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Dirty snowballs never looked so good.

That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. That's a pretty obvious side-effect to account for, so why would anyone be testing it in air? It wasn't even designed for that.

It's just that darned exciting. Kinda like the way a forum looks 5 seconds into the New Year.

In the meantime, people who normally don't, are thinking about space, and NASA is getting some extra publicity. Quit complaining.

Who said the Em requires no power? It's a screwed up concept but knowing that a solar sail can be powered either by solar winds, or by a laser, I see no obvious reason this isn't actually possible. In conventional terms, what this is, is the classic cartoon image of a boat with no wind. The solution? Pull out an electric fan, point it at the sail, and watch it go. Of course, in that case, newton's laws kick in, and any wind the fan is blowing, cancels out what hits the sail, and the boat goes nowhere. But in space? Were you to aim a laser on the ship at the solar sail, you could conceivably make it move if the heat generated by the emitter was less than the radiation pressure on the sail. The laser itself won't produce thrust at all (if it did, we'd be using lasers instead of ion drives). The concept should work. It's mostly a question of how efficient it can work. My laser example would require a ridiculous amount of power (which is why we'd fire it from Earth if we ever wanted to use it).

A little advice, don't go completely insane with your first project. Emulate something with simple mechanics first so you can get the hang of the basics. A SimCity clone will be VERY hard for a first game.

Bigdad, this sounds like trouble to me, like "I want to put you in the friendzone, without you realizing it." Maybe I'm being too cynical, but this is what has always happened to me when I got that kind of response.

Skepticism in humanity is likely at an all-time high. It's probably that simple. Hope is now often viewed as an emotion that only idiots have, especially when it flies in the face of logic. The change in attitude towards space travel over the decades is a perfect example. Star Trek was once accepted as a believable future for humanity. These days it's looked at no differently than magic. Perhaps another way of looking at it is, the definition of "too good to be true" has shifted from "news that seems ridiculously good" to "news that doesn't seem to be bad."

Not saying this kind of warfare is bad for humanity, though it could stretch our numbness to conflict even further and become really messed up. But I'm just thinking in terms of being able to write a good story. Seems that 'adventure' is almost synonymous with 'god of the unknown,' where the unknown is a rapidly-shrinking mental sandbox.

'Radiation pressure' was my first thought on what this thing is 'probably' doing in order to get propulsion. Depending on efficiency, it would still be a nice improvement over solar sails.

Random thought, has nobody actually thought of building 'indestructible' archives of knowledge in the event of an electronic catastrophe? There's that "Noah's Ark" bunker full of seeds just in case some major disaster happens and we need to start over. A Hall of Records for teaching people how to quickly redevelop should be a no-brainer. Unless it's assumed that the information would be useless because language may change too drastically by the time anyone has to go read it.

It'll be practical for manned space travel. They just need to install it on a ship that's bigger on the inside. In all seriousness, I hope this isn't another fluke, like the "FTL neutrino" incident.

I've heard water will deflect them sufficiently, though I don't know how much. Presuming you can wrap your gear sufficiently in water-tight bags, you could just sink them to the bottom of a pool or tie a rope around them and leave them in a pond. I've got an urge now to find out what FEMA's opinion on all of this is.

linkxsc I was just looking into the CME issue just the other day, after news of our recent near-miss with a class-X. Seems it's pretty trivial to build your own faraday cage, or at least one that's 'good enough' to protect small electronics. A bit of clever planning and you could park your car inside a combination of cardboard and tinfoil. That's what I "read" anyway, and I'm taking it with a few grains of salt, because I have trouble believing it's really that simple. But if it is, you can then experience the fun of fighting off the crazy looters who are trying to get their hands on the only functional car in the whole town. If nothing else, I'd at least like to construct something that I can toss by hard drives into, along with a few 'survivalist' electronic devices.

I'll listen to pretty much everything but mainstream hiphop. But I'm pretty particular about all of it. A few bands or songs from each genre that I really enjoy. I lean a bit heavy towards metal/rock though. Nightwish Meatloaf Journey Pink Floyd Michael Jackson Sarah Brightman Manowar Queen TSO And for more classical stuff... Phantom of the Opera (Andrew Lloyd Webber) War of the Worlds (Jeff Wayne) James Horner Jerry Goldsmith Those last two are all over my KSP music playlist.

In terms of keeping it relate-able, it doesn't leave much left for writers who want to do futuristic conflicts if they want to use hard science. Not without introducing ultra-convenient plot-hooks (X-class solar flare wipes out all electronic weaponry, we run out of silicon, etc). Heck, not just war, but practically anything. Goonies would've been over with a 5 second cellphone call if it happened today. Pretty scary to think about in some ways. Especially if things continue to degrade. Going way off into speculative territory now, but the possibility of humans becoming completely obsolete is quite real. Even to the point where we might spend most of our time in VR, connected to robotic avatars for recreation, because "outside" has become too toxic. Even if you could plot it, it'd be very unlikely that the asteroid would hit its target though. Large chunks can break off at any moment during reentry, drastically altering its air profile. Cheap space/robots probably stands a good chance at ending warfare, as long as we can build the dream of it. If everything is taken care of by automation, people won't be 'wanting' for much, and that'll do away with most convenient excuses for killing.

Maybe you're doing this from a world perspective, but another infographic that would be interesting would be a handful of the ridiculous and pointless things that exist in government budgets, compared to how much their space programs currently get.

Heh, from what I'm seeing, and this doesn't only apply to space, warfare is about to get EXTREMELY boring as far as the human element is concerned. Computers, computers, robots, more computers, and a few more robots. That's all there's going to be.

Westi, if you're interested in some spacey futuristic 'dogfighting' that 'might' be possible, check out the Descent series. Basically zero-gravity combat in hollowed-out asteroids, with a successor to RCS for maneuvering. Other typical sci-fi elements (lasers, near infinite power, shields, etc) persist but the flight concept is pretty interesting. Always wondered what the game would've been like with persistent vectors.

There was a thread about this in the space lounge already. And I heard they regained control of the sat.

Not much, really. But compared to Capitalism, it incites a stronger sense of unity with fellow humans...

Well if it works like Star Trek transporters, it would HAVE to record ALL information about you and what you're carrying. Even data. Otherwise you could teleport a harddrive but when it arrived, it would suddenly be blank. You could encrypt the data when it gets sent but there's still going to be that doubt about whether or not somebody is poking around. The only alternative is a more magical type of teleportation. Or something that doesn't require 'de/reconstruction' but then that's not really teleportation anymore in the classic scifi sense. It's an artificial wormhole.

Considering a teleporter would have to break you down and store all of your data before sending you to the exit-port, the computer would know the details of everything you were carrying. There wouldn't even be a need for agents. The computer could just NOT reassemble your contraband. You'd pop out the other side wondering what just happened to your cuban cigars.

Isn't nationalism practically a prerequisite for answering the question posed in this thread?

I think my early schooling had astronomy, for no other reason though than the fact that I still have one of my old 'science projects,' a 'map' of the solar system. But then I don't know if I was actually taught it in school or if I read about it at home on my own time. Maybe I was just too young to retain the memory of it? Similarly, I apparently had Bible school when I was a kid, but I have no recollection of any of it. Everything I know of the Bible now is stuff I relearned later in life, or derived from one of the classic films about the subject. But I CAN remember in primary school, that space was pretty popular. A lot of random projects we were given to hone our skills in any particular field of study had something to do with space travel. The shuttle was the epitome of cool and the school took complete advantage of it to keep us engaged. UNTIL the Challenger explosion. Once that happened, space seemed to completely disappear from the classroom.