Accelerando

I'd guess it looks something like Triton!

I'm in a lighthugger moving at 99%c, so I move out of the 100-mile range within .6 milliseconds. While slowing down to my next destination, I release a cloud of probes to survey the system ahead of me. Moving at .1c and with a mass of 5kg each, one probe is headed toward the next poster to impact with something like 2e15 Joules of energy, or about 500 kilotons of TNT.

personally, i'm sick of hard SF film being about the glory of exploration or the terror of exploration or challenges of exploration or some related stuff, in itself it's cool but i want to know the world of the scifi, which isn't always just about spaceship engines blazing and the experience of space and space accessories. that said, you might enjoy Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise edit: lovely clip you post! must watch mores...

I gotcha! I've increased my troops to 350, the limit of my food production. I'm also producing a very minor surplus of Oil.

1-5m/s is velocity, arr! Distance over time, while acceleration is the accumulation of velocity or speed over time. Sweet little ship!

What's the highest rate of military force vs. your own population and economy that can be sustained in this game?

Haul an asteroid back to HEO and bore the museum into it. Assuming a density around 3.2g/cm^3 for stony meteorites, and a 600,000,000g or 600 ton asteroid pushed by ion engines, we get a volume of roughly 188 m^3. Could presume, from there, that we have a roughly spheroid shape: solving for radius of a perfect spherical body gives us a radius of ~3.5 meters, a diameter of ~7 meters. This sounds like it is within the boundaries of NASA's proposed asteroid capture mission, except for the large detail that we are hauling to HEO rather than Lunar orbit. Assuming that's possible, this would give us enough room for maybe a really small module for use as a museum, using the rock as a radiation and dust shield. It would probably cost on the order of however much the asteroid recovery does, est. around $3 billion, plus however much it will cost to send the module up there along with drilling equipment and maybe astronauts to install it all and give everything the once-over. Cost of launching an SLS is est. around $500 million so I'll assume in the neighborhood of $2 billion for actual museum installation because of the new equipment. This puts us at $5 billion to do it all. Will it be visible with the naked eye? Maybe if the asteroid were painted with some highly reflective material, or sheathed in a large structure made of Mylar, for instance. Alternatively, we could skip the hauling asteroid part and install the museum at an asteroid that's already close to home, 2010TK7 at solar L4. 300m diameter gives us more room to work with at distance-based cost of visibility and accessibility. The museum itself: The museum will contain digital and analogue data stored in several types for redundancy. We will have records, sturdy plates, shelves of books, some genetic information, and a few exemplary pieces of technology. We should have at least one record that demonstrates how humans speak. We could record speakers saying letters aloud, or phonemes, or Chinese characters, something to that effect. At the same time, we should include with this record a written list of all things spoken, so our future listeners can figure out what they're hearing. Other records, like the one included on the Voyagers, would be nice. Sturdy physical plates of some sort should be used for recording important text, maybe in conjunction with the records. We could engrave important works of art onto them, maybe encoding color data in the depth of the engraving at each pixel. Our paper library most critically will have picture books. Clear, to-the-point illustrations should show what the basic words of our written languages mean, at least sufficiently that the reader will be able to use the dictionary. After this we will have mix of language learning books, historically important fiction, philosophy, science and mathematical texts, history books. Among these books we may have some containing punchcards. Genetic material could be stored in a heavily shielded container in the center of the museum. Refrigerating it can allow it to stay readable for more than a million years if the asteroid remains cold enough. We store petabytes digitally if we can perfect formats such as laser-baked glass and iron-in-CNT memory that promise incredible information density and more than a million years of life. If that doesn't turn out, we engrave the data in metal or ceramic, or maybe punchcards as before. Even if they can't hold much, we could keep them to serve as examples of stored data formats. Technology-wise, we may want to include a few actual computers. Not sure what else. Final note. Digital records, like human language, will need to come with a way to decode them. On a sturdy physical medium, like metal sheets, we should draw clear diagrams, something like a picture book that shows how we read and write and process digital information. Computer architectures, maybe? Lists of characters and their corresponding numerical values in various text encoding formats like Unicode, ASCII, etc. What do you all think?

Calls out to a hope that the mission controllers could have done more, that somebody could have done something... and maybe you could at least understand better if you tried it out yourself in-game - aye. I cried at the last page.

True enough, I guess. But then what happens when the troubled society inevitably fails as well?

I find this hilariously ironic in that the point of a utopian society, if you live in one, is that you don't need these programs to keep "advancing"  and even if you wanted to do so anyway, you should have the resources at hand if it's truly a perfect society as is the definition of utopia. Basically, you're only interested in spectacle and the feeling of supporting something you think is so great  I guess I shouldn't be surprised considering your name.

to be fair, inertia reduction technology was a fairly critical plot device in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series, which is pretty hard SF, overall. the idea was that by manipulating some property of the quantum foam, or something on a similarly subatomic scale, it's possible to reduce particles' inertia. the more practical idea is to squeeze out as much speed as possible from every unit thrust from their torchship engines, because almost all civilizations are STL in these books, and the protagonists are preparing to run from a horrible alien threat that's also STL but able to achieve much higher fractions of c. I'm curious what the input of actual physicists will be.

I applied to the alliance as Phlalchas.

People being served eviction notices probably don't find them pleasant to read, but the importance of their content is no less diminished. The point is that either way it's such a trivial difference; and even if it can be whipped up in a few minutes, what's the matter other than to please some nitpickers who value tiny changes over the gist of a post? OP's post isn't a term paper, it's a question that can be understood and answered without a whole mess of deep thought.

Before midnight strikes drink 2 of the medium Starbucks size cups of coffee. Don't eat anything. Drink 2 more cups at 3:00AM and 2 more at 6:00. Go immediately to sleep when you finish your work. Don't eat breakfast. You will regret it.

Atmosphere is important to generate a shock wave, not for the explosion itself.

Hurm, I played Galaxy on Fire 2 HD on my iPhone 4 which was barely able to run it, but by heaven it looked glorious, and it was a pretty great game overall. Controls could have used work. I'll try out GoF RTS some time!

Whining and moaning like an upstart child is the standard now instead of just getting over some little formatting discrepancy? How interesting. I would have expected more from someone interested in "careful and better".

It's quicker, it's easier. It clearly caught your attention so it seems to have done its job fairly well.

Prepare for the wave of people whining about how they'll lose all their family and friends etc etc and how they're afraid of growing bored with life.

I created a page on the KSP Wiki for Kraken Drives. Please feel free to edit the article, I'm sure I'm missing a lot!

Kraken Drives are a real phenomenon in the KSP universe, with all that implies.

$7 or $8, just before .14 came out and the first price hike went into effect. I figure I've gotten something like 1500 hours of gameplay out of it... less than pennies on the hour!

Yes, let's ruin the hour for people who have done nothing to harm us and are struggling to get into space whatsoever and/or view docking as a mystical thing beyond their grasp/are trying to learn  let's deorbit their spaceships or send their Kerbals into wonky interplanetary trajectories. That'll teach the little sh**s for thinking they could have fun in a video game with people who've been playing longer than they have.

The most obvious problem with Project Orion, and the one that almost never seems to be acknowledged by either its supporters or those discussing it in general (yell at me if it's been pointed out earlier in this thread), is its payload capacity and associated inability to scale down. Having the cargo space for 1000+ tons, or more, and no ability to scale back fission bombs beyond a certain point is a huge stumbling block because it means that in order for launches to be as cheap as possible you have to be able to build 1000 tons of equipment, which is like an entire space program in and of itself: you wouldn't have found many customers for that in the 1950s-70s. I'm not sure how this scales for pure fusion bombs.

I used to say KEEthane but since methane is often pronounced MEHthane I tend to say KEHthane in that manner now.