DDE

There's a similar competition going on with airplanes and intercity trains. P2P BFR is particularly egregious because it's going to be launched from and to locations even more far-flung than airports.

Indeed.

Whether we're dealing with a minor power or a superpower is a very major caveat that has to be established at the start of any ABM discussion.

Actually, @zoliking, they call it a HОE.

Not to toot my horn... https://1drv.ms/b/s!AmlSZuL0ax7C0BeCWHUc-KHd9jiA 4. Might be a result of a paucity of adequate samples for the sound guys to work with. The post-production effects teams can be notoriously ignorant and add mistakes to a movie where they were none, such as the guided missile beeping on the AT-4 in Battle: LA. 6.1 Standard convention for all other forms of combat as well 6.2 Audiences don't like the BRRRRT, it sounds too much like farting noises 7. That can be easily forgiven because they're invariably used in tandem nowadays Well, TBH the MiG Falcon 9 is cool.

Did this thread just finally create justification for real-life escape pods?

True that, it's a wall we've hit and it's the wall many people don't want to see.

It's quasi-storeable with at least 270 days practically achieved. This was enough for Glushko to spend decades developing high-energy lander engines of the R-5xx family.

You don't say... Is it ClF5 time? Is it time for hydrazine, pentaborane or beryllium? Is peroxide back in play? You might not want a SST-LLO lunar lander. I think we're going to see aluminum-oxygen before we'll see lunar hydrolox.

The hoverslam doesn't really leave much time to detect an issue and abort. We're talking an escape pod that also has more dV than a 0-0 ejection seat.

Rambo was never there.

To paraphrase Evgeny "Bad Comedian" Bazhenov, the story consists entirely of the main characters making a mockery of every internal rule of their own universe. Start with the non-binding nature of the assignment test. It would be ridiculous for it to pay any reverence to science. Also, grab some bleeprin to ease the pain.

It restarted circa 1998 and has continued on an on-and-off basis ever since.

Actually, from some of the unflattering descriptions of Edison, he was the Elon Musk of his era, mobilizing or downright appropriating talent and then selling it on the back of a lot of PR. His smear campaign against Nicola Tesla, Westinghouse and alternating current is legendary - he tortured a convicted man to death over several hours in front of an audience in the failed bid to prove AC to be deadly.

On the one hand, I really doubt that would be politically acceptable. On the other hand, Roscosmos is up for the DSG. Which at this point feels like not interrupting the enemy when they're making a mistake. But hey, it's relevant to this thread because it would be an SLS payload.

In a word? Yes. That's why Zubrin accuses them of black propaganda by pretending to be proponents of Mars exploration when they're actually trying to kill the very idea.

We have the huge problem of the BFR not having a stated fixed passenger capacity. It's easier to give it the ability to blast off from the booster.

Because they propose a Travelling Space Station expended in every mission, each of which they base on the total lifecycle costs of the ISS. Multiply the ISS by nine missions. Here's our man Zubrin: http://spacenews.com/op-ed-misdirection-on-mars/ Whoops. I'm afraid you've made the usual Musketeer mistake of largely ignoring the Earth-Mars transit, and the associated problems of keeping the whole thing in peak condition for two years of flight, whereas they've only had to do so for minutes, and then survive EDL from hyperbolic orbits. MADV is very specialized, whereas the BFR is an enormous leap.

The problem is that it risks gobbling up the entire market in one launch and then spending the rest of the year in cold storage, because the launch market booming due to decreased costs is not as guaranteed as some like to think. The bulk of costs being due to keeping the lights on and the personnel on the roster, gee, where have we heard that before!?

Do you even have to ask in a Kerbal forum? Boring Flamethrower Mk II takes ClF5 canisters. While I don't have a link, some 'science' 'journo' was so shellshocked by an SLS-related testfire that they've expressly written that Orion is capable of Mars ascent and landing. Yes, the 'Journey to Mars' PR blitz has been that affective (Freudian slip, meant to say 'effective'). BFR doing something largely similar probably adds to the confusion in the plebs' minds.

No, the protagonist ODs on some sort of nootropic booster and becomes a goddess.

Useful, yes, practically achievable with a rocketship, no. Airlifting troops from base to base is achieved by aircraft in politically relevant amounts of time, and direct combat insertion by rocketship is insane. Ithacus (which existed at a time you couldn't aim at your base) was rejected for a number of reasons: the uncertainty of the condition of troops on arrival (will Private Joe be in fighting condition after the g's?), the extreme vulnerability of inbound rocketship to enemy long-range AA fire, and the fact that the rocketship would blow itself up when trying to lift off and RTB, even assuming you've somehow refueled it after it landed on Ivan's barn. That is what confines it to pad-to-pad flights... and you can be damned sure the destination pad would last minutes in a shooting war. This means you will use the Milspec BFS to get the troops into about 1000-2500 km from the target country, and then load them onto Ospreys or, more likely, Boeing's 'double Ospreys', and then actually ship them to the battlespace. 'm not sure how that is a win - and you'll still have to watch out for Nuclear Attack Warning System-cued ASAT hitting you near the trajectory's apex. I say we go with the Mobile Offshore Bases instead and call the BFS an "incremental capability". Did you know you can do more with $1500 than you can do with $1000? Amazing!

Not entirely. Due to high cost of offspring, especially spacefaring-grade, we tend to be a whole lot more selective than bacteria, so there are a lot more places we haven’t settled even given the chance. Nobody is sending thousands of people to random places in the Solar system on the off chance that one of these groups will survive and prosper.

Not in human lifespans. ...Sorry to preach to the choir.

Ithacus has been throughly considered and rejected half a century ago, @DAL59.