Seret

Use the rocket equation? Plug the ÃŽâ€v into it for the orbit you want (eg: 4500ms-1) and see what kind of mass you can go up to. Try this tool: http://www.quantumg.net/rocketeq.html

Tywin's Lannister's buttocks, by all account.

I love lamp.

IMO it would have been much more amusing to not point this out, just to see who's actually reading and paying attention.

Well, I agree that these big headlines almost never play out as predicted, but battery technology has been advancing at a pretty ferocious pace for a while now. The demand is there, and the chemists and materials people tell us the potential for significant growth still exists.

If EMP was particularly effective at disabling enemy systems, it would be in battlefield use today. It's of some use against civilian infrastructure, but combat vehicles are pretty hardened. Space vehicles in particular have rad-hard baked in (even civilian ones) since space is a pretty hostile place from an electromagnetic point of view. The effectiveness of EMP has been somewhat overstated IMO. It's not an automatic off switch for anything flying. Yes an no. There will be computers and robots, but you've got to look at the big picture. Combat doesn't take place for its own sake. There's always a political or strategic objective, which usually comes down to exercising some degree of control over a population or territory. There would be no point in fighting a war just to mangle the other guys robots, the main reason you'd engage his robots is because they're preventing you from influencing or observing his squishy humans, or moving your own squishy humans around. Take modern air combat for example, why do fighters bother to shoot each other? Because whoever clears out the enemy fighters can use that air superiority to deliver strikes against surface targets, move and replenish their forces by air and conduct reconnaissance. Air (or space) superiority in itself is useless, it's what you do with it that counts. If we replaced all fighters with UCAVs today (as I'm sure will be the case in our lifetimes) you'll still be seeing people getting blown to bits with bombs. The air war will still have a very human face. Ditto space, even if the primary mission of space assets remains recce, as it is today. Personally as an ex-serviceman myself I have absolutely no problem with machines killing the hell out of each other while the humans sit back and control it all on a screen. You may find that "boring", but I'm sure they guy who gets to go home to his wife and kids after all his drones were "killed" would appreciate it.

Except for the very earliest part of the war they had the AIM-9, which was pretty effective even before it had SEAM and all-aspect. They got plenty of kills with the Sidewinder, it's where the weapon made its name. The SUU-16 was a proper gun pod. Not sure what you mean by a cargo pod? Pilots of fast jets can usually carry a luggage pod for their uniform and such if they're landing away, but the SUU-16 wasn't adapted from a luggage pod as far as I'm aware. Gun pods on fast jets aren't unknown, we had some types that sometimes carried them when I was an armourer. The argument about whether to include a gun or not comes up every time a new fighter is on the drawing board. Only some of the F-35s have an internal gun, and the Typhoon came very close to not having one. Bottom line is that a gun is a lot of stowed kills, and fighter pilots love the gun, so the spec does generally call for one. The military are often a bit reluctant to give up traditional weapons like guns for fighters and bayonets for infantry. Old habits.

I assume they're looking into it?

You've talked yourself out of that one. A manned vehicle is just as susceptible to EW as an unmanned one. It's not like the crew could navigate or use their sensors or weapons without the ship's systems. There's no "manual override" on a radar. There is no sensible reason to put a human in a combat spacecraft, and about a million to go unmanned. Sorry Buck Rogers, you're out of a job! Not so. Most designs are multirole these days. You can't claim that aircraft like the F-16 and F/A-18 have been anything other than hugely successful. This was nothing to do with ECM or evasive tactics. F-4s ended up in short-range dogfights a lot because their AIM-4 missiles were almost comically useless. Early Phantoms effectively did not have any long range weapons.

Depends on what sort of teleportation you're envisaging. Take the Altered Carbon novels, where people digitise their mind and transmit that, where it's downloaded into a new body at the destination. From the traveller's perspective it's teleportation. The body they left behind could either be stored for their return or rented out to someone else, and a new body (synthetic or natural) bought or hired at the destination. Teleportation is a purely sci-fi idea, so it might work any way that you imagine it.

You'd have to get pretty high to have much of an effect. Space elevators work because once you get up to c.40,000km altitude you've got enough velocity to be in orbit. The highest a balloon has ever gone looks like about 50km, so that's about 1/800th of what you need to attain orbital speeds.

The universe. Can you explain what it is about that you're struggling with? If you're trying to think of what might have caused the Big Bang, that's probably either unknowable or a meaningless question. Either way, we don't have any idea.

DC motor. It happens. IIRC the newer models are brushless, which should make them significantly more reliable.

I've only owned one thing from Dyson, one of their vacuum cleaners. I've had it for about ten years and it's in excellent condition. None of the plastic is broken or damaged in any way. Recently the motor burned out and I replaced it, but that's pretty decent reliability if you ask me. Their stuff is all plastic, but it's decent quality engineering grade plastic. They're also very repairable and there's a good market for spare parts. I'd highly recommend them. If the parts remain as easily available here's no reason why I shouldn't get at least another ten years out of my vacuum.

Indeed you can. A good tinkerer can make an impressive range of stuff in a good workshop with hand tools. Machine tools just save a lot of effort. Where things start to really accelerate is when you have created tools to make more tools. That's the definition of technology, and does necessitate some infrastructure. Like you say, aluminium just isn't going to happen without a large energy surplus. Fun fact: The cap of the Washington Monument in Washington DC is aluminium, because when it was built in the 1800s aluminium was a precious metal.

It's in interstellar space already. Eventually it'll swing close by something, it'll just be a looooooong wait.

Hull? It's not a boat, it has a fuselage Although I do admit that aviation nomenclature is a mishmash of nautical and obscure French, so it's a bit confusing. They may have bulkheads and use port/starboard, but they don't have portholes. Go figure.

I think he's talking about the OP's: Where they're basically talking about using a rocket or other first stage to get up to speed for the ramjets. That wouldn't be SSTO.

Probably about 10 times more LV-Ns than you need too. My interplanetary tugs have three engines, and are designed for Jool system return missions.

Witty commentary is essential. Keep it short, and make sure you're doing something interesting. Having a plan is good, unless you're really good at improvising amusing chaos. Never seen the point of having a webcam showing the player TBH. It's just some dude sitting at a computer.

Monthly subscription is not at all unusual for an MMO.

Ramjets have lots of moving parts, they just have fewer than other engines.

Er, your demographic questions need tweaking. You missed out the world's largest ethnic group and the fourth biggest religion. Your political affiliation question is also clearly biased towards US political parties, people outside the US wont be able to answer it properly.

I agree, but flight times would be so long it might be of dubious benefit. Quite apart from the possibility mentioned above that propulsion advances could have our probe outrun during it's journey, it's also highly likely that imaging advances would render it obsolete. We're talking about a flyby probe after all, it may well be that in the decades or centuries it was en route that telescopes and instruments back here were able to gather the same sort of data remotely. Even in the nearish future things like spectroscopy of exoplanets is going to yield an avalanche of data. I think it's too soon to even think about interplanetary probes. For a start we don't know where to send them. I say wait until we've got a better picture of which destinations look really interesting.

No, but when you're discussing a topic with someone who's a professional in that field (and you're just an enthusiastic amateur) you should probably recognise that you're not going to be able to speak with much authority. We've all got topics we can speak with authority on, and some where we should be a bit more humble.