Codraroll

Also, why Sprint and not HIBEX? The latter accelerated four times as quickly, although it wasn't ever deployed as a weapon.

Can we take a moment to appreciate how the rocket segment is resting on stacked pallets? This being rocket engineering, one would think there would be something like a specially designed Rocket Segment Supporting Apparatus, which is worth more than the building it's located in. Of course, we don't know the specs of those pallets ...

It's not much of a weapon if it destroys everything and can't be controlled. In this case it's even the opposite: even by attempting to create such a rogue AI, you give all your enemies immediate justification for doing their hardest to destroy you, because the universe would end if you succeeded. Then it's not a weapon, it's a big flashing target.

Anything that bends reality on a large scale or changes the law of physics handily wins this one, I think. If you're able to "switch off" the strong nuclear force in an area, for instance, you can essentially turn any matter into a rapidly scattering cloud of elementary particles, and there's no defense from it.

Just ... sit down and think a bit about your qualifications for saying that, compared to the qualifications of the people working on it full-time. I've noticed that quite a lot of your posts could have done with such a little evaluation before hitting the "submit reply" button.

I've noticed he has a certain tendency of strong opinions backed by doing no research whatsoever. It is honestly becoming quite annoying.

For *those* rollable PV arrays, the cost is anything but reasonable for a private consumer, I'm afraid. Rollable PV was a thing a few years ago, using thin-film silicon technology, but I think that entire market segment died when the cost of crystalline silicon dropped off a cliff. It could compete while it delivered one-third of the efficiency for one-third of the price, but then crystalline silicon PV suddenly became a hundred times cheaper, leaving the rollable PV panels both vastly more expensive and vastly less efficient. I'm not sure if the situation ever recovered.

The alt-text of the original comic explains that the missiles were helped out of Earth's gravity well by strapping on extra boosters, developed for Amazon's same-day-delivery option for the Lunar colony.

Stories. Prose. Scripts. Literature. Any lengthy bit of text that actually uses the information you keep asking for. If the point is to just explore new concepts, you might as well make a "Spacescifi's questions thread" or use the existing questions thread rather than flooding the forums with one new one every single day. Especially if you think it through and figure that the answer to the question might possibly be "It's your sci-fi, you make the rules, have it however you want" like seems to be the case for 90% of those threads.

I just wonder, have you ever written anything or are you just churning around with hypotheticals? I must admit I get slightly tired of the endless flood of threads asking questions for which the answer is always "You're making stuff up for sci-fi, the answer can be anything you like".

If I were to hazard a guess, the designs could be influenced by the need to transport rocket parts long distances by rail between their factories and the launch pads. That's a requirement that tends to result in lots of smaller-diameter strap-on boosters compared to the large-diameter designs favoured in the US. The Soviets never quite figured out how to build as large engine bells as they did in the West either (or if they did, they didn't bother too much with them), so their designs use a forest of small engine bells (several of which may be connected to the same engine) instead of the singular large ones like the F1s on the Saturn V.

The moon is also, famously, peppered with craters. Stuff landing on it at very high velocity and kicking up ejecta is part of the climate, as it were. Sooner or later our lunar infrastructure would have to adapt to that phenomenon anyway. Then again, perhaps one shouldn't try to cause such events if it can be avoided.

Given how the housing prices seem to evolve nowadays, it wouldn't surprise me if this would be true in a few years even if the cost of rocket engines goes up.

I wonder what the last remaining uncontacted tribes of the world think about satellites. They have mostly been appearing within living memory. I'd love to hear how they are explaining this new phenomenon. Depending on their visibility from the depths of the Amazon, Papua New Guinea, or North Sentinel Island, Starlink satellites could already be designated as mythological creatures.

I see one of the paths crosses over northeast China. There would be some cruel irony if it were to fall down in Beijing.

As of writing this, it's 12:35 AM here, I have work tomorrow, and Starship SN15 has landed but is slightly on fire. Today's excitement may be over. I think I'll go to bed and check back in the morning to see how well this comment has aged.

Sounds like it's time to build a new ISS. All we need is for literally everyone to chip in 30-40 dollars or so.

Aren't Soyuz seats custom made to fit the astronaut riding them, though? I'm quite sure I can remember reading that somewhere. I guess two astronauts with similar body structures could ride in each other's seats, but you couldn't put anyone in somebody else's seat.

This is ... stretching it a little. Starship has prototypes constantly being made and tested, funding, specialized hardware for the mission (Raptor engines) under serial production, crew hired and allocated specifically for the project (for several months already by now) and has made several large strides in its development in a very short time frame. It also comes off the back of the success of Falcon 9 and (to some extent) Falcon Heavy, giving some credence to the crew building it. By comparison, the recent past of Russian spaceflight has been ... rough. Angara's development is agonizingly slow, the project to replace the Soyuz has gone on largely unsuccessful since the 1980s, the Russian space program remains notoriously under-funded, and I've lost track of how many new rockets and spacecraft have been announced to great fanfare only to be quietly shelved years later. Russia has had the Orel spacecraft (previously Federation, previously PPTS, previously PTK NP) in development for about as long as SpaceX has worked on Dragon, but Dragon flew to the ISS almost a decade ago and has already been replaced with a new version, while Orel keeps being pushed back a couple years at a time, and it doesn't even look like they have settled on which rocket they want to carry it or whether said rocket even exists. In short, there's a lot of stuff that never made it off the Roscosmos drawing board in recent years, and quite little that actually did. The idea that this space program could produce an entirely new space station on its own in the current climate strikes me as slightly less likely than the idea that SpaceX manages to pull off the newest rocket they've been actively working on for a while now.

Gotta make sure that the increasing Chinese diaspora has access to a properly closed, firewalled, government-approved Internet wherever they are in the world, lest they fall for the temptation to try the non-censored version on their trips abroad.

That depends entirely on the value of the credit.

Not insignificant. Just that Discworld has even bigger scientific realism problems than that. The Disc is spinning on the shoulders of four giant elephants standing on a ten-thousand-mile long turtle, for a start. There is a giant waterfall over the rim of the Disc, and the only thing known about why the seas don't empty is that "arrangements are made" to get the water back on the Disc again. The sun and the moon orbit the Disc but pass above the back of the turtle, meaning that the elephants occasionally have to move a leg to let the celestial bodies pass. Then again, it's repeatedly said that this is all possible due to copious amounts of magic and the supervision of some gods who were tired of the usual "ball of rock" type of world building. During the "spaceflight novel" mentioned by some above here, the plot revolves around an attempt to assassinate the gods using the magical equivalent of a nuclear bomb, and the author explains how that entire world would go south immediately if the source of magic was destroyed. I think it's stated somewhere in the later books that the Disc has two types of light. The slow type that spreads across the landscape like syrup (that's how the Disc has time zones), but also another, faster type that allows the former to be observed (and has been found to serve no purpose apart from that).

Let's just say that the flatness of the Disc is one of the least significant problems it has, from a scientific realism standpoint.

That, or saving them for a rainy day later. "Now we build SN164. Last week it was SN163. Next week it will be SN165. These names are so boring!" "Hmm ... we haven't used the name SN18 yet. Perhaps we should call the next one SN18 instead of SN165?" "Yay, variation!"

He's not saying outright that they can't afford to maintain or replace their ISS segments, and are using the plans for a new station as an empty threat to leave, in a hope that it will make the Americans pay for their upkeep, but it certainly sounds a lot like that.