Spaceception

HOPE?

Yeah And to make it clear, it's 0.05c, 0.5 c is half the speed of light There's always Ross 128, well over a couple centuries away with current-ish tech, but still fairly close by (Less than a dozen light years). Unfortunately, the Bussard Ramjet may be closer to the Daedalus side of things, because the scoop needs to be massive, and you're limited by pure Hydrogen fusion, not deuterium, He3, tritium, or any combination of those. And pure Hydrogen fusion is harder. You could use a reactor design we have, and have the hydrogen fusion for the drive, but then you absolutely need to stop the ship in other solar systems to refuel the reactor. You're actually limited by about 0.12 c, because of the drag caused by the scoop, and low density of the interstellar medium. However, you'll essentially have a near-infinite supply of fuel, and you only need to stop in other solar systems to stock up a bit and repair your ship. On the plus side, I think there was an idea you could use the drag of the scoop to slow your ship down. But you don't have to cut your speed in half, because again, all your fuel is in the interstellar medium (You still have to get up to a certain speed using onboard fuel to make the scoop effective though). So that's less than 40 years to the nearest star, and less than a century to anywhere within 10 light years or so! The 0.05 c limit is there I believe, because beyond that, you start getting diminishing returns. Yeah, they're nuclear bombs, and pretty powerful ones at that, but to reach higher speeds, you need pure fusion pulse propulsion, or something similar (Like Daedalus. Man, that's always cropping up). Otherwise, the tyranny of the rocket equation will finally creep up on the Orion, and your mass/fuel ratios will become worse and worse.

Ignoring money and ethics (Although, I don't really see it as unethical to use Nuclear in space considering there's no life)? You're right about Orion giving you around ~10% light speed, but I don't ever remember seeing 20% (Except now that I remember, I do remember some Ben-10 episode talking about Orion getting that high, but I wouldn't call that a reliable source ). 20% may be possible for something akin to Daedalus, but not Orion. And Daedalus definitely isn't possible with current technology. If we were really serious, I suppose we could start the research for that, but it'd probably take decades. The caveat for Orion is that you're only going to see about ~5% light speed if you want to slow down. So that's 90 years to the nearest star. Not horrible, but not really fast either. With current technology, anything we build will be limited by nuclear fission. If we had fusion, our options would be pretty large, but alas. In this list, you can see a lot of options. I believe you want your specific impulse in the (high) hundreds of thousands of seconds - or higher - to be viable for an interstellar drive http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#werkaffre If you want to coast to the nearest star using current technology to around ~5-10% light speed, a combination of laser sails and nuclear pulse propulsion, or (maybe?) nuclear salt water would be your best bet. And here we begin with starshot. Ignoring the fact I don't know if its possible to have a postage stamp sized spacecraft that can last decades; the basic idea of using a massive laser array to push a solar sail is a good one, and has been around for decades (Scroll down http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/slowerlight.php). You could get pretty impressive velocities too, at least 0.1-0.2c (or ~40-20 years to the nearest star. Now we're talking). But the catch is that there's no laser on the other end, so you'd be limited by your maximum velocity to something manageable (<.1c) by your drive (AKA, Orion), until you can build a laser array on the other end to catch your ship. You could also slow down using the solar wind of the target star, but I don't think it'd slow you down a whole lot to be done alone. Going back to a fusion drive in general (http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/realdesignsfusion.php), you might be able to get away with it if it's powered by a new generation nuclear fission reactor. However, I don't know how inefficient/ineffective that would be. Or if a design could match or exceed 5% the speed of light. Someone more knowledgeable will have to answer that. Finally, using current technology to build a starship would be hard, and if crewed, dangerous. I'd bet that if we started on one today, it would be delayed by things we hadn't considered, and require technology later down the line. But I would also say we have most of the base technology already. So we're in an ok position to begin. I'd try to account for the wait calculation though

Like, how hard it'd be to use in the first place?

Er, context please? (I only got up recently )

Yeah, I pressed that too It was a while ago, so I have to go a couple dozen pages back to see the unread-but-not-really-unread-posts now. I'm pretty sure I asked then too, there's no way to undo it.

Yeah, but this is nuclear pulse propulsion you're talking about. A spacecraft that uses at least thousands of nukes onboard for propulsion. Some early designs were for the military for massive battleships. There would be worries about military contracts for that technology. No matter your intentions, people would be wary, and I wouldn't be surprised if it quickly became an international matter. Getting permission to build even one ship would be a tremendous undertaking. True. Plus, we would need a lot of research on autonomous spacecraft, that can make smart decisions, and work properly for decades, or centuries. And spacecraft that can last a very long time without breaking down, or at least, can repair themselves.

Only way I can see us doing that is if someone like Musk or Bezo's figures out how to get around the outer space treaty/nuclear test ban treaty, and builds it in space, far from Earth. But by the time we're capable of that, I'd hazard a guess to say we'd have access to something better. That 2013 design for a fusion engine seemed promising, and would lead to more powerful drives, whatever happened to that?

*Reads last one* Good to know I'm not the only one who does that. *In response to 0111narwhalz No, I don't do that. User below me knows/is learning a programming language.

You gotta love SpaceX

That must've been a real pucker factor there... Glad to hear the Astronauts are okay.

True. If I did, I probably would've considered myself to have peaked. The user below me has been camping before (As in, no RV's, all gear and equipment in backpacks, etc).

Ok, keep in mind, I'm very early in this. Infinitum and The children between worlds have to come first before I start planning that, so the plot may be different in a few months or something like that.

Kinda, I guess. Once it has a foothold, it spreads fast. Some hit population centers, etc, and no one is really sure whether they should nuke it (That'll be a conflict in itself). Yeah, you're right. I did say it was subject to change. Humanity is in the middle of colonizing Mars when it happens, may as well continue if the Earth may become uninhabitable. And yeah, they also begin to construct a fleet around Mars to protect it. If we're desperate, and have the technology, I'd argue that we would devote more time and resources to space exploration. And maybe not a few million people, but you could probably do a few hundred thousand at the least with the time given. Assuming not much goes wrong. Each BFR could do up to 100 people. If you have a lot of engineers, and prior experience using them, you could build up fairly quickly. Many of them would go to the Moon anyway. Plus, like I said, they've got around several decades before they enter the solar system.

Yeah Watching this right now

Damn, that bottom pic looks like something striaght out of a sci-fi movie.

Working on a new plot for the Children between Worlds and Infinitum. I'll be doing the Children between Worlds during NaNoWriMo, and however long it takes after to finish the first draft. Then I'll start Infinitum again. It's been awhile... @ChrisSpace Didn't want to derail NSEP's thread, but here's a basic premise... that may be changed In the near future, a large amount of an unknown substance hits the ocean at high velocity. Scientists worldwide celebrate the discovery as proof of extraterrestrial life, but within a few months, they find it's hijacking, and changing the ecosystem. Several more of these hit the Earth over the following year, and they conclude the Earth must be being terraformed. They look in the direction where it came from, and see traces of what look to be ships, moving towards Earth. Everyone goes into high alert, and humanity begins constructing a fleet of their own around the Earth and Moon, as well as the Mars colony. Millions of people are shipped off Earth to give humans a chance. Spoilers about the aliens.

Funnily enough, I have a near-future alien invasion story idea, where I'm thinking of using the BFR concept as a part of it Like @KSK said, I'm embracing it; and they will be retrofitted to become battleships That or it will be used to quickly construct battleships for LEO, LLO, and LMO.

This is excellent. Robert Zubrin would be proud. Bookmarking this, and will keep an eye out for updates

We need moar telescopes.

Cool worlds, a channel led by the people looking for this came out with a couple videos

SpaceX's big reason is that they're gunning for Mars. And Methane rockets is one of the best ways to go for ISRU production there. Whether or not you think they will achieve that goal doesn't matter. But they're planning ahead, which is important. And then Scott Manley's video summarizes everything else. I just realized you were mostly talking about Blue Origin. Sorry, I just focused on the quote and not the title earlier.

That title was from this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.08632 https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43844m/researchers-mind-melded-three-people-to-collaboratively-play-tetris Tl;dr, Three people had their brains "connected" through a Brain-to-Brain interface and they played a Tetris-like game with each other using the technology. Early attempts were pretty successful. Abstract; We present BrainNet which, to our knowledge, is the first multi-person non-invasive direct brain-to-brain interface for collaborative problem solving. The interface combines electroencephalography (EEG) to record brain signals and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to deliver information noninvasively to the brain. The interface allows three human subjects to collaborate and solve a task using direct brain-to-brain communication. Two of the three subjects are "Senders" whose brain signals are decoded using real-time EEG data analysis to extract decisions about whether to rotate a block in a Tetris-like game before it is dropped to fill a line. The Senders' decisions are transmitted via the Internet to the brain of a third subject, the "Receiver," who cannot see the game screen. The decisions are delivered to the Receiver's brain via magnetic stimulation of the occipital cortex. The Receiver integrates the information received and makes a decision using an EEG interface about either turning the block or keeping it in the same position. A second round of the game gives the Senders one more chance to validate and provide feedback to the Receiver's action. We evaluated the performance of BrainNet in terms of (1) Group-level performance during the game; (2) True/False positive rates of subjects' decisions; (3) Mutual information between subjects. Five groups of three subjects successfully used BrainNet to perform the Tetris task, with an average accuracy of 0.813. Furthermore, by varying the information reliability of the Senders by artificially injecting noise into one Sender's signal, we found that Receivers are able to learn which Sender is more reliable based solely on the information transmitted to their brains. Our results raise the possibility of future brain-to-brain interfaces that enable cooperative problem solving by humans using a "social network" of connected brains. All in all, pretty awesome

"Man, landing those rockets must be a piece of cake." "No you fool! It's like a piece of pie." "That doesn't make any sense."

Does it really make sense for wormholes to be automatically "connected" (is the area between wormholes a different kind of "space"?), and could there instances where you end up in a totally different system than where you intended to go? I know this can't really be 'known' so what are your thoughts/opinions?