Rune

I was actually going to rep you for that comment on history (space is most definitely not the Far West, you are right on that), then I kept reading (and this response also sums up some other points made by other people on following posts, not only about what you said). Rockets don't have to be expensive. What is expensive about a rocket? Fuel? The cost of metal? No, what makes them expensive is building them like works of art, in a clean room, with the tightest tolerances in any industry, and by highly skilled aeronautical engineers, and then throw them away after 5 minutes of use. Now study how the V-2 was built, and the launch cadence. You could even trace a reasonable parallel with the mass production of cars. And then you could even look a little bit further, and start thinking outside the box and see that a rocket is not the only way to get something to orbit. The rocket equation may not be going to change, but a space elevator (and this is just an example) could in theory be a fully conservative system, even be used as an energy source. And energy IS cheap, at least right now. Now, there might not be any destinations to go to right now. But neither were any destinations when the first Atlantic crossing was done. Neither was there any reason to leave Africa because of lack of resources. The fact that those things, those motivations, don't exist at the moment, doesn't mean they never will. Rune. Besides living, I want to dream the future into existence too. Sue me.

Hum. I really have to re-post my crafts. My K-22 has the same powerplant (single jet+2 nukes), and I find the thrust issue to get over 10,000m, not on rocket takeover. I actually use the nukes with the jet to get over 15kms quickly (by 7,000 meters you already get upwards of 700s isp on the nukes). But I also light them when I'm close to flameout, and throttle down to 2/3rds to keep the jets going a bit further and build vertical speed quickly. But, my takeover speed is also much, much higher, about 1,500m/s, so I get much more in-space delta-v out of it. What's stopping you from really speeding up? Drag? Too few intakes? Burning all your jet fuel before then because you climb too slowly? Edit: Upon close inspection of the screenshots, I see you don't touch the throttle. Bad idea, you can squeeze quite a bit more out of the jets if you throttle them down a bit after flameout. Rune. Kinda confused.

I have a couple on things waiting on me passing my driving license exam this wednesday and allowing myself to start KSP to actually launch them. I'll post them here ASAP. Rune. If I can stick them on top of a Nova safely, that is.

Really? Well, due to lack of ideas, R-SUV is still the first choice, so you might get lucky, I'm horrible at naming stuff

Just by your description, and without trying out the craft, I think I know what's the problem. On rocket takeover, and with any SSTO really, you want to have a decent ascent speed to get over 35 kms and serious drag losses as soon as you can. So after speeding up at 20-25kms, pitch up until you see about 50m/s on the vertical speed indicator, perhaps lighting the nukes to get an even higher T/W on the pull up maneuver. You can loose an infinite amount of delta-v by staying in atmo. Rune. The second the jets go out, the atmosphere becomes your biggest enemy.

Ok, how about a big supernova relatively close? That fries the whole solar system, never mind Earth. Is that enough of a radical thing? Rune. There are ELE's, and plenty to choose from.

Hey there! I didn't see you, but I think I like you.

That's an easy one to answer: room to grow. A solar system with a few trillion humans will be much more productive in terms of anything you can name, including science, than one with perhaps 10-20 billion at most and zero growth allowed (I won't even get into what kind of society would evolve under such a constrained scenario). Of course, I wouldn't get out of a planet to colonize another, much less a barren rock like the moon, that would be stupid thinking. There is enough stuff in the main belt to build about 300.000 Earth's worth of habitable surface, pick the surface conditions to suit your taste. Never mind using the Oort cloud or the Kuiper belt. Rune. There is a lot of planetary chauvinism going around.

Not if you have some knowledge about how these things work and make it a rod of tungsten with a decent ballistic coefficient (long and pointy). Look at the beginning of thethread to see what percentage of the energy gets dissipated as heat. Then divide by the energy necessary to vaporize each unit of mass of tungsten. Increase mass so final impact mass is the one you want, by perhaps a few of kilograms per delivered ton. Rune. It's called ablative heatshield, and tungsten makes a hell of a good one.

No magnetic anomaly would bring down a plane, or sink a boat. I'm dead certain about that. However, a massive methane buildup and release produced by, say, algae, might (by greatly lowering the density of an area of the sea and the air above it). And in fact, I seem to remember I once read that there is an area somewhere in the pacific where this kind of thing happens relatively often, thus providing a natural explanation to the Bermuda Triangle legends.

Hey! A Hugo award I haven't read! That goes to my "to do" list right away, thanks. And Scotius... well, if the polynesians could do it, then I'm sure we can, without having to wait for new fancy physics. Rune. We have a saying in Spain... "Sobre gustos, no hay nada escrito".

Well, thermodynamics haven't changed since then, so the efficiency of rocket engines is pretty much unchanged. You could shave some weight with our fancy electronics, but that's basically extra peanuts for the astronauts. So with the same fuels and the same number of stages, the rocket would pretty much just as big.

Then I'll hold off on rebuilding my thread until it comes back. I still can't find a decent name for the company, anyhow.

Some screenshots would do wonders to go with those great introductions. I upload the to imgur, but you may have your own preferences. Edit: Ok, never mind that. Apparently I was suffering from a horrible case of network adapter settings, making web pages go at the speed of a paralytic snail, and the images didn't load at all. I'll leave it because I hate empty posts without explanation as to what happened. Rune. And keep at it!

Yup, but since there are very few people at the poles, we say that is global coverage. Actually, that is also the reason Molniya orbits (highly elliptical polar orbits with a lot of dwell time over one pole) were developed, and are still used to communicate in the high northern latitudes and Antartica. Rune. Always nice to read someone with curiosity.

Well, me personally, I've always found more compelling sci-fi universes without FTL than those that have it. Lightspeed may sound like a big barrier, but there are ways around it (generation ships, for example). And if you mean see them yourself, well... you could outlast the universe if you were going fast enough. Rune. I recommend Tau Zero as a read to illustrate that last point, and Revelation Space to see how cool "STL" travel can be.

Wait, conservation of momentum? I mean, the instant it regains mass, it should stop considerably on its own. Where do all those G's go, in that case? I think you just torpedoe'd your own design, unless you assume some fancy inertial dampeners, which would make it redundant.

As an engineer, my final answer is pretty simple: better for what? The answer could be either, depending on the requirements you set. So it's kind of an impossible question to answer, impartially. Of course, since we are all speaking english here, I kind of guess which one will come out ahead. As a biased personal opinion, I will point out that variants of the booster used for Vostok are still in use today, and to carry US crews to the ISS no less. Rune. Good 'ol R-7 Semyorka, Soviet engineering at its finest.

Well, it is a really good way to keep a lot of aerospace contractors happily working, I can't deny that. That is short of what I have been saying all along. But I would much prefer to have them working at something worthwhile. Imagine if the money was spent on building in-space reusable (hence, refuelable) stages and putting them on top of rockets (chemical or nuclear, for a near-term personal proposal, I would like to see a methane/LOX transfer stage/unmanned tug). Or fuel depots, or transfer habitats, or multipurpose reusable landers, or waypoint stations, or surface habitats... we could have an inner solar system transportation system set up for what this program will cost, and we would end up going somewhere, while those aerospace contractors keep receiving their paychecks just like they do now. The only big advantage SLS could have over other launch systems is the 10m diameter of the core stage. And Boeing keeps on showing stuff that throws that away by inserting a 5m adapter, and other people finding neat tricks to get around the launch diameter limitations in the meantime (inflatable heatshields, segmented mirrors, that short of thing). That means they throw that away and look even more silly next to the Falcon heavy, or even ULA's own launchers. Hell, even old Proton can do what SLS is meant to do, cheaper, if you master the crucial in-space techniques like autonomous rendezvous and fuel transfer that we would need anyway. Right now this looks like the old NASA fixation on direct return from the moon and huge Nova rockets. Remember what Churchill said? "You can always trust the Americans to do the right thing... after they have tried out every other possibility and seen that they don't work". When is NASA going to do the equivalent of the "go with LOR" decision, and how much money will they burn in the meantime? Rune. Lots of things to do, and practically none getting done.

It' probably beyond my physics, but from a sci-fi "I don't care how it's done" point of view, it sounds like a cool way to hit 99+% of c in near-instantaneous fashion (Einstein's limits will still apply, since you say it still has some mass) and make the trip, form the perspective of the travellers, in zero elapsed time.

You mean Altair, right? The H2/LOX lunar lander that could do polar missions? Just nitpicking, don't mind me.

It's a relative distance thing. You could find a small planet if it orbits very close to the star, since it covers a large portion of the star, but then it won't be in the habitable zone. Or you could find bigger planets further away, but you will also need more time to confirm them since you need a couple of revolutions at least to confirm your findings, and that means a few of their years. Small planets far away need either a lot of passes to be able to confirm them with certainty (and each pass takes more time, remember), or are just beyond Kepler's sensitivity.

Completely off-topic, but I just took the zombie test in your sig. I was very sad that there was no way to answer that I own a bow and know how to shoot it fairly decent. I'm sure that would have got me a push to get over 80%, I got a 79. Rune. Because, you know, arrows are recoverable, silent, and such.

Hum. Depending on density, you could get close to 1G surface gravity, and it would fit. But iceballs must be relatively common around there, and if it's got a significant rocky core, surface gravity may be much, much higher.

Let's run those numbers again. Assuming they actually reach the goal of 500 million a flight (I don't believe that, but its what they say), we get 70mT on low orbit at 7.1 million/mT. You compare with shuttle, and indeed you are right, since the best cost analysis I've seen on it (at least in order of magnitude, shuttle accounting is a mess) got a similar cost per flight, and the payload was roughly a third, so it is more effective... unless you take into account that the whole ~70mT orbiter got to orbit with its ~25mT payload. But then you go and compare with Falcon Heavy. Which is announced to cost 125 million to the customer, and you could book right now. They wouldn't charge you for development, they wouldn't charge you to "maintain the capabilities", or to build a new launch pad/construction tools/crawler/whatever they can get away with. And it clocks in at 53mT to 200km LEO circular, which comes out to 2.35 million/mT, or a third of the cost for 2/3rds of the payload. Any, I repeat, any ELV can do better than SLS in cost per kilogram to orbit, even the incredibly expensive Delta IV. Which is really, really strange, since as you said bigger rockets should be much more efficient in those terms. And that is believing the cost projections as they stand right now, which is really hopeful thinking IMO. My conclusion? Someone should prosecute the contractors for fraud. They are robbing you blind. Rune. Once, a long time ago, I was actually looking forward to Ares V. Then I learned better.