We're already over the break-even point in terms of raw energy (the aforementioned Q, aka fusion energy gain, factor) - JT-60 in Japan can achieve Q=1.25. Of course, while that's net energy production, it's not self-sustaining, even your Carnot losses alone would mean you're not going to capture nearly as much power as you put in. But it's a real testament to how far we've come, from Q factors a tiny fraction of a percent. ITER is projected to have a Q factor of around 10, and DEMO 25.
that has made more progress (in terms of particle energy * confinement time) in the last 5 years on a few million bucks than ITER has in 8 with billions.
So would a teenager working in his garage on a Farnsworth fusor, tweaking his design. That doesn't mean anything. What matters is what the scientific community thinks of the scaleability. Do you have a published comparative metastudy of the literature on the prospects of focus fusion vs. tokamaks to back that? Heck, has Lerner even demonstrated getting past the limitations set forth by Rider on non-maxwellian plasma fusion yet (since his device, contrary to his claims, is not based on confined thermal plasmas and really not functionally different from earlier pinch experiments)? Or is he too busy trying to argue that the Big Bang never happened?
Both approaches are a lot smaller than the aircraft-carrier sized reactor (no, not sized for an aircraft carrier, as big as an aircraft carrier) that tokamak designs predict will be useful;
Note that advancements in increasing achievable/affordable torus field strength (which we absolutely are seeing) have dramatic scale-down effects on the required size needed to make a viable tokamak-based power plant.
I really don't know whether tokamaks will prove commercially competitive within a few decades. But the possibility does exist. There are other types of fusion - lots and lots of them - which are also worth watching. I'm kind of fond of some of the "hybrid" approaches that mix various "traditional" forms of fusion together, such as combining pinches, laser compression pulses, laser heating pulses, etc. But the pulsed methods all face commercialization challenges on achieving rapid firing rates, particularly those compressing holraums (remember that we're dealing with tiny, tiny objects that need to be precisely struck), and going from high power, slow-firing gas lasers to their equivalent power in diode lasers (which can fire much faster) is not going to happen overnight. But there's enough different possibilities out there that I wouldn't be surprised at all to see one succeed eventually. Tokamaks at least seem to have the fewest technical barriers in front of them.
And anyway... "News flash, giant multinational project sees schedule slip - details at 9!"
The reasons for the schedule slip?
The ITER organization’s role is to draw up the design, ensure everyone sticks to it, and then to supervise assembly of the reactor while also satisfying the local French regulators, especially the nuclear safety authority ASN. That has not been an easy job, as the organization does not deal directly with the industrial companies doing the manufacturing; that is handled by each partner’s domestic agency. Last year, a highly critical management assessment faulted the organization for failing to establish a workable “project culture.” Bigot has gone to great lengths to get contractors, domestic agencies, and ITER staff working better together. “I want that the ITER organization and the domestic agencies are never the limiting step for contractors to deliver,” he says. Previously, work on the tokamak building had been held up because ITER staff hadn’t agreed on a final version of its design.
The problem that the next council meeting will have to resolve is that some member states are further ahead than others in their assigned tasks for the assembly of ITER. Those that are ahead, and are closer to meeting the old schedule, don’t see why they have to fund a slower—and hence more expensive—schedule imposed on them by other partners.
I see lots of "it's X years away and always will be" comments below but no response to this. Why am I not surprised?
The "Fusion power is 30 years away and always will be" meme started around 1960 as a result of the British ZETA project, a Z-pinch system. When they got it into full operation, they indicated temperature readings of 1-5 million degrees and a level of neutron production matching the predicted values for those plasma temperatures. It was huge news in the late 1950s, as it meant that they were ready to make a demonstration power production reactor (ZETA II), and then a commercial reactor. They started development on ZETA II.
The only problem was, it was wrong. The matching temperature and neutron production levels were coincidental. The temperature readings were wrong because the high energy electrons were interfering with their spectral readings in a manner that had not been seen before. The neutrons were due to an unknown effect going on at tiny scales where instabilities at the edge of the plasma created enormous electrical potentials, acting as miniature particle accelerators and creating neutrons through spallation. This would have been obvious had they measured the neutron energy levels (random vs. consistent 14,1MeV neutrons) and directionality (directionally biased vs. random). And indeed, these measurements ultimately disproved the ZETA claims. The only issue was, they had to develop the technology to do so in the process - the technology to measure the directionality and energy of weak neutron fluxes wasn't available to the ZETA team. That's how immature the technology was at the time. Likewise, they had no way to know that plasma would behave as it did because the study of plasma behavior was very much in its infancy. Computer models would have helped, but of course they didn't have them then, and computers at the time were far too underpowered to do more than the most rudimentary of particle interaction calculations anyway, nothing like simulating plasma instabilities and neutron production through spallation interactions.
Fusion research, unlike fission research, was never given a Manhattan project. It gets funding, but never at the levels of "a relevant chunk of the nation's entire GDP". So it moves forward, but not through giant leaps - one can only test a few concepts at once, and the work doesn't race along. But plasma physics is a vastly different world today than it was in 1960. We have incredibly powerful computer simulations. We have decades of experience working with tokamaks, high power lasers, etc. We have far higher magnetic field strengths, which are critical to scaling down workable and affordable reactors. We have lasers for ICF and other related fusion forms orders of magnitude more powerful than those back in the day. And on and on and on. We've gone from Q factors that were a thousandth of a percent to greater than unity. And on and on and on.
Technology doesn't just show up when you want it to, or necessarily in whatever method you attempt first. The standard for radical, revolutionary new technology is that it's more often than not a long time between when the technology is conceieved and when it's widely commercialized, and full of initially promising starts that turn out ultimately to not work well. Look at, say, the development of the internal combustion engine. The earliest design was from 1661, and was based on gunpowder. Inventors tried and tried again - mainly with gunpowder, but also with everything from hydrogen to moss and coal dust - up until the 1800s where practical designs were realized and their usage took off.
This is normal. This is how technological development generally works. You have to gather knowledge and sometimes wait for other technologies to catch up to what you need (think of the limitations Babbage faced, for example, due to the technology of his day). Sometimes you may encounter promising starts, but hit roadblocks later on with your design, requiring a switch to a different approach. But ultimate
Okay, then, if you're not ignorant about the history of fusion research: why did early attempts at production of fusion power fail to work out? Surely if you're going to cite history you must know it.
Forget quadruped, what exactly do legs bring to the equation? Humans use tons of robots to do a vast range of industrial tasks, but they're not legged - if they need to be able to move freely, they're on wheels or tracks. And their bodies are generally just one or more big arms with various gripping or tool elements as "fingers".
Let's not kid ourselves, they are talking about a massive operation. They're supposed to fill up an ore carrier to China every 5 to 7 days. So that means they're ripping up the size of the ore carrier's cargo holds at least once weekly. The surface support vessel is designed to house up to 180 people. This isn't some tiny pilot operation, they're going full force on trying to demonstrate economic viability in the large scale.
Which is why all of your electronics use silver interconnects, right?
Gold is used where corrosion is most important. Copper is used where conductivity and price are most important. Silver's marginally better conductivity over copper doesn't justify it's usage for bulk electronics purposes, and it's too corrosive-prone for use in interconnects. It sees some electronics usage, but generally gold and copper are more important.
Point of note: all of these measures are conductivity *per unit cross section*. However there are better metals than silver on a mass basis - sodium, for example, is 3x better. Then comes lithium, calcium, potassium, beryllium, aluminum, magnesium, copper, then silver, then gold. But of course most of those metals are extremely corrosion-prone/flammable and beryllium is absurdly expensive. Aluminum is widely used in wiring (including most transmission lines) due to its better mass conductivity and lower cost, but its mechanical properties make it not as "forgiving" as copper and more prone to shorts - hence the issues with aluminum home wiring over the years.
I really have no firm grasp of how vertically mobile the silt would be.
While overall the effects will probably be quite negative, if the silt does reach the surface and is carried into the deep ocean, there's a chance ironically of some positive effects. Most of the worlds' oceans are near dead-zones because they're mineral deficient (mainly iron). Iron seeding has been demonstrated in test projects by Pacific Northwest natives to vastly increase fish populations, and there are test projects working on using it to sequester carbon dioxide.
On the other hand, each of the robots clocks in at 310 tonnes; they're going to be crushing ore and pumping slurry at a pretty prodigious rate. The production ship to handle it 227 meters long staffed by up to 180 people - think "oil rig"-sized. It's supposed to be capable of filling up a transfer ship to haul the ore to China once every 5-7 days. We're not talking some backyard-scale mining operation, this is an operation designed to move serious tonnage.
The deposit in question is 6g per tonne - which is still 5x better than your average gold mine on land. So the gold from 20k tonnes actually only pays for about 15% of a robot. But it also gives you 1400 tonnes of copper worth a quarter of another robot, plus nickel, silver, cobalt, and zinc.. altogether, yeah, 20k tonnes of ore, refined and sold at typical market prices, probably buys about one robot.
However, it's worth adding that there's no overburden. On your average surface mine, you have to remove an awful lot of rock before you get to anything that's actually worth something.
It's in the ballpark of an order of magntiude more concentrated than what a good gold mine on dry land gets. But it's under no overburden (except the ocean itself) where as mines on land are generally under dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of meters of earth.
There's three types of robots. One is a "can operate anywhere" crusher with low throughput. Another crusher requires relatively flat ground to operate on but has much higher throughput - so it operates on areas prepared by the first type. And the third collects the crushed material so it can be pumped to surface ships in a slurry.
Olympic Dam has 1,6% copper and 600ppb gold under 350m (a third of a kilometer) of overburden. These deposits are 7% copper and 6000 ppb gold under zero overburn - just the ocean. I think it's fully understandable why they want to give mining this a go, it's an amazing deposit.
Indeed, there was actually a lot that flew on the Shuttle that couldn't have flown on any other launch vehicle - and we're not just talking people and a much more capable deployment system. Between 1988 and 2004 the Shuttle was the highest payload launch vehicle in the world. And the lower end of that range is questionable, as Energia never flew in its heavy lift configuration. In 2004 the Delta IV Heavy came online with slightly more payload capacity than the Shuttle, And really while it "came online" in 2004, its first successful launch wasn't until 2007. The Titan IVB came fairly close to the shuttle's nominal payload (which, BTW, could be increased in certain launch configurations) from 1997 to 2005, but wasn't as large. The same could be said about the Proton M from 1999 onwards and Ariane V from 2002. The Space Shuttle nonetheless had 15% more payload capacity and much more capable launch abilities than these systems (as well as being the only large payload return system in the world that ever operated for more than a few test flights). During the timeperiods these systems weren't available, the next closest systems to the Shuttle in terms of payload had only 3/4ths of its launch capacity.
Part of the reason they kept the Shuttle flying for so long (many had wanted to retire it much sooner) was that there were some ISS modules that could only be launched by the Shuttle.
There were a lot of things that nearly came to be that would have significantly boosted the Shuttle's payload even more, such as the ASRM. They had also started work on the five-segment booster, which would have vastly increased the Shuttle's payload (it's now part of SLS). If there had ever been demand, it had been determined that the payload bay could have been modified into a 30-74 seat passenger area, with a launch cost of 1,5 million USD per passenger (flights per passenger on Soyuz cost $20-40m)
And besides, you'll surely forget to bring a ladder or something and not realize it until you've hopped off to get samples, and then you have to send a whole new mission to rescue them.... invariably leaving your rescuers stranded as well....
Solution: more struts.
Are you listening, NASA? EUROPA CLIPPER NEEDS MORE STRUTS!
You do realize that you're talking about decelerating from a *minimum* of 1432 m/s (3426 mph) on impact. That's *if* you've already slowed down into the lowest possible orbit skimming right over the surface. Hitting straight from a Europa-intercept trajectory from Earth would be vastly faster.
"Padding" is not going to cut it. These sorts of impacts convert their impactors to plasma.
Oh wait, we don't have to guess about the density, it's right there on the page: 1 cup = 177g. So the USRDA for protein on the all-kidney-beans diet would mean eating one cup of cooked beans per meal (ooh, shocking amounts!) - but to stay alive in terms of calories they'd have to eat three cups.
And again.... are you picturing that - instead of eating more food - vegans eat less total calories per day?// baffled
To get enough protein from lettuce, you'd have to eat seven kilos of it per day
Because that's totally a normal vegan diet, the all-lettuce diet.
My figures above for kidney beans (24g protein / 100g) are for dried ; cooked they are more like 8g / 100g, so you'd have to eat 700g of cooked kidney beans (a pound and a half) to get enough protein for a day.
Again, because that's totally a normal vegan diet, the all-kidney-bean diet?
But hey, let's go with kidney beans, shall we? This page says that 177g is 32% of the USRDA for protein - so the actual figure is 550g of cooked kidney beans. Let's say that they're a density of... oh, maybe 1,5g/cc, does that sound fair to you? Then that's 366cc, or 1,54 cups of cooked kidney beans. Divided over 3 meals, that's half a cup of kidney beans per meal to get 100% of their daily protein. MY GOD, WHAT SORT OF MONSTER COULD EAT THAT MUCH??? Note that those kidney beans would only make up a third of the person's daily calories. If they actually ate only kidney beans, and ate an average number of calories, they'd be consuming 3 times the USRDA for protein.
And let's not get into the "complete protein" myth again, it's already been well addressed elsewhere in this thread.
... we develop software the old-fashioned way: incremental improvements to an ancient codebase with fundamental flaws in its core that nobody's brave enough to tackle, with irregularly-scheduled releases set into the production server without automated unit testing.
At home I develop in a more refined fashion: diving right in without much prep or research, working on it for weeks to months, then finding that the project is 100 times more complex than I expected and someone else has already done it.
Indeed, zucchini is a rather flavorable vegetable. Who says that zucchini doesn't add taste? That's like saying that pumpkin doesn't add taste.
As for the reason to add things that don't add taste, such as tofu, the reason is texture. A boring stir-fry for example can be greatly improved with the addition of tofu that's soaked up the flavors of the dish.
Can of tuna: 25g protein in 85g. Tofu: 11g protein in 114g, so yah, not even close
Apparently for some bizarre reason you decided that "tofu" is a synonym for "some of the highest protein sources".
Try looking up gluten, seitan, and TVP as examples.
As covered elsewhere in this comments thread, the "complete protein" thing is BS as well. All essential amino acids are commonly found amply in typical vegan diets.
Slashdot Mirror
We're already over the break-even point in terms of raw energy (the aforementioned Q, aka fusion energy gain, factor) - JT-60 in Japan can achieve Q=1.25. Of course, while that's net energy production, it's not self-sustaining, even your Carnot losses alone would mean you're not going to capture nearly as much power as you put in. But it's a real testament to how far we've come, from Q factors a tiny fraction of a percent. ITER is projected to have a Q factor of around 10, and DEMO 25.
So would a teenager working in his garage on a Farnsworth fusor, tweaking his design. That doesn't mean anything. What matters is what the scientific community thinks of the scaleability. Do you have a published comparative metastudy of the literature on the prospects of focus fusion vs. tokamaks to back that? Heck, has Lerner even demonstrated getting past the limitations set forth by Rider on non-maxwellian plasma fusion yet (since his device, contrary to his claims, is not based on confined thermal plasmas and really not functionally different from earlier pinch experiments)? Or is he too busy trying to argue that the Big Bang never happened?
Note that advancements in increasing achievable/affordable torus field strength (which we absolutely are seeing) have dramatic scale-down effects on the required size needed to make a viable tokamak-based power plant.
I really don't know whether tokamaks will prove commercially competitive within a few decades. But the possibility does exist. There are other types of fusion - lots and lots of them - which are also worth watching. I'm kind of fond of some of the "hybrid" approaches that mix various "traditional" forms of fusion together, such as combining pinches, laser compression pulses, laser heating pulses, etc. But the pulsed methods all face commercialization challenges on achieving rapid firing rates, particularly those compressing holraums (remember that we're dealing with tiny, tiny objects that need to be precisely struck), and going from high power, slow-firing gas lasers to their equivalent power in diode lasers (which can fire much faster) is not going to happen overnight. But there's enough different possibilities out there that I wouldn't be surprised at all to see one succeed eventually. Tokamaks at least seem to have the fewest technical barriers in front of them.
And anyway... "News flash, giant multinational project sees schedule slip - details at 9!"
The reasons for the schedule slip?
I see lots of "it's X years away and always will be" comments below but no response to this. Why am I not surprised?
The "Fusion power is 30 years away and always will be" meme started around 1960 as a result of the British ZETA project, a Z-pinch system. When they got it into full operation, they indicated temperature readings of 1-5 million degrees and a level of neutron production matching the predicted values for those plasma temperatures. It was huge news in the late 1950s, as it meant that they were ready to make a demonstration power production reactor (ZETA II), and then a commercial reactor. They started development on ZETA II.
The only problem was, it was wrong. The matching temperature and neutron production levels were coincidental. The temperature readings were wrong because the high energy electrons were interfering with their spectral readings in a manner that had not been seen before. The neutrons were due to an unknown effect going on at tiny scales where instabilities at the edge of the plasma created enormous electrical potentials, acting as miniature particle accelerators and creating neutrons through spallation. This would have been obvious had they measured the neutron energy levels (random vs. consistent 14,1MeV neutrons) and directionality (directionally biased vs. random). And indeed, these measurements ultimately disproved the ZETA claims. The only issue was, they had to develop the technology to do so in the process - the technology to measure the directionality and energy of weak neutron fluxes wasn't available to the ZETA team. That's how immature the technology was at the time. Likewise, they had no way to know that plasma would behave as it did because the study of plasma behavior was very much in its infancy. Computer models would have helped, but of course they didn't have them then, and computers at the time were far too underpowered to do more than the most rudimentary of particle interaction calculations anyway, nothing like simulating plasma instabilities and neutron production through spallation interactions.
Fusion research, unlike fission research, was never given a Manhattan project. It gets funding, but never at the levels of "a relevant chunk of the nation's entire GDP". So it moves forward, but not through giant leaps - one can only test a few concepts at once, and the work doesn't race along. But plasma physics is a vastly different world today than it was in 1960. We have incredibly powerful computer simulations. We have decades of experience working with tokamaks, high power lasers, etc. We have far higher magnetic field strengths, which are critical to scaling down workable and affordable reactors. We have lasers for ICF and other related fusion forms orders of magnitude more powerful than those back in the day. And on and on and on. We've gone from Q factors that were a thousandth of a percent to greater than unity. And on and on and on.
Technology doesn't just show up when you want it to, or necessarily in whatever method you attempt first. The standard for radical, revolutionary new technology is that it's more often than not a long time between when the technology is conceieved and when it's widely commercialized, and full of initially promising starts that turn out ultimately to not work well. Look at, say, the development of the internal combustion engine. The earliest design was from 1661, and was based on gunpowder. Inventors tried and tried again - mainly with gunpowder, but also with everything from hydrogen to moss and coal dust - up until the 1800s where practical designs were realized and their usage took off.
This is normal. This is how technological development generally works. You have to gather knowledge and sometimes wait for other technologies to catch up to what you need (think of the limitations Babbage faced, for example, due to the technology of his day). Sometimes you may encounter promising starts, but hit roadblocks later on with your design, requiring a switch to a different approach. But ultimate
Okay, then, if you're not ignorant about the history of fusion research: why did early attempts at production of fusion power fail to work out? Surely if you're going to cite history you must know it.
.. of ignorant "Fusion power is only 30 years away, and has been for the past half century!" comments in 3, 2, 1...
Which is why we make offroad vehicles on Earth with legs?
Forget quadruped, what exactly do legs bring to the equation? Humans use tons of robots to do a vast range of industrial tasks, but they're not legged - if they need to be able to move freely, they're on wheels or tracks. And their bodies are generally just one or more big arms with various gripping or tool elements as "fingers".
Why legs? So it can fall over?
Actually, this company is Canadian. And they're selling the ore to the Chinese ;)
Let's not kid ourselves, they are talking about a massive operation. They're supposed to fill up an ore carrier to China every 5 to 7 days. So that means they're ripping up the size of the ore carrier's cargo holds at least once weekly. The surface support vessel is designed to house up to 180 people. This isn't some tiny pilot operation, they're going full force on trying to demonstrate economic viability in the large scale.
Which is why all of your electronics use silver interconnects, right?
Gold is used where corrosion is most important. Copper is used where conductivity and price are most important. Silver's marginally better conductivity over copper doesn't justify it's usage for bulk electronics purposes, and it's too corrosive-prone for use in interconnects. It sees some electronics usage, but generally gold and copper are more important.
Point of note: all of these measures are conductivity *per unit cross section*. However there are better metals than silver on a mass basis - sodium, for example, is 3x better. Then comes lithium, calcium, potassium, beryllium, aluminum, magnesium, copper, then silver, then gold. But of course most of those metals are extremely corrosion-prone/flammable and beryllium is absurdly expensive. Aluminum is widely used in wiring (including most transmission lines) due to its better mass conductivity and lower cost, but its mechanical properties make it not as "forgiving" as copper and more prone to shorts - hence the issues with aluminum home wiring over the years.
I really have no firm grasp of how vertically mobile the silt would be.
While overall the effects will probably be quite negative, if the silt does reach the surface and is carried into the deep ocean, there's a chance ironically of some positive effects. Most of the worlds' oceans are near dead-zones because they're mineral deficient (mainly iron). Iron seeding has been demonstrated in test projects by Pacific Northwest natives to vastly increase fish populations, and there are test projects working on using it to sequester carbon dioxide.
On the other hand, each of the robots clocks in at 310 tonnes; they're going to be crushing ore and pumping slurry at a pretty prodigious rate. The production ship to handle it 227 meters long staffed by up to 180 people - think "oil rig"-sized. It's supposed to be capable of filling up a transfer ship to haul the ore to China once every 5-7 days. We're not talking some backyard-scale mining operation, this is an operation designed to move serious tonnage.
The deposit in question is 6g per tonne - which is still 5x better than your average gold mine on land. So the gold from 20k tonnes actually only pays for about 15% of a robot. But it also gives you 1400 tonnes of copper worth a quarter of another robot, plus nickel, silver, cobalt, and zinc.. altogether, yeah, 20k tonnes of ore, refined and sold at typical market prices, probably buys about one robot.
However, it's worth adding that there's no overburden. On your average surface mine, you have to remove an awful lot of rock before you get to anything that's actually worth something.
It's in the ballpark of an order of magntiude more concentrated than what a good gold mine on dry land gets. But it's under no overburden (except the ocean itself) where as mines on land are generally under dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of meters of earth.
There's three types of robots. One is a "can operate anywhere" crusher with low throughput. Another crusher requires relatively flat ground to operate on but has much higher throughput - so it operates on areas prepared by the first type. And the third collects the crushed material so it can be pumped to surface ships in a slurry.
Olympic Dam has 1,6% copper and 600ppb gold under 350m (a third of a kilometer) of overburden. These deposits are 7% copper and 6000 ppb gold under zero overburn - just the ocean. I think it's fully understandable why they want to give mining this a go, it's an amazing deposit.
Indeed, there was actually a lot that flew on the Shuttle that couldn't have flown on any other launch vehicle - and we're not just talking people and a much more capable deployment system. Between 1988 and 2004 the Shuttle was the highest payload launch vehicle in the world. And the lower end of that range is questionable, as Energia never flew in its heavy lift configuration. In 2004 the Delta IV Heavy came online with slightly more payload capacity than the Shuttle, And really while it "came online" in 2004, its first successful launch wasn't until 2007. The Titan IVB came fairly close to the shuttle's nominal payload (which, BTW, could be increased in certain launch configurations) from 1997 to 2005, but wasn't as large. The same could be said about the Proton M from 1999 onwards and Ariane V from 2002. The Space Shuttle nonetheless had 15% more payload capacity and much more capable launch abilities than these systems (as well as being the only large payload return system in the world that ever operated for more than a few test flights). During the timeperiods these systems weren't available, the next closest systems to the Shuttle in terms of payload had only 3/4ths of its launch capacity.
Part of the reason they kept the Shuttle flying for so long (many had wanted to retire it much sooner) was that there were some ISS modules that could only be launched by the Shuttle.
There were a lot of things that nearly came to be that would have significantly boosted the Shuttle's payload even more, such as the ASRM. They had also started work on the five-segment booster, which would have vastly increased the Shuttle's payload (it's now part of SLS). If there had ever been demand, it had been determined that the payload bay could have been modified into a 30-74 seat passenger area, with a launch cost of 1,5 million USD per passenger (flights per passenger on Soyuz cost $20-40m)
If only we had some sort of seasonally-appropriate story about middle-eastern people seeking refuge being turned away by the heartless.
And besides, you'll surely forget to bring a ladder or something and not realize it until you've hopped off to get samples, and then you have to send a whole new mission to rescue them.... invariably leaving your rescuers stranded as well....
Solution: more struts.
Are you listening, NASA? EUROPA CLIPPER NEEDS MORE STRUTS!
You do realize that you're talking about decelerating from a *minimum* of 1432 m/s (3426 mph) on impact. That's *if* you've already slowed down into the lowest possible orbit skimming right over the surface. Hitting straight from a Europa-intercept trajectory from Earth would be vastly faster.
"Padding" is not going to cut it. These sorts of impacts convert their impactors to plasma.
Oh wait, we don't have to guess about the density, it's right there on the page: 1 cup = 177g. So the USRDA for protein on the all-kidney-beans diet would mean eating one cup of cooked beans per meal (ooh, shocking amounts!) - but to stay alive in terms of calories they'd have to eat three cups.
And again.... are you picturing that - instead of eating more food - vegans eat less total calories per day? // baffled
Because that's totally a normal vegan diet, the all-lettuce diet.
Again, because that's totally a normal vegan diet, the all-kidney-bean diet?
But hey, let's go with kidney beans, shall we? This page says that 177g is 32% of the USRDA for protein - so the actual figure is 550g of cooked kidney beans. Let's say that they're a density of... oh, maybe 1,5g/cc, does that sound fair to you? Then that's 366cc, or 1,54 cups of cooked kidney beans. Divided over 3 meals, that's half a cup of kidney beans per meal to get 100% of their daily protein. MY GOD, WHAT SORT OF MONSTER COULD EAT THAT MUCH??? Note that those kidney beans would only make up a third of the person's daily calories. If they actually ate only kidney beans, and ate an average number of calories, they'd be consuming 3 times the USRDA for protein.
And let's not get into the "complete protein" myth again, it's already been well addressed elsewhere in this thread.
... we develop software the old-fashioned way: incremental improvements to an ancient codebase with fundamental flaws in its core that nobody's brave enough to tackle, with irregularly-scheduled releases set into the production server without automated unit testing.
At home I develop in a more refined fashion: diving right in without much prep or research, working on it for weeks to months, then finding that the project is 100 times more complex than I expected and someone else has already done it.
Indeed, zucchini is a rather flavorable vegetable. Who says that zucchini doesn't add taste? That's like saying that pumpkin doesn't add taste.
As for the reason to add things that don't add taste, such as tofu, the reason is texture. A boring stir-fry for example can be greatly improved with the addition of tofu that's soaked up the flavors of the dish.
Apparently for some bizarre reason you decided that "tofu" is a synonym for "some of the highest protein sources".
Try looking up gluten, seitan, and TVP as examples.
As covered elsewhere in this comments thread, the "complete protein" thing is BS as well. All essential amino acids are commonly found amply in typical vegan diets.