ToughSF

@ToughSf • 38,058 subscribers

Matterbeam. Author of the ToughSF blog. Original SuperNerd. Ex-Kurzgesagt Duck. Freelance writer. Discord https://t.co/Q4cBKnMezk

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ToughSF

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This torch drive is turning 11.1 tons of matter into pure energy per second. If the exhaust is a 20° cone, and it grazes an Earth-like planet, it would cause "all the global warming since the Industrial Revolution" within 30 million km then "boil the oceans" within 3 million km.

The bacterial flagellar motor can spin at 100,000 RPM in one direction, then switch gears and flip to spinning in the other direction. How does this work? Cryo-electron microscopy reveals some of the nanoscale mechanics involved:

The F-22's Jet Fuel Starter first spins up its small APU turbine, which gradually turns the much larger F119 engines via connecting gearboxes:

The lunar rover scene from 'Ad Astra' raises so many questions... How do they transition from day to night so quickly when the terminator is ~15 km wide? Where can pirate rovers hide on the Moon? Who are the neon signs on the outside of the base meant for?

Intercepting KKVs in low Earth obit with a laser: It's got all the right elements: radiators heat up as power increases, the laser itself is invisible but focusing optics do scatter it, targets are conical and gradually vaporize under fire...

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A mini-movie showing off the Skyhook concept, where an SSTO is boosted off an electromagnetic accelerator and ramp to meet a 230 km long rotating tether that flings it to the Moon:

Is this the largest rocket explosion on US soil ever?

Real Engineering's excellent video on the F-14 Tomcat: The explanation of the inlet ramps in very well animated. By Brian Mac Mághnais

The Mitsubishi Air Lubrication System (MALS) that lets ships ride on a low-friction 'air carpet': It was already demonstrated to reduce fuel consumption by 13% in its first trials.

Mass-produced steel rockets for the Atlas ICBM, in this restored 1962 USAF documentary:

Sculpting a continent-sized asteroid into a statue then crashing it into Jupiter is one way to make a statement. #space #art by Alex Jay Brady 🥶

The largest CFD sim ever on a single computer was a NASA simulation of the X-59 using FluidX3D: It used 117 billion cells loaded on 6 Terabytes of RAM and generating 7.6 PB of volumetric data.

A Tu-22M3 'Backfire' takes off on full afterburner. Its two NK-25 turbofans produce nearly 500 kN of thrust.

A railgun mass driver on the Moon, explained by Ian Long : The landing pad doubling as launch armature is a lot of dead weight to accelerate, but that's fine if the 'wasted' energy is recovered by regenerative braking at the end of the track.

The largest non-nuclear artificial explosion in history is the Minor Scale test: 4744 tons of ANFO packed into a dome simulated the blast for an 8 kT yield airburst nuke.

You'll find an excellent example of hard-SF space combat in SAD:Frontier. Here, the PFS-028 Bellerophon fends off a wave of missiles in orbit around Callisto.

There's been 12 succesful Falcon Heavy launches since 2018. The next one, happening this year, will take the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into orbit. Here's stabilized footage of USSF-67's spectacular booster separation:

The Liberty Lifter: a DARPA project for a ground-effect seaplane with the cargo capacity of a C-17 but 2.3x more efficient flight.

It's not often that you can see the blue glow of ionized air surrounding a mushroom cloud, filled with radioactive particles from a fission bomb:

The original 4000t Orion design dropped a nuclear shaped charge every second, averaging 100 TW of thrust power. A single launch of this vehicle would deliver more payload to LEO than the entire Apollo program. Brian Mac Mághnais:

The Sukhoi Albatros was a fully reusable launch system with winged booster and 80 ton spaceplane. It used sea launch, but totally not in the way you'd expect: By Hazegrayart

The Shuttle Training Aircraft was a Grumman Gulfstream II modified to simulate a gliding Shuttle orbiter: It still needed to drop gear and reverse thrust to match the terrible L/D of the orbiter on descent.

On the dark side of the moon, a radio telescope could be suspended over a 5km diameter crater. it'd bypass the ionosphere and be shielded from Earth's electromagnetic noise, achieving substantially greater sensitivity. Real Engineering (Brian Mac Mághnais):

The Star Forge Class Armed Star Frame, a space warship with massive phased array lasers, spinal UREB cannons and beautiful dusty plasma radiator arcs. By Staladus 🐁: