Kryten

You could just use conventional firearms with frangible ammunition, or hollow-point if the walls are tough enough to take it.

[quote name='GluttonyReaper']Honestly, at first I thought it was joke, but then found out that there's 8 [I]seasons[/I] of this stuff, with the same guys and everything. :P[/QUOTE] It works for the same reason reality TV works; it's really cheap to make. A few 'experts' with no real qualifications, no need for real research or fact checking, and plenty of stock footage.

[quote name='SomeGuy12']Solid propellant has low ISP. These are like tiny millimeter sized pits in the bullet capable of tiny course corrections, making up for irregularities in the gun barrel and the enemies jumping out of the way.[/QUOTE] You'd need a pretty fat bullet to fit a guidance system in. Smallest that's been demonstrated at is .50 inch. One hell of a revolver.

Getting mixing of LOX and propellant right would be hard, especially doing it very quickly as you'd pretty much have to do with this. Also, mass and bulk are still a pretty big deal in space; you might not have gravity to deal with, but there is inertia.

Europa clipper is probably not suited to be the basis of this, given the radiation environment it has to deal with. I've seen estimates from people who know what they're talking about that a Europa probe would cost about twice as much as an equivalent probe to somewhere else from radiation alone.

[quote name='|Velocity|']Eh, just to be a little pedantic, I don't personally don't like the term "relic" hominid. I don't think it really fits with how evolution works, and we don't really know what they might have been like. Would you call chimpanzees relic hominids? Neanderthals had bigger brains than us, and their last common ancestor was probably Homo erectus, the same last common ancestor we shared with Homo floresiensis. Would you have called Neanderthals "relics"? 3% of me might be offended if you do :[/QUOTE] It's basically the same kind of cryptozooly perpetuated by Sanderson and Heuvelmans, where bigfoot is a Neanderthal (meaning something like a more upright gorilla) and sea monster sightings are plausibly scaly ribbon-necked plesiosaurs. 'Relict' works for it on multiple levels. [quote name='|Velocity|'] Are we even really certain yet that Homo floresiensis was a real species?? The last I checked, there was still some controversy, but it's been a while. [/quote] It keeps coming out that way in phylogenies, and none of the 'diseased [I]H. sapiens[/I]' hypotheses are terribly credible. They all posit what would be crippling and rare disabilities, not the kind of thing you'd expect to find in a few specimens on a tiny island. [quote name='wumpus']As far as I know, there is only one sample of [COLOR=#333333]Homo floresiensis known. It is pretty much impossible to know that until you find enough samples in one place.[/COLOR][/QUOTE] While the first and most complete specimen seems to get almost all the press, there are at least six.

People in most parts of Indonesia are like people in most other places theses days; thanks to modern smart and features phones the majority have some kind of camera with that all times. They're also heavily pushing into forested areas for stuff like palm oil plantations, and the remaining areas are typically designated refuges which are quite heavily studied. And we still don't have any clear amateurs photos or camera trap images or corpses found in freshly-cleared fields of anything remotely resembling a relict hominid.

[quote name='WestAir']It's economically unfeasible and one thing about rich people is that they didn't get rich by spending it unfeasibly.[/QUOTE] Buying a Boeing 747 as a personal transport is going to be just about as unfeasible, you're probably looking at not much better processing times than a normal flight. There are still no less than 12 of those, at something like 3* the price of this thing.

[quote name='fredinno']I wonder if supersonic commercial aricraft will ever become viable.[/QUOTE] If they ever will be it'll be in this kind of segment, but it's hard to see much of a market when supersonic travel over land is still banned in most countries.

NACA was only a small part of what became NASA: the former ABMA guys at Marshall were a much larger part of the space side, and they also got parts of the Naval Research Laboratory and ARPA.

[quote name='Camacha']Is that total probe cost, or the costs of actual probe. That is quite a difference :)[/QUOTE] Total cost for the probe and mission, excluding a 'standard' launcher for that class (Atlas 551 for flagship, ~Atlas 400 for Discovery, somewhere intermediate for NH). A mission that needs a more powerful launcher pays the excess.

[quote name='jwenting'] The idea isn't practical. The cost of the mission is mostly determined by the cost of the launcher and support infrastructure, not the cost of the probe itself. [/QUOTE] Not true. Flagships are $1.5 billion+, there's not a launcher on the planet that costs remotely that much. New Frontiers missions like New Horizons are $1 billion, and typically get their rides on Atlas Vs, which even in the most inflated accounting are under $250 million. New Horizons had to grapple with Titan IV at $400 million early in the programme, but that's retired now.

Standardisation doesn't make a lot of sense when you're looking at something that would fly maybe once a decade. You'd have to replace so many out-of-production or otherwise obsolescent parts that they wouldn't actually be meaningfully standardised.

[quote name='llanthas']I find it pretty hilarious that Jeeps are one of the least reliable brands in the world...[/QUOTE] Well, they haven't actually been producing for the military since the 60s. When your market is mostly civilians who just want a giant status symbol and are never likely to even take it off-road, reliability isn't too high a priority.

[quote name='fredinno']I still don"t get it...[/QUOTE] Increased complexity means both enhanced chance of failure and more failure modes for you to have to analyse.

With exotic fuels or oxidisers, you also need to consider whether there's an industrial base for it; if you select something nobody else uses, you've just put up your costs massively because you have to support all that infrastructure alone. Liquid fluorine works because bulk fluorine is common in industry; liquid ozone or chlorine triflouride, not so much.

[quote name='fredinno']Why???[/QUOTE] It's six and a half stage vehicle with 32 motors, it's going to be inherently difficult to bring to the kind of confidence needed for these payloads.

Even without the RTG's, you're extremely unlikely to get a configuration like this certified for flagship-class payloads.

I'm pretty sure the very existence of this thread is giving the poor ....... at NASA who's in charge of nuclear payload certification night terrors.

[quote name='FungusForge']The bombers that carried out the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings survived if I remember correctly. Something along the lines of dropping the bomb and booking it right the heck out.[/QUOTE] They would have been fine even of they were directly over ground zero. Bear in my mind they were at over 9km altitude.

Orion, as well as breaking a whole bunch of arms control treaties, would be enormously expensive. Longshot requires technologies that don't yet exist, and again would be enormously expensive for limited scientific gain. Even more conventional reactor projects like Prometheus hit cost issues rather than the mystical all-powerful fear of nuclear anything invoked all so often on this site

SR-71 is bigger, has two seats, and has more prominent chines. EDIT: Also, SR-71 has US AIR FORCE and small roundels on the top surface, A-12 has no markings.

Not quite; it's an A-12 OXCART, the blackbird's CIA ancestor.

That would be completely pointless.

They only need a couple months delay to push it out of 2018, so I wouldn't say that. Certainly they'll be up before the end of 2019 barring something catastrophic.