sevenperforce

Dat ogive tho

The RCS props need to stay settled too. I do not believe that the Centaur's hydrazine monoprop thrusters have the same surface-tension-based propellant settling reservoirs that were used by the Shuttle OMS engines/thrusters or the Draco thrusters. Soyuz doesn't use surface tension; I believe it uses a metal diaphragm. EDIT: I'm wrong; the Centaur uses bladder tanks for its hydrazine RCS. Oops. I guess maybe the constant RCS burn is to counteract drag in the low parking orbit? Also, I know that keeping the main props continuously settled reduces boiloff, which is particularly important for hydrolox.

I mean technically if you used solar power to run the LHC then you could turn photons into massive particles. It's just the long way of going about it.

If you want to make this actually a workable challenge, you need to think more in terms of what IS allowed rather than a set of restrictions about what ISN'T allowed. The former is manageable; the latter is infinite. You want a conventional rocket? Great. Define that. For example, you could say that we must only use serial staging, that we cannot part-clip inside fairings, that all impulse must be provided by bipropellant rocket engines, and that total launch mass must be under 100 tonnes. That would be a start.

Thanks man. I appreciate it. A lot. Thank you.

Starting what is either a very rough separation or an extremely rough divorce. There are kids involved (who love rockets because they love their dad and their dad loves rockets) which makes it a lot harder. This sucks.

"Fastest to orbit with an SSTO" would be an interesting challenge.

Schedule slip, inability of rocket companies to work together, lack of autonomous spacecraft docking capabilities outside of the ISS world, and so forth. Company cooperation is probably the biggest thing. No exec will agree to a plan that has part of the money for a mission going to another company. Also there aren't that many payloads going beyond Earth's SOI these days.

Mmm, Blok D goodness. Korolev approves. Do you have a source?

Why don't they just do a gorram distributed launch for it?? Throw it up on a reusable Falcon Heavy, let it hang out in MEO, and then meet an empty Centaur or DCSS for the ejection burn. Fast, cheaper than SLS, and a really cool proof of concept.

Funny... https://xkcd.com/2328/ By this I assume that the odds of a meteor passing through that hoop from space are 0.3^30? A standard hoop is 280 square inches. That is 1/2.824e15 the surface area of Earth. 500 meteorites reach the surface of Earth per year. Thus, on average, it will take 5.648 trillion years for a meteor to fall through any particular 280-square-inch region on Earth's surface. 1/0.3^30 = 4.86e15 , so on average Randall will take that many shots before he gets 30 in a row. So he needs to make 860 attempts per year or about 2.4 attempts per day to break even.

Yep, this is the crux of it. Assume things like AoA are going to be optimized mathematically for a given application, then model lift as a function of drag with the velocity envelope you're using. Because the drag-force equation can be derived from Newton's penetration approximation, you can also use the cross-sectional path through the atmosphere to approximate the problem.

My next door neighbors set off a half stick about 20 feet from me -- it felt like getting punched in the throat.

Yep, as much as I loved that movie I kept thinking "where the hell are the F35s and the M1A2s and the freaking USS George Washington? Yes, I'm US-centric but that's because I live here. If a single frag grenade could kill an Alpha, a dozen F-35s and the USS George Washington could WASTE the Omega's entire army in a matter of minutes.

Thank you!!!

In my head-canon, sci-fi plasma weapons actually fire some sort of tightly-bound antimatter particle cluster. They move slowly because the containment depends on their velocity, like some kind of self-sustaining particle vortex; that's the light you see from the plasma bolt. When containment fails on impact, they explode/annihilate. A round from a typical assault/battle rifle packs around 1.8 kJ; to duplicate that in an energy-based weapon you would need only 1e-11 grams of antimatter. For comparison, that's roughly the mass of the nucleus of a human cell. Granted, you'd probably need extra energy because an antimatter explosion is going to be less efficient than a 5.56mm NATO round, but you've got mass to burn. It explains why larger weapons are needed for effective longer-range attacks (the containment process eats away energy as the cluster travels), why a point-blank shot is more devastating (less of the antimatter is used up in the containment vortex), and why you can "charge up" a more powerful blast or a faster-moving blast with certain weapons settings.

I wonder about a monopropellant dung-solar engine........

Okay, not Eve, but what appears to be the core of a Jupiter-class planet, orbiting close to its star. Evidently it lost its atmosphere. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53250819 At 3.5 times the radius of Earth but 39 times the mass, you'd be looking at a surface gravity of 3.2 gees, which is nothing to sneeze at!

Dehydrating probably increases burn rate.

Air intake bug is dead so you'd need manual CFG editing. If I'm manual CFG editing then imma increase the fuel drain isp a thousandfold.

For anyone who did see the film (or even if you didn't), would you mind taking a moment to go vote for it? It's in a PBS contest. https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/vote-in-the-2019-2020-indie-lens-audience-awards/

You could also have them cram all their poo into a bag and use the Canadarm to fling it retrograde. Probably wouldn't move very fast but hey, that's impulse.

Tweakscale, Ubio Welding, and some visual/control mods, plus manual .CFG editing.

That's got hella mods.

That's a lot of green. I wonder if they inject TEA-TEB into the kerosene between the tank and the chamber.