p1t1o

Precisely

Not sure if this makes sense. For starters, if you are on a supersonic aircraft, there is no "boom" for you at all. What is the reverse of a sonic boom? Im not sure, something like a shaped charge? - emit a planar shockwave from the inner surface of a giant cone, shockwaves meet at the axis and propel an object to the speed of sound at the shock apex?

@ZooNamedGames @TheEpicSquared Actually I was thinking, a long, horizontal beam, with connectors on both ends right? Join many of therm together, end to end, along the equator. Little bit of jiggery-pokery to squish a few extra beams in to increase the radius, give it a bit of a kick and put it into orbit around Kerbin. Double points if you spin it fast enough to generate a mild artificial gravity on its inner surface. Am I anywhere close? Is that even possible in KSP, whaddya reckon?

Are you thinking what I think you're thinking?

I think that rings true. Its not so depressing though, as instinctive competition and self-interest is a powerful survival mechanism, it sucks to a human mind but we may not have made it this far without it. I think that it may be possible to become civilized enough to overcome it one day, but I do not see that being a small thing.

@tater Sure, sure. Wouldn't need to be any further away then Earth orbit though. Or if we are feeling particularly ambitious, even with infinite money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globus_Cassus

His last tweet, and possible conclusions of suicide: http://gizmodo.com/chris-cornells-last-tweet-shows-just-how-surprising-his-1795324957 My favorite:

A probably unpopular point: with infinite money, there would be significantly less need for space exploration. Want to make the human race survivable? All we need is a moon city. Resources? We can just dig deeper Overpopulation? Theres a million ways you can solve that with infinite money. So the only thing left would be exploration for fun and curiosity, though with infinite money there is no reason not to do both of those things to the MAX. We dont need a colony on Mars. We need a Martian Las Vegas. Or ten.

To think about it another way...with "infinite" money, you can do a lot of things with quite low tech. Want to go to the stars? Build a large, slow generation ship and send 10,000 people. Could be propelled with present-day hydrolox, since we have infinite money, we can make the mass ratio ridiculous. Who cares if it is inefficient? We could straight-up build a full-size domed city on the moon and launch things from there, opening up the solar system. You dont need fancy nuclear engines, anti-gravity, relativistic speeds etc. If you have "infinite" money. Just do it stone-age style and use the extra money to make it comfortable. There certainly isnt any need to make it profitable. Though without a doubt, the best thing to do with infinite money (amongst other things) would be to spend it on research, so we can have star-trek style space travel, but that doesnt wuite seem to be within the spirit of the OP As for questions of speed, I dont think even infinite money could speed things up much, I suppose if you initiated some kind of country or world-wide industrial focus, you could get the components fabricated faster, and physical testing could be done a bit faster, but only by so much. And with infinite money comes larger and more complex projects, so Im still thinking years to decades to get any major space exploration off the ground, so to speak.

There's a well-known method that has been popular for 100s of years, although its popularity is waning in recent years. Its called science. If you defined science as "explaining magic" you'd be pretty much exactly spot-on, without a hint of snarkiness. Obligatory Arthur C. Clarke's 3rd law quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." From which we can grammatically extrapolate: "With sufficiently advanced technology, magic is indistinguishable from science."

One word: Daedalus

"A black body" yes, is a hypothetical totally non-reflecting object. However, "Black body radiation" or what I referred to as "black body signiture" is something everything emits, even a shiny, metallic object. No real object is a perfect "black body" due to material properties such as those you mention for metals. So depending on what an object is made of, it might not have an emission spectra exactly matching "a black body" at its temperature, but its wrong to suggest that a shiny metallic object will only reflect incident radiation and won't emit any of its own IR radiation.

A metallic object will still radiate its black-body signiture, surface finish is of no object, but it will also reflect incident radiation as well (not 100%, some is always absorbed, proportion dependant on material properties). RelatedFunFact: What colour is the sun? Its black. It just glows white/orange because its hot. *** Anyone know anything about the frequencies detected by IR cameras? Is it possible that IR camoflage is working, rather than just blociking IR radiation, by shifting emissions to a frequency not as readily detected by common IR CCDs?

I dont think Ive got the maths to help you - but a ramjet powered drone? Interesting! How are you going to get the drone up to ramjet speeds? How are you testing a stationary ramjet? You built a ramjet that can bend a steel frame?! Impressive! How are you going to maintain remote control over a drone that will be going, like, SUPER fast? Is this thing even going to be legal?

Wow look at that, where'd you get a picture of the internet from outside?

What is wrong with a ball joint? Or I could be missing something because I have no idea what a quaternion or a cardanic suspension is...

It was sarcasm. We didnt get nuked, but we did come too close many times, and we got rid of MAD as soon as it was possible specifically because the risk of nuclear war was too great.

I get this real bad with anything that has J.K.Simmons in it, I always see him as Vernon Schillinger from "Oz". Basically the patriarch of a prison-based white-supremacist/aryan gang, its funny seeing him in sitcoms or as the editor of the daily bugle...

Which as the cold war showed, works totally fine........

Hmmm...and I have a birthday coming up...

smh...Just because the pilot isnt wrestling with the controls to keep from shooting into space, doesn't mean you aren't missing something. Oh well silly me. In the future, it would be convenient to let us know which answers would be relevant, save us some time.

This is not correct. The SR-71 gained aeronautically-significant "lift" from its fraction of orbital velocity and it had to be taken into account whilst flying the aircraft. Sorry if Im late to the party, but the obligatory: This is besides from the fact that a thousand other obvious signs confirm a..."round Earth". Isnt there some forum rule against pseudoscience?

KFC have published a romance novel for (american?) mothers day... https://www.amazon.com/Tender-Wings-Desire-Colonel-Sanders-ebook/dp/B0713XG522/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1493997990&sr=1-1

There was a driver in that!? "If only we had the technology to somehow make this lorry move without a person in it..." "For gods sake man this is 2017 not Buck Rogers in the 31st century, tell you what I'll fly a magical self driving lorry here in my flying car! Now GET IN THE CAB!"

All of known science is a model. This should be taught more, to reduce the proportion of people that think it is ok to point out flaws in the models and because of that, accuse science of being worthless compared to their gut feelings.