DDE

They end up unemployable, perhaps. Earlier today, I flunked a job applicant who wasn't able to complete even a third of our up-front finance-themed online test; this evening, his resume finally showed up in the system. Fresh engineering design BSc grad from Baumann, and yet he's clumsily knocking on doors in banking and finance instead. I hope he's just covering his bases, rather than this being an indicator of Russian manufacturing being all the way down in the excrementster.

Oops. https://falsesteps.wordpress.com/2017/08/13/sidebar-the-tupolev-oos/ You were saying?

Molten down? Not with much efficiency. But much of it are oxides of iron and silicon, so they can be broken down into the two contituents to produce low-performance chemical rocket fuel.

I know there were a few during the early dockings. Beregovoh messed up and approached his target upsidedown because he read those lights wrong.

Aha, that's why I suspect an impostor rather than a hack.

You're trying to make sense out of a system that doesn't make sense. I think u/Senno_Ecto_Gammat on r/space used to have a canned rant about how the Shuttle was constantly used for missions and tasks that made zero sense, just to justify its continued existence. Compared with those experiments, a visit to Mir is tame.

I think there's an impostor among us

Brace yourself. You know Tolkien, LoTR, that sort of stuff? Well, he takes a rather... compromise position. First, the world was flat. But then the equivalent of Atlanteans decided to acquire immortality from the gods by force, and the flat world was made a sphere. https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Change_of_the_World

As I keep repeating in this thread, it's also incredibly amusing to see the fruits of the labor of actual science consultants stucking out from beneath the dreck. Someone told them about orbital propellant depots, and a Lunar slingshot to match velocity.

I've noticed they mentioned an "industrial" module.

We need a distraction.

Wait... is it the transfer compartment to the Soyuz port aft, or the spherical unit fore with three ports? Fantastic, I was thinking about the wrong leak location all along. Thing is, I now understand even less how it wouod separate the ISS in two. It'd just cut off one of the Soyuz docking ports.

So, for once in its entire existence the ISS would perform its original envisioned role as a shipyard. Three - Nauka, Zvezda, Zarya.

o_0

I'm guessing we have klimbim to thank for that little alternative fact.

Valentin Glushko has entered the chat

There were handwave lines about that in some draft of Episode 4. https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/220-SIG_Tactical_Sensor_Jamming_Device

And Nauka is a big cautionary tale in that regard. I don't think a higher-inclination orbit offers a significant benefit, if any, outside of remote sensing applications, so they should go ahead with the "ISS splinter" concept.

Indeed. And yet anyone who goes into battle commits to a certain level of "acceptible" casualties, trading lives for tactical and strategic gains (which is why Leia's reaction to the loss of a handful of bombers doesn't make sense either). The line between a suicidally dangerous mission and a suicide attack is very much blurred, and if the latter may spare many people from dying in the former, you'd find plenty of volunteers willing to solve your Trolley Problem for you.

Not contamination. NERVA and other NTRs feature a directionally shielded reactor that shined radiation in every direction. Approaching it from anywhere but the front of the spacecraft would have been as suicidal as gazing down the hole in the roof of Chernobyl Power Block 4. Radiation for the crew of the Shuttle itself is likely due to the prohibitive mass of shielding with a sufficient reduction factor. However, this contamination would not persist, so once on the ground the reactors could be retrieved by something like this: And stored in properly shielded containers. A solution in prior rocketpunk novels were taillanders that would put the NTRs below the level of the pad structure, thus providing fairly effective shielding to operations above. Question is, why are you bothering with all of this on a Shuttle?

But not too expensive to put them into battle. Including single-seat FTL-enabled ships. Simply put, there is no excuse for them not lightspeed-ramming a Star Destroyer, let alone a Death Star, with a snubfighter all the time. SW opened up the mother of all cans of worms just for one pretty visual that had little storytelling value - the ramming scene as well as the Supremacy itself are a late addition (that TLJ went with the first draft is an oft-repeated lie), Holdo used to be an actual FO sympathizer as a senator for Cantonica the Casino Planet, the covert seat of Snoke's power and the location of his throne room, ensuring that the main characters converge on the same location rather than some of them spend time on an inconsequential side story. Sounds like a better movie, does it not? /rant

A right and proper moonblaster?

A-khem... I demand the full supervillain lair package.