Kryten

What does he give as the exhaust velocity?

The highest exhaust velocity I can find for an Orion pulse unit is 120km/s, and 3% of the speed of light is 9x106m/s. Slotting those figures into the rocket equation, and doing a bit of rearranging, we end up with our vehicle having to have a mass ratio of 3.7x1032. TL;DR: No.

Journals like what?

The Aurora program is what's mentioned on the wikipedia article for 'manned misison to Mars', and isn't mentioned many other places. Even ESA themselves have taken that part of their website down completely.

NASA and ESA have completely different priorities, it wouldn't work. ESA is based around relatively small-budget science and technology missions, and NASA overwhelmingly focuses it's budget on crewed flight boondoggles. ESA doesn't even have any plan for crewed flight at all; one of the things wikipedia fails to make clear is that that the full Aurora document was only ever a proposed plan, and the only part approved by the council of ministers was Exomars.

NASA and ESA tried to pool resources. NASA realised they didn't have any resources to pool, which is why ESA had to turn to the russians. Same thing happened to JUICE.

Yes, the Aurora program from 2005. Here in the year 2014, the only missions from Aurora with any kind of schedule or funding are Exomars 2016 and 2018, and even they required big financial contributions from the Russians.

What're you basing this on?

No, it's just a function of the binding energies involved. Any neutron will show the same excess mass, regardless of how it was produced.

It's a result of the energy expended to cause the proton and electron to fuse, which becomes part of the binding energy of the neutron.

...not exactly.

It's only being sent to the ISS because that's where OPSEK is being constructed; they plan to assemble the whole thing there near the end of the ISS' life and then remove it. Uzlovoy can't really act as a 'support module', because there's basically nothing in there; it's just a node fitted with docking ports.

While true in a lot of cases, very little of this post applies to the design in the OP; because it was made by von Braun himself. The similarities with the V2 aren't because of some kind of cultural zeitgeist, it's because it's effectively based on the german super-V2 ICBM plans.

Nauka is simply very, very late (it was supposed to be up there in 2007), and Uzlovoy isn't intended to be part of the ISS; it's the first component of OPSEK.

The ISS already does a large proportion of it's station-keeping, but to do so it requires it's fuel topping-up regularly by the same Progresses you're trying to get rid of.

Experience shows that that may not be reliable enough. The Soviets had a series of low-orbiting radar sats with nuclear reactors, and used exactly that concept to try and render them safe, but two of the reactor cores (out of 31 reaching orbit) ended up re-entering anyway.

Don't forget China's planned one, which they've stated they'd be open to co-operating on. Sure, NASA or JAXA won't exactly be chomping at the bit, but ESA are very differently interested and Roskosmos and ISRO might be as well.

It's actually worse than that; the guidance system had three of those sensors for redundancy. He managed to install all three upside down.

That's because most ideas are bad. That's how life works; 90% of everything is crap.

Your reading comprehension is as poor as your logic. Read what I quoted; you were complaining about nibb supposedly deciding speculating and discussing were 'not allowed', and in the post after you're saying he 'doesn't like open discussions'. He hasn't called for anything to be removed or for anybody to shut up; he's simply discussed people's ideas.

It takes a lot of energy to completely vapourise something, but vapourising small amounts of material creates thrust that can ultimately change the orbits of objects and cause them to re-enter; that's the kind of thing people usually mean when they talk about anti-debris lasers. It'd still take much more energy than is available at the ISS, but there's nothing fundamental from stopping this kind of facility being at ground level. Crazyewok logic in a nutshell. Saying things I don't like=trying to censor people's threads.

Use of organisms isn't viable. There isn't a single one alive that even has the same kind of genetic material as those ~ 1 billion years ago had, so imagine what 5 billion years would result in.

The kind of weather you get over the north and (especially) south poles isn't exactly perfect for airship operations.

So? That's all the kind of missions there's any remote demand for.

That's nonsense, plain and simple. There are plenty of properly worked studies showing missions like NEO visit and Mars orbit to be possible using SLS, or vehicles in the same sort of size range-i.e. the kind of vehicle the vast majority of nuclear propulsion mission concepts assume to be available anyway.