Quote:Original post by wilhil
Excuse me, but I started by saying I dont know much about nano tech, and everything that I was talking about, I saw on the discovery chanel last night, I thought it was a joke, but they were going on about nano tech and how it would soon be available.

Quote:Original post by odiousangel
Raduprv, you have to be the most stubborn GDNet poster I know of. I think you need to admit defeat and move on once in a while.

You present an idea (subject it to criticism), it turns out to be a bad idea. You continue to defend it, but the more you try to defend it, the weaker it becomes. You do this to yourself all the time here.

It is perfectly fine to present an idea and have it proved illogical, or to revise a bad idea based on criticism, but to defend an inherently flawed idea so vehemently is silly.

It frustrates me because you seem like a nice guy and one whom shouldn't squander all his time on such things.

Quote:Original post by AnonymousPosterChild
Transfer orbits are great because they don't require the ship to provide any thrust, its all done by the gravitational pull of the other planets. The only mass you'll need to worry about is in the braking mechanism. Compression doesnt decrease mass, but it decreases size.

Quote:Original post by Raduprv

Quote:Original post by AnonymousPosterChild
Transfer orbits are great because they don't require the ship to provide any thrust, its all done by the gravitational pull of the other planets. The only mass you'll need to worry about is in the braking mechanism. Compression doesnt decrease mass, but it decreases size.

But you still need some energy to accelerate away from Venus and head to Mars. You also need some energy to head in the right direction. Breaking might not be necesary, since if the ship is cheap, you can just crash it on Mars.

Quote:
The Interplanetary Superhighway has come to denote a set of transfer orbits between various planets and moons in the solar system. These transfers have particularly low delta-v requirements, and appear to be the lowest energy transfers, even lower than the common Hohmann transfer orbit that has dominated orbital dynamics in the past.

...

If a spacecraft placed at the L1 point is given even a slight nudge towards the Moon, for instance, the Moon's gravity will now be greater and the spacecraft will be pulled away from the L1 point. The entire system is in motion, so the spacecraft will not actually hit the Moon, but will travel in a winding path off into space.

...

The transfers are so low-energy that they make travel to almost any point in the solar system possible. On the downside, these transfers are very slow, and only useful for automated probes.

Quote:Original post by LessBread
Here's another thought. By the time we are able to terraform Mars we will likely have figured out how to build fusion reactors and therefore how to transform the materials on Mars to make the elements needed to terraform it. So instead of transporting CO2 from Venus, it would make more sense to use a fusion reactor to create it inplace.

Quote:Original post by Extrarius
Why do you need a pipeline? Just compress it in tanks, calculate the path of all the gravitational bodies that will have an effect, and use that info that calculate the right direction to launch the tanks. Then you just need a way to accelerate them really fast (essentially a big cannon). If you can get enough precision, you could end with the tanks in orbit around mars and from there you just gradually slow them down, release the gas, and launch them back.