Winter Man

And none of it with the same energy density as nuclear (also, not household level, community level).

I always assumed the thing that made FTL violate causality wasn't the fact that something arrived there before light (slower than instantaneous), but that it was an artifact of applying the laws of general relativity to said 'something' and assuming it arrives by travelling the same path as the photon would, forcing it to travel backwards in time. Warp drives have their own separate bubble of space-time and are by default not taking the same route as the photon (unless it's on for the ride in which case it'll get to the destination 'faster than light' too), they're taking a shortcut kind of like, but topologically completely different to how, a wormhole does.

This is why I don't like forum discussions, no one reads back a page I'm not on about RTGs, I'm on about a small nuclear reactor little to no moving parts. Granted I couldn't find and link to it at the time, but I've found it now - linkymagig. It doesn't run on strontium/plutonium, but on mildly enriched uranium hydride, which is a self moderating material. Those are what I'm on about distributing.

Didn't say it was more efficient than using a higher temperature source. That'd be bloody ridiculous, and possibly over-unity. Even if you could get the same efficiency you wouldn't solve the world's energy problems, because they run much deeper than efficiency of extraction at the point of burning it. What it'd do is create a distributed grid system rather than a centralised one, preventing large-scale blackouts or brownouts.

Except you're missing that a large quantity of warm water can have its energy transplanted into a small quantity of high temperature steam with a Ranque-Hilsch tube (via some kind of gas for transmission, 134a's probably about right), which would drive a turbine efficiently.

Nope, a small scale regular plant fueled by decay instead of fission. And maybe a little bit of fission. The point being it needs far less input (all you need to do is drop a steam pipe down into it to thieve its heat) so you can have loads of them, unguarded besides the aforementioned concrete.

That's why you use bloody large ones buried under many a metre of concrete, and distribute them to every 10,000 people (although obviously not an RTG due to the inefficiency).

How are you tuning your antennae? And are you amplifying the signal once it get to the servo?

There was talk a little while back of a small town scale generator that'd get buried under a public building, encased in concrete. It'd have worked pretty much squarely in between a conventional reactor and an RTG, using a core with no moving parts but with a steam generator instead of a thermoelectric one, getting round the inefficiency.

Well it's not quite true breakeven, that comes next. What happened here was the fuel gave out as much energy as it absorbed, not as much as firing the laser consumed.

Bung it round the Moon. If there's enough fuel left, land the bugger.

I do believe that's more plausible

MOST Kerbal plane? The rocket-assist C130. Moar. Boosters.

You're forgetting that land is very much a resource. The ongoing conflict in Israel is primarily land-related (half the living Palestinians being forced off theirs, half the living Israelis now having lived there their whole lives). Include land as a resource and an awful lot more wars become resource-related.

Neutron radiation? This tagged sci-fi theory, I think we can safely say it's aneutronic (pB11 or somesuch).

I think you're looking at that wrong. His first thought needn't have been "KIIIILLLL!!!", more "I can use this to save my own tribe from the neighbours".

The game doesn't really lend itself well to console controllers, though. They're fine when flying planes in-atmosphere but as soon as you get to space you start running out of buttons fast.

(in reference to solar sails) Sorry to quote back to the first page, but solar sails have already been flown reliably in interplanetary space - just not by NASA. JAXA's IKAROS spacecraft did a flyby of Venus using a little one.

The problem with vacuum balloons is the negative pressure involved means you need big heavy structures to hold them, i.e. they don't float too good. Hydrogen, helium and hot air are all easy because they're contained at atmospheric pressure so don't need the support.

Sounds like someone's been watching Look Around You.

I'd quite like to see it written as 'Space Station 1 Stage 3 (discarded)', but then that's just me.

I'd probably end up killing myself, Mal from Inception style.

I quite liked the idea in the Mars trilogy of loads of floating fusion reactors in the high atmosphere of Jupiter, just putting out light for the colonists on the moons.

Other than looking kind of pretty, it'd serve absolutely no purpose. You can't fly two rockets at once, and there's no delay when launching a second ship.

The immediate problem I see with that is the 'make room' part. Palladium (or any other hydrogen adsorbing transition metal) unfortunately takes less force to break apart than it does to squeeze two hydrogen isotopes together. The metal will form nanoscopic fissures as par for the course, if indeed it will make room as opposed to just saturating, meaning no matter how perfect you get a surface, all your setup will do is make pits in it.