Spacescifi

It is known that animals and insects can adapt through successive generations to the mode of life that they live. It is the reason we can breed dogs and cats to look different and even act different from each other. During the summer in the USA, ants love to come inside the house where it is cooler. After fighting off massive invasions several times in my youth, I decided upon some trickery. I put ant traps OUTSIDE wherever I saw an ant trail. Results: Smaller invasions... or massive invasions in different areas they used to not go. I suppose because colonies decided to try another location. I also noticed strange larger bugs I had not seen before invading. I suppose if you wipe out the Alpha swarm that are ants hen something else will always fill the void even if less in quantity. I never seemed to notice ants adapting to the ant poison to become immune to it, so I am thankful for that..... although some ant traps worked faster than others. By the way, can insects become immune to insect poisons?

For what it is worth, I will add what I read online. Teflon is a known carcinogen, and basically using any sort of plastic that is heated during cooking will lead to it's fumes or worse leaching into your food. For the most part natural materials we have been using for millenia (metals and ceramics with few exceptions) are safer to use I actually used a ceramic pan which is more or less non-stick for cooking eggs and saute... granted they are easy to scratch and require occasional seasoning, but I kept mine stashed away where none of the careless ones could use it anyway

My instinct was telling me the same. I presume he wanted me to pretend to be him with his card... but I am not going to take the fall for some stranger! I don't even do that for those I know. Everyone should be responsible for their own self. That is what separates working adults from every other kind.

So I was leaving in the parking lot and a man approaches me and before he can finish his sentence I blurt out, "Lemme guess? Money?" He was wearing shorts and a tank top and carrying a plastic bag from the store. He replied, "Actually I wanna GIVE you money." Red flags appeared immediately for me. I do not trust anyone easily, especially strangers who approach me with offers. I told him I was OK while smiling, since I assumed his attempt at scamming me had failed spectacularly. As he was leaving he said his card had been maxed out and wanted me to go to the store for him. I have no idea what that means. What was the situation? Anyone care to explain? Yes I live in the USA.

Studies I have read about have shown that houseflies give up in zero g and start crawling around. Strangely bees get their bearings eventually and still fly around. The scifi scenario: Assuming personal gravity inhibting personal devices was a thing on Earth and mechanical insectoid wings were attached to them, how well could a person fly wearing it? For example, suppose a person wore a gravity inhibiting insectoid wing-pack. The wings are based on bees and as long as his arms. Would he fly fast or slow? My guess is slow initially because insectoid wings are too soft to push air hard. I think to reach faster speeds faster the wings would need to be harder perhaps? Or maybe bird wings would be better I dunno.... your thoughts?

The wikipedia article also showed both it's advantages and disadvantages.... the plasma gasification process. Advantages: Works in space, can process just about anything in space. Disadvantages: Large industrial upfront cost and investment. Also the machinery would require constant maintenence. This not at all like a car you can drive for months without taking it in for an oil change if you are processing stuff daily.

What Austin said is correct. I do not have KSP right now nor do I have the means or circumstances to reasonably play right now. But I would love to see proof of concept! Sink or swim.... only one way to find out if the idea is any good or an epic fail. It seems good... in my head at least lol. I was thinking that it would be the most uber SSTO ever. Thankfully kerbals are apparently immune to radiation.... unless there are realism mods for that too : (

I like your thinking. Basically it is like making a weakness a storytelling strength.... making what does impair them a legitimate point of interest to both the plot and character development. Scifi is all about going where we have not gone or done before right? After all the blind and the deaf always find ways to compensate. Compensation is a mark of intelligence, and the greater one can compensate against the odds against them I honestly think is the mark of high intelligence or at least a lot if experience.... maybe both. What if.... that is arguably the most important question that scifi is well qualified to answer in so many ways.

Only from scifi enthusiasts like yourself.... the only scifi books I read were mainly during my school years. My life growing up was... not good.... and access to such things was simply unknown due to how much of a control freak my father was. I could read it now of course as those years are history.

You do not. Koalas have two thumbs on each hand for climbing trees (literally two thumbs side by side and three fingers on a hand). But you and I don't do much climbing do we? It's ironic, since if you want to give scifi alien sapient species plausibility having manipulators that look like hands helps... because claws and tentacles cannot sew clothing or make clay bricks etc. A third arm with a special wrench like hand would be helpful... at least until tools were invented. And I suppose those who were cheap could stiill rely on their third special wrench arm.

I think it is a given that if a sapient species lacks proper manipulators, their technological progress would be seriously retarded. The human hand is a marvel. With it we write words, make art, give massages, and pick our noses. It is incredible how much we could not have done without hands.... for it is capable of both brute force and precision. Imagination is of course finite, and my mind tends to think that beyond adding on features to the human hand, it really cannot be rivalled or improved upon much that I can think of... unless you can. I seriously doubt something that did'nt even look like a human hand would be as efficient, but a hybrid of sorts... weird as it may look, may be the only real rival. I have seen odd fictional hands with two thumbs lol. Thoughts?

Scott Manley did it.... probably with mods. But no one to my knowledge has done anything like what I propose. It would be a first. Scott comes close, but my version would need no wings since although it is a belly lander it takes off VTOL.

I do not have KSP nor do I currently have the resources or time to play it currently. Yet I have an idea that I would love to see tested to see the viability of it. Namely a belly lander SSTO project orion. You can either follow my version I wish to see made or make up your own. What I would like to see: 1. Use as many realism mods as practical. 2. The spaceship would be called Skyhammer or Hammer Of God... one of the two. 3. Because it has a hammerhead (it is T-shaped composed of thick cylindral hulls). The pusher plate and pistons are at the tail end whereas the hammerhead is the front. 4. Lift off/landing rockets are under the belly of middle of the ship's main body, and the hammerhead section has steering thrusters for steering on it. Objective: VTOL to orbit and land nearby KSP space center. Other objectives: Fly it to the mun and back. Beyond: Go wherever! Have fun. You should be able to have the heaviest VTOL SSTO ever with project orion. Thanks for any interest in the project!

A fusion pulse drive with a magnetic nozzle is what you are referring to right? Trying to SSTO with a magnetic nozzle may damage it since magnets do not like excess heat and atmospheric explosions tend to conduct just that. A fusion torch drive SSTO I already implied would be probably be larger than Orion simply because it's only way to shed excess waste heat is with it's propellant during launch. Again trading payload/cargo space for propellant would occur using rocketry as opposed to orion which would allow greater payload to fuel ratios... unless you can honestly tell me that an advanced rocket would have higher payload to fuel ration than an orion without melting it's engine.... I doubt it. That is one of the main advantages of external pulse propulsion... you will never melt your 'engine'..... not for a long, long time anyway. So orion may be more primitive, but it has more applications (can SSTO) and also seems to have better high payload to fuel ratios. What does it matter if an advanced rocket is more fuel efficient than an Orion if it can carry less cargo than an Orion? More ships is not always better if they basically fuel tanks more than anythimg else. I would rather have a few orions with a lot of payload capacity than a bunch of fuel tanky low cargo super efficient torch drive rockets. Orion os efficient enough and only gets more so the more super tye bomb you have. As for metallic hydrogen, I was referring to metallic hydrogen bombs.... not fusion bombs. If we had thermobaric metallic hydrogen bombs with shaped blasts you would not have to radiate the lower atmosphere at all... swtiching to pure fusion bombs once the air thins out high in the atmosphere.

This is a guy after my heart! Thanks!

Floating like balloon wont get you to orbit anytime soon lol. But even without gravity inhibition.... project orion is literally special because unlike chemical rockets, you can SSTO massive payloads with it. The price you pay is what it means to detonate nukes.... but in all honesty it simply requires small-ish super bombs, and nukes are the first we have made. Who is to say futuristic bombs could be made just as powerful and small witj minimal or zero radioactive fallout. Just off the top of my head there are antimatter catalyzed pure fusion bombs (only theoretical due to our immature antimatter production and storage) and metalliv hydrogen thermobaric bombs (theoretical due to metallic hydrogen production being difficult or impossible). MH bombs would have zero radioactive fallout and antimatter catalyzed pure fusion bombs would have less than a similar yield nuke. What I am getting at is the fact that chemical propellant reactions are less energy dense than superbombs. Which means it requires MORE propellant for what you could actually do with LESS superbombs. Try and SSTO a large spaceship with rocket engines and it would I reckon need to be huge and mostly propellant. Even if you use an antimatter rocket or NSWR to SSTO I think it still be huge and necessarily larger than an orion.... and we both know Orions are not small. Superbombs give you more thrust for less mass compared to rocketry.... period I believe. If superbombs could be made small enough you could make star trek van size shuttlecraft.... only with pusher plates abd rocket enginrs to land.

I find it ironic how overpowered scifi can get when you mix fiction and rrality together so here goes. The scenario: An orion battleship with an antigravity shield device is blasting across the sky where jetliners fly ij midair. Because of the device it can float weightlessly as if it were in space even though it is only in the air. Modern fighters and drones are dispatched to take it down. The orion projects a 3 kilometer field around it that nullifies the pull of earth's gravity inside the field. Upon detecting the fighters approaching the orion turns it's pusher plate in their direction and begins blast detonating. Do the fighters have a realistic chance of shooting down the Orion? If tge orion was struck deeply enough the device itself could be hit and the orion would fall out of the sky unless it used the pulse detonation to reach space. I honestly think the fighters would not want this mission. It's nearly suicide. This is the kind of mission you send drones on... and even then I think the nuclear EMP's might drop them too.

The scenario: We get a time warp field device which can surround a spaceship with it. Inside the time warp field time passes normally. Outside the time warp field time can be warped to go faster. Hours can pass in minutes, or hours can pass in seconds. Implications: For relatively short interplanary distances artficial gravity for flight is no longer needed because crew travel time will be much faster due to time warping. For example if hours are warped to seconds a hohman transfer will take a coasting spaceship from LEO to the moon in only a few minutes at most! I am sure some planets are far enough away to stlill merit artificial or spin gravity, but many no longer are with time warp. Even Mars is OK to coast to I reckon using time warp... although I am unsure how much faster the trip would seem to the crew.

Moar gas (thicker atmosphere) equals a more destructive blast wave generally speaking. Less gas makes a blast wave that is less destructive. A nuke in a vacuum is bascislly just a flash of bright light.... blink and you will miss it. Yes the radiation csn hurt if not shielded, and a direct hit would do serious heat damage besides kinetic, but overall less damage than anywhere with an atmosphere because no atmosphere means no blast wave. A vacuum has no air to conduct kinetic explosive force to, so all you get is hard radiation and maybe bits of shrapnel and definitely plasma that rapidly dissipates in a cloud so fast that will miss it if you blink.

The water tank would be attracted of course. The tiles detect all items touching it while touching each other as 'together' and combine their weight. So far more things would be effected than you realize. If I were to drink a glass of water standing, the water cup would 'feel gravity) standing on the table, and also the moment I grabbed it. It would become weightless the moment I let it float in the air. Ultimately the only time gravity would be 'off' is when even anything bounces off th floor or when someone tries to drop something. Needless to so throwing any ball would be like neverending pong till it slows dramatically enough to just float around or rest on the ground without bouncing.

I goofed (did not realize 100 kilograms equals 220 pounds). I will change it to 70 kilograms or above in weight. So some would be okay.... I would at least. Sorry kids.... you don't weugh 154 pounds? No gravity for you. And lady.... I know you're skinny, so either bulk up by working out OR start packing on some fat. Those are your options. Sorry! So either chubby, giant, or muscular ladies need apply lol. https://ihaventshavedinsixweeks.com/2015/05/28/what-154lbs-looks-like-on-different-womens-bodies/ Well... you can buy 50 kilogram attractor tiles (110 pounds or more will be ok), but those are more expensive. 100 kilogram attractor tiles are cheap, 70 kilogram are moderately priced, and the 50 kilogram ones are expensive and seen on luxury spaceliners. So if you weigh a lot you can boldly go where no man has gone before on the cheap!

On second thought I won't use that after all. And this is BEFORE I even read the follow up posts. For one I don't like the look, and the look is a BIG part of what matters to me besides how it works. It turns out that the OP design for this post would work just fine with a bit of tweaking. See... I LOVE the look of the project orion spaceship, and adding a cross cylinder beam to the front just looks even more awesome to me.... because it is actually a practical feature. If the ship ever decides to deorbit via reentry it can simply fly headfirst, since the 'hammerhead' will take the heat instead of the pistons and pusher plate, which you really do not want getting messed up anyway. Getting up and down I already mentioned how... even though both require first stages, whether via a booster or scifi tractor beam lifting platforms. Shuttlecraft would be seaplanes with pusher plates, since pure fusion bombing the land, while less fallout than a nuke, is still not a healthy for anyone nearby. So pure fusion bombing the ocean would be a much better trade off I say. The space for the landing engines would be on the underbellies of nacelles on the flanks of the rear end, and also on the underbellies of the 'hammerhead' at at the opposing ends. But realistically taking off a planet for the main ship would be an emergency maneuver, not standard. As it should be. The awesome thing about pusher plate propulsion is it scales up better than it scales down, even with pure fusion bombs, which means making dart swarm missiles out of them would be impossible anyway. Which further tips the scale into classic scifi space opera... which is more or less what I want with a dash of realism. But you are right, I also figure out that constant acceleration for gravity is wholly unnecessary if I just bite the bullet and accept scifi artificial gravity. Of course, given that it is me doing it, I cannot simply make it just work like REAL 1g. In my case it would be 'attractor tiles', metallic tiles that attract anything that weighs 100 kilograms or more with 1g.... so long as you are touching it. Which would mean as soon as you jump off you are weightless... which would make for some fun sports in zero g to say the least! It also means you cannot really drop anything and a lot of of stuff would still float around... best of both worlds I guess. As for pure fusion pulse propulsion, not only do I like it for how it looks, but also because it uses the power of the processes of the very environment it is in.... star nuclear fusion. Using the power of the stars to travel among the stars! Very fitting. Since on earth chemical processes dominant, but in space radiation, gravity, and stellar nuclear fusion processes dominate. And of course the simplicity and multi-functional use is also appealing. Not only can you SSTO with it (granted for emergencies or for seaplane SSTO shuttles only) but you can travel around the solar system too! And yes... FTL or hyperdrive right now is about as valid scifi artificial gravity without spinning, so I agree with you. Some tropes just beg to be used if you do not want to overpower the setting.

It was an 'experiment' to see what would really happen IRL. Nothing in IRL is infinite, at least no mass is, but massless things at least appear to be so (time and space). I do not like infinite with 'experiments'. It's like cheating im KSP. Exactly so. When it comes to fictional spaceships it is hard to make them capable without making them overpowered. On the one hand you want near infinite 1g acceleration for manned flight and gravity.... even though the same abiity would inevitably create missiles with the same ability that would make space opera as we know it obsolete. If you do not want overpowered thrust or delta v you must limit both. And to not be completly arbitrary about it I finally figured out a way. Single Constant Impulse drive: Linked to main rocket engine and requires it. Thrust and acceleration are based on the last main engine burn.. only difference is that once you initiate the SCI drive you accelerate at that rate constantly without rocket engine input. How? Spaceship splits in two and chases the other half while attracting and repelling it.

The Scenario: This is not for scifi but is simply a consideration of what would REALLY happen. 1. FTL warp is allowed so don't question that otherwise the whole scenario breaks. 2. Teleportation is NOT allowed in order for the discussion to take place (nevermind how OP it could be weaponized but seldom is in ST). 3 . The 'Enterprise' is shaped like the letter T, made of two thick cylinders. It has an Orion pusher plate at the rear, with the 'hammerhead' being the front. Piston plates are on the perimeter sides of the pusher plate but not the perimeter above or below. Why? The ship is a belly lander, so it has rocket engine slots full of nozzles in three areas on the belly. One slot near the pusher plate, and two near the opposite ends of the 'hammerhead' providing tri-axial landing thrust. The initial boost to space is down using a reusable booster with a pusher plate of it's own, but any planets the 'Enterprise' lands or launches on or from thereafter will be on it's own with the intent of in situ refueling of the tri-axial landing engines. 4: The 'Enterprise' uses antimatter catalyzed pure fusion bombs for pulse propulsion. In other words no fission is involved. As such the bombs are smaller than nukes but just as powerful. The Main Discussion: You cannot orbit some random earth clone planet and land in a matter of minutes.... right? It is my understanding that deorbiting takes about 6 hours if you do not want to burn up. Granted you could deorbit faster but that would require burning fuel for a powered retroburn (or bombs in the case of the 'Enterprise'. Now obviously without a teleporter the 'Enterprise' would be cautious about landing on the new planet of the week.... simply because it involves costs that cannot be readily replenished just anywhere (the bombs) and likely terrifying the locals (the bombs again). So what realistically is an option to get down and up again on an Earth-like world? It would take time cruising for deorbiting, but getting back up won't be a big issue. The idea? A pusher plate shuttlecraft that lands on the ocean near the coast! Since pure fusion bombs are smaller than nukes, they could fit on a shuttle, and the bomb yield could be throttlee down enough not to kill the crew with g-force either. Bonus? A four man away team on a shuttle loaded with bombs, gliding wings, abd a pusher plate sounds about right to me! Pros: Can visit strange worlds. Cons: Always starts at the beach coastline so forget starting elsewhere unless landing on an airless moon. Alternatives: If a world ALREADY has advanced scifi tech in theory one could shoot 'elevator tractor beams' to boost a stationary platform into LEO. All a shuttle would have to do is slowly deorbit and then boost to slow for landing on the platform, which would retract back to the surface of the planet carrying the shuttle. Big enough platforms could carry ships as well, restocking them with fuel or bomvs before boosting to spqce again via elevator beams/platform. Question: Am I right about the time required to deorbit safely? Faster is only possible with powered deorbits?

I presume the boosters for project orion are considered a loss the moment the nuke lights up. I am curious and suppose that a reusable booster that could land itself (ala spaceX) AND survive the nuke detonation blast wave is possible. How? Put the Orion on top of another pusher plate which is the top of the booster. Yes the booster would have to be massive, but with a pusher plate of it's own and rocket engines, it could in theory survive and even land. Probably as the heaviest first stage reusable booster ever! Not for scifi. Just curious.