Shpaget

Not entirely fiction, and this was an actual shower thought, but after that wretched Rose hoarded that entire frikkin huge door all to her selfish self, just to watch poor old dear Jack freeze to death, Jack should not have sunk. His lungs were not flooded. Besided, she should have taken off her floatation vest, shoved it under the door, perhaps add a few more from the surrounding donators (such as that poor propeller guy) and it would have made a nice raft, but noooo.... she was too busy clutching that awful, gaudy neckless Mr. Sleazy gave her. She didn't even like him, or so she says. Also, don't lie in freezing water, you'll catch a cold. Stand up to minimize contact with cold water.

Wow. Do you have it indexed? Such a huge amount of data is of little use if it's impossible to navigate.

It's not really a boom boom boom thing. It's a single continuous explosion that just keeps on going. As the shock front pases one part of the toroidal combustion chamber, new fuel is injected behind it just in time for that same shock front to come again after making a full lap (actually there are multiple shock fronts chasing each other, but whatever).

One more of those ideas that would/could/should work in practice, if only all the problems with it could be engineered away. What happens when the pellets start hitting the shield off center, and the spacecraft is pellet-weeks away? I'm having trouble imagining a shield sturdy enough to withstand continuous relativistic impacts, big enough to be a viable target for an interplanetary shooting range, yet still light enough to fit the one-ton-spacecraft description.

Sounds thermodynamically illegal.

Agreed, but not my idea to use solar.

Op considered nuclear option and quickly dismissed it. His focus is on solar energy, I'm just working within those constraints.

No mention of ISP in the article.

No. You most certainly do not. Producing antimatter is not making an energy source; it is storage, of poor efficieny. Making antimatter on the fly just to anihilate it immediately is wasteful.

Just started The Final Empire. Too early to judge, but prologue seems to be promising.

Even with your overoptimistic scaling of power requirements (I'm almost certain you can't just scale linearly with cross section) how do you propose to pipe 50 kW through a 6 cm bore over 15 km (in addition to data link). Have you done any back of the envelope calculation on mass of that wire/pipe/hose?

ETS2, train simulator, flight sim., mario

So do funerals.

Bad science in fiction I can live with, it's fiction after all. But when the main marketing spiel is how scientifically accurate the movie is, that's exactly what I expect and demand. Context matters. In some juristictions, this may be called misleading and/or false advertising which absolutely is illegal. The fact that the render of a black hole is as good as we have right now pales in comparison with the failure to get basic newtonian physics right.

Nice. You'll get bettter view in a few days as the terminator moves across the surface and the craters cast nicer shadows.

Not today, but actually tomorrow, Croatia adopts the Euro, and also enters the Schengen Area. It's going to take some time to mentally switch to prices in €.

Don't forget the bestagon up north.

This one?

Why would you sign up?

Faithless singer and songwriter Maxwell Fraser AKA Maxi Jazz passed away on 23rd.

Hydrogen is the way to go. There is no oxygen in atmosphere of Venus, so it's not flamable. It is hard to produce, though, with all the lack of water we take for granted on Earth. Which brings us to the top choice - air. Nitrogen and oxygen, just the way we like to breath. Venus atmo is CO2, so nitrogen is a lifting gas there. Oxygen because your baloons can do double duty as habitats.

0.99 is closer to 1 than 0.9 0.999 is closer to 1 than 0.99 0.9999 is closer to one than 0.999 There can be nothing closer to 1 than 0.9..., therefore they are the same. No, you are wrong. They are exactly the same. In the field of Mathematics, this is not a controversial opinion.

Infinite 9s is a valid notation. It doesn't have to be, but it can. You can also choose to go the other way and represent 1 as 0.9... Both are valid. Yup, and 4.9... = 5

No ifs and buts. They are exactly the same. Not "almost but no quite". Exactly the same. No, this makes no sense. Nowhere in the sequence of 0 is there a 1. It's exactly 0. No. The trick is to never stop adding 9s.

No. They are exactly the same. There is no end. That's the whole point. The term "superrationality" exists in game theory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality