Re: SpaceX StarHopper Takes First Flight
Without FTL, the best we could do would be a mix of fusion and laser propulsion to make relativistic speeds possible. Realistically, unless FTL turns out to be practical, we probably max out at 0.1c outside of the exceedingly rare-and-expensive, even by interstellar standards. In theory, a perfectly designed laser ship, with a high-quality laser highway could get far closer to C, but you'd have to build the laser stations at no more than 0.1c, probably much slower.
... But yeah, I had a long post with an aside about the "Star" bit being a weird name for an interplanetary ship, but it got kinda weird, so I deleted it.
It seems like everyone who hears about Orbital Rings immediately wants one, in spite of how outrageously expensive and difficult those would be at any point in the next century. Spacex's bringing launch costs down, and Blue Origin trying to industrialize space, are both necessary steps to making Orbital Rings make sense as a goal, and once you have one of those, you basically win. In the short-term, though, I'm hoping someone can scrape together the resources to build the kind of space infrastructure so that we can get genuine cost-effective production of 0g and vacuum chemicals / crystals / solar panels / etc, the kind of stuff that would solve a ton of Earth's problems if they weren't so expensive that even the obscenely rich haven't pulled them off. If you want post-scarcity, you need that nigh-infinite energy, space, and material. As has been made abundantly clear over the past decades, the Earth can only handle so much, and the only way to put the human genie back in the bottle is with levels of genocide that would make Thanos blush.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
