DDE

Yes, but going in for close-in combat you expose yourself to a lot more risk even from an inferior force, assuming you can't snipe individual hostiles with killer crowbars from orbit. So if you value your forces, you would probably be willing to risk ordnance rather than close-in attack platforms.

Except in KSP, this whole thing would have exploded long ago.

Because it's not a subsidy if you get services in return?

[citation needed] There's a paper that suggests entire civilizations can settle inside the event horizon. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.6140v4.pdf

And what makes you think that a museum exhibit is to any degree usable. Sure, it's not covered in as much bird crap as this 95% complete second Buran: But it's still an unflyable hunk of metal.

Oh Kraken, where are my backups, how many backups do we have, Gus!?

Yeah, but I think the Shuttle would have a slightly lower aerodynamic load than a simple capsule, wouldn't it?

I guess both Halo: Reach and CoD: Infinite Warfare both fall into the "orbit is when you go high enough and gravity stops" trap too.

Nope. Because of a treason case involving some Chinese, this particular scheme, which also deviates from the textbook design, was actually declassified and widely corroborated.

Yeah, they surely have dedicated barf bags. But that's in IVA.

Not on all suit types. Say, the Orlan has a non-removable helmet.

Yeah, but first the stuff is in one's mouth. I haven't seen any first-person accounts of zero-g puking, but I imagine it can get messy; and I remember how much all first aid guides bang on about preventing an unconscious person from choking on their puke. Combine that with being stuck in a helmet that you can't take off, and I see a potentially lethal situation.

Precisely, because the program schedule is almost disturbingly slow. I seriously wonder if it's the optimal way to do it, compared to a more rushed schedule. I remember a very old jocular presentation I saw, about managing projects. The Smart Guy's proposed progress graph was a long flat line with the peak the end.

They do, as we know from the W88; it's unconventional but doable. As to the OP subject, it's a combination of ablative heat shielding, carbon-carbon, and, in some designs, an entire layer of uranium, which is very difficult to melt. The cavity up front actually forms itself out of a perfectly conical heat shields. And while it seems that insulation is a very big issue, the g-force tolerance is not. Remember how the steep entries in KSP can easily lead to 12 g or more, while saving ablator? The nuke coming down from the 1800 km apex doesn't care for your g's.

This didn't prevent NASA from designing their Apollo-Venus variant just that exact way.

The Soviets used to load Soyuz launchers with Synthene (which is, uh, synthetic) with no change to the systems.

Uh, OP, could you please start a poll? I'm most peeved by Archidemian physics in space dogfights. A missed opportunity for some spectacular maneuvering, and it wouldn't cost as much, as, say, depicting combined arms land warfare.

It's called a qualitative breakthrough. NASA has a longer history of those, too. The concept comes from Purnelle's fiction, and I don't see how they can't create a closed-cycle Project Pluto-LANTR hybrid, which would make winged SSTOs quite advantageous. Because now, they really aren't.

Chapter 8: Breaking Point There was one more launch to go, but this one was pretty exotic. Thor was built on the same chassis as Odin, and was largely identical, but it used a full-size Terrier-Dachshund launcher. That was because it was pushing the envelope, aiming for an orbit beyond that of the Beacon Array. It slipped into position, assuming an orbital period of exactly one Kerbin day, and would hence remain permanently stuck in the sky above the KSC, its multispectral cameras and cavity radiometers tracking the weather patterns down the launch path. ---------- The next launch was even more peculiar. The Dachshund core was fitted with new Sickle boosters also carrying embedded fuel tanks. The Pathfinder was first delivered into a 250 km parking orbit. “Flight program compiled and sent,” Gene intoned, “Transmunar injection in 60 seconds.” “So we ARE coming back to the Mun,” Val noted. “In an extremely cheapskate and risk-free way, yeah!” Jeb responded. The Terrier motor reignited. It burnt, and burnt, and burnt, until the stack was headed onto a near-collision course with the Mun. The probe detached from the booster stage, deploying its primary radio dish and going into sleep mode for the entirety of the transfer. ---------- Jeb didn’t think he could experience cabin fever on the ground, but between the underway flight and the cadets, he was clearly experiencing it. Which meant he’d explored every broom closet, bar and tree in a twenty-mile radius, scared every slacking-off technician by popping out of nowhere, and was generally making repeated orbits through KSC. One kerbal caught his eye, though. The guy wasn’t wearing any of the ISP uniforms, he wasn’t a peacock from the press, and he wasn’t even one of Fitz’s suit-and-tie goons – the guy was wearing a light long-coat. At the equator. That made Jeb stop. The weirdo reacted immediately. “Mr Kerman? Yaroslav Kermanov, Union of Journalists,” he introduced himself with an odd accent. “Where’s Walt Kerman?” Jeb asked bluntly, ignoring Yaroslav’s offered hand. How did this loon escape his handler and made it to the VAB? “Corralling the rest of the talking heads, I would assume,” Kermanov responded. Jeb squinted – the journalists he’d seen were pretty full of themselves, but they harboured collective delusional pride in their profession. “Where did you say you worked again?” Jeb asked after a pause. “A freelance science journalist,” he responded. ‘There ain’t no such animal,’ Jeb thought, wide-eyed. “What are Duna’s ice caps made of?” he blurted out. ‘He’s gonna say ice, he’s gonna say ice, nobody bothers to learn the difference…’ “Frozen atmospheric carbon dioxide.” Jeb was about to explode. Since when does the press worry about reality? They still thought Jool had a surface. “Can one grow food on another planet?” “Yes, inside an artificial habitat, but the chemical imbalance is likely to render it inedible.” “What should one do if their deorbit motor dies on them?” “Might as well get out and push,” Kermanov smiled. “Well, Mr Kermanov, I’m liking the cut of your jib. If you can keep your brains from getting torn out by the g-force, I think I have a job offer for you.” Dear readers, meet Flight Journalist Yaroslav Kermanov, or Slava. He’s got these yellow suit marks, so he doesn’t look anything like other Kerbals! “Flight, INCO, receiving traffic from Pathfinder 1.” The probe was hurtling towards the darkside. As customary, the insertion burn would occur out of radio range. INCO was busy narrowing down the trajectory data in the remaining time before contact loss. Kermanov was on station, scribbling notes constantly. “Contact lost.” “So,” Yaroslav piped up, “Do we have confirmation on the landing site?” “I’m going to drop it into the eastern highlands, it’s the quick and dirty target,” Jeb mused. “You do not want to risk dropping into a crater yet?” “It would take a much steeper descent that I’d like to have the autopilot handle.” “Contact!” Gene barked. “Telemetry coming through, good insertion!” “Take it down,” Jeb ordered. “Sending landing burn data, commencing in one-twenty!” The probe’s motors executed the burn that sent it on a suborbital trajectory – that is, a collision course with the basalt plateau. At this point, the probe stopped receiving, and was in fully autonomous descent mode. Ten thousand meters. Five thousand meters. The twin rocket motors sparked to life again, throttling up to neutralize the extreme velocity. Twenty-five hundred. The probe began to pitch over as it finished neutralizing its downrange velocity. Finally, it throttled down as it had slowed to a stop a few meters away from the ground, and began to gradually set down on the slight incline. The entirety of KSC watched as the radar altimeter clocked down to zero. The printer spat out a sizeable sheet of data. The main screen switched to a grainy camera feed that panned across the desolate grey landscape with the blue crescent of Kerbin hanging in the sky above. ---------- Pathfinder 2 had been rolled out the next evening. It was bound for Minmus. “We don’t know much about what’s to expect,” Jeb admitted to Yaroslav, “No atmo, bizarre terrain, no atmosphere beyond minor ice particles. We’ll have to recon once in orbit.” “Sixty seconds to launch, fuelling is complete,” Gene announced. There was a bright flash outside the windows of Mission Control. It was a minute early for the blast-off, and the fireball was a bit too big. “Oh krak…” Gene mouthed. Gus kicked in the decon sprinklers. There was yet another explosion as the SRBs disintegrated. “Go to internal air circulation!” Jeb began barking out commands, ”Keep the fire unit back, have them put up a mist screen downwind! And for Kraken’s sake, keep the front gate locked!”

An unwisely idealistic view. SLS at least relies on off-the-shelf kit. SpaceX's Falcon Heavy is below that league, and the MCT is at the very best a decade away from completion. Unlike Falcon 9, there is no other customer for super-heavies except NASA and probably the USAAF if the latter get serious about Rods from God, which makes the project not terribly commercially viable compared to Falcons. And something tells me Musk won't be allowed to colonize Mars by himself, because the US Congress is already playing with fire as it flirts with the notions of allowing private companies to lay claim to asteroids in order to bypass the Outer Space Treaty; they probably won't let privateer boots hit Martian ground. So, in your proposed system, the MCT is unlikely to exist and the SLS is completely necessary.

Correct, but at least it shows they were serious about the project. They similarly rated the facilities to handle the eight-booster Vulkan.

But they are a whole different affair still. One's a mix of unreacted fuel and fission products, the other is a very small amount of fission products and what's left of the neutron-activated casing. Thermonuclear bombs are a lot more clean than nuclear reactors, of any kind.

What you're better off referring to is metallicity. Not enough elements were around for formation of terrestrials. But then it's kinda crushed by the 11-billion-year-old Kapteyn system and other extremely old worlds. Well, many species on Earth navigate by polarization of sunlight rather than actual astronomy. We didn't reach that in Physics classes, so I don't know how the atmosphere on Titan would affect this mechanism. Generally rare. I think that one was found in Chernobyl. We have these nice examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermococcus_gammatolerans

Well, as long as they can establish an energy gradient, they might get something working. Remember, it doesn't have to be anywhere near as fast as we are used to. I'm skimming through Wikipedia, and, since Neptune's atmosphere is pretty active, wouldn't that mean that there's some energy to go around?

Nah, the one in the films was palladium poisoning. Yeah, no idea what palladium was doing in here, or how he found in "in a cave, with a box of scraps". The MIT tried to jump on the hype by introducing the Affordable Reliable Clean (*rimshot*) tokomak with a liquid metal cooling jacket. Interesting, but nowhere near what Tony needs.