Nuke

seems for the sake of weight savings you would want to use one main dish for everything. but if you got a rover/relay pair it makes sense to have a long range high gain antennea and then a short range omnidirectional antennea for the downlink. you can get full duplex communication on a dish, but the fact that its directional means that if its pointing at earth, it cant talk to the rover. now it can do a thing where it points the main dish at the rover while it doesnt have line fo sight with earth, uplinks a lot of data, and then transmit from storage when line of sight is restored. usually this also means more bandwidth between rover and relay than what you would have with the omni. this also comes with the added advantage that you can keep comms open with the rover durring this, so it can recieve and relay commands from mission control to the rover while moving the data.

randomize all the things, your main focus is to maximize the error between where the missile wants to be and where you actually are. pumping the throttle is a good idea. of course the more things changing and the higher the variations of the rates of that change the more error you produce. if your main engine is gimballed and you're not exceeding your design tolerances for your craft, and your aren't splattering the crew (blacking out is acceptable if this is all computer controlled), rapid changes in orientation will help add more error. of course if that missile has infinite fuel then you will just end up doing this forever (this is why the expanse has pdcs as the missiles are so fast and manuverable and long range that if they miss they can turn around and make another attempt). but for a missile that has one shot at hitting you, it might work. maneuvers might also be chosen to waste the missile's delta-v budget if that is a known quantity. in this case maximum thrust burns would be best. i kind of like the daily hypotheticals. if it helps him write better scifi then its worth it, and if not its still an effective mental exercise. and its better he asks us than a bunch of science illiterates.

just chock it up to a rounding error. or put on some behemoth or something. but i am reminded of one time in my senior year where i got in trouble once for looking at the church of satan webpage.

i think common sense would dictate not approaching a planet with space launch capabilities. satellites are a good indication that the possess anti-sat capability. you might also want to look for evidence of nuclear weapons testing. if you dont see either of these things you might have found a target ripe for invasion or at least something safe to approach. it wouldn't be too hard to stick some passive surveillance hardware on a small piece of natural space debris and send it on a flyby, and then either have it do a tight beam broadcast or go pick it up to return its findings. if someone on the ground saw the thing they would just see space debris. we see that all the time and its never out of the ordinary. that way you can get intel without risking detection.

usual anti satellite weapons use the target's own momentum to do the damage as they are often launched on suborbital trajectories. a couple gs of acceleration would get you to escape velocity pretty fast, but probably not fast enough to avoid the intercept of one of these munitions provided the were launched around the time the target started its burn. however these weapons are for targets in static orbits with very little thrust for collision avoidance and might not have the deltav to compensate for evasive maneuvers from the target. of course if you shotgun the asat warheads, like send up a bunch of them to increase the size of the skill zone, or perhaps have them detonate into submunitions to cover even more area. even something the size of an airsoft pellet could be quite devastating to a target at orbital velocity. even then its kind of iffy. if these asat weapons are in fact capable of more delta-v (effectively anti-torch ship missiles) then the target might not have a chance as we certainly have engines that can beat 2g, however now were talking a massive rocket that might be too large to be air launchable. if launched from a fixed ground base it might be plausable to burn in such a way that you simply never come into its firing arc.

i didn't mean to invalidate your statement either. it just reminded me of a historic factoid. it makes sense as they were merchant marine and not navy. even a 1940s german officer might, on occasion, do the right thing.

in the duniverse, some people do get away with breaking the rules, the ixians for example. one good example of this (from the 80s move actually, i dont think its actually in the books) was when paul trains on the fighting drone (which according to the expanded novels is ixian). before this takes place thufer orders the room be cleared and locked, presumably because they dont want even their own people to know of the existence of the drone. its never made clear in the movie, but i always thought this was a clever and subtle way to underline how dangerous it is to own computer systems of any kind. in the expanded universe you have cases where people are getting killed for something as petty as owning what is effectively a pocket calculator. however you might be able to justify analog or mechanical computers which could be very advanced such as the ones used in ww2 (for things like stabilizing battleship guns or the norden bomb sight). it might presumably possible to do apollo with analog computers provided you put in the time to miniaturize them and use lightweight materials. the imu for the most part was analog. and it wouldn't be hard to tie that into an analog pid controller to stabilize the spacecraft. any math you needed could be phoned in to mission control and handed off to a team of solvers (or a mentat). slide rules and things like the mechanical fuel calculators that pilots use might be totally legit. as these are just tables of information computed by humans, turn the dial to your input and the arrow points to your output result. its also interesting to note that pid controllers were developed by watching the way a helmsman maintains a ship's course. make small adjustments periodically and compensate for the previous error. so it certainly is something you can train a human to do. you just now need 3 of them to maintain stability on all axes.

in dune computers were just flat out illegal. that thing with the butlerian jihad. of course a computer is completely different from a control system. use the joystick to set the rate of gyro slew. but that too might be construed as a thinking machine in the duniverse. frankly idk how they managed to make their ornithopters work without an elaborate fly by wire control system. i guess so long as a human has their hand on the joystick its not a thinking machine.

i seem to recall the german officer who was in charge of uboats got off at nuremberg for war crimes regarding failure to rescue survivors, mostly on the grounds that we did the same thing. last thing you need on a sub is a prisoner clanging on the hull and giving away your position to an antisubmarine boat. not to say rescues didnt happen, but likely in situations where it did not interfere with the mission (say it was due back in port) or pose a threat to the sub. lol i could totally see alien be used as a training film in the future.

if you want to procure alien tech and in tact artifacts are hard to come by, then why punish those actually trying to recover it? incentivization seems to be the better approach in this case. now if say recovering alien tech resulted in a treaty violation or some such it might make sense. of course then there would be a black market. in either case i dont think it would be that hard to offload your goods.

when i was doing my aa i had to take a political science class. something i was completely disinterested in taking. to make it worse we had the most sleep inducing instructor they could find. but at least he wasn't flat out malicious, just extremely dull, ive had a lot of the former especially in elementary school. i also had a really stupid second grade teacher in a combined 1st/2nd grade class that though i should stay back a grade so she put me with the 1st graders, but then didnt tell anyone about this, needless to say i was grossly unprepared for 3rd grade and to this day i still can not write in cursive. more of an honorable mention: i had this unpredictable whackjob in 4th grade. im not sure how to describe the guy. he was very political, he had his own version of the pledge of allegiance and various patriotic songs, made us watch these obscure weird low budget films probably coming out some liberal arts university's drama department, or rather visceral medical documentaries featuring various surgeries (most 4th grade teachers would have resorted to schoolhouse rock). one time he devoted an entire day to debating the second amendment. id say hes like the father from 'captain fantastic' if he was a public school teacher. i only had the guy for about 3 months and i started in the middle of the year. he may have actually been a good teacher had i started the year with him, hince the honorable mention. but the reason he's here is he had me shipped off to a special school (which id describe as a dumping ground for sociopaths, lunatics, and the developmentally challenged) because i was such a disruption to the class apparently (if you can disrupt chaos). this was late 80s or early 90s so im sure there are worse examples now.

get you a software defined radio module. will give you a lot of good data acquisition.

you might get a reward for turning it over to a military or other government authority, especially if the technology is more advanced. advancing your own technology would be a top priority, especially if the aliens in question are hostile. they might even have bounties in these kinds of situations to encourage salvage crews to recover this tech. obviously these would come with the essential precautions as conditions to the bounty, like taking the salvage to a secure station or facility, and probably quarantine of the crew. spending a month in quarantine would be worth it for a years salary for example.

im more of a chili man myself take about four pounds of whatever meat you just shot. a pound of bacon, about a dozen serrano peppers, an onion, 3 tablespoons chili powder, a can of green chilis, and a can of kidney beans (beans are a personal preference, most chili makers regard them as a mortal sin). cube the meat, cut the bacon into small pieces, and cut up the onion, throw it into a large skillet and fry the meat in lard until browned. then put it in a slow cooker with the rest of the ingredients. let it sit in the slow cooker all day (for best results set it to 'on'). serve in a bread bowl with a side of tums and a glass of milk*, you are going to need them. *may be substituted with vodka if you haven't got your ulcer yet. original recipe called for 20 serranos, but that was like eating a nuclear reactor, i figure 12 should be merely face melting. i suppose you can be a wimp and use jalapenos instead.

and now for something completely different. its kind of an odd fusion of slave spirituals and black metal, but it works. so far the live stuff is best.

seems you could do a 3g intercept with shuttles (crewed by well trained rescue personnel/pirates that can handle the gs) while mothership continues to destination as planned at 1g. if its a trap then you just have to explain the loss of the shuttle and personnel. but you would likely be operating under some standing orders as to how to deal with such situations, if something goes awry, you can say you were just following standard operating procedure. thats kind of why they exist. they would likely report the situation and buck it up the chain of command, they could accept the loss or send another more well armed ship to recover it if possible. if there was some kind of interstellar maritime law there might be other rules for how to handle the situation, with a lot of "at your discretion" in the regs, and of course what your employer/insurance company thinks is acceptable would likely override that. or it could be something like privateers in the pirates golden age. funded by and operated under a government flag, but could do whatever they wanted so long as they didnt attack their own shipping. your a patriot when its convenient and a pirate otherwise. i think it all depends on who you are working for.

i figure at some point in the hopefully not too distant future we will have a need for a multi-fuel engine that can take a wide variety of fuels/propellants with little or no modification on the fly. it would be the perfect engine for asteroid mining as you never know what you might find. pump whatever you find into a holding tank and you might just give yourself enough delta-v to hop to the next closest rock. the profitability of asteroid mining will likely increase the more rocks you can process before your consumables run out. figure it would be some kind of electric or nuclear engine where you don't specifically need combustible fuels as much as remass. in this case the tanks would be very general purpose and able to handle a wide range of temperatures and pressures, and have some processing capability to remove anything that would be bad for the engine. they will almost certainly come with the tradeoff of being more mass to haul around than a single fuel engine, but the utility of being able to source delta-v from almost anywhere will greatly increase your capabilities. its an engineering problem.

in before 'remember the cant' from a cosmic looting stant point id want to see what was in there, if you rescue some crew/passengers in the process, then that just allows you to justify your looting later. call it recouping your losses. otherwise legitimate salvage. just hope whoever that ship belonged to comes from a species that understands salvage rights.

can haz preorder before i run out of stimulus money?

nuke the clouds!

probably not something anyone would plan for, but i kind of did it once in ksp to save a ship that didnt quite have the deltav to get into orbit. fortunately it was the hab stage for a jool mission and id already boosted the transfer stage, its orbit was close enough that i could plot a just in time intercept with the transfer stage. of course i had to send up a tanker to refuel it having burned a good portion of the deltav in the maneuver, but at least jeb and val didnt burn up. possible yes, but were in extreme situation territory.

i see a lot of electric plane concepts with multiple small props. yet all the commercial sport offerings seem to be single motor affairs. the simplicity of a single drive shaft with a rotor (just a ring of neodymium magnets) and prop on a pair of berings puts most of the aircraft engines to shame in terms of simplicity. of course since redundancy is essentially free, bring a couple. but you see concepts bristling with small props and it just seems laughable. the place where you actually want the redundancy is in the battery. multiple banks any one of which provide enough power to maintain altitude. would probably enable all but a couple banks for takeoff, and then switch down to one or two durring flight or alternate between them to manage heat. perhaps do some minor range extension by installing thin film solar panels on the upper wing and fuselage.

1. bacon is the law. thou shalt eat bacon and celebrate its awesomeness. 2. kitties are your superiors, even when they are being jerks. pet them and give them noms. 3. it is ok not to be able to think of any more rules

i figured it would take about 6.4 MW of electrical power to make this kind of thruster power a 737, and thats not counting the added weight of the engine or the batteries or whether a battery pack could put out 6.4 MW with current tech.

i think the idea is that solid state batteries would have the energy density for short hop flights. of course that could be a decade or more of development before we start seeing them in devices and another before we start seeing massive ev packs. add another for airliner sized packs.