Terwin

If you over-build your rockets and don't mind being sub-optimal, you can launch straight up until about 35km where aero stops being an issue, and then turn to 45 degrees up/east until your ap is above 70km or close to your desired orbit, then turn straight east until your pe is the desired height.(low TWR rockets may need to keep the angle above the horizon for longer, high TWR rockets can use a planned maneuver node at ap and may coast for several seconds before starting that burn)

70 minutes of 3g acceleration(~123km/s) of a 9000 ton vessel gives it kinetic energy equivalent to roughly 713 fatman bombs, or approximately 1/6 of a tzar bomba at max yield. (not counting any boosts from the gravity of the planet it is attacking) This will not disintegrate a planet, but it will be very effective are removing a large city, or even a small country from the map entirely while throwing up enough particulates to do bad things to the environment should it ram a planet. Note: a 'Rod from god' is less than 11 tons, so any vessel of this size will be a massive kinetic weapon, even if it can barely deorbit itself.

It is called a helicopter, and it turns out that moving in three dimensions is both more expensive and more difficult than moving in 2 dimensions, which is why most people do not bother to use them. (generally just people with more money than time) Also, since the only people that can afford to fly and maintain a helicopter can also afford multiple high-end cars, there is not much point in making a less functional car/helicopter hybrid.

It depends on how fast you accelerate, and how you accelerate. With an Albercurrie drive you don't accelerate. You should not even feel as though you are moving, so how could that crush or compress you? (the space around you is moving relative to other space, but you are not moving relative to it) If you are going near c, and are struck by a mass without protection, then that would be bad, but generally you are inside of an enclosed space which is maintaining your atmosphere, so presumably the enclosure would take any damage from stray bits of matter, not the passenger. If you use a gravity drive to accelerate at several G, then you may suffer some inner-ear discomfort if the gravitational gradient is uneven, but otherwise you would be fine(it would be the same as falling towards a planet with no atmosphere and then missing, you would not feel any acceleration at all, as opposed to a car when you hit the gas) If you use a reaction engine to push your vessel forwards(like a rocket), then you need to be careful how hard you push, as you will feel the acceleration, and accelerating too fast can be harmful to humans(it feels identical to gravity, and a few dozen Gs will crush a person to death in short order), but if you accelerate slowly enough(say 0-2 G of acceleration), then you should be fine even if you accelerate up to near-c velocities.

I have heard that mechanical counter-pressure may help reduce the bulk of space suits. servo-assisted bending could also counter stiffening, I suspect. In any case, if they work well with only a slight bulk increase, it could be quite a big deal.

I thought aero-drag is only significant if you are trying to start the rocket with a very large impulse low in the atmosphere, otherwise aero losses are very small compared to gravity losses, and you still need almost all of the speed for reaching orbit when you launch from the balloon. (ie a cannon/mass-driver or spin-launch approach would benefit most from a high altitude launch, but those require a very large base-station, making balloons unfeasible from the start)

That is sort of like claiming that the airline owes you money because they caught a tail-wind during your flight and used less fuel than expected. You bought a ticket to fly from point A to point B, and so long as you get to point B in a timely fashion, you got what you paid for and do not get a refund if they happened to save money in one way or another. Same with NASA purchasing a certain number of fights to the moon(one unmanned and one manned I think?), so long as the ships fly as expected, if SpaceX can save money by adding unicorn farts to the fuel mix, then why would NASA care?

If you want super-human but non-human human-alike, just go with the tried and true: Elves For examples please see: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceElves (Vulcans, Eldar, Mimbari, etc.)

More energy does not conflate with endurance. Smaller mammals tend to have higher heart-rates but do not always have good endurance. Higher burst energy probably, but endurance is more than that. Also, heart-rate(which relates closely to metabolic rate) and longevity are somewhat linked, mean-time-before failure and all. (examples: ferrets have a heart-rate ~5x the human heart-rate and the oldest ones live to about 14 years, cats have ~2x the human heart rate and a few specimens live to be 25-30 years old, while Rabbits have ~3x the human heart rate and the oldest recorded rabbit lived to be 18 years 10 months old, and finally, Elephants have a heart-rate roughly half that of humans and can live to be 70 years old in the wild) So flesh and blood aliens with three times the heart-rate of humans might die of old age around 20-30 years old(better than rabbits due to medicine).

Kind of makes you wonder if bombardment is the Great Filter, and we lucked out to develop while passing through a void so we can(hopefully) not get wiped out before we are capable of protecting ourselves.

Not at all, considering how powerful the pumps need to be to handle the required fuel flow, any crew or equipment in 'wet' sections would be minced then pressure-cooked.

That sounds very plausible, especially since I saw something on youtube about a 'blast proof' camera that was thrown quite a ways during the test. I think the goal is 10% of the parts removed need to be put back on, or you are not trying hard enough to remove parts.

Makes you wonder if those plates are being added because something got scorched or if it is preventative. But 'best part is no part' would suggest reactionary instead of preventative, unless this somehow allows something to not be on the rocket.

A good way to drive away business(traffic is life for retail businesses), lower property values(reduced convenience=lower desirability) and create new ghettos while still allowing politicians to crow about how they are helping the community.

Speed itself is not the problem, it is relative speed that kills. Everyone going 80mph is much safer than everyone going back and forth between stopped and 30mph again and again due to speed bumps and other control measures. Adding in turns and swerves just adds lots of speed zero buildings, trees and pedestrians into the forward vector of the vehicle. This is not mentioning the possible loss of control due to hitting an unexpected curb or speed-bump.(or the additional wear that can cause a sudden mechanical loss of control) Also, reducing the maximum speed of a route only increases the numbers of cars on that route at a given point of time, and usually both the stress and fatigue levels of those drivers. The vast majority of US roads are in places where it is just not economical to have mass-transit in a useful form, and if it is not useful, then it will not be used enough to matter.

For the sake of intimidating other drivers, SUVs have nothing on SH

Looks like a hydrogen leak was detected when switching to fast-fill again...

How confident are you that an off-the-shelf industrial-strength fan would not have any catastrophic failure modes that could endanger the rocket? Steel fan-blades shooting through pipes or poking a hole in the fuel tank would be catastrophic, and I doubt many fans are rated to run while exposed to both evaporating liquid hydrogen and a hydrolox exhaust plume without any risk of throwing a blade. Putting a fan in a safety-bunker with an exhaust vent that has enough turns to ensure a RUD of the fan could not harm the rocket may be a little more than they are prepared to handle at the moment.

I might be misremembering the mechanics, but I am pretty sure that the throat turns the heat into pressure, and the nozzle turns the pressure into thrust. Heating up the exhaust after it leaves the nozzle is effectively heating up a near-by nebula that happens to be behind you. There might be a little something from the photon pressure, but nothing significant.

This would do nothing useful for the rocket propulsion wise. For dumping raw energy/heat into the exhaust to be useful, it needs to be before the throat of the engine, which in turn is before the nozzle. But you can only do this up to the point where the throat of your engine starts to melt, and this is a point that we already reach quite easily with just chemical combustion. Shooting a laser into the exhaust of your rocket is functionally equivalent to mounting a small, off-center photon engine next to your chemical engine: lots of complexity for no practical gain. If you are adding magical uber-power sources without associated magical uber-materials, and also constrain those uber-power sources with a destructively-high minimum functional output, then you have basically re-skinned the nuclear fission bomb. The only use-case where pusher-plates make sense is when you are limited to fission bombs or a close analog, with no materials or propulsion technologies significantly in advance of 50 years ago. Just remember: using an Orion engine in an atmosphere will cause significant damage to both the vehicle and the planet, so they are only of use once you are already in-orbit, where things like ion or plasma propulsion can get similar ISP with far less engineering and damage, even if the thrust is much lower.

It can be retro-active however. The easiest way to specify this without any problems with over-lapping reigns is to use the legal stance that the monarchy transfers instantly. Also, as far as I am aware, most monarchies have claimed or do claim a divine origin/mandate/blessing/etc.

I am being very careful to specify organization, as a corporation is only a sub-set of organizations. Even then, a corporation with with public stock is very different from most other organizations, and even most businesses. In the US non-profit organizations and what they can do are narrowly defined to prevent abuse of their tax-exempt status. If you prohibit all other organizations from doing anything non-profit motivated, then you have just banned people working together on a broad swath orf normal activites and placed a heavy regulatory burden on any group that is not seeking profit. Do you really thing that the chess-club at your local middle-school really needs to register with the federal government for non-profit status just so that they can reserve a space at the state-level championship? This is what you are advocating for by preventing any legally created entity without a federal tax exemption from participating in any activity that is not primarily profit based. You are also making trust funds and many other financial instruments illegal, as they are not seeking profit, but to distribute funds according to the instructions of their founding. Incidentally, the tools used by a grandparent creating a trust fund that will pay for the education of their grand-children, are not particularly distinct from the tools used by some other entity(possibly a corporation) putting money into a PAC to advocate for a particular bill/law/policy, or from a scholarship fund set up by an education-minded foundation. Also, you do not need to use commercial speech to limit the conduct of your employees, you publish a code of conduct and fire anyone that refuses to either agree to that code, or fails to abide by that code. This is a standard practice and is one of the ways an employer can fire someone who sexually harasses others without risking a law-suit from the harasser. It can also be used to fire someone who falsifies a time-card, is rude to customers, or causes other problems in the work-space. Putting non-tax laws in place that distinguish between taxable and non-taxable organizations is only asking for problems(and a prompt legal challenge).

No, the legal purpose of an organization is to assemble capitol(including people) into a legally distinct grouping. If a corporation has share-holders, then it often has a fiscal duty to those share-holders to provide a positive return on investment(which may or may not mean making a profit). If an organization does not have share-holders, then its only real organizational obligations involve following the law, including paying taxes and fees as applicable. Not all organizations are corporations, or even businesses. While it is often advantageous for organizations not seeking a profit to seek non-taxed(aka non-profit) status, many are too small to even bother with such a thing. I was a member of a hobby-group for multiple decades, and while it did successfully apply for non-profit status for part of that time, it was usually not worth the effort because the group just did not handle that much in the way of money, usually on the order of a few hundred dollars in dues a year. Your definitions would require that that hobby group be a purely profit-motivated organization just because it is too small to bother with the paperwork to be non-profit. Note: the main reasons for having an organization at all were so that we could rent out park meeting halls for events and people could point to this legal entity as the reason they were carrying a potentially illegal(looks like a knife/sword and > 6" long 'blade', even with no real edge) dress-sword in their trunk as part of their costume when traveling to said events. (the hobby group was defined as educational so we could have things like 'reenactment props' for a legitimate reason to carry around something that looks like a sword or dagger so long as that was all we used them for) There you go, a legal organization that did not have a profit motive and was too small to bother with the rules and paperwork to be tax-exempt. You would prohibit such organizations?

There are specific limits and requirements to be a non-profit, most notably the requirement to fall into one of several categories, each with their own limits and requirements. You would prohibit me from making a company who's primary purpose is to help people just because it does not fall neatly inside the requirements of one of the federally specified non-profit categories. Categories that have been specifically made narrow because of the tax-advantages conveyed upon non-profit entities(like tax exemptions and the ability to accept tax-deductible donations). In any-case, non-profit and for-profit are misleading. A more accurate description would be Tax Exempt and Taxed. Lots of tax-exempt organizations make massive tax-free profits, and many taxed organizations are primarily philanthropic in nature, it all depends on how willing the organizers are to tie themselves to this exemption in the federal tax code.

How do you identify if a given entity is specifically to make profits, or just happens to make profits due to the activities they engage in? Why is it impossible to have a company who wishes to 'do X but in a profitable way'? You seem to be engaging in absolutism, and while fun to think about, I have yet to find a non-physics based absolutism that actually works in the 'real world'