Tommygun

Just give it time, when they actually try building it to completion, I'm confident they will find ways to go over budget.

Have any spacecraft ever used tungsten as part of a heat shield?

I went with Option B: "Technology". It's just harmless PR stuff. It helps keep NASA in the public eye like the asteroid mission for KSP.

I just showed this to my sister. She's a retired biology teacher and does part time volunteer work in Liberia. She says she is going to try and look into this.

I'm not sure anymore. A few years ago a doctor created a working crude heart in part with a 3D bio printer. Can you imagine describing a heart transplant to a doctor from two hundred years ago. One to two hundred years from now, I can see it as possible. If nothing else, they could still print fertilized eggs for the artificial womb. Some will have religious or philosophical issue with this approach, but this happened with the first organ transplants and other medical advancements. If we still have slower than light travel at that time, I think this may be the only cost effective way of mass interstellar travel. You don't even need to bring any organic materials on the ship. Just mine for raw materials locally, process them and then print on demand.

If we are talking a century or two from now, then I would go with a Fission-fragment rocket on a small DNA seeder ship. The craft could be controlled through an artificial intelligence and self replicating machines. Make the ships small and keep the cost down, but make as many as you can afford. Then send them anywhere that looks promising. After it arrives the machines start mining and build more of themselves and then a colony. After that they can use technology like DNA printers and 3D bio printers to produces human colonist and raise the first generation.

If the vibrations are coming from the motor, then could you set it up to run on a drive belt to help isolate the vibrating motor from the glass. Does the container have to be glass? Maybe a heavier base plate could act as a flywheel too? If it has more mass it may take more energy to create significance vibrations. This might be worth looking at, as it lists sources of torsional vibration and methods for reducing them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torsional_vibration

I think part of the reason why we currently have a lot of different spacecraft right now is what happened to a number of NASA programs. NASA spent a number of years and a lot of money developing different designs, only to cancel them and start over completely new. After several failed attempts and running out of time, NASA and Congress didn't want to back just one program and have that fail as well, so they helped fund several programs at once. There was some talk a while back from Congress that they wanted NASA to concentrate on fewer companies, but I don't know what came of it.

Here is the Marine Corps version of the DARPA program. Low unit cost with fuel and maintenance available through indigenous vendors. Damaged units can be re-purposed into MREs.

I can't see the video at the moment, but are they talking about the whole aircraft or just the engine flying? I've seen test engines mounted to a regular production aircraft with its own separate set of engines as a way of testing. Basically a step above a wind tunnel test.

I think an unmanned version of a German Wiesel AWC would be better suited for urban combat. Give it better applique armor and air bursting 40mm grenade launcher with 50 cal gun combo. Maybe an up sized but cheap LAW rocket for any big targets. The Wiesel weights less than three metric tons and would probably be able to go to 80 percent of the places the walker would go and have better armor protection. The Wiesel would also probably be over 30 times cheaper to build and maintain than a high tech walker. Again, I think some guy in a powered armor exoskeleton standing two and a quarter meters well be the closest you will see to mechs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiesel_AWC

I think the closest thing you will ever see to a "Mech" is a slightly larger version of the powered exoskeleton the Army is working on. The taller something is, the easier it is to see and hit on a battle field. Ground pressure is also a problem on a bi-peddle walker if you want it to have any real armor protection and also walk on soft ground. Flying and jump jets will never be small enough to be practical in our life time on an armored exoskeleton let alone a Mech. They are fun SciFi, but they will pretty much stay that way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powered_exoskeleton

It's just too weird. I'm a bit worried about all those cables getting snagged on a rock. I'll try and keep an open mind, but it's so weird. Like War of the Worlds weird, it just needs a three eyed death ray. ....did I mention it's weird looking?

Try Googling the words "free sound foley" Also this: http://www.freesound.org/search/?q=wheels

Well Energia was built about 25 years ago. I haven't heard of any big calls for it. In an ideal world it would be great to have these super heavy designs around, I just don't see anyone making money off of them.

I was thinking about that too. Perhaps if you could give each reaction wheel a small counter rotating flywheel to eliminate unwanted movement. Maybe even a finely controlled step motor that accelerates non-linearly.

My games start to crash between 1.5G and 2.5G depending on what plugins the mods have in them. With City Lights and Clouds I have to keep in under 1.5G and if I also add Krags PlanetFactory, then I need to keep it under 1.0g.

Very nice looking. How does it reenter? It looks like it might come in sideways like a wingless shuttle with heat tiles on one side. Are you planning an inflatable part on the side?

Very very nice, I immediately had a vision of David Bowman running through that ring.

That's exactly what I was thinking, but some digital electronics use complicated multilayer PC boards and hybrid computer chips that make re-purposing very challenging. I guess it depends on how off the shelf the parts are.

I'm wondering how hard it would be to turn that into a guidance system?

I have it loaded, I just need enough science points to unlock all the rover parts.

A nuclear missile base on the Moon Sounds like a great way to bankrupt a nation. It's also redundant when a missile silo will get the ICBM to the target faster, cheaper and better. It would probably be more effective to just send them hidden in 40 foot shipping containers.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is quite good, but they do become more and more political by the third book. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy Also another Larry Niven book "A World Out of Time" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_World_Out_of_Time

Well I got it to work, but not good enough for Jupiter. I think I'm having Parallax problems and other issues with the lenses not being at true 90 degree angles to the stick. I'm seeing a lot of rainbow effects in the image. It should be good enough for the Moon and it magnifies quite well. On a side note: I live about a quarter mile from a runway of a small commercial airport. I'm standing outside with a "telescope" over one shoulder to aim it and pointing it up at the sky. Then it slowly dawns on me.......this thing looks a lot like a SA-7.......maybe I shouldn't do this in the middle of the day.