Nuke

i kind of interpret 'dwarf planet' as a subset of 'planet' as opposed to 'not a planet', so still technically a planet. i mean we had to differentiate groups of spheroidal things because we were finding way too many of them.

yea i kind of expected a lower tech star trek than what we ended up getting. it didn't really have that many memorable episodes either. i think we should let enterprise rest. the only memorable characters either had a couple redeeming attributes or was a dog. currently in the middle of a voyager binge and its better than i remember it, though still not as good as deep space nine due to a lot of weak, poorly developed characters. bad characters has been an issue with star trek ever since then. we need to gather all the writers and actors into a theater and make them watch babylon 5, deep space nine, firefly, and several others all clockwork orange style. maybe that would inspire them to write/portray better characters. pike trek might fix that though, as everyone seems to like pike and number one, and spock. provided they have a semi descent secondary cast it will work. with 2 animated series, and pike trek in the pipe, in addition to picard and discovery, i think they might be overdoing it. right now star trek is just something i watch while i wait for the next season of the expanse. if i was going to do another prequel series, i think i would want to do a series immediately following first contact. something involving long duration voyages, with lots of tequila and rock'n'roll involved. a ragtag crew brought up in the aftermath of ww3, perhaps zephrim cochrane's first voyage to another star while earth undergoes a period of reconstruction. take away most of the space magic, no transporters, phase cannons, polarized hull plating or inertial dampeners. crudely built ships limited to warp 1 or 2, weapons possibly limited to nukes, slug throwers or lasers. maybe stick some pilfered borg or federation tech in there to make things interesting.

uranus because reasons.

synthesis of some elements involves taking a lighter element and making a heavier one exists. if taken to extremes we can do things like validate existing theoretical elements or potentially make new ones if the island of stability can be achieved. but you are usually just fusing up lighter elements. you are just moving around existing particles, not creating any new ones. im not sure how you go about creating the required quarks out of thin air. then one has to debate the existence of particles in the standard model. aren't they all effectively quantum fields? matter and energy are effectively the same. wheres a qft guy when you need em?

when i think a rescue suit i think one of those spherical beachball things. i dont think that makes any sense though as thats the kind of gear you use for passengers to hold up in until a rescue mission launches. once you get in there and get it inflated and turn on your transponder, there is not a damn thing you can do to save yourself. you simply wait for rescue and hope the rescue team has enough delta-v to pick up your ball. so that's totally useless right now. of course, add a few more orbital stations and a larger orbital population and these things start making sense. you can start supporting a few full time on station space rescue craft in orbit to retrieve these things. and they will more than certainly come in handy in partial decompression scenarios involving large stations.

this sounds like a really fun space cruise.

in this case "star" is used as an adjective, which may be a feature of the english language rather than a bug. but this is the least of the problems with star wars right now. i think it may be grammatically acceptable to use a noun as an adjective though, so things like "space ship" or "ship cat" are ok. but its been a very long time since i watched schoolhouse rock. using a noun as a verb is still completely unacceptable to me though. relevant xkcd: also when you say "star ship" what i think of is a boat sailing on the surface of the sun waving around a jolly rodger. so i actually prefer "space ship"

it would depend on the hull thickness thats for sure. like the middle of an oneil cylinder it would be pretty safe as you would need to smash through several layers of hull to get to vacuum. a ship with a hull like what you had on the lm, nope. i figure the racing would be where there are a lot of turns and you never have much chance to accelerate to dangerous levels. you are also subject to aerodynamic drag and possibly subject to computerized safety lockouts as well. and you can balance the pack performance such that it can get you up to a sprinting pace and not much else.

1. just multiply your fuel estimates by a factor of four, then add moar boosters. 2. not enough to get to the mun. though i wonder why a cargo bay fuel tank option wasn't a thing.

maybe some kind of sport using a sort of indoor mmu using either compressed air jets or high performance fans as thrusters. i imagine some kind of racing or capture the flag kind of thing being possible.

turns out they used a password reset to get into the accounts. i knew that would lead to trouble someday.

they are probably just a part of your usual hygene procedures. you also have the problem of astronauts simply growing out their hair in space for long duration stays, im pretty sure they have a means for handling that stuff. how else does scott kelly keep his cueball. vacuum clippers?

i wonder who got the bright idea of using bitcoin for nefarious purposes. the block chain pretty much guarantees you can back track every transaction ever done and not only figure out who is spending but who is profiting as well. you just have to resolve the credentials with a particular transaction and they are made, easily done with a standard issue law enforcement sactioned sting operation.

if anyone specifically asks for bitcoin its probably a scam. usually when people are looking for legit donations they will accept a wide variety of payment methods.

i worry more about it getting sucked into the life support system. the stuff can stop fans and clog vents and bind up all kinds of machinery. ive had plenty of hair ripped out by power tools (including an incident with a skill saw which damn near became deadly). idk what nasa's policy is for astronauts with big hair but there are plenty of pictures of poofy hair gals in zero g. so maybe its not as big an issue as you might think. if a buzz cut is the price of going to space i guess i can deal with it and grow it back out when i get back to earth, but you can do a lot with hair ties, braiding, or some kind of hair covering like a hijab or the caps worn during a spacewalk. regular vacuum brushing might also be a good idea to keep loose and weak strands under control, and rooms might come with such an apparatus. long term space habitation will likely result in a large number of zero gravity friendly hairstyles and various headware might even become stylish.

the only reason i set it so high is because the apartment building is old and of poor design. thus we get drafts. building is also on piles due to the soft soil in these parts with a huge crawlspace under it. and the maintenance people are kind of stupid and are always leaving the hatch open. not to mention all the holes where local animals have burrowed under it to stay warm. if this place was well sealed 68 would probably be fine.

having lived in both very hot and very cold locations ive noticed that people way overshoot comfortable temperatures in their thermostat setting. like people were constantly setting the thermostat to 78 last winter, which i found unbearably hot, i prefer around 73, but i put it down to 70 to save power most of the time. i find our floor is poorly insulated and the house is rather drafty when its windy, and i might put it up to 74 in those situations. likewise when i lived in phoenix i found it wasn't unusual to be freezing while inside in the middle of summer. like when i had my system builder gig, it wasn't unusual for me to warm my hands on the back of the server racks. idk what they had the thermostat set to but it was pretty frigid, mostly because of all the servers. but it wasn't unusual for me to find various shopping malls and other businesses too damn cold, and i grew up (and currently live) in alaska. my grandma's house in phoenix has a swamp cooler and its horrible. i mean it can work sometimes when the humidity is low and it gets the temps inside to the 70s, but when its humidity (like it is in the monsoon season) can be rather miserable.

scifi focuses on the big innovations that enable the setting and often miss the little ones. cant really say it was my idea, as i was somewhat inspired by contact tracing apps for covid, which can tell you if you are walking into a hotspot and can help enforce social distancing (i think the tesla/spacex are using a watch like device that vibrates when you get too close to someone, and having all their employees wear one). sometimes the future is now.

i wonder if 2001 didn't hit the nail on the head with their use of velcro. metal floors are heavy and most metals used in spacecraft construction are either not magnetic (aluminium) or are weakly magnetic (titanium), assuming were not using ceramics or composites. maybe if you have torch drives you can put down a few hundred square feet of steal plating, but velcro on carbon fiber would weigh a lot less. i also have a feeling people who would go on such a space cruise would want the astronaut experience. so unlike an ocean cruise which is mostly built around the perpetual binge eating of gourmet foods, gambling in the ship's casino, maybe catching a show or shopping in the ship's mall. instead you are going to be eating astronaut food, perhaps some zero grav sports are in order or maybe a recreational space walk where you can go out "on deck" in a space suit while under thrust (now that i think about it this would just be a bit of floor space outside with railings, so literally on deck). i imagine there would be a number of safeties on the control system to keep the ship from harming its untrained passengers. like locking out thrusts above 1g and limiting the rate of throttling, even limiting rates of rotation such that the passengers do not suffer centrifugal effects. a captain could disable these safeties in extreme situations like needing to answer distress calls or collision avoidance maneuvers. you might have all passengers wear a watch-like device that can provide emergency instructions to passengers, including the location of the nearest unocupied couch or safety equipment in the event of various emergency situations. a step up from a ship intercom which can issue computer generated instructions tailored to each passenger's current situation that maximize the safety of all passengers. even walk passengers through certain procedures should the crew be unable to get to them. drills on the system could even be part of the astronaut experience (sort of like the lifeboat drills on normal cruises).

i live in alaska so i normally just open the windows. we do have warm summers unless you live above the arctic circle. can get temperatures in the 80s and sometimes 90s especially in the interior. i live in the southeast which makes seattle look like a desert, but it can get warm if it ever stops raining. we usually have high humidity so temps in the 60s and 70s can get really uncomfortable. this summer has been mostly a bust because we cant ditch our cloud cover long enough for it to get nice out. fortunately our winters in this part of the state at least are also fairly mild. though they did recently install heatpumps, which i do believe can operate in reverse, but thats a waste of energy imho.

yea but why bother with a close detonation when you can have an internal one. even conventional weapons sometimes do this for greater effect. i dont think accuracy will be a problem when we get to the point of actually using weapons in space.

outside a ship a nuke (or antimatter weapon) is completely useless, inside the ship, well its a lot less useless. so nukes would need to be a delayed detonation affair. combine a kinetic impactor and nuclear warhead in a single shell, just before impact the warhead would separate from the impactor. the impactor's job is to put a hole in the ship to let the nuke through. you would want to aim for pressurized parts of the ship, propellant tanks, hab areas, etc, for maximum effect. you may not need the impactor if the ships in question are not very well armored, but for warships i think it would be a good idea.

warp drive makes sense though, alcubierre drives would not accelerate the ship, it would move the space. its the impulse drives that dont make any damn sense. essentially they are a fusion torch drives that can get to 1 c in a sane amount of time but manage to do so without any time dilation. the tng tech manual said they have driver coils, which is effectively a small warp coil, and this is probibly the means for handwaving away the effects of constant acceleration. given a drive that makes the epstein look like a bottle rocket, ships seem to move extremely slowly and do combat at knife fighting ranges.

when you cater to the lowest common denominator, you get it.

today i was about to make a thread asking for help with parallel lipoly packs that wont explode. but then i found a 10ah battery on ebay, ordered it, and closed my browser. i even had 3 paragraphs up.