Nuke

were getting to where we can actually make power supplies for these things. though i dont think were quite up to twr of 1 just yet so no hovering. flight on the other hand is still possible (google mit ion plane). but were still talking extremely lightweight construction likely not suited for manned applications. as far as power supplies go, mit's schematic took a high dc voltage of 160-225v which is then inverted, fed to an hv transformer, followed by a full wave six stage voltage multiplier. id love to see what this actually looks like but all i can find is a simple schematic, except for the transformer this is likely all solid state, and the transformer is going to be small, so we might be talking a few square inches of board space (possibly larger to prevent arcing between components). the only way i figured the battery pack would be small enough to fly is with flat cells, and i found some flat cells with a very small mah rating. i figure it would run < 1 minute on a charge and likely with zero battery safety circuitry. there is a long way to go. though there was this thing awhile back about using giant flying wing shaped airships with a 1km wing span using ion propulsion powered by thin film solar cells to get to orbit. it was insane but it would be something to see.

construction materials, a power plant of sorts, raw resources, a reason to exist, and a lot of collective will. we probably need to get over our fear of gmos as those are likely the key to developing a crop that is well adjusted to growing in space or on a centrifuge, disease resistant, effective co2 scrubbers, and with a high crop yield and very compatible with hydroponics. you may very well be eating foods that don't exist yet. bioreactors might handle decomposition of waste into useful nutrients for farming. the food cycle would need to be as closed a system as possible. the fewer consumables the better. on earth we use a lot of open ended processes because the environment is big enough where it can handle it (for the most part, were still probing the limits of how much abuse it can take). its not necessary to completely recycle sewage as simply treating it so its safe enough to dump where the environment can handle most of the break down processes. but in space a barrel of poop might be precious material and open cycles are a good way to run out of things. you will need to produce something of value that can be traded. maybe you are sitting on some metal rich asteroids or have a moon with a lot of hydrocarbons, even just being a breadbasket colony. you may not have everything you need to survive but you can trade what you have for what you need. the second law of thermodynamics is what it is and you will need to replenish essential consumables as stockpiles can only go so far. finding a body with a lot of resource diversity might mean you can make or recycle everything you need. this is where a good power supply comes in handy as it greatly increases the number of industrial processes you have access to.

dont get your science from documentaries, get it from science papers. documentary makers like to tell stories, putting narratives in places they don't belong. i had to stop watching them, they were making me stupid.

step carefully, you are walking on the dead.

i do neither of these things.

tried the cueball look in highschool, found out my head is too bumpy for it to look good. ended up developing a scalp condition that made me look like one of the aliens from alien nation. as a result my hair is now 3 feet long.

i already had one but its reached new levels of bushiness. i usually let it grown out in the fall and winter months and trim it down to a goatee the rest of the year. but with the late ending winter and the virus i just don't see any point. protip for growing beards: turn 30. went and done a hard flip from wont grow at all to wont stop growing around that time. for me this all happened around 30 and has only got worse since, but ymmv. i live in a fishing town populated by people of viking ancestry so a beard is standard workplace equipment.

the thing really holding up advancement of ion engines is really available space power supplies. you could have some beefy engines if you can produce power on the order of megawatts in space. no point researching an even more powerful thruster when you really cant power the ones we have. better space fission reactors would help. i also have a hunch that fusion rocket engines would be significantly simpler than fusion power, so no point doing fusion-electric. something oddly ironic like having a fission power supply and a fusion engine might be a thing.

yea, ice isnt so hard to come by that you need to do anything insane to get it other than mine it.

problem is you slam a rock going one way with a rock going the other way you get a bunch of debrits with their orbital velocity canceled out which immediately falls into saturn. if you can reverse the direction of half the rocks, you can haul all the rocks to a base. you might be able to artificially engineer a collection mass, an artificial moon with no other purpose than to gather material for future harvesting. just start lashing rocks together until they have enough gravity to draw in the others. but that could take centuries.

long term reliability is something we are really not good at, we aint got nothing on the ancient egyptians, of course they didn't build interstellar rockets (to the best of our knowledge), though that might just be survivorship bias. also the orion isnt something that has much redundancy. multiple drives on a single ship would probably destroy each other. perhaps one engine in the rear and a spare up front (can also dampen impacts from space debris). going with plasma engines, you can make huge clusters of small thrusters, with lots of spare parts and replacement units in stock. then you lose an engine it might add some more travel time but you will be able to keep going. so something like that looks the most promising (though plasma is a non-contender).

i always have my doubts about the shock absorbers in the pusher plate. they need to turn an intermittent huge force into a continuous smaller force.i mean its a well understood technology, but we are building it on a huge scale in a hostile environment and with long term reliability requirements. then for the case of interstellar trips, they need to remain functional for months or years, with a long period of idle time in between burns for things to corrode, auto-weld or for working fluid to be permanently lost to space due to running into a space pebble. id hate to come out of hypersleep (though being awake the whole time facilitates continued maintenance) to realize that i either have to choose between being lost to the void due to being unable to slow down or have to risk having my spine powderized in the now significantly more bumpy breaking burn. even in the solar system if you use these as battle ships, the oil tank is going to be where i focus my shots, because if i can make an enemy eject from the solar system, that might as well be as good as a kill shot. i wonder if fission fragment would work out well enough to give orion a run for its money. orion is definately the more near term option, but if you are going to spend 100+ years on a voyage, who cares if your departure burn lasts for 3 months or 3 years. at least assuming they are on par isp wise (i very much doubt it)

some guy in engineering is going to convert tokamak parts into a still, and theres going to be that gal in astrophysics that gives half the crew the clap, and gambling will be against the rules yet everyone including the captain does it. i actually think of it sort of like m*a*s*h, but in space.

the moon (or any low grav no atmo rock in the system) is a great place to put astronomical observation equipment. especially with the area around the planet cluttered with com sats. and the saturation satting that starlink is doing is bad for optical scopes. so not only for radio but optical scopes as well. kind of think any moon base should also come with an observatory.

moving rocks costs energy no matter where they are. what i suggest will probably require a small fleet of laser tugs. the power requirements for each would pit the nif to shame. probibly would be cheaper just to go out and net them.

torch drives seem more feasable than warp drives, but i dont think we will have expanse levels of performance from them and will probibly look more like flying radiators with tiny habitable spaces than the compact utilitarian looking expanse ships. star trek technically has torch drives (impulse engines), but their ships are neither optimized for them nor do they make it apparent in the way its shot. actually space battles in star trek are a lot like the fights in dragonball z. 2 opponents staring each other down from a distance, sometimes spewing forth threats, bravado, or boasts, and not doing a whole lot else.

i kind of think things have gone a little too far at this point. the term politically correct is almost certainly oxymoronic in nature. as i have never known any politician to do anything correctly. so its not really something people should aspire to. many people fall afoul of power gradients in society and generalizing who has it worse is just bad. i for one think its pretty damn racist/sexist/whateverist to be lumped into a group of privileged individuals based on my skin color/gender/whatever and not my actual situation. id go into it more but its kind of hard without breaking the no politics rules, which i may have already stepped over with this post. not to mention i only clicked on it because i thought it was about computers.

use lasers to ablate the surface of the ice, then using cv algorithms and physics modeling software figure out the right spots to hit to get the ice where you want it. thus turn each chunk into its own little space ship on its way to a collection area. i imagine having them march single file right onto a tangental approach to a ring station.

some of the most interesting people ive met have always been society's rejects. unfortunately they usually have such a low view of themselves, or worse are outright narcissists (sometimes both) that they either too good for or you are you are not good enough for them. the more normal types tend to go for the safe bet. they tend to have such a low tolerance for anything but other normals and thus end up in boring safe lives where nothing can ever go wrong. i feel sorry for them sometimes. and these days to get anyones attention you need to set off a nuke near by so all their phones get emped just to get them to frantically ask eachother if they have any bars, never mind the incoming blast wave. people are often not worth the trouble. theres this large viking woman (im 6'4" and shes still taller than me and pleasantly plump) that im interested in, but i cant get her eyes off her screen for 2 seconds to ask her out. shes one of 5 women on the island in my age bracket (late thirties) and the only one that single as far as i can tell. i even made her brownies once but it turns out shes diabetic (and a bit bipolar but that's not a deal breaker). she even plays the drums so between the two of us that like an entire black metal band. i mean its her or one of the 40+ gals that keep oogling me, im kind of starting to get interested in the cat lady.

neither a leader nor a follower be. omega or bust.

still it would suck to lose your slowboat ion probe because someone with a bigger budget than you fired up their torch drive nearby.

for launchers i tend to make the case leave the reactor on the ground, make hydrolox. you can always build bigger rockets. especially large multi-stage reusable rockets. once in space all bets are off and you can use whatever you want from the nastiest of hypergolics to the cleanest fusion drives. though you might have a nuclear exclusion zone for really nasty drives like fission fragment and orion (for the latter we might be talking in a solar orbit no closer than mars). actually im curious how far actual exclusion zones would be for various drives. not just to keep fission products from entering the atmo, but also to protect satellites. i dont think there has ever been a study as no one has ever flown a dirty drive in space to the best of my knowledge.

i love the violent reaction you get when you fail to dry your potatoes before tossing them into the deep frier. a fine example of why you should never rush the cook. there is a way to get rid of hot oil without lighting your house on fire though. turn the faucet on cold perhaps a quarter its max flow rate. allow it to flow gently down the side of the sink towards the drain with laminar flow (avoid splashes), then slowly pour your oil directly into the drain. its important that your oil to water ratio be at least 3x more water than oil, as you need enough thermal mass to avoid a rapid boil off. you should never pour water into hot oil because that is a good way to build and impromptu flame thrower. i dont like leaving it out because the cats have a way of checking out the kitchen while everyone else is eating, and leaving it out to cool can cause kitty some nasty burns. i suppose you could just cover it but that's wasting dishes, which would not be an issue if the freeloaders i feed would do dishes. oh damn necro.

habitable is not so much a black and white thing as a shade of grey, with very few planets completely in the black and even earth itself not being completely white. right kind of power supplies and you can make any of them useful to a spacefaring civilization.

nah, they are to be butchered, florets separated from their stalks and thrown into a pan full of onions and dead cow parts and covered in an asian ginger sauce. thus is the nature of life. and dont forget the fungus too, it soaks up sauce, them mushrooms are not immune to the butchery. at least in my kitchen their suffering will be honored by being delicious.