Talk-Polywell.org

Technically the original 6502 was NMOS (as was the unlicensed clone in the Famicom/NES, if I'm not mistaken). The CMOS version was the 65C02, and it fixed a few bugs as well as tossing out the undocumented opcodes in favour of additional "real" opcodes. My experience, such as it is, is wit...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

Is there a type of stellar maser that produces a single peak at ~11 GHz?

That is the big advantage of a NERVA style motor: it really doesn't care what type of "fuel" you push through it, as long as it doesn't interfere with the heating process. Since no one else has mentioned it, I'll just note that this is entirely untrue, for two separate reasons, neither of...

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...