@Agrippina_Siderea @nyrath Wendell, I'm sure I've read somewhere on Atomic Rockets the story of a future military space ship that's surplus after a war, repurposed as a freighter, abandoned, refurbished and finds a purpose again as a fighting ship.

@korronald That last panel reminds me of the very depressing tragedy "When The Wind Blows".

@nyrath Or if your cargo ship works with modular pods, build/buy/steal some weapons pods, like a semi-trailer truck towing a concealed HIMARS.

@toughsf One thing about boosted-fusion rocket designs is that they don't have to meet breakeven like a pure fusion reactor. If they can produce a x3 gain in output, for a rocket that's worth it.

@daviddlevine At times I'm reduced to opening my browser's html editor and manually removing the ads one by one.

@jes5199 @nyrath The greatest logical flaw in astrology is who could have ever established what particular celestial patterns mean? Especially when western, Indian and Chinese astrology all ascribe completely different interpretations?

@nyrath Hey Winchell, I don't remember if it was your site but somewhere we were discussing what was the largest "tail sitter" rocket in SF? Someone finally came up with the reference to one I'd recalled reading: an alien rocket ship that was **250** miles high, with landing legs diagonally 75 miles apart. "For Love" by Algis Budrys.
https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v20n05_1962-06/page/n1/mode/1up

@timokuemmel The reviewer admitted that he struggled with his nuclear-phobia over the very concept of Orion drive spaceships.

@nyrath Few people realized at the time that the Space Race mostly ended on Oct. 10, 1967. That's when the Outer Space Treaty went into effect, banning nuclear weapons from space or nationalizing territory on other bodies in space. Space would henceforth not directly affect the strategic balance between the USA and USSR. The nail in the coffin was when the USA's only purely military manned space project, Manned Orbiting Laboratory, was cancelled on June 10, 1969

@sjvn Gotta' watch for when killing the crew technically meets the programmed goals.

@tay Why DID they make the battery terminals identical to the sockets they would be plugged into?

@apLundell I'm not so sure. Fictional spaceship interior design often is more geared towards looking cool than dealing with the fact that the crew are locked inside a pressure hull with nowhere to go for over a year. A spaceship has to be it's own little self-contained world; nothing but the distant stars and vacuum outside. 378 days submerged would be a hardship tour for a nuclear sub.

@solarphasing Weird though that he interpreted the Martian travel machines as robots, complete with eyes and tentacles actually holding the heat gun.

@martinvermeer @cuchaz @varx On the corporate level it's about *agency*: the people at the top being able to set an absolute agenda that won't get watered down or filtered by intermediaries. Call centers used to be staffed by humans who were drilled to robotically follow a script with language carefully crafted by the lawyers. Now call centers are actual robots.

@toughsf Question though: does penetration suffer when the projectile exceeds the speed of sound in the target material? My understanding is that e.g. micrometeoroids mostly blast a crater in the surface of what they hit.

I'm no expert but isn't that also the "Klingon disrupter" prop gun?

@adamgreenfield Does this mean that nuclear power is a prime source creator of value?

@steinarb @nyrath "The new design will have the capacity to withstand higher operating temperatures for the reactor core and radiators. This will enable a great reduction in the overall mass of the propulsion unit."

That would be a game-changer if true.

@ttrpgblogs Of course irl there is also predation from the bottom up: parasites and disease organisms.

@isaackuo @Aaron_DeVries Hardly casually; they're investigating a previous expedition being wiped out by an unknown but violent cause.