Well of Souls Forums

If you're worried about keeping track of radioactive substances and similar items, it's actually fairly simple - they very politely announce their presence to all and sundry. Why? Well - they're radioactive, and modern instruments are damn sensitive. Who knows - maybe you could tag certain objects w...

That wouldn't help very much, actually. Trust me. (It would, but only by one or two km/s, at most...)

See, the Moon isn't all that big or fast, all things considered.

At any rate, you're better off reprocessing the spent fuel here on Earth. Lots of useful stuff left in it.

No, you do have to do that. Orbital mechanics is pretty strict. Again, based on the patched-conic approximation (which is a good approximation) you need a lot of delta-V to end up in the Sun. Again, if you look at the sort of trajectory that an object headed into the sun would travel (a very eccentr...

You could probably just impact the waste into the moon if you wanted. It takes much less energy to do that than to put something on a trajectory towards the Sun, trust me. Orbital mechanics. Let's see...for Earth, mu is 398600 km^3/s^2, for the Moon it's 4917, and for the Sun it's 132712440018. The ...

A long while back I saw a comedian on TV who, as part of his routine, mentioned the nuclear waste problem. He suggested giving all Americans an approximately key-sized piece of waste (probably he meant spent fuel) and then just having them lose it somewhere. While that would be a bad idea, he uninte...

I did find some nice, simple campaign rules:

http://firedrake.org/roger/ft/campaignft2.html

Once again, there have been 4X space-based boardgames.

http://billinghurst.spalding.gen.nz/Web ... paign.html

The issue is that none of us have a copy of anything like that and I don't think you could find complete rules online. And the above looks rather complicated.

Our descendants a hundred centuries hence damn well better not be a bunch of primitives who don't know about radiological hazards. At any rate, honestly - in ten thousand years we'll all be dust. We might well all be extinct or unrecognizable by then. So tell me why exactly we're going to all this t...

I didn't mean the fourth-gen reactors when I mentioned proliferation hazard. Incidentally, you could use them to produce weapons material, but you'd need to make significant design changes - I mean, you do get a nice neutron flux. Just put in a way to stick targets in there somehow, cool them, and s...

I think I have a nicely simple way to do it, based on what I posted previously. Terminology: Primary/Industrial Capacity (PC/IC) Primary/Industrial Points (PP/IP) Primary and Industrial Capacity would be built in various locations and represent infrastructure - mines, factories and so on. They would...

Some people cite the proliferation hazard, but restricting civil nuclear power won't do much about proliferation. In the first place, how exactly is the US opening and running more nuclear power plants going to encourage other countries to get nuclear weapons? And how is reprocessing of spent fuel (...

So, more on the economy - I liked the thing about the three types of economic capacity. I'd call them something else, though. The Alliance is probably going to have a market economy - the way to do it would be to somehow abstractly represent the growth of the private sector and then based on that, s...

I should probably get to sleep, but - eh. I bet the component states of the Alliance would have a lot of autonomy. But the Alliance would do things - defense standardization. And they'd run procurement projects and have various organs. They'd collect contributions from member-states - I guess they'd...

I'd personally go with an even simpler model. MIlitary output/military output effectivity. The first being your total military economic output and the second being how much of your actual infrastructure is geared toward military output. a MOE of .2 would mean that only twenty percent of your indust...

*groans* Did actually anyone of you read the title of this thread to its end - "ideas thread" - which means I am just fleshing things out and need input from you. Yeah, I realized shortly after, heh. Well - I guess you're going to have to model several different aspects of the Terran polity. The ec...

This sounds good enough that I decided to register. I'll probably end up regretting this (I'm going to be busy enough as it is for the next month or so) but count me in. That natural sciences/engineering post sounds good. If we have to be characters in addition to portfolio-holders, I think I alread...