DDE

Hell, the designers of Gnom treated a solid rocket that propelled the whole thing to M=0.75 as a 'zeroth' stage.

No, it’s one of the regular test shots at Plesetsk. And the 2S7 203 mm artillery cannon has a similarily derpy alarm signal. Nope. That’s why there were concerns regarding AShBMs and Trident-based Prompt Global Strike - launching a conventional payload on an ICBM is just begging for full-scale atomic trouble. Topol does have a civilian payload launcher, but I don’t think it can be fired from a mobile launcher. The largest Russian conventional missile launcher out there is Islander, which by my guesstimate launches smaller rockets than the old Scuds and FROGs but is suspected of breaking some treaties by extrapolating an appropriately-sized version of the Kalibr subsonic cruise missile.

That's the difficult bit. The structural enhancements needed to navalize fighter jets do not bode well.

I'm gonna top that with a video. See the smoke coming out the lower section of that launcher?

That reminds me... Totally an 80 t geophysics experiment, nothing to see here!

I dunno? Having been pushed for more than a decade past it planned operational life, how many near-disasters had Mir suffered?

*shrug* Let's go inflammatory, shall we? What may turn out to be Energomash RD-800. Up to 37% increase in kerolox Isp claimed by some "highly" "informed" sources, annular pulse-detonation motor. Puny Orion, only detonates at 1 Hz, not 20 kHz.

http://i.imgur.com/C5FfO02.png

Once ze rockets come up Who cares vhere they come down? Zat’s not my department! On that note...

...but I highly doubt it will damage. Interplanetary flights are no joke. I’m not sure the bulk of the parts would last more than one roundtrip, let alone a thousand.

Which is about as probable as the Hyperloop having operating costs of 0$. I think that following every interplanetary trip we're going to see something very familiar:

That probably won't fly, pun intended. NORAD and RuVKS both have military units that independently verify the purpose of every object in orbit. "Space control" we call it. http://www.npk-spp.ru/deyatelnost/adaptivnaya-optika.html

Unless you try to get about 75% technological overlap.

Dumb question, was it not possible to design Orion with a range of SMs with different propellant capacities? They wouldn’t have to comanifest with a manned ship, so they probably *could* send each module up in one go. No, he means Delta IX. http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Delta_IX_rocket That one definitely has better main(s). No, it actually declared, “How uncivilized, flying is for droids!”

No, this IS about stealth, because you’d still have to disguise the same thermal signature of an operational spacecraft as opposed to a dead chunk of metal.

Paket-NK, 324 mm, 1.4 km against torpedoes, 20 km against conventional targes. If I’m reading it right, the 20 km range is for a conventional monorpopellant torp, whereas the M-15 antitorpedo is a mini-Shkval solid-fuel rocket, but with the same 50 knot top speed due to lack of a supercavitation tip. Buy yours today. That’s technically the second Soviet/Russian antitorpedo system. The RBU series of depth charge rocket launchers have been designated as anti-torpedo-capable for decades, and it’s not like people hadn’t tried to shoot incoming torpedoes (to little effect) prior to that. RBU-12000/UDAV-1 is particularly sophisticated. The first two rockets drop four Nixie-style decoys, the next salvo plants a minefield in front of the torpedo, and only the third one aims for the kill with ordinary HEs. I’m surprised the 2038 corvettes and 11356 frigates don’t mount them.

Yes, but how many of those would be willing to fork out enough cash? Because the shallower your client pool gets, the higher the ticket price becomes, which is yet another vicious circle. And this is where it gets difficult. You’d either have to fly them full of ballast at your own expense, or you’d have to somehow find massive payloads that don’t exist. A theory of mine is that we’ve reached long-term equilibrium in the annual payload mass launched, and further advances in rocketry are simply unwarranted.

And such serious gamma shielding is utter overkill, and it also exacerbates the charged cosmic ray impacts. Have you tried, I dunno, something more versatile like water?

Unlikely. A space race stimulates Apolloism - systems optimized for short-term milestones, not protracted service. These “cool new launch systems” would be prohibitively expensive and/or unreliable and/or single-purpose. Where’s the thriving Saturn V commercial payload program? A non-starter. Go back to the beginning of the thread, we’ve methodically demolished any notion that there is economic utility in a greater level of space exploration and exploitation. And that’s the only thing corporations are going to hear about. Space tourism is a non-starter. Tourists want a package deal on comfort and entertainment, which mid-term space travel will be unable to provide. Novelty tourism burns out very, very quickly. And that’s before we get to awful travel times and spaceflight being currently more dangerous than trips to Raqqa - and that record requiring large-scale passenger flights to correct, creating yet another bicious circle in the oath of space cadets’ dreams. And Moon Cheese, given how expensive it will be, will have a tiny target aidience, and sales will drop to zero in a week. You’ll never recoup the initial, fixed costs.

A large pressure vessel alone does not a space station make.

Crowdfunded spaceflight is a complete non-starter. A promise of instant gratification with video game starships was enough to raise $150+ million, but that’s probably the limit and it might just crash and burn and cause a backlash against crowdfunding in general. Gotta use that state monopoly on violence to raise the requisite heaps of cash.

I'm not sure that set-up is repeatable. Between the sociological and PR differences making obfuscation a fairly effective and cheap method of maintaining national prestige these days (the 24-hour news cycle, yadda yadda yadda), and the fact that massive rockets are no longer considered the cutting edge of technology, CRISPR is... I'm not sure a red flag on the Red Planet would particularly bother the other likely competitor.

How much deviation from "normal" are you willing to tolerate? Light gas guns are limited by speed of sound in hydrogen, so their muzzle velocity is somewhere in the range of 6 km/s. The Voitenko compressor can achieve a full 67 km/s, but is blown up in the process. At which point... what would you say to a CASABA-HOWITZER?

Aramid fibre is not particularly resistant to stabbing, and there have been glove pucture cases on EVAs.

Missiles, full stop. Effectively unlimited range, higher impact velocity than regular guns. Lasers still suffer from target coupling - it’s more efficient to punch through targets than to melt them - and they don’t actually have perfect accuracy. Thus far, lasers haven’t been tested in orbit. There has been a 23 mm cannon trial (R-23M in Kartech-1 gun pod on Almaz stations) and de facto missile strikes in the form of air-to-space missiles (fired by F-15s and possibly MiG-31Ds) and coorbiting kamikadze satellites (various versions of IS, operational since 1967, over two dozen intercepts).