NBODYPHSYICS!!!!11!!!

[vv3k70r]

20 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

TL;DW: Trying to use any planet as a rocket would destroy it.

Blowing away atmosphere by solar wind deliver some thrust for long period.

Do we call Mercury destroyed because of this?

[Bej Kerman]

6 hours ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

21 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

https://youtu.be/Dgu1syQP124

TL;DW: Trying to use any planet as a rocket would destroy it.

Don't remember what he said exactly, but wasn't it essentially that the force from acceleration would overcome the gravitational force keeping the planet bound?

That, but also you'd use up all the fuel I.E. the entire planet after a few years.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

1 minute ago, Bej Kerman said:

That, but also you'd use up all the fuel I.E. the entire planet after a few years.

Yep, that's the other one i was thinking. You have to throw at least the same amount of mass out the other end if you want to achieve the desired planet-smearing accelerations.

Going slow, and drifting most of the distance to the destination is how you move anything as large as a planet. Turning them into gigantic torchships.....

Not really in the cards with today's, or even technology 200-400 years in the future.

Plus, planets aren't actually that slow to begin with is what i think people often seem to forget. Earth's Orbital Speed around the sun is about 30 kilometers per second, that puts even some of our fastest robotic missions to shame.  New Horizons is around 16.2 Kilometers per second, which is about half of that. So when you realize you'd still need to accelerate earth to eject it from the Sol System, and it's already going twice as fast as anything we've ever made.

Well, the idea is even more absurd. There's plenty of speed there, the focus really should be more on keeping the planet livable for the ride (The Wandering Earth does mention this, to it's credit) You have an entire planet as your ship, so why rush things? Yeah it's going to freeze over, but that's happening independent of speed. So you need to figure out how the heck you're going to survive the void, and that i find the more interesting bit.

Interstellar space, just from the tiny bits we've gotten from Voyager 1 && 2 seems rather hostile. The radiation from the Galactic Core is ever present, and it might be only one of many sources (There were some spurious gamma spikes, i think they (NASA) are still investigating if they're from faulty hardware or legitimate) There's light, but only a dim glow from the surrounding stars. Stars that you'll never even come within a comprehensible distance from.

So anything on the surface is going to die, plant or animal. The atmosphere will eventually come down as cryogenic snow, sealing whatever facility you might have built in a impenetrable tomb of rock-hard ice. The oceans might remain liquid under a massive sheet of ice, and the planet's core will still be warm. Just waiting for an encounter with a star, that might never happen.

The moment you commit to flinging a planet out of the solar system, you start having to think in terms of millions of years. Personally, it's something I'd wonder how horrifically bad it would end. Civilizations have risen and fallen in far less than 100 years, and the idea that people would have to remain aware of this mission for multiple generations?

All the problems of Generation Ships, with the downside that there's absolutely no going back from it. Everyone on that rock, willing or not is committed to the mission.  And if you stumble backwards technologically, forgetting the knowledge needed to maintain your facilities? That becomes a potential extinction level event. Plus there's the usual suspects, disease would be a massive threat. War as well.

[kspnerd122]

Heard of gravity tractors, work pretty well, you can move some large asteroid to tug the planet outward, but Nbody would suck, eve would screw up everything(going to duna would be 10x harder, same for moho)

[Incarnation of Chaos]

7 hours ago, kspnerd122 said:

Heard of gravity tractors, work pretty well, you can move some large asteroid to tug the planet outward, but Nbody would suck, eve would screw up everything(going to duna would be 10x harder, same for moho)

Yep, that's definitely in the "Slow and steady" category though.

[Arugela]

The joke is you could discover the planets using infinite fuel cheats basically. It's to parody the game. the internal logic is already unrealistic. The game is on rails. This would be the nbody version of it. So, slightly more realistic. Or just different.

I'm aware it would realistically run out of fuel.

The idea is that if you put it in nbody you already have to deal with something impossible. So, just go with it and make it artificial or some other story. Whatever it is. One joke is that kerbals eventually manage to stear a planet and unwobble the solar system or something.

Edited January 27, 2021 by Arugela