it's interesting how that "question" continues to garner upvotes and there's fewer and fewer percent of downvotes on it every day as its total score increases and it remains linked everywhere on SE as featured
ok asked a question that I've been wondering for a long time now and is now bugging me a lot after seeing "The Expanse", it probably needs lots of healthy criticism to avoid being too broad and opinion-based -- please go ahead and edit if you wish!
@BrianLynch One thing that bugs me in "The Expanse" so far is what happened with all the water in the main belt, especially Ceres itself that might have more water (in the form of ice, but some ought to be liquid with detected geothermal activity) than the Earth itself. Orbital mechanics in it so far seem just complicated enough to give the impression of realism, more than being really well thought through.
And for a series with such a title, a bit too many things happen in close proximity in open space and in crowded places where life is supposed to be harsh and unwelcoming. I got a better impression of the expanse in Lem's Tales of Pirx the Pilot.
But I still watch it tho...
but there is no way to get such angular momentum out of a flyby of small bodies like they depict
I tried to find the tag wiki, and failed. I feel pretty stupid now, after trying to find it by searching trough meta and the help centre for about half an hour. Can somebody give me a link to it? :)
@Hohmannfan go to the main tags page, and then on any of the tags go down to the bottom right corner of its entry and a blue 'edit' link will come up. click there and you are taken to its wiki.
@Hohmannfan Re your question, check for DE-STAR and Philip Lubin's work on it, there's even some pretty good videos with him explaining the concept and what it could be used for. I don't remember anything about its application for Mars but they did for fun calculate how long you'd need a class 5 DE-STAR to point at Pluto to melt it and that worked just fine, so I'm guessing that it shouldn't be a problem for a much, much closer target
I think he mentions that in this presentation, but there are others ... concept works pretty much the same for all these applications tho, from beamed propulsion to planetary defense and terraforming
An orientable energy beam capable of warming a planet, what else could you do with that? The first that comes in mind is "Flight of the dragonfly" by Robert Forward.
Thought this was interesting: "T-3 hours. On a normal Falcon 9 launch, this is point when propellant loading of the first and second stages would normally begin. Of course, with the introduction of the Rapid Propellant Loading Sequence for Falcon 9 v1.2, this will now occur at T-35 minutes."
Tildal and I are due a Bronze tag badge for F-9. Finally crossed the 100 question mar.
@BrianLynch My 8 year old son wants to write a letter to the US Air force to protest their retirement of the A-10. He is a fan. We went to Cradle of Aviation museum in Long Island two weeks ago and saw an A-10 in person. He loved it.
