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Belly or tail lander? Implications pf scifi tech


Spacescifi

Which is scifi tech is safest to use?  

2 members have voted

  1. 1. Which scifi tech is safest to use?

    • Antigravity ascension
      2
    • Quoton rocket
      0
    • Portal rocket
      0

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  • Poll closed on 05/24/2019 at 10:42 AM

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I am new to this, so forgive my poll before insering information.

So spaceships can land on their tail or their belly in scifi.

Yet to do so repeatedly (20 times and counting) you need scifi tech (part fantasy part science).

So here are some proposed solutions:

Quoton rocket: Somehow photons are accelerated to FTL speeds. Thus with such high momentum going out the flashlight nozzle, momentum in the opposite direction is given to the ship. You can fly so long you have electricity. Yet to push greater amounts of mass you need greater amounts of electricity. Something like a navy vessel's mass would likely be getting it's electrical power from antimatter.

A small light vessel could get by with batteries, or a nuclear reactor to provide the electrical power.

Portal rocket: Portals connect ship to a planet fuel depot. Rocket fuel is fed into the ship up to a light second distance max. Such range can be increased by linking portal satelites every light second from the planet. In deep space far away from any portal satellites or planets with portals linked to fuel depots, the possibility of running out of fuel is a real one.

Antigravity ascension: A ship generates antigravity waves beneath it to repel itself from the planet. I would imagine that the gravity and antigravity forces would cancel out beneath the ship, making anything beneath the ship weightless. As the ship ascends farther and closer to space, the antigravity waves will have spread for miles. Essentially making miles of a planet's surface weightless. As long as the antigravity ascension drive is on this effect would continue, that is why the ship should reach orbital speed ASAP. Unless it does not care about those below floating, and a lot of dust floarlting upward as well.

So with all that in mind, which scifi solution for reaching space would you prefer to use and why? Which is safest to use?

 

Spoiler

 

 

Edited by Spacescifi
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1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

If it carries a cargo, it's easier to roll on/roll off, than to up/down.

I was thinking much the same. We do the best with what we have and conceive, but scifi must do what gets the job done most efficiently, even if not possible for us in reality. Rockets are not the most efficient to travel, but they do work.

1 hour ago, Shpaget said:

A "tail" implies a rocket. A sufficiently advanced propulsion system would not require a rocket like configuration.

Borg cube.

 

 

True. I wonder what kind of exhaust a space jet would have. You know, like an air jet, but instead of air, compressing and expelling void (more empty than vacuum until the exhaust is thinned out into normal vacuum again).

Edited by Spacescifi
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Say that this took place after Interstellar... antigravity, for sure.

The other options seems to be a bit too wounded-up. One basically implies stable, minuscule wormholes - so advanced manipulation of gravitation; the other implies FTL, so why not go FTL from day one ?

Edited by YNM
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On 5/23/2019 at 3:05 AM, YNM said:

Say that this took place after Interstellar... antigravity, for sure.

The other options seems to be a bit too wounded-up. One basically implies stable, minuscule wormholes - so advanced manipulation of gravitation; the other implies FTL, so why not go FTL from day one ?

Interestingly, the power levels associated with FTL are non-trivial. I remember scientists involved with researching the highly theoretical warp drive have reported that they can cut the energy requirement fown from one whole Jupiter of mass

Such energy requirements boggle the mind. To give you some idea of just how much energy that is, the Tsar bomb, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever, test detonated by the Russians, had the energy equivalent of converting one whole paper clip into energy.

Back to how the scientists cut the level of energy required for the warp drive, they cut it dow to one whole voyager 2 probe mass. Less, but still something that would be considered WMD. It is 721.9 kilograms, shy of a ton of mass.

If such a ship crashed on a planet and exploded? I do not wanna say dinosaur extinction event, but who knows? Probably not that bad, but you get my point.

My point is, unless one is drawing their power from an extra-dimensional realm, an FTL ship would have to store such energy. That means that landing such a vessel on a world to trade with would have to be done very carefully, even if you had access to constant acceleration drives to do it easily. I would imagine such vessels landing at space ports many kilometers from civilization. Perhaps an island base? Aircraft would ship the rest of goods around the planet.

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