p1t1o
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Posts posted by p1t1o
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Why hasnt evolution eradicated sleep?
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12 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
We can aerobrake.
Now that would be something to see!
Briefly, before your eyeballs melt.
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3 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
But at least it didn't require Jupiter mining.
Meh, its just another challenge in getting around space quickly-ish.
Lets face it, the OPs specifications of travelling to the nearest star at 0.5c (also with implied stopping at said target) by 2038 (including travel time) is not possible.
All that is left is the currently impossible.
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18 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
Daedalus was by design 4 times slower, 0.12 c. Too weak, too slow.
And the fastest versions of Orion were rated at 0.05-0.08c
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25 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
A rather realistic project.
Did you notice the part about travelling to the nearest star at 0.5c?
Besides, you dont have to follow the design proposal to the letter.
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4 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
OK, let's do it this way.
(Though, it's a little unclear can the nuke energy really be focused in a particular direction like in Orion project.
I've read somewhere that just 6% of its energy was focused in practical tests.)You could Daedalus it if you're willing to spend a handful of decades in R&D.
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1 hour ago, SiriusRocketry said:
Orbital?
Kraftwerk?
WipEout. WipEout is the shnizzle and will always BE the shnizzle. P.E.T.R.O.L from 1995 will always be my favorite.
Dude, P.E.T.R.O.L *is* Orbital
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44 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
<snikt>
Didnt you just prove that a warhead capable of irradiating the crew will certainly destroy the ship?
Having said that, according to project rho (and the US military), you may only need as little as 80Gy to rapidly incapacitate crew.
Either way, you also have to worry about incapacitating the rest of their fleet if you want to get close enough to board with humans. Getting a warhead within 40m is one thing but a boarding craft needs to stop (relatively) and will have its acceleration severely limited by skwishy human payload.
I dont think it would be impossible to capture an enemy ship during combat, but I also think that it would only very, very rarely be a tactical option (eg: last ship standing, damaged/surrendered)
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*in voice of Oprah Winfrey*
6 DAY WEEKEEEEEEEEEEEND!!
EDIT: lol I didnt see that caption on the gif before I posted
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On 6/12/2018 at 5:24 AM, SiriusRocketry said:Talked to my friend about music- he's a total EDM purist and doesn't usually like any other music, let alone talk about it.
He's weird.
I love the way that "EDM" is treated like a niche thing like it hasnt been around for 3 decades and spawned basically every other electronic genre...
..tell him if he isnt listening to Orbital, he knows nothing and should go home.
...and if you really wean to outfreak him, ask him how many Kraftwerk vinyls he owns.
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4 hours ago, kerbiloid said:
So, you have to irradiate its crew and electronics with mass flow of gamma/X-ray, then capture the derelict ship.
Unless they mine or self-destroy it.But most part of its equipment will be just a metal scrap not compatible with your electric inlets and program code, and with diffeing size standards.
Unlikely you can melt the scrap far from the homeworld to make something useful.
A special kind of headache would be its nuclear reactors containing partially spent fuel.But you can try to infiltrate a sabouteur capsule through a hole in the ship hull, and try to capture the electrical stand of their air pumps, switch it off and make them sleep. In zero-G they need it.
If somebody did care a lot about this far perspective.
This is a battleship, it will be hardened against biocidal levels of radiation. Anything that kills the crew, has killed the ship first, wouldnt be much of a spacebattleship otherwise.
I think physically capturing a spacewarship would be exceptionally difficult, this is not naval warfare. Combat may start at 100,000km range, thats a heck of a long gauntlet to run to board a ship which will probably not be alone.
However, hacking it from afar...that may well be an option. Defences against those types of attacks are not proportional to battleship size or lethality or numbers.
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4 hours ago, Cloakedwand72 said:
Has anyone had positive or negative energy from the some parts of the community on other KSP support & fan sites like this one on Facebook? Like on this group over at Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/KerbalSpaceProgram/?ref=br_rs. ? I've been kicked form the group with out reason several times & I asked one simple question then everyone attacked me no physical threats just lasted out at me all high & mighty.
One asks oneself why are they congregating on Facebook rather than at the official forum...
Gaming community fora are a particular kind of thing, I've certainly experienced some hostile forums, the official forum for Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations (a hardcore strategy title) is a nasty place for example, I've even seen the devs themselves chime in. They'd rather tell you to play something else than help with your questions, every question is taken as a criticism of what must be a perfect game (it is very good, possibly the best, but nothing is perfect).
But KSP is one of the most positive forums I've ever been on. A mix of age ranges encourages discussion and knowledge-sharing and there's very little elitism, this is definitely a safe place to ask questions.
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I was reading some movie trivia about "Enter the Dragon" earlier today. Tonight, as I was dozing off, I was half-dreaming about the movie, so Bruce Lee, martial arts and stuff. Then just cheese everywhere. A large block of swiss cheese with holes in it and slices flying everywhere all over everyone trying to martial-arts everywhere. The weirdness of it is what woke me up. Dreams be crazy.
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On 6/6/2018 at 8:37 PM, RealKerbal3x said:When I was small, I used to have dreams about standing in a totally white room next to a red London double-decker bus.
Those were weird.
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On 6/9/2018 at 8:12 AM, Bill Phil said:
What if the plasma torpedo was powered by a nuke? As in the Casaba Howitzer... Although that's more a directed energy beam and not a torpedo.
I think Casaba Howitzer is a Kinetic kill mechanism, and a pure nuke is primarily a radiation flux kill (X-ray, IR, Neutron, take your pick)
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If there is any article written, or video made, that includes word in the description like "TRUTH REVEALED!!!" then I am 100% certain it is BS clickbait. I feel no need to ponder it further, no need to consider any other factors.
And that is a 100% scientifically valid position.
And considering the source material, quite a distasteful example at that.
Thing is, conspiracy
theorieshypotheses are always un-dis-provable. All evidence is subject to forgery, all witness testimony subject to coercion and corruption, and usually everything is covered under a huge blanket of time that has passed. It also helps if you choose something that has the vast majority of physical evidence out of reach, say under a few km of seawater or on the Moon.***
Given the rise of the internet over the last couple of decades, they really need to teach this stuff at schools.
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19 minutes ago, wumpus said:
Occasionally used in Science fiction both hard (Forever War) and of literary importance (Dune). I think (it was a long time ago) that the last battle the main characters in Forever War basically fought as phalanxes or similar tech level (I can't remember why *both* were out of tech). Dune simply assumed a technomagical "forceshield" that stopped bullets and that firing lasers was a bad idea (and to go with the thread it isn't clear that a slow moving plasma would make a shield user's day go very bad indeed. We don't know if the aggregate speed of the plasma would go through the shield or if each atom (which should be moving very fast) would be stopped individually. I suspect it would go through).
Don't assume that once a various tech is "dead" it is gone forever. Phalanxes were revived for medieval warfare as pike squares and lasted into the introduction muskets. Slings are presumably useful for launching grenades (I'd assume early grenades needed to be sufficiently bulky that this was a good idea, and probably used a sling staff), but probably only used by rare special forces as I'd imagine even a relative few soldiers blowing themselves up would cost more in morale than any advantage the sling could bring.
Not quite what I meant, I mean weapons which resemble bows or crossbows, and even have parts which resemble bowstrings or limbs which flex, but which fire energy/plasma/laser bolts.
On a similar note, something which really bothered me - in the Van Helsing movie starring Hugh Jackman, he has a repeating crossbow that works by having a pressurised gas canister re-cock the bow.
Using gas to re-cock the bow instead of just using the gas to directly launch the bolts is a huge waste.
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41 minutes ago, MatterBeam said:
Because a 1MW reactor sitting around Neptune can be worth a 1000MW reactor around Mercury.
I know a 10x energy increase is a lot, but building something around Neptune is a huge price to pay. I would wager that building 10x 100MW powerstations on Earth would be vastly cheaper and easier (and easier to manage) than building a single 1MW station around Neptune.
43 minutes ago, MatterBeam said:Perturbation is compensated for in the same manner used to ensure that the projectiles enter the catcher's mouth accurately: propulsion systems on the projectiles themselves.
The projectiles are rather small and would always burn up in the upper atmosphere because of their high velocity. The Earth is bombarded by thousands of small meteorites every year, only only their dust drifts down to the surface.
Even so, you can position the catcher to be very far away from Earth, and complete the final part of the power transmission using lasers.
I did not see that they would be small enough to burn up, fair enough
This still seems like a lot of hoops to jump through for electricity, especially when we have the Sun right there.
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15 minutes ago, ARS said:
Exactly. On the other hand "blaster" almost never "blast" the target (it's almost always laser gun), despite the name (literally) means "the one who blast" (it does sounds more badass than ray gun, though)
I think I remember my old history teacher at school telling us that the original meaning of "to blast" something was to send it to hell, along with a joke about how that means the archaic insult "Blast you!" is technically more insulting than the modern "xxxx off!" (where "xxxx" is that 4 letter word we cant type here) because we'd all rather do that latter than the former.
So a "blaster" sends the victim to hell, which is quite badass I guess
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18 hours ago, ARS said:
Plasma gun/ rifle (why energy weapon needs rifling?)
Well "Plasma musket" would sound weird
I have an issue with anything "plasma". Plasma is just a hot gas. "Hot gas gun" doesnt sound like a great weapon does it.
A "plasma torpedo" would be substantially less powerful than a nuke. A "Plasma gun" would have terrible penetration characteristics. A "Plasma grenade" would be ooh, several tens of percent more powerful than a conventional one and potentially less powerful than a thermobaric or incendiary grenade.
And Im being really generous in my imagination too, imagining targets exposed to sustained (0s< <1s) temperatures in excess of 1000K and not just an instantaneous release of some compressed ball of hot gas.
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The wreck of the Titanic has been studied quite hard by people who cannot possibly have been involved in a conspiracy. It makes these
theorieshypotheses quite unlikely. -
1 hour ago, VaPaL said:
Wouldn't an asteroid a few AU from Earth get to Earth first than the projectile in the outer solar system? No only due to distances, but the concept of this is that you stop the object and let it fall radially, so v0 = 0m/s while the asteroid is already a lot faster and closer to Earth.
In the inner system, thats where your projectiles are fast enough to have an effect, so thats where you hit it, but you are correct, to make the intercept, you'd have to detect them much farther out than that. I admit I have not thought this all the way through.
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11 minutes ago, YNM said:
Also, what about perturbation ?
Yes I am a little concerned about thousands of weapons of mass destruction wandering through an N-body maze and then arriving quite alarmingly close to my house.
But here's a thought:
Rather than electricity generation, which necessarily means targeting rocks to the vicinity of your home with some regularity...
What if we used these as asteroid defence?
Given a few years notice, any dangerous comet or large asteroid within a few AU of Earth could be pounded with a steady stream of heavy projectiles thrown from the outer system for only a few dVs.
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1 hour ago, ARS said:
<snikt>
Dont forget spacebowandarrows and spacecrossbows and the very rare spacebolas.
Spoileralternatively: laserbowandarrow, lasercrossbow, laserbolas.
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15 minutes ago, sh1pman said:
So where does all that extra energy come from? Do you steal it from the planet’s own orbital energy somehow?
Gravitational potential, like a hydroelectric powerstation.
Like spending 10J to push a penny off the top of the Empire State Building, and harvesting 100J of impact KE at the bottom.
Its "free" in the financial sense, not in the physical sense. Like how solar power is "free".
***
What I want to know is, why would you want to generate electricity in this way and not in some other way?
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24 minutes ago, wumpus said:
This only applies for missiles being fired with the reaction drive. See the "lasers as space weapons" thread to see how badly lasers spread out (at least some of this has to do with the limits of optics). Also note that an LED that has been focused such that light is emitted that only focuses light to within 9 degrees off center is still 99% efficient as a thruster: I doubt the laser can make that up on the LED (although you might pull off some sort of UV laser that a LED can't and get higher "momentum efficiency").
I must have missed that Kzin book, but this is a common trope by now. But really it should only work for "point blank" range for direct damage of the energy output.
Consider putting a 300GW laser on your car and see if its attenuation at range makes anyone feel better
Shower thoughts
in The Lounge
Posted · Edited by p1t1o
What are the risks of not needing sleep? Boredom?