Seret

Because Windows is the dominant gaming platform, and it's a slow-moving behemoth that had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards the light.

A NAS is an excellent idea, but you'd have to spend a bit extra. How much data do you actually need to back up? You might not need to bother with a drive at all, you can get some pretty big USB sticks and SD cards. In general though, this would probably be a good time to think about how you're protecting your data. You want something with redundancy, you want it automated, and you want to safeguard that with offline backups.

They actually weren't vehicles, those were the Martians' bodies. Wells was talking about cyborgs. The invaders were a vision of us from a future where or technological and biological evolution had become linked. It always disappoints me that this idea, to me the most interesting and impressive part of the book, gets left out of film adaptations.

Er, no. Not at all. You're right, that wouldn't follow logically. However, as I said to Vger I think this is going OT. If you want to continue to discuss it we'd be better off in another thread, and it would be very difficult to stop some idiot from bringing politics into it.

Yep, the problem is that space exploration is a necessarily high-tech activity. That means an enormous and complex supply chain behind every nut, bolt and washer. For any kind of foreseeable future Earth will be supplying the vast bulk of the equipment. What we would be able to build in space will be very rudimentary. Shelters out of regolith bricks is probably about the kind of tech level we should be thinking. We'll get there evetually though. It's essentially a bootstrapping problem. Vger, while I don't disagree I think your line of discussion is heading OT, and probably in a direction that would get us pounded with the lockhammer.

Real chip foundries are somewhat more complicated than this though. You're not exactly sputtering and doping your own silicon at home I assume? They're large factories with billions of dollars worth of extremely complicated precision machines. The cost and complexity of chip foundries is the main force that is working against further advances in processor speed. Basically we only get faster chips if the eyewatering cost of their production can be overcome enough to make them viable economically. You'd never build electronics in space. Like you say, they're small and light but they do require huge infrastructure to fabricate. You'd just build them on Earth and ship them up.

Lot's of things we do today aren't sustainable long-term. That doesn't mean that economic growth itself is unsustainable, just that future growth would have to be derived from different things. Economic growth does not rely on population growth btw. The richest countries in the world all have the lowest rates of population growth. Money is made of thin air. It's an idea, not a real object. We attribute value to things for entirely arbitrary reasons sometimes. It's about attitudes, emotions and even fashions as much as any kind of intrinsic value.

Got Jeb a new space bus for giving his boys rides to the planets and he immediately took it for a quick burn out to Eve. Probably should have thought about what he was doing, as he's now stuck out there on his own for a few months. Hope he packed some underwear... Still, it's his job. One of my few personal rules is: "Jeb never lands back on Kerbin" so I've got to find some trouble for him to get up to.

Fuel efficient yes, but economical? Who knows? I was just thinking out loud really. Yes, moving lots of useless mass is expensive, but so is sending processing infrastructure into space. Like I said, we don't have enough information to say how the numbers actually add up.

Right, I see you're equating economic growth with energy demand growth in a strictly linear fashion. That's not an entirely unreasonable simplification, but it turns out that reality is a bit less straightforward. As I mentioned back in my original reply to you energy use does decouple somewhat from economic growth in industrialised economies. At the very least what happens is that countries get more efficient at squeezing more economic growth out of small increases in energy use. For example the UK (the first country to industrialise) managed to improve their Energy/GDP ratio by a factor of three between 1880 and 1990. So they were getting three times more economic growth out of the same rise in energy demand. And growth can indeed be had completely for "free", Denmark's GDP increased by 50% between 1977 and 1999, but primary energy consumption didn't rise at all. Efficiency is a good thing! Generally what happens is that energy intensity (ie: energy demand per unit GDP) does rise sharply as nations industrialise, but the biggest peak was the UK and every nation since has showed a smaller peak (they benefit from improvements in efficiency). After that the trend starts to reverse due to a lot of complicated factors (de-materialisation of industry, growth of a service sector, etc) and completely decoupled economic growth can and does occur. So no, projecting a flat ever-increasing energy use due to economic growth isn't really realistic. Energy demand just doesn't track economic growth like that.

I wonder how much processing would need to be done at all in the asteroid belt? It might be cheaper to move them to Earth and process here. The difficulty here is that it's all down to practical decisions, but we don't have any data for what the actual variables would be at some random point in the future. So it's impossible to say anything particularly coherent IMO.

Why do you think a stagnant economy is inevitable?

It keeps coming up again and again, but there's some detail here. It wouldn't have to engage in mimicry, there's enough thermal variation in that background that identifying anything becomes more difficult. You've also got a fat layer of water vapour across both horizons that an enemy could hide in very effectively. That horizon is quite close in LEO. Realistically weight and power limitations will mean combat spacecraft are unlikely to carry their own long-range active sensors, they're likely to rely on ground support heavily. GEO sats could help, but their fixed location could make them quite vulnerable if the enemy has weapons with enough smash to reach them. Physics stays the same, but technology changes, and that means changes in tactics. Naploeanic armies fight under the same rules of physics as modern ones, but they do it differently. You wouldn't expect someone in the 19th century to accurately predict something like vertical envelopment or understand the tactics involved. Likewise I don't think we can expect to say anything of any value about weapons and tactics in the far future. We can only talk about technology we know currently, or which is just around the corner.

As the price rises it also becomes profitable to do more clever recycling. Apparently it's already viable to extract metals from catalytic converters out of road sweepings, for example. So much of what we've already mined will go around again. It'll have to really.

We've already covered this, IR search is only that effective for tracking objects above the horizon. What kind of orbit both yourself and the target are in will determine how much of a clear lookout you get, there is a reasonable chance you'd be engaged by an enemy from within the ground clutter. I definitely wouldn't rule stealth out because of thermal search. Ok, but if you're assuming that you're talking centuries into the future, at which point veracity has left through the side door, and anything becomes possible.

I don't agree that the choice is either asteroid mining or a stagnant economy, if that's what you're saying.

Heavily armoured ships wouldn't happen at any range. Spacecraft are built for minimum weight. Combat spacecraft would be built for survivability through redundancy, maneuverability, spirit sensors and weapons and possibly stealth. Again, look to aircraft for your cues here, as the design constraints are similar.

That's not a realistic way to forecast future energy use. Population wise, we're not expecting to grow continually. The growth rate has already started to slow, middle-of-the-road forecasts put us topping out at about 2100 with a population of 10 billionish. Economically, after nations industrialise energy use substantially decouples from further economic growth, so there's no reason to assume demand will continue to grow endlessly. If the entire world stabilised at roughly current European levels of energy use we'd be looking at about 50TW. It's not really a problem that calls for asteroid mining. Personally I don't think asteroid mining will ever be economical with any current or near-future technology. We'd either have to develop much cheaper access to space or in-space manufacturing (which is NOT a trivial challenge) to make it attractive.

Warheads in anti aircraft missiles aren't contact fused anyway, they're proximity weapons. They explode in proximity to the target and cause damage through fragmentation (typically they use an expanding rod type warhead). Since spacecraft are constructed the same as aircraft these warheads would be just as effective against them. So the aspect threatened by a missile wouldn't just be the side facing the enemy, it would also be all your flanks too. I don't really think passive armour is a practical idea. Active counter-measures and defensive maneuvering would really be the way to go. Same as aircraft really. People seem to have this idea that space combat would resemble naval combat for some reason. It wouldn't, it would be far more like aerial combat.

That wouldn't be a problem to counter. Aircraft are able to dodge too, and missiles are able to hit those. I think you'll find a guided weapon for space use would use an initial boost to accelerate and close the distance, enter into a fairly dormant cruise phase, then use a separate terminal guidance maneuver system. I think orbital engagements would be 99% rather than 1%, but I suspect you're envisaging a situation further into the future than me.

Old warships did actually have torpedo bulges at the waterline. Like you say though, warheads back then were contact fused, and they'd be ineffective against modern back-breakers.

I'd like to back the truck up and challenge this assumption. The military aren't going to be deploying combat spacecraft into deep space. The strategically important "ground" worth fighting over is Earth orbit, and the maximum distance you're likely to get is the distance between two objects in geostationary orbits, which is about 83,000km if my back of napkin sums are correct. That's about a quarter of a light second. Engagement ranges in LEO would be a lot shorter, down to a maximum of 1,000km between two vehicles in the lowest orbits once you take obscuration from the atmosphere into account.

Absolutely. Destroy the threat and vector the fragments away from you at the greatest distance possible. Similar technology is already in use on ships and tanks.

I take it all back, mechs could be just the thing if you're suffering an invasion of giant moths.

It's clearly an outreach programme. As a publicly funded organisation NASA does have a remit to engage the public in their activities. As for the designs, I found myself trying to decide which was least bad.