Coolant [Spaceships]

[Verjigorm]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

But anyway, the impracticality of Project Thor is admitted but not important, and spaceships are unlikely to be built out of tungsten. The point was that any spaceship in or capable of reaching low orbit is weapons-grade. It's the very least and most inescapable demonstration of Jon's Law: "any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction".

Jon's Law seems to make it almost axiomatic that a successful space-faring civilization is going to have to have far better social and political control mechanisms than we current have. Even playing around in Kerbal Space Program, I've seen the problems of just how destructive a powerful rocket can be while doing routine things, such as rendezvous and docking. Kerbal lets me avoid a lot of the repercussion of mistakes through saves and reloads, as well as mechanical limits that keep impacts from cascading, but in reality, those are not mechanisms that apply.


I still haven't wrapped my head around it completely, but it seems like there is almost a need for a rather strict protocol for spaceship ownership and operation.