Nuke

use a double hull and put the fuel and other consumables in the space between the hulls. if you need to haul a lot of water around it makes a great neutron absorber. then just have a electromagnetic coil to handle the charged particles.

im really good at the game and seldom kill kerbals, though i did do a play through with the goal of killing as many of them as possible. i guess they are kind of cute. i never really gave it much thought though.

a december launch in alaska, well good luck with that. and dont use anything with o-rings.

as little as possible.

arent those things a form of currency? i mean you may have stolen somone's life savings.

unfortunately my love for pork only extends as far as the kitchen, and perhaps the grill. i make some brutally awesome pork ribs. i always wanted to cook a whole pig in the ground, but our ground is unsittable for pig cooking. gonna have to settle for a spit. my grandma's fridge is a nightmare. its full of condiments that expired in the 70s. i vowed never to let our fridge get that nasty. it should never contain one item that can give you food poisoning. cross contamination is a thing. it helps if you put the new food in the back.

i only got one cat who will take human food. and he is unnaturally old. my youngest will take seafood though, if im shelling shrimp or cleaning my catch, she reports for duty. i think i saw some crab pots at the house i picked her up at, she must have been raised on the stuff.

i was cleaning out the fridge, there were a large number of pork products which were getting old, some bacon, some breakdast saussage, some canadian bacon, and some black forest ham. so i threw them all into a pan, fried them and stuck them on an english muffin with some cheese and an egg. it was delicious, though it probably took six months off my life span. it was supposed to be about helping others? i mean i did clean out the fridge.

there have been situations where house cats have repelled burglars. of course it only takes the cat to not be in a burglar repelling mood at the time for it not to work. there is also the chance that the cat might like the burglar more than you.

im from alaska. from the size of some of the wildlife we got (bears, wolves, moose, caribou, sea lions, mosquitoes), im surprised they are not mandatory. willie pete is hard to come by, not impossible mind you.

dog + shotgun will do wonders. im not a dog person though, so i try to make myself very scary and i never leave so yea good luck steeling my worthless junk.

rarely.

i bet elon musk did it. the sheet metal cutoffs from starship production line.

you could get some thrust out of the thing if you chuck it out the airlock.

ignore it. still havent been able to get through blade runner without falling asleep.

so the expanse will end with season 6. we get 2 more seasons but thats it, and no alex for season 6. i guess he just couldn't keep his pants on, that or its another cancel culture injustice. another casualty in the ongoing march towards oblivion.

im more of a bomb pumped x-ray laser kind of guy. you only get one shot, but you only need one shot.

i see a situation where nasa starts to outsource its launches. probably to spacex or whoever the lowest bidder is at the time. at that point nasa can focus on science.

freespace has some of the best mission-oriented gameplay out there. even compared to some modern games.

thats the problem with space sims. if you want realistic combat, you are going to need to fight bvr. if you want to see your target, you usually need a wwii in space type game. modernish combat flight sims also have this problem. you end up chasing dots in the sky, if you even can see a dot.

yes but building those things also depletes the resources. any they dont last forever. entropy calleth no matter what you do.

what are these... pants.

is anyone still doing icf? i also think that is going to have a huge problem with getting to engineering breakeven due to the inefficiency of lasers. jet is going to be going for the q record using d-t next year. iter is looking forward to the result. lets hope they raise the bar.

polywell was a different machine arrangement entirely created by robert bussard of interstellar ramjet fame. a bunch of magnetic coils contains a ball of electrons in the core which the ions "fall" into. effectively replacing gravity with a potential well. in theory they cross in the middle and have a chance to fuse. it was meant initially for d-d and then p-b11 fuels. but the university of sydney put out a paper that has been consider a final nail in the coffin. it was such a shame because its the kind of reactor you could stuff in a rocket fairing and put on a space craft.

there is also the florine-politician fueled rocket engine. when it comes to magnetic confinement there are hard physical reasons why you cant make it smaller. you dont want a failed fusion to send the particle and all its energy into the reactor walls, because that takes energy out of the plasma. you want it to recirculate and potentially have another opportunity to fuse. so your toroid cross section has to be large enough for the particle to turn back into the flow. unfortunately it has the side effect of making your tokamaks huge and heavy. there was the polywell which used a spherical arrangement rather than a torioid, which would make it 3 or 4 meters across. but a recent paper has shelved the concept. i have a feeling first gen reactors are going to be tokamaks. its just the most well understood arrangement.