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DDE

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Everything posted by DDE

  1. And the explanation here is utterly pragmatic. Actual explosions, rather than cinematic deflagrations, would, erm, destroy things and people. They are less visually satisfying while being enormously more dangerous to work with.
  2. Yeah, and the Russian media just ran a clickbait storm about SOHO data suggesting Earth's atmosphere extends beyond the Moon
  3. Hands off, I called dibs on it back before Armata was announced... then there’s that laser system.
  4. What is Russia’s NRO? I’m pretty sure the 821st Center doesn’t just monopolize and process all of military satellite data.
  5. A new paint job and a biconical exterior makes it 200% more Soyuz-like. Also, Federatsya is probably a rarer name than Traktorina. It’s a complex affair. Russian nouns are by and large all gendered. “Ship” is masculine, so are most naval ship classes, “vessel” is neutral, “boat” (including submarines and a host of minor craft) is feminine. And your ears will ring if you call anything less deadly than a missile boat a “ship” near a maritime aficionado. And yeah, the vast bulk of Soviet spacecraft had masculine names, except for Mir’s Priroda, the Tselina SigInt sats, and the obvious Luna and Venera. And Zarya and Zvezda. Zarya, BTW, is standard Mission Control callsign.
  6. Dammit, this looks like a sneaky way to not dump the Fili compound altogether.
  7. Alright, I’m confused. They waived off the original sampling site. So which of the two first two planned samplings is this?
  8. I prefer this over the playful NASA probe twitters.
  9. Lots. But it's the most likely factor - the 2.1a doesn't come with the new engine for precisely that reason.
  10. Before that, he was told to eject. 1h 46m 45s, per my early-2000s DVD. *vents fumes*
  11. In action? Yes. But back in the very first movie Porkins was told to eject and he didn’t. And that’s über-canon.
  12. “Or RD”. Roscosmos will pretend this is a serious error, but in actuality Soviet designers were utterly obsessed with staged combustion. All of them.
  13. They have ejection seats, all of them - except the Y-Wing and its escape pod (ditto for TIE-derived late-Imperial Scimitar). Also, those flight suits are forcefield-sealed anyway, per the old canon.
  14. Instead of a cosmetic fairing, the X-Wing has a large bundle of machinery and two high-mounted engines blocking the view; you’d be looking at an all-out redesign. The situation is even worse for a TIE, which has all of its machinery behind the pilot. The A-Wing is the closest thing you get.
  15. I wondered what’s it like to be an in-the-flesh boogieman. Synthaxis is definitely Russian, too.
  16. A bit redundant in a universe of proton torpedoes. In practice, @Maximum7, there’s probably a demand for Electronic Counter Counter Measures (ECCM) due to all the jamming that supposedly nerfs guided weapons. If guided weapons weren’t nerfed, it’d have been a very different universe.
  17. Are we all the way back to the Senate Launch System? Your chances are, overall, horrible. A lot of “research” in Star Wars tends to get outgunned by what the archeologists scavenge up as a result of said 25,000 (more like 50,000 AFAIK, what’s with Revan and his Rakatan battleship 3D printer) of rather cyclical technological development. A small but probably pretty topical field would probably be anything to do with countering artificial gravity wells. The hyperspace-blocking tech surfaced around Revan’s era, then promptly disappeared (a millenium later the galaxy was down to metal swords, AFAIK), then reappeared in Imperial use, where Admiral Thrawn actually used it on his own ISDs to drop them into ongoing battles with ridiculous accuracy. Also, I am sure the First Order are not the only people that are working on hyperspace trackers...
  18. @Maximum7, up front it’s a somewhat difficult question. Are we looking at the canon after it was savaged by Disney? Because that jettisons a lot of the established engineering. The old technical manuals even risked foraying into the subject of actual accelerations (thousands of gees for a Star Destroyer) and weapon yeilds (gigatons per turbolaser blast). Furthermore, it would be a bit helpful to narrow the field down a little, and ditch the omnidisciplinary scientist trope. Yes, we know you’re awesome, Sam, but you’re too awesome to be real. A further problem is that a New Republic scientist probably doesn’t work on military projects. That’s a whole lot of potential avenues going down the drain. Which raises the question of how much of a budget they have. Given the supposed state of the galaxy? Probably not much, so any theoretical physics research with planet-sized particle accelerators is probably off the list, it’s not like a research institute or an Empire remnant can just churn out a planet-sized installation, right? First off, you seem to be trying to cheat around OP’s moratorium on hyperfuel research. Second of all, it’s probably hopeless, given the apparent infinitely superior production and handling qualities of extant hyperfuel. Hell, the old canon had those ships have a propellant mass fraction of 50% or so with no tanks to speak of, implying very funky properties of hyperfuel.
  19. I’m not sure it has an advantage on hypermatter in terms of raw energy density.
  20. There’s a significant hazard of the grinding operation consuming a lot of energy. If not more than is being produced.
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