Don’t sweat the higher end RAM. It’s only good for the faster timings, and for overclocking which you stated you are not interested in. The faster timings will deliver a smidgeon faster machine, but not anything you would notice normally.

As for something new being released… you will never escape that treadmill. Just buy what you think is best, and don’t worry about it until it’s time to upgrade or build a new machine.

Buy your hardware from Newegg.com. Best computer site ever, and I have shopped from a lot.

And most important of all… create a Steam account. Steam is one of the best things ever to happen to computer gaming, and one of the worst things for my wallet. Wait until you see one of their large sales where most of the game catalog is on sale from 25% up to 75% off. There is nothing like buying Far Cry 2 for 5 bucks or Portal 2 for 10 bucks.

You’re right, there are a lot of factors that come into play here. If you mount weapons and thrusters on gimbaled appendages, for instance, then you don’t have to worry about turning the whole spacecraft bulk around to point them in some desired direction. I suppose it’s all about what our future space admirals want to achieve!

My opinion on stealth is basically that it’s a balance between your camoflaging ability and your enemy’s sensing capability. You don’t have to make yourself undetectable to be stealthy – you just have to make yourself hard enough to detect that you can loose your missiles before the opponent finds you. Most of the stealth naysayers I’ve seen on the Internet completely neglect the challenges of sensing, and just assume they have a device at their disposal that will detect everything (something I think is unfeasible – and I recently took some more flak for that opinion! ). On the other hand, to the wannabe-Romulans, I have to note that every cloaking device invented for a sci-fi plotline invariably seems to fail all the time, or encounter adversaries who find a way around it.

Thanks for the comments!

Making a spacefighter very spherical might make it as manouverable as a gnat, but weapon design always involves tailoring the tool to the job, which might not require that level of manouvreability. Thats’ pretty much the same reason we don’t have Mach 6 jet fighters; though very possible to build, they would prove quite useless except in very narrow tactical situations. Your Starfury example show this very well. Very agile, but no fuel to do anything useful!

I love the concept of using debris to deny an enemy “orbital superiority”. Unlike other discussed topics related to space warfare, this is actually one that we can actually study as a real phenomenon, since it’s causing problems for space agencies right now!

Your view of stealth is a lot more balanced than that of both the stealth-naysayers (who doesn’t seem to understand the conditional situations that allow stealth in warfare) and the wannabe-Romulans who want stealth as simply a button to be pushed.

I can see one good reason to do a Martian sample return mission, and that’s as a technology demonstrator for in-situ return stage fuel production. That would be a capability that could feed directly directly into both robotic and human exploration throughout the Solar System. Mars rocks themselves are probably less interesting, especially because the samples we return are likely to be much smaller than the rocks from Mars that we already have.