Nuke

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.

recently a post on hack a day about space toilets got me thinking. crap is actually rather flammable, even more so when vacuum desiccated and compressed. when formed into a hollow cylinder and combined with an oxidizer feed you have a hybrid rocket engine. further more its a way to dispose of a waste product that would need to be returned to earth at some point anyway. you could potentially use such crappy engines to re-boost the station and solve two problems at once. makes me wonder what kind of isp you could expect.

antique furniture is often better than modern in terms of durability. they didn't conduct stress analysis to try and figure out how little material they could get away with using, and just overbuilt everything. just sand and reseal it, cheaper than buying a new one. as for the dishes, keep em till they break. people i live with keep buying fancy china and and really fancy silverwear that somehow weighs 5x your typical stuff. always make me nervous when i do dishes. fortunately they haven't replaced my mason jars yet, drop em and they bounce, drop the fancy glass and it shatters. never mind that pairing fancy dishes and silverware with prego jars is tacky af.

i was mostly thinking military applications where larger than usual safety margins are acceptable. say you have a space station which has been taken over by another government, and you need to send in a special ops team. granted were not quite where we need to do things like this yet. maybe they want to do a cover up and a properly lined up re-entry puts you in a position to be shot down by that country, so re-enter with different phasing, refuel, and rtb. you probably have to come up with a tom clancy esque situation where this capability is useful. crew is specifically the thing you need sstos for. especially if you want space travel to eventually be affordable to the masses. the skylon's approach to crew launch is a hab module in its cargo bay and the entire crew module could be jettisoned in an emergency and landed with chutes. biggest risk is engine failure at take off (and i have serious concerns about engine placement on skylon). a failure of one of the precoolers can be countered by switching to rockets giving you the option of a fuel dump and turn around. non-explosive failure of other parts of the engine might also be sufficient for a come around on the other engine (provided its placement is made more sane). explosive failure of an engine would probably trigger jettisoning the crew module. i think it could be made even safer than rockets with sufficient refinements.

i wouldn't doubt that its been done in ksp, though i haven't done it personally. this kind of thing seems like it would only really make sense for military applications, us space force would love to have this capability.

that might be another reason to have your thrust vector 7.5 degrees off axis and the widely spaced engines. but yea skylon is a paper airplane designed to sell engines. however i still see an ssto as a light surface to leo craft, with multistage semi-reusable heavy rockets doing the heavy lifting. the advantages of being able to routinely operate with fast turn around. if combined with midair refueling, then you can pick your position for your orbital insertion manuver and are no longer constrained as much by launch windows. i wonder what the feasibility of refueling a space craft post re-entry to fly it back to its home space port under power.

ive read that the sabre engine will be about the size of a bus.

more of a cat person myself. but my family down in az had a chihuahua that wasn't too bad. i think they mostly bark at people they don't know because this one was calm and quiet most the time. but i couldn't see myself having a pet that isn't constant plotting revenge on some minor past grievance.

i wouldn't mind if they stole the tv, then i could actually read more books. hell so long as they leave my main rig alone, dont take the 3d printer or any of my myriad of boxes of junk and random salvage parts, or anything from the fridge, id be cool with it.

idk about that, the dominion was mentioned in season 2. granted season 1 and 2 were a lot of recycled unused tng scripts, especially the one off episodes. but in retrospect ds9 had one of the better first seasons of any trek (not including tos). and babylon 5 was awesome for 4 seasons, i try to forget the 5th and some of the movies and the spinoff that didn't go anywhere (i did like the captain's character though).

seconded. i might have played ksp maybe a couple days this year, having played it to death in the earlier days. but the forum still has good science content. and its more approachable than an actual science forum somewhere.

the skylon design operates at a high angle of attack so it bends down so the shock cones align with airflow, also its neccisary to angle the engine down in order to line up with the plane's cg, since its essentially one big fuel tank. the result is an engine curved 15 degrees, which i see as being neither efficient nor practical. the wide spacing in the engine nacelles is somewhat of a concern, losing one of those at any phase of flight would be catastrophic. keeping the engines more inboard would make such scenarios less catastrophic potentially allowing for an rtb without the loss of payload. the skylon is essentially a paper airplane they used to promote their engine design, i dont think the final design would look anything like that and its probably going to go into someone else's space frame. ultimately i see this as mostly useful for small crew shuttles or other small payloads. maybe some kind of space fighter. heavy lift largely reusable rockets would be better for large payloads though.

it would have made the space race more interesting.

dino scale battlemechs.

i presume there are limits to how much "fuel" you can put into the thing. otherwise you can just put as much in as you need for the entire life of the ship or at least till the next servicing. but i guess you get to a point where the whole thing is too massive to be an effective space transport.

i think you are better off scooping gas giants.

theres a pre-order? shut up and take my money!

i assume theoretical as something that we can actually build as our current scientific understanding is developed into viable technology. im going to have to go with a boring fusion drive. fusion does not even need to be break even and probably wont be in this case. a second reactor would be needed for electrical power, and that can be fission or fusion. its probably not going to a torch. just a notch above a high power mpd drive.

there are a lot of classic movies id love to see in a theater. pretty much anything filmed in a wide format. but classic movie theaters are few and far between. i dont even think there is one in my state.