DDE

If available in quantity, would mammoth wool find industrial applications?

Why am I not surprised? One of us ONE OF US Doubtful. Remember that copper brazing escaping with the exhaust? Key word is “brazing”. Wonder if they replicated the Soviet chamber design, which was extremely heavy on copper and vacuum brazing.

To continue a thread’s worth of complaints about snow, the situation in Russia is getting ridiculous:

True. And as you can see, Ansel is working very hard on fixing that. His ISD looks a bit more like a seagoing battleship now with all the tirrets, but ultimately SW ships tend to have a large number of “main” guns. In our case we’re talking about eight octuple mounts with dozens of gigatons per each shot. On top of that, the Star Destroyer is in the bottom rung of Imperial capitals, as per the EU. I think it’s easily explained by the original model designers not having a coherent plan - the Star Destroyer used to be a two-seat ship - and the subsequent contributors being even less literate. After all, massive miles-long space warships only became the gold standard pretty recently.

There used to be a nifty graph over at Gallup... This should be enough for my purposes: http://www.academia.edu/179045/_Public_Opinion_Polls_and_Perceptions_of_US_Human_Spaceflight_

Well, you’ve got these relics: They’re threatening to rebel and throw down the shackles of an overhead wire network:

Hm. With such a challenge, my old gal the Martin 410 comes to mind. If you use two of such lifting body RVs, you’d only need to replace the ablator on one following a nominal entry - or perhaps you could even equip them with a non-perishable TPS of some kind, and/or link them to the main Starship coolant loop. Finally, if you don’t mind completely losing the Starship after LES activation, locating all of your pods on the leeward side, with their single-use ablator inside the main hull, is probably the best option.

I've dug up grandpa's Mosin... just in case. Unlike many other examples, Barbarossa and Zitadelle at least looked decent on paper, and had to be countered through massive battles of attrition, which is not exactly the highest form of strategy.

Do not take @kerbiloid entirely seriously.

I think they still have that as their hab design.

Actually, voice is a far more unambiguous indicator unless you're building a humanoid platform, where things like gait and hip width become a viable indictor. And even then, it's deliberate messaging by the designers. It's possible to make a humanoid robot of indeterminate sex... but where's the fun in that, and what's the utilitarian point in that when both sexes respond better to feminine voices?

Next week's headline: LRO conscripted by NRO, all imagery henceforth classified.

Evidently. It has all the required functionality, and enough crew capacity for early missions to Moon and Mars. A Mars mission will likely eat up the rest of the cargo space with habitat equipment. Or... or... we could create a vertical stack of several Dragons! It's unnecessary due to vehicle configuration and width. Also, I love the look of a crew transfer tunnel blister.

Oh, it's worse. Even the currently declining populations are likely to be propelled upwards by a fecund minority. And I'm not talking about immigrants from less developed societies. No, as my citations show, to a certain slice of the population. The theory goes that that slice didn't use to stand out because having many kids was useful. It's not now, but this same slice of population keeps breeding. And simple Darwinism means they'll form greater and greater share of the population. And this is where we arrive to the more terrifying part of the prediction. Fertility correlates negatively with IQ. IQ is also significantly heritable. Which means that this growing slice of the population is also of below-average intelligence, which will create a draw on the human capital of developed nations. So technological development will likely hit a major snag just when human resources become more plentiful, and cheaper.

On destroyers? Every day, all day. It's a feature.

Somebody commissioned Ansel Hsiao to create a 3D missile cruiser. Now, Ansel Hsiao is a freelancer that works (worked?) mostly for the old Star Wars technical manuals. So what would happen if someone asked him to create a missile cruiser?

IN SPACE!

Well, in this design it's an option. But so is creating a tunnel through the equipment at the bottom of the pod.

On a basic level, true. But the big problem is, those docudramas will either not show it, or they will depict the stunt mentality of the Space Race. The stunt mentality would lead to a strong dissonance with the perception of the modern era of international cooperation and/or commercialization - in the West, that is; the way the camera caresses Soviet iconography in Time of the First and Salyut 7, filmed under a grant from the Russian government, is unambiguous. Depictions of the near future can just as dissonant. For example, it would be interesting to investigate how many people came out of the theater wondering why The Martian depicted a NASA mission since, as observed with a lot of novice commenters on r/space, there’s a perception that SpaceX has supplanted NASA entirely. NatGeo’s Mars tries to tackle it, and the result looks weird: they have a completely corporate-operated expedition with a mixture of funding by a billionaire and a bunch of governments, joined later by the evil Lukrum corporation which extracts oil, err, water for sale to... whom, exactly? That international expedition is searching for evidence of life... while also working with a Chinese space outpost to terraform Mars via orbital reflectors? Oh, and a lot of emergencies are created for the sake of drama, and everyone is permanently depressed - which is strongly dissonant with the optimism projected by the talking heads in the documentary segments (when it wasn’t a giant SpaceX advert). Hell, their depressive depiction of spaceflight goes right into unrealistic territory, because actual space fliers can at least crack a joke and are trained to respond to adversity constructively. In fact, of the entire cast of charecters only the villain is having any fun at all So if “Hollywood” wants to popularize spaceflight effectively, they face some very tough questions, and I’m pretty sure with the current quality of writing and the research behind it in high-budget films they’re not going to provide consistent answers.

Sorry to rain IRFNA on your parade, but public support for spaceflight is already at an all-time high. And it wasn’t even a solid majority back in the Apollo days. So I’m not sure Hollywood can help.

Oh, I wouldn't be too sure about that... https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2013.2561 https://jasoncollins.blog/2018/10/11/an-evolutionary-projection-of-global-fertility-and-population-my-new-paper-with-lionel-page-in-evolution-human-behavior/

Bonus content

Broke: hooligans with spray paint Woke: misguided officials And yes, that WWII relief on Novokuznetskaya is supposed to be white.

Well, the calls come from the same camp that sees space colonization as a way to export billions of excess population, and without causing an ecological disaster to boot.

You may joke, by since Federation is up for a rename, and it may as well be a city name... That would be a fun naming convention for mission stacks.