drakesdoom

Everything can be boiled down to greed, maybe with some hate on the side but mainly greed. Be it for power or resources greed drives nearly every real problem facing mankind today. You talk about the poor and the sick and the hungry? All of those things could easily be fixed if everyone cared more about each other than they do themselves. I have met some people who would help others but most that would have at one time have been hurt too many times too try anymore. On the other end I have met people who would pay any price in other people to gain the tiniest boon, sell mother into slavery for a nice car?

That sounds like the best cover too a major breakthrough ever.

That was a game, real rtgs in a worst case scenario are hot temperature wise and a minor radiation risk for 80 some years and are then a heap of odd rock.

The problem with hydrogen fuel cells is it is only a way to store and transport power, you still have to run conventional generators to split off the hydrogen in the first place.

The smaller body would be ripped apart by gravity gradient and scattered into a short term ring as it bombards the larger body over the next few thousand years.

Actually I don't have to imagine as I work in a machine shop. If you were to use only high end equipment you could put one cnc machine up there that could make any part that would fit inside out of any material with extra sets of cutting heads. Cutting coolant is recycled with 0 lost, chips care recycled into new stock, replacement parts are made in space before they are needed. All oils, plastics, and rubbers now have synthetic variations that can be made in a chem lab. High end filters never die you just wash them in solvent which is then boiled recovering all the oil, solvent, and chips for more recycling. Forget bringing the products back down, you make real spaceships that will never see atmosphere and there goes half the complexity and weight right there. It would be extremely expensive but I could easily see a 1k ton factory that only needs raw material to make anything you want.

Metal gear nukes all your basses. DONE

I think the first priority should be mining and manufacturing in space. Get just enough up there to make more of what you need to make more of anything. Once we have even a foothold there will be an explosion of progress.

I believe the idea is that the mineral oil has so much thermal inertia that unless you are running the computer 24/7 it should never heat to the point to become a problem. I work on machining equipment and it works the same, there is no radiator for the transmission or cutting oil there is just so much of it that it never gets too hot.

For the military then that looks like a good sidearm, I had not seen tests on the AP rounds before. Unfortunately AP pistol rounds have been banned so the SS190 is out though the S4M might be available someday (manufacturer "out" of stock). For a civilian I think maximizing soft tissue damage is still the priority in pistol rounds, it is incredibly rare for criminals to be wearing a vest, unless it is under a blue shirt. For the rifles out in the country around here most places you would be lucky to find a 200 yard vantage however the middle east is made mostly of mountains and desert. In that kind of terrain ranges can easily be 400+ for light rifle fire out too 1500+ for anything that can reach that far. If the enemy is firing from beyond the effective range of the average rifleman's firearm then he is only there as a potential wounded. Below are some videos showing some long range combat in the mountains.

k^2 maybe you should give him some tips on how to apply Nail Spike concepts to speed him along to his conclusion.

Yes Devil's brew was the fuel of the first series of Russian ICBMs. Managed to incinerate/burn/poison almost the entire development team at once before ever even flying. Video on live link, if you want to see that you can find it yourself.

Well if that's not strong enough for you I have a little extra spicy concoction called Devil's venom Nitric acid mixed with UDMH. Everything you want in rocket fuel in one small package. Won't boil off even during engine burns, hypergolic, high storage density, better thrust and isp then kerosene. Warning both oxidizer and fuel are highly flammable, acidic, toxic, release poison gas, carcinogens, and hypergolic with a wide variety of materials. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_venom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe#23_October

Yeah once you get in the cities a full size rifle round is pointless I agree, however there is combat outside of cities. Right now in Afghanistan when firefights break out in the mountains the m4 simply cannot reach far enough with the 5.56, the AK can reach slightly further. That is why so many M1s have been brought out of storage and touched up. Pistols against body armor are a joke, even the brain bucket helmets they give the troops these days can stop them. I just don't see the 5.7 round out of a 3.5" barrel going through kevlar, not to mention military vests have plates and those will stop battle rifle rounds. If you know of any sources for video of live fire of the 5.7 round defeating kevlar that would be awesome, until then I will consider the pistol a fancy way to punch someone in the face on the modern battlefield.

The 5.56 is nice indoors but I can hardly call it a rifle round when it will reliably bounce off a human skull at 500 meters. The 5.7 is in all respects just an even slower and shorter bullet. The P90 seems like a good PDW, small, high capacity, high rate of fire. Doesn't even matter if they really do pierce Kevlar spray them down and you will hit the head at that point. The pistol I have serious doubts about though, it certainly could kill someone, but that is not what you want in a weapon. If you need to shoot a person you need them down 5 seconds ago, I cannot imagine semi auto fire of that caliber round being up to that task.

Well actually John D. Clark said something about Fluorine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride#Rocket_propellant

Who cares for efficient, effective is much more fun. Like getting a glass doored walk in commercial deep freezer and mounting all your internals to the wall with passive heat sinks. As a bonus you will be able to save on meat by buying a half cow now.

Beautiful in the same way that antiseptic is effective. It works and it works well, just don't keep too much of it around for too long or it will smell the whole place up and make want to hurl. Just because metric works (sometime) and people like to daydream they live in a math book doesn't mean I wish it would pack up and take it's snobby self back to the bloody queen. You are correct about .223 though, most ridiculous round to ever come out of the American continent. I can understand the use of a mid-range cartridge but chopping and necking a .30 down to a .22? The Russians actually got that bit right just take your normal .30 rifle round and shorten it up till you get the recoil reduction wanted, if you line it up right you could even get the same ammo cans to work for both.

Even if it is feasible we have (hot) fusion working, still some trouble getting power out of it but we are building a fusion pulse rocket prototype right now for flight tests. Frankly tokamak generators and torch ships will be up and running before anyone gives any more time to cold fusion because they have shown reproducible results and progress in those designs.

Star Citizen until then I will be over there with Rome: Total War the first and only.

Yes but then I would have to call my bullets something silly like 12.5mm instead of .50 cal, or even worse that horrid squib round called 9x19mm instead of a good proper hole maker like .45 cal.

I don't see how building new F/A-18E/Fs for double the cost of an F-14 for sir superiority and as an attack aircraft to replace the F-4 at 20 times the cost, Harriers at 2.5 times the cost, and Intruders at twice the cost. A super hornet may be able to do any role but you could load 2 or 3 carriers with a variety of aircraft that only fill one role but do it better. Yes existing airframes were aging and needed replacing but I have seen no practical reason to develop a multi-role air frame. Dedicated role aircraft are cheaper to design, make, and maintain while being better at what they do. Please give me one advantage of the super hornet over say making a super tomcat or super phantom?

I think this whole idea of continuing to launch exploration missions from earth is bunk frankly. We need to get a production center in space as fast as possible, if you could build your ship on the surface of the moon even you would bring a mars mission cost down by a factor of 10 not 1 or 2. If we are ever going anywhere in space we will do this so why wait, and if we are not going anywhere in space can they just start WWIII already so I can see some real fireworks.

I work on the other end, metal fabrication and production. The shop I am in does not do terribly precise work, understand that precision is expensive in production and is avoided if possible. Now even this not very precise work has total tolerances as low as 0.0016 inches, we may have tighter but that is the most I have seen. Once we get into actually cutting the part we measure in decimal, but before that all stock, parts, bolts, screws, machines, chucks, collets , taps, drills, and dies are in fractions.

That compromise issue is my main complaint. The US continues to retire airframes and move towards one super expensive can almost do anything but not really anything fighter. For example the F/A-18E/F replaced the F-14 as the navy's main interceptor. Now the F/A-18E/F is a great fighter don't get me wrong, however at twice the cost it carries less missiles, is slower, and has a smaller combat range. Yes it does have newer electronics and does fill a multi-role function, but so would having multiple airframes.