DDE

* cough * Slate * cough * someone did something really Kerbal * cough *

You forgot these two puppies:

50 gigs? After several decades of collecting He3 for a single launch? Get real and have 10 gigs right away.

Err, nope. That dV includes drag from atmosphere. My map says 3400 m/s for Kerbin orbit but 2270 m/s for a - albeit much lower - Tylo orbit. The ability to assume a very low orbit around Tylo can be exploited to dramatically lower the thrust requirements for the uppermost stage. I would dare suggest a stage-and-a-half afterburning nuclear rocket for ascent. That's how a single-stage Tylo lander is doable in KSP, and if you don't fire up the reactor until launch there will be no problems with radiation during EVAs.

Yep, this is slightly concealed by the core stage being lopsided.

If you take a more detailed look, though, it's because the engine-eers behind N-1 had never built rocket engines. After Valentin Glushko told Korolev to either use the hypergolic RD-23x and RD-270 engines, or **** off; Korolev had to go to Nikolai Kuznetsov, a jet engine designer (not to be confused with Victor Kuznetsov, a telemetry expert), and have his people learn to make kerolox/Sintin-lOx motors from scratch; no surprise they went down the untrodden path and eventually produced the NK-33 with its unparalleled TWR. Glushko correctly predicted that he'd need twenty years of general R&D to create an equivalent to F-1s, which is the RD-170/171/180/190 family, based on Kuznetsov's work.

Yes, but once you detect the railgun firing - easily, the muzzle flash is going to be quite vivid - you can start dodging randomly, "drunkwalking"; almost any change in trajectory will be enough to foul up their firing solution. Any spacecraft easily detectable by infrared. Muzzle flash easily detectable on IR. Whoops.

Actually, if I remember it right, I've seen a breakdown by fields, which lead to a number of intersecting parabolic curves (lifecycles of disciplines) of different height intersecting; with IT entering the stagnation period biotech being on the rise now.

Lasers aren't exactly that good. It takes the currently available ones a while to burn through anything; it's far from being able to instantly rupture anything, let alone something that has a lot of cool liquid in it. And most definitely not a light-second away. Ever heard of beam waist and diffraction? Disagreement! It would take even railguns several seconds to reach a target at a realistic range. That gves enough time to dodge. If you haven't noticed, fighter jets do that to missiles, too.

I dare say it wasn't that sudden. Many inventions get conceptualized for centuries before they can be delivered. For example, the Wrights weren't the only ones to have an aeroplane in mind. There was a whole bunch of attempts with steam engines, and the gliders had been built before them. More often than not, an invention is just a combination of technologies that has not yet been attempted.

Yes, and it takes much less dV to kill something in orbit than to put something in orbit.

@The Raging Sandwich I don't think it's worth the effort.

It's also about spreading the pork. NASA would have to dump a large portion of its suppliers... and of course the Congress isn't gonna let it.

Water launch is the key to Big Dumb Boosters like the Sea Dragon, since they'd be built in shipyards out of regular 8 mm steel.

You're free to try scratching off the bird crap. There is, however, this American Buran:

The guy behind Children of a Dead Earth has concluded that just sitting in one place (or firing an electric rocket - same thing) leaves you exposed even to conventional cannons, let alone railguns, dozens of them. Technicolor traces mandatory, of course.

They cannot be used to get anywhere in a tactically useful amount of time, and can't be used to dodge at all. I'd suggest hydrazine with ClF5 oxidizer.

Asset denial via scorched earth (har-har) is the smart response to a superior enemy. I have it in my fictional WWIV scenario.

OP, have you ever considered Children of a Dead Earth? It fits your mandate for "proven technology only". However, trying to control LEO will be incredibly annoying. I'm pretty sure Russia has a bunch of Naryad ASATs in some old warehouse, and China, well, who knows. Overall, thanks to ground clutter and the complexity of putting anything massive into orbit, it's very easy to counter any attempts to set up a hostile presence in space.

Actually each Venera or Mars pair were of identical design; Venera 11 and 12 were both 4V-1-pattern probes. The lander on the left goes into the spherical fairing atop the bus. Here's a human for scale:

But it could breathe! And some of Ivan Ivanoviches had eyelashes and could talk, therefore repeatedly leading to increased laundry expenses for NASA and CIA.

Oh, Ivan Ivanovich, I've found your long-lost American cousin! The only person to ever fly on a Progress freighter!

I'm backing up preemptive strike. Don't even need FTL for that, Relativistic Kinetic Kill Vehicles are non-SF planetbusters. And they are nigh-unstoppable. They make preventive extermination of every possibly sentient lifeform the only wise course of action.

Quite, likely, yeah. 10-15 on each Sarmat. The image above is, as best as I can determine, a US PGS concept with an HTV-2. Judging by some procurement paper trail, Yu-71/Item 4202 has been tested on old UR-100 missiles over the last decade, suggesting it's around 2 t apiece. It's a third-generation design with the first being a 15F178, tested in 1985-91; NPO Mashinostroyeniya developed a dedicated 15P170 Albatross missile with SLA-1 and SLA-2 gliders and included it in a publicized prospect in the sloppy '90s.

Multiple. Independent. Maneuvering. Turns out that's not the term du jour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuverable_reentry_vehicle ...MIMaRV?