StarDestroyer.Net BBS

29. A Terminator would understand that nuclear weapons are likely to be a doomsday option.

I'm just wondering how you get a cloud of free-floating gas in space, without it disappearing in all directions at the speed of sound. Well, I'm also wondering about the precision timing on the launched parts hitting the apogee of their trip at exactly the right time. There's a very small volume of ...

So . . . rifle with attached bayonet used as a poor spear vs. rifle flipped around to serve as a poor two-handed club?

To the tune of Weird Al's "Weasel Stomping Day": Faces filled with joy and cheer; What a magical time of year! Howdy Ho! It's Nazi Punching Day! Put your knuckle dusters on, Be a pugilist paragon. Don't you know it's Nazi Punching Day? All the little girls and boys Love that wonderful crun...

Matterbeam, I would suggest that you get a copy of Kerbal Space Program and play around with it. After you've managed to put things into orbit and get them back, and make things meet up in orbit, you'll understand the problems involved better than you would by just looking at figures and equations. ...

Smaller rockets use less engines and have smaller fuel tanks. They save more than just the mass in fuel. You can even get away with cheap Kerolox designs rather than high-performance Hydrolox. Then . . . why all this fuss about the hypersonic tether catch system? Every iteration of your idea gets m...

The elephant in the room for this idea is that it's all designed around saving rocket fuel. This is a bad idea; rocket fuel is cheap. Rockets are expensive, and traditional rocket launches require building rockets and using them only once. That's why, here in the real world, we see SpaceX focusing o...

I have to grudgingly admit that the Fop sounds like the best bet for holding the kingdom together. I would try to stress to him that he really ought to get the Bureaucrat and the Engineer into high positions and have them work together for the good of the kingdom.

with AIs having far surpassed human capabilities

I ask the AIs to design it for me, obviously. This is too important an effort to accept sub-standard work just to stroke the human ego.

I came closer than I'd like to committing a mass killing myself, back when I was in the Navy and suicidal. I got some help, but I was strongly discouraged from doing so and was punished for it (unofficially, but quite clearly). The US military is NOT doing an adequate job of providing for the mental...

I'm going to need a raft of citations on that. To be honest, this sounds like the sort of wishful thinking where people like to believe that their political preference is an unmitigated benefit with no real tradeoffs (and thus the people who oppose it are either stupid or evil). You might be confus...

It occurs to me we still may need some system to catch welfare cheats, although less extensive. In Japan elderly children keep collecting checks for their parents who went missing years ago. Identity fraud could still be a problem in countries implementing a UBI. 1) If everyone is entitled to get t...

Like, I think the MNU characters in the film itself espoused that, and I think actual audience members and folks here theorized that as well. I was always a little confused about that. The movie never told us that; what we saw was some characters within the movie speculating that it might be the ca...

After thinking about this a bit, I have to agree that remote spectroscopy to look for metabolic byproducts is certainly a feasible approach. If a ship had windows, you might (or might NOT; I don't know enough about how such things work) be able to get a spectroscope reading on the atmosphere inside ...

Oh yes, Star Trek cheats like hell. However, at least for the purpose of this question, I was curious as to what people could come up with that would be physically plausible. I couldn't think of anything that would give good (i.e. reliable and easy to interpret) results, and it seems that no one els...

Someone mentioned Lovecraft, and he's the source of my first, last, and only thought on the subject of this thread:

Joseph Curwen wrote:I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you cannot put downe

I have to admit that I haven't TRIED one, but it's hard for me to imagine that using a Realdoll would be as good an experience as an escort that's doing a good job.

The second part of the question is actually interesting, in that to my knowledge, no one has really TRIED to miniaturize mechanical computers, either digital or analog; once the transistor was invented, mechanical computers had nothing to offer people who needed computations performed. The first com...

You know, I was curious about this and looked up the information and started writing a post where I worked it out, until I noticed that the OP is Archinist again. Archinist, you really, REALLY need to improve your internet research skills. I found the numbers I needed to answer this question on the ...

"Sensors show no life signs aboard the vessel, captain." We've seen it in a dozen different sci-fi works; the skipper wants to know if a spaceship has anyone aboard, so the sensor operator fiddles with their console, maybe looks at some wiggly lines, and confidently reports that there don'...

Hmm, in rainworld, hydro power, of both the mechanical and electric variety, would be plentiful. That's the one up-side, I guess. It would be horrible and lots of people would die, but it would be possible to settle down into a sustainable life. Even if you couldn't grow crops in the rain, you could...

These people who are talking about castration... Really? I mean, if you want kids, but since you were "forced" into marriage, you'll take away your own ability to have kids permanently? Cutting off your nose much? And if you don't want kids, then the statement seems pretty empty Well, fir...

I wouldn't say it's "beyond physical sciences", just at a higher level of abstraction, in the same way that the HTML code for what you're looking at now is a higher level of abstraction than the transistors switching on and off to make the computer work.

Holy crap. I just checked the stats for my home state of Oregon, and while hydro power is our biggest source (yay!) and renewables and nuclear power make up more than half of our power (yay), we're still at 47.2% fossil fuels and 33.7% coal. I had no idea that we were burning that much coal here. Ed...

Isn't "magic" (defined as supernatural, thus outside the laws of physics) outside the realm of logic? Of course not. If "magic" were supernatural and outside the laws of physics, but real , it would have some sort of observable effect (by definition of "real"). For exa...