Winter Man

So I've noticed it happen a few times on here, and it happened again just yesterday to one of my threads. You can have nothing but positive feedback in the thread itself, but the thread as a whole can show up as 'one star' putting other people off because only one person decided they didn't like it. I'd suggest simply not displaying thread ratings until at least three people have voted on it to get a more balanced view. edit: just noticed it applies to all forums, not just the suggestion one. Can't edit title.

That'd be cool. Can you guys who like it rate the thread? Cos it looks like one guy has just stuck one star on it.

I think that's probably the best solution to the problem, giving an 'experimental part' warning.

Flux pinning, he means. But still no, the Earth's field is too weak. No City of Columbia for you today, I'm afraid. I mean, you might be able to produce a metamaterial out of superconductor that works in weaker fields than currently, but still not as weak as Earth's.

So now that we've got these shiny company logos, how about putting them to use? For example, a 'messageboard' screen in the space centre with contract bids from different companies. One company might be a little unreliable but cheap (lower max. heat on the engine?) or what have you. Since there's tweakables, it'd just be a matter of adjusting the max. settings of everything by a constant per company. Say you need more power and you don't care about cost, you switch your engine contract to a company who provides that. You could have it so that when you initially develop a part, you pay more for having it built in-house until you farm it out to contractors.

Come on guys, this is sci fi theory. 'A time of need' is clearly a Soviet-made distress beacon going off on Mars.

If you ignore carbyne, yeah. Other than that though, the main issue is cost. Who's going to invest in a space elevator when SpaceX is throwing stuff into orbit for a fraction of the price using proven tech?

I think if you're connecting two points in space via a wormhole you've got to take into account the depth of the gravity well at either end. Earth and Venus have roughly the same surface gravity, but Venus is deeper in the Sun's well than Earth. Nice little graphic: http://xkcd.com/681_large/

Well the guys over at talk-polywell seem to take him relatively seriously, but I only lurk there so I posted the question here.

Well it's Joe Eck, so take it with a pinch of salt (his 'Meissner transition' could easily be noise if you weren't looking for it), but it seems to warrant further investigation. http://www.superconductors.org/77C.htm He does provide actual instruction on how to reproduce, though.

Well, they've been reported up to 70something C, just not in bulk. So we're getting there.

Hmm. Could make for some good satellite chassis coating, then.

Helioforming. The main obstacle as I think has been said is the pressure required to maintain a fusion reaction. If Jupiter could sustain fusion, it would already be doing so and be a brown dwarf. It's a nice idea, but it won't work as-is. The Mars trilogy had the nice idea of floating 'fusion lanterns' close to the surface that would suck hydrogen in, fuse it in a man-made fusion reactor and dump all the energy as light, making it as 'good as' a star for making the moons more habitable.

So I had a thought the other day. Superconductors exhibit the Meissner effect which excludes the magnetic field from their interior. Moving charged particles generate a magnetic field. Would a superconductor 'exclude' charged particles that tried to move through it, e.g. high energy cosmic rays?

The dust storms can get thick enough to block out the sun almost entirely, but off the top of my head I don't think that'd add enough 'oomph' (to use the technical term) to push over a rocket.

If we're just saying planes that look awesome now, The B2 bomber. Not the American stealth bomber, though. The Handley Page Victor B2. That's the K2 variant, but the B2 looks pretty much the same.

I'm talking about during the 60's here, when it was initially being built and tested. They only used P&W engines, the JT9D, on the original.

The 747 had the same problem. It took Boeing taking some guy high up in Pratt & Whitney up and forcing several engines to blow before he got off his arse and had his guys fix it.

So here's the first drop test of a quarter scale model of SpacePlane, Airbus' foray into the field of cool. http://www.space.com/26196-european-space-plane-drop-test-video.html Appropriately, it looks like the mildly deformed offspring of an F104 Starfighter. edit: suborbital, I should add, but single stage unlike SpaceShipTwo.

Bussard's been dead for a fair number of years, the company's out of his control. Dr. Nebel was in charge when they got Naval funding. Also, Greenpeace are full-blown-sandwich-board-doomsday-prophet nuts. They once tried to convince me global warming was a thing. Not bad, you think? It was completely redundant, this was in England at a hippy music festival. Everyone already knows.

That and it's a lot smaller, with all those neutrons you don't have to block. It's integral to the design. The shell of the device is the direct conversion. Something to do with decelerating the particles by charging the shell to a voltage equivalent to whatever the particle energy is (4.2MeV?). I can't quite remember, I'm kind of drunk.

Well this is interesting. http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.0133 Looks like they've moved to a much smaller coil diameter (and chamber) than WB8 was intended to be to validate the 'high ß' ideas they've had floating around. Last I heard they were looking at 1.5m diameter coils, not 15cm.

Back in my day we didn't even have a Mun to land on! Take it away, I say! New players have it too easy having a tangible object to aim towards!

We were talking about focus. Direct conversion and direct current. The wires are getting a little crossed I think.

It's a DC output, it'd need to go through some manner of smoothing and alternating before transmission anyway so they could be run at any frequency, really. The output is more like a square wave with the trough at 0V than a sine wave centred on it, basically. As for ITER, chances are it'd take a back seat but still be a really useful science experiment.