Not according to the (badly worded) article you linked to above.. instead, they've discovered a promising line of research. Most research folks need to do that to keep their funding.
Quote from: CameronD on 12/22/2016 01:02 amNot according to the (badly worded) article you linked to above.. instead, they've discovered a promising line of research. Most research folks need to do that to keep their funding.Yes, it's suggestive something is going on but nowhere near an actual product. A perennial problem with superconductors is the materials tend to be brittle and this one looks to be no different. The REBCO tape materials that MIT is planning to use for their compact fusion reactor seem to avoid this problem, although they are looking to operate around LH2 temperatures (27K?)TBH I'm not sure how much benefit space exploration will see from fusion. The standard tokomak design has even more severe scale down problems than LH2 turbopumps. I'd say you'd need SLS to put a fusion reactor into space assuming the MIT team can get funding to demonstrate the ARC reactor plan. That said if they could get it to work ARC can deliver a large amount of low radiation energy from a very abundant source indefinitely provided you can live with the (by space standards) very large minimum mass requirement and radiator size.
There are other promising fusion reactor designs that would be even more compact than ARC.
Quote from: lamontagne on 12/21/2016 03:11 amBut convective cooling only works at room temperature, obviously. Convective cooling only operates in an atmosphere.This coating (assuming it can be scaled up) stops heat being absorbed by the tank above that temperature, allowing the tank itself to continue emitting until it gets closer to the ambient temperature, in this case 3K.One joker in this pack for SX is that the question "At what temperature does a composite tanks start to develop brittleness issues " AIUI SX want to run LO2 close to its melting point, which is well below that of Methane. 47K should be OK but I don't think anyone really knows.
But convective cooling only works at room temperature, obviously.
I see, I got it completely wrong :-) As a very reflective coating, it does a lot of work with a single layer. I wonder if you can combine this with multilayer insulation to reduce heat gain further?
How did this relatively mundane technology of a reflective coating come to dominate this thread? It deserves its own thread.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-03-scientists-unveil-giant-anti-aging.htmlwell that's that then.
Quote from: Stormbringer on 03/24/2017 04:13 amhttps://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-03-scientists-unveil-giant-anti-aging.htmlwell that's that then. It's certainly intriguing, and the possibility of near term human trials is encouraging."radio protectant" drugs are one of those logical ideas that NASA never seems to have funded at all. Which is odd because if you're not going to seriously reduce travel times between Earth and anywhere else, or do so inside something with the shielding level of an asteroid, it's your only real way to avoid a massively increased radiation dose, given that the usual NASA Aluminum can offers < 5% of the Earths atmosphere.
The entire set-up was taken specifically, directly, and consciously from the Directrix. In your story, you reached the situation the Navy was in—more communication channels than integration techniques to handle it. You proposed such an integrating technique and proved how advantageous it could be. You, sir, were 100% right. As the Japanese Navy—not the hypothetical Boskonian fleet—learned at an appalling cost.
The bridge of the classic Star Trek Enterprise was designed by Matt Jeffries. In a second stunning example of science fiction innovation it influenced the design of the U.S. Navy master communications center at NAS San Diego. On US naval vessels, their bridge design does not look anything like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, but the Combat Information Center in a navy vessel does have some resemblances (mostly the Captain's chair in the center of the room). Again, refer to The Great Heinlein Mystery: Science Fiction, Innovation and Naval Technology by Edward M. Wysocki Jr.
i am no fan of suspended animation ( ahem "vegging out") at all for solving transit problems for solar system missions but here is something that may help that particular line of exploration:
True. However ARC is attractive because it leverages the architecture most fusion physicists have worked on for the last half century but applies some clever materials and some reverse thinking (essentially making the inside the vacuum chamber inside everything else and making it replaceable).
Quote from: Stormbringer on 04/23/2017 12:17 ami am no fan of suspended animation ( ahem "vegging out") at all for solving transit problems for solar system missions but here is something that may help that particular line of exploration:I have been in a medically induced torpor before. Waking up from it was neither pleasant nor quick. Though I have to admit that I do not know how much was the torpor and how much of it was the underlying condition. It is a good idea but I am not sure it is the right solution.