Drop by user-created models at say civitai at some point and start browsing. We're talking user-created stuff, not things made by megacorps.

"Refrigeration in space" is otherwise known as "painting your spacecraft white" :)

I tire of this farce. Go play some Kerbal Space Program for a while and come back when you have the slightest fucking sense of how orbital dynamics works (hint: it's not about "distances")

The tube is not loadbearing, "jackass". It exists soley for its neutronicity.

The cost of lifting ~10t of fuel for a 10-50t spacecraft+cargo (e.g. depending on how extreme dV they actually want the spacecraft to be capable of) - aka, for a very large mission (the Apollo LM was only 4t incl. fuel) - at Falcon 9 prices - is 15M. At Starship prices, like an order of magnitude or more less. This is nothing compared to the billions of dollars you'll spend developing the spacecraft and billions more on mission hardware.

You have the most insane ideas.

? It's not a fusion rocket.

It's a fission rocket - bloody close enough.

additionally, have you factored the weight and storage space lost on the fusion rocket, to make room for 2x the fuel,

It's an ISP of 5000, it doesn't matter.

If you want to get there quickly, you're always loading it fully with fuel. The only difference is in the transfer time. All of them are "very fast", just varying degrees of "very fast".

It's like trying to say we should only fly airplanes on the couple days per year when the jet stream is strongest. It's such an immensely stupid idea.

1) the 'now 2 months' is down from the 'best time of 6 months', caused by mars being literally closer to the earth.

That's not how Hohmann transfers work. Just stop. And a minimum energy transfer to Mars is 9 months anyway, not 6.

In order to achieve the 2 month travel time, it must launch WITHIN THE LAUNCH WINDOW.

Get this through your head: There Are No 'Launch Windows' With Nuclear Propulsion. You don't leave a craft that can travel to Mars a matter of months sitting idle rusting away rather than repeatedly ferrying back and forth, just because some times the trajectory is somewhat longer and others it's somewhat shorter.

There are launch windows with minimum energy Hohmann transfers because that's what you need to have Mars be at the right place when you intersect its orbit. It takes roughly the same amount of energy to intersect Mars's orbit regardless of when you launch a Hohmann transfer, but unless you time it right, Mars won't be there. Launching at any other time requires more dV to dogleg it - and dV is dearly bought when it comes to chemical rockets. It isn't dearly bought with nuclear rockets. So launch windows simply don't apply to them. You launch on an elliptic which doesn't terminate at Mars' orbit, aka you applied more delta-V than was necessary to get out that far, but that's happening by definition if you want to get there faster. A minimum energy elliptic can only intersect Mars orbit opposite its starting position, but the higher the energy of the transfer, the more rotated the interception point is.

I will repeat: your capital cost is in your rocket. You're not going to leave it sitting around waiting for 2 1/2 years when you could do 10-ish trips during that timeperiod, just because some are longer than others and some somewhat shorter, and thus raise your capital cost per kg tenfold. They're all varying degrees of "short", and you have flexibility; you're launching on all of them. Unless you're an utter moron who likes throwing away 10x more capital at a project. You do not have to intersect the planet at a specific location on its orbit in opposition to your starting point when you apply more than the minimum dV.

since the ships ARE NOT THOUSANDS OF KM APART, due to ALL LAUNCHING IN THE SAME WINDOW

Launching just days apart in the same window (which again, THERE ARE NO WINDOWS), they're MILLIONS of kilometers apart. Do you not even know how far Mars and Earth are apart, or can you not divide a travel distance by the number of days of the trip?

And for the last goddamn time, the exhaust doesn't even remotely resemble a collimated beam, even if it did it would still be orders of magnitude weaker than ambient radiation, and even if it wasn't all you had to do was microscopically off-angle it. This is such a stupid line of discussion.

And people laugh at me when I go buy old TV series on DVD and rip them. The old stuff was not HD anyway, so DVD is usually quite good and easy to rip and store. Star Trek TOS, TNG, DS9, etc. Lots of classic britcom. Perry Mason.

Plus there's still a lot of free, commercial-free old TV shows out there if you know where to look. Some are on Archive.org (for now anyway). Youtube has over 15 seasons of Midsomer Murders on an official channel.

More than enough material for me personally.

Yes, and you clearly don't.

Nobody is going to leave the capital investment of a spacecraft that can do such quick transfers sitting idle waiting for a "window" when they can head there and back repeatedly in the same timeperiod.

Your costs are in your spacecraft, not your fuel. You're not going to leave it sitting idle for years waiting for a "window" to make a single delivery when you could make ten deliveries in that same timeperiod. Doing the former would mean increasing your capital costs by an order of magnitude per unit cargo shipped. Which is a braindead idea.

If your goal is "don't work on researching new technology until you've fully solved all of the problems at home", then I have to ask, how do you enjoy living a hunter-gatherer existence? You're setting a standard to never do basic research, because there will always be problems.

Nobody is saying "dump half of the globe's GDP into space exploration". The world's space agencies spend like one twentieth of a percent of global GDP. And have spawned a massive commercial market in things that benefit life on Earth, which is far larger than what space agencies spend (total space revenue now amounts for about half a percent of global GDP). All of those satellites orbiting Earth aren't up there on a lark, they're doing so because they're profitable to have them up there, because they provide services to the people of the world that people want to pay for. Global communication (particularly in remote areas for ships, planes, and emergency responders, and now increasingly, rural broadband), global positioning and timing, weather monitoring, fire monitoring, other natural disaster monitoring, climate monitoring, scientific research, agricultural management, resource mapping, national security, disaster response, media broadcast, on and on and on.

Basic research is your seed corn; you don't boil and eat it. Basic research is useless until it very suddenly isn't. "OMG, look at all these people wasting all this money trying to make heavier than air machines fly, when we have all these problems to deal with on the ground!" Sure would have been a GREAT idea if we had listened to those people, huh?

Do you understand what the word "parallel" means (aka, "not entering the planet"), and that these particles are rapidly en route to escape the solar system at several thousand kilometers per second? You're not catching up with them. Ever.

It's just nonsense. It's not even a highly collimated stream, and even if it were, you could just angle it slightly off-axis. It's moving away from you at relativistic speeds, and it's versus an environment that's already awash in radiation.

You simply do not understand orbital dynamics. You're referring to Hohmann Transfers. They're irrelevant if you're applying extra dV, which is what this entire article is about. There are no "windows" with nuclear propulsion. Nobody is going to leave the capital investment of a spacecraft that can do such quick transfers sitting idle waiting for a "window" when they can head there and back repeatedly in the same timeperiod.

Furthermore, even if we pretended it was just a few days apart (aka, even if we pretend nonsense) - On, say, a 200m km trip in 75 days, 2 days apart is over 5 million kilometers distance. You'd struggle to see a high powered laser pointed right at you from that distance. You're not going to increase radiation over background. Period. Even if the stream was super-collimated, which it isn't even remotely.

It's nonsense. Just stop.

1) There are no "launch windows" with nuclear propulsion. You're not doing Hohmann transfers anymore.

2) You couldn't contaminate the next spaceship from millions of kilometers away if you literally tried to do so. You're not going to be detectable above the (already significant) background radiation, by orders of magnitude.

3) "Contamination" implies something that persists. Not something that buggers off out of the solar system at a speed of thousands of kilometers per second. Distance from Earth to Pluto in just a week or two.

Stop thinking like a 19th century industrialist.

Start understanding the mind-boggling vastness of space and the already immense radiation load therein.

If you have 50 kNs/kg of specific impulse and 2 month transit time, *why the hell* would you care about "orbital alignment"? With that you can fly almost any time you want!

You don't have to be that far off-axis / distance before you've diffused to less than the (already significant) space background radiation. Remember that the distances we're talking about here are tens of millions of kilometers. Kinda hard to irradiate people from those distances even if you tried.