Kryten

That's because the thermal conductivity is so low-it works precisely because it doesn't cool down quickly, i.e. transfer heat to the environment.

Dyna-Soar was a purely military project. I don't really see why the military would make moon landing plans.

In your second scheme, the 'earth return vehicle' is fully capable of both landing and returning the astronauts-so what would be the point of the 'LM-kind of capsule'?

How would the CSM be able to carry enough consumables for even one person for the length of time required?

Depends what exactly he does engineering on. Plenty of e.g. sewer infrastructure predates metrication, in places by centuries.

So, given a period of multiple decades, it's going to be impossible to strap some standard star-trackers and a new navigation computer to a warhead? Or to just stick it on a stage with it's own navigational systems?

I know for sure that sodium-potassium alloy is liquid in space (at least over reasonable timescales-it'll boil away, but over thousands of years)-the soviets used it as coolant in some space-based nuclear reactors, and to this day there's droplets of it whizzing around in LEO after a couple developed leaks.

The near-future seems extremely america-centric.

That doesn't really apply, because thorium is almost never found as a pure ore-it's almost all in monazite, which is heavily prospected for, as it contains valuable heavy metals.

Originally gravitational forces and vectors were done seperately for each part-which led to gravity gradient effects arising organically. That stopped when gravity started being calculated from CoM in one of the first rounds of optimisation.

Well, we might as well do something useful with this thread; What exactly was in that video that's got everyone so excited? It might sound like a stupid question, but all I can actually see on this computer is a message telling me to download flash.

Looking at the shape of the LM cabin, there simply isn't a lot of difference between the side-on area and that from the top, so I'm not sure that'd have helped.

The idea is to have a magnetic rather than physical scoop, but that means you've got to ionise all of the material beforehand somehow, usually with a laser apparatus IIRC. Although I thought bussard ramjets were pretty much completely impractical in our region of space, due to the sparsity of interstellar material, again IIRC.

Kiwi, the kind of resources we're running out of are ones that aren't found on Mars or the Moon; for either to be remotely worth it, we'd have to somehow start running out of rocks. And...could you please...try using...punctuation...other than...ellipses'...they make...your posts...quite difficult...to read...

You seriously think anybody is going to go to the moon to collect resources? Do you have the slightest idea how much it would cost to bring anything back from the moon?

The potential for particle radiation to penetrate however much material is based on the energy of individual particles, not the overall level of radidation. It has been found that there are particles within the Van Allen belts that are high-energy enough to have that kind of penetrating power, but there simply aren't enough of them to make a lot of difference to overall dosage.

Can whatever mod responds to this please split the gibbering rather than lock the entire thread? It was doing well until our drive-by conspiracist showed up.

I think you'll find the actual reason people haven't tried that is heart-lung machines aren't actual functional replacements for, well, a heart and set of lungs. The record time for survival on one is about a month. Having a number of hormonal systems missing may well be unpleasant, but there's not really a plausible mechanism by which it could 'doom' the brain.

As far as I can tell they're titanium with pretty standard vitreous enamel for the coating. Not sure how well titanium stands up against stuff like concentrated sulphuric acid, but the enamel should be fine.

I'm not so sure about that, given the enormous number of various pennants the Soviets threw into the solar system. I've not found any with names on the moon, but I do know there are a few of these; on venus.

The Russians have effectively ruled out transferring any more NK-33s because they're preparing their own launcher using them (Soyuz-2.1v); any use with SLS would require production being restarted, which isn't terribly likely when there are plenty of in-production rocket engines avaiable.

If you want to look at RTGs for grid power, you really need to be comparing the energy output from the RTGs to the energy output from the nuclear reactor/s you need to produce the RTG fuel in the first place.

Chemical rocket burn. It's too far out for ion propulsion to be really practical within the kind of mass budget the mission has, the panels would have to be huge.

What we have with the e-cat is basically this; A guy with, as you said a history of producing cons makes a 'fusion reactor' that is connected to mains electricity, that is insufficiently shielded to stop the gamma radiation it should produce, and produces copper as a 'fusion product' that just happens to have the same isotopic ratio as natural copper. What part of that could leave anyone with hope for anything?

This process is used for generating radioisotopes for medical use. Reactor doesn't necessarily mean power-producing reactor.