Spacescifi

This is why for all the improved efficiency of mini-mag orion... the original project Orion may still carry more payload, since the mini-mag would need a lot of radiator panels to approach the thrust of the original Orion... unless you are shipping less payload than the original to begin with.

But more thrust right? That is the trade off?

How about doping metal beads into liquid propellant for an extra kick? Something very reactive with LOX? I am throwing stuff against the wall here to see what sticks. As far as I can tell the extra mass shot out the back would deliver extra thrust. Or we could just go crazy and put enriched uranium beads in liquid methane and light it up with LOX. Probably blow up the rocket lol. I am not sure if using a reactor and liquid propellant doped with metal beads is a good idea... but who knows?

And what America both does and does not do often has a domino effect on other parts of the world. Whether anyone likes it or not America is very influential, but less so on places it could care less about lol.

Mine is Supergirl, specifically the 2006 onward character but not the New 52 reboot which I hated. Supergirl may be a pretty blond teen, but she is more than that. She is a character that I can empathize with because: 1. She is an outsider. And literally lost her entire world. In a way I can relate because I departed a high control group with family still active members.... which naturally means limited or zero contact as the leaders instruct them to do toward former members. 2. She is kind of reckless and overconfident.... because she's one of the most powerful people on the planet and virtually unstoppable. I was that way more in my youth but older-me realizes risks are indeed risks and not excuses for ego-tripping. 3. She is naive and inexperienced and has a tendency to make mistakes. Again that was me in my youth, but I still recognize the need for experience to grow nowadays. Beyond all that, the comic has several heartwarming slice of life moments and even humor. Examples of this are below: This one follows Supergirl seeking to make amends for past mistakes by visiting several friends and aquaintences she felt she messed up in some way. This one is hilarious but she means well... and yeah... Supergirl is willing to consider doing stuff her cousin never would. So what is your favorite comicbook character and why?

I was thinking of a dense fuel that would not require massive storage tanks like LH and it dawned on me that molten metals could work. Advantages: If you can manage a chemical reaction with some other element then you get smaller storage tanks making your vessel lighter and overall increasing thrust. Disadvantages: Molten metal is hot and in space you may need radiator fins... hopefully not as heavy the massive tanks you would have had if you used LH instead.

Well thank you Bob. I was actually already aware that hydrogen required far bigger tanks due to being so low density. Denser propellants basically mean you are hauling more energy per kllogram whereas with hydrogen you would need far more to even match it. Ha... maybe someone will make doped molten lead propellant propellant someday. I do not know if lead will react with anything for thrust, but I already know certain chemical reactions can be used rocketry with other metals.. such as alluminum.

True but they act human... only difference really is the sheer difference in power. Indeed... the most popular fictional characters are all too human. Granted there is Godzilla... but he is hardly known for or watched for his character.

Hmmm... yes and no about power making superpowered folk egomaniacal. Supergirl has had a ton of variations through the years, but by far my favorite comic book run of her was from the early 2000's onward (do not like the New 52 era after). Supergirl as a character was not simply a stunning blond beauty, but displayed again and again that she had a tendency for recklessness and even naivety at times... but she means well... at least when she is trying to be good (sometimes she acts up like an angsty teen). The difference between her and Superman is that people both know and respect Superman, but people in general don't know her as well and neither respect her as much but she also wants the same same respect he receives. This drives her to speak and act rashly... driving her to make a promise she intends to keep no matter what.... not fully realizing yet that being Super does NOT mean we can or SHOULD do whatever we want. It stems partly from her concern for the boy, but more so from her own insecurity over being in Superman's shadow. https://arousinggrammar.com/2012/11/01/supergirls-unfortunate-promise/

It would seem... at least based on a previous conversation with sevenperforce, that a 10% fuel to ship ratio is not happening for an SSTO even if or especially if it can make orbit on it's own.... at least if it is a rocket. I imagine an Orion could still manage with such ratios only because it is overpowered with thrust. I suppose a 10% fuel to ship ratio is seen as some sort of scifi ideal.... but it seems the lower the fuel ratio the higher the energy you need to react with it to get to orbit... but engines can only take so much energy before destroying themselves. The alternative is burning a higher ratio of fuel to compensate for a less energetic reaction.... which is what we do with rockets in real life.... which thus favors staging over SSTOs. In space a 10% fuel to ship ratio is possible, but again unless it is a very high energy reaction your mileage won't be very far. Interestingly this leads to a conclusion I have made.... which you can feel free to correct me on about scifi SSTOs... provided they use some sort of advanced rocketry based on stuff we know like antimatter thermal rocketry. My Conclusion: If you have a 10% fuel/propellant ratio and are using antimatter thermal rocketry for an SSTO you have a few options for dealing with waste heat. 1. Closed cycle cooling would require more of the ship to be engine and radiators than otherwise simply to deal with waste heat. 2. Don't. Just use antimatter project Orion propulsion AKA as chucking out photon torpedoes instead of nukes. Open cycle rocket cooling is not an option since you would need more than 10% fuel ratios to reject all the waste heat from the antimatter thermal rocketry. The lighter weight an SSTO is the easier it is to get to orbit powered by antimatter thermal rocketry... but ironically the waste heat is so high that your payload would be relatively small since much of the ship would have to be engine and radiators for closed cycle cooling. And that is the final nail in the coffin for an even somewhat realistic SSTO. Pointless as you cannot maximize payload to fuel ratio no matter what you do so long you hold to a 10% fuel/propellant ration. All because of waste heat! Why bother SSTOing if your payload will be really small compared to your engine/radiators. May as well two-stage. Exceptions would be airbreathing scramjet antimatter thermal rocket airplane SSTOs, but that has it's own problems just trying to avoid not burning up in the atmosphere.

You have a point, but with powers this potent, AND the ability to have babies, chances are someone would escape monitoring. At any rate it creates a good and natural backstory to an engineered race of supermen and superwomen and why they are exiled off from humanity to found their own homeworld... with human help. Since clearly Earth is not big enough for humanity to house a rival that could potentially beat them at some point in the future. Earth... exporting new life based off the human or animal template to the rest of the galaxy... the future. Nice premise actually. Just don't come back guys... please don't haha! We sent you away for good reason.

Wow... so now I see why futurists are banging on about fusion being the hope for the future and why they keep pushing electric power.

Oh it will be easily recognizable since the way I intend to do it they will either totally glow (flight) or partially glow (hand and forearm) when using their powers. Explosive collars seems rather harsh though.

I mean I am not sure TV or movie scifi even addresses this but they SHOULD. I mean somewhere between the spaceships and warp drives you would think they may run out of fossil fuels at some point. But even if humanity does or did would it really be so bad? I have read that cars can be designed to run on cleaner less enviromentally damaging fuels that are renewable but redesigning would be expensive. My point is that even without fossil fuels there is a good chance we can go to the moon and do the other thing... whatever Kennedy meant by 'other thing' lol. Methane and natural gas are not fossil fuels right? And so long cows and people have to poop we will always have a lot of both. We are sitting upon virtually inexhaustible sources of fuel.

Just curious if modern technology could even provide security in the following setting: Scenario: 1 in 1000 of people gains BOTH superpowers of the following variety: Tactile kinesis and flight: Tactile kinesis means anything they touch they can move as if moving the entire object at once... instead of just the part they are touching. The limit is ten tons, after which the powers won't work on any object either heavier or massing more than ten tons. Such a power would enable one to not only lift a car with their pinky, but spin it too assuming the ground was not in the way. Supers can get around the weight limit if multiple super-people grab the same object which multiplies their tactile kinetic strength by the number of supers (for example 3 people could lift 30 tons max). Flight: An extension of tactile kinesis really... just using your own body and moving it with mere thought. You can also use tactile kinesis at the same time, meaning you could literally swoop across the freeway and pick up a car or two (average cars only weigh 3 tons). Flight while powerful has limitations such as wind chill freezing you if you fly too fast and of course flying into stuff is still deadly. Power activation: Tactile kinesis is present from birth but flight does not become available to use until age 20. The Problem: For every sane and safe human there are insanely dangerous ones. Since only 1 out of a thousand is born with these powers, larger populations with densely populated areas (cities) would be the most at risk. The Solution: Part social part technology. Monitoring from childhood as well as well as isolating superpowered folk from society at large would be helpful. Draconian but effective. Visits would be okay but extended stays at best would be monitored heavily. Technology solution: Dealing with a rogue psychopathic superhuman would be difficult to say the least. But I suppose guns and anti-aircraft guns would suffice in cities. The bad thing is the high potential for collateral damage. Maybe knockout gas missiles I dunno, or gas cannons that shoot it at close proximity. Something most superhero films do not address. Cities would have to be redesigned to deal with such a threat. Maybe densly populated cities would only be far away from known super populations... that could work too.

Yes... so it's crazy NSWR versus the ocean... I would like to think it makes up for the challenge with raw power.

Ya know... it dawned on me that the very reason many of the more risky high powered rocketry ideas have not been tried may work quite well here on the ocean with an actual sea going ship. Let's disregard radiation as a concern and just assume the mission is dire enough to want using extremw nuclear rocketry to propel seagoing vessels. I am talking stuff like the infamous NSWR propelling an ocean ship or better yet speed boats. Even the nuclear lightbulb and the gas core nuclear rocket would be available to try. I cannot think of any reason for using this other than having infinite reaction mass (sea water) to mix with limited powerful nuclear fuel. Bonus is uber speed boats and faster ocean going vessels than the norm... while radiation is bad we are ignoring that because it's cool to build NSWR propelled ocean vessels.... it is a very kerbal thing to do. Maybe someone has already done it in KSP?

Just in from google since you mentioned weather being effected by a faster rotation speed. In short... we would not have a civilization beyond any structure that can survive hurricanes and underground bunkers. If the Earth spun faster, hurricanes would be stronger because the rotation would push winds further eastward and would make the effects of hurricanes more severe as they would spin faster and have more energy in them. Sep 17, 2022 https://www.popsci.com/earth-spin-faster/

True... I just assumed because air moves in all sorts of directions but yeah that makes sense. So in other words it would be a boon for space rocket launch? Nice! On the other hand the day/night cycle would seem wonky... not unlike it is for the ISS with who orbit every 90 minutws. Some have said the magnetic field may be effected too from increased spin. I do not know about earthquakes... but maybe.

If Earth's rotation suddenly sped up, what is the max rate of spin it could have and still support life and how would that effect life? My guess is that at the maximum you may get what seems to be a stiff breeze, purely from the Earth spinning faster than the air overhead. At unlivable rotation speeds it would be like a global hurricane that would wreck all but some sea creatures that do not depend so much on what happens on the surface.

I am not sure what answer you are looking for but I will try to answer. Obviously anything launched from any planet retains at least that planet's orbital vector unless it thrusts to change that. Ever play asteroids or Space War? I know you have... we all have. Impulse warp would allow you to seemingly accelerate across the screen with only a single burn, but when you shut off warp your would retain your original velocity vector before warp. What that means is you can do some cool stuff like fly to ram an asteroid or moon and flip and burn right before hitting it and warp in the opposite direction at the same acceleration... basically cheating inertia... until you shut off warp anyway By the same token in real life you could use this and rinse and repeat to gain a bunch of speed from gravity at the cost falling backward and warping forward again with a single burn again and again.

Thank you for more or less killing off the idea of The Expanse TV series... at least it would not look the same at all. Still there is some hope for gas core that could improve performance by combining it with MHD tech. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/power.php#nukemhd About Impulse Warp: Your speed and velocity and inertia will be the same it was when you engaged the impulse warp drive. So yes I am aware this can be weaponized easily due to the wild differences in relative speeds in space... still one would have plenty of notice since 3g may be fast but still takes more than enough time for anyone to detect and prepare for any such RKV attack. The main benefits for impulse warp are dropping out of warp to gain orbital or lose orbital speed as well as make maneuvers to evade that normally would be impossible. Missiles without impulse drives are essentially obsolete unless they are near enough to overtake a fleeing vessel they would run out of fuel chasing it. As for thrust, I presumed more engines of similar thrust would grant overall more thrust tham a single one on it's own... at the cost of burning more propellant. IRL more engines than less are used since it is easier to cluster a bunch of less powerful engines together for higher thrust than make a single uber engine that can do the work of a whole cluster of engines by itself.

To be sure the impulse warp drive DOES rely on thrust from main engines to kickstart it... but after that... yeah... it is virtually free space warping. So long as you have propellant in your tank to exhaust out your main engine you can also use it to set your impulse warp acceleration. So nearly... free.

Actually on second thought doing that does little good... since the backup ship needs to spend propellant just to keep up with the ship it is going to feed. Unless you literally launched a bunch of tankers off a huge coil gun to ALREADY be where you are going when you get there, they will lose so much propellant along the way that it is an inefficient system that can be made more efficient by taking forever using ion engines. Fission and fusion both are kind of in the realm of science fiction if we want torchsips. According to wikpedia the very reaction chamber that nuclear saltwater rockets would use is at risk of melting from the heat. Zubrin thinks increasing the flow rate of the propellant will solve that problem as it will carry heat away fast enough not to wreck the reaction chamber. But we won't know for sure until we actually build a NSWR. Worse yet there are concerns of stray neutrons messing things up and even causing a subcritical nuclear reaction to go critical and.... BOOM! Long story short... we do not even know if modern materials could sustain a reaction chamber that could survive a Nuclear Saltwater rocket burn. So even NSWR may be fiction unless we can prove otherwise.

Very true. I guess with me anyway... I am far more interested with scifi spaceship design that is fitting for the kind of propulsion it uses. In real life rocket shapes are optimal given their relatively short but hight thrust burn times to clear the atmosphere. Only when you have higher energy to dump into your propulsion system or propellant without melting your engine when compared to modern space rockets do you get options for shapes other than rockets if we are lifting off an Earth-like planet. Scifi often shows non-rocket looking spaceships flying like SSTOs to and from planets.... but to do that you would need vessels with performance similar to what I typed in the original post.