Jonfliesgoats

Another thought on airbursting a steel projectile falling from high orbit: Iron meteors do this all the time due to ridiculous thermal gradient within the projectile. Adjusting the ceramic coating around the vehicle and modifying the reentry profile could get a somewhat reliable air burst. The more I consider the practicality of orbital weapons, the more I appreciate the "good" facets of nuclear weapons. Radioactive fallout and the fear of it, warranted or otherwise, is a deterrent for any nation to engage in even limited nuclear war. Even aristocracy and the wealthy have to deal with cancer, birth defects, etc.. While air bursting nukes only creates a small amount of long term radioactive fallout, the fear of this still limits their use. The ability to use orbital flechettes to achieve similar destruction without the the fallout risk to politicians and elites makes mankind more prone to use these devices. Moreover the technology to do this is already here and within the capability of many nations and some Silicon Valley billionaires. Obviously we are not talking 64ton impactors, but a 7 ton impact or at similar at similar speed would be devastating. Aside from massive retaliation, there are few reasons not to use these things. You can see the prescience of or fathers in signing the Outer Space Treaty.

Steel has a density of 8t per cubic meter. A .5r by 10m h telephone pole is roughly 8 cubic meters of steel or 64 tons. This is about as heavy as any feasible impact device would be with current or foreseeable technology. Heavier impact devices are possible but require much more complex systems. anyway 64000kg at 10000m/s will yield 3.2 e10^12 joules. Each ton of TNT has 4.2 e10^9 joules of energy. So you are looking at something in the kilotons of yield. Airbursting a steel telephone pole is doable, but difficult, so this would be an effective bunker buster to remove another nations nuclear stockpile or ICBM silos, but not for airbursting over troops or cities. If one wanted to wipe out Three Gorges Dam or Cheyenne Mountain, this may be a better way to go than a high yield, nuclear ground burst. In reality, smaller flechettes are more useful. These things due to mass and perhaps a light-reflecting coating would be impervious to current and foreseeable ABM tech. "But Goat, iron meteorites fall to earth all the time without leveling cities! Surely these iron telephone poles can't be that destructive!" Iron meteors entering our atmosphere rapidly find themselves melting at their leading edge stagnation points, tumbling and eventually disintegrating. An iron-tungsten or DU impact or that had a ceramic leading edge or an an ablative coating would retain its mass. The weak point for this system would be time of flight. While the projectiles aren't susceptible to ABM, the platform would be highly susceptible to ASAT/ABM. So higher orbits would provide more energy and time to react, but long time of flight (hours or days) one you rifle your orbital weapon. In that time, targets and inventories can be moved. Energy dissipating paint is visible and iron is radar reflective, so there would be a fair bit of warning from an impending strike. Perhaps these factors make the weapon system more useful for retaliation than deterrence? Anyway, in the movies these types of this strike out of the blue. Moscow, Beijing, Washington or Brussels would have time to evacuate targets and coordinate retaliation before these things land. Again, this is the reason why smaller flechettes have more tactical and strategic applications.

Asymmetric warfare is not an inherent part of modern warfare. We live in a long peace that has existed since the end of World War Two. To be sure there are many ongoing conflicts, but the fraction of global population lost to warfare each year is much lower than what was seen in previous centuries. With regard to shockwaves above and below the surface, there is a lot of declassified material regarding this available on the internet. It would not be like the movies. With regard to orbital bombardment in general, the math is simple. Let's run the numbers for a telephone-pole sized piece of steel impacting at 10km/s.

Since people are concerned about guidance, perhaps we should change the way we approach heat control of our reentry oven? Initially we were thinking about a metal conductor with variable flight profiles for temperature control. What about a variable geometry heating element? Again we can use our FREE Breadsticks to balance things out. by adjusting the position of our heating element, we can control how much heat goes to the pizza by dumping excess heat into our FREE breadsticks. Yeah, the breadsticks may be charred to a crisp or nearly frozen, but the pizza would be perfect. Also, since there is so much heat available, I envision just a few, small heating elements rather than a large coil like in a conventional oven. Variable position/geometry heating elements would give our reentry oven much more freedom to maneuver. Since we are ordering multi-million dollar pizza, wine would be gratis. Can you age wine or brew beer in orbit? I can't see any good reason why the microbiology wouldn't work. You know, there may be a practical application for this. Weaponizing space is generally frowned upon. This said, nobody really limits what toppings we can put on a pizza. If Lockheed launched an orbital pizza shop, who's to stop a government from ordering a pizza with anchovies and some sort of depleted uranium topping encased in a ceramic delivery oven? We could see a lot of pizza orders for various government agencies! Mankind first rose to space in an effort to kill each other, so while weapons in space are unfortunate, you can argue that it is inevitable (and in fact happened decades ago). A more troubling concern for me is weaponizing pizza. Pizza is usually a nice treat after a kids football game, a corporate retreat, etc.. Having contemplated using pizza to vaporize city blocks with orbital pepperoni bombardment, I now find myself looking at Chuck-e-Cheese and other pizza restaurants in a new light. People see dinner. I see doomsday weapons.

Interesting thoughts. I like the relationship between free time and innovation, so perhaps we have to tolerate self-important lazybones as a byproduct of fostering innovation? Again, figuring out how much one needs to crack the whip v. encourage novel thinking seems difficult. I find myself always making corrections one way or the other.

I didn't know the falling steak thing was Randall Monroe! Cool! I think a teeny, spaceplane oven is where this is headed. The ceramic tiles on the space shuttle always reminded me of a brick pizza oven, anyway.

I guess a constellation of PizzaSats would be required so you can receive a piping hot star-pizza in a reasonable amount of time. With regard to orbital pizza and false, doomsday alarms, we need to put some kind of "Not a doomsday weapon!" transponder on our reentry ovens. We would make sure that no nefarious actor abused the pizza transponders by assigning each pizza order a discrete code distributed via one-way datalink with spacefaring, nuclear capable nations. The Pizza transponder codes would be held by a devoted, multinational team of scientists, non-proliferation experts and pizza chefs.

So I was mulling this over on my way to my next assignment. There are technical challenges before we even deliver the pizza. For customer defined reentry pizza, we need to find some way to make a pizza in orbit. If we have our automated PizzaSat prepare a pizza at 0g, how do you get the toppings to adhere to the dough? Either you would need an adhesive of some sort on the dough combined with a pepperoni and cheese gun or you would somehow have to "paint" all our potential toppings onto the pizza with some sort of food-grade sauce-jet printer. This still doesn't address all the floating pizza stuff getting the mechanics of Pizzasat. Another workaround for this is to spin Pizzasat fast enough that the pizzas are constructed under 1g or more. In this situation the automated pizza construction becomes a relatively simple affair, but deployment becomes problematic. The reentry pizza-ovens would now destabilize Pizza sat if they separate asymmetrically and some sort of ballast would be required to stop Pizzasat from tumbling wildly. My recommended solution is this:free breadsticks! You just don't know how many breadsticks you will get because the breadstick dough is portioned out specifically to balance Pizza sat at the moment the reentry oven is deployed. The reentry vehicle itself could Correct for whatever trajectory it's on when it separates from spinning, Pizzasat. As a prerequisite, our reentry oven will now need some sort of orbital maneuvering capability to Deorbit itself. It would not be a bad idea to make it a hypersonic glider in order to maneuver in the atmosphere. As others have suggested, reentry and maneuvering would subject the pizza oven and pizza to five, tens, or even one hundred g plus. While this sounds abusive to pizza, imagine how thin and crispy the crust would be as our reentry oven blazes straight down through our tables, basement and house foundations!

I nod vigorously in an effort to comofluage my ignorance! i think a fair number of people would enjoy dabbling with the more nuanced physics. whether or this is even achievable with the current software and consumer PC/consoles is another matter.

Argh! I can't wait for 1.2 to hit Xbox land!

Imagine an orbiting, automated pizza satellite. It launches stocked with frozen dough and all the common toppings. Pizza orders are radioed up to Pizzasat and requested toppings are assembled on the frozen dough. The pizza is then loaded into one of, say, fifty conical, reentry vehicles. Metal conductors radiate some heat into our reentry vehicle to cook the pizza during its ten minute reentry. Your pizza then slams, at a few times the speed of sound, through your roof and right onto the gps/ins coordinates of your dinner table! I know this is impractical, but could we have pizza-oven reentry vehicles that deliver hypersonic, artisanal pizza to our own, shattered rooftops? Is this technically feasible?

Imagine a lego set full of all the stock KSP parts! I would force my children to play with these!

What about sci-fi haikus? Rise with fire and hope Low budget rockets explode Papa John's in Space

Whoa! I like the idea of ancient, space dwarves! All my lawn gnomes (I have fifty!) are monuments to our future, interstellar pioneers?!

My thread is meant to say that I think he was a genius who fell victim to con men. He was brilliant, but maybe naive. I think Crowley and L Ron Hubbard saw an easy mark in Jack Parsons. Hubbard ran away with the poor guy's wife. Good science requires an open mind. I wonder if this makes some of our most innovative minds susceptible to con artists? Also, have any of you watched that film about James Randy, "An Honest Liar"? It's quite good!

Absolutely. Looking at my first post, it reminds me of some of the dumb corporate posters that I occasionally see defacing our walls ("2+2=5: Synergy! It's up to you!"). What I am really driving it is how you manage to get real science and engineering feats accomplished without forcing new talent into the limitations of current group-think. It's a problem I haven't managed to crack yet.

A book full of simple paper airplanes meant to be folded along printed KSP art. You would have Jeb riding a rocket or spaceplane etc.. Instructions could be included for optional addition of bottle rocket propulsion (to include locating the rocket in a spot where the center of thrust is somewhat near the center of mass and the change in mass of the rocket doesn't cause an excessive shift in CG.). Pass these things out to 8 year olds!

IRL predicting how complex parachute systems interact with each other was very difficult. As forces would change, the geometry of your lifting surface would change too. This was one of those situations where there was really no substitute for actual wind-tunnel and flight testing until recently. This is one of the reasons holes in the tops of round parachutes not only make the canopy more stable but even make it a more effective parachute! Calculating parachute effectiveness in terms of drag is an antiquated method. Parachutes, including round parachutes are lifting surfaces like any other wing, rotor, etc.. Still, if you need a quick 90%accurateish idea of what a simple parachute will do, the drag equations work. In KSP, I find my cowardice makes for inefficient design. So I needed to come up with a quick idea of just how much parachute to bolt on to a given mass.

I used to play on PC a long time ago and got strung out on KER. Playing straight stock has its own fun in that a little more is invested in each craft in terms of research. Plus I have broken out my long-retired graphing calculator (actually a graphing calculator app). So I get to pretend I'm an educated chimp again!

We do benefit from the sidereal velocity at the equator more than elsewhere, but oblate planets would be cool! This said, perhaps I am missing something? Wouldn't it be a relatively small change in the dimensions of planets to simulate this?

Very informative! You know I read about it, but without talking to someone who actually uses FAR I am not sure what I am missing out on. I was ranting some days ago about how I thought vertical takeoff ssto projects were more satisfying than hotol projects, and I think my root frustration is still stock aerodynamics. I am on consoles, so no FAR for the time being. Thanks for the info!

I have not had a chance to experiment with FAR. Does it simulate interference, vortices and general planform effects? I notice that, even players with FAR, don't seem to make much use of winglets, etc.

In contemplating advances in spaceflight, it's worth considering the nature of human innovation itself. Mesoamerican civilizations knew how to observe and predict the movements of celestial bodies, communicate over vast distances, cut stone and wood very precisely and preserve ideas across generations in writing. Still, not one of them invented the wheel or learned how to distribute weight via the arch. Innovations we take for granted are far from assured! How strange was the first person in the Levant (or wherever) to use the wheel? It must have been completely mind-blowing! As we look to the future, we will keep seeing a slow march of progress from regular sources like tech companies and universities. However, the next, giant leap for humanity will come from a very odd mind. Is it worth cultivating a nursery for weirdos, knowing that you are also cultivating a nursery for shams?

Thoughts regarding Jack Parsons, nerds?

There are surprising advances being made in locating and controlling the genetic factors behind human aging, cancer, etc.. If, in the future we see human lifespans range up to 200 year, it is entirely possible that fifty to one hundred year journeys at .1 to .2c become a possibility. Freeze-drying or hibernating a crew becomes less important than having a room full of plants and animals, a room full of music and shag carpet, etc. An interstellar, multi-decade flight to a nearby star with a long-lived waking crew may require the skills of great architects and artists as much as engineers and aviators. My ideas are recycled from others, of course. the point is the future is odd and we rarely predict things accurately. Next time we are drinking scotch and discussing flight, space flight and the near-religious commitment we have to these things, let's shift our attention away from propulsion for a night. Some of the sillier ideas for soaceflight may be closer to fruition than "serious" spaceflight ideas. Also, snacks.