Seret

Highly directional RF is nothing new. We've used it for things like navigation, comms and search for decades just by designing the antenna a particular way. Not all comms is broadcast via non-directional antennas, if you want to go point-to-point for whatever reason (such as being harder to detect) then you can use a tight beam. Doing so requires a lot less power than going non-directional. If you want to see a nice low-tech example check out the "cantennas"people hack together to improve point-to-point Wi-Fi.

Depends how you want to rate the "biggest". By number of bombers it probably was Dresden, but the late war fire bombing of Tokyo was more intense, killed a lot more people and devastated a much bigger area. Fewer bombers were used because they were the big late war B-29s. With fewer aircraft they laid waste to an area more than twice as big as in Dresden, killed five times as many people, and they did it all in a single night. Tokyo was bombed a lot, but the March 9 Operation Meetinghouse raid was the single most concentrated slaughter of the war, bigger even than the A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

If you read it carefully their main objection is that a manned spacecraft can't have a thermal signature low enough. Fine, that's probably true, but why in the heck would a combat spacecraft be manned? It does make you wonder if they're deliberately ignoring the point, or if they just haven't really thought about it. The author seems to have their head stuck in sci-fi land, not the real world if you ask me. Apart from that your point seems to be that a spacecraft couldn't be made perfectly undetectable. If so, that's completely true. Nothing is completely undetectable. Stealth technology doesn't attempt to make something undetectable, it just degrades the effectiveness of the sensors trying to find the target. Even the fanciest stealth fighter can in fact still be detected.

My wife's got one of those, she absolutely loves it. A lot of women like the really big phones, since they're carrying them in a handbag anyway they might as well have a nice big screen. it's not heavy at all. I wouldn't buy one myself, I agree with you that it's a bit too big for a guy to comfortably fit in their pocket. If that's not a problem for you it's a great phone though.

Not really handwaving, that's a legit idea. Anything in GEO could stick the radiators on top and have a very much reduced IR signature to anything at the same or lower altitude (ie: pretty much everything).

"Stealth" works fine in space, especially when you're talking about aspects of stealth like emissions control. To the OP, highly directional RF signals aren't new, and indeed are inherently harder to intercept and/or degrade. Generally keeping an eye on the enemy's emissions is a good passive way to detect them. It's called Electronic Surveillance Measures (ESM) and you'll find that the military strictly control what they transmit to avoid giving the game away. It's not like in the movies where everybody is using their radar all the time, in reality folks will often keep their transmitters shut down a lot of the time. Even for a powerful active sensor like a radar the enemy can detect you via ESM from a lot further away than you can detect them directly with your radar. Pretty much all aircraft and warships have a reasonable ESM ability, although there are examples of both that specialise in it and pack all sorts of sneaky gear.

Yes, they're called solar slates. They're more expensive than normal panels, so generally only used when the local planning department are likely to get uppity about the aesthetic effect of tacking panels onto an existing roof. I looked at getting them at one point as I was re-roofing at the same time as installing my PV array, but they worked out much more expensive than the cost of a normal array and regular roof tiles.

Perhaps you could post up your craft file and let some other people try and reproduce your problem fuzzdemon. A bug that can be reproduced is far more likely to get fixed.

No, but that's how it was done in the past. Remember that this disaster has thrown everything back to pre-industrial technology. Manual labour would be the normal way of getting everything done. No more comfy life for us lazy modern folk.

Oil and gas are getting harder to find, but there is still stupid amounts of coal left that's easily accessible. Several hundred years even at current rates of consumption. Coal can provide both gas and liquid fuels if required (albeit at lower efficiency than natural gas or oil). - - - Updated - - - Maybe, I'm not quite sure why you'd bother though.

Sure, if by "all" you mean "one tiny part of" The kind of system you're talking about needs to go through a cycle something like: Scan Categorise threats Acquire Track Engage Analyse Re-engage Actual fire control of the engagement phase isn't beyond us, as you say. The kind of fire control you're talking about is pretty routine. But that's far from all that's required. Lets look at some actual real-world systems like you're positing: naval CIWS and tank active defense systems like Arena. Both are quite effective against the threats they were originally developed for. But especially in the case of anti-shipping missiles the threat has adapted. Modern ASMs use a supersonic sea-skimming profile (disrupting 1-3 of the above list) followed by a terminal pop-up maneuver that makes it extremely hard for CIWS to track and engage them. Big chunky guns (which they need to be to have decent range) aren't able to easily track targets moving at supersonic speeds across their field of fire at short ranges, and they have a maximum elevation. Bottom line is that CIWS systems, which are under automatic computer control and quite capable of adjusting fall of shot at millisecond speeds, aren't anywhere near 100% effective. That's why they're used as a last-ditch effort in a multi-layered defence. On land systems like the Arena are operating in a much more challenging environment. They're fairly effective against the likes of RPGs, but it's highly dubious whether they'd be able to effectively defend against a top attack missile like the Spike or Javelin, or a supersonic weapon like the Starstreak. There are numerous other things missiles could do to render them ineffective, such as offset approaches or terminal pop-ups, simultaneous attacks from two or more directions, etc. There's absolutely no question of any tank fielding any kind of active countermeasure that would be able to stop direct fire from a supersonic KE projectile. A common problem with active defences is an extremely limited number of engagements. The enemy will always have enough firepower to overwhelm your defensive measures. When I was in the air force one of our standard tactics for strike aircraft attacking ships was to pepper them with unguided rockets fitted with dummy warheads that mimmicked the active radars of ASM missiles. Each aircraft could carry dozens of these, and the ships would have to treat each one like an actual vampire. The ships would waste all their SAMs and CIWS shots on these before the actual attack was pressed home using ASMs. Evolving threats, new tactics, and downright cheating can overcome pretty much any new defensive technology, or at least severely degrade it's effectiveness. So you can see that foolproof active defences don't exist, even before you start trying to extrapolate the tech down to something as incredibly hard to stop as small arms. How would an anti-small arms system even work? How would it tell friendly from enemy fire? How would it stop tiny supersonic projectiles fired from short ranges (infantry combat mostly occurs at <200m, giving you about 0.2s at the outside to classify, acquire, track and engage the threat). How many engagements does this thing pack? To usefully protect a platoon from small arms fire it would have to be able to carry out tens of thousands of engagements. It's just not realistic. There is no current or near-future tech that looks like offering anywhere near this kind of capability.

You can't really turn an ICE into a steam engine, but you can turn it into a wood gassification engine and run it off firewood without too much hassle.

I agree. I disagree that most people are using them. Mods like Mechjeb actually do a really poor job of docking, most people don't use them for long, if at all. Keep practising, you'll get the hang of it.

It's really not. As people have said there was an undocking bug, IIRC they've squashed that. But docking works absolutely fine.

Not hard at all IMO. I've never bothered with docking mods, you can just eyeball it. Just keep the speed low and change the camera angle a couple of times to make sure everything is lined up. It doesn't need to be perfect, they'll align themselves when you get close enough. Changing the camera to chase view helps hugely though.

In that case you should check out the "moon", it'll blow your mind.

You don't. I suspect you've either done something like stick one of the docking ports on backwards, or (much less likely) you've found a bug. The only thing I've found that routinely stops docking ports from attaching is SAS. With it on the reaction wheels and docking port magnetism can end up fighting each other. Just turn SAS off and it should click together nicely.

No you don't. If someone walks past your house taking photos in through your windows, you have no right to run out and smash their camera. Ditto drones. They're not technically trespassing, so there's little you can do. Having said that if someone was being really obnoxious with one I doubt the police would have a lot of sympathy for them if someone swatted it.

Unlikely. There's always an evolutionary battle going on between weapons and defences. Every time someone develops a better defence the attack steps up its game. Warheads almost always stay enough of a step ahead for nobody to be safe. It's important for them to be so, because as soon as defence ever outmatches attack you end up in horrific situations like the stalemate on western front in WW1.

Definitely, switching and transients go hand in hand. One system I've worked on was a 1970s era underground train. No power electronics there, the motors were controlled by vast armies of relays and contactors. Failure of suppression on one relay was enough to mess up the logic and cause some weird behaviour. Horrible old battleaxe of a machine, but quite fun to fault find on. There pretty much is. Maybe not a "rule", but definitely an ethos. Where you live maybe. In the rest of the world they're much less common, especially outside of rural areas. In some parts of the world most folks rarely even see guns, and would never have used one.

Hell no. About the only possible advantage I could see with one of those is that you could cast your own bullets if you happened to have the moulds. That really doesn't make up for the many, many downsides IMO. Lead acid starter batteries are tough as nails, starting an engine draws a fair wedge of current in a very short time. They're inherently resistant to transients.

Well, a rose by any other name and all that, but to me a battle rifle is the old-style large-bore weapons like the M1, FAL and G3. They're not around so much any more. Assault rifles are the ones using the smaller calibres or cut-down versions of the big cartidges (eg: M16, AKs in both 7.62x39 and 5.45mm, etc). That's pretty much what everybody carries these days.

Really depends where you are, some places they're dime-a-dozen. But like you said, you'd end up using whatever was available. I live in the UK these days, getting your hands on anything other than a shotgun here would be pretty unlikely. The only place you'd get an assault rifle is from the military, they don't exist in civilian hands here. Not entirely sure why civilians have them in the US tbh, besides plinking. Once the human population crashed, animal populations would increase. Just look at things like the Chernobyl exclusion zone, it's a bonanza for wildlife. Who knows what you'd be hunting? Could be dogs if you were hungry and there were plenty of them (which there probably would be). Definitely, but farmers aren't averse to supplementing their diet with wild game. When harvests are bad you'd be scrounging for anything and everything edible within range. If you were hungry in the middle of winter and there were bunnies in the fields you'd grab your .22 and go pop a couple of them. Snares would be more efficient, but needs must.

An M16 is a particularly bad example though. The way it's built (close tolerances, idiotic lack of return rods, etc) mean it does have to be kept clean. Now an AK...

And that's why you get that buzzing sound in modern types as soon as you power on; there are vibrators in the instrument panels.