Bill Phil

Warfare on any scale above interplanetary is... Useless. I was going to say impossible, but that isn’t technically the case. You can most certainly wage war acrocss interstellar distances and perhaps even intergalactic distances - but to do is a vast waste of time and resources. For one thing a civilization may live in widespread habitats that are too small for RKVs to reliably hit from light years away - of course you could shoot a huge swarm of RKVs but that’s an utterly massive waste of energy. There are far more useful things to do with your time. Antimatter is not the ultimate weapon - anything with a Lorentz factor above 2 (about 0.867c) has a kinetic energy equal to its mass energy, anything faster has more than its mass energy in kinetic energy. These constitute RKVs, and making them of antimatter is pointless since you can just make it faster and get the same effect. They’re certainly deadly but reliably hitting anything is tougher than it seems. Planets? Those could be hit reliably. But there’s nothing stating civilizations only live on planets. Any kind of orbital habitat would be fine. A billion orbital habitats seems like a conservative estimate for a mature stellar civilization. They could be easily spread out over 500 thousand cubic AUs, with about 2000 per cubic AU. Each one could be just a few kilometers in size. And these aren’t static objects. So hitting them from lightyears away, while possible, is a waste. The amount of effort to destroy 2000 habitats requires blanketing an entire cubic AU with RKVs, potentially sizable ones at that. That amount of energy is nothing to sneeze at - you could potentially lift enough mass off of a planet or asteroid to build 2000 or even more habitats with that much energy. The energy balance isn’t favorable. While you’re shooting RKVs at them they’ve expanded and might have even more habitats by the time the RKVs arrive. The only useful methods are ships that can then target enemy habitats after getting close but these ships will be easy pickings for enemy weapons. There’s also no reason - you’d get more resources spending the energy on star lifting. Basically - it’s useless. And a big waste of energy. Eventually things might change as civilizations could transition into much slower forms, but at least in the near term interstellar warfare is not energetically useful - barring any crazy General Relativity tricks that let you scoot around and reach places before light would.

King Crimson has struck again.

Hey I’m still in 2019 Happy New Year though

On a similar note: Slaughterhouse Five could be how Billy copes with his war experiences.

Not gonna end soon. There’s money to be made. So barring a societal collapse - it’ll keep going.

Hmm... 40 years from now? Mini-Mag Orion could enable expeditions to Jupiter and Saturn. Then maybe develop some kind of beamed propulsion (either mass beam or photon beam, though mass beam propulsion is more efficient and I’ve seen proposals for beam-assisted Mini-Mag Orion) to get higher velocities with known technology and no extreme fusion tech. What’s cool is that this can lead to rapid interplanetary transport and could be a potential development path for interstellar propulsion as well.

You mean a model to calculate various aspects of the rocket? Yeah, you can make one pretty easily in excel actually. Or do you mean one that calculates the optimum trajectory? Yes, but some of the tools are a bit complicated. Some good ones can likely be found somewhere though.

You’re missing my point. Admittedly I’m not the best at communicating my point but here’s the rundown: Orion vehicles are so powerful that they rarely ever take the most fuel efficient route from one celestial body to another. This means that the variation in required delta-v between a “best case” mission and a “worst case” mission is well within reasonable limits - that is the Orion is already likely to fly on a very fuel inefficient trajectory to begin with, thus the Orion is relatively insensitive to the alignment of planets, compared to a chemical or nuclear thermal rocket. Orions are so powerful that you can fly on very expensive trajectories and you are likely to do so. The relative cost of nuclear pulse units for different missions are thus not likely to be a major factor, as an Orion isn’t intended to take the most efficient route nor does it have to like chemical rockets. This is even more pronounced in the KSP solar system due to the scaled down nature of everything and the slower velocities. Now this all is fairly sensitive to the performance and cost values they give to the Orion drive (or drives). I’ve used some Orion drive mods for KSP, and they’re so powerful that you can leave Kerbin whenever you want and go to just about any planet you want. But the devs of KSP2 may decide to give it some balancing properties though I suspect they won’t nerf it too much since there will be some very powerful rockets in game with much more ridiculous performance.

I’m not disagreeing with that. It’s just not a major consequence. The cost might only increase by all of a few percent. It depends on how much the pulse units cost in game. If Orion takes a hyperbolic trajectory at all times then a poor alignment will not affect the total delta-v as much you would expect.

Yeah it does take more delta-v, but the KSP solar system is so small that an Orion drive makes minimum energy transfers a moot point - the absolute worst position might increase delta-v by a substantial amount - if it wasn’t Orion. The worst times will be Eve or Duna when they’re on opposite sidea of the Sun. But Orion can fly on high energy hyperbolic trajectories, it takes longer yes but it doesn’t need many more pulse units. Indeed you can probably sacrifice payload for more delta-v so the number of pulse units required could be the same. An Orion pulse unit can easily provide meganewton-seconds of impulse - and that’s a small one at that. KSP will probably scale this down but we’re still talking a system that can probably do a grand tour of the solar system in one launch.

Orion (not the capsule, the thing that shoots nuclear bombs out the back for propulsion) is confirmed. The concept of a "launch window" doesn't apply when you have the might of the atom powering your ship. Presumably it's not as advanced as the Daedalus depicted in that screenshot.

Yeah. If they have the original film reels it should be possible.

I think the main issue was that the goal was too difficult, too extreme. At least at the time. Even Lindbergh’s famous flight was just the first solo flight across the Atlantic between New York City and Paris. Flights across the Atlantic had been done before so the Orteig Prize wasn’t a big stretch in terms of possibility at the time. But I don’t think the space industry was mature enough at the time for a prize like that.

The story was decent and the movie was good. But they essentially compressed an entire trilogy of plot into one movie. If the whole trilogy essentially had the same plot, and there was some stuff fleshed out, the whole trilogy would’ve been pretty good.

You got the Master Chief Collection on Steam?

No... it bans nuclear tests in space. An Orion flight wouldn’t necessarily be a test so you could potentially skirt around it. That said, other treaties would likely prevent it. It also wasn’t the reason Orion was cancelled, though that isn’t the right word. Orion was being studied past the signing of the treaty - what killed Orion was the complete lack of any need for it. The USAF was very interested but the DoD killed its interest, and without the USAF they thought maybe NASA could take it up, but NASA had already decided to not use nuclear power of any kind for their manned program, at least until after Apollo. So Orion was killed. Orion is so powerful that it can launch more payload in a single flight than the entirety of spaceflight history. We just don’t need that.

I think the main benefit of the pusher plate isn’t actually the pulse aspect. Yes it exists but consider the waste heat of an internal drive. At high power you need immense radiators. Even mini-mag Orion (which I think is worth developing), an internal pulsed drive, needs radiators for the drive. The biggest advantage of a pusher plate is to avoid the need for dealing with the engine’s waste heat. This lets you run engines with immense power and no need to physically contain anything and no need to reject waste heat. Of course a Medusa style sail approach should have a similar benefit.

It’s at a low TRL. That and nuclear power isn’t necessarily politically viable for space exploration - and space exploration is heavily tied to politics (as much as we don’t like it, it’s still true). We also have no true reason to build large ships. One thing we only recently discovered is just how seriously the USAF was considering developing Project Orion nuclear pulse propulsion vehicles - not for exploration of course, but that would have likely occurred as a side effect. The argument the higher ups in the DoD used against it wasn’t that it wouldn’t work, but that they had no way of knowing that they even needed to push thousands of tonnes around in high energy trajectories and if they ever did, by that time other options might be available. By all indications it looked like they didn’t need it anytime soon. So they didn’t do it. But it was a lot closer than we usually think. Meanwhile gas core rockets are far more complex and suffer the same issues as Project Orion - it’s too big.

KSP2 is not developed by Squad, thus KSP development is expected to continue. I'm personally excited for KSP2. Interstellar travel, colonies, an Orion Drive. Oh yeah, I can't wait. My understanding is that wheels aren't fully fixed but they're more usable now. They added Delta-V readouts, orbit parameters, new SRBs, and some other cool stuff to stock. If you count the DLC as stock then they've added robotics parts, propellers, and historically inspired parts. To me the game hasn't actually changed at its core in a long time - though there were some rocky versions. 1.4 really shook things up for some mods, not to mention some glitches which I was lucky enough to not run into myself. I haven't played 1.8.x yet but I think that some of the 1.7 versions were pretty good. Leaving Kerbin's SOI isn't too tough - missions to Eve are real easy to do, if you don't land. Gilly is a good target if you want to go there. Duna isn't too bad either. Use the tools like Kerbal Alarm Clock (compatible with the version you use) to time your launch windows.

Yikes. Sometimes my physics professor would configure the software a bit wrong, so instead of a test being out of 100, it'd be out of 106 (or 111 for the final). Usually he'd fix it relatively quickly... but sometimes it'd be on there for a while. That's one of my problems with college, it's not that transparent when it comes to how well you're doing. Some of that makes sense - it takes time to grade things. But I've heard of professors and instructors deliberately delaying posting some grades until after the withdraw date so that failing students wouldn't know they were failing until too late. Which is a bit sketchy if you ask me. But then I've had some instructors grade tests the day after. I guess it's more of a luck of the draw thing.

Weather isn't climate. Just a cold front coming through. But usually if we see any snow it happens in January... I'm just waiting for Christmas to be 60 degrees again (Fahrenheit).

It's actually snowing. In Alabama. I haven't seen snow in forever. Report says it might keep up till ten tonight, local time.

Oh, you meant the Alien movie. I thought you meant the Covenant from Halo, since Halo: Reach dropped into the Master Chief Collection a few days ago... In other news, I spilled coffee on my laptop. It survived, but now some of the keys are a bit "sticky." I got real lucky.

Photon rockets aren’t that great. Photon sails on the other hand are pretty darn good in comparison but have their own issues. Mass beam sails (using either magnetic fields or some other kind of reflector) can be more efficient and thus can have higher newton per watt ratios.

"How many roads must a man walk down?" Well, if you ask the mice anyway.