TheGatesofLogic

CO2 is a poor greenhouse gas when not in aggregate, water is actually far more effective. Manufactured chloroflourocarbons could be made using a relatively small number of factories for a reasonable atmospheric level in approx. 250 years, and a viable ecosystem in an incredibly short 1000 years. The 100 years estimated above was a gross underestimate of the difficulty of the process.

Anyone know a good way to dampen roll on a FAR rocket. My rocket is extremely stable until the boosters are ejected, but then immediately afterwards roll becomes ultra sensitive and there is no way to stably correct it. It's not that it has a tendency to roll, but rather that any roll correction I make is WAY over compensated for. Here's an image: edit: by roll i mean in the aircraft sense, as in a moment about the axis of travel. edit 2: nevermind I solved it, and that rocket was way overbuilt, was only meant to lift that payload to orbit and when it got there it still had 4000 m/s of dV left...

No need even for that, nuclear reactors actually are very safe unless you're essentially giving the core a bear hug. The walls of the reactor ought to be good enough for government work. And if you want to be extra careful just stick it like 30 meters away from the living area and your perfectly safe

Seriously man, don't bring up Fukushima-Daiichi here, some people, including myself, have very strong opinions regarding the situation there.

The only thing i have to bring to this discussion is this: books would be far and away more valuable than gold

Please don't respond to this first part, it's off topic and irrelevant to the discussion except in terms of credence given to opinions. That wasn't an attack man, and i'm sorry if that came off that way, the first part was a generalized request for anyone to not assume things. The second part was a supporting background for an apparent inconsistency. I may be totally wrong and as such my observation is simply immaterial. I apologize if i offended you, that was never the intent. Back on topic: if you begin contemplating a point at which warp drives are economical for even small vehicles you begin allowing for more efficient weaponology. For example, when warp drives are so "simply made" and applied one would expect incredible enhancement in the stability of the warp bubble. If taken far enough you reach a point where super-luminal missiles would simply rip through enemy ships. Once ships are within a light-second of one another then such missiles are impossible to dodge and serve as instant kill weapons. Since missile dodging would have to be unpatterned to prevent predictability, and when THAT happens you compromise the ability of fighter craft in that they begin to lose their ability to perfectly protect the parent ship since the random dodging motions would also be compromised if a fighter was familiar with the randomization pattern and fell to an enemy. Unfortunately, now that i'm thinking about this again i realize how much more complex this becomes as the mother ship begins to continually jump around.

The only reason gen IV reactors are considered a decade off is because most companies investing in nuclear power have been heavily refocusing on small modular reactor designs. In fact, most Gen IV designs could be built right now with existing technologies, but the profit isn't there as much as for modular designs which allow for higher versatility and faster manufacturing processes as well as simpler containment and also have the benefit of extremely easy scaling in comparison to multiple-gigawatt reactors. That and the fact that President Carter said essentially: "no reprocessing!" For those who still actually take chernobyl seriously please read up on why making a boiling water reactor with a positive temperature coefficient without nearly any shielding at all is a very bad idea. For those who take Fukushima seriously please read up on how incompetent the initial japanese response was and also how hard protection against the biggest earthquake in half a century followed immediately by a tsunami is to make in comparison to the actually quantity of high-level-long-lasting waste was released and you might change your tune. Also, lajoswinkler, hah, one time i was testing different salts at their melting points for the microstructures produced at phase transitions and one of my assistants spilled tetraborofluorate salts on the floor. When you see hydroflouric acid fumes spreading throughout the lab you run faster than you would ever think possible

Non-hackers trying to make statements like this make me want to bend over and bleed out of my eyes. Please, if you don't have knowledge in the area of an argument you are exploring then phrasing it as a question will make everyone happier. Seriously, there is no shame in that. Also, if you majored in physics i'd expect you have experience with computers on a highly technical level since you almost certainly know MatLab and several other languages. I don't mean to be a jerk here and i might be totally wrong, but from the framing of your responses and their points i am finding it increasingly unlikely this is true. Be honest man, i'm almost certainly not the only one who noticed this.

I expect that a civilization capable of amassing the incredible resources needed for even "slow" interstellar travel would have any need for the paltry resources of earth,especially considering the low fraction of rare metals on its surface in comparison to the size of its gravity well. I would also suspect that such a civilization would require a centralized community and government to sustain such a massive undertaking. At such a point humanity is valueless as a species save for cultural purposes, unless humans are a marginally more rational or intelligent species (intelligence is different from technological level) however one would expect that factor would also be marginal considering our current rate of AI development.

Fukushima hardly released any significantly dangerous waste at all, there are more deaths total from the solar industry than there are from the nuclear industry due to the incredibly toxic processes involved in making solar panels. The statistics are staggering. Did you know that not a single person has died from radiation poisoning in the US since the first "nuclear reactor" was built by Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago. Also, the death toll from chernobyl was 50, not the million ridiculous media coverage purports.

That's not right. Energy can formulated by finding the area under a force curve with respect to distance (equivalent to a constant force multiplied by the distance over which it acts) and in the case of an object sitting on a table you have an electrostatic force that repels the physical object and the physical table that results from the charges and distribution of those charges in the structure of materials at the atomic and nuclear level, but this repulsion is in equilibrium with gravity by pulling the materials close enough together that the repulsive force between them equals the force of gravity and forms a stable state of equilibrium. In this state of equilibrium the sources of the forces do not move relative to one another and hence there is no* energy input or output. (Nothing is truly physical as we like to think, physical contact is not REALLY possible as we think of it, however the weak force, which has nothing to do with this, can be interpreted as having a finite range which leads to some interesting effects that you may learn about later on in your life) I will however concede that it might be best to interpret the statement by Lukaszenko saying, "you don't need energy to fight gravity" as "you don't need energy to fight gravity in some circumstances, but you do in others" since energy IS required to lift an object against gravity from one height to another. *(more complicated stuff makes this statement somewhat untrue)

Yeah, the problem is in the time-expenditure vs the gain. Currently KSPI hardly incentivizes ISRU at all, and since using He-3 requires you to have the delta-V to send a ship out into Jool AND come back you run into the issue of it costing more than it's worth in terms of gameplay. Adding He-3 to the moon adds a much needed early source of He-3, and allows you to set off for jool using only the reactor that you plan to use there. What I think is the best approach to this is adding a very small concentration of Munar He-3 to the game, and then increase the concentration of He-3 in Jool's atmosphere to provide a progressive and useful gameplay dynamic.

Yeah, umm, I've actually already set it up for myself, but thanks anyways. I was just bringing up a reasonable feature that other people might enjoy. I've noticed that it incentivizes ISRU use INCREDIBLY.

FractalUK and WaveFunctionP, have either of you considered adding Helium-3 to the ISRU mining resources on the Mun? It's far more realistic than Jool aerofiltering (Real-world precedent) and would provide a MUCH needed balance to Helium-3 as a fuel for AIM reactors. Also: Einarr, the Vista engines are Fusion Pulse Propulsion, and as such they don't really have the type of effect you are afraid of, Sure there's a lethal blast of neutron flux in the IMMEDIATE area, but it honestly isn't much more dangerous than the exhaust from your standard rocket engine, since the specific impulse is so much higher. In reality, whatever you use to block the rocket exhaust from a liquid fuel/oxidizer engine ought to be enough for the brief period of time surrounding the launch of a vista engine. There is also actually LESS environmental damage from the Vista engine than a Liquidfuel/oxidizer engine would typically produce, since a Vista engine would release only water when activated in-atmosphere, and no radioactive fallout, whereas a standard rocket engine uses a chemical fuel that is left in atmosphere from the exhaust.

well, i'm specifically referring to tritium DECAY not tritium use. That is a very large amount of decay however. How long are you warping before this happens?

it could be that tritium decay is adding up timewarp decay after-the-fact, but i don't actually know why something like that would happen considering that it ought to be warp-dynamic like everything else is...

it's usually frowned upon to directly copy a written article word for word without adequate citation. You should also try to initiate a discussion, because it isn't clear wat you want to be discussed in this thread. This isn't reddit let me remind you...

That works on a quantum basis, not a relativistic basis

Here is a more recent paper concerning the system, perhaps this is more relevant. This one was presented at the International Astronautical Congress in 2013.

Would it be hard to ask for a legitimate discussion instead of random unbased denials? People claiming it doesn't work because they think the people making it don't understand physics is ultimately just popular hypocrisy.

No it doesn't, modern physics cannot validate the conservation of momentum in relativistic scenarios

The Northwestern Polytechnic Institute in China is VERY highly regarded. I would not doubt in any way that their findings are legitimate. Furthermore the theory paper surrounding the device is sound mathematically, which means that if it doesn't work we have to re consider some aspects of the physics that support its operation.

heh, people complain about this being bullnuggets but the wikipedia article is extremely misleading, in fact the name EmDrive is misleading in and of itself. The EmDrive concept is similar to the Wodward Drive concept in that it involves unequal forces on opposite ends of an oscillating system. However the EmDrive is not actually the result of electromagnetic resonation in a cavity but rather the relativistic effects of resonation in such a cavity. Furthermore the tapered waveguide under the conditions of special relativity allow for a substantial thrust force arising out of the open system consideration that must be applied when considering a relativistic speed resonant fluid (in this case microwave radiation). The theory behind the drive is actually quite solid and contrary to popular belief DOES NOT contradict conservation of momentum under Newtonian mechanics because Newtonian mechanics does not apply when considering an open system. All in all the theory is solid and has been thoroughly tested by a group of chinese researches using the same device the chinese space agency uses to test its ion thrusters. Here is a link to the Chinese research study and here is a link to the theory paper The one foreseeable problem with the EmDrive concept is that it appears to violate 4-momentum, however 4-momentum fails to recognize any form of quantum relativity and as such it is questionable whether it is actually violated or not.

Has ORS been configured for asteroid resource values? And if it hasn't, is it in planning? I've been creating a private tech tree and resource system that utilizes TAC, KSPI, and EPL with extreme limits for a more challenging gameplay experience (KSP is to easy as it is...) and I am planning to add Iridium, ferromagnetic minerals, and Platinum-Group metals (the last one for catalytic and electrical purposes, the first two for active and passive radiation shielding)

What is the purpose of the deuterium-tritium cryogenic container? It seems to lack any use as of right now...