DDE

They’d have to alter their ponderous production plans. Hopefully they’ll manage to launch Nauka in the next decade.

Just got a new colleague who interned at TsNIIMash. He says there's more "snack packers" than rocket scientists there now.

Since shielding yourself from radiation favours long, slender craft, you needn’t a tether - many designs have sufficient leverage already.

The “refresher” on the Millennium Falcon has a long history of disappearing and reappearing depending on who’s drawing the cross-section. I hear KhimMash have been working on CO2-based “dry” cleaning for space applications.

Judging by earlier threads, you shouldn't expect any consistent position on what rules aren't being broken. This is an attempt to bring minute elements of realism into a setting that's already gone extremely soft on the really big things. Which is... pretty lopsided. Not entirely. Matching velocity in a reasonable timeframe brings us right back to the need for insane accelerations. Especially when you go interstellar and slap anywhere between 10 and 100 km/s of velocity difference.

Hours? You’re fussing about hours in zero-g, @Spacescifi? Right now, the solutions we look for are to counter the effects of years of zero-g. They are thus simply not relevant in the softer sci-fi settings. It’s interesting that you just gloss over The Expanse. For true interplanetary flights, rather than brief hops within the Belt, they’d end up having acceleration gravity throughout most of the flight. It’s also notable that, with accelerations developed by vehicles typically found in sci-fi, you’re not just looking at acceleration-induced gravity - you’re looking at your crew reduced to paste. Once you sit with a timer and some basic astronomy, you are looking at accelerations of many kilometers per second per second. This means ubiquitous phlebotinum of “inertial dampeners”, which in turn can reasonably be expected to be a subform of artificial gravity. There’s no reason for a setting that handwaves typical sci-fi travel times to not handwave zero-g away.

Pretty much all modern engines use propellants as lubricant. Sound like a rehash of Start.

IT’S ALIVE!

The aerospike is an attempt to create a rocket nozzle that automatically adjusts its own expansion ratio through interaction with outside airflow. It’s heavier than a simple de Laval nozzle, but it’s a much better option than any of the various transformers.

Keep in mind that spacecraft are likely to be double-hulled. So the external shape can be vastly different from the interior.

Apparently a mile-long self-critical fission reactor could do the trick. Nope. How are you going to keep it in the middle of a Dyson shell, or guide stars into a deconstructor facility? They can’t. Most don’t have widespread bioengineering, or sensors that can see past 100 m, or ships that move faster than 10 m/s

Any amount of weight can be added by sufficient amounts of thrust. Indeed, the square-cube law means rockets scale up quite nicely. The Earth can be easily moved with continent-sized thrusters firing bits of said continents. The Sun is even easier, with some math having been done for a modestly-sized (a few kilometers long) gamma-ray laser that would induce enormous CMEs.

Oi, mate, you don’t have a loicanse for that irony! BOS Tenderness deployed!

Bart Hendrickx has published something Russia’s premier space li-oin battery and solar panels manufacturer didn’t think should be published - namely a complete list of their projects apparently posted on an open cloud service. Now the guy is all over the news. Anyone wants to catch some FSB malware over on his link?

Crappy plastic shell and ‘canvas’ bag included.

Naming a laser “Peresvet” is such a terrible pun, too. It’s a legitimate name, but it’s also ‘a prefix for excessiveness’ + “light”. Now, meet the Azart (“thrill”).

Exit, pursued by a missile. Also, don't forget the "flower" line.

I know you think that’s clever, but the Eiffel Tower didn’t hijack an existing building.

Well, let me calm you down. In May 1986, the level of radionuclide exposure for children was raised about by 33 times.

Meteor and several other upcoming air-to-air missile sport air-augmented solid motors. RD-170 has +7°...-8° gimbal. RD-0120 had +7°...11°. Cf. Gubanov.

Never go full Varyag! You might just go AWOL in Greece, like the CEO of Roscosmos’s electronics branch has. Nothing to do with an audit of his company, of course.

It never got the name, technically. None of these designations are official, they still primarily go by GRAU index.

Consider the Proton, too. Rockot? Sort of. Then there’s Start.

Anyway, @Galileo, take two... Problem: should these trees be so visible? It seems to me they shine right through scaterrer's atmo haze. Modlist Logs: https://1drv.ms/t/s!AmlSZuL0ax7C5EVvjLdFS_GtLsg4