Seret

Actually NASA do release quite a bit of stuff under permissive licenses. They either use common open source licenses like BSD or Apache, or their own NASA Open Source Agreement. None of these restrict by location. Their founding document (the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958) requires that they: ...so you could argue that they're legally obliged to be as open as possible.

Indeed. You'd probably need to do some calibration after you'd spun up, but after that the spin would be locked in at a constant rate and direction, so compensating for it wouldn't be hard.

Well yes, that is how inertial navigation works! Pretty much every spacecraft and aircraft has done it that way for decades. I think the OP was more curious about things like sighting stars, but I don't think that would a problem.

NASA have always been very open with their code, they contribute to a lot of open source projects. IIRC they were one of the big drivers behind Openstack. Check out code.nasa.gov to see what else they're doing.

Please don't disassemble cartridges to extract primers. You can just buy the primers on their own. Reloaders use them. To get maximum effectiveness you'll need to find some way of providing a good gas seal inside the barrel. You could try a drive ring made from a soft material like copper or plastic which is expanded to bite into the barrel wall by the gas pressure. This is called obturation, there's a lot of different ways to achieve it, have a bit of a play and see what works for your setup.

Well, even if you can't we're still only in vague guess territory. As you say, geometry comes into it a lot, and you can't really judge the overall loads on a structure just from it's general layout. Some parts of the structure will be under higher loads than others, etc. Hmm, disagree with this. You always have to worry about cyclical stresses. Vibrations and imbalances are a fact of life, and the failure mode associated with fatigue is sudden, low energy and catastrophic. But I'm probably just being picky. For sure, but again we're in vague guess territory. This kind of thing is always a cost effectiveness decision, and we can't know the costs. Practicalities come into it too. Is the material available in large enough quantities? In the right shape and size? Can it be repaired easily? When was the last time you pulled a washing machine apart? All the ones I've seen inside have either had the motor as part of the sprung mass or used a belt drive that has allowed movement. The drum is fully suspended, so the axis of rotation can move.

You're probably most familiar with the metric prefix giga from computing. In the metric system giga anything is 109. So as well as your gigabytes and gigahertz you could have things like gigajoules and gigapascals.

Or attach a big grunty acoustic modem to the underside of the ice and transmit it all as sound waves? Low bandwidth, but we're not in a hurry. You'd have to have some good maps of the properties of the ice though.

In reality I think the conservative figure would be well under that. You wouldn't want to be operating at anywhere near 100% of your yield strength, 50% would be more realistic and for a critical structure with many human lives at stake you'd want to be going even lower. Your 9GPa figure seems somewhat high, too. The best high strength structural steels are still well under 1GPa UTS, some aluminiums get up to about 500MPa IIRC. For a rotating structure you're also looking at cyclical stresses (and at low temperature, fun!) so fatigue and brittle fractures would need to be looked at. Brittle fractures are always the lowest energy type of failure, so even if something looks good in nice ductile fracture land it could go snap if you stick it in the freezer and wiggle it enough. However, like you say we don't know anything about geometry and what materials are available so it's hard to say.

But is bigger better when it comes to designing rockets? If you're using too many parts and having to use buckets of struts you should probably be starting from scratch instead of trying to nurse a dodgy design IMO.

I don't think boring through 40km of ice is at all a trivial challenge. The deepest ice core I can find that we've done on Earth is a bit over 3km, and the deepest we've drilled through land is about 12km. Bear in mind that no surface probe has ever moved 40km on another planet, and you'd be asking it to do it through a solid object. The energy demands alone would put the probe into a class beyond anything we've ever built. I suspect you'd be looking at a nuclear power source. Getting signals back would be easy, just lay a cable to a surface station as you drill/melt your way in.

40km straight down through the ice though. That makes getting in to take a peek pretty tricky.

Those thrusters might save on weight, but they'd be more complicated and therefore unlikely to be more reliable. You always want to reduce the number of moving parts, not increase them. There's no problem in using standard quad blocks to maneuver while spinning anyway, accounting for the spin would be pretty trivial. RCS systems are still perfectly useful while spinning, or they wouldn't be fit for purpose. Generally speaking, since you're going to be rotating around your centre of mass and your engines will be aligned along the same then there's no problem with main engine burns either.

Sometimes comparisons help: 1GW = 2 billion watts Average metabolic output of a human body: 100 watts. Boiling a kettle for a cup of tea: about 2000 watts (2kW) Power output of a family car: about 80,000 watts (80kW) Power output of a formula 1 car:about 450,000 watts (450kW) Propulsion system on a Nimitz class aircraft carrier: 190MW Average electricity demand of the whole UK: about 40GW So a single source at 2GW is pretty epic power output. Especially if it was able to maintain that for several minutes. Only the very largest thermal power stations are able to maintain that kind of output continuously, and they're BIG machines. Where would all this power be coming from? And even if whatever mechanism they were using to convert input to output was 99% efficient (which is astonishingly good) they'd still be having to shed 20MW of heat. Which is 200,000 times the heat your body normally has to get rid of. Your fictional superhero would need some badass sweat glands...

I don't think you'd need to bother. I don't really see any major problems caused by having the ship spin. In space everything is always moving anyway.

My friend, I assure you that if you go through life thinking the problem is always the other guy, you'll always be wrong.

Corrosion is always a concern, but we manage harsher problems than that on a routine basis. Big steel offshore rigs sitting in salty water, for example. An impressed EMF can channel the corrosion towards easy to replace sacrificial anodes, rather than your hull. I imagine you'd have a pretty robust water barrier at the bottom with an engineering space underneath to allow for maintenance. It would be easier and tidier to put all your services under the "ground" anyway.

Any directional antennas would need to be on a rotating mount anyway. Really can't see how it would be a problem.

It would be nice to have an animation for burning up when they de-spawn.

No. I don't build stuff that big, but lots of other players do. I don't see why they should have their fun ruined because of how I play the game. Once we have to start paying for parts I think they'll find the mega parts are prohibitively expensive in career anyway. Or at least, building small will be more profitable.

Robots aren't going to entirely replace human troops any time soon, they'll complement them. The robots will provide air support, move materiel, do EOD/IEDD, run route clearance, stand stag and conduct close reconnaissance. The reduction in manpower requirements won't be massive, as mentioned above the majority of the manpower even in the army isn't frontline combatants. Robots will require logistic support just like people do, and they'll still require supervision from a chain of command just like people do.

In a really massive habitat station like that it would be possible to have a much more biomimetic life support system than our current technology. So you could have a proper hydrologic cycle (clouds, drainage, maybe even precipitation, etc). Lakes/reservoirs would be by far the simplest way to store your bulk water, and would do double duty as recreational facilities and sources of biodiversity. Wetlands would filter your water, and the lakes would serve as big sponges for atmospheric gas imbalances. In short, why would you NOT have lakes? You need the water on board anyway.

"Meat-based"? Is that some kind of euphemism? Because if this shark is made of the same "meat-based substance" that goes into your average Friday night kebab then I'm not sure we're talking about a level playing field. It could have all kinds of mutant superpowers.

Gotta say I kind of feel the same as the OP. I'm not really interested in more large parts, I rarely even use the mainsail. I find myself strangely meh about the idea of grappling asteroids, so it's not really been an interesting update for me.

Not really any patience required with some distros these days. You just plug it in and it works. It's certainly a lot less hassle than Windows.