DDE

Uhm... it's an R-7-pattern launch facility? Except for the mobile tower and the entire thing not rotating (which requires a roll maneuver), it's the vanilla Sputnik-era set-up by Barmin with very minor additions.

Sounds remotely like ionocraft and plasma hoverers. Every once in a while you end up encountering over-the-top fans. Somebody’s read too much spy thrillers featuring red mercury. Am I reading it correctly? Are you suggesting a Zubrin-style Mars surface-Earth surface return craft with no Battlestar Galactica in between?

Oh, it’s much worse than that, and never explained. The Blight is an actual all-destroying organism with a nitrogen biocycle. It’s destroying crop types one-by-one and it’s also driving down the atmospheric oxygen content. heavily implied to be engineered or alien. You assume other nation-states still exist. It’s essentially a post-apocalyptic world. The canon reason is that they used a chemical booster to conserve SSTO fuel. BTW, they strapped two SSTOs together in that launch.

Bashing on lack of realism in 2012 is like saying a paraplegic can't do ballet. It's the crappy sauce that went onto my bucket of popcorn.

They wouldn't be the first to flunk that. I think 2012's planet-killer neutrinos are still funnier. They've found a particle name, and failed to read past the article header on Wikipedia.

IIRC their station projects long predate SpaceX. They bought TransHab tech from NASA in 2000.

Well, at least now we've got two integration facilities working in tandem.

It would be extremely painful...

Assuming they had the option of long-range attack in the first place.

@kerbiloid I'll never forget that Popmech used Kerbal Space Program to depict Makeeyev's Rossiyanka.

The date under Obama was 2024, mind you; and DSG existed in some form for a decade. I'm really annoyed at all the coverage slyly implying that Trump is out to destroy the ISS.

I would disagree: in terms of speed there's no material difference between using a Pegasus and a Strela, the latter being the converted Topol used at Svobodny. I don't think stop-gap response is the only purpose. Fixed orbits have long been an impediment of spysats, which is why SR-72 is/will be a thing. Having the ability to spam microsats whenever you need that specific orbit for that specific operations seems to have been long in the works. It's also interesting to note that this pesky thing showed up with the fall of the Soviet Union. Why limit yourself to a specialist platform? In this case you'd actually be looking at further development of the MiG-31D, which was designed for the 79M6 Kotakt ASAT. It's still different enough from a regular Winged Ivan for it to be a problem... so, how long is the bomb bay on the B-1 Lancer? Not terribly. Well, that's quite unfortunate - although merely palletizing the booster for use on a C-130 or C-17 is quite plausible. https://youtu.be/H8d21iOowjo?t=732 Then why use an upper medium class vehicle for it? That's stupendous overkill. The payload would be 80% concrete ballast. Well, they have two options. You have the Soviet method of either controlled disposal or conversion to orbital launchers. And then you have the Trident variant of the Prompt Global Strike. Which is humanity-wide suicide because it's impossible to distinguish conventional and nuclear ICBMs. Or maybe NORAD wouldn't publish TLE data for it. It's not a reality detector.

TBH boarding wasn't much of a thing in the Age of Sail as well. As soon as gunpowder artillery entered the fray, it rendered the marines into specialists.

The armoured gunship would, however, be in turn more vulnerable to the bigger guns.

And on GOG it was just gathering signatures back when I checked. Woooot? -75% Perfect. You’re hired, Witcher.

I ground my Railway Tycoon 3 CD flat, and haven't found a replacement. So I'm stuck with Cities: Skylines. Fussy as all heck. Invisible subways. Don't talk to me about subways.

Well, well, I leave this mess for a week and look what happens... But is he afraid of needles?

There is no such thing as permanence. Disposal orbits only slightly alleviate the planetary protection hazard, which is the primary impetus for deliberate disposal.

But the hype was there. At least, I hear.

@Jhorriga, all banter aside, you really need to decide what the primary purpose of the boarding party is; the less pacifist it is, the less easy it's to excuse sending your marines to near-certain death. If it's extraction of personnel or a peacetime Visit Board Search and Seizure, you'd want a penetration method that doesn't vent the ship, and weapons that don't pierce the hull If you're after non-biological intel, use maximum violence. Vent everything in your path with weapons fire; if you can't, spray fast-acting nerve gas everywhere and watch everyone unsuited choke on their own puke If you want the enemy ship for anything else, do reconsider; a coup de grace is much more easily delivered at a distance, and attempts to capture the ship as a prize of war are very likely to be of a greater burden - it's a different design school with a difficult logistics train, you'd be lucky if you know how to operate half the systems, and you won't be able to fix them when they break Furthermore, If the ship is assaulted while it's not mission-killed, it's going to repel the boarding team with all of its point-defence weapons If the ship is mission-killed and then assaulted, there's nothing preventing an attempt at a self-destruct by the crew My personal favourite in all of fiction is the Caestus assault ram. A lot of armour tipped by a Mega-Melta that vapourizes a few (dozen) meters of armour as the craft, well, rams the target to disgorge squads of Terminators.

Somebody didn't. The SpaceX of the 1990s.

It was sarcasm! The fifties didn't happen either! (I couldn't find a better picture in time)

We're talking pretty soft sci-fi here, don't worry.

Yeah, especially in traditional pods, with eyeballs-out braking. Quite likely to be blind for hours afterwards.

Nobody tried landing rockets vertically before Elon Musk. Although mostly they're agitated by carbon composite construction.