Yeah, that the Nordic countries' prison systems for you;) Remember the whole "Iceland jailed its bankers" meme? (actually they only got the real egregious fraudsters, but that's neither here nor there). Here's where they went to jail. There's no fences. They even went out for ice cream at one point recently. No need to do that any more, though, as the government recently changed the law to let them out early.
Some googling suggests that AY-102 is in fact high level waste, targeted for vitrification for ultimate disposal as HLV.
That said, this hype (which, by the way is what one would expect from the sources, a local news station and the Russian propaganda outlet RT) is totally unjustified. And then the Slashdot story makes it even worse, turning 3500 gallons into 35000 gallons.
It's 3000-3500 gallons, leaked from the interior tank into the exterior tank. That's it. It's a known issue that's been around for quite some time - not just since March. And the double hull is doing its job - catching the contents of the inner tank in the event of a leak.
They do need to get the stuff out of there - there is no third hull, and the outer hull doesn't have the air scrubbing of the inner hull. But that's underway.
I did not miss it. Do you have some information that would imply that there is something specific about Florida that makes launching there all of the sudden so much more economical than what they'll have in Texas.
What would lead you to believe that their operational costs would be the same everywhere?
They're renting facilities from NASA. Even from what is public we've seen significant events in that regard, including NASA approval for ground landings, relaxing of contracting requirements, etc. They're using a different drone ship now. And there's thousands of other factors that affect everything, some of which can't have been predicted in advance, others of which can readily shift - from local fuel costs to port fees to local taxes to crane rental costs and on and on ad nauseum.
It's ridiculous to assume that all costs for everything are going to be A) fixed in price, and B) equal in every location, and C) that plans never become overtaken by changing operational environments due to external factors.
The same reason they would build a site in Texas to start with, increasing launch capability to make more money. If launch economics are even better
Did you miss the "in Florida" part of what I wrote concerning the potential of improved economics? Or are you under the impression that the economics of every activity are identical at every site on Earth?
Google Books is not a "short-term public benefit", it's a real tangible benefit to the public. I can't tell you how many times I've found important information from Google Books on scientific topics that I otherwise wouldn't have had ready access to - even though interspersed by blank pages. I can always buy the book if I want the additional information in the missing pages - but the key point being, I would never have known that the book existed and provided the information I was looking for had it not been scanned, indexed, and shown up in Google searches.
Actually, things have indeed changed. They're using a different landing platform in the Atlantic, they have been granted limited landing permission, some of the government contracting barriers have been removed, etc. And I'm sure there's a lot of things have changed that aren't readily visible to external observers.
Why would improved launch economics in Florida justify accelerating the site in Texas?
Hence you're complaining about plotting, not worldbuilding.
In case you didn't notice, I was praising the worldbuilding, not the plot aspects. I find a number of aspects of the plot worthy of criticism. Its unoriginality, but in particular its unoriginality in regards to a rather insulting trope, is most definitely one of them.
Or situations changed. Perhaps upfront they were planning to spend more by reinforcing with concrete pylons, and discovered this cheaper situation after the fact. Or perhaps they found they were getting better economics operating out of Florida than they expected and the Texas site became a lower priority. Or a whole host of other things.
. Seeing as Sully's Na'vi clone has the same ability even though his human brain wouldn't be able to translate the tail communications.
The translation is done by a hair-lined nerve cluster on the back of the head; it's not a conscious effort. Yes, they need to be integrated with it as much as they need to be integrated with the rest of their body.
Then there's the fact that it made ZERO sense for the humans to go after the largest deposit initially given the giant floating chunks lying around.
You're of the view that it would have been easier to mine while flying?
Not to mention the weapon design was completely fucking awful.
What weapon are you referring to, out of curiosity?
Ironically, the most emotional moment in the movie was apparently accidental - the destruction of Home Tree. Lots of reviews mentioned how much it reminded them of the collapse of the Twin Towers, and how that brought back memories for them. But apparently (or at least ostensibly) that wasn't the intent - it was just an emergent consequence of how large structures burn, how smoke rises off them, how they collapse, what they kick into the air, what they leave behind, etc.
What broke immersion for me was that they had the technology to mind link a crippled guy to a fully genetically engineered hybrid alien, but couldn't trivially do the same for the dude's legs.
Huh?
Did you miss the whole fundamental plot point that the reason that he was spying for the military was so that the military would pay for precisely that?
It's not a "Hate Whitey" plot so much as a "White Guy Comes In And Saves The Natives" plot, which IMHO is the more insulting of the two. They can't save themselves, but G.I. Joe here can come in, learn how they live, and then do "native stuff" better than them and save their whole tribe in the process, being received as their great savior and leader.
Avatar has been rather unfairly maligned, IMHO. Yes, they did some copouts - most notably:
* Making the na'vi more humanlike than the earlier concepts so that audiences would emphasize with them more
* The "white man comes in and saves the natives" plot aspect
But the depth that Cameron went into for the backstory - most of which never showed up in the movie - was impressive. Including something that viewers made fun of about the movie - the term "unobtanium". In the Avatar universe, science had continually been frustrated by all of the potential technologies that could be achieved with a good room-temperature superconductor; long before it was discovered on Pandora, they had jokingly taken to calling the concept unobtanium. When it was actually discovered, the name stuck, reinforced by the difficulty of actually getting it back.
For the biology, Cameron brought a botanist who developed evolutionary trees, developed the mechanism for plant communication, and advised the crew on how botanists would go about studying the environment. For the Na'vi language they brought in a linguist from USC. The Venture Star was based on the Valkyrie interstellar spacecraft concept. And on and on. The level of detail that they went into was impressive, such as how being on a moon orbiting a gas giant would cause unusual color changes over the course of a day, and the effects that this would have on the indigenous populations' culture.
In the backstory to the Avatar universe, the moon quickly gathered scientists' attention because of its abnormally intense magnetic field. Unobtanium is a room-temperature superconductor. Superconductors become flux-pinned in magnetic fields, so floating islands are actually a natural repercussion of such an environment. With plants growing in an environment where they can readily incorporate a superconductor into their biology, extensive usage of electrical messaging between cells would be a very natural evolutionary adaptation. Here on Earth, plants communicate between each other with far lower bandwidth messaging mechanisms available to them, such as pheromones (for example, acacia trees signal to others when they're being eaten so that they can produce more bitter/toxic compounds). The concept that an emergent inter-plant neural network could occur would be not at all unrealistic in such an environment. And if plants have evolved such a network, then it would be to animals' advantages to evolve to tap into it as well - to manipulate it, to gather information, to call for mates over long distances, etc.
I think they did some excellent worldbuilding, but it was poorly served by a lot of poor decisions in the scriptwriting. Even the general plot could have been fine if they had handled it better. Examples:
* Why should a bond between animals be one-way, with the animal becoming basically just a servant of the Na'vi? It would have been interesting if the na'vi riding it became more like the animal as well, taking on the animal's interests as well. If the bonds tend to be characterized by one dominating the other, then why should the Na'vi inherently be at the top of the chain? Surely there would be manipulative parasites, for example. Perhaps the toruk is so dangerous to bond with because it convinces its rider to give up and be eaten.
* They could have had Sully at least *try* to use the Na'vi language more. Maybe this "slow student" won't be giving speeches, but after all this time, he hardly seems to put forth the effort, just an occasional word here and there - yet that doesn't seem to bother anyone much. I know, I get it, it's easier for the audience to hear English than read subtitles....
* Part of the problem with the "white man saves the day" plot is that it's insulting to indiginous peoples, that they can't save themselves and need some white savior who simultaneously assauges "white guilt". But they didn't have to go this way. They could have merely taken an easy copout and not cast
Haha, reminds me of when I was coding for a LP MUD. I ended up getting into a sort of "wizard battle" with other coders... one person would make a "dest" (kick you off the server) tool, the other would write a tool to counter it, the other would write a tool to counter that, and so forth. It gets complicated fast. Anyway, I was trying out a new tool and due to a bug it thought I was attacking myself, and dested me in response and then fell on the floor. It then proceeded to dest anyone else in the room on sight. Said room just happened to be the login room, so nobody could log back in - and the person who had access to the server for a reboot was rarely available.
Not good! However, from my FTP access I was able to determine that there was still one coder logged on, in a different room and blissfully unaware of what had transpired, still actively uploading and changing files. But I had no way to contact him. However, I noticed that I had write access to the directory where he was modifying files, so I created a file with a name like "AMMON - DO NOT LOG OFF OR GO TO THE LOGIN ROOM - PLEASE READ ME.txt", with a summary of the problem and the solution to fix it. About 20 minutes later he noticed the file, destroyed my buggy object, and everyone could log back on.
All I can say is that I'm glad it happened with that version of the object, because the next version I had been planning to make was going to try to counter attempts to hide from the player search function by means of rapidly teleporting from room to room and object to object, looking for characteristics that matched the target - a sort of hunter-killer drone. Needless to say, that version got cancelled;)
When I was just learning Linux, a friend told me the trick for playing wav files by running "dd if=/path/file.wav of=/dev/dsp". Neat, I thought! But I didn't try it out right away, and by the time I did I didn't remember the name of the sound device. "But that's easy," I thought, "I just want the first sound device, so sda, right?" "dd if=/path/file.wav of=/dev/sda"...
Yeah, that wasn't a good day...
For most people back then it wouldn't have been that bad because that was pre-SATA and most people used IDE drives (/dev/hd*). But lucky me, I had a Seagate Cheetah which I was very proud of (10k RPM, wow!), and so had all my most important files on it... :
This sort of thing is what one should expect when you start breaking down categories.
Initially fats were all one category. "Apparently fats are bad - stop eating so much fat." Okay. Then different categories of fats were studied. "Apparently saturated fats are bad, other fats not as bad." Okay. Then different types of those were studied. "Apparently monounsaturated fats are pretty good, but when polyunsaturated are concerned, most people get too much omega-6 and not enough omega-3 - and that can be as bad as too much saturated" Okay, this is getting complicated.... Then it keeps going: "Well, when you compare gamma lineolic acid to arachidonic acid...." Stop!
It's not that the earlier data was wrong. It was just categorically too broad. Even knowing statistics about individual chemicals isn't (ideally) enough, because the effects can vary depending on who eats it and how they eat. For example, potatoes: it's a little known fact that letting many types of starches cool (rice, potatoes, pasta) converts readily digestible starches into resistant starches, significantly reducing their caloric content and glycemic load. Or that eating iron-rich foods in many small servings over the course of a day yields significantly more iron absorption than eating the same amount all at once in a single serving. Etc. It's relatively straightforward to gather health data for foods, but often very hard to turn that into "universal recommendations".
The odds that a Slashdot reader will suggest quantum entanglement as a communications approach approaches 1 as a space-related thread grows;)
There are people discussing the issue in the comments section on the Starshot page. For my two cents: given the described craft, which is to have a very flat sail and very high pointing accuracy.... it's really simple. You have a ~100GW class laser on Earth as a fundamental requirement of the proposal. Point it at your craft and fire. Even at those distances, the reflected light will be vastly more than such a tiny "chip" on the sail could ever possibly produce. As for how to modulate the signal, again, that's not tricky. Put a tiny piezoelectric vibrator in your chip. Even tiny vibrations will throw off the phase and particularly the pointing accuracy of the sail. If the vibrations aren't self-damping the you can use active damping to cancel them out.
When I first heard about this concept, my reaction was mostly "keep dreaming". But actually it's starting to sound more plausible (if they can work out the sail and nanoprobe, that is). For example, the lasers. 1TJ at 20% net system efficiency and industrial power rates of $0,05/kWh is only $70k. There's nothing unaffordable about that - even if your costs work out to be dramatically higher it would still be quite reasonable. But what about storing and then discharging such vast amounts of power? No need - use a chemical laser and store the feedstocks. Chemical lasers also give you the highest power outputs anyway because they discharge their heat in the exhaust, like rocket engines.
In particular, I'm looking at something like COIL. Discharge into water to recover the iodine as iodic acid, then recover elemental iodine from that through dehydraton followed by reaction with carbon monoxide. Elemental iodine is solid, so you can store it in a big pile if you wanted. The other side of the laser involves creating excited oxygen. COIL does it by reacting a mixture of hydrogen peroxide (produced by the anthraquinone process from hydrogen and water) and KOH with Cl2 (KOH and Cl2 produced from the resultant KCl by the chloralkali process). But alternative reactions might allow for lower capital cost storage, particularly in terms of avoiding Cl2 tankage. But if we assume that a traditional COIL approach is used, then what you need to drive the regenerative processes are carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and electricity. It just so happens that those are the three things you get from the partial oxidation of methane (aka natural gas) driving generator. Natural gas being the cheapest available fuel source in many areas.
Total stored feedstock mass for the laser should be on the order of several hundred tonnes. The most expensive chemical involved by far is elemental iodine, which is $30/kg. So no capital cost problem there. So it just comes down to the capital costs on the lasers and associated optics hardware.
Really, I'm not seeing any roadblocks in this regard.
That's one thing Tesla has been well respected by customers for, which is going above and beyond when it comes to upgrades and recalls. They kind of have to, though - critics are going to keep holding them to a higher standard because they're A) a new company, and B) selling a very different product.
The Soviets' didn't explore much outside of Venus and the Moon (their Mars program was rather ill-fated... though at least they tried; they didn't even try outside the orbit of Mars). But their efforts concerning Venus really were admirable; they had some failures but overall they proved that exploration of Venus is quite doable, and gathered most of the data that we have today.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that the Nordic countries' prison systems for you ;) Remember the whole "Iceland jailed its bankers" meme? (actually they only got the real egregious fraudsters, but that's neither here nor there). Here's where they went to jail. There's no fences. They even went out for ice cream at one point recently. No need to do that any more, though, as the government recently changed the law to let them out early.
Not necessarily. The stuff is self-heating, it steams off on its own.
Some googling suggests that AY-102 is in fact high level waste, targeted for vitrification for ultimate disposal as HLV.
That said, this hype (which, by the way is what one would expect from the sources, a local news station and the Russian propaganda outlet RT) is totally unjustified. And then the Slashdot story makes it even worse, turning 3500 gallons into 35000 gallons.
It's 3000-3500 gallons, leaked from the interior tank into the exterior tank. That's it. It's a known issue that's been around for quite some time - not just since March. And the double hull is doing its job - catching the contents of the inner tank in the event of a leak.
They do need to get the stuff out of there - there is no third hull, and the outer hull doesn't have the air scrubbing of the inner hull. But that's underway.
What would lead you to believe that their operational costs would be the same everywhere?
They're renting facilities from NASA. Even from what is public we've seen significant events in that regard, including NASA approval for ground landings, relaxing of contracting requirements, etc. They're using a different drone ship now. And there's thousands of other factors that affect everything, some of which can't have been predicted in advance, others of which can readily shift - from local fuel costs to port fees to local taxes to crane rental costs and on and on ad nauseum.
It's ridiculous to assume that all costs for everything are going to be A) fixed in price, and B) equal in every location, and C) that plans never become overtaken by changing operational environments due to external factors.
It's not at all about "looks". Please go back and read my original post.
Did you miss the "in Florida" part of what I wrote concerning the potential of improved economics? Or are you under the impression that the economics of every activity are identical at every site on Earth?
Google Books is not a "short-term public benefit", it's a real tangible benefit to the public. I can't tell you how many times I've found important information from Google Books on scientific topics that I otherwise wouldn't have had ready access to - even though interspersed by blank pages. I can always buy the book if I want the additional information in the missing pages - but the key point being, I would never have known that the book existed and provided the information I was looking for had it not been scanned, indexed, and shown up in Google searches.
Actually, things have indeed changed. They're using a different landing platform in the Atlantic, they have been granted limited landing permission, some of the government contracting barriers have been removed, etc. And I'm sure there's a lot of things have changed that aren't readily visible to external observers.
Why would improved launch economics in Florida justify accelerating the site in Texas?
Hence you're complaining about plotting, not worldbuilding.
In case you didn't notice, I was praising the worldbuilding, not the plot aspects. I find a number of aspects of the plot worthy of criticism. Its unoriginality, but in particular its unoriginality in regards to a rather insulting trope, is most definitely one of them.
I must have missed the part about room-temperature superconductors in Pocahontas. I think I was also in the bathroom for the interstellar travel bit.
And NASA is famous for performing on schedule by comparison?
Perhaps you meant to write "the whole space industry is notorious for underperforming on schedule".
Or situations changed. Perhaps upfront they were planning to spend more by reinforcing with concrete pylons, and discovered this cheaper situation after the fact. Or perhaps they found they were getting better economics operating out of Florida than they expected and the Texas site became a lower priority. Or a whole host of other things.
And Ariane costs $10k/kg. This is who you want SpaceX to mimic?
The translation is done by a hair-lined nerve cluster on the back of the head; it's not a conscious effort. Yes, they need to be integrated with it as much as they need to be integrated with the rest of their body.
You're of the view that it would have been easier to mine while flying?
What weapon are you referring to, out of curiosity?
Ironically, the most emotional moment in the movie was apparently accidental - the destruction of Home Tree. Lots of reviews mentioned how much it reminded them of the collapse of the Twin Towers, and how that brought back memories for them. But apparently (or at least ostensibly) that wasn't the intent - it was just an emergent consequence of how large structures burn, how smoke rises off them, how they collapse, what they kick into the air, what they leave behind, etc.
Huh?
Did you miss the whole fundamental plot point that the reason that he was spying for the military was so that the military would pay for precisely that?
Were you sleeping through the movie or something?
It's not a "Hate Whitey" plot so much as a "White Guy Comes In And Saves The Natives" plot, which IMHO is the more insulting of the two. They can't save themselves, but G.I. Joe here can come in, learn how they live, and then do "native stuff" better than them and save their whole tribe in the process, being received as their great savior and leader.
Avatar has been rather unfairly maligned, IMHO. Yes, they did some copouts - most notably:
* Making the na'vi more humanlike than the earlier concepts so that audiences would emphasize with them more
* The "white man comes in and saves the natives" plot aspect
But the depth that Cameron went into for the backstory - most of which never showed up in the movie - was impressive. Including something that viewers made fun of about the movie - the term "unobtanium". In the Avatar universe, science had continually been frustrated by all of the potential technologies that could be achieved with a good room-temperature superconductor; long before it was discovered on Pandora, they had jokingly taken to calling the concept unobtanium. When it was actually discovered, the name stuck, reinforced by the difficulty of actually getting it back.
For the biology, Cameron brought a botanist who developed evolutionary trees, developed the mechanism for plant communication, and advised the crew on how botanists would go about studying the environment. For the Na'vi language they brought in a linguist from USC. The Venture Star was based on the Valkyrie interstellar spacecraft concept. And on and on. The level of detail that they went into was impressive, such as how being on a moon orbiting a gas giant would cause unusual color changes over the course of a day, and the effects that this would have on the indigenous populations' culture.
In the backstory to the Avatar universe, the moon quickly gathered scientists' attention because of its abnormally intense magnetic field. Unobtanium is a room-temperature superconductor. Superconductors become flux-pinned in magnetic fields, so floating islands are actually a natural repercussion of such an environment. With plants growing in an environment where they can readily incorporate a superconductor into their biology, extensive usage of electrical messaging between cells would be a very natural evolutionary adaptation. Here on Earth, plants communicate between each other with far lower bandwidth messaging mechanisms available to them, such as pheromones (for example, acacia trees signal to others when they're being eaten so that they can produce more bitter/toxic compounds). The concept that an emergent inter-plant neural network could occur would be not at all unrealistic in such an environment. And if plants have evolved such a network, then it would be to animals' advantages to evolve to tap into it as well - to manipulate it, to gather information, to call for mates over long distances, etc.
I think they did some excellent worldbuilding, but it was poorly served by a lot of poor decisions in the scriptwriting. Even the general plot could have been fine if they had handled it better. Examples:
* Why should a bond between animals be one-way, with the animal becoming basically just a servant of the Na'vi? It would have been interesting if the na'vi riding it became more like the animal as well, taking on the animal's interests as well. If the bonds tend to be characterized by one dominating the other, then why should the Na'vi inherently be at the top of the chain? Surely there would be manipulative parasites, for example. Perhaps the toruk is so dangerous to bond with because it convinces its rider to give up and be eaten.
* They could have had Sully at least *try* to use the Na'vi language more. Maybe this "slow student" won't be giving speeches, but after all this time, he hardly seems to put forth the effort, just an occasional word here and there - yet that doesn't seem to bother anyone much. I know, I get it, it's easier for the audience to hear English than read subtitles....
* Part of the problem with the "white man saves the day" plot is that it's insulting to indiginous peoples, that they can't save themselves and need some white savior who simultaneously assauges "white guilt". But they didn't have to go this way. They could have merely taken an easy copout and not cast
Haha, reminds me of when I was coding for a LP MUD. I ended up getting into a sort of "wizard battle" with other coders... one person would make a "dest" (kick you off the server) tool, the other would write a tool to counter it, the other would write a tool to counter that, and so forth. It gets complicated fast. Anyway, I was trying out a new tool and due to a bug it thought I was attacking myself, and dested me in response and then fell on the floor. It then proceeded to dest anyone else in the room on sight. Said room just happened to be the login room, so nobody could log back in - and the person who had access to the server for a reboot was rarely available.
Not good! However, from my FTP access I was able to determine that there was still one coder logged on, in a different room and blissfully unaware of what had transpired, still actively uploading and changing files. But I had no way to contact him. However, I noticed that I had write access to the directory where he was modifying files, so I created a file with a name like "AMMON - DO NOT LOG OFF OR GO TO THE LOGIN ROOM - PLEASE READ ME.txt", with a summary of the problem and the solution to fix it. About 20 minutes later he noticed the file, destroyed my buggy object, and everyone could log back on.
All I can say is that I'm glad it happened with that version of the object, because the next version I had been planning to make was going to try to counter attempts to hide from the player search function by means of rapidly teleporting from room to room and object to object, looking for characteristics that matched the target - a sort of hunter-killer drone. Needless to say, that version got cancelled ;)
When I was just learning Linux, a friend told me the trick for playing wav files by running "dd if=/path/file.wav of=/dev/dsp". Neat, I thought! But I didn't try it out right away, and by the time I did I didn't remember the name of the sound device. "But that's easy," I thought, "I just want the first sound device, so sda, right?" "dd if=/path/file.wav of=/dev/sda"...
Yeah, that wasn't a good day...
For most people back then it wouldn't have been that bad because that was pre-SATA and most people used IDE drives (/dev/hd*). But lucky me, I had a Seagate Cheetah which I was very proud of (10k RPM, wow!), and so had all my most important files on it... :
Meh, don't start with that sort of talk in this drum circle! You should take the time to learn how to be gluten intolerant so you can fit in better.
This sort of thing is what one should expect when you start breaking down categories.
Initially fats were all one category. "Apparently fats are bad - stop eating so much fat." Okay.
Then different categories of fats were studied. "Apparently saturated fats are bad, other fats not as bad." Okay.
Then different types of those were studied. "Apparently monounsaturated fats are pretty good, but when polyunsaturated are concerned, most people get too much omega-6 and not enough omega-3 - and that can be as bad as too much saturated" Okay, this is getting complicated....
Then it keeps going: "Well, when you compare gamma lineolic acid to arachidonic acid...." Stop!
It's not that the earlier data was wrong. It was just categorically too broad. Even knowing statistics about individual chemicals isn't (ideally) enough, because the effects can vary depending on who eats it and how they eat. For example, potatoes: it's a little known fact that letting many types of starches cool (rice, potatoes, pasta) converts readily digestible starches into resistant starches, significantly reducing their caloric content and glycemic load. Or that eating iron-rich foods in many small servings over the course of a day yields significantly more iron absorption than eating the same amount all at once in a single serving. Etc. It's relatively straightforward to gather health data for foods, but often very hard to turn that into "universal recommendations".
The odds that a Slashdot reader will suggest quantum entanglement as a communications approach approaches 1 as a space-related thread grows ;)
There are people discussing the issue in the comments section on the Starshot page. For my two cents: given the described craft, which is to have a very flat sail and very high pointing accuracy.... it's really simple. You have a ~100GW class laser on Earth as a fundamental requirement of the proposal. Point it at your craft and fire. Even at those distances, the reflected light will be vastly more than such a tiny "chip" on the sail could ever possibly produce. As for how to modulate the signal, again, that's not tricky. Put a tiny piezoelectric vibrator in your chip. Even tiny vibrations will throw off the phase and particularly the pointing accuracy of the sail. If the vibrations aren't self-damping the you can use active damping to cancel them out.
When I first heard about this concept, my reaction was mostly "keep dreaming". But actually it's starting to sound more plausible (if they can work out the sail and nanoprobe, that is). For example, the lasers. 1TJ at 20% net system efficiency and industrial power rates of $0,05/kWh is only $70k. There's nothing unaffordable about that - even if your costs work out to be dramatically higher it would still be quite reasonable. But what about storing and then discharging such vast amounts of power? No need - use a chemical laser and store the feedstocks. Chemical lasers also give you the highest power outputs anyway because they discharge their heat in the exhaust, like rocket engines.
In particular, I'm looking at something like COIL. Discharge into water to recover the iodine as iodic acid, then recover elemental iodine from that through dehydraton followed by reaction with carbon monoxide. Elemental iodine is solid, so you can store it in a big pile if you wanted. The other side of the laser involves creating excited oxygen. COIL does it by reacting a mixture of hydrogen peroxide (produced by the anthraquinone process from hydrogen and water) and KOH with Cl2 (KOH and Cl2 produced from the resultant KCl by the chloralkali process). But alternative reactions might allow for lower capital cost storage, particularly in terms of avoiding Cl2 tankage. But if we assume that a traditional COIL approach is used, then what you need to drive the regenerative processes are carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and electricity. It just so happens that those are the three things you get from the partial oxidation of methane (aka natural gas) driving generator. Natural gas being the cheapest available fuel source in many areas.
Total stored feedstock mass for the laser should be on the order of several hundred tonnes. The most expensive chemical involved by far is elemental iodine, which is $30/kg. So no capital cost problem there. So it just comes down to the capital costs on the lasers and associated optics hardware.
Really, I'm not seeing any roadblocks in this regard.
That's one thing Tesla has been well respected by customers for, which is going above and beyond when it comes to upgrades and recalls. They kind of have to, though - critics are going to keep holding them to a higher standard because they're A) a new company, and B) selling a very different product.
The Soviets' didn't explore much outside of Venus and the Moon (their Mars program was rather ill-fated... though at least they tried; they didn't even try outside the orbit of Mars). But their efforts concerning Venus really were admirable; they had some failures but overall they proved that exploration of Venus is quite doable, and gathered most of the data that we have today.