Hell yes. Just lasso an Iron/Nickel rich asteroid and tug it over to lunar orbit. Set up an Iron works and manufacturing plant on the Moon, and… wait a second… THAT’S NO MOON!
But will you make the ventilation ducts big enough to crawl through?
Yes…but then I’d fill them with adhesive balloons that expand when they encounter body heat. And I’d make all of the access panels attached with non-removable fasteners.
Stranger
I can’t believe I’m the first to say this. The amount of iron available on Earth is insignificant next to the power of the force.
There…I got it out of my system.
Well played, sir!
Well, also, you could equip them with armour that is even slightly resilient to blaster shots, or else just let them fight naked.
Lots of foggy breath and dripping corridors, though.
Si
[old space veteran]Yeah, I 'member the Ginandtonic wars. I was there; did two tours on the ISS Quinine and one on the L-Twist. Was on the 'Twist on Shaken Day. No, I won’t tell you the worst of what I saw, but if you buy then next round, I’ll tell you some of the best …
[/OSV]
Well, I find your lack of ambition disturbing. I want my first trip to the asteroid belt to be in style. Not in some cramped little ship looking for ore to mine.
Actually, we not only have that much metal available, we could probably even assemble it into something a floating vessel shaped roughly like a Star Destroyer as well. Which would be incredibly friggin cool.
Big deal. I’ve seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
Newbie. :rolleyes:
Harumph. Back in my day, we were held responsible for our goddamn tears. No whining about losing them in the rain or some other cheap excuse. (Licks the side of his ice ship) And we 'ad to supply our own damn swizzle sticks!
I’ve often wondered what would happen if say, Bill Gates and the Sultan of Brunei got drunk together and vowed to build a big time serious space ship.
Not necessarily a star ship, per se, but with their funding, could they launch enough material into space to build at least a hull of what we would think of as a serious “space ship”?
IIRC it cost about 10,000 a pound to get stuff into orbit. You can do the math from there. If they use paper mache and styrofoam they will get much more visual bang for the buck.
I can see it now.
“Admiral, where did your ship go?”
“Well, Mr. President, the men were right cranky about, basically, flying around in an ice box, so they turned up the heat.”
“It evaporated? I find this unacceptable, Admiral!”
“With all due respect Mr. President, you can’t make a pile of poop into a puddin’ pie.”
If you’re willing to accept certain…environmental impacts and rather delicate public relations/political problems…then there are some apparently technically plausible methods for building and launching from Earth’s surface some really big ships with true interplanetary capability. On the order of 8,000,000 tons (which is big enough you could probably do things like wrap the crew areas in water tanks as radiation shielding for lengthy deep space voyages).
And as a bonus, if anyone objected, you could threaten to rain down nuclear explosives on them from orbit!