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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 21, 2016 11:43:47 GMT
It always amuses me when Thomas Hobbes' dead ass gets invoked as the reason why the fancy million year spaceship ideas won't work as opposed to stuff like "You're expecting a human-engineered system to last over a thousand years on automated operation while babysitting a bunch of human popsicles" but I guess that's one of those easily handwaved engineering problems I hear so much about who is Thomas Hobbes and how is he relevant to cryosleep ships? On the off chance you haven't looked him up - English political philosopher of the Early Modern period, who lived in the shadow of the English Civil War and associated chaos. The central thrust of his work is the idea that, left to their own devices, people will naturally fall into viciousness and chaos (the 'state of nature' for the purposes of his work), which sourced a great number of quotations that still see usage (the ones mentioned above, the war of all against all, etc). The only solution is, in his model, for people to subordinate their freedom of action to an agreed-upon means of arbitration, so we have a way of resolving disputes we all agree on without anyone getting brained with a club - he reccomends an absolute monarch, as it minimizes (in theory) the risk for that authority to become divided against itself and fail. This then creates a serious problem for international relations, as there isn't one of those on the scale of nations. Even if everyone in the kingdom really does embrace the rule of (the same) law, you still have all those other kingdoms, and so you'll fall into that state of war and anarchy in the grand scheme even if the individual pieces are ordered. It would be the logical thing, then, for all the nations to agree on a ruler to prevent that. I'm sure they'll get right to it. That's his model, anyway. It's a subject of debate, like most famous philosophers. Personally, I think his argument is interesting, but (deliberately) overstated and over-universalized, and so getting too excited about its implications is a bit silly. Opinions vary. I leave the comparison between his model and your response to the lockstep scenario for you to evaluate the merits of.
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 21, 2016 11:28:19 GMT
These guys used destructive geo-engineering as a weapon of war, on the planet that they were living on at the time. The odds of them holding to environmental protections in the face of economic and strategic utility is basically zero. Well, I guess that the CoaDE solar system is probably pretty doomed one, especially that Titan is in the hands of those who destroyed Earth's biosphere. I am pretty sure that life on Titan, if they do exist, would have a really, really terrible life. Yeah, the people of this setting... well, they grab the idiot ball, and make their absolute best effort to squeeze it straight past "too dumb to live" and into the marvelous atomic explosion of "too dumb for anything in their area of influence to live".
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 21, 2016 6:01:57 GMT
The capital cost for farming methane from rich deposits (For example... Titan) is multiple orders of magnitude less than trying to suck hydrogen out of a gas giant. Until Titan got announced to be a wonder of nature in year 2200... These guys used destructive geo-engineering as a weapon of war, on the planet that they were living on at the time. The odds of them holding to environmental protections in the face of economic and strategic utility is basically zero.
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 21, 2016 0:01:29 GMT
Hmm. I recall reading an article (on SciAm, I think, so I really should check another source) explaining how a 5% deformation in the airframe could lead to the total destruction of the aircraft during high supersonic flight. That doesn't really sound equivalent? 5% deformation of most precision machinery would cause disaster, but that's not what's usually is being talked about in terms of safety margins, is it?
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 20, 2016 23:40:22 GMT
It's much denser, therefore easier to transport affordably.
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 20, 2016 8:00:44 GMT
How much? I've been able to squeeze 90%+ efficiency out of both stages, at least at the pedestrian 200 MW of my main model (only 80/95 on my 600kW baby model).
Setting aside the output change, it sounded from upthread like the net effect is halving the required size of mirror for a given performance. So if you can get high efficiency at your chosen outputs and specifics, little reason not to do it.
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 20, 2016 6:59:49 GMT
Well, it's the usual false economy of cutting orders of things you've already paid the development money on. That money's in the hole, you might as well get three dozen planes rather than three.
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 20, 2016 1:15:37 GMT
That would be good - and I'd honestly like an automatic start in at 5 seconds (current rel. vel.) prior to entering range, so that you have time to get guns pointed, or start a dodge, even in high-speed passes.
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 19, 2016 20:53:10 GMT
Is that with 10 gigawatts in, or 10 gigawatts out?
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 19, 2016 20:42:39 GMT
I was mostly doing it for the cheap volume fill, trying to get as much of the surface covered in laser-resistant materials as I could, as they pop conventional guns like noone's business, and I can't just wrap the barrel in a half-centimeter of Aramid, so I tried for the next best option. Really, though, I just want to limit the heating on something with quarter-kilos of TNT being placed in it several times per second as much as possible. And look like an adorable death star.
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 19, 2016 9:07:50 GMT
do you have a screenshot of a working sabot cannon? The graphite-gel is still being experimented with, the gun is combat tested against conventional craft but fails hard against serious electromagnetic weapons, as one would expect. Honestly, the gel is there in large part because it's an adorable little death star, but was inspired by the reports that having gimbal 'armor' thick enough to cover rocket injectors improved their nuke tolerance.
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 19, 2016 7:53:54 GMT
I'd assume the big draw, aside from being able to say that your death laser is frequency quadrupled into the nUV range, is extending the range at which you can reach that threshold intensity, rather than improving drill rate within range.
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 19, 2016 7:51:38 GMT
All the payload armatures seem (?) to disappear after launch, as near as I can tell, at least in prior versions. Haven't been zooming in on little 10-gram slugs to see if they have a gram-weight, ten centimeter disc of plastic on the back, though.
Either way, they play merry hell on foes if they can get into range, which suits me just fine.
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 19, 2016 7:48:43 GMT
I would definitely like this. Honestly, I'd want to see pump-only / cold-gas options as well.
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Post by cuddlefish on Dec 19, 2016 5:30:11 GMT
The radiation level, my god. Are you sure people won't get fried just from standing close to it? I can minimize the Radiation level by reducing reactor cross section (which will require about 50-100 kg more control rods) but there's no point when Lithium-6 is so good at catching neutrons. I wonder what the service life of a Lithium shield looks like when it's facing up to that much neutron radiation...
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