The ballpoint pen is actually a fairly recent invention. Ballpoint pens of similar quality and reliability of what we use today weren't really available before WWII. It's slightly tricky to come up with balls of good fit and ink that won't clog up the ball's rolling.

Fountain pens date back a few centuries, and various types of quill and bamboo pen are older still.

If you knew anything about nuclear weapons you'd know that the soviet weapons program largely tracked the US one, not the other way around. They were constantly in a defensive position.

I don't fault Feynman and the others for working on the bomb during the war. There was good reason to think Hitler might have been after a bomb, and the true nature of the weapon being constructed wasn't known to anyone except a small group of people. Most of the scientists were just given a few anonymous equations to solve and they did it.

I do, however, fault those that chose to stay after the war and continue working on nukes.

I think that if and when the US and Russia agree to disarm, they should detonate a few nukes way up in the atmosphere (say, around 20 km or so up) just for show. Of course environmentalists would never allow it, but it's fun to dream.

> A military target should make a point of either being hardened enough that it could take such a hit without serious damage

Well, with a foil weighing just a few micrograms you could get a yield equivalent to several kilograms of TNT, assuming an impact velocity of several thousand km/s (and thus significant fusion yield). Increase the impact velocity by a couple of orders of magnitude and you're looking at about a ton of TNT.

> or unpredictable enough that you simply couldn't be that sure.

How? In space it's not like you can just change direction at will. Doing so requires a lot of fuel and a lot of mass. You yourself are saying that your missiles would have to be light and they'd fire their thrusters once to head towards their target.

> Beyond that... the laser would be detectable. It would both make the "foil" detectable which would mean it could be intercepted by something else.

Not necessarily. Unless you're directly in the beam path, it's hard to detect lasers. And if you're in the beam path it's already probably too late.

One possible option for a kinetic weapon would be, for instance, a high-power laser shooting thin metal foil at a target. The foil is accelerated by the laser power from the moment of launch up until it hits the target. i.e. the projectile is in constant acceleration during flight. We've already been able to accelerate thin films to 1000 km/s velocity; this would cause considerable damage if it were to hit a target as the atoms in the foil would fuse with the atoms in the target, multiplying energy output by 100x or more.

> The most sensible weapon for space combat that I can think of is a particle accelerator.

For a broad enough definition of 'particle accelerator' I agree with you. Your particles can be subatomic or macroscale, and you can accelerate them to either relativistic or slower speeds. If they are macro-sized particles (say, specks of dust) then you need fewer but your particle accelerator has to be bigger to accelerate them to the same speed. For very large particles (marble-sized all the way up to asteroid-sized) and very high speeds you have a fearsome relativistic kinetic-kill weapon.

All of these are fine choices that may be suitable for various purposes. I just don't think we can predict what those purposes are right now.

Ah ok, I guess I should have RTFA.

I don't see how you conclude any of those things. Why would your weapon need to be the same as your propulsion system? Few, if any, current battle vehicles are arranged like that. A propulsion system and a weapon have very different design criteria. If this is just to be lightweight, then why couldn't you use the vehicle itself as a missile?

> You'll need to be a hole in space. So you need to be small enough to avoid detection, have minimal radar return, and your thermal signature needs to match the background of space.

That's effectively impossible as the background of space is 2 K or so. There is no stealth in space. http://www.projectrho.com/publ...

I'm not saying what you're saying is wrong; it's just one of the many ways that space battles could be fought. There's no reason to think it's the only way.

Alright, it's electricity theft, but "risked a fire"? Come on.

And by 'getting aggressive' do you mean a fistfight or threat of violence or something? No of course you don't, you just mean an exchange of words. Something that AT MOST would warrant a temporary arrest and escorting out of the property/train/whatever for release.

It's really just a matter of putting a sign above it saying "For staff use only" or similar. Then, you can at least say you told them before you arrest them.

It's really hard to say at this point what space battles would actually look like. There are just too many variables we don't know about. We don't know what kind of weapons will exist. Will they be energy/radiation-based weapons? In that case they have near-instant speed but limited range (as particle beams/lasers dissipate after some radius). Will they be kinetic weapons? In that case the speed is limited but you have virtually infinite range. What will the armor look like? Current spaceships have to be extremely light because we need to launch them out of gravity wells. But future ships could be extremely heavy and well-armored. Alternatively, not, because they may need to be light to easily accelerate around.

It's like those ridiculous drawings of 'future battle behemoths' that people drew in the early 20th century depicting the immense and insanely armored battleships of the future... whereas in reality the ultimate 20th century weapon (the weapon superior to all others) wound up being the nuclear ICBM.

Well I understand that it's science fiction, so I give them a pass, but in the real world there's obviously no way you can 'shield' against a freaking nuclear weapon. Unless you're willing to consider a solid metal shield with a thickness of a hundred meters. Wouldn't be much of a ship though.

I think it's more likely that a fighting force armed with ACTUAL weapons of mass destruction fighting against other, similar forces would fight in a similar manner as the USA and USSR did during the cold war. Namely: Few if any direct confrontations, a lot of military buildup, and plenty-o-proxy wars. Now you could say that on an interstellar scale nukes are no longer WMDs, but then we already have the _ability_ to build planet-destroying nukes. They'd be about the size of office buildings and cost a few tens of billion dollars (a modern high-tech bomber costs about a billion dollars). We just don't have any need for such massive nukes so none ever got made. But they'd be very useful fighting against a multi-planetary enemy, if only as a show of force.

She draws a comparison with New Zealand. I live in New Zealand. She probably came here as a tourist and had fun and went camping and thought everyone lives that way. They don't. It's true that we're less work-obsessed than the USA, but then most developed countries are less work-obsessed than the USA, so that isn't saying much. While the wealthier in New Zealand do work less, the poorer classes work their asses off to survive just like everywhere else.