Recent content by Nobby-W

I always thought the combination of a replicator and transporter would be a good way to fabricate and deliver nuclear weapons (or eve large conventional explosive devices) to your target. I think the makers of Star Trek missed a trick.

That's not strictly true. While NASA's manned exploration programme has been moribund since the Apollo Programme, a lot of work has gone into the International Space Station, which is the most expensive object ever built by mankind, and many, many unmanned missions have produced research from...

Some sort of programmable protein (or protein analogue) synthesis mechanism would be necessary for cellular life to reproduce. Its not necessarily a given that DNA/RNA is the only mechanism that could do this, but it's the only one that's been found to occur naturally (extremophiles still use...

May I suggest you try Kerbal Space Program. You can learn more about orbital mechanics than you ever thought you wanted to know. https://xkcd.com/1356/

If Kerbal Space Program counts I have. Gravity assists are useful if you don't have a lot of Delta-V to play with in your manoeuvre drive. Folks running probes have used gravity assists to get their craft on grand tours of the solar system and can be incredibly stingy with reaction mass if...

I've done hybrid systems on a few occasions. If you take the CT Book 1 character generation system (or any of its variants in other editions) you can make some modifications along the lines of: Allow the player to select one of the service skills per term from any table they have access to...

The reasons I use for this are essentially that brain surgery is still intrusive, and the immune system will grow a sheath around any electrodes over the course of a decade or so, rendering implants unreliable after some time. This means that your cybernetic implants will have to be...

Typically low orbit - a few hundred km up. This type of orbit will have a period of (say) 1.5-2 hours, meaning that it can service multiple downports with a launch window every orbit for shuttles between the highport and downports to make a time-efficient rendezvous (i.e. shortest flight time)...

This is a misconception with Depleted Uranium. U238 is only very slightly radioactive; the problem is not that it Depleted Uranium is a radioactive toxin in the way (say) Polonium-210 is, but that it's a heavy metal poison in much the same way that Mercury or Lead is. If you manage to ingest...

Nope. The electromagnetic force accelerating the projectile still generates a corresponding force on the rifle - Newton's third law of motion still applies no matter what means is used to generate the force. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion

We have a couple of analogies from an era where comms were intermittent and slow: Usenet and FIDONet. These were networks of computers that would download news from their upstream peer and forward it to their peers. The methodology was called store-and-forward and emphasised local storage of...

Of course, the canonical application of this power is 'These aren't the droids you're looking for ...'

They're not mandatory but I don't have a problem with them in my games. The first thing to remember with psionics is game balance. If a power grants some ability that can be replicated with a piece of equipment, then it's unlikely to cause problems with game balance. For example, a psionic...

OP was asking about the secondhand value of the ship. You could also include a discounted cashflow projection over a (say) 10-20 year period for the return in order to speculate on the value of the ship. My assumption about a 15% ROI was just pulled from thin air assuming a somewhat risky...

Modern body armour is designed to have replaceable panels. If it gets hit you can get another panel and fairly trivially slot it in. There's no particular reason for sci-fi armour to be any different. Combat Armour has a pressure suit component, which could be damaged - one might expect...