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There certainly aren't any physics reasons you can't build a big spaceship. They were going to build an entire fleet of the things during the Cold War, because of general Cold War insanity. https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2714/1 quote:In late 1959, Captain Mixon laid out the evidence for General Thomas Power, the commander in chief of SAC, and obviously convinced him. On January 21, 1961, General Power signed a SAC requirement for a “Strategic Earth Orbital Base” (SEOB) based on the Orion propulsion system and roughly following the space force deployment concept. The SEOB would be “capable of accurate weapon delivery” to “include the capability to attack other aerospace vehicles or bodies of the solar system occupied by an enemy.” The SEOB would also be able to orbit “extremely heavy useful payloads” on the order of 5,000 tons. These are the ship roles they were planning: quote:STATIONED IN SPACE  Some extremely pro classified concept art:  It might actually have been cool and good because there's no military reason to build a giant space fleet in the foreseeable future, so it would funnel military funds into something militarily pointless while opening up the way to the solar system. There were also civilian applications for Orion, of course. They wanted to fly to Mars and Jupiter and such.
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Feb 23, 2021 12:43
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A space warship (or a large civilian ship for that matter) probably wouldn't look a lot like the ISS because if you have something that's worth calling a space warship it kinda implies there are things in space to fight wars over which implies we probably don't need it to be launched in tiny self-contained modules on small rockets. It's an extreme level of modularity that's not necessarily the best choice for most things.
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Feb 24, 2021 15:19
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Conspiratiorist posted:Absent perfect optics they'll diffuse into harmlessness after several dozen kilometers. With hypothetical sci-fi perfect optics you'd still be diffraction limited due to quantum effects, so the same would happen but take longer. Here's a mirror for a laser intended to shoot down Soviet nuclear missiles, and Reagan talking in front of a mockup of the full satellite.   This was part of the Star Wars program and is the kind of very stupid thing that could start a nuclear war.
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Mar 4, 2021 01:46
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