I still like mine. It's got some cool stuff on it, available on no other platform and one of the biggest pluses is I don't go on the internet with it, so that distraction and annoyance isn't an issue. :)

Of course, the old Orion design has been significantly surpassed by a number of newer designs. Medusa, for example, is much better than Orion - the bombs explode in front of the craft behind a gigantic "parachute", which captures far more of the energy and the long cords on the parachute allow for a much longer, smoother acceleration pulse. The bombs are also able to be detonated much further from the craft, and the craft may be made a lot smaller.

Nuclear thermal - the first version that was being developed called Nerva - allows for "clean" (to varying degrees) fission propulsion from the surface. Or if what you want is high ISP in space, then a fission fragment rocket goes much higher than an Orion or Medusa design (and scales down a lot better)

Once you've got an audience it may be doable, but there's still a huge grey area in the beginning where you need to somehow reach the hundred thousand people required to find two thousand people enthusiastic enough about your work to be willing to support you. Patreon makes the business more easily sustainable once you're famous, but it doesn't negate the need to first find a way to become famous.

An email from Amazon, to authors:

The numbers are always a little vague ahead of time. There's a pool of money allotted each month, and that pool is divided among books that are viewed. Originally KDP select was just for lending, but is expanded to include this, now, too. Historically I've seen values around $3+ per loan, often around $3.25. It depends on your pricing and royalty scheme whether this is "good" or not, but at 70% royalties, if you sell your book for around $4.64 or less, this is higher than what you'd make for a straight-up purchase, and if you sell your book for more you're probably "losing" a little money compared to a sale. The thing is, both the lending library and this Kindle Unlimited program basically make the books "free" to the user, so they may be more likely to try something new without the risk of committing money.

I don't think Amazon differentiates royalties based on sales numbers. It's a flat 70% for most books, but 30% for some of the cheapest. (I forget what the cutoff is, but it's easy information to find.)

I talk about retrocomputing with several people and most of those who are both over 30 and a long time computer users remember the Amiga.

LK

I've tried a few dozen of the freebie books. Many have been bad, a few as bad as you say. I've also read a couple that I really enjoyed, and there's at least one case of an author where I bought a few of her sequels after reading the first freebie.

What would be nice is a much broader rating and recommendation tool than currently exists. Not just a single star-rating, but some more reliable information about quality of writing and editing as well as content, to help people find the diamonds in the rough.

It varies a lot, but freelancers often work for a fraction of a cent per word, maybe around .2 or .3 cents. Some work by page count or other means. I paid about $3k for a very long novel.

Also depends if you're looking for a full-on editor, just a proofreader (or eventually end up with both).

There's also cover design, which can run a few hundred to a thousand.

And if you're not going strictly digital, you may need to hire layout services for the book, which can be another several hundred to a thousand.

So, roughly speaking, a short book might only cost you a few grand, a long book with lots of extras, or multiple revisions, could easily run five grand or more. And that's assuming if you print it's on-demand (the most expensive in the long run, but cheaper than shelling out for a large batch up front).

Decade or two to ramp up production for new vehicle sales. Plus a decade or so for consumer acceptance lag. Then two decades or more to phase out existing gas cars. We're talking half a century here.

Yes, at one point there were 5 cars per million people period. Around the year 1890. Today there's 0.15 cars per capita globally. It took over a century to scale up that much, so I don't think that's the sort of point you want to be making. Plus, not only do we have to scale up for existing car replacement, but also to handle the rapid growth of the third world, which will push that 0.15 cars per capita way up over the coming decades. It's simply something that will take decades to get the production capacity in place, and then decades at that level to phase out the existing vehicles on the road.

Biofuels are hardly a gap filler. Have you ever checked how much land they eat up even to meet today's tiny pathetic percentage of the market share? To meet the needs of the average American driver's 12k miles per year in an average 24mpg car (500 gallons) would require 3 million square miles of farmland dedicated to it, more than double the US total farmland for *all* crops - for human consumption, for animal feed, for clothing, for industry, everything combined. And that's just for passenger cars, let alone freight trucks, trains, airplanes, ships, etc.

It's not a gap filler. It's an environmental disaster on a greater scale than the oil it's trying to replace.

And for the literally 99.9995 percent of the world population who doesn't have a Tesla?

As much as I'm a fan of electric cars, it's simply an absurdity to pretend that everyone's going to have one any day now. The average car on the road in the US is 10 years old, implying an average US lifespan of 20 years - and many live on even longer, shipped to the third world. So even if every new car sold tomorrow was an EV, it'd still take decades to switch over. But of course, every new car sold tomorrow won't be an EV. Even if every consumer in the world was suddenly sold on the concept of EVs, it'd take a decade or two to be able to ramp up production that high. But of course every consumer in the world isn't sold on the concept of EVs, it'll take a decade or two of people getting to experience the technology and being satisfied with it for that to happen.

I wish this wasn't the case, but the majority of the cars in the world aren't going to be electric for many decades to come. So if your plan is to stop all oil production during that time... yeah, best of luck with the end of human civilization.

You think the boat is just going to sit in one place? They drag the sensors behind them while they travel across tens of millions of square kilometers. At the sort of pulse rate discussed and at typical ship rates of travel for a craft like this, the pulses would be about 100 meters apart, and the ship would be dozens of miles away an hour later.

There's no point to sitting in one area and pulsing the same place over and over.

France also has a much milder climate and 3.5 times the population density. They're also heavily dominated by nuclear power, which some people like but others truly hate, and which tends to be one of the more expensive generation sources per kilowatt hour and with a very long turnaround time from conception to commencement of generation.

And once again, we're talking about oil here, oil and electricity are not interchangeable. You need to be comparing oil consumption per capita. France's is a bit over half the US's, but with a population density 3.5 times higher, that's kind of to be expected.

Let me know how you managed to fit the sun or a fusion reactor into your gas tank.

Are we really going to keep pretending that oil and electricity are the same thing?

For the third time I have to point it out in this thread, underwater explosions are measured differently on the decibel scale than above water explosions, you need to subtract 61.5 from the decibel figures before comparing them with above-ground noise figures. That's over 6 orders of magnitude difference.

Also, when people talk about how the ships keep making pulses every ten seconds, they act like it's in the same spot. Which would be idiotic. "Okay, now that we know what's down here, what should we explore next? I know, let's keep exploring the exact same place!" The ships pulse every 10 seconds while moving across the vast survey area.

Lastly, see my comparison with lightning above, which strikes more frequently in the survey area, louder, and often hits the same area for hours on end.

Once again, people here at Slashdot seem completely unaware that underwater sounds are measured by a scale that's 61.5 db louder than sound in the air.