Well of Souls Forums

I think people may have too much faith in the reliability of automated systems. Being a programmer and seeing over and over again the endless unexpected ways that systems can fail, I get nervous when people talk about self-driving vehicles. I'd point out that a self-driving car doesn't have to be p...

And bear in mind, they're apparently aiming for a water landing, so if the booster can float long enough and they can slow it down enough, they won't need "proper" landing gear. I'm fairly certain they only plan on doing one water landing, and that's just part of the proving process. Show that it c...

Personally, if you're going for a "space is big" setting, then retractable cable-mounted centrifuges would be worth considering. You can retract them behind armor slabs when you needed to, have them deployed otherwise, and if you're worried about ambushes then you can have them be both armored and ...

usually in sci-fi the box have to be replaced by the slim aerodynamic vessels because of the rule of cool, but the simplicity, brutality, practicality of the box is really what makes it so awesome. Rule of cool and brutal simplicity aren't always mutually exclusive. I'd offer the original star dest...

Aw, and seeing this bumped back up got me all excited. Stupid spambots.

Given that, I can imagine failure modes where you end up with fair amounts of NSW on the ground pooling outside of the tanks. Those failure modes may not be very likely, I'm not especially qualified to say, but they seem at the very least plausible and worth serious study if one were actually build...

Given that, I can imagine failure modes where you end up with fair amounts of NSW on the ground pooling outside of the tanks. Those failure modes may not be very likely, I'm not especially qualified to say, but they seem at the very least plausible and worth serious study if one were actually buildi...

Absalom wrote:Stop it, all you'll achieve is to get him to start debating the definition of "boil".

Well, I've been in agreement with him more often than not through your debates so far, so maybe I'd learn something from that too.

The water is not the moderator, its the medium. As it escapes its not leaving exposed fuel rods as it would in a light water reactor, its taking the salt with it. Thats why I said self moderating. Any reaction that does take place serves to undermine the ongoing reaction. Correct me if I'm wrong, b...

It's a Facebook/browser game, and I was part of the alpha testing group; I didn't play it for very long, because... it's a Facebook game (and therefore targeted at "causal" gamers"), and there wasn't much "there" there. But admittedly I haven't played it in a long time, and it certainly seems that ...

I'd also point out that when you're launching something into orbit, you can't really perfectly guarantee that something won't go freakishly wrong and drop a large metal can practically anywhere. If you're launching things into space, you're accepting that some level of collective risk is permissible.

I don't recall any of the NSWR proposals I've seen stipulating terrestrial launch at all(Edit: This is really poor wording on my part. What I mean to say is, I've never seen a serious proposal that uses a NSWR as a launch vehicle, firing at any point in the atmosphere. If such things exist, please p...

great! so now not only we would have a shield of debris around the planet but we would also have a deadly radioactive dust layer If memory serves the exhaust velocity easily passes solar escape velocity, so as long as it doesn't hit anything major or get trapped in a magnetic field or anything, it ...

I'm as big a fan of NSWRs as anyone, but launching from a populated atmosphere with one seems like sheer insanity. I'd rather try an Orion drive and then do some tests with NSWRs far from anything important. Orion may have its own potential for mess, but at least we've got a lot of practice in makin...

Those updates I mentioned have now come to fruition. anyone who downloaded the tools at their initial posting should check out the updated tools posted today. Lots of improvements have been made to many areas. The updated tools can be found at this link. ATOMIC SPACE TOOLS: Combined orbit toy and sy...

Some more verification on my part has revealed that the math is all right, but the camera is 'under' the solar system instead of 'over' so the systems appear flipped compared to reality. This will be fixed in the future.

Hi again. It's been quite a while since I've been active here, but some of you might recognize me as an old regular, and I still do lurk. Outsider, the level of detail in it's background, and the level of discussion of scientific concepts in the community helped spark a love of harder science fictio...

Count Casimir wrote: Star Wars writers are silly, but not THAT silly.

The Ultra SD is probably a more reasonable and believable warship than the Death Star, so... yeah, I think they are that silly.

Galaxy gun.

There is a potential additional option. That option being that the farseeing is being jammed, and the Umiak have noticed this fact by watching the presumably unusual Loroi actions in this system, but the Umiak themselves are not responsible. Thus by lying Kliktik potentially scares useful informatio...

Wasn't that in part due to an American policy of pulling aces back to train their next crop of pilots rather than keeping them missions to rack up huge kill counts? I don't have any source, just vague recollection, so I could be wrong, but if true it could mean an overall better trained airforce, ev...