I said that, back when I was hand-writing reports, it took far less than a month. You responded with a bunch of detail that simply didn't exist when I was hand-writing reports, so I'm describing the conditions I worked under back then.

There's lots of reasons I can be stuck with payments. They don't affect ownership. If I lose my phone in the middle of a contract, I need a new phone. If I lose my phone after the contract's over, I need a new phone. I don't see the difference.

As far as a cheaper month-by-month plan, I haven't seen much of that in the US. Most plans are based on you getting a subsidized phone every two years, and you're paying for it whether you take advantage of the subsidy or not.

Specifically, we're closer to being able to launch a manned mission than we were in 1975. That doesn't mean it would be a good idea.

You're not talking about very maneuverable spacecraft, or short battles. If the battle is fairly short, the orbit doesn't matter. (Given limited delta-V, it can be important in setting up the battle.)

In the old Star Trek RPG Combat Simulator, I played with the idea of a fighter. It turned out that weapons dominated the cost of the ships, so for not much more cost than putting a phaser on a shuttle, I could put a real ship around it and make the phaser more survivable.

Actually, crossing the T was a very useful tactic from the time when sailing warships with broadside cannon became common (sometime in the 1700s or so) until gun battles ceased to be important.

How are you putting the heat into the enemy ship? If you're using a beam-type weapon, you're using up a lot of power to generate it, and that creates heat on your own ship. If you have problems keeping on target at the range you're at, you're probably heating your ship more than heating the enemy's.

In a battle with maneuverable spacecraft, you don't care about the orbit you're in. What's important is position, velocity, and acceleration relative to your opponents.

In other words, you don't require a public-facing bug list. You just want access during the sales process (and probably later), and you're willing to sign an NDA first.

Your problem is thinking that salespeople should be able to deal with phony issues. That is very likely not to work. If a competitor's salesperson comes up with a phony issue with your product, your salespeople are playing defense and trying to reassure the customer when they could be concentrating on your product's good features.

Non-techies buy most software products. There's a lot more of them than us, so they're a much larger market.

If you have to educate a customer before you can sell something, you've almost certainly lost. In most fields, you need to be able to sell your stuff to people who don't fully understand it, and in particularly don't fully understand the development process.

Marketing is not a simple job. I don't really know how to do it well (in this company, that's a problem for other people). It deals with things that are hard to quantify, but that doesn't make it any easier or more important.

You seem to miss the fact that this is an opinion of sales and marketing, not just sales. If you think there's no difference, you're unqualified to have an opinion. (Marketing is about setting up an environment where it's easier to sell, sales is about actually selling the stuff.)

Your attitude is that the developers should dictate how sales and marketing should work, and sales and marketing should spin what the developers like. This is very much like having sales and marketing set development deadlines and vague and partly contradictory specs, and expecting development to come up with a product that conforms to the specs on the given schedule. If you (correctly) think that's a recipe for failure and other bad things, why would you expect sales and marketing to work well when given orders from developers?

Basically, if you can't trust the opinions of your marketing guys, fire them and hire different ones. They're the experts here.

Why worry about missing? We're very, very good at placing spacecraft exactly where we want them. This isn't some Edgar Rice Burroughs thing where the Mars mission winds up crashing on Venus. There's innumerable dangers, and you pick one that isn't going to happen?

On the trip, we have radiation exposure, extended zero-g effects, needing to maintain a livable environment for a long time, things like that. Worry about those.

Actually, we're closer than in 1975. The cost of getting stuff to LEO is going down considerably, and we know a lot more about keeping people alive and halfway healthy in space for long periods of time. LEO is a good chunk of the way to planetary escape velocity, and from there we can use low-thrust engines that could be more efficient than rockets.