I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that there’s plenty of direct NYC to LA flights though...

While the C-130 is definitely durable as a truck, note that for instance they only fly out of Kuwait for their Iraq/Afghanistan missions. These kinds of assets you stage medium far from the conflict, so using a very fast, decently fuel efficient, decently large enough platform such as the G550 is more akin to grabbing…

this is extremely infuriating and I hate andrew more than ever now.

Indeed it would. The water storage tanks is the solution while in transit between planets, but as far as storage requirements, I’d definitely go with underground until the unobtanium radiation suits are available. Soil is too good and too cheap at blocking radiation that it doesn’t make sense not to go underground…

Indeed, that is a problem. I’d consider it to be relatively solvable though, for instance by putting the cell containment inside the water storage tanks, which would act as a fantastic radiation shield. They’ll be bringing quite a bit of water with them.

There’s a bunch more ethical questions that come up if you do that, I’m all for it, but you’ll get a lot more pushback with this method I think.

Don’t forget though, that 40% success rate is likely based on women whom are already having trouble becoming pregnant. If the sample were based on women whom are of “prime fertility” I’d make a wild guess that the success rate would be higher than 70%.

Regarding the needing to send a ton of people to prevent inbreeding, couldn’t a significant amount be cut down via use of IVF, using other people’s eggs and sperm to create genetically completely different people? Those are “easy” to carry along the way to mars from earth.

Don’t forget the Miatas...

Honestly the autonomous truck design looks the most mature and possible. The trucking industry is going to be rather disrupted by this kind of tech. The two modules is also extremely forward looking.

Can we please include this as an experimental payload on the next rover thats sent to mars? give it a bunch of seeds, some water and some fertilizer, I figure it could be done for under 100 pounds worth of payload. The rovers already carry a drill and shovel like implement to do the planting right?

Hah, one of those two things is definitely true. I want SLS to die though, those funds could go to much much better places...

I agree. I’m not excited till we can surpass ourselves.

It’d be more impressive if SpaceX hadn’t already tested a Raptor Engine...

As far as the sides of semi trailers is concerned, they can easily be combined with aero to increase efficiency at highway speeds, I figure these would literally pay for themselves after a time from the fuel savings. 

That makes sense, extreme regulation, limited suppliers and a sole installer tends to do that. I figure there would be significant differences between the two styles of reactor, I’d not thought about enrichment percentage though, it’d make sense to use highly enriched on a submarine where it being struck is…

When everyone else gets rid of their armies, then we can possibly talk about getting rid of ours.

Thanks, yeah that makes a lot of sense. Though isn’t the S9G (Virginia class Sub) much smaller than the A1B? What kind of economies of scale would be needed to actually make the TOC go down to feasible levels?

Color me corrected then. Were they just impractical due to the size of nuclear reactors of the time? Would a modern nuclear reactor such as one pulled from Virginia Class sub be practical?

Nuclear destroyers... Russia’s got a few