Bill Phil

Even if you could terraform Titan it wouldn’t be worth doing. The gravity is too low to even consider it as a colonization target at this point, and even if that wasn’t an issue, you’d have to deal with it being half ice. Industry? That’s a different story. Colonization? I don’t really see it. There are so many better options... Although dismantling Titan could provide loads of useful materials. You want to colonize the Saturn system? Orbital habitats are the best bet.

I'm trying to make the beginnings of a standalone FPS game with the GZDoom source port of Doom. So far I've managed to get the application to recognize the new game. But I still need to figure out what to do so it'll actually run. Everything's in the pre-alpha stage, so to speak. The textures are solid colors, the only map is a square box, and I still can't figure out how to actually make a palette for the dang thing... Sadly the G/ZDoom documentation seems to be somewhat lacking, so just setting it up to run something even as bare bones as this might take more effort than I'm willing to put in... So I guess I'm complaining about the documentation. It's good for making simple mods that just add some maps or textures, even a few monsters. But not for establishing everything necessary for a game to load... If and when I get to the point where I can actually develop content, I'll probably need a lot of help. I can't make music, nor sprites or textures. Sound effects may be an issue as well.

Yeah. I was thinking Halo 3 in particular. Haven’t played Reach...

Some of the older Halo games had split screen. The modern ones might still have it, but I lost track of the franchise... If you’ve got an N64 podracing might be fun.

What is this, Project Orion? (The nuclear pulse one) Well, jokes aside, it sounds like they might get a landing test before the end of the decade. If they’re lucky.

Hope your next Galactic Empire treats you well.

While you're not wrong, there have also been many smear campaigns and plenty of anti-nuclear protests that were paid for by the oil and coal industries. Not only that, but China Syndrome came out weeks before Three Mile Island, and that certainly didn't help anything. Plus, the word nuclear is used both for reactors, and for bombs. And a good number of people don't like that, so they associate reactors with bombs, eventually. After that it's not hard to see how someone could begin to believe certain things about nuclear power. Flying a reactor in space is a different beast, though. While I definitely think nuclear is pretty much our best bet for getting anywhere beyond the Moon, it's not likely to be used. The only thing I can think of that would minimize risk would be to distribute the nuclear fuel launches so that there's very little per launch, and if there's a failure only a little bit is released into the environment. And that would balloon costs like crazy. I don't know. SMRs are well underway in the development aspect. And my nuclear electricity is pretty cheap (though likely subsidized).

I understand that there’ll be issues. Of course, you can change the stats yourself or go back to a previous version. Many people use previous game versions for mod compatibility, for example. The problem is that, in light of such a huge ISP and very few downsides, the engine is superior to just about everything else. Indeed, as a core engine with strap-on boosters it was excellent before it was nerfed. And as far as I recall, it was intended as a vacuum engine... the kind a service module would have.

RTGs have a few kilograms of radioactive material within them. Personally I’d be more worried about natural radiation sources than RTG failures. Radon has been found to be responsible for tens of thousands of deaths per year. A few kilograms of plutonium is a drop in a bucket in comparison. Heck, thousands of tonnes of radioactive material is released into the atmosphere by coal plants... Is there risk? Of course. But there’s risk in everything. The question is whether or not the benefit is worth the risk.

Yeah but then the Moon gets sent careening through interstellar space.

I wasn’t allowed to use a calculator (even my one-line scientific calculator - which I was quite fast with) during my Calculus tests at university. Most problems were pretty simple though and used nice numbers. The goal was to test our calculus abilities, not whether or not we could push buttons on a device. Even so the class average was not very high. I did pretty well though, calculus did come easy to me... d/dx e^x = e^x Instantaneous rate of change of a log function? Depends. If you model some quantity with respect to another as a logarithmic function then finding the instantaneous rate of change is pretty useful. And even more so, the derivative of lnx is 1/x, thereforr the indefinite integral of 1/x is ln|x| + C. One method of deriving the rocket equation involves an integration like this, but a definite one as opposed to an indefinite integration.

Well technically everything is in space, it’s just a question of whether or not it left the atmosphere. It’s pretty tenuous up there, so I’d give it to them.

The electric telegraph was most certainly a thing by 1869. 1869 was 11 years after the first transatlantic line and a second one was laid before 1869 as well. And maybe even a third, though I can’t say for sure.

Well, the Thor engine eventually became the H-1, so it comes back around... the Saturn haf Thor (the first stage of Delta) lineage.

Or have a part that allows it be displayed like KER.

DC-X was a test article. A fairly successful one at that. “Not invented here” killed DC-X once NASA gained control of the program. Instead NASA began development of X-33 and Venturestar... which couldn’t even have a successful demonstration.

X-33 was a tech demonstration and would never go to orbit. That said they had trouble with cryogenic composite tanks (thermal stress), and the unconventional tank geometry didn’t help. Moving to metal would make the tanks work but they became too heavy. And that’s before the performance of the aerospikes is considered (worse than SSMEs in many regards). X-33 never flew, and neither did Venturestar. If only the DC-X was developed instead...

I’m not certain. But if the two events connected are not causally connected then it is allowed, as far as I know.

Wormholes are only allowed to connect events that aren’t in each other’s light cones, at least if you don’t want to violate causality, afaik.

SpaceX should've played this for the Falcon Heavy test...

There are multiple types of wormholes. Some have an actual throat, a region of flat spacetime between the two ends, that must be traversed. Interstellar was probably going for a 2001: A Space Odyssey vibe... Also, wormholes may not exist in nature. As such, they may need to be artificial. They're also more accurately described as a spacetime distortion that connects two points in spacetime (and they don't have to be at the same point in time, either, thus why they could create a time machine).

No wormholes, huh? Or even Krasnikov tubes? At least those are valid solutions of GR... Of course, any system that lets you get FTL (even just apparent FTL) runs the risk of becoming a time machine. This means that you might only be able to use it in one direction. For warp drives, you're causally disconnected from the universe, and can't turn it off from inside. This means that you need an external station to turn it off. But if you have near lightspeed travel, you could go to the target star near lightspeed and then warp back to Earth, and hopefully get stopped by a station that can deactivate the warp bubble... Honestly the most believable method would be wormholes. Orions Arm has a well constructed example, and Luke Campbell's Vergeworlds wormholes are actually pretty interesting. Of course there isn't any FTL travel, but causality could still be violated. Unless there are quantum effects preventing that... Whatever you think, if you're writing a story make sure to take into account the consequences. In Orions Arm wormholes are massive objects that must be quite far away from the planets in a solar system, limiting their effects. Meanwhile Vergeworlds has microscopic wormholes of similar mass to subatomic particles, and thus all sorts of things such as communication, energy generation, industry, and more are affected by this. Space travel may not even be necessary.

I don't see why having cool is bad. Nor do I see why we can't have both, as that is what we are doing even now. The manned program is pretty much just cool, and the unmanned program is science. Seeing as how NASA's manned program budget is less than half their total, they're doing more science than stunts. At least if we measure it based on monetary input...

This was a much needed addition. I always found it odd that maneuver nodes told what amount of delta-v was needed but not how much you had. Thanks a whole bunch. Desperately needed indeed. Now I'm thinking about a mission planning tool. Maybe something in mission control (another tab?) that looks like the tracking station view, but instead of vessels it has maneuver nodes and SOI changes. Maybe start off by defining an initial orbit (LKO, stationary orbit, synchronous, etc.) around a specific body and then treat it like map view. Make it so that players can save flight plans and then choose them in flight. Could be useful.

Squees Helmet removal and... Delta V? *passes out*