Talk-Polywell.org

It was Jupiter IRBMs in Turkey. Atlas, being an ICBM, could hit its targets from much further away.

There are old Atlas and Titan bases scattered all over the continental U.S.; I believe there was something of a fire sale on them a while back.

I don't have a formal education in rocket design, but I should have enough expertise in the general area to figure out something like this. Lemme take a crack at it: What I don't get is how dumping exhaust gas from the turbine preburner into the combustion chamber boosts pressure. It doesn't. But in...

I've got to say, I don't like the idea of calling it Nemesis. In the first place, Nemesis was supposed to be much further out than this thing; its orbital period would be a couple thousand times as long, and instead of perturbing the Kuiper belt to confuse astronomers with Sedna-like objects, it wou...

Apparently he's backing a TWR.

I would take Zubrin's opinion on this with a grain of salt. He seems to have something against VASIMR (probably because it conflicts with his own Mars scheme), and his arguments are overblown. Handwaving based on a tiny Russian reactor from the '70s is disingenuous, especially when studies of potent...

The block buy already covers the capability contract (the subsidy) for more launches than are supplied by the 36-core procurement. Besides, you're forgetting a couple of things - first, we were talking about Atlas*, and Delta is more expensive; second, ULA has other customers, who pay the lower pric...

GIThruster wrote:Those Atlas V's cost $400M

No they don't.

Yeah, at least with a flywheel design it takes significant thrust efficiency to get net power, because the relative speed of the thruster with respect to the generating equipment it's reacting against has to be high enough that F · v (minus losses) exceeds the thruster's input power. I can't imagine...

I think you're confusing the gravitational field with its potential. The field is a vector, yes. The field is the gradient of the potential, which is a scalar. Think of a hill - grade is a vector, but elevation is a scalar. And Mars is much further up the hill than Venus is. It does not matter how y...

siphon Follow that line of thought. To move matter between two points at different potentials, you need to supply the corresponding energy difference, which is path-independent for a conservative force field. The wormhole is part of space; therefore the same considerations apply inside it as outsid...

MMOD = micrometeoroids and orbital debris. Perhaps not the best choice of terminology, since you're probably talking about bigger stuff, but bigger stuff is even rarer. Unless spacecraft traffic increases substantially for some unforeseen reason... I don't know about the idea of having a combination...

10 km/s is a rough estimate of typical launch delta-V; the two days is probably for rendezvous and propellant transfer operations. Delta-V from LEO to EML1 is broadly similar to trans-Mars injection, a little shy of 4 km/s. That paper is not discussing SLS (assuming that's what you meant by SSL); th...

Isn't the decision between high thrust-to-weight and low ISP versus low thrust-to-weight and high ISP the normal design choice you have to make with any kind of rocket engine? For chemical rocket engines, generally that's taken care of with the choice of propellant combination. (The analogy with an...

Also want to point out that subsequent projects to NERVA demonstrated much higher T/W than 1, high enough to SSTO. Wasn't this contingent on ISPs of 1600 or more? I don't know what you're referring to, but I do know that (a) solid-core NTRs can't do 1600 s, and (b) Dumbo was not subsequent to NERVA...

Timberwind was a pebble bed design and had trouble with hot spots. Dumbo might be a better option for future development; same general idea but a structured core.