DDE

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160713-could-this-be-the-first-nuclear-powered-airliner Aside from multiple nuclear physics errors like this There's this Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Well, I guess it's more thoroughly discussed in Ignition! and Things I Will Never Work With. Apparently, though, they also tested chlorine trifluoride:

Your post is being pretty damned chauvinist by assuming that "life" necessarily exists in Earth-like conditions.

Wasn't it the one they considered shooting in order to safely disable?

'fraid there're faster ones. Can't beat Mach 25. I'll make a dastardly mention, then.

Can't go wrong with anything from the Apollo 13 OST.

At this point, I'm tempted to drop H2 and bring up H, which is implied to have been one of innovations of Project SUNTAN. Sure, it requires supercooled tungsten matrices to store, but it should be a lot more compact.

Size creep. Few nations build "cruisers" and "destroyers", but then you have pretty nasty "frigates" being rolled out instead. Right now a littoral combatant can have 2000 km effective range on her cruise missiles. OP, care to say whether you're talking about a battleship or a warship in general, and define "battleship"?

Dead weight. It's what kills jet-assisted orbital SSTOs and it's going to wreck the life of a suborbital SSTO as well, because the airbreathers would be off and the wings wouldn't be providing significant lift for much of the acceleration stage.

Hm, those two sound familiar. Li-F-H gives you 542 sec ISP, and plasmas are for gas core nuclear thermal rockets, amirite?

Unfortunately, that's precisely how a hydrogen-fuelled plane would work. Compressed tanks wouldn't just get insanely big, they'd also get insanely heavy because, unlike cryo tanks, they have to handle a lot more pressure. Add to this the need for complicated mechanics of wing mechanization to operate right to the stuff, and you have a massive issue on your hands. Synthetic kerosene, biofuel or methane are way easier.

On the other hand, one should not delve too deeply into the exotic. As one may guess, most solar systems would be average, with small peculiarities rather than outright crazies.

There's one factor going for the "film it from inside" team. In addition to mini-reentry vehicles of the ATV and Progress, there's off-the-shelf technology for data salvaging in case of a violent reentry - with the USAAF and RVSN. From what I understand, they have the gear to recover flight data recorders from MIRVs. Well, the museums seemed to have quite enjoyed displaying pancaked pieces of Skylab. Rath's been rolling around with this unsourced claim for quite a while. As if the same KBs design ICBMs and spacecraft... Also, they have been busy, look up Yars, Rubezh, Bulava and Sarmat.

Which is exactly what I was talking about.

Wouldn't that be a necro, though?

A Planet X Trojan?

I HAVE disabled all of MechJeb tech. Plus there seem to be errors when unpacking the stations. Given how much crap OrbitDriver and other warp-related physics are giving people, I do think there may be an issue.

Then go hotter. That's why I've mentioned gas-core lightbulbs, they should pack enough energy to keep up Isp despite higher mass flow. NERVA had control drums, other systems would presumably carefully evacuate the fuel - such as UF6 gas - to containment. By afterburner I meant injecting liquid oxygen into preheated hydrogen for a conventional hydrolox reaction in the de Laval nozzle. NASA's contractors seem to think that such a LANTR would work. Clearly Delta IVs are missing the elephant in the room as well. As to water NTRs, to quote the guy over at https://childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com , Which is why shipbuilders in his quote-game-unquote ended up gravitating to methane and water NTRs as well as methane-fluorine rockets; because the game is about combat, the size of requisite tankage is a major limitation.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36773074 Many knew that it probably won't play out from the start, but this is a confirmation: apparently SABRE tech is now being pegged for an air-launch system. Which has its own unsolved challenges.

What I'm pondering is why there aren't that many solutions that push for mass flows sufficient for launch, by using lOx afterburners and hotter core designs (up to an including gas cores). Cooling isn't that of a problem; reaction mass is the coolant.

I've been toying with vertical SSTO rocketships over the last few days. In particular, I had quite high hopes for @Nertea's pebble bed lOx-augmented modded NTRs, however, they still turned out to be more mass than wallop at take-off. So I have this non-KSP question: why do vacuum-oriented chemical and nuclear rockets lose this much thrust ASL, and why then are nuclear lightbulbs frequently touted as the SSTO engine of choice in hard sci-fi?

Hm. Not nuclear. I suppose Heinlein would be slightly disapproving. I've been toying around with Nertea's hydrogen and nuclear motors for some extra Isp and hence better mass ratio; admittedly, the pebble beds I had high hopes for have thus far proven disappointingly weak. What's with the use of Mk 3 fuselages? Shouldn't you try to escalate to the 3.75 m tanks to cram more fuel into less craft length and less drag?

Jumping onto the xenon bandwagon, why doesn't the ISS use the hydrogen from electrolytic oxygen generators for some sort of electric propulsion?

Thanks to having completely lost sense of the days of the week, I'm going to try to turn your Sunday into a Monday with these. They're proof Jeb deserves that second qualification ribbon. Before the next major op, I may have to populate the KSC Mission Control rosters with mostly-generic Kerbals (Bobak, get out from under the table!). All four of them.

It's revenge for all the 'faux Cyrrilic' that gets thrown around.