Orion nuclear pulse drives are powerful *despite* their design. The energy efficiency of the 10m diameter USAF design was just 0.78%, as the 1 kT pulse yield converted into 2 MN thrust at 3350s Isp.
www.projectrho.com/public_html/...
Animation @brianmcmanus.bsky.social: youtu.be/EVwlTsa9oMM
DLR's Reusability Flight Experiment is a 400 kg, 2.7 m long flying testbed for hypersonic reentry and autonomous flight, launched to 130 km altitude by a VSB-30 Brazilian sounding rocket:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
No parachute or landing gear, so it aims for crash ending.
The Porsche 917 LH (Long Tail) was a lengthened version of the 917 that aimed for lower drag at high speeds.
It would achieve 386 km/h on the 6 km long Mulsanne Straight in 1971, using a 600 horsepower flat-12 engine.
Orion I, a transporter ship inspired by Syd Mead's work, done in Blender 3.6
#space #art by Isaiah.
www.artstation.com/artwork/x3nb5R
DART's impactor shifted asteroid Dimorphos' velocity by 2.7 mm/s.
Based on an asteroid density of 1500 to 3300 kg/m^3, that means the momentum enhancement factor is 2.2-4.9x thanks to kinetic energy ejecting additional debris upon impact:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
France and the US are working on certifying the Rafale for refueling F/A-18s:
theaviationist.com/2025/05/17/r...
Testing is being done by the Flight Test Division of the Direction Générale de l’Armement and U.S. Navy’s Air Test and Evaluation Squadron VX-23.
Watch the smoke trail from the flares reveal the massive vortices and turbulent wake of the F-22 Raptor as it shows off its post-stall maneuverability:
youtu.be/xvQUwmP0eXE
Concept art for a MU/TH/UR computer room, meant for Predator: Badlands.
#art by Sean Hargreaves
www.artstation.com/artwork/YG92o6
Combining the output of many single fiber lasers into a single large beam is a reliable path towards high efficiency, high-quality easy to cool lasers scaling beyond 100 kW:
www.mdpi.com/2304-6732/8/...
Pulsed lasers can be combined too, but you also need to get the timing right.
There's a nucleus at the center of atoms then a cloud of electrons all around.
But reality isn't so neat.
For example, the 'halo nucleus' with protons/neutrons sitting just a few femtometers outside the nucleus. It's usually a neutron halo that lasts for a few milliseconds.
The "botanipunk" worldbuilding and tool concepts make for a very unique aesthetic here!
#art by @chromamoma.bsky.social for a personal project.
www.artstation.com/artwork/nJ9bZr
Reducing the convergence ratio in hotspot ignition inertial confinement ratio by replacing the solid DT ice layer at the capsule wall with liquid DT:
firefusionpower.org/IAEA_2018_Li...
Lower ratios decrease intensity and implosion velocity requirements, but comes with complications.
The HC-130P/N "King" extended-range variant of the C-130 Hercules is dedicated to assisting Search And Rescue efforts, seen here refueling HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters.
www.af.mil/About-Us/Fac...
It even got to serve as space flight support for NASA.
Plasmonic metasurfaces with ~100 nm features for converting light into electricity:
pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
99% absorption from IR to UV is possible with multilayered W/SiC/SiO2, boosting traditional PV or building solar-thermoPV with 85% efficiency potential.
The Titanic had hidden mounts for guns so it could be converted into an armed merchant ship, as required by British law.
Her sister ship HMS Olympic did get to serve as an armed troopship, got painted in dazzle camo, and sunk German submarine SM U-103 by ramming it.
The 'Nexus Ship' created for Reikon Games. Perhaps that's a debris shield in front.
#space #art by Tim Zanconato.
www.artstation.com/artwork/mAeL1Z
Out of the 63 countries with positive organic population growth in the world, 42 are in Africa.
Many of its cities have seen incredible expansion in the past decades, multiplying 10x, 30x or 90x over their size in 1950.
Returning 100 kB of data from Proxima Centauri, when you have only a 1 gram probe with 10 mW of power, is about a BILLION times more difficult than communicating with New Horizons past Pluto.
Here is how the nuclear rocket engine will work:
youtu.be/eDNX65d-FBY
A NASA/AEC animation for a regeneratively cooled nuclear-thermal rocket with graphite-uranium core, from 1958.
Under the overpass, in the glow of neon lights.
#art by Matvey Radkov.
www.artstation.com/artwork/4Nn1nW
Well, they lived several levels underground in the previous season, which is more than enough protection if they spend a good % of their time there.
According to the For All Mankind official 2004-2012 timeline, 'Iridium' has become the unobtanium that justifies the space economy, Mars habs above ground are protected by magnetic shielding and there's an interplanetary illegal immigration problem with stowaways:
youtu.be/sjQmbeoiMOM
Quaia is an all-sky quasar map showing over 1.2 million active supermassive black holes detected by the Gaia mission:
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...
It's the catalog with the "largest total volume of the universe mapped".
Carbon has a metastable BC8 form that's tougher than diamond. Its compressive strength may be 30% higher!
However, it would have to be grown as nanocrystals condensing out of liquid carbon at insane 5000K and >1500 GPa conditions.
pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
Kitbashing industrial equipment together to create spaceships is not a terrible approach.
#space #art by Stanislav Verbitsky.
www.artstation.com/artwork/yk8qaR
Xcimer Energy is developing a commercial DT fusion reactor that's like a highly modernized NIF: a 10+ MJ Krypton-Fluoride 248 nm excimer laser (>5% efficiency) as driver and capsules shot by EM gun into a HYLIFE III chamber with molten FLiBe in the walls
xcimer.energy
Solar sails with a modest lightness ratio of 0.1 can transfer to Venus or Mars and become "quasi-pole-sitters", orbiting indefinitely less than 30° from the planet's poles:
www.researchgate.net/publication/...
Thinner sails with better lightness ratios can become perfect 0° pole sitters.
I'm quoted several times in there.
A simulation of a neutron star merger by the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics that would explain the GW170817 gravitational wave observation by @LIGOVirgo, followed by a gamma ray burst:
youtu.be/xIthgcx-axs
