/sci/ - Science & Math

>>4341745
This was seriously considered as a good idea.

How can you not have mad nostalgia for the Cold War?

There was hardly a project or experiment that wanted for funding.

Here's my argument for space exploration/exploitation.

>New heavy lift boosters
>Engineering proposals for better/cheaper ways of lifting things into orbit
>Surveys of Trojan orbit asteroids
>Space based solar power satellite prototype/pilot project
>Manned Mars mission, more probes to finally determine if there is primitive life there
>Plans to begin terraforming Martian atmosphere with engineered microorganisms
>A manned deep space exploration vessel

Sometimes, it takes a government to make investments to create economies of scale when developing/introducing new technologies.

The free market isn't willing to take long-term risks and invest the huge amounts of capital necessary to develop things like:

Heavy lift rockets (it wasn't until the 90's that commercial space launch became a profitable business and even now only the US/EU/Russian space agencies can do true heavy lift)

Intertial confinement fusion (monstrously expensive)

Molten salt reactors (testing reactor design by building a prototype in the 1960's was WAY beyond the means of even the largest corporations, they partnered with government to pave the way)

Nuclear batteries (beta voltaics rock, but they came from government labs)

Fly by light (developed jointly between NASA and private enterprise with generous helpings of government funding)

Dynamically flexible wings (developed by NASA, implemented by Boeing in commercial airliners, extending their service lives-- done with government money as private industry wouldn't build the necessary testbed aircraft without subsidy)

Quiet supersonic aircraft are also a NASA development (which will soon allow titans of capitalist industry to jet about at greater than the speed of sound in supersonic business jets)

>>4053991
Screw diplomatic relations. They're decades behind us and on their last legs.

Let's build some of these mothers (pictured) to take on their ships and jam the hell out of their communications by broadcasting loads of white noise at their home planet along the same frequencies that they're using.

With any luck, the home planet won't know what we did and we can later claim it was an accident. All the while, we should study what debris/wreckage/taken ships we can.

I propose using an enhanced radiation weapon near their "flagship" to take it in-tact so we can get data and reverse engineer it once it cools off.

>>3983194
oh yeah, for the interested parties....

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/realdesigns.php#id--Project_Orion_Battleship

A design like that would need some tweaking and a few additions of modern technology, but the basic design is sound.

>>3963080
Fuck yeah.

I want an Orion battleship. Since it's powered by a drive named for the god of hunting, we'll call it the Artemis Class. The civilian freight/passenger version will be called the Hermes class.

We'll have to tweak the original 1960's design a bit though.
>EM shielding to protect against radiation
>Water storage between outer and inner hull to protect against radiation
>1 MW class FEL's (Free Electron Laser) for point defense
>Heat sinks and radiators
>Heat sinks that can "charge" inflatable decoys
>Supercooled gas to propel "stealth" kinetic kill warheads at planetside or other targets with predictable orbits/courses
>Bridge that can be filled with flurocarbon breathing fluid to protect against g-forces induced by sudden maneuvering or acceleration
>Long counterweight in the nose on a carbon nanotube tether. Once the ship has accelerated and is underway, this can be extended and the ship can be spun to produce artificial gravity.
The above is only for routine interplanetary transit under non-combat conditions.

Those are all the improvements I can imagine for now. It'd be fucking sweet to have a space elevator because then we could (reasonably) construct huge orion-drive ships in orbit.

>>3953462
We're not guessing as to why. All that matters is that /sci/ wants it built and we want to improve on the original design.

I'm also thinking that adding a system of countermeasures would be a good choice. Some kind of small, inflatable thing with a mylar outer shell and very thermally conductive core connected to the shell. The cores are linked to the ship's waste heat management system and ejected when a decoy is needed.

The decoys inflate and give off tons of waste heat for a limited amount of time. The decoys aren't good for forever, and the enemy will figure out they aren't maneuvering pretty quickly, but it might buy our warship some precious time.

>>3953483
Fuck that noise. C'mon! WARSHIPS!
I think a good idea would be to accelerate up to speed, deploy some kind of retractable counter-weight to a faraway distance, then start spinning. Your direction of travel won't change, but you'll still spin. It'll save weight and present you with fewer maintenance troubles.