Stargate525

But now he does have two *****es.

Yes, but is that because we CAN'T, or because we don't see a need to?

But not 40 light years away. As I've said before, we don't need interstellar travel, we need a viable colony on another planet. And, we CAN travel interstellar if we're prepared to wait. Generation ships are hypothetically possible, just prohibitively expensive. And I'd like to point out that nearly every time limit humanity has set for itself, we've broken. And yea, mea culpa on descendants. >.<

Problem being, I don't think there's a way for the game to recognize what ship A and B used to be once docked.

There's also the lag time. Assuming that, tomorrow, an alien race launches their obliteration strike as soon as they've heard our first radio signal, their star is about seventy light years away. Let's be generous and, for the sake of argument, say that the projectile travels at light speed to us. It will be another seventy years before it hits us. Seventy years ago we weren't even at the MOON. We didn't have transistors. In the most developed nations on our planet, a large number of homes barely had ELECTRICITY. When you do something like what you're saying, you aren't pissing off the target you shot at, you're pissing off the ancestors of the target you shot at. You can't see into the future, and you have no clue how quickly or in what ways they will develop. Those hypothetical aliens are shooting at what we looked like seventy years prior, and will hit the civilization that's emerged a century and a half after that.

Name something else you could use that a) Is immediately recognizeable in a number of different styles and sizes and immediately calls 'save' into mind. I can't.

Diamond-tipped saws-all. I mean honestly, I think Kerbals are insane enough to carry a device on their ships with which they can hack bits of it off.

Even the birds have to land somewhere. Eat something. If anything, I'd predict the deep ocean environment to survive with the least damage.

Define 'the earth' Is the atmosphere stopping as well? If not, I imagine all of our buildings immediately blow over, and the earth is sandblasted by 1000mph winds.

Welcome back to the age of the zeppelin. That much energy, you can easily support the creation of a commercial hot air envelope. OR... Since the product of fusion is helium... And if you want to go somewhere fast... hyperloop.

If by 'lose a few cities' you mean 'completely obliterate the twenty largest cities in the US and our governmental structure,' then yes. And we didn't have EMP. You can't assume their weapons are impossible to intercept, without affording the same thing to others. So now you're saying they'll ACCIDENTALLY obliterate us? With the ensuing invasion and occupation and etc. That's a big accident. No. You are advocating the premise that the logical, rational solution to a first contact is complete, immediate genocide. You can't say that and then go 'but of course WE wouldn't do that...' I'm not arguing we hug them. I'm arguing that we don't do what you suggest, which is immediately start stabbing. But trying to kill it is. If you're gathering that much information, you're talking decades of passive observation. If you've done that, your argument of 'well if we make contact they'll immediately try to kill us' makes no sense. YOU haven't. Why would they?

You'll still need a place to store and regulate that amount of energy, and a source of fuel. The beauty of the fusion reactor is that when it fails catastrophically it doesn't explode like internal combustion or meltdown, it just... stops.

Nope. Give the US teleporting nukes, and we still would not have used them. Because no matter how many nukes we had, we could not GUARANTEE taking out every opposing bunker, every weapon. If you miss even one base, one viable bastion of your enemy... I will see your sci-fi and raise you this: http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/We_Know_You_Are_Out_There So now you're talking a pre-emptive orbital bombardment, followed by a permanent monitoring of the system? This is paranoia. Total and complete paranoia. It is so much EASIER to send a message and determine intent than... this. As far as I can tell your argument boils down to 'we need to kill them first because they might kill us' and your only answer to 'why would they kill us' is 'because they might.' By that logic, the Secret Service should gun down anyone who gets within fifty feet of the president because they might be an assassin. After all, we are talking about the leader of the free world.

muzzle velocity. When you're doing trigonometry to get your target, a lot of the kinetic energy you're putting into the shell is used to get it to the target.

Yup. That's our big one. Endurance. We are the only species on earth that will WALK you to death.

You're talking direct fire, where you're only accounting for a little bit of drop when aiming. He's talking parabolic firing. In that case, your shell is going to be doing about terminal velocity no matter how its sliced.

But muzzle velocity does affect range. With a railgun, I could conceivably see an orbital artillery; something that has a range most easily measured in percents of the earth's surface.

I knew it! You're NOT HUMAN! As far as abilities... Gonna have to go with resilience. We are blessed with one of the best endurances in the animal kingdom, are incredibly hard to kill, and very persistent. Heck, we overcome disease by GIVING OURSELVES A SLIGHTLY WEAKER VERSION. If that's not badass...

These seem mutually incompatible. If it is as easy to hide in space as you say (and I'm not disagreeing with you), then you can NEVER know if you've finished the job. You meet a guy in an alley. You have a gun drawn. He may or may not. You may or may not kill him before he fires back. The best way to stay alive is to simply NOT SHOOT HIM. Alternate scenario. You meet a guy in an alley. You have a gun drawn. You've seen him, so you know he's unarmed. Still, you may or may not kill him before he acquires a gun as well. Best way to stay alive is still to NOT SHOOT HIM. This is the nuclear arms argument all over again. You have NO WAY of knowing, for sure, that your enemy cannot get off a retaliatory strike before you hit all of their assets. It's a mutually-assured destruction. The only winning move is not to play.

We're about 50% closer than we were a decade ago, when we couldn't even get this reaction outside of a thermonuclear weapon. I think we're close because now we have a viable method that has demonstrated that it can ignite a sustained reaction. The problem now is keeping that energy it's producing facing inwards.

So... an immobile, massively powerful projectile artillery. You'd get six or seven shots before every enemy source zeroes in on that location.

What the HELL kind of weapon would you need a fusion reactor to power? It would be immobile, as the equipment to lug that stuff around... Laser artillery? EMP defense system? What?

But you're leaving out the 'why.' Every genocide that we as a species have perpetrated has one thing in common; proximity. We've never marched across a continent to kill someone arbitrarily, much less star systems. I mean, the nearest equivalent I can think of would be if Europeans found Native American poetry float in across the ocean, and their first thought was to build and send two massive warships with the express purpose of annihilating whatever they found.

Except just recently scientists and engineers have gotten a net positive reaction. We're still putting in massive amounts more energy than we're releasing, but for a while we got the reaction to sustain itself. We are close.

Counterpoints to the ridiculous amounts of liquid fuel in the Mk3s. A lot of my spaceplanes end up with massive amounts of liquid fuel remaining. Oxidizer tanks solve this. If a more realistic fuel-extraction system arises, where you can't mine both fuel and oxidizer in situ, then you're wasting half your weight on something the miner doesn't extract.