KSK

I could go for the Monty Python version... "Doom, doom, doom, doom... luvverly doom!" - "I'll 'ave doom, doom, eggs, chips and doom."

Probably, but I wouldn't expect as much and I'd expect buildup to be slower than, for example, with kerosene. Burning a hydrocarbon molecule is not an instant process. To completely oxidise it to carbon dioxide and water you also need to break all the carbon-carbon bonds in the molecule and this is essentially a random process in which your hydrocarbon chain gets fragmented into smaller and smaller pieces. Those pieces don't necessarily get broken down all the way to single carbon units (and oxidised to CO2), so you end up with hydrocarbon fragments building up on the walls of your burner. Eventually this shows up as coking and it's a bigger problem for heavier hydrocarbon fuels (more carbon atoms per molecule), which is one reason why diesel, for example, tends to burn dirtier than gasoline. Conversely, it's less of a problem for lighter hydrocarbons - and methane is the lightest possible hydrocarbon.

Yeah, these jokes are pretty sub-standard.

I love this thread. A one liner turns into a general Lord of the Rings quote-fest - and everybody just gets the reference and joins in!

Honest face huh? Nothing going to go wrong there then. No sirree. Probably got a firm handshake too, unlike that sparkly J.R. PЦTIЙSКI. Nice work with the Top Gun riffs, even if you did have waaaay more fun than is technically healthy with call signs and other linguistic mayhem.

We aint gonna need a bigger boat... Seriously - that is a deeply impressive beast of a ship! I wish the molten-puddle-of-silicon, formerly known as 'your computer', the very best of luck.

I'm not sure it would work. If I remember correctly, the Ulam-Teller mechanism relies on focusing the radiation from a fission explosion into the fusion fuel, triggering the fusion reaction. I'm not sure that a controlled fission reaction (whch I presume you have in mind) would create enough radiation pressure to cause a fusion reaction. You could of course go for a Super Orion type design using small (for certain values of small) hydrogen bombs rather than fission bombs but I'm not sure I'd really describe those as controlled.

I think you just mis-spelled: Doom, doom, doooooom.

Yep - end of April, so a bit before the opening chapters of Whispers. I think we'll chalk that up to great minds thinking alike rather than prescience! Either that or the fact that a USSR themed KSP fic just wouldn't be right without Val in it!

Ahh, that makes more sense. If copies of the film were to be sold, that did sound like it might have made things a bit more complicated in terms of using Squad's IP. Not that it's any business of mine (and I'm sure Scott, Rareden and Nassault would have it covered anyway) but it did raise a mental red flag as a possible spoiler for the project. As it is, all power to those who put their hands in their pockets and helped make this happen, at least on any sort of reasonable timescale. I agree with @benjee10 and @magico13 - this is voluntary patronage of a pair of artists and, provided that said patrons are quite clear about what they're getting into (which I have no reason to think was a problem here), is a good thing. Full disclosure - I did not contribute to the Voyager kickstarter but I have backed other projects through Patreon. Having said that, I've thoroughly enjoyed Nassault and Rareden's shorter works and am very much looking forward to seeing Voyager!

Given the depth that's gone into your Val, I'll take that as a big compliment! She is a bit different to most of my characters and fun to write for that reason. Funny you should mention that... After a bit of a hiatus, the next chapter is getting towards done. Hoping to have it finished, revised and posted by the end of this week but that'll mostly depend on how nuts work gets this week.

As a complete neophyte when it comes to graphic novels, I'd like to give that a try once I'm done with the next chapter of First Flight. I strongly suspect that my minds eye will see further than my ability with pictures can reach, aka 'it'll look awesome in the privacy of my own head - far less so on the actual screen', but we'll see what happens!

Perhaps, but unless I'm missing something, the article made no mention of repurposing current hardware. The closest thing I could find was a mention that Bigelow have been awarded a study contract for a next generation hab module - and that one of their inflatable modules is due to be tested on the ISS. Besides, if ISS hardware reuse is a serious proposal, I have absolutely no doubt that Boeing et al know exactly what they're doing, particularly if building this thing is done under a costs plus contract. Reusing ISS sounds like a lovely money saver, letting them put in a lovely lowball bid. Conveniently that lowball bid also has enormous potential for all sorts of unanticipated problems cropping up, thus lots of lovely cost overruns. And if by some miracle, hardware reuse does actually go smoothly (unlike the farcical efforts at saving money by repurposing Shuttle hardware), then Boeing or whoever can extract the maximum amount of government money for the minimum amount of effort. Total win-win for them. A decent habitation module happening as a result would be a happy side benefit. Edit. This is not meant to disparage the actual people working on the project. I have no doubt that they'll be deeply committed to it and want to see it enable the kind of deep space missions that I think most folks on this forum would want to see too. I just don't think the companies as a whole give much of a rats behind about space exploration except as a previously mentioned method of extracting government money.

Fine. In which case, a friendlier and more productive response (in terms of generating a decent debate) would have been to point that out and then put forward an alternative. Instead I see a lot of point by point shooting down of people's posts and precious little else offered in counter example. Anyhow - I'm done with this thread.

More station parts of any kind would be nice. Some decent IVAs for them would be even better.

Why on earth would we do that? By the time you've bodged, futzed and otherwise compromised your design for the sake of incorporating mismatched technology that was never intended for the purpose and modules that were never intended to be part of anything other than a LEO space station, I'm betting it would have been cheaper, safer and more efficient to have started from scratch. Besides, unless you're seriously intending to dismantle ISS and build it's parts into your new ship, you'd need to build your ISS-a-like parts from scratch in any case. Building a spacecraft out of ISS era parts in The Martian was a nice visual clue that the Ares program was set in the near future. Doing it in real life would be a waste of time and money.

Yes, which is why I included numerous statements to the effect of 'not going to happen but it would be nice if it did.' Did people miss the 'optimistic' part of this thread title? Or did somebody rename it 'post your optimistic ideas about space flight and have them dumped on from a height' whilst I wasn't looking?

If we're being optimistic anyway, lets extend the ISS lifetime. If not, lets put that first point in the past tense and hope that it led to something productive. Regarding space junk, I agree that minimising debris by design is the most sensible option going forward but that doesn't do much about the stuff up there already. Cost effective is difficult to judge but I agree that Commercial Cleanup is unlikely to be profitable, which is why I made it a government program. The idea being to do something useful whilst providing another objective/stimulus to the developing private space sector. On the last point - great, that's one thing I can tick off the list. Now lets scale it up and see what else can be done with it!

Very optimistically? Not going to bother doing this year by year but after 10 years, this would be my wishlist. I'm not fussed about which company or agency does what but I think it's fairly obvious who would be involved for some of these. Commercial crew and commercial cargo to ISS both well established with at least two competitors in each program. NASA gets to keep any savings to plough back into Cool Space Stuff. D-Prize won. Objective - to demonstrate cost effective deorbiting of space junk. Commercial Clean-up established on the same basis as Commercial Crew and Commercial Cargo programs. Orbital refueling demonstrated. First propellant depot established in space. First privately operated space station completed and continuously occupied by paying customers. Lunar Tourist Transporter in operation. Flies free-return trajectories around the Moon (later upgrading to Apollo 8 style lunar orbit flights) before returning to Earth orbit. SABRE engine successfully tested. Work begins on testbed spaceplane. Prototype solar power satellite launched. Maybe some of that isn't terribly glamorous but I'm hoping for something to kickstart the development of orbital infrastructure and a more robust spaceflight industry in general. Actually, that's not quite right - a more diversified spaceflight industry would be a better way of putting it. Probably not going to happen but hey - that's why I called it a wishlist.

It's back! And it keeps getting better. I liked the interaction between Jeb and Bill, the description of the machining centre but mostly I like that you're writing a serious story about a physics glitch. Long may it continue.

You managed to sneak a Roland in there too. He's not missing a couple of fingers is he?

Yeah, sometimes they just go all nineteen on you.

Oh wow. Now that is the way to do an interlude! It sure puts the Empress in a different... light too. Or perhaps that should be a different Light.

I'll take that bet. If we do ever send a crewed vessel to Mars, I say that it won't have a separately rotating habitation section. I think the engineering problems involved in doing so are at least as 'immensely complex' as having the whole vessel spinning and a separately rotating hab section adds all sorts of new and interesting failure modes. Rotational stresses that vary depending on ship location can be calculated ahead of time and the spacecraft and it's components designed with those stresses in mind. Yes, it's complex, especially to this non-engineer, but no more so (I would think) than building any other air or spacecraft. Having large moving parts that need to operate in space for months at a time strike me as a far less reliable proposition. It's space - something will go wrong. Nibb's example of the SARJ problems is particularly appropriate. They were 'just a big bearing in a vacuum'. They weren't supposed to have any problems. They did. Regarding the last point, it would be much easier to dispense with the bearings altogether and just have a tube, pressurised or not.

Sorry, I disagree but it might help if I set out how I envisage this thing looking. Basically, I'm picturing a relatively thin central spine with the engines on one end and hubs for your habitation rings in the middle. The habitation rings are mounted on the hubs - they could be discs, they could be spoked wheels - doesn't matter much for this discussion. Fuel tanks and other ship systems are strung along the spine. Now, the spine is the load bearing bit, so your fuel tanks can be fairly light. As Nibb pointed out, anything capable of getting out a gravity well should be just fine. Fuel slosh might be a problem but as already discussed, there are ways around that problem. The spine needs to be fairly light too but it also needs to be stiff enough to support one or more habitation rings. KSP style wet noodle constructions are right out, especially if your habitation rings are spinning because you'll not want those big spinning rings to be wobbling about. I really don't see why that spine + engines + tanks construction would have a major problem with being spun about it's long axis. If it's stiff enough to support a pair of spinning wheels, it's stiff enough to support being spun itself. The habitation rings are a different matter - they need to be light to minimise the ship's moment of inertia so that you can spin them, or the ship, as easily as possible. On the other hand they also need to be strong enough to withstand their own rotation. But you need to overcome that problem whether you're spinning the whole ship or just spinning the hab rings. Given all of the above, I think that having the entire ship spinning is the easiest, simplest and safest option and quite possibly the lightest given that you don't need the added mass of hab ring bearings or, using your example, counterweight rings. I don't see what advantage having the rings spinning separately from the ship provides and I see a whole lot of problems if anything goes wrong with one of your bearings. So yeah - I'm still with Nibb31 on this one.