Fantastic final post:

"Sci fi fans taking on NASA engineers is too funny, but also a waste of time. We deal with real hardware here. Locked."

Bingo. The project is to build a very poorly designed spacecraft to perform a mission it's not well suited to for a ridiculously large sum of money. If we're going to build a spacecraft to journey to Mars, we shouldn't force it to conform to a 1960s fantasy hull design.

I wish the engineers at NASA spaceflight, instead of taking a dump on the guy, would applaud his enthusiasm and then explain the better and cooler things that could be achieved with a trillion dollars over 20 years. Technologically they're dead right, but they come off as a bunch of unimaginative jerks.

This thread is actually kinda sad. The guy seems to be full of passion, but doesn't have knowledge of actual engineering/science to do anything useful in that direction; (and seems to be unwilling to criticaly think and learn something, but that's another point). I wonder, if somebody set him in right direction when he was younger (think a good math teacher) would he work with those nasa guys now? It seems to me that true passion is a resource many tech communities could really use.

I can't believe that none of them commented on the giant laser in the front.