Beowulf wrote:ICBMs don't exist because there's not much reason to spend the giant sums of money they require to be able to deliver a couple tons of chemical weapons to the other side of the world. They don't exist because there's no reason for them to exist.
Yeah, sure, no nukes, but that doesn't really affect my point: the technology for giant missiles is there, it's just that for one reason or the other no-one built them yet. If we put our minds to it though, with our tech level there's little reason not to assume we could do it easily and quickly.
PeZook wrote:I don't have doubts we could easily do that (hell, the R-7 series did come into existence quite rapidly). But all rockets so far have been solid-fuelled, and a liquid fuel rocket has a lot of technological hurdles to overcome. I assumed we'd dick around with lightweight rockets first, then move up to large ones relatively quickly (note that the Proton and Saturn familied will fly in three years, rather than five or ten). But I don't think skipping the "small rocket" stage is viable, since you need to work out the kinks with the engines themselves which have a crapload of critical moving parts working in high-stress environments.
I myself at least didn't skip the small rocket stage, I was dicking around with the solid fuel Simoleon series of MRBMs and IRBMs (Pershing I and II analogues) modified to dump gizmos into low orbits for some time before the Lucrelance went into service, and when that did the first rocket blew up seconds after launch. After that no more hypergolic rockets were launched for nearly a year until the design flaw was fixed, and it's now working. The next step is using those solid fuel rockets as boosters for the hypergolic rocket ala the Titan III, but the first such rocket yet has to be launched and I fully expect things to go wrong during the first launch (it's become sort of a tradition that the first rocket of a new San Dorado rocket family blows up on the launch pad).
It's a breakneck pace, sure, but still. It's 1960's tech, and I think it's fairly clear we're cutting a few corners here and there. We can, because unlike FASTA if we get something wrong at least we won't be incinerating poor puppies
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The Ares I and Orion spacecraft aren't quite 1960s tech.
Yeah, I'll grant you that I did raise an eyebrow when I read that Lonestar was launching the Ares already. Although he did launch the very first space rocket in all of SDNWorld, and it was a pretty big one too. He launched a heavy lifter when I was still dicking around with modified MRBMs that could put 60kg in LEO...