wumpus

83 seconds was for one stage (stage 2 might have been a bit less, maybe around 60 seconds. But nothing around 30 or so seconds like a typical solid booster). So very much like an oversized trashcan. The whole stack presumably burned much longer than a Shuttle SRB (~120 seconds?).

So it is turning sunlight into energy on the ground? From the comments I was expecting somebody pitching the idea of building Maxwell's Demon out of nanotech... Even starting to work out the math on high Isp interstellar engines, I've commented that the heatsinks would provide significant thrust (even if one side was black and the other white), possibly even more than the nominal engines. Convincing matter to emit energy as short-wavelength radiation would go a long way into building such a beast (so what if your cyclotron was inefficiently flinging mass at relativistic speeds, your heatsinks will take the "wasted" energy and turn it into "infinite Isp").

And that first stage is the only kerolox bit in the rocket. Don't underestimate its relative density (I'd love to stick some of the boosters used in the Peacekeeper/MX-missile as boosters around it, that 1.15 TWR seems wasteful). - yes, I know those boosters are from 10-20 years later, and even later than the Shuttle boosters. They also burn a bit too long (83 seconds) but that's a far more sane time than the Shuttle boosters (which basically drag the shuttle to orbit).

Sounds like BO engine is entering reality with its "25 reuse" engine. Didn't that used to be claimed in the hundreds? I know Falcon was supposed to be rated for 10, any *maybe* one flew three times. Also Musk's numbers on BFR pricing assumes something like 1000 flights per rocket.

According to the infallible wiki, Krakatoa released ~8*10^17J and left the world without a summer that year. I'd strongly suspect any dramatic effects to involve at least temporary cooling. On the other hand, I don't think the Tsar Bomba (~2*10^17J) test had any effect on the climate. It mostly depends on how much dust is kicked up to reflect sunlight outside the atmosphere.

Most of the fuel is burned getting the thing up to cruising altitude, so you would be out roughly the cargo space/weight of your rocket. You would also need to transport your payload engineering team (hopefully you can get it down to one) all the way to your destination. While 747s are ideal for this type of thing (the extra hard point), they are being retired and I'm not sure what would also work (the LM-1011 is even more rare). According to https://www.quora.com/How-much-would-it-cost-to-rent-a-Boeing-747-for-a-round-trip-to-Asia a round trip charter flight of a 747 from Chicago to Seoul would be $.7 million dollars. This doesn't seem to be a significant portion of the cost of a rocket launch, but every $.7M counts. This also means that it wouldn't be unfeasible to launch plenty of rockets while convincing airlines that you could safely launch from their planes and customers that you wouldn't strand their cargos at the destination after an aborted launch. Between the rare Pegasus flights (which uses similar enough tooling to other Orbital final stages that it is still in production, otherwise I doubt they would bother), and the complete lack of any rocket built for Stratolaunch, I think this is a dead end.

An old used fighter jet would limit you to an entirely solid rocket (or at least non-cryogenic, but do you really think you can bring DSMH to your friendly neighborhood airport?). Expect even LOH to require considerable "topping off" while getting to altitude. At that point, you pretty much have a Pegasus that needs ~600m/s less delta-v to get into orbit. At worst, this is pure vaporware. At best, the R&D team has a real vision, that has been "sexied up" by the marketing team to the point of inability to uncover the basic idea. Note that trying to add this capability to a blackbird (which was presumably designed in from day 1) destroyed the plane and killed the launch operator (the pilot survived), but presumably could be tried with some of the MiG aircraft. If you were really serious about such a craft, I'd assume that you would at least claim to be in talks with Stratolaunch (even if they keep hanging up on you), as they seem nearly complete with the more expensive side of the 400/9000 m/s split. If I were designing this, I'd assume the "plane" was rocket powered and landed shuttle style (launching might be arbitrary, and allow for a TWR<1 with lift from the landing wings). Aerospike design (assuming you have to make a specific rocket engine for the "plane") mostly in hopes that I could get this to be air-augmented [linear aerospikes should be easier] as opposed to hopes of aerospike efficiency through the atmosphere. Separation would be outside the atmosphere followed by X-15/shuttle style re-entry (although spaceship 1 might be a better inspiration). Or you could "double down" on the airplane side and forget the aerospike (unless you really can make it air-augmented) and build a rocketplane launching from Stratolaunch and again separate outside the atmosphere (at >"mach" 6). The whole point of the rocket propelled aircraft frame would be to avoid a hoverslam and allow a pilot (preferably on the ground controlling the thing like a drone) to land it like a plane. I suspect that taking the wings to even "mach' 6 would be too much, but people/[investors?] like plane launches.

I'd say the issue is more like driving vs. flying. The drive to the airport and back might be the biggest danger you face while flying on a commercial airliner, but people are convinced that they are dangerous because they see every crash on the news. - Basically anything on the news isn't a danger, otherwise it wouldn't be "news" it would be "business as usual". PS: crime peaked in the US around 1980 and has steadily gone down since, but they keep selling it as "more dangerous than before".

I'm pretty sure that radioactivity was discovered by some other element and a photographic plate, or perhaps radium long before Curie isolated and named it. You wouldn't call it radium until you isolated and noticed how bright it is on its own.

That signal is almost certainly going through a ton of ECC (error correcting codes) and is either going through in its entirety or not. I'd bet that's sand left on the lens.

Why would you bother with gimballing if you stay in the atmosphere? Even Spacex uses active fins (titanium paddles) on the way down. But looking at the picture that is definitely gimballing.

Which makes a wonderful question for sci-fi/steampunk writers (and better yet, screenwriters). Does regular use of a corset improve the effectiveness of a G-suit (or ability to fly a plane in a much tighter G-suit)? Corsets might have been well out of date for post-war programs, but girdles certainly weren't (which probably wouldn't have nearly the effect). Steampunk could certainly take advantage of such things.

Secret budgets? The sky is the limit. Testing the transponder to 20 some MIL-STD requirements: thousands of engineer-hours (including some senior guys to write up the tests) Having all work done in Faraday cages in guarded buildings: check. Having all such work depend on success of cat herders: budget successfully blown!

"Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" includes a map drawn before the war that the allies captured afterward. It shows just how far the Germans thought they could supply an army invading the Soviet Union. That proposed supply line only stretched 2/3 of the way to Moscow, and to my untrained eye (I'm weak on the exact times and locations of eastern front battles) appeared to be an "abandon all hope ye who cross this line" line historically. Terry Pratchett had a mythical "military guide book" in one of his books. A character would inevitably consult it for advice. The advice for "what to do when outnumbered and with a worse position" is "make sure there isn't a battle". The axis position more or less dictated "make sure there isn't a war", although I'm not sure the internal politics would really allow that.

No astronaut chosen before the Space Shuttle was 6' tall (and I'm not sure about the Shuttle: this is from Micheal Collins excellent memoir of his time in the space program: "Carrying the Fire" so he didn't talk about shuttle astronauts), although a few could be relatively stocky (although probably not the original 7, those Mercury capsules fit like a glove). I know of earlier programs that suggested using pilots no heavier than 100lbs, so somebody at the conference suggested it would be easier finding women of such weight (he was astonished of the support/fan mail he received from women who heard about it). NASA even chose and trained a bunch of women as astronauts, but it would have taken a vast more push behind it to overcome 1950s-60s attitudes (it didn't help that there eventually was friction between the women chosen/trained and the woman who got the whole thing started). Micheal Collins comments implied that reduced size may have been ideal for early capsules, but he didn't think dealing with issues of "coed" long term flights (he flew multi-week gemini and apollo missions - extremely long term for the tiny size of the capsule). You would presumably want 2 women for gemini and 3 for apollo. ISS flights shouldn't have that problem, and if it pops up again to Mars (months!), your spacecraft is far too small. There was also a "throw away" comment in Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers about spaceships typically having women pilots due to ability to handle higher G forces, but I suspect the research didn't quite exist at the time (the book was written immediately after Ike banned nuclear weapons tests).

More likely the reason they didn't build so many trucks was lack of oil to fill them. They could fill trucks or tanks, and the tanks got the oil. There's a reason both sides fought to the death at Stalingrad (it was the best defense between the Germans and the oil).

I'd have to assume that a 90 day dust cleaner would involve a compressed gas used to remove dust. No way that there would still be any available by now. Maybe some future rover will compress the martian atmosphere to produce a dust cleaner, but I'd hate to think how much that would deplete already dangerously low batteries. Any other ideas? Orbital (double orbital?) feather duster? presumably a single light feather with minimal stress on the duster (although it would have to move fast enough so it doesn't leave dust on the panel)?

Way back in the dawn of time (actually about a year later than the "free DLC" cutoff, but long before "career mode"), I started with campaigns: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Campaigns So presumably build a rocket, google to find out how to launch it. Come back, hit the space bar, google some more to learn you have to either have a kerbal in the capsule or a probe core, rebuild and finally launch. Note that the "campaign" has you launch unmanned first. I think after starting there is a "hit a different continent with a missile" but I decided that it would be hard and use skills I wouldn't really need in space so I went straight to working on going to orbit. Campaigns were a good start, and basically didn't have any grinding (if you didn't like the mission, you did the next. If you needed the skills in the next, you backtracked until you could dock. Career mode was more or less inevitable, but that doesn't mean it will ever graft well onto the natural sandbox that is KSP.

Note that this doesn't make economic sense with hammers: you're better off burning hammers instead of the liquid rocket at all. for LV-30: 2 hammers + 2 side decouplers + 2 fuel pipes + 2 FLT-100 tanks = 595 thrust, 2450 funds 3 hammers + 1 central decoupler = 593.7 thrust, 1000 funds for skipper: 2 hammers + 2 side decouplers + 2 fuel pipes + 2FLT-400 tanks = 963.8 thrust, 2900 funds 5 hammers + 1 central decoupler = 989 thrust, 1400 funds (I don't think anyone would replace mainsails with hammers. But I think the math still works). And of course if you had more hammers off on the sides this doesn't change anything (unless you used more than 2 couplers, then using a grouped cluster only gets cheaper). Just add the additional hammers to your new cluster. Note that for anything but hammers, you run into both stability and control issues (expect to add 2460 in funds just in 4 AV-R8 winglets [you should be able to get away with 2 aligned N-S]). Stability of rockets balanced on kickers is tricky, unless they are small swivel and/or terrier rockets. You *can* of course mount kickers or thumpers to the sides of these rockets, and just build the hammer cluster to fall away first. I doubt the hammers will take you so far vertical that you have a problem with your pitch over (gravity turn) [if not, give it a little angle towards the East before launch]. I still like pure kicker first stages, but the new aerodynamics model makes them extremely difficult. Expect to mount most of your thumpers and kickbacks on the side.

Rockets are even worse than that. Pretty much the only reason they are used involves lack of reuse and/or 99% of the trip requires rockets and there are too few trips to justify designing a more efficient non-rocket stage. Spaceship 1 had *tiny* delta-v requirements (compared to any other space mission) and they still designed an entirely custom non-rocket stage 1. - that might have been in Burt Rutan's contract. You'd think an extremely used 747 would have been cheaper (perhaps designing the White Knight was cheaper than the legal challenges pointing out all the 747's subsidies).

I got the distinct impression that there was a stronger push to either increase women's place as a "soviet worker" or increase the impression that they were doing that in the Early Soviet union. Either more conservative types filtered into Politburo and shut it down or perhaps the PR benefits weren't paying out and they stopped pretending to do it, I'm not sure. But it seemed like something the Soviets did a lot in Lenin and Stalin's time, less in Khrushchev's time and pretty much had given up by Brezhnev's time. - this may be too much of the Soviet Union as seen during the Cold War. It was almost impossible to know what was going on inside, so I have no idea how much was PR and how much was a real push.

Occasionally used in Science fiction both hard (Forever War) and of literary importance (Dune). I think (it was a long time ago) that the last battle the main characters in Forever War basically fought as phalanxes or similar tech level (I can't remember why *both* were out of tech). Dune simply assumed a technomagical "forceshield" that stopped bullets and that firing lasers was a bad idea (and to go with the thread it isn't clear that a slow moving plasma would make a shield user's day go very bad indeed. We don't know if the aggregate speed of the plasma would go through the shield or if each atom (which should be moving very fast) would be stopped individually. I suspect it would go through). Don't assume that once a various tech is "dead" it is gone forever. Phalanxes were revived for medieval warfare as pike squares and lasted into the introduction muskets. Slings are presumably useful for launching grenades (I'd assume early grenades needed to be sufficiently bulky that this was a good idea, and probably used a sling staff), but probably only used by rare special forces as I'd imagine even a relative few soldiers blowing themselves up would cost more in morale than any advantage the sling could bring.

They only launch at NASA facilities, have NASA as a big customer, and are unlikely to get FAA/FCC certification if NASA is unhappy. Ignoring NASA would pretty much require selling the rocket to ESA to be an ESA manned mission. There might be even more red tape launching through ESA (not to mention non-trivial legal expenses thanks to various challenges as well as all kinds of political pushback). They will meet NASA requirements or simply won't send astronauts. BFR to Mars may be a different story, considering that is the whole point of Spacex. But manned Falcon isn't worth the cost of "beating NASA", even if you could.

Considering early Terminators (i.e. the one in "Terminator") ran 6502 code (I think Apple2 6502 code showed on the screen), the AI probably couldn't make the thing walk and required a human operator (perhaps it had a 6502 dedicated to walking, and so on).