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[Twiggie]

speaking of railguns, arent superconductors ridiculously easy in space? thats kinda cool.

[Sean Mirrsen]

They would be if it was actually cold in space. In space, it's actually rather hot unless you completely reflect outside heat, in which case it's just cool. Even the dark side of the Moon is only cold because of the whatever negligible atmosphere that exists there. Without a medium to take heat away, space is only cold to objects that actively radiate heat.

[andrea]

Well, lack of atmosphere (few Kgs on the whole moon) helps a lot when it comes to insulating the superconductor i guess. After you cool it down you just need to keep it in an area not hit by the sun, which can be done without big problems probably. Maybe building the whole thing underground. Or just building a roof outside.

[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

Personally, I think a giant prism should be built on the dark side of the moon.

[Sean Mirrsen]

What use would be a giant prism on the dark side of the moon? Also, the dark side of the moon is moving, it would have to be mounted on a mobile chassis. There's a similar problem with a theoretical colony on Mercury, you have to remain in the comfort zone just between the light and dark sides, so you have to have a mobile base.

[Twiggie]

orrrr you could go underground. like DWARVES. yeah.

[DJ]

What use would be a giant prism on the dark side of the moon? Also, the dark side of the moon is moving, it would have to be mounted on a mobile chassis. There's a similar problem with a theoretical colony on Mercury, you have to remain in the comfort zone just between the light and dark sides, so you have to have a mobile base.

I've actually read quite a neat idea for a Mercury colony. I think it was in one of Asimov's books, but I'm not 100% sure. Anyway, the colony was built on rails that went around the whole planet. Due to heat, the rails expand on the side that's facing the Sun, and this expansion pushes the colony towards place where rails are less expanded, ie shade. This was fine-tuned so the colony was always in the twilight zone (pardon the pun).

[Sean Mirrsen]

A little too much wear on the tracks, no? I'd prefer a mega multi-wheeled or multi-treaded vehicle that can steer itself, with two sets of wheels/treads so that one can be raised for repairs/replacement and the other can be used to drive. Removes the need for tracks, and can move anywhere on the planet to gather scientific information/whatever. Powered by solar energy that is ridiculously abundant on Mercury.

[Il Palazzo]

Nuclear-powered jets. They heat the air with gas pipes passed through a nuclear reactor instead of burning fuel. Only the Soviets were successful in make an actual airplane with the technology, and their design was... messy, at best. Polluting the air, irradiating the crew...

They won't work on the moon, for obvious reasons.

Unless you mean ion thrusters or something of the kind.

There was this "Project Orion" thingy, to use micro-nukes for a propulsion. Basically, dropping a bomb every few seconds off the ships ass and letting the blast push it. The only thing that stopped it's development were pollution concerns.

[sneakey pete]

Btw, I remember some people saying that cargo containers will burn up on reentry. Um.. hello? The Moon's relative orbital velocity is tiny compared to the satellites and other stuff in Earth's orbit. Given a "barely sufficient" nudge, they will be hardly experiencing more friction than airliners when they enter the upper layers. Deploy initial chutes for additional deceleration in the upper layers, then main chutes for landing. No need for any additional protection except shielding if the cargo is sensitive to solar radiation.

That's not how it works mate, you actually go quite fast by the time you get to earth. It might be going relativly slow up at the moon, however its angular momentum is Huge due to its large distance from the earth. since angular momentum is conserved, the closer you get the faster you need to go. hence large speeds at earth that need a ballistic rentry to overcome.

Also: there is no dark side of the moon. It has days!

[Sean Mirrsen]

It does have a dark side, in a way. The dark side we can see is just a part of the day/night cycle, but there's also the "other" side of the moon which can be considered "dark" because we can't see it from Earth.

And I would explain the speed increase when approaching the Earth as an effect of gravity, but yeah, now that I think of it you can build up quite the speed from  300000kms spent accelerating. So we'd probably need the cargo to decelerate in the thermosphere first.

[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

What use would be a giant prism on the dark side of the moon?

For purposes of progressive rock.

[Dwarf]

They would be if it was actually cold in space. In space, it's actually rather hot unless you completely reflect outside heat, in which case it's just cool. Even the dark side of the Moon is only cold because of the whatever negligible atmosphere that exists there. Without a medium to take heat away, space is only cold to objects that actively radiate heat.

THIS. Stop the freaking insta-freeze cliché! It takes about an hour to die from hypothermia in space. The point is: On earth you have air which you can constantly directly transfer heat to. In space, there is only a truly extremely miniscule unbelivably small amount of gas, meaning you can only radiate your heat, which is quite slow.
It'd go faster if there was air, but then, the whole space would be a freaking sea of five thousand degrees C anyway.

[Sean Mirrsen]

But the whole point of space is that there wouldn't be air. Gravity kinda takes care of that. If space was filled with air, it would mean there is no gravity.

I don't remember who the author is, but there's a webcomic named Unicorn Jelly that has a universe with radically different physical laws. Like Linovection instead of gravity, that acts as a force that pulls things down, on the universe-absolute frame of reference, and only does so for object above or below a certain size. So you have air that is not subject to linovection, and massive landmasses that are also not subject to linovection. Massive triangular landmasses, because of another law (whose name I forget) that makes matter clump together in triagonal forms. This, again, only has effect on objects above or below a certain size - so there are millions of triangular islands in a space filled with air. Fun universe.

[buman]

They say they are gonna shoot the moon to see if theres ice.

Though, we need oxygen to, probably get some factories up there and at least make an atmosphere of some kind of gas.

And gravity. It would be awful when your mail gets delivered and it floats off.

For the record, 1/3 of water is oxygen. They could split the molecules given something else the hydrogen an bond to (I believe such a system is used in some submarines).

IIRC the moon dust is 40% oxygen so is both in higher concentration and easier to access.