stories of cell phone use on September 11th 2001 can possibly be true.
Those people don't know much about cellphones, then. They probably misquote some technical data. There's really no problem with operating cellphones from a plane- except that it places excessive strain on the phone network, which is the REAL reason they're banned inflight. A cellphone will connect with as many cell towers as it can reach. On the ground, that's usually 2-4, but over a city it may be 30+.
Note that the team accompanying Senator Kerry on his campaign jet use their cellphones all through the flights...
*Ahem* There's one big, huge, gaping problem with your intial assertion... Interfering with the radio communications between the tower and the jet does not automatically "crash planes".
I guess you don't know why "personal electronic devices" (not just radios) are required to be deactivated. It's more than just ATC comm.
There was an incident 10+ years ago where a jetliner's avionics (including things like the altimeter) went haywire. The crew suspected EM interference, and searched for 20 minutes before locating thet offending gizmo. (Supposedly, they were on the verge of jettisoning luggage). Ever since then, the FAA's "shutdown for takeoff and landing" rule has been in effect.
Here's a list of some problems attributed to unintentional electromagnetic interference. Whether or not that was really the cause hasn't been firmly tested- probably not in all cases.
I consider it a security risk that flight computers are so vulnerable to inadvertent interference. One imagines that terrorists could do some mayhem with sneaking devices hidden in other things (which of course will not be searched for like a bomb would)
They're not secret, i think it's a given there's stinger squads at the whitehouse.
Do you know how far the Pentagon is from Regan Internation Airport?
Not even one kilometer. A passenger jet can cross that distance in less than 5 seconds. The White House is further away, 15 seconds or so. The missile itself needs 2+ seconds to travel. Imagine how quickly the guards can decide a plane has become a threat, target it, and launch.
Oh, and how many Stingers does it take to bring down a 747? Three.
Yes, there probably are Stingers in an arms locker at the Whitehouse. They might be useful if a terrorist helicopter shows up... happens all the time in the movies, right?
What is the difference between someone talking on a cell phone and two people talking on a plane or a bus or a restaurant?
Probability. Most passengers are individual business travellers who don't know anyone else on the plane, and are unlikely to talk to them. But this category of person definitely has customer/boss/secretary/host who they'd want to talk to. On airplanes, cellphone conversations will quickly become more common than live ones, unless they're quite expensive.
I predict that airlines will advertise the cost of phone use onboard, and that while some travellers will be attracted to low costs, others will prefer higher ones, to reduce irritating chitchat. (The next best thing to a traditional no-cellphones flight)
Throw in the fact that the wings are dead weight that costs propellant during orbital maneuvers
WEIGHT is not the word you want. Try again.
(Sorry, couldn't resist. But when talking about activities in such weak gravitational fields, it's better to say "mass")
it's cross-range capability
Now there's an important benefit. (I continue to believe that wings were added for propaganda value. A controlled descent by a heroic astronaut-pilot is so much more glorious than a random tumble by an astronaut-payload)
If you are saying that 'because' a population is fed better that they will magically have fewer children,
It's not magic. It's that with more food available, each child now has a higher chance of reaching reproductive age, so they have less need to produce redundant children.
You're correct. I've pointed that out often, but in the end, it doesn't matter much.
An RTS is about strategy in the same way an FPS is about shooting: both of them try to present the overt appearance of strategy/shooting, but you're really just trying to adjust a set of software variables into a winning condition (often by clicking the mouse very precisely).
However, the definition of "Strategy" you give is a little too specific. It's not only nations that engage in strategy, but smaller organizations and even individual people. In that regard, the players of an RTS, an FPS, or even a physical sport like football may all be exercising strategy to the same extent.
Another good perspective on it: "Any question of strategy, rehearsed often enough, becomes tactics"
Finally, within the realm of game studies, very little attention is paid to multiplayer games
There's been a lot written. But, can you read Korean?
My pet theory is that the game features a three pronged force:
Your theories are pretty much right, although they should've been obvious- they follow from the very definition of "game", which some "game critics" forget.
Games are competitive challenges of skill and ability to determine a winner, and have fun doing it. "Sport" is an important subcategory of "game", where athletic abilities are needed to play correctly. Something like Counterstrike or Starcraft is much like a sport where the closest thing to athletic requirements is rapidly coordinated mouse-movement.
Following the true definition of game, things like Everquest barely qualify.
* the spontaneity offered by other players easily trumps preprogrammed yet "interactive" levels and enemies
Obvious, in the same way that poker & bridge are more fun than solitaire.
* the team based and multiplayer focus heightens suspense and immersion.
The word "immersion" doesn't really fit there. What the multiple players do is increase controllable complexity. Games become boring if they're too easy and predictable- but randomness introduced by the software isn't the solution, because it's completely outside the player's control/comprehension. But increasing complexity by adding more players introduces new human motivation to the game area, which is something players can think about, and increase their performance according to their ability to guess what the opponents are thinking.
It's the same reason that football and baseball are so much more popular than sprinting and pole-vaulting. More players = more complexity = more possibilities = more fun.
I don't have celebrity game creators in very high esteem. In almost 30 years, they have failed to make gaming a recognized art form, which cinema had achieved at the same age by the 1930s.
Your dates are way, WAY off. Games weren't invented in 1974. They've been around for 2500 years, that I know of. Yes, I'm aware that you probably only meant "video games", but that's NOT what you wrote.
And it's good to remember that the most popular and admired games are still things like Football and Chess. Nobody complains that they're not "recognized art forms", because that isn't the objective.
Deus Ex: great game, cool story...no Art. You experienced no emation
Your definition of "Art" is incorrect. It's not about emation (or even "emotion"). But going along with that definition, your critques are still entirely subjective. You apparently only found Homeworld effecting, while other people have had different reactions.
Homeworld: Art. Like Max Payne
I find your example of Homeworld very interesting, because in comparison to Deus Ex and Max Payne, the actual game had much less of the story in it. The aspect that drove your emotional response were the cutscenes presented BETWEEN playing the game, not DURING it. So it's not actually the game that impressed you at all. There's a saying, originally about Final Fantasy: "Great movie, but distracting bits of game mixed in"
"the subtleties of being evil without being purely self-destructive for no good reason." Seems like a damn good definition of evil to me! Evil always has a reason which doesn't stand up to logic.
No, that's a dangerously limited definition of evil. Of all the obviously evil acts that are perpetrated around the world each day, only a very few were "self-destructive for no good reason". People generally have a well-planned reason to do evil, and they often wind up profiting by it, not "self-destroying".
"Evil" is really putting your own needs above those of others (compare it against "good", which is helping others at your own expense).
And if you say "But that definition means we're all evil!", then: Congratulations on your insight.
It was a cheap shot, I admit. Although Bush still isn't being fully honest about it- the body text is at odds with the headlines.
He's inverting priorities. Cart before horse. The only way hydrogen can revamp the USA's energy economy is if it functions as an intermediate fuel for moving vehicles (or anything that you can't plug into AC).
He mentions nuclear at the end of a list, when really it should be prominent in the forefront. Hydrogen fuel without nuclear plants to produce it is meaningless (unless by some miracle solar cells become efficient enough). But there's a strong anti-nuclear voter bias, while hydrogen is a neutral (or unknown) topic for them.
Importing Earth HYDROGEN to add to Lunar Oxygen for fuel/reaction mass is a much better propostion.
Ok, but irrelevant to your claim that expending Lunar water as reactive mass is "disastorous". If you can import hydrogen to make water, it doesn't matter if you do it before extracting moon water, or after. (And after has the advantage that the technological/infrastructure base will be more advanced by then)
A rather bad example. It fits on the nose of a rocket because it's small, and it's small because it fit just one person was possible.
If we used a craft focused on getting humans up and down, we'd be able to strap them to smaller and cheaper vehicles.
Ok. But Shuttle-style controlled re-entry is the wrong way to do it. Pod + parachute is safer and cheaper- ESPECIALLY if the craft is small. For a controlled landing, you must have a pilot in the crew- and if the vehicle only holds 1 person, then only pilots can travel in the vehicle! This is a great constraint on the personnel assignments you can put into space, and for no good reason.
Congress will be sure to pull the rest of the funding for the manned space program. Once that happens, how do you propose we get them to pay for a new program?
I hate seeing that argument. Translated: "My sponsors are irrational. Therefore I've got to do stupid, wasteful things to keep the money coming"
The Shuttle's return method is fine, we just need a normal rocket launch.
The way a Shuttle launches is an unavoidable result of the return method. They can't be separated.
The Shuttle is large, heavy, and has a huge cross-section. You can't do Shuttle-style re-entry with something much smaller. But to get something that big into orbit, you either need to (a) use the complex 4-part (shuttle + 2 booster + fuel tank) multistage launch of today, or (b) put it on the nose of an even more enormous rocket (which would be even more expensive).
But your comments about the relative saftey of Soyuz versus the Shuttle are complete bullshit.
I wasn't talking Soyuz vs. Shuttle, but disposable vs reusable (where the Soyuz and Shuttle happen to be high-profile examples of each kind).
Furthermore, the USSR skimped on safety spending, yet had similar levels of danger, because of a fundamentally safer design. The safest of all would be a Soyuz-like design (meaning unguided re-entry), with USA levels of redundant spending.
The Soyuz has killed all its passengers more times than the shuttle has - look it up.
Ok, I looked it up. The Soyuz has killed all its passengers twice, exactly the same number of Shuttle disasters. That adds up to 4 people lost on Soyuz, versus 14 killed in Shuttles. So... what was your point, exactly?
One minor part of the Shuttle's excessive risk is caused by the winged landing: To land the Shuttle, you need a aircraft pilot, who's otherwise useless. His presence onboard adds mass, and increases the number of lives that would be lost in an accident.
DRAG is not the word you want. Try again.
I wondered if you'd jump on that. FYI, the definition of "drag" is "an impediment or burden". But if you'd like it to only mean "retarding interaction with a fluid medium", then I'll rephrase: "The wings were a drag on liftoff, and their mass uselessly increased the thrust needed for both liftoff and orbital accelerations"
I don't even like the Shuttle, I wanted to build the gigantic space plane
Any kind of spaceplane is still a bad idea. "Planes", by definition, are only useful in an atmosphere. Putting any kind of plane is space is just wasteful mass and excessive complexity.
Or on New York and Washington and San Francisco...
Actually, if Nazi Germany had been smart, they could've destroyed those cities with submarine-launched radioactive bombs in 1943. (Not "atomic bombs", but what we today call "dirty bombs").
You mention Harry Turtledove in your sig. He works in the alternative-history genre. There's a book in that genre which covers Axis launches of radioactive bombs onto US cities: "Trinity Paradox".
Maybe, maybe not. Hitler had already given up on trying to invade the UK by the time the US got involved,
Wrong. You seem to be talking about when the USA entered combat. But they had been "involved" and helping from the beginning. That's where Britain's ammunition came from.
Both the German and the Japanese programs could almost certainly have produced atomic weapons within a couple more years,
Retrospective examinations have shown that the German a-bomb project was flawed at a fundamental level of physical understanding. They could never have caught up with the USA.
It's fun to play games with how WWII could've gone differently. Victory in a few key battles (like the invasion of Egypt), better German research priorities (especially cryptography!), or a sustainment of the USSR non-aggression pact could all have lead to Germany being far more successful in the European theater. But any of those changes would ultimately be meaningless, because they were behind on the A-Bomb, and could not catch up.
(Of course, if your What-If scenario is "What if Germany had a good atomic physicist?", then anything goes)
And, of course, nobody but the Germans had anything that could be developed into an ICBM.
The USA had jet engines underway. The reason I said "1948" instead of "1945" was to allow them enough time to produce a jet-powered high-altitude bomber.
But if we were fighting either one, especially China,
If the USA was actually fighting China or India (which will never happen), the entire 1-billion population of either opponent would be dead within 5 hours.
So delivering asteroidal materials takes longer, and costs more deltaV. Great trade-off, don't you think?
The factor supporting asteroidal materials is that the potentially could have high concentrations of useful metals. No proof of that, of course. But we do know that they're not common on the moon.
(don't want to take lunar water for this - Moon is a Harsh Mistress, remember? Using lunar water for fuel/reaction mass would be disastrous in the long term).
Not really. Water is water. Importing earth water to prevent using moon water is no better than using moon water first and then importing from earth to replace it.
Personally, I prefer having some attitudinal control during re-entry.
Personally, I'd prefer to survive re-entries after losing control.
When that happens to the Soyuz, the crew is lost in the wilderness for 10 hours until a retrieval team eventually finds them. When the Space Shuttle messes up a re-entry, the crew is scattered into a pinkish mist spread over 3 states.
unless you plan to do like the Soyuz, and just bail out the pilot and flight computer while the majority of the spacecraft smashes into the earth like a hypersonic missile.
Yep. That's the way to do it. Considering that building a whole new disposable spacecraft is less expensive (and more reliable, and even more scalable) than refurbishing a reusable vehicle, that's the prudent approach. (Building the disposable vehicle is cheaper, because the vehicle itself is a lot simpler, since it doesn't need features to survive re-entry)
Hmm... needs more maths. I suspect gliding re-entry is still going to win, though.
Wrong. It's not even close.
The shuttle's glide re-entry is a totally useless, counterproductive feature. Even if the wings did cause re-entry to need less fuel, it's not enough of the savings to make up for having needed to lift those wings into orbit in the first place. The wings were a drag on the liftoff, and a drag on all manuvering done in space. Just having them there increased the fuel-usage of every other mission activity.
The winged spaceplane is a project that justifies itself in terms of itself. The wing features allow the Shuttle to be reusable. That's good, because the Shuttle is expensive. And the Shuttle is expensive because it has wings....
Can't you use a significant proportion of the excess heat to power steam turbines and create more electricity?
Yes... and when you use that electricity to power a motor or computer, the heat comes out again. An attempt to usefully-reuse heat will only collect a portion of it (never 100%), and that heat will be returned when the collected energy is used.
The "Puppeteers" were a science fiction culture created for the "Ringworld" book, who had so many power-plants generating excess heat that they decided to shift their planet away from the sun, to balance it out.
Slashdot Mirror
stories of cell phone use on September 11th 2001 can possibly be true.
Those people don't know much about cellphones, then. They probably misquote some technical data. There's really no problem with operating cellphones from a plane- except that it places excessive strain on the phone network, which is the REAL reason they're banned inflight. A cellphone will connect with as many cell towers as it can reach. On the ground, that's usually 2-4, but over a city it may be 30+.
Note that the team accompanying Senator Kerry on his campaign jet use their cellphones all through the flights...
*Ahem* There's one big, huge, gaping problem with your intial assertion... Interfering with the radio communications between the tower and the jet does not automatically "crash planes".
I guess you don't know why "personal electronic devices" (not just radios) are required to be deactivated. It's more than just ATC comm.
There was an incident 10+ years ago where a jetliner's avionics (including things like the altimeter) went haywire. The crew suspected EM interference, and searched for 20 minutes before locating thet offending gizmo. (Supposedly, they were on the verge of jettisoning luggage). Ever since then, the FAA's "shutdown for takeoff and landing" rule has been in effect.
Here's a list of some problems attributed to unintentional electromagnetic interference. Whether or not that was really the cause hasn't been firmly tested- probably not in all cases.
I consider it a security risk that flight computers are so vulnerable to inadvertent interference. One imagines that terrorists could do some mayhem with sneaking devices hidden in other things (which of course will not be searched for like a bomb would)
stewardesses searched
They're not secret, i think it's a given there's stinger squads at the whitehouse.
Do you know how far the Pentagon is from Regan Internation Airport?
Not even one kilometer. A passenger jet can cross that distance in less than 5 seconds. The White House is further away, 15 seconds or so. The missile itself needs 2+ seconds to travel. Imagine how quickly the guards can decide a plane has become a threat, target it, and launch.
Oh, and how many Stingers does it take to bring down a 747? Three.
Yes, there probably are Stingers in an arms locker at the Whitehouse. They might be useful if a terrorist helicopter shows up... happens all the time in the movies, right?
What is the difference between someone talking on a cell phone and two people talking on a plane or a bus or a restaurant?
Probability. Most passengers are individual business travellers who don't know anyone else on the plane, and are unlikely to talk to them. But this category of person definitely has customer/boss/secretary/host who they'd want to talk to. On airplanes, cellphone conversations will quickly become more common than live ones, unless they're quite expensive.
I predict that airlines will advertise the cost of phone use onboard, and that while some travellers will be attracted to low costs, others will prefer higher ones, to reduce irritating chitchat. (The next best thing to a traditional no-cellphones flight)
The astronauts do it because they are pilots and can't stand to let the machine handle it.
And WHY are they pilots? Why should piloting have anything to do with becoming an astronaut?
It's because the Shuttle is pilotable, that there needs to be a pilot on it. Not a good reason, but it is the reason.
Throw in the fact that the wings are dead weight that costs propellant during orbital maneuvers
WEIGHT is not the word you want. Try again.
(Sorry, couldn't resist. But when talking about activities in such weak gravitational fields, it's better to say "mass")
it's cross-range capability
Now there's an important benefit. (I continue to believe that wings were added for propaganda value. A controlled descent by a heroic astronaut-pilot is so much more glorious than a random tumble by an astronaut-payload)
If you are saying that 'because' a population is fed better that they will magically have fewer children,
It's not magic. It's that with more food available, each child now has a higher chance of reaching reproductive age, so they have less need to produce redundant children.
Face it, "RTS" games are nothing but "RTT".
You're correct. I've pointed that out often, but in the end, it doesn't matter much.
An RTS is about strategy in the same way an FPS is about shooting: both of them try to present the overt appearance of strategy/shooting, but you're really just trying to adjust a set of software variables into a winning condition (often by clicking the mouse very precisely).
However, the definition of "Strategy" you give is a little too specific. It's not only nations that engage in strategy, but smaller organizations and even individual people. In that regard, the players of an RTS, an FPS, or even a physical sport like football may all be exercising strategy to the same extent.
Another good perspective on it: "Any question of strategy, rehearsed often enough, becomes tactics"
Finally, within the realm of game studies, very little attention is paid to multiplayer games
There's been a lot written. But, can you read Korean?
My pet theory is that the game features a three pronged force:
Your theories are pretty much right, although they should've been obvious- they follow from the very definition of "game", which some "game critics" forget.
Games are competitive challenges of skill and ability to determine a winner, and have fun doing it. "Sport" is an important subcategory of "game", where athletic abilities are needed to play correctly. Something like Counterstrike or Starcraft is much like a sport where the closest thing to athletic requirements is rapidly coordinated mouse-movement.
Following the true definition of game, things like Everquest barely qualify.
* the spontaneity offered by other players easily trumps preprogrammed yet "interactive" levels and enemies
Obvious, in the same way that poker & bridge are more fun than solitaire.
* the team based and multiplayer focus heightens suspense and immersion.
The word "immersion" doesn't really fit there. What the multiple players do is increase controllable complexity. Games become boring if they're too easy and predictable- but randomness introduced by the software isn't the solution, because it's completely outside the player's control/comprehension. But increasing complexity by adding more players introduces new human motivation to the game area, which is something players can think about, and increase their performance according to their ability to guess what the opponents are thinking.
It's the same reason that football and baseball are so much more popular than sprinting and pole-vaulting. More players = more complexity = more possibilities = more fun.
I don't have celebrity game creators in very high esteem. In almost 30 years, they have failed to make gaming a recognized art form, which cinema had achieved at the same age by the 1930s.
Your dates are way, WAY off. Games weren't invented in 1974. They've been around for 2500 years, that I know of. Yes, I'm aware that you probably only meant "video games", but that's NOT what you wrote.
And it's good to remember that the most popular and admired games are still things like Football and Chess. Nobody complains that they're not "recognized art forms", because that isn't the objective.
Deus Ex: great game, cool story...no Art. You experienced no emation
Your definition of "Art" is incorrect. It's not about emation (or even "emotion"). But going along with that definition, your critques are still entirely subjective. You apparently only found Homeworld effecting, while other people have had different reactions.
Homeworld: Art. Like Max Payne
I find your example of Homeworld very interesting, because in comparison to Deus Ex and Max Payne, the actual game had much less of the story in it. The aspect that drove your emotional response were the cutscenes presented BETWEEN playing the game, not DURING it. So it's not actually the game that impressed you at all. There's a saying, originally about Final Fantasy: "Great movie, but distracting bits of game mixed in"
"the subtleties of being evil without being purely self-destructive for no good reason."
Seems like a damn good definition of evil to me! Evil always has a reason which doesn't stand up to logic.
No, that's a dangerously limited definition of evil. Of all the obviously evil acts that are perpetrated around the world each day, only a very few were "self-destructive for no good reason". People generally have a well-planned reason to do evil, and they often wind up profiting by it, not "self-destroying".
"Evil" is really putting your own needs above those of others (compare it against "good", which is helping others at your own expense).
And if you say "But that definition means we're all evil!", then: Congratulations on your insight.
Regardless of your opinion of President Bush
It was a cheap shot, I admit. Although Bush still isn't being fully honest about it- the body text is at odds with the headlines.
He's inverting priorities. Cart before horse. The only way hydrogen can revamp the USA's energy economy is if it functions as an intermediate fuel for moving vehicles (or anything that you can't plug into AC).
He mentions nuclear at the end of a list, when really it should be prominent in the forefront. Hydrogen fuel without nuclear plants to produce it is meaningless (unless by some miracle solar cells become efficient enough). But there's a strong anti-nuclear voter bias, while hydrogen is a neutral (or unknown) topic for them.
Importing Earth HYDROGEN to add to Lunar Oxygen for fuel/reaction mass is a much better propostion.
Ok, but irrelevant to your claim that expending Lunar water as reactive mass is "disastorous". If you can import hydrogen to make water, it doesn't matter if you do it before extracting moon water, or after. (And after has the advantage that the technological/infrastructure base will be more advanced by then)
Umm... no. Take the Dynasoar for example.
A rather bad example. It fits on the nose of a rocket because it's small, and it's small because it fit just one person was possible.
If we used a craft focused on getting humans up and down, we'd be able to strap them to smaller and cheaper vehicles.
Ok. But Shuttle-style controlled re-entry is the wrong way to do it. Pod + parachute is safer and cheaper- ESPECIALLY if the craft is small. For a controlled landing, you must have a pilot in the crew- and if the vehicle only holds 1 person, then only pilots can travel in the vehicle! This is a great constraint on the personnel assignments you can put into space, and for no good reason.
Congress will be sure to pull the rest of the funding for the manned space program. Once that happens, how do you propose we get them to pay for a new program?
I hate seeing that argument. Translated: "My sponsors are irrational. Therefore I've got to do stupid, wasteful things to keep the money coming"
The Shuttle's return method is fine, we just need a normal rocket launch.
The way a Shuttle launches is an unavoidable result of the return method. They can't be separated.
The Shuttle is large, heavy, and has a huge cross-section. You can't do Shuttle-style re-entry with something much smaller. But to get something that big into orbit, you either need to (a) use the complex 4-part (shuttle + 2 booster + fuel tank) multistage launch of today, or (b) put it on the nose of an even more enormous rocket (which would be even more expensive).
But your comments about the relative saftey of Soyuz versus the Shuttle are complete bullshit.
I wasn't talking Soyuz vs. Shuttle, but disposable vs reusable (where the Soyuz and Shuttle happen to be high-profile examples of each kind).
Furthermore, the USSR skimped on safety spending, yet had similar levels of danger, because of a fundamentally safer design. The safest of all would be a Soyuz-like design (meaning unguided re-entry), with USA levels of redundant spending.
The Soyuz has killed all its passengers more times than the shuttle has - look it up.
Ok, I looked it up. The Soyuz has killed all its passengers twice, exactly the same number of Shuttle disasters. That adds up to 4 people lost on Soyuz, versus 14 killed in Shuttles. So... what was your point, exactly?
One minor part of the Shuttle's excessive risk is caused by the winged landing: To land the Shuttle, you need a aircraft pilot, who's otherwise useless. His presence onboard adds mass, and increases the number of lives that would be lost in an accident.
DRAG is not the word you want. Try again.
I wondered if you'd jump on that. FYI, the definition of "drag" is "an impediment or burden". But if you'd like it to only mean "retarding interaction with a fluid medium", then I'll rephrase: "The wings were a drag on liftoff, and their mass uselessly increased the thrust needed for both liftoff and orbital accelerations"
I don't even like the Shuttle, I wanted to build the gigantic space plane
Any kind of spaceplane is still a bad idea. "Planes", by definition, are only useful in an atmosphere. Putting any kind of plane is space is just wasteful mass and excessive complexity.
Or on New York and Washington and San Francisco ...
Actually, if Nazi Germany had been smart, they could've destroyed those cities with submarine-launched radioactive bombs in 1943. (Not "atomic bombs", but what we today call "dirty bombs").
You mention Harry Turtledove in your sig. He works in the alternative-history genre. There's a book in that genre which covers Axis launches of radioactive bombs onto US cities: "Trinity Paradox".
Maybe, maybe not. Hitler had already given up on trying to invade the UK by the time the US got involved,
Wrong. You seem to be talking about when the USA entered combat. But they had been "involved" and helping from the beginning. That's where Britain's ammunition came from.
Both the German and the Japanese programs could almost certainly have produced atomic weapons within a couple more years,
Retrospective examinations have shown that the German a-bomb project was flawed at a fundamental level of physical understanding. They could never have caught up with the USA.
It's fun to play games with how WWII could've gone differently. Victory in a few key battles (like the invasion of Egypt), better German research priorities (especially cryptography!), or a sustainment of the USSR non-aggression pact could all have lead to Germany being far more successful in the European theater. But any of those changes would ultimately be meaningless, because they were behind on the A-Bomb, and could not catch up.
(Of course, if your What-If scenario is "What if Germany had a good atomic physicist?", then anything goes)
And, of course, nobody but the Germans had anything that could be developed into an ICBM.
The USA had jet engines underway. The reason I said "1948" instead of "1945" was to allow them enough time to produce a jet-powered high-altitude bomber.
But if we were fighting either one, especially China,
If the USA was actually fighting China or India (which will never happen), the entire 1-billion population of either opponent would be dead within 5 hours.
at the moment, space is American territory.
Hurf? At this particular moment, the USA has ZERO ability to send a man into space. AT ALL.
that the majority of manned flights happen with some assistance of NASA
If by "assistance", you mean "Hey Ivan, I'll pay you $35 mil to take this carton into orbit for me!"
So delivering asteroidal materials takes longer, and costs more deltaV. Great trade-off, don't you think?
The factor supporting asteroidal materials is that the potentially could have high concentrations of useful metals. No proof of that, of course. But we do know that they're not common on the moon.
(don't want to take lunar water for this - Moon is a Harsh Mistress, remember? Using lunar water for fuel/reaction mass would be disastrous in the long term).
Not really. Water is water. Importing earth water to prevent using moon water is no better than using moon water first and then importing from earth to replace it.
but what do LEOs, Law Enforcement Officers have to do with space missions???
Someone has to maintain control over the crew of convicted felons forced to build the first moonbases.
What? You don't seriously think that free men will volunteer for a dangerous assigment like this.
Personally, I prefer having some attitudinal control during re-entry.
Personally, I'd prefer to survive re-entries after losing control.
When that happens to the Soyuz, the crew is lost in the wilderness for 10 hours until a retrieval team eventually finds them. When the Space Shuttle messes up a re-entry, the crew is scattered into a pinkish mist spread over 3 states.
unless you plan to do like the Soyuz, and just bail out the pilot and flight computer while the majority of the spacecraft smashes into the earth like a hypersonic missile.
Yep. That's the way to do it. Considering that building a whole new disposable spacecraft is less expensive (and more reliable, and even more scalable) than refurbishing a reusable vehicle, that's the prudent approach. (Building the disposable vehicle is cheaper, because the vehicle itself is a lot simpler, since it doesn't need features to survive re-entry)
Hmm... needs more maths. I suspect gliding re-entry is still going to win, though.
Wrong. It's not even close.
The shuttle's glide re-entry is a totally useless, counterproductive feature. Even if the wings did cause re-entry to need less fuel, it's not enough of the savings to make up for having needed to lift those wings into orbit in the first place. The wings were a drag on the liftoff, and a drag on all manuvering done in space. Just having them there increased the fuel-usage of every other mission activity.
The winged spaceplane is a project that justifies itself in terms of itself. The wing features allow the Shuttle to be reusable. That's good, because the Shuttle is expensive. And the Shuttle is expensive because it has wings....
Can't you use a significant proportion of the excess heat to power steam turbines and create more electricity?
Yes... and when you use that electricity to power a motor or computer, the heat comes out again. An attempt to usefully-reuse heat will only collect a portion of it (never 100%), and that heat will be returned when the collected energy is used.
The "Puppeteers" were a science fiction culture created for the "Ringworld" book, who had so many power-plants generating excess heat that they decided to shift their planet away from the sun, to balance it out.
Helping other countries has historically proven not to foster good will, but to create anger against us from those countries' enemies.
Yeah! Russia totally hates the USA today, because of what it did for Germany and Japan.