... 'no' is a much more interesting answer. ... I guess that's reassuring? ... you were rolling for Full Thrust?...ohhh, right the game. never mind. Stephen...
... OK, a jump line terminates at a distance from a star equal to the EM flux that is the same as the average the Earth gets from Sol and the point has a...
... You might as well assume that the overall density of your ship would be about 1, but why does it matter? Are you calculating drag? ;-) For armor, we...
... It really depends on tech assumptions. The torch consists of a reaction chamber surrounded by a containment structure, plus an ignition system. The...
... I have some notes here http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3f.html#volume which boil down to "damnifiknow". I think Rick Robinson had a WAG that the...
... appropriate ... etc); ... OK, so I have some room to choose what fits best here... ... What would a likely overall density be? ... I'm assuming a design...
First of all, any ideas on how to handwave away the "why haven't we seen them" aspect of writing large inner-system wormholes into a story? My setting has...
... Maybe they are enabled/disabled/created/destroyed by various extremely energetic events. And the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs was enough to send...
Not directly relevant, but are there any guesses at why dark matter (presuming that it exists in the amounts and places predicted) has a different distribution...
... enough to ... begins when ... I don't like the asteroid thing, but the general idea of Sol having no links at first and then having one form at some point...
... (presuming that it exists in the amounts and places predicted) has a different distribution to ordinary matter? It's basically friction that causes...
... It just doesn't stick together so it's only held together by gravity. Bits of dust can bounce off of each other and then radiate out the energy in order to...
... Yes, though not as much disrepute as Spengler. Be that as it may, using a questionable historical theory to craft an SF future history is much better than...
http://www.molvray.com/sf/aliens.htm Not all social groupings are likely to lead to intelligence. Whenever food is ridiculously easy to find, as for...
... Almost past disrepute now, perhaps, to simply forgotten. I think I read somewhere that some younger historians have given him a second look - the...
... Yes. That's based on present-day aircraft such as the 747, as representing broadly what you get for a strong, lightweight structure designed to enclose a...
... Well, you want to know overall density to know the relationship of ship mass to dimensions. But an average density near 1 is very high for vehicles that...
... This is going to severely depend upon what you're using for fuel/propellant. I tend to favor nuclear bombs with a high Uranium 238 content. Compactness...
... structure ... Note that a loaded passenger aircraft like a 747 is much less dense than a loaded bomber like a B-52. This is because a payload of bombs is...
... I strap the tankage alongside the pylon, forward of the radiator fins (see the illo on my blog; though the styling is retro, the basic design of the...
... Well, yes. A Toynbee generator is an interesting model to think about. It will have two basic subroutines, one for handling growing civilizations (meaning...
... I meta-handwave that. My argument is brutally simple: so long as you need thousands of tons of armor for passenger ships, there will be no large-scale...
... That depends heavily on life support assumptions. Any ship using mass-based shielding will have crew quarters that are small and often rather dense. ... ...
