Codraroll

One of the Dragon capsules could be outfitted with just enough stuff to legally make it a space station. There must be some tax loophole or other that SpaceX could take advantage of by making one of those.

Isn't there always another backup date? I mean, it's that or abandon station, isn't it?

Dang, that's a scrub, isn't it?

What about reticulating splines? ... oh wait, wrong game.

Interesting reading for a while, but it sort of degenerated into incoherent screaming at the end.

Nah, the render shows the equivalent of those horse coach rides you can currently take in Central Park, between the glass-and-steel skyscrapers of Manhattan. A veteran vehicle shined up and/or recreated for tourists.

Solution: build a second space station orbiting in the plane of the TLI maneuver (assuming such a thing exists). After all, in this scenatio we've re-introduced the shuttles used to build it already.

It is a pretty cool rocket, all things considered. The problem is just that it's become rather expensive for what it does.

I think you would be much better off with a launch vehicle that carried the payload safely to low Earth orbit, where it could sit for a while waiting for another spacecraft to be launched (at its own leisurely pace) to rendezvous, dock and transfer in the safety of the vacuum and stable(-ish) orbits, and then afterwards boost itself to whatever orbit it wants to go to. Doing it the KSP way, in other words.

If you could come up with a way to turn your ceaseless rate of questions into a propulsion system, you would have a contraption so effective you'd never have to make another thread here again.

I just realized that the captains of the fairing recovery vessels have the completely opposite job of naval commanders: Every now and then, under certain circumstances, a state or non-state actor may find it upon themselves to launch rockets into the atmosphere. The rockets shed stages as they go. Very high up, pieces separate from the tip of the rocket and fall back to earth. The job of the captains is to know precisely where those bits are going to fall down, and to ensure that their ship is placed directly where the impact happens.

Not all of which would be needed to solve at once, though. I think there already is a market to be tapped into there, given a cheap enough way to get a spacecraft up: prospecting. Sending a bunch of probes to various promising rocks and having a good look at what they're made of. Then build a database, and sell the data at exorbitant prices to the guys who are developing spaceborne excavators. Each company would then need to develop less tech and carry a smaller risk. If you have good prospecting data, you can make money even if there is no excavator. If you're building an excavator, you can use the prospecting data to know where to send it. It's probably a process that can be broken down further too. Say your little rocket company develops a great space tug that can take a decently-sized payload from Earth orbit to the asteroids. The prospecting companies would love to use your services to get their ground-penetrating radars to the most promising rocks. You're making money without having to deal with the hassle of mission control. They might even have bought the radars from somebody else, who specialize in geological survey equipment but don't want to run their own space mission. The prospecting company would have the probe assembled by another company with a clean room. Mission control services could probably be contracted as well. The challenge with space is that a lot of tech development and a bunch of lengthy processes with various required expertise is needed to do things. It's expensive as heck. But given easier access to space, the challenge can be split into many fragments, each small enough that the required tech development, infrastructure and expertise is manageable for a single company, lowering the risk far enough that it doesn't take a lot for the venture to become profitable. You wouldn't need to build a whole space program to get anything done, but buy the services off somebody else and add your own special ingredient to create a unique product. Most involved companies wouldn't run their own missions, but deliver a product or service to be used by somebody else. Put another way: It would be impossible to run a profitable taxicab company if you had to build cars and lay down roads.

Well, I would say that if a patient were to breathe an inert gas at close to boiling temperatures for a quarter of an hour, the chance that they will die of the coronavirus becomes extremely slim.

Plausible, yes, that's the case for many of the listed examples. But there's a fair long way to go from "plausible as a concept" to "operational on the battlefield right now", and the Russian ministry of defense tends to mean the former when they claim the latter.

"Ideal" can also mean "hypothetical, unachievable, can only exist as an idea, imaginary", such as a frictionless vacuum, an infinitely thin, straight line or the ideal turbine used to derivate Betz' limit for wind power efficiency. In that usage, the word may actually be appropriate. But anyway, give it a few months, and Russia will probably boast of having it in their arsenal anyway. There seems to be a trend in Russian defense news that if a weapon can be conceived on paper as a conceptual possibility, it is considered operational and in use by the armed forces, even if the concept has only been tested once to spectacular failure. See undetectable torpedoes, hypersonic missiles, radars that detect stealth aircraft, tanks that survive anything, etc.

This. Also, since sci-fi engineering by necessity is very difficult engineering, it takes an expert to understand the finer details of everything. Heck, just try to write an account of the Apollo missions while explaining the ins and outs of the minute details, and that was fifty years ago! Now scale everything up to the observable limits of technology as viewed from a state-of-the-art perspective today. For the story to contain an accurate description of everything that's going on, a lot of expertise has to be written into it. This means you either have to write a story about an expert, for whom it would be natural/reasonable to narrate the finer details, or you have to assume the reader is already an expert so you can jump straight to the juicy parts, or the story has to contain tons of narration to try to make the reader understand what is going on - in which case the reader usually tends to find something more interesting to read. Spending chapters upon chapters on minute explanations of technical details might have worked for Herman Melville, but Moby Dick was salvaged by its great characters and great prose. Nobody reads it - or remembers it - for all the time it spends poring over the various aspects of whaling. Much more commonly, and usually more effectively - just wing it. See the The Expanse books, for instance. The Epstein drive works. It's efficient. Later books reveal it's based on laser ignited fusion somehow. That's all there is to it. It is mentioned that - but not how - the problem of waste heat has been solved, and that's not a big problem for the story, because The Expanse is not a patent application for the Epstein Drive. The Star Wars universe has its hyperdrives, whose technical descriptions boil down to "this is the part that lets you travel faster than light, it's a Bad Thing if it gets broken". So yeah, at some point you have to invent some magic. If you try not to, it tends to take over the book, and that is much less interesting.

I'm reminded of a case I read about a few years ago. A big Chinese city had set a lofty goal for crime reduction: that there should be fewer than 30,000 cases of violent crime that year. The goal was met, just barely. At the end of the year, the tally stood at 29,998. The last of those had occurred on September 26.

Elected or forced at gunpoint to take office?

By this rate, things will get interesting in a month or so. We'll quickly get to the point where the diagnosis will be ready before the test can be taken. I can only imagine getting a test in the mail, with a letter attached: "The test results show you are infected with the coronavirus. Please take the test in order to preserve the space-time continuum."

If they want to go all the way to the full launch weight including all the margins, it will be exactly 1 at the point of launch. It might not get all the way to orbit that way, though.

I read this thread a little too late in the evening, skimmed through, and saw this as "What do you mean N? The N-word?". Needless to say, this made tater's response look rather ...odd. In other news, it seems like the situation in Norway is reaching a sort of linear rise and not exponential, which is ...something, I guess. The number of hospitalized has risen by about 30 per day for about four days now, and there haven't been any new deaths (now 7) reported in the past three days. The number of registered infections has also been linear for 12 days now, around 150 registered per day, but as they aren't testing everyone with symptoms anymore, it's hard to get a clear meaning out of those numbers. One graph even goes a little down: the number of hospital employees in quarantine has gone from 9400 yesterday to 8800 today. I choose to believe this is because their quarantine period ran out without them reporting any illness, and not because they're told to ditch the quarantine and get as many idle hands as possible to the hospitals. For now, the situation seems manageable, which is reassuring seeing as we've been in a partial lockdown for a week and a half now. On a brighter note, according to the statistics on the linked page (it's all in Norwegian, sorry), the number of people registered recovered from Covid-19 is today higher than the number of registered cases on March 2. As the number of cases rose about exponentially from there, hopefully the number of recovered will rise likewise. The sight of those two lines finally crossing will be uplifting when it finally comes, at least.

This could potentially let you attach your kids' first smoke signals to the fridge.

That's 0.6 percent, I sincerely hope. Otherwise, we're in a load of doodoo.

More like: 6A. The corp awards you with a cushy board-member position where you're paid six figures to attend two rubber-stamp meetings annually. 6B. Profit.

Yikes, that's the kind of statue you design when you have zero faith in your sculpting skills. Or just very little time to work, I guess. "Yes, it meets all your specifications. It's three meters tall, Gagarin's on it, and I got room for all the text for the plaque. Well, it's not really a plaque anymore..."