@weezmgk @catsalad The blue glow is pretty anyway...

@eldadoinquieto @nyrath @jgamble Does look like the sort of take-no-shit thing Judge Dredd might do.

@jayrockin They're also mobile weapons of mass destruction with the capacity to either fry anything not shielded by atmosphere or accelerate hundreds of tons of mass to tens of kilometers per second.
My guess? In the future it will be de rigueur to NEVER set a collision course to any destination; they will be justified in vaporizing you at range without warning if you do.

@nyrath @jgamble @eldadoinquieto I know I've posted this before, but it's still topical:

@synlogic4242 @nyrath @jgamble @pulplibrarian The last 200 miles per hour/ 1000 feet above the ground is the second-hardest part for a reusable rocket barring only reentry heating. For decades we thought only a spaceplane could do it; only a few visionaries looked at vertical landing.
For Starship to fulfill its cadence goals it has to return to its launch site for quick turnaround and relaunch. The chopsticks let the rocket land on the gantry it needs to take off again from.

@GalbinusCaeli @swope @nyrath If it's propeller driven no one is going to call it a missile. In general if it flies more or less straight to its target its a missile; if it maneuvers around hunting for a target its a drone.

@FredKiesche @StefanEJones Strange, but this was not on the perennial round of television holiday classics I saw in the latter 1960s. Was it aired by ABC? Because my home town did not have an ABC affiliate until 1970, so there are distinct gaps in my cultural upbringing.

@Plumbert @nyrath ... thereby producing a creature that combined the worst traits of cats and humans, with none of the good ones.

@isaackuo @nyrath I toyed with the idea of writing a SF story or series of shorts (never made up my mind) based on the premise that every sophont species is insane in its own characteristic way. For humans it was that they believe in a Universal Observer that takes note of everything they do.

@zauberlaus @infobeautiful In QM terms that's the *wavelength* of the particles; just like the lower the energy of a photon is, the larger its wavelength. Some hypotheses of dark matter are that it consists of particles so low energy that their QM wavelength is on the order of light-years. For fundamental particles physical size is a tricky concept; the best that can be said currently is that no discrete extent has been detected for electrons.

@LightFIAR @infobeautiful That would probably be on a Z-axis extending toward and away from the viewer.

@solarphasing WHY did he interpret the Martian travel machines as giant robots?? Complete with eyes and externally held heat ray guns.

@isaackuo @nyrath Oh, it would have flown... after how many weeks behind schedule as the engines were nursemaided? The Shuttle was sold as a cheaper way to get into orbit, but that was ruined by the turnaround time.

@isaackuo @nyrath I can't remember how many times I heard the phrase "cracks in the fuel lines" with reference to the SSME. Shuttle-derived HLLVs would presumably have suffered from the same problem. As for Saturn we would have needed the Space Defense Initiative fifteen years earlier to justify it. As it was the Titan III-C was all the ELV the USA was willing to pay for.

@Viss @catsalad

@leshiaaimee You might find the story of Nick Chopper a.k.a. The Tin Woodsman disturbing.

@arstechnica Down to having nine first stage engines; or is that a functional result of the requirements of powered landing? (maximum thrust takeoff versus minimum thrust landing, plus engine redundancy)

@nyrath Are Starliner and Orion completely different projects or is there commonality between them?

@jdnicoll Yes, and then two planets, Mercury and Mars, have close to the same surface gravity, about 0.39 G; and then several moons have roughly 0.15 G. Some people wonder if for astrophysical reasons surface gravity in our solar system is quantized.

@jdnicoll Surprisingly, gravity at Saturn's cloud tops is about 1G. If some sort of balloon habitat is possible it could literally be "on" Saturn.

Titan is the only moon with halfway decent surface gravity, about equal to Luna's. Rhea's is only a quarter of that, <3% of a G, and all the rest are smaller. Too little gravity to be helpful, enough to be annoying?

ETA: Titan has a dense atmosphere at close to liquid methane temperature; in rapidity of heat loss, colder than Pluto. VERY chilly.