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DDE

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Everything posted by DDE

  1. DDE
    Some of GCRs are gammas and they don't care about your magnetic fields.
  2. DDE
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordyceps
  3. DDE
    Thus far, the answer has been to be prepared to purge and sterilize the entire system if a bacterium mutates significantly. This answer is primarily concerned with the tendency of natural algae to abruptly start producing nerve gas.
  4. DDE
    As if everyone will be scrambling for all the other aspects of life in the void. Apparently, one serious factor is just making it big enough. The smaller systems will be a lot more vulnerable to shocks. Given how space colonies are already ultra-conducive to the spread of all infections, this is probably a marginal factor. From what I understand, it will be very difficult to ever take the colonists off of imported vitamin/microelement supplements. Probably true for the fish as well.
  5. DDE
    According to Bart Henrdrickx, the Ekipazh project with a 100 kW reactor to power an E-war suite is proceeding towards an early 2020s launch on a Soyuz-2. However, the megawatt-class TEM tug is sucking away the precious resources. http://thespacereview.com/article/3809/1
  6. DDE
    That, and the delay between firing order and impact can be horrendous, comparable to an airstrike but with much leas flexibility - what's the cross-range of a crowbar?
  7. DDE
    Sea Launch's Odyssey platform is being prepared for relocation to Russia's Far East... by stripping away all US and Ukrainian systems. https://www.rbc.ru/rbcfreenews/5d9c3f5e9a794793e6174759
  8. DDE
  9. DDE
    Scud-D used autonomous TV guidance for CEP of 50 m. This seems to rely on perception of a strict dichotomy between nuclear-biological-chemical and everything else. That might work the atomophobic public, or with China's no-first-strike pledge, but not with Russia and both its doctrine and the concept of "strategic conventional" weapons. There seems to be at least a faction in the US MIC that really, really wants to loosen the criteria for use of nuclear weapons or surrogates thereof, stymied only by public perceptions and very dubious excuses ("if you nuked Tora Bora, the Taliban would be able to scrape together the unburnt nuclear fuel"). Hence high interest in low-yield nukes (e.g. the most recent Trident upgrade), in pure fusion nukes (since these supposedly would present none of the radioactive PR mess associated with a nuclear strike), potentially of even smaller yields and with 'augmented effects' like CASABA-HOWITZER, and hence the discussions of a pure-kinetic Trident around 2006. To this faction, the promise of a non-nuclear but nuclear-equivalent weapon is incredibly attractive.
  10. DDE
    Yeah, the idea of just using the gravity gauge is pretty ridiculous. The only two options are a massive ortillery gun that depends on cheap solar energy, or actually dropping the orbit bit altogether and use a conventional-tipped ICBM.
  11. DDE
    This is putting it mildly. Most asteroids are believed to be rubble piles.
  12. DDE
    The expectation is apparently to achieve flash-vaporization velocities. Colour me skeptical.
  13. DDE
    We all know the hyped-up weapons system: The problem is that the average depiction of such a weapon works as follows: Space station magically floats in space, where there is no gravity An oversized kinetic impactor is released Gravity suddenly feels guilty for being a slacker, and selectively affects the impactor Impactor comes down at close-to-vertical trajectory Meanwhile, we in the Intellectual Gaming Community know that's not how space works. Except Project Thor was also envisioned by people who know how space works, so clearly we're missing something. The two burning questions I see are: What kind of a realistic deorbit "burn" (e.g. via railgun) is necessary for maximum retention of kinetic energy on impact? What are the effects of the considerable lateral velocity?
  14. DDE
    Things tend to good look on paper. Plus I suspect that Skylab was short on the clutter compared with the longer-lasting Salyuts.
  15. DDE
    I dunno, the guys at Sarov once installed a bitcoin miner in a 1-petaflop nuclear weapon design mainframe, maybe you should ask them to run your modded KSP install.
  16. DDE
    Soyuz-5 was supposed to be the fast-track option for an Oryol booster, but interests within Roscosmos keep steering towards methane. Odd, the graphic seems to suggest a GG exhaust duct on the first stage. Found Lying on the Side of the Road Didn't S7 run around with the smaller Soyuz-7? "Starship isn't real, it can't hurt you"
  17. DDE
    My - likely obsolete - understanding is that the real Goldilocks allows carbon sequestering into limestone, while sufficiency size and an active dynamo prevent all-around atmospheric loss.
  18. DDE
    *groan* They're super-Earths, and the more we look at them, the less they look like Earth.
  19. DDE
    First actual space chase?
  20. DDE
    Those wholes on the Falcon are canonically escape pod silos.
  21. DDE
    Done. What's next?
  22. DDE
    There's very shaky info that they might have gotten the Emiratis to cough up the cash to refurbish it to a Soyuz-2 standard. Which is, in light of Rogozin's Napoleonic plans, a waste of time.
  23. DDE
    Unfortunately, the papers I see mostly just estimate the amount of water. https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EPSC-DPS2019/EPSC-DPS2019-1846-1.pdf
  24. DDE
    Does it have to be the exact one?
  25. DDE
    There's word of a serious turf war between the military, and Roscosmos's patron Rostech. Watch out for the next misstep, for it may signal the end of civilian leadership of the Russian space program.
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