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Will Fawkes

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Posts posted by Will Fawkes

  1. I like the concept of the 'engine' being the outermost layer of the ship because spiraling around and around accelerating the ions about. Sure it's still going to be slow even moving stuff as fast as it is because the thing being pushed is just so bloody massive but I had a thought. Wouldn't that sort of engine configuration also protect from radiation? You have to have shielding anyway for the particle acceleration plus the accelerating particle stream itself.

    I have this mental image of a long tube with magnetic funnels at each end. One at the front to hoover up material to be fed into the engines/reactor and another out the back to redirect exhaust for most efficient thrust. Granted this design leaves me wondering how you'll STOP once you find somewhere interesting or if you have enough time to just cut the engines and coast the rest of the way in using the forward magnetic scoop as a drag/bake extending it out so you suddenly are getting velocity loss because you're hitting tons and tons of stuff.

  2. Hey Squad? Getyour merch people in touch with this guy. I want a dozen of his mugs/decoupler coasters.

    The 'decoupler fits over mug and holds second mug that has lid I could see as being somewhat practical for storage pending shelf height/mug size.

  3. Given this is more 'fugure investment on the off chance i can afford a better computer sometime soon' if i do not win I will not mind so much.

    Dosorta wish there was a 'lite' version or something that was netbookable.

  4. I actually think this is the most viable idea, but you're not going to, at present, get people behind this one. Plus it'd be a ways off for the sort of machinery to make that level of automation viable.

    Then again it'll take a long time for ANY of this to be viable and hopefully by then we'll have sorted out the ethics and responsibilities when AI is created. Though personally if you're sending robots, why bother with 'recreating a biosphere'? If they're smart, let them have their own world to settle and have a go at things hopefully with the knowledge of all the mistakes we've made so they won't be our electric bogaloo. If it ins't that smart of a system... maybe i'm just hidebound but I'd rather somebody, preferably several somebodies, in the loop in case a machine glitches out, which is why you end up with all the life support anyway.

    As for the 'matrix' solution. On the one hand I kinda like that since you can maintain a population for a long time that way without needing that much space but personally if we're going that route we already have enough computing power and knowledge of the human mind, probably, to make AI. So just send the AI out as our children.

    But yea this was originally setting material which sortof depended on humans going out. However with that said the 'crisis' that causes it to be interesting is one ship meeting another and seeing how they adapted and evolved while giving enough shared language and other bits to be able to handwave how they'd be able to understand each other and interact.

    So if I actually bothered writing any of this... why not try 'all of the above' and just show different ships meeting at different times?

    Even if you were trying to poke or make playful Jab Velocity then it's a good point to raise. Assuming we don't collectively destroy ourselves then a ship full of smart machines would be simpler to send out.

    Re Andrew: The thought was to actually have a large civilian population with public places, high value on entertainment and the arts since there's no point in going 'there' if once 'there' you have a military culture hat is radically different than what spawned the ship in the first place. Think of it less as a 'get there with all luxuries removed' and more 'space colony that happens to be heading somewhere.'e

    But again part of the setting's appeal, at least to me, is to explore all the possible what if's involving both ships that are sent out to settle, and others that decide to remain in the stars harvesting what they need. I can even see more than a few that park around a habitable world and then after the colony has been established for ten or twenty years the ship itself gets patched up, topped off, and goes on it's merry way to some other system.

  5. Re 'Operation Baby Factory' while Logic might hold that as a better idea to send people across you'd effectively have a crew that has to stay pregnant with the REST of the crew, then train them. Even without looking at any of the other issues this is an ethical nightmare.

    Re 'Robotopolas' again Logical. However I sorta just don't see that ending well. Then again I'm one of those idiots that want human hands involved even if a robot would be steadier the whole trip through. Effectivly the same as'operation baby factory' that was mentioned earlier but neatly sidesteps the whole 'any woman aboard would have to be preggers while repopulating/populating the destination.'

    I like the idea of a giant magnetic scoop. After all wouldn't the thing have to have it's own magnetic field anyway to act as a radiation shield? Since said field would funnel anything towards the pole ANYHOW why not make it useful for something? My worry is at .2C interstellar space would effectively shotgun apart the ship. While a whipple shield would be one of the lines of defense I'm not sure it'd be enough on it's own given just how energetic everything hitting would become. One of the advantages of star wars/trek shielding, you can tell all the things to buzz off.

  6. Well the idea is there is no 'going back' because by the time you get 'there' then either 'home' has developed FTL or some other cheat to get around the light speed barrier or by the time you get back not only has the sponsor nation probably vanished but there's a chance humanity (or kerbin) as a species has evolved past the point of recognition or died out.

    So there's that I guess. Thanks for the prompt feedback even at this weird to me hour. I'd considered using an O'neill cylinder as the main body since we're taking simulating gravity for millions of people. Granted I was/am tempted to just cheat and go 'you know what, they've developed an artificial gravity system'... except the implication of being able to fake gravity without spin is you could and probably are using that sort of technology and or the principles behind it for other things ranging from propulsion, hull design, weapons, and so on. Propulsion based off that would potentially be a deal-breaker here but considering gravity, so far as I know at least, works at 1c, you'd still need a generation ship to get anywhere interesting, but my brain says 'you can't do that. Even if you use gravity as a propulsion method you can't cheat Enstein and to get into relativistic speeds you're going to still need insane amounts of power'.

    I suppose it boils down to 'what can we conceptualize as probable' vs 'what looks cool to the non-technical person'? After all the important thing really isn't 'realism' so much as internal consistency.

  7. Still a planet. A brown dwarf is large enough to fuse/have fused Deuterium, but small enough that hydrogen-hydrogen fusion is impossible. I forget the exact limits, but that is something on the order of 10-12 Jovian masses up to around 30 or so Jovian masses. Below that an no Deuterium Fusion, above that and it becomes a red dwarf as hydrogen-hydrogen fusion occurs.

    Well the limits are, if i remember, a bit 'fuzzy' due to composition but I'd always heard something like twenty times jupiter being the lower limit for a red dwarf, and much below that you get into brown dwarf territory but you give a wider range so I'm differing to you on this one.

    I'm more interested in the fact we found this thing when it emits no real visible light and would be so small seeing it on IR would probably be problimatic.

    Interesting stuff.

  8. OK so I'd revisited an old old OLD story concept I'd had after reading an asimov book about space (forget which but it does go into detail about the concept of a generation/colony ship as means to get Out There.) Basics are a third or fourth generation Generation ship ends up parking in orbit around a star to top off on water, minerals, etc etc.... and finds another ship from a similar era though not built at the same time it was. Cue celebrations, dusting off old 'this language will be preserved because we realized societies would drift in hundreds or thousands of years and want ships that spawn from this program to have a way to talk' protocols.

    Unfortunately I haven't had much luck getting feedback. I know it's been done storywise since basically EVERYTHING has been done. Plus there's lots of room for things ranging from silly (one of the ships is full of genetically modified cat people) to Horror (robot servants took over and are now prepping to expand by cannibalizing the newly discovered craft) to... well anything.

    The thing is my original notes listed these things as roughly the size of texas in terms of total area with a much smaller habitable/people friendly zone. Thing is that just seems kind of off. I know a lot of area would be needed for things like intakes for scooping hydrogen gas, fuel storage and processing, random machinery needed when you come into resources (oort cloud, orphaned planet, whatever...) but that just can't be right, especially since I don't know the math and was just sort of spitballing a random guess.

    Also notes list safe cruising speed at 0.2c with a theoretical upper limit at as high as 0.25c, but the fuel/energy requirements would be... Insane even if you had some kind of exotic propulsion system. The concept was more a prop/window dressing for a D20 game that never got off the ground due to no playerbase. Might revive for NaNoWriMo this year. I dunno.

    Since we're all space geeks. Discuss?

    Was thinking of calling it 'The Many Faces of Humanity' since well hundreds or possibly thousands of years would lead to interesting developments in the populations even if you ruled out scifi genetic manipulation.

  9. KSK I'm sorry I don't have much to add but Really liking the fic so far, and while you'd said something about 'would make an ebook but would want to get the developer's permission', making an ebook version of this does not nessicarily mean you have to charge people money to download it.

    On the other hand you have a very nice writing style and frankly I want to see you get heaps and heaps of cash thrown at you. Do sorta wonder, if they said they'd host your book on site as an 'extra' but no money would change hands (working under the idea you're getting credit here mind you) would you go for something like that?

    Oh and because I derped on something while reading, what's a kermol? I like the apparent plant based symbiotic connection the Kerbals have. Lot of interesting questions and I'm glad you're going the direction you are.

    Also I'm hoping Rockomax succeeds in things. Granted I also sorta want a rivalry but well, I'm sure Jeb would agree having someone else out there with a lighter under your pants is going to get ou moving and trying to push ahead... even if ultimately in a crunch situation you'd drop everything to help them out of a spot.

    Not looking forward to the eventual loss of life, manned crew not making it back. Still if it didn't happen eventually It'd feel somehow off. It's an unpleasant thing but new frontiers tend to take lives either by overconfidence, underpreparedness, or blind stupid bad luck.

    *not affiliated with KSP, the developers, or anybody else. I'm just that guy y'know?

  10. I'd been somewhat interested in KSP for awhile, watched Scott Manley's and Danny's youtube videos. Thing is I don't have the hardware capible of running it. On the other hand this is basically a community of rocket scientists, astronomy nuts, and basically the sort of people that I might feel at home with since I'd been interested in 'space' ever since I had memory... just about anyway. Thing is for the time being I was going to nose around to try getting information on an old old project Iwanted to recreate which involves generation ships and how a meeting between two such ships that are several generations removed from eachother (IE both are relatively new, but if we use the analogy of families they'd be distaint cousins instead of siblings.)

    FIgure a community of amature rocket scientists would be helpful on details I'm a bit hazey on.

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