point. of course this is more philosophical and not very scientific.

im actually somewhat interested in building one of these myself. i already got the 10dof imu, arduinos, mcus, board etching skillz, and an rc heli. but im to lazy to figure out all the maths.

brain doesnt run on a clock, it is totally asynchronous. you cant just crank it up (well you can speed it up a little but it involves substances that will probibly kill you and is illegal almost everywhere). but something like an i/o chip would be pretty cool. cpu can talk to the chip, and the chip can talk to your brain (actually it would probibly be more of a chipset, you would want chips in places like the occipital lobe and the motor cortex, speech center, etc). the whole system of implants would talk to a host chip and that chip would talk to the computer via some kind of interface, such as wifi. this also allows things like radio telepathy as well as a control interface for computers and several other kinds of machines and vehicles. of course you might as well throw in a cpu in there as well so you can preform math and logic at a superhuman rate.

you just need to use a more sensitive ccd.

the lag would be horrible. besides all your packets would time out before they can be routed. nasa has interplanetary communications protocols that would do the job but it wouldn't work like the internet we know. you would probibly enter a whole list of things to look for then like an hour later you would get a large chunk of data to browse through, and it may be longer depending on what kind of data rates we could get out of interplanetary communications. im curious if there has been any attempt by nasa or anyone else to find and catalog extraterrestrial cave systems. cave habitation would actually work quite well. once you got the door sealed you are pretty much free to construct whatever you need on the inside of the cave using good old fashioned manual labor. much of the work will be in reinforcing the caves to be much more structurally sound. spray on concrete is really good at this, but you will probibly need to make it from local materials (or at least use local aggregate/water, and bring the cement). ive also considered sending tunnel boring machines to other planets, but those require huge industrial complexes to operate, and its probibly sufficiently complicated of a machine where it would need to be manned. this is pretty clever, at least as a temporary seal until a more permanent one can be constructed. mix the foam with local aggregate and you have an even more robust airlock.

or if you drop it. i can imagine the whole of human knoledge sitting on the desk of some alien overloard serving as a paperweight, assuming it survived the invasion.

it actually makes sense. there is very little need for throttle control on the first couple of stages. thats the get me out of the gravity well part of the rocket. i doubt something like this would be man rated, because abort is probibly going to be "hit the self destruct button".

i wasnt referring to the cat engine at all, but ion engines in general. i dont see how the cubesat concept would work at all beyond leo. i mean its not just the engine and propellant limits, its also the capacity to communicate at distance, which needs a large antennea, and a beefy transmitter and then you still have to get a sensor in there for whatever the mission was. some people like to think small, i like to think big.

my platform was made back before 0.6, to take advantage of on the ground conversion. the platform had structural issues so landing one on mun was impossible, but it still serves its purpose in my save. will probibly come up with a better one when the next ksp version comes out and i clear my save.

as soon as i read the word kickstarter i closed the page. i really think the issue isnt engines, its power. more power, more thrust from your engines. if you can provide a steady 200kw, vasimr gives you 5n. mpd thrusters are nice too, and they get you in the tens to hundreds of newton range (at the expense of thousands of kilowatts). there are a dozen high performance engines that would work if we had the power. a 1MW nuclear reactor would allow for some seriously powerful super efficient ion engines. the need to use solar power is why ion engines are so damn slow.

one thing the moonbase needs to start out is a reusable leo <-> lunar orbit transport system. this would be a multi craft system: 1 unmanned ion powered cargo ship: since ion propulsion wont need a whole lot of propellant mass to make the trip as a chemical engine, it is perfect for hauling cargo. this ship is not suited to transport astronauts because of time spent in the radiation belts. the ship accepts a cargo container. 2 cargo container system: a container that can be mounted to a rocket (or skylon), and launched to leo. it would have some basic stabilization systems but little or no propulsion, its just a box. the cargo ship can dock with the container for transfer to the moon. the container may also optionally have resource transfer connections that can connect up to whatever is docked to the container, to facilitate refueling, fuel transport and other liquid or gaseous consumables that may need to be exchanged with other ships and stations in the system. a cargo pod can be boosted to leo with the propellant neccisary for the transfer to lunar orbit (at least initially until lunar production of ion engine propellant can accomplished). 3 lunar way station: unmanned or occasionally manned (with short duration life support) station with cargo racks (that connect up with the container system) and docking ports for other ships in the transport system. can be upgraded with a refueling pod, a cargo container with tankage and refueling equipment, for refueling spacecraft. the fuel pod will be loaded with lunar produced go gas. prior to lunar fuel production, ships will be refueled in leo. 4 crew transport vehicle: a small lightweight vehicle for transporting personnel. propulsion would be chemical to minimize radiation exposure. it may also have auxilliary ion propulsion, since radiation belts extend only out to 60km, you could skip over them quickly with chemical propulsion and then use ion propulsion (vasimr is a good candidate for newton level thrust, if you can keep it powered that is) the rest of the way. this ship is not intended as a lander. they can crew and initially refuel at the iss or some other station. 5 surface transport vehicle. a reusable ship for transporting crew and/or cargo between the lunar surface and the waystation, would require chemical propulsion. would also be compatible with the container system. so you can deliver supplies to the moon base and from the moon to the station (when fuel production comes into play). there you have it, infrastructure. you probibly should do robotic fuel production missions first, to hammer out all the maybes, but it is a system needed for initial colonization.

im concerned that a quick trip to mars and back would just be another publicity stunt. we will go there, come back, and spend the next 50 years debating about whether to go back to mars or send people to europa. we still wont have any infrastructure to cut the costs of future manned missions. we wont have any colonies. return to the moon with the intent to build a research colony. think of it as a testbed for colonization technologies, radiation shielding, extraterrestrial mining, manufacturing, construction, and agriculture. testing the long term effects of lunar habitation. if successful, then begin expanding the colony and setting it up for permanent habitation.

there are two medium tanks in the middle. one fore and one aft. this is a convert on the ground type rig. it has sizable monoprop and xenon reserves as well as the 8 lf/oxy tanks. when its not mining it launches to orbit and is my primary fuel station for interplanetary missions.

iirc plasmas like to follow magnetic flux lines. problem is the flux lines will intersect your ship at the poles of your magnet. this is why earths poles get a bigger dose of background radiation than you get at the equator. what you can do is utilize passive radiation shielding in those areas, while the rest of the ship is protected by the magnetic field. if your ship has a rotating section, it might prove useful to put the coils in the hub so that the field geometry matches that of the ring so that no flux lines intersect it, completely eliminating the need for passive shielding. problems are these systems need constant power, they need to use superconducting magnets, so you also need to bring coolant along with you (easy if your using lox/lh2), and you only need a little bit of passive shielding rather than a lot. there are other issues, like maintaining orientation in a planet's magnetosphere, but thats easily done by tweaking the magnetic field geometry. i googled and got this: http://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2012_phaseII_fellows_westover.html as for what it would look like, pretty much just your typical superconducting electromagnet. the article has a picture.

i use nuke engines on all my kethane landers. i always seem to get a large amount of fuel. it helps to offload any unneccisary delta-v from the lander, and have just enough thrust to take off when its full. i almost always come back with a 3/4 of a full tank (not counting what i need to land again). of course i usually think big: