Nuke

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.

i pronounce it "that really bad year that sucked".

the vorlons were known for doing all kinds of manipulations to almost every race in b5. genetic manipulation, social manipulation, religious engineering, etc, for millennia. they are why most races have telepaths for example, and i wouldn't doubt they are responsible for sweedish meatballs as well (which is why i call them vorlon meatballs). you saw some religious engineering when kosh got into g'kar's head and by the end of the series he has reached messiah status, even going as far as making themselves look like deities to everyone except londo. im curious if the vorlons and shadows agreeing to leave wasn't part of their plan all along. the whole thing could have been a test to see if the various races were ready to leave the cradle as it were. perhaps failing to pass the test the first time around. rather than each race choosing one side or the other, choosing their own way instead. if they were really at war they would have destroyed eachother long ago younger races be damned. instead i see them in a shepherding role, their conflict is not about them. i think they could have made it work even losing some main characters, or they would have done their thing, instilling order, knocking over some anthills and went quiet for another few thousand years. they are clearly playing the long game here and can tolerate huge setbacks.

they are from a park near a small beach not far from the end of the airport runway (not really a great place for plane watching as we only get a few a day, a couple alaska airlines flights a cargo plane and maybe a medivac if you are lucky, you are better off at the floatplane dock for that). judging by the number of grubs we found they were not using any pesticides at all. up here in se alaska we get a large number of berry species. most neumerous are blueberries and salmon berries (sort of like a raspberry and come in several different colors, we also havew watermellon berries, elderberries, strawberries (usually the deer eat them before they ripen) , and a few others, but not as numerous). by everywhere i mean everywhere, lots of kids like to chew up the salmon berries and spit them out along the roads and trails so that more berry bushes show up next year, even had one pop up under our deck once. they usually dont have bugs though, or none that ive found.

i find the biggest source of weevils was a case of kraft macaroni and cheese that sat in our pantry for a year or two. the tell tale sign is little tinny holes in the cheese packet. im not sure whether they come with the cheese or the noodles. but ive found them in flour, bisquick, sugar (that was the fastest weevil ive ever seen, and this may have been cross contamination since i only found one), buttermilk powder (produced some of the largest and most numerous), and various pastas, but i have never seen one in rice. with non-tube pasta you can usually just ignore them and they float to the top and can be skimmed off with ease. with things like flour any live weevils get ground up in the milling, but the eggs can survive, the use by date usually correlates to when they hatch. to store it long term you need freeze it and transfer it to a clean sealable container after a few days, never put new flour on top of old flour. many drystuffs come in paper packaging, which wont stop cross contamination so be sure it gets stored asap. because of the pandemic we have received so much extra money that our pantry is overflowing, and a lot of it is going to get contaminated before we can use it. so i have been rotating it through what little freezer space we have. also when living in a humid environment, freezing sugar seems to cause it to clump up into solid blocks that need breaking up. you can tape a couple silica gel packets to the inside of the lid to keep it from re-clumping. we usually arent so concerned about sugar though as we rotate through it pretty quickly.

think of it this way, they are blueberry flavored grubs. im more grossed out by the hotdog episode of how its made.

one day we had my sister and her family over. everyone had the munchies but there was no snackfood in the house. so we went blueberry picking. wild blueberries always have grubs as insects like to lay their eggs in the blossoms that become berries. to get them out you need to soak them in brine overnight. we used seawater, as the berry bushes were near the beach. the larvae lose their oxygen supply and quickly burrow their way out of the berry, almost immediately they start floating to the surface. im not certain the role the salt plays, as i just picked this up from the folk wisdom of other berry pickers. its not 100% foolproof as a dead grub cannot extricate itself from the berry. if they drown or died prior to processing they stay put and some species of larva can live without oxygen for long periods of time and try to wait it out. i think farmed blueberries have the same problem as you can find grub boreholes on store bought berries. everyone wanted me to make some blueberry muffins, so after only four hours in the brine we skimmed the grubs and rinsed the berries and used some of them in the muffins. i made like 2 dozen or so muffins. some of them came out a little dry and my sister decided she would make a blueberry frosting. upon applying the blender to some berries and dumping them into a mixing bowl, we saw grubs everywhere. by that time everyone had eaten at least one muffin, i ate 2. thing is by the end of the day there were no muffins left, i even went back for a couple more myself. they tasted like any other blueberry muffin. this tends to make one wonder whether thats because all the other muffins have grubs too, and that a grubless muffin might actually not be as good. we also had a problem with pantry weevils. they seem to hate bay leaves and that has done a lot to suppress them. the weevils seemed to be coming from the food itself, as there were no pantry beetles as you would find if you had an infestation. factories might be able to sift out the weevils they have, but the eggs remain, and if you let things like noodles and flour sit in your pantry for too long, the eggs hatch and soon they are everywhere. so its all a matter of avoiding cross contamination between foodstuffs, we moved everything to tins. we also put drystuffs in the freezer for a couple days before putting them in their designated containers, with the hopes of killing the eggs. keeps them more or less at bay. this is another case where the gross out factor far exceeds their impact on human health and the flavor of food. its ok though as the fda has strict regulations regarding the insect content (as well as rodent droppings, this is why housecats are a thing) of your foods. keep in mind these thresholds of acceptability are non-zero.

you need the pee to make the oxidizer.

like all power structures, they seldom evaporate when they have served their purpose.

its very hard to find any realism with regards to space in most works of fiction. cartoon space craft are designed to dumb down the person watching the show so that later on in life they wont call out more adult scifi for committing the same atrocities against realism.

lol, nope. people are here more so more opportunity for them to make messes increases.

don't waste your work ethic at work. they usually don't deserve it.

the good news is you are in a space suit, the bad news is you have to go inside with it on. cant leave it at the door as a farmer would do with his boots.

plasma as a warhead might be a thing. i recall there being a mention of plasma torpedoes in the expanse books, better than conventional but not quite nuclear.

ive never worked a job where i didn't feel like i was exploiting people.

this happened a couple days ago. but after doing a bunch of house work so this place doesn't look like a crazy cat lady lives here, i opted to take a shower. i had made my usual rounds on the internet and left my computer on. when i came back i find one of my cats sleeping on my keyboard and a bunch of instances of kerbal space program running, most were spewing out errors. it took two restarts to get my computer back to functional. no doubt it did some damage to my ssds, as memory started running out (granted they might be getting upgraded soon, as the state of alaska decided to give us our pfds early this year due to covid).

there was project marauder that was supposed to create a ring of self confining plasma. such a weapon would have a strong emp effect. essentially its a ppc ala battletech, even the name references a common battlemech which carries such weaponry. supposidly its results were so good that it was quickly classified by the us government. that was back in the 80s-90s so who knows how far they have come since then. i think the expanse hits the nail on the head with its pdcs, railguns, and missiles.

more because its something thats easy to do when you are surrounded by vacuum. freeze drying is essentially putting things in a vacuum chamber, which causes the moisture to evaporate while keeping the solids. its probably more involved than that, but that's the jist of it. once its dry it can be compacted to remove the voids formerly occupied by moisture. space toilets already do these things, but the excrement is usually bagged and placed into storage for disposal on earth. instead make the compactor compact the crap into the right shape needed for a solid/hybrid engine. the "brick" can be loaded into the combustion chamber of an engine. so you need a hybrid engine design that has the ability to be reloaded during a space walk or perhaps from inside the station itself. buffalo chips.

i remember meat rocket. but not poo rocket.