DDE

There’s a general assumption that you can’t just let an uncrewed lander chill in orbit without an attendant facility. Similar to how the ISS was supposed to build Mars ships.

“Am I a joke to you?”

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/26251/cia-and-skunk-works-secretly-planned-to-turn-the-a-12-spy-plane-into-a-space-launch-mothership

Clearly you haven’t heard of electromagnetic interference, which is not a factor for frogs... but is a factor for complex machinery. During the Nedelin Disaster, outside magnetic interference caused a poorly-designed solenoid to fire, causing second stage engine activation while the R-16 ICBM was on the launchpad and fully fueled. Warships already spend weeks verifying the behavior of their various systems after each major refit, and their radars aren’t even in megawatt territory yet! It’s the same reason many are very cautious about artificial magnetospheres for ships. The cruel irony is that technological advancements make your systems more vulnerable to interference.

Something tells me magnetic hovering doesn’t work as well as you think. Which is why it doesn’t seem anyone’s heard of it.

According to Tim Poole, this helps a lot with Google algorithms. But then Beanie Man himself has been quite into Apophis and planetary defense.

Well, looks like the show’s as melodramatic and atomophobic as expected. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/06/06/why-hbos-chernobyl-gets-nuclear-so-wrong/#11396e97632f

@MatterBeam will have a few worlds to say in favour of two-dimensional armour sloping:

The first clip is definitely doctored, probably to avoid the shots where the airframe is visible.

Philip Clark reports that ‘2521 just did a burn: May 30.882 97.860 deg 89.789 min 261-268 km 153 deg May 31.950 97.859 deg 90.159 min 267-298 km 257 deg

That only slightly diminishes the shielding requirements. Electronics don’t like knocked-out bits, mechanical payloads don’t like neutron embrittlement, and food doesn’t taste well with free radicals. Any “super-secret Soviet tech” surfacing in the 1990s is suspect. Please define. It sounds suspiciously like a nuclear-electric powerplant.

What have they done to A-235's cold-launch system? It's wailing!

Yamal-601 may be having engine trouble, while someone managed to just walk out of Energiya with several sacks of Swiss electronics for future ISS modules, and hand them over to the local scrap dealer. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/3991478

Which is why widespread ABM and SDI are so utterly terrifying. Unless you have a half-decent PR machine that pretty much uncouples your public image from your actual activities, at least to audiences that matter. I think you picked up a few extra zeroes. The Soyuz LES was reengineered entirely for something like a 60 kg increase in payload.

That would be about two years. I would know. I almost had the 1.6 install in the bag, but then I got a new laptop...

No. Which is why you must bow before your benevolent alien overlords... or your own compatriots shall slaughter you for the Greater Good. The promise of a utopia has always been pretty compelling. Especially when other means of persuasion are applied.

Yeah, but think of all the special effects!

20 TCs in what seemed to be a staged combustion cycle? Not bloody likely.

Piracy died with wooden ships. Mostly because you can’t forage for coal and steel plate.

With only one stone and a bit of talent, you could shoot a better movie than the Avengers.

I’d love to see a solid Nova. Oh, funny you’d mention the Heavy. I’m raising you a pile of expended Fagots.

And fluorine is even less nasty, as Glushko argued when discussing the roll-out of RD-301.

For starters you pretty much need to rule out FTL collisions. Yes, YOU. Then you probably dial down the maximum velocity of a vehicle to a non-absurd number. After that, just accept the residual risk: atmospheres would stop most of the impromptu RKVs, and humans tend to like worlds with at least some atmosphere anyway.

Sounds like a job for Program 7 to thermally decontaminate!