Mayer

Indeed, getting the right answer for the tactics of the enemy was probably more important than the plane itself. The Vietname would do ambushs and not loiter around to pose as a target, the window of opportunity was small and reaction time was key.

Wait for sale when you count every penny. Simple as that.

Cute, i made a paper tank too once.

Sword casting was done frequently in the bronze age.

About what levels of power supply are we talking about? A fusion reactor is by all means a power generator. Fusion power doesn't exist? The sun begs to differ Conservation of Energy! You never wave energy into existence, fusion power is converting the binding force of nuclei. That is fiction.., that is utopian.., that doesn't mean anything. The same buzzwords with which rockets and airplanes were disregarded in the past. You need some solid arguments for the infeasibility of the concept. I for one trust the British Interplanetary Society(if their name is supposed to be funny, remember what a similar sounding Society for Space Travel gave us) and NASA who had a similar idea with Project Longshot. Every form of nuclear fusion is hard to initiate because you have to overcome the Coulomb barrier. That's why we have thermonuclear bombs and large plasma containers. Small fusion pellets would be a big step forward but the technology is still in its infancy. If nozzles are so wasteful, why are we stll using rocket thrusters? The principle behind utilizing a chemical explosion or a nuclear equivalent is the same. Nothing in space-travel is cost-effective or commercial at the moment, it's a money sink. The chance of colliding with a larger object is ridiculously low and you can't compare interstellar space with our solar system because the sun attracts a lot of junk. ITER costs around $24 billion and weights 23,000 tonnes. In the best case, it costs $10,000 to get one pound into LEO. ITER's ~50.7million pounds would cost $507 billion. So it's a 530 billon dollar project, not including resupply missions, maintenance and space work hours. NASA's annual budget is $19.5 billion, you have to subtract $3 billion for the ISS, if they didn't spend it on anything else, they'd have 247.5 billion dollar in 15 years which is less than half. The NASA director is obviously lying, playing the stupid yes man.

I was in college, but it didn't end well. Quite a change from school with a lot of information to memorize.

ITER is a half-way finished Tokamak design, the international community is working together on this one. What is so bad about it? Wendelstein 7-X is just a test reactor in the Stellerator design which will not usable as a power plant because it's too small. The Stellerator design has the benefit of preventing particle instability, but it's still poorly understood. The ITER team has the tools to predict particle instability. "When you get beyond the capacity to harness the power, then power is unlimited" Conservation of energy applies. If you have a whole lot of energy and don't do anything useful with it, it has to go somewhere like heating up your ship. Unlimited energy seems quite impossible, like a perpetuum mobile or the massless drive without propellant. "Above 0.01 c your acceleration is pityful" Well, with non-nuclear ships like the laser-sail acceleration is pitiful from the start. They can nonetheless go far beyond 0.1c. "because the ISP used requires acceleration to relativisitic speeds to gain the mass." How is that relativistic? Relativity comes into play when approaching speed of light. You gain 10% more mass when travelling 0.5c and there it goes up. Meaning you need more thrust until acceleration becomes impossible at 0.99...c "It took some time to realize there is an acute marginal utility of gain once Vexhaust is above 0.1 C because your waste products are more than exhaust weight. " The fuel has to be accelerated too and there are waste products, because the reaction is inefficient. Which is why i said 0.1c as maximum, but Project Daedalus could even go 0.12c. " (a speck of dust is a nuclear warhead at near light speeds). " With this reasoning you can discard interstellar travel altogether. The interstellar medium is quite empty, cosmic dust is primarily microscopic. You are talking about an event which is highly unlikely to occur and even then it might be possible to divert or suck these particles up. Asteroid 1I/2017 U1 came from interstellar space with slow speed, meaning it had ample time(thousands of years) to crash with fast objects but it survived, proving that interstellar travel is possible. "Every bit of power used for these reduces the power that can be devoted to the very hot fuel you needed to get rid of and fast" The very hot fuel contains power by itself, you can use a fraction for the ship's systems and still move the ship forward when getting rid of the fuel, thanks to Newton's Third Law of Motion.

I still have a shuttle from my career. Is this right, just have some cargo and do these missions? Are all engines allowed, my Orbiter has LV-N?

I watched Star Wars when it had a interesting story and state-of-the-art special effects to heighten the tension, but nowadays i am sick of it. Ep.V was the pinnacle of the series.

I'd also like to see another Messerschmitt, but alas the company is gone and development of a indigenous plane would take too long now. If Britain and Germany ever had a conflict again, they would use the same planes on both sides. Which is why i highly value the F4 Phantom II which is both battle-proven and reliable. A Luftwaffe saying goes "The Typhoon is a warm weather plane. if you want to be operational at -20°C you have to deploy the F-4F" I may be biased on this but i live near Tactical Air Force Wing 71 "Richthofen" which had the last F4s in service and there is a monument to one on a street crossing. The Fw-190 was a good counter- example. I just have the opposite opinion, an aircraft with diverse mission profile will come atop because it is versatile and cheaper to maintain than a fleet of vessels which can only do one job, it's also much more survivable than a low-altitude bomber. Germany in the past had bad experience with the F-104 because they were used as fighter-bomber for which they weren't designed for, an airframe specifically designed for the task is preferable. Britain is also getting F-35 btw. As it stands, it needs to be proven that the F-35 is a bad plane. Reports near the project seem to indicate the opposite, that it really is one step ahead. This train of thought may work for large militaries but a small country can not bear this losses. You want to avoid unnecessary risks, which is why you don't look for a dogfight. You want to maximize casualties of the enemy and bring your pilots home. Modern sensors and low chance of detection means the 5th generation fighter has an information advantage and can avoid fights to its disadvantage.

Fusion power is not unlimited energy, it's constrained by fuel and efficiency(how much D, T or He³ actually undergoes fusion). Even a antimatter-matter annihilator, the ultimate mass to energy conversion, would not be unlimited energy. It's a controlled reaction, you have a specific output. ITER is aiming for 500MW. It's obviously not massless. I agree that cooling will be a challenging problem in space, but so is engineering a form of fusion propulsion in which most heat will be expelled. Your example of a spacecraft which can only operate fusion in small pushes could still benefit from it, because the reactor (1GW) is so large, it will probably have a positive energy output. I don't quite understand the dilemma in the last paragraph, interstellar voyages are long no matter what. But travelling at 10% of speed of light can cut the travel time a lot. Space travel within the solar system will multiply when more payload can be moved cheaper, enabling exploitation of space resources, higher velocities may be interesting for passenger lines or intercepting a fast object.

I reckon quite early. The paper "The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information." by Hilbert, M., & López, P. published in the Science magazine, puts the number of general-purpose compution of the year 1986 to be 0.06 MIPS(Million Instructions per second) per capita. There were around 5 billion people in the world, which means 300,000,000 MIPS. The average person also had access to 539MB of storage space, so also 2,695,000,000 GB in total.. In contrast KSP minimum requirements specify a Core 2 Duro processor (which can do about 27,000 MIPS), 3GB RAM, 512 MB VRAM and 1 GB of HD storage space.

I tried yesterday but my plane could only fly around 100m with 24 LV-N despite asparagus-staging. Looking at that picture, less might have been more.

For real, if someone made a plasma sword it would be unbearably hot in its surrounding. And melee weapons, especially larger ones don't belong on modern battlefields. Maybe you can find a miraculous solution for the heat problem or create a low-temperature plasma but it will still be useless because of projectile weapons.

Fusion is funny until you realize how much energy is released from Deuterium-Tritium and Deuterium-Helium³ reactions. Once i've put their values in the formula of kinetic energy and got around 10% speed of light. I don't think a vessel with solar sails can pull this off, there is no solar wind where Voyager 1 drifts.

Being in a habitable zone doesn't mean habitable. Trappist-1 star may be too big and bombard its planets with intense radiation.

The F-22 isn't meant for export, the F-16 is cheap and thus viewed as cost-effective but it's weaker than the F-15. The Greek and Turkish Air Forces show that an old F4 Phantom II with new electronics and armament can go toe-to-toe with a F-15. [snip] Air combat is evolving, it's no longer the days of Richthofen and his flying circus. Simulations show that the F-35 has a decisive advantage over 4th generation fighters due to its ability to stay undetected. I would be very worried to go up against this stealth plane. And hating the F-35 seems to be a popular opinion due to its development hell and conspiracies on the internet.

I sum it up like this: The Air Superiority fighter is a niche and outdated concept, every fighter is to some extent multipurpose nowadays. Including all those strike crafts on the poll above.

I had this with my Mun base, as soon as it came into loading disctance of my 2nd craft, it exploded.

A wormhole is a tunnel between 2 regions of space and has nothing to do with velocity, but you could achieve these speeds with a gravity-assist around a blackhole.

Congratulations, you have reached 18.9% speed of light.

I'm an outsider but it remains to be seen that the F-35 is a bad plane. I view it as superior to Airbus FCAS(Future-Combat-Air-System) which only exists on paper and the russian Su-57 which is still developing. It's the most capable aircraft on the market. I find the arguments of this article to be faulty. The F-35 has a lifting body and high thrust-to-weight ratio, it's reasonable maneuverable for the unlikely occurrence of a close air fight. The cost of procurement isn't very high, maintaining obsolete planes like the Tornado for 2025+ will be more difficult and expensive. And having different planes with specific roles would cause chaos with logistics and spare parts. Building low-tech fighters en masse.. well, it could be viable according to the motto "quantity has a quality of its own"(Lenin) but that's a strategy only viable for big countries who come out on top in a long war of attrition. In military history there were enough examples where a larger force was defeated. Instead the goal should be to get where the enemy is the most vulnerable and strike hard, preferably silent. "Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate." (Sun Tsu) Which is why i strongly disagree with the conclusion that stealth is useless. Even i know that the serbs who shot down a F-117 had a lucky shot in specific circumstances. My prediction is that we will see more stealthy vessels in air, on sea and on land. Also the P-51 Mustang which the author so idolizes as the epitome of air superiority in the past had the aforementioned Fw-190 as rival in Europe, which was a jack-of-all-trades but more like a swiss army knife than a master-of-none. And the "venerable" A-10 close-air-support was from what i read too vulnerable in the Gulf War and the F-16 did its job better. Another historical comparison from WW2, the infamous Stuka(Ju87) was a highly successful CAS in the early years but later it became a lame duck which couldn't survive in the battlefield, the Fw-190 did its job better. Mind you, the Luftwaffe at the time had no doctrine about strategic bombardment but was all about ground support and tactical integration.

Dogfights in WW2 planes are one thing but modern fighters are very expensive. The 5th generation even more so and will be just too valuable to risk in an engagement on even ground. Honestly if we see a reemergence of close air combat, it will be in the form of drones who are disposable and can withstand higher G-loads. In the meantime a multipurpose airplane is more than adequate. Vietnam was a special case due to technical failures and strict rules for engagements, but most kills were done by Flak. Old Migs would come atop in dogfights but what's the point? The Mig-29s were retired in german service because there was no need for them. And funny is that me talking about the massive #%&*!! with the Eurofighter (and all the Airbus projects lately...) is somehow inappropiate but american failures can be freely cited. The Tornado in comparison was a european project done right. btw Focke-Wulf 190 was the best fighter in WW2 all around

This thread is neither related to spaceflight nor have i insulted anyone, so it's clearly not a violation of 2.2b? Also no need to defend the Eurofighter, production is phasing out, it was a political program with horrible mismanagement which found no customers. And its original role of dogfighting was scrapped after the Cold War for multirole purposes.

Talking of which, the US is going to sell its expensively developed F-35 multi fighter with stealth capabilities and the Luftwaffe wants to buy them. edit: what is even the point of a dedicated dogfighter like the name air-superiority fighty implies when we have BVR combat?