AdAstraGames

Lesbians of colour! If you are interested in working with me on a TTRPG project, please comment on the post below ⬇️

Based on a spike in sales, someone said something nice about Architect of Worlds recently. If anyone knows who or where that was, we'd love to know to promote the review!

Denys Cowan, Hannibal Tabu and Morgan Hampton celebrate The Dakota Incident at The Comic Den

Generations of Black comic book creators! @denyscowan.bsky.social media and @moellennial.bsky.social celebrating the launch of The Dakota Incident! #blacksky #addtoblacksky

We've got a couple of bills due on March 2nd that are minor, but would be much much simpler to pay if we sold, oh, about $45 worth of stuff on Wargame Vault in the next 6 hours. (Basically, we can pay them via PayPal debit rather than put them on a credit card.)

Links to our titles below!

Did Guardians of Order pay you when they were supposed to?

(Still salty about McKinnon and the people he stiffed.)

196) Both of those fusion types require vastly greater temperatures and pressures than D-D fusion does; 11B-H will get minor amounts of D-D sideband fusion, spitting out neutrons, and D-3He will produce even more.

If someone tells you aneutronic fusion is easy, be skeptical.

195) And that fusion was messy old D-T fusion, which produces 80% of its energy in a terribly inconvenient neutron spray. Lots of SF assumes there's an effective way to make 11B-H fusion, or D-3He fusion, but somewhat ignores the incidental neutron creation from side reactions.

194) A lot of SF still uses "cheap, small, aneutronic" fusion reactors; they're there in Niven and Pournelle's stuff, BattleMechs use them, and they still show up in SF through the 2010s.

Fusion is tricky; it was 2024 when we got *an* instance of inertial fusion producing better than break even.

193) Bussard ramjets were a staple of hard SF from the 1960s and 1970s. They fell out of favor in the late 1980s.

Why did they do so? Because the drag of the magnetic field through space needed to accelerate the hydrogen into the fusion reactor was greater than the thrust that could be generated.

Of course, the tricky part is getting to the last post in the thread -- any tricks people have on that?

It’s so nice that the way a person makes a shape or puts a line down on a page can still delight me so much

One hopes that as the terribleness is known, the importance lessens.

Hopes, but perhaps have grown too cynical to expect...

192) I slipped a decimal place in this reply 6 months ago:

7% of light speed is still the threshold where you get 1% relativistic mass adjustments, but it's about 20.8 km/sec.

191) The Chinese are figuring out how to actually *cook* things in space as part of their research. Cooking things in microgravity is tricky! You need a radiant element, and fans, and heat doesn't rise, it soreads evenly. Chinese taikonauts on Tianlong Station recently roasted spiced chicken wings.

190) Modern ISS research teams have microwavable meals, and a limited supply of treats; astronauts are asked to taste test the meals they ask for in their meal plans for their stay.

189) By the time of the second crewed mission, NASA sent up re-usable water bottles, and let the astronauts choose more of their own food, while the stuff the astronauts had no say over borrowed research from the Army's MRE development program, which happens to be "low residue".

`88) The water station on Skylab was cleverly builtand someone got an award for it; it had a hood and a capture filter for water droplets with an intake fan.

It also lacked stirrups, the button was stiff enough that astronauts would shove themselves up into that hood and have to bite the water.

187) On the first crewed Skylab mission, everyone was constipated. This came about for two reasons: The first was that NASA wanted to maximize nutritional density and all the rations were, er, high protein. The second is that Skylab's lower air pressure made eveyone dehydrated.

186) The process by which you pee in microgravity looks a lot like hooking a vacuum cup over your genitals so that a fan can suck the flow to the tank. Similarly, defacation means pooping over a suction intake.

185) It took reports from Senator John Glenn, on the Space Shuttle, for this to make it to NASA, who then had to write policies saying "We won't downcheck you for in-flight vision differences. We'll even send up sets of reading glasses for you to test out."

184) When NASA asked their retired astrnaut corps about this, many of them 'fessed up; most of the early astronauts were pilots, and used to having 20/20 or 20/15 vision, and they did not want to report a vision impairment that might flush them out of the job!

183) Keeping meat alive on spaceships and spacestations is a process we're still learning interesting things about.

For example, 40% of astronauts develop vision problems in space because microgravity and slightly lower air pressure mean that their eyes change shape, distorting their corneas.

All right. For each "like" this post gets, I'll give one hot take on space combat, the underlying tech assumptions, and how it's portrayed in novels, film/TV and gaming.

Divided by 3,600 seconds, is a bit shy of 4 hours, so a smidge over 7 hours for the complete trip if you stop at the other side.

Top speed is 21,466.25 * 19.53125 = 419,262.75 meters per second, or 419.26 km/sec, or a bit over 1.4% of c.

How much dust you hit depends on too many outside variables.

Missed this 6 months ago:

Neptune's orbit is 4.5 billion meters in diameter.

d=0.5 * a * t^2

4.5*10^9=0.5 * (2 * 9.765625) * t^2

9.0*10^9/19.53125 = t^2

460,800,000=t^2

21,466.25=t. In seconds.

May I add you to the Space Opera Starter Pack?

Squadron Strike: Newton’s Cradle preview — A fully 3D flight/combat sim for your tabletop Physics? In my tabletop space fighter? It's more likely than you think.

Squadron Strike Reviews!

From @gamingtrend.com

Fun fact. The tariffs have changed twice since this was posted.

You are also committing one of the acts considered to be part of genocide.

Drop something MUSCULAR.