No, low-Z materials act as a moderator, lowering the temperature of the neutrons. High-Z materials reflect the neutrons away from the shielding. The main reactor shield isn't concrete and water; it's a big steel containment vessel.

It seems my response to anything nuclear ends up being, "Just use solar." And so it is, yet again.

You can build a type of rocket called a solar moth that can achieve similar specific impulse (Isp) as a liquid core NTR (which is what is being described here) but is much lighter than any NTR because it doesn't require heavy neutron shielding (you can only really shield neutrons with high-Z atomic nuclei, and thus mass; that's why lead is a great neutron shield). Using non-Hohman trajectories, i.e. dropping inside the or bit of Venus first to double your specific power and then meet up with Mars on the back leg, you can reach Mars inside of 90 days.

Mars orbit gives you only 44% of the insolation (incidence of solar radiation) as Earth orbit. You can overcome this easily by including two extra mirrors to double the collection surface area of the engine. This won't add much weight as most of the mass of the engine is going to be in the heat exchanger and nozzle of the engine. In the inner solar system, the rocket isn't so much limited by the collection area of the primary mirrors but by the material thermal limits of the heat exchanger. If you were using unobtanium instead of real matter in the heat exchanger, you could achieve temperatures equal to the temperature of the surface of the Sun with clever engineering.

With a solar moth, round-trip time for a "Flags & Footprints" mission is 6 months. We actually do know how the human body will respond to 0g for that length of time from Mir and ISS.

Keep in mind something about animal models, and rodents in particular; most of these single-gene aging related studies end up finding such mutations are already active in humans, which is why we live so much longer than mice, even relative to body size. However interesting this very preliminary and unreplicated study might turn out to be, it's probably useless for human life extension.

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

Actually, it's pretty easy to experience rabbit starvation from over consumption of pulses, nuts, and seeds. What prevents it is your body will just start craving less protein-rich foods to balance out.

The only reason half of Americans aren't malnourished right now is because of the introduction of enriched foods. Meal, salt, and most drinks (including most tap water) are enriched with some combination of vitamins and minerals. Artificially nutrient-enriched diets are one of the great successes of modern public health. Not quite at the level of sanitation, hygiene, and mass vaccination but definitely top-10.

This is objectively false as your average vegan is significantly less likely to have a nutrient deficiency than your average omnivore. As long as you're combining a pulse with a grain in your diet, you'll be fine as far as amino acids go. If this weren't the case, agrarian societies would have all failed a long time ago. Pre-industrial agrarian societies were mostly vegan in practice if not ideology because animal products and byproducts were so relatively rare and expensive in the first place.

I literally included two in my post. LLMs tend to liberally sprinkle nonsense adverbs into sentences. They also slap em-dashes around like a nervous twitch.

It's not. It's good at matching common style guides. Human language is redundant for fault tolerance reasons. There's far less data conveyed in a sentence than the information it contains. That's why you can finish someone else's... The meaning of the sentence was already transmitted before the end of the sentence. That inherent fault tolerance of language makes it easy for people to interpret around the nonsense LLMs inject into their sentence structure. That's why LLMs tend to use so many m-dashes and adverbs. They're the language equivalent to six fingers on a hand or a baby with a dog's face.

First, it wasn't a few years ago. It was a decade ago.

Second, I use Feedly. In fact, I navigated to this article from reading it on my RSS feed.

To some extent, yes. Mostly it marks a shift to what's called "mechanical doping" where you hide an electric motor and batteries in your bike. It turns out adding a motor makes you go faster than taking a bunch of drugs.

Blue Ridge carry up to six helicopters. They have hangar space for repair of up to two helicopters at a time. They are flattop warships. Helicopters very much are aircraft and form the primary offensive armament of the ship. They're literally based on the Iwo Jima-class carriers. Again, similar ships in literally any other navy than the USN are called carriers by the USN.

My point was that if you use the standards the US Navy uses to determine what is an aircraft carrier in other navies and apply that to the US, there are a bunch of ships that should be considered carriers. And, with little to no modifications, all those ships I listed can carry and launch F-35Bs. F-35Bs actually are STOVL and not VTOL with combat loads. They do require a flattop ship to sortie combat missions from. "Can launch fixed-wing multi-role fighters into combat" seems a reasonable standard to call something an aircraft carrier. Yes, there are a bunch of ships that were clearly built with the assumption of buying F-35Bs once those became available. Like the French Mistral and Japanese Izumo ships. I think Italy has a few "sea-control" ships that also fall under this. I have seen white papers on launching F-35s from every class of ship I mentioned. Will those work out in practice? Maybe? It will almost certainly require resurfacing the flight deck because the F-35B has a habit of burning holes in flight decks that aren't specifically reinforced to resist that. That's what happened to the America-class, which was even purpose built to launch F-35s. That's one reason (there are many) that the project is so behind schedule. (Aren't they all?)

"Chinese" and "communist" are adjectives modifying "party".

Wikipedia is not authoritative. It can be modified by anyone. Including weirdos like you. But, let's go ahead and quote Wikipedia, just for shits and giggles. "The Communist Party of China (CPC),[a][3] commonly known in English as Chinese Communist Party (CCP)..." First fucking line.

7 Wasp-class, 2 America-class, 3 Lewis B. Puller-class, 2 Blue Ridge-class. That makes 14. I forgot to count the front falling off the Bonnie. The surface fleet build pace of the US being dogshit, I'd assumed four more Puller-class would be active as they were supposed to be by now but are stuck in the hell that is US surface fleet construction.

Firstly, in English, it's called the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP. The same way we used to call the country the USSR and not the CCCP. Or the way everyone calls Germany something other than Deutschland. Maybe you don't speak English as your first language, but in English, that's the order the adjectives have to be.

Secondly, you seem to have even less of an idea of how American politics work than you do on how Chinese politics work.

Finally, you also lack an understanding of what social reproduction is. That's the point of the PLA, not military aggression.