AckSed

Honestly, give me a console that could connect a keyboard and run a web browser, and it'd cover a lot of my use-cases. The Steam Deck pretty much is that.

The Orion's Arm universe gives a reasonable approximation of how 'beyond' even a S:1 sapient (humans are S:0, and it goes up to S:6 in the AI gods) can be with a "toposophic mindmap': https://orionsarm.com/eg-article/529f53ba6d7a8 It also explores what someone ascending into this stage might have to leave behind, with a short story in the "Ascension" entry: https://orionsarm.com/eg-article/45f993669526b As well as what disorders such an entity might suffer, like "Ultraconscious Depersonalization Disorder" where they are aware of their own thoughts to the point they know that the self and free will are constructed, and stranger still, "hyperautism", where you can simulate your self and other people so well that you can predict 'normals' near-perfectly, and assume they have the same insights as you: https://orionsarm.com/eg-article/480d5070d7135 Each one copes in their own way, but most often by associating with others of their toposophic level. Thinking about it, the Merovingian is a transavant: high above normal intelligence, maybe with 'spikes' of their area of expertise into S:1. The Architect might be a true S:1, perhaps even S:2, and I've always suspected the Matrix was also part of their computronium base as well as a power-source. Edit: Apologies for returning to this well so often, but it's a fascinating thing.

Vast now has a show house:

Damn. Well, it's nice to know I didn't miss it due to sleeping in.

It's only a proposal, but - 5000 square-metre solar sail mission to Mercury! https://www.universetoday.com/articles/a-mission-could-reach-mercury-on-solar-sails-alone This dovetails neatly with the rise of miniaturised electronics, capable small- and cube-sats and regular rideshare missions or small satellite launchers (note the phased-array antennae). The sail is quoted as only having an acceleration of 0.17 millimetres per second per second, which is well below the 1 mm/s2 baseline quoted in Louis Friedman's Starsailing. It would take 7 years to reach Mercury to begin science, but once it did, it could remain there for 6 years to fully map it to 1m per pixel resolution. They could expand it to a full square kilometre and arrive in 4 years, so I am secretly pulling for that :). They still have to work out propellantless attitude control to take full advantage, currently leaning towards reaction control wheels and RCD - electrically-powered 'windowpanes' in the sail, as in the IKAROS probe. The trouble with the latter is there are no current RCDs that can survive the conditions in orbit around Mercury. Fingers crossed that it comes out in the next few years.

I am all for more Venus probes.

Presumably they would have a monstrous megastructure of a space telescope that could resolve planetary details. The JWST is already discovering atmospheric compositions of large exoplanets, so the construction of a lower-tech, mass-produced cluster of 10m telescopes, with free-flying coronagraphs to block out the light of whichever star these people are being sent towards (a technique to spot any planets orbiting it), would be a neat prologue: We have found Earthlike planets all over the sky. Let's go check them out! Concerning the spaceship, I have always been a fan of solar sails and propellantless propulsion. You have routine travel between Jupiter/Saturn and Earth, presumably ships fitted with a drive to do this in a reasonable amount of time and maybe you have a decent in-space construction industry. The "photonic railway" is a concept I love, because it frees you from the tyranny of the rocket equation and gives you decent performance, but also requires massive lasers constructed in space or on airless moons, and brave explorers to venture out to set it up. I outline it here: Presumably a beaming station set up in orbit around Jupiter would get these scout-ships up to speed, but they'd then have to slow down at their destination. If that's not enough, we could go for a sun-grazing solar sail. https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=58581.msg2485032#msg2485032 But maybe you don't want to fly around the Sun. Orion's Arm is a hard SF universe with its own encyclopaedia. Its list of ships should provide inspiration. Broadly, if you have cracked reliable fusion that does not emit neutrons, or have a way to get around the radiation they emit, then you can live damn near everywhere you can find fusion fuel (deuterium, helium-3, lithium-6 and so on). If you want to slow down from high percentages of lightspeed, deploy a magnetic sail. The Barnard Banger uses the concept of the "wilderness Orion": gathering fusion fuel and light metals from icy moons or Oort cloud comets, to make small nuclear bombs that explode behind it. The ice, formed into a block in front, also serves as particle and radiation protection, since the ship accelerates to a low percentage of lightspeed and any dust particle hits with the force of a grenade at those energies.

Haven Demo (testbed satellite for most of the Haven systems) approaching completion, ready for launch this month:

Lightning on Earth can produce antimatter (positrons), and then X-rays and gamma rays when they annihilate electrons, through the radioactive decay of isotopes of oxygen and nitrogen. The isotopes are themselves produced by gamma rays. The trouble is, we don't know where these come from. Gamma-ray glows and downward-pointing Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes have been measured with energies in ranges of 1-40 MeV - up to about the energy of a linear accelerator in a hospital. But there shouldn't be enough energy density or length in a thundercloud to cause them in the first place. The gamma rays only happen in about 1 in 10 thunderstorms on Earth as it is. The best hypothesis so far is that the electric fields inside a thundercloud may accelerate electrons to relativistic energies, which strip off more electrons, which finally emit bremsstrahlung gamma rays as they interact with ambient atmospheric nuclei. However, not all the gamma-ray glows (ramp-ups in emission before a strike) happen with TGFs (flashes produced in a strike) and the opposite - TGFs without ramp-up - is also true. So there's still more to learn. Edit: More recent research points to special types of lightning strikes: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2024GL113194

External link: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/spinlaunch-yes-the-centrifuge-rocket-company-is-making-a-hard-pivot-to-satellites/ Yeah, this is definitely a case of following the money. With relatively cheap launch and small satellites becoming increasingly capable, it seems like the way to go.

No (unintentional) boom. Next stop, Karman Line!

This, this and thrice this. Airily saying that it doesn't matter gets to me. The whole point of the scientific method is to have rigor in your observations of reality such that your predictions can be reproduced; it's skinning the hide of science to cover your bamboo framework and leaving the soul. We don't want a stiff, dead, taxidermied pseudoscientific animal with glowy lights, we want a Frankenstein's monster that has some semblance of agreement with life and the world, one that can actually speak to us. I do write (fanfic, but still) and you can speak to human experiences and be successful, because we do like to hear about ourselves. The very best science-fiction authors allowed what they know about the world to drive their stories, to let the environment warp their characters because they were speculating via the scientific method. E.g. Robert Heinlein's The Menace From Earth frankly gets some important details wrong, and its appeal is in the very human characters, but it is still true that with Earth-normal strength and a bit more air-pressure humans on the Moon wearing wings and a tail can fly under their own power. It ignited my imagination and drove me to write my own short story set on the Moon, based upon what we know now. You say people don't care? I care. I'm people. Spacescifi, please post examples of your stories, so I can see where you have put the effort in and the advice we have given. I don't like feeling like we're being used more as an oracle by the lazy, or worse - market research.

Remember all those renderings and drawings of rovers with manipulator arms? They may be coming to life: https://gitai.tech/2025/03/31/gitai-awarded-jaxa-contract-for-concept-study-of-robotic-arm-for-crewed-pressurized-lunar-rover/

That they actually had to turn it on and off again while docking is definitely hair-raising.

More details of Hera's Mars flyby, including testing of new autonomous navigation software: https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Hera/Hera_asteroid_mission_tested_self-driving_technique_at_Mars

Booster touchdown. MVac shutdown. Zero-gravity polar bear toy deployed. Second stage separated.

3 minutes! Lightning in background makes this dramatic. Liftoff, MaxQ and MVac chill. Stage2 ignition and nominal trajectory

15 minutes.

Weather front is moving away to the East. Prop load started. Showing off a portable X-ray plus digital X-ray plate that'll be used in-flight.

Official stream is up, with Insprucker presenting: https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=fram2 Interesting that all of them have a connection to polar expeditions.

1 hour 30 minutes. More details: https://orbitaltoday.com/2025/03/30/next-private-spacex-mission-to-push-human-orbit-limits-like-never-before/ For the Fram2 polar spaceflight, astronaut & filmmaker Jannike Mikkelsen will use a reMarkable Paper Pro tablet, O2XR previs, RED V-Raptor 8K cameras, Canon R5C cameras, and a range of Canon RF lenses.

2 hours and the rain is coming down. Ah, Chun Wang just posted a clip of them closing the hatch. Looks like it's still go for now.

No official word, but the astronauts haven't gone to the pad yet and the weather's getting worse. The T-zero is still counting down, though.

NSF stream showing a large stormcloud with lightning, but not over the pad.

Interesting ideas. Dry ice as explosive, I don't see, but if you're making oxygen anyway, could be you'd use oxyliqut - carbon soaked in liquid oxygen. See also this previous thread for other hab designs: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/226413-optimal-size-for-domes-and-other-structures/page/2/