DDE

Was it ISIS or Al-Qaida that ran a campaign showcasing that their suicide bombers were not basement-dwelling losers?

Basic lesson on Emergomash nomenclature incoming! 1xx - kerolox 2xx - storeable nitrous oxidizers (NTO, IRFNA) 3xx - fluorine oxidizer (see RD-301, ammonia-fluorine) 4xx - solid-core nuclear thermal rockets (RD-401 through 405, not related to RD-0410) 5xx - advanced storeable propellants (hydrogen peroxide, pentaborane, beryllium compounds) 6xx - vortex-confined gas-core nuclear thermal rockets (RD-600 and electricity-only derivative EU-601) 7xx - kerolox-hydrolox tripropellants Somewhere in there are stray hydroloxes and methanox conversions

VLS is just the most recent delivery platform for... well, English doesn't have a proper word that encompasses all of ракетоторпеды. Funnily enough, the same 533 mm payloads are standardized across older surface ships and submarines, so, say, if you liquided off the Indian navy, they'd either have to close into range of their RBUs, which are a Katyusha-Hedgehog hybrid, or: Load their antisubmarine missiles into old-school (i.e. WWII-style) five-tube torpedo launchers Fire the missiles overboard Missiles go underwater Rockets fire Missiles exit water Missiles fly through air Missiles release their torpedo payloads Torpedoes deploy braking ballutes Torpedoes hit water Torpedoes try to lock onto the nearest apparent contact Yeah, really. They don't seem to have any rail or VLS-launched designs, just the kind I linked to, and the old Kamov helicopters can't simultaneously carry sensors and torps. That's why Russian munition producers still sell anti-submarine variants of RBK-500 cluster munitions and the UDAV series of sonar-guided bombs.

You can always get better response time by having your weapon leap of out the water, fire a rocket motor, and then toss a torpedo towards your target. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPK-6_Vodopad/RPK-7_Veter

At least under some definitions, seeking power equals political ambitions.

No. You should, however, consider bolters and other rocketguns. There is already a company that’s busy resurrecting the Gyrojet for that purpose. If it’s green, maybe. But then you have the problems of lasers in general. You failed to mention something developed by a guy sharing my surname. And given the anime avatar, I’m mildly angered you don’t know about Soviet/Russian underwater assault rifles.

There hasn't been a single Roscosmos electric-propelled deep-space probe, and if we take them at their word they're swimming knee-deep in nuclear-electric propulsion and fission rocket designs.

N-1 has been, in various sources, named “Nauka” (Science) or “Hercules”. Probably the person to ask is Alexei Leonov, designated lander crew for the first manned L3 mission.

Hold up. This is where I have to ask you to do your homework. There has never been a spaceborne turboelectric design. BES-5 (about thirty flown) had a thermocuple converter; 3 kWe. Topaz (two flown, both mated to plasma thrusters as part of Plasma-A experiment) had a thermionic converter, 6.6 kWe at less than half the fuel mass. Yenisei (two reactors last seen in US SDI storage) featured an integrated fuel rod-thermionic power converter design, 5 kWe. Given that these reactors were pretty damned small, this sounds like a good start. Furthermore, the leakage seems to be primarily associated with the ejection system and not normal operation.

The term you’re looking for is “salted bomb”. And this is where red mercury showed up as a canard to lure out terrorists who choose to take up thermonuclear hobbies.

Ahw, bummer. That means they’re totally gonna get trolled now, and we all know who’ll win. [snip]

But at the same time it’s significantly beyond what one would entrust to an Average Joe.

Surviving this isn’t completely unprecedented. Soviet Moon sample return vehicles had no telemetry gear whatsoever.

North Korea has a few more fancy pieces of kit than a garage tinkerer. They’re not in this alone, after all. https://i.imgur.com/2PKicFU.png

I'm pretty sure it's a GDI cover-up for what actually happened.

No Buck Rogers, no bucks. Public funding for space exploration is driven solely by the dream of manned exploration. Remove that, and forget ever venturing outside L1 solar weather sats. There is absolutely zero benefit in going into space to survive a nuclear war. In both cases you’re basically stuck cooped up in a bunker. And a terrorist threat in space is downright greater than on Earth. You’ll start to encounter it as soon as regular Joes make it into orbit (and there’s a lot of things for a saboteur to break up there), and if a super-ISIS secures medium-range ballistic missiles they’ll be able to directly shoot down anything in near-Earth space.

That didn’t stop Galileo. Also, the smaller the sat, the less data it’s going to send, quite likely. Yes, but this assumes they’ll be able to stick with that paradigm as they begin to work on a noticeably different and infinitely more complex product. The BFR SpaceX is unlikely to particularly resemble the SpaceX we love (to hate). I heavily suspect that the logistically and economically optimal size of the reusable launcher is something like Falcon 9 or even Falcon 1 or Angara. Just imagine trying to coordinate the payload of a cargo BFR.

As a Microsoft brat... Yes. Not sure how much more can I say before somebody a) an old NDA shows up, or b) a security agency from one of Eurasian countries knocks at my door.

Once you get to a certain project scale, the difference starts to diminish. If it’s a public good project rather than a commercial project (which the BFR is highly likely to end up as), the difference is naught.

That makes the individual craft even more expensive. And in the long term, where economies of scale start making sense over an expendable flag-and-footprints, it’d require a lot more BFRs than Apollo CSM/LM stacks were produced.

Yes, but I find Musk’s optimistic belief that they’ll be able to casually escalate to deep-space flight suspect. SpaceX has no proven manned spaceflight capability as of yet. And nearly every issue regarding the massively increased flight duration is handwaved. SpaceX may be good at boosters, but there’s no evidence they have any expertise in interplanetary flight.

Apparently reflectance is factored in, it just stops being relevant very quickly. I’ve seen QSwitched cite aluminium outer armour as being dirt-cheap and light-coloured, hence more resistant to lasers than its thermal properties alone would suggest... but not by much.

For me it's a 50:50 between REEs and propellant.

Oh, hey, my most beloved canard! How much have I had to deal with energy shield proponents on the Space Engineers forums citing it. First of all, from my best determination, it works by being a huge capacitor, huge enough to completely evaporate the kinetic penetrator or HEAT hypersonic jet that connects the inner and outer plates. Good luck with building something like that. Second of all, it doesn’t exist outside the two Telegraph artciles a deacde apart claiming it to be in a highly experimental stage.

His purse isn’t bottomless, and he couldn’t finance Apollo. To assume the BFR would be cheaper than that is ludicrous.