SomeGuy123

So my question requires 2 separate conditions to be met. 1. The mining equipment, for mining objects like asteroids that may be hard rock or loose aggregate, needs to obey known laws of physics. The "open air drills" of Space Engineers don't work - there is no way for them to actually collect any of the rock they chew up, and there is no practical way for such a "mining" spacecraft to work without infinite propellant. (or engines that violate conservation of momentum like they do in space engineers) 2. It needs to be renderable in a videogame with a reasonable number of polygons and reasonably straightforward techniques. The problem with the real life proposed nets and foil bags that you surround an asteroid with before mining is that they are flexible. That means a game would need to physically model their surfaces as thousands of interacting joints, and this would murder performance.

As described, it's more like a servo that helps you open the door after you've turned a handle. You could add considerable automation. 1. When pressurizing, the computer could do what you are describing and add 2 psi and then check for pressure loss. If this happens, it would put a CHECK OUTER DOOR alert on the display and refuse to continue unless someone presses override on the GUI. 2. When depressurizing, the computer could reduce pressure in the inner chamber and check for pressure gain (leakage from the station into the inner lock). If this happens, the computer could put a CHECK INNER DOOR alert on the display and again refuse to continue. 3. There could be sensors inside the inner airlock that detect if anyone is in there. (motion sensors). If no one is there, you could remotely cycle the airlock from remote controls for it. 4. The motor as I've described it will not work if there's a pressure differential. So it's more like a motor on your car that can only open the doors if your car is stopped and the engine is off.

Heh. Let's just say that eventually the chickens come home to roost. The authors of the novels did not forget this fact.

So, here's how the ISS airlocks actually work, per one of the mission control staff. There's of course an inner and an outer door. Both are actuated with cranks - no electrics, no control panel, no cool "emergency blow" button per several movies. Both are designed where mechanically an air pressure differential prevents you from opening the hatches at all. So you cannot crank on the inner hatch while there is pressure inside the station, and you cannot crank open the outer hatch while there is pressure inside the airlock chamber. So to use the airlock, you just crank open the inner hatch and get inside the chamber. Crank closed the inner door. Then, you activate the vacuum pump. It just pumps the air inside the inner chamber back inside the station. That's it. I always figured there were compressed air tanks for holding that air, there aren't. Just a pump and 2 hoses and 1 set of electrical wires to a switch. What if the vacuum pump has failed or there is no power? There's a vent. You open the vent, the air in the airlock leaks out to space. You will die if you do not have a suit on, but the venting takes time, so you could close it if you somehow opened the vent by accident. You then crank open the outer hatch. Done. To get back in, you get inside, crank the outer hatch closed, and open the inner vent. Air leaks into the air lock from the station through that vent. Then open the inner hatch. What if you wanted to board the station and the inner door is open and the station is still pressurized? You open the outer vent, accessible from the outside. All the air in the station will eventually drain out that vent. This is how attacking space marines would board the station by force. Apparently, the air maintenance systems in the station will not automatically dump their gas contents to try to keep pressure up - there are obviously compressed oxygen tanks and compressed nitrogen tanks onboard, but the computer controls on them won't automatically dump their contents - so there's plenty of air left in the gas tanks so you can repressurize. Once the station pressure is zero, you can open the outer door. Then close it. You can then access controls and try to re-pressurize - one problem is the vacuum may destroy some of the equipment from overheating, preventing you from doing this. You may have to access the valves to do this manually. What if there's an attacking alien and you need to open the airlock doors to eject them to space? You're screwed. If you wanted to execute someone, per several movies and tv shows, you'd put them in the inner chamber, while restrained, and activate the vacuum pump. Some time later the air pressure would get low enough and they'd peacefully pass out and die. No eyeballs exploding, no sudden ejection to space. This is how airlocks should be designed. If I were designing a futuristic airlock, the only thing I'd change is add an electric motor to turn the crank. I'd deliberately make the motor too weak to actuate the crank unless there is no pressure differential. (I'd design the motor to safely stall without burning anything up when this happens). I'd then add some cool looking illuminate touch screen controls explaining how to use the airlock, and I'd have all the key controls backed up by manual switches and manual cranks. Actually, nix the touch screen manual - print pictograms into a plate set into the side of the airlock panel. The 2 main crank handles would fold inwards, and there would be 2 red disks that rotate when driven by the servo motor. You'd see them turning. If there's a motor failure, you just grab the disk, pull out the fold out crank handle, and turn them yourselves.

Maybe. One flaw of long range lasers is the mirrors. The final step of a laser weapon is a main focusing mirror. There must be an unobstructed line of sight between the target and the mirror. The radius of the mirror and the wavelength of light used determines the laser weapon's effective range. (out of range, the beam is too diffuse to do any damage) Well, what if the target fires back at the mirror of the laser being fired at it? Like shooting the gun of a tank with your own gun. The mirror is such a fragile target you can probably do this using a much smaller laser than the one firing at you. You need to use a different wavelength than the one the enemy laser mirror is tuned for. So if they are using "blue" light, you might have to use "red" or "purple" light (dielectric mirrors are very precisely tuned). They only have to heat the mirror surface enough to burn off the surface layer. Once they do that, the mirror is useless.

Like everything, it depends. It's one thing if the Martians have their own fleet and are a fully independent civilization. But what if there's an early rebellion, really early. Mars has just 200 unarmed scientists and 5 years of supplies, and they decided to rebel. Then you'd only need to send a small force to subdue the scientists and make them get back to doing science (arrest/execute the ringleaders, of course) So you send a few soldiers on the trip over. They would just wear ordinary space suits with body armor plates strapped on and have rifles modified to use dry lubricants and handle the heat of firing without cooling air better. Nothing special or expensive.

As we don't have any known mechanism for FTL travel, it's pointless to speculate on how a space battle might go. Now, it is true that from the known weapons that might work for space battle, neutral particle beams would only work "point blank" - and by that I mean a few thousand kilometers. Particle beams can't be intercepted and armor doesn't stop them very well, so their only drawback is range. Space battles that cannot resolved at greater distances might devolve to a particle beam beaming contest at "point blank".

Option 2 is more likely to be true than option 1. Experimental evidence >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Theory. Anything you observe the real world doing consistently is truth. Anything you don't see or have evidence of is just wishful thinking. There are undiscovered tricks in nature, maybe radically different physics no one has ever observed, but there is no particular reason they would adhere to anything in current theories.

If you read my post a little more carefully, I address that. " adding more volume inside a spaceship is cheap " I don't say free, I say cheap. As in, because of the whole surface area/volume law, the amount of extra "skin" on the spacecraft needed is smaller the bigger is. A very large spacecraft you can add another m^3 of volume for almost nothing, especially if you also take advantage of inflatable fabrics and other very low mass skins. I'm assuming for this exercise that everything has been manufactured from parts in orbit.

So you need a skinsuit and a detachable life support unit. It would make sense that in each crewmember's quarters they would have a skinsuit custom fitted for them. The inner optimizer in me doesn't like the idea of carrying 2 life support units - they are pretty heavy and there are a lot of systems inside one. A "wall mounted" unit doesn't need a casing or technically need internal batteries like a portable one, but the internal batteries would mean if the ship's main power failed, life support would keep running off individual modular units until their batteries are exhausted.

Now, hmm. I know space is relatively cheap on a spacecraft, since it doesn't have to be any particular shape and you really only pay for mass, not volume, and adding more volume inside a spaceship is cheap. Still, the unused space inside each "atomo-coffin"..inelegant. Must be a way to combine functions. Oh. Of course. Just make the door on each crew quarters module seal and give it a life support module. If you were really god's gift to engineering, you'd make the normal air recycler unit for the crew quarter module - the one that keeps the carbon dioxide out of your face - also be detachable and usable as a backpack. So then the only thing you have to have is a light space suit in there. Russians can do it in 10 kg, so it's possible. Still, wonder what you do if 2 crewmembers happen to pile into the same module and they happen to be the only survivors? There's only 1 suit...

You're completely correct. It could be as simple as a cabinet made of aluminum. The same life support pack that pressurizes the space suit would be able to pressurize the cabinet if the door is closed and the pressure is below 1 atmosphere. So yeah, you run towards the nearest cabinet and get in it. The cabinet has an icon indicating it's a shelter of some time. You press a button to close the sliding Cool Door. At that point, there's a loud hissing sound as the life support pack on the space suit vents air + nitrogen through the open helmet to repressurize. You then can get into a space suit at your leisure. And if 2 people happen to get trapped in here, and they just happen to meet the other's mating preferences, bow chicka wow wow.

Ok, so an adult man uses about 0.3 liters/minute of oxygen. Blood has "19.7 mL O2/deciliter". So you need 1.55 liters of blood to live a minute. (your blood flow rate is faster than that because you don't consume all of the oxygen) So the article says "The suspension carries three to four times the oxygen content of our own red blood cells." So a minute would be 381 milliliters. Too much fluid to carry around. I also found a rule for decompression, the "one-one-ten-hundred rule: " A one square-centimeter hole in a one cubic-meter volume will cause the pressure to drop by a factor of ten in roughly a hundred seconds. If you started at 1 atmosphere, that's about how long you have to stay conscious if you are breathing pure oxygen. So, I'm not sure. All the gear that a person could have "on them" all the time seems like it would be not much smaller than just wearing a space suit all the time with an inflatable helmet of some kind.

So built into the uniform in an out of the way spot there's this pouch. There's a battery operated auto-needle in there and a pressure sensor. What does this thing inject, exactly? Care to share enough data to figure out how long a given volume/mass of fluid could keep you conscious? What do your lungs do? You're totally right, this is how to go.

So, what I'm hearing is, it wouldn't be practical to put on a complex suit like the Sokol while the air is gushing out. You could separate the ship into more compartments and try to make it to one that isn't affected, but you would expect to close automatic doors immediately on pressure loss to isolate the gas mass lost to the actually affected compartments. The crew in those compartments don't have time to go through an airlock. So you need a uniform that has internal banding of some sort. Power laces and fibers. Myoelectric fibers that shrink when power is applied. External stiff bands sewn in, sized so there is a little bit of give, and then air or liquid bladders that you inflate to provide compression. Interestingly, everyone would be wearing an outfit that fits them tightly and no one is permitted to gain or lose weight because if you do you'll need a new uniform. You'd actually want the emergency oxygen goggles and mask as part of your uniform, ideally. Kind of bulky though.

I want to say around 30 minutes to an hour. Enough time to make it to an airlock to an intact section of the vehicle. At a minimum you need to be able to use your hands, at least poorly, so you can press buttons on control panels and clamber around. Also the life support backpacks on real spacesuits need to have a connector that is compatible with ports on the thing you are in, so if you get to a suit up locker, and the locker is depressurized so you cannot get out, you can hook up the backpack. Similarly, the actual life support "conditioners"- a big ship would have multiple "substations" that store oxygen and nitrogen and waste CO2 in compressed gas bottles "locally" (there would be compressed gas lines letting you pump those 3 gases all around between the "substations" and to the actual recycling center) would need ports on them that connect, and you need enough dexterity to be able to connect them to your suit/hamster ball with arms. The conditioners contain a CO2 scrubber, the heater to flush the CO2 into gas bottles, several compressor pumps to compress gas, monitoring sensors and air quality displays, heaters, air conditioners, humidity controllers...this is basically what has to be connected to every "vent" in the ship.

So, you know the cliche. You have a gigantic spaceship or space station. It's military and/or or on long interplanetary journeys, and the designers of the vessel are worried about hypervelocity fragments - possibly from enemy action or micrometeorites - hitting the ship/station when the crew are not at general quarters and wearing their suits. I mean, we can describe it well. All the insides are grey and dull chrome, with lights with intense shades of blue. There are long corridors and conduits everywhere. Ever so often in the corridors, the floor has these yellow/black warning markers for an automated door that will close in the event of pressure loss in a section. So the klaxon goes on, an amber strobe light and a computerized voice warns you of pressure loss. You sprint for the nearest emergency suit locker, which is easy to find because there are signs with a little pictogram of a suited astronaut pointing that way. The locker has popped open automatically on detecting the reduced pressure. What's in the locker? How do you make something that you'll probably never use, it's probably about as useful as the seat cushions on an airliner for a water landing, yet still functional enough to work? It needs to be as lightweight as you can possibly make it. Those clear plastic "hamster balls" have the problem that you are trapped, I guess minimum functionality is that it has to save your life and allow you to move around well enough to reach another section of the ship.

I thought this was actually to cool the incoming air, the water itself is besides the point. I don't know. In the case of turbocharged piston engines, you inject water mist into the cylinders and adjust the turbocharger "boost" pressure. Essentially, the air from the turbocharger is at higher pressure and so each cylinder-full has more actual air. This lets you inject more fuel. The water mist flashes to steam as the cylinder of fuel-air compresses, cooling it. The purpose of this is to let you have more fuel and air and not get predetonation from the "overfilled" cylinder heating up the air inside too fast during the compression stroke. So you get more power: weight, but the energy lost from the water injection (and the weight of the water tank) reduces efficiency.

It also is starting to sound fun. A pirate skiff is basically a stolen main engine from a freighter, a bunch of fuel tanks, and like 1 guy in a space suit riding the rocket. It has to be light. When the pirate gets to the automated merchant ship, anything could be there to stop him. He's all alone and there are many dangers, many lockouts, many sensors that if they detect him may trigger countermeasures to make it more difficult. "Big scores" - ships with more valuable cargo - would have proportionally more security, all the way up to an armed warship full of space marines being hidden inside the cargo bay, with the waste heat from the armed warship vented out the same radiators the freighter uses. (so in this one situation stealth in space would actually work - everyone can see the freighter, they can't see the warship inside) It's totally a viable game. Space Pirate simulator 9000. You have your secret base, you upgrade it xcom style, you have your ship, you can upgrade it but there are tradeoffs (the more things you add to increase it's capabilities, the more fuel it takes and the higher your profile is), looted parts from freighters you can use, etc.

This is the "science and spaceflight" forum. Yet, no one here seems to be even vaguely aware of what real hacking involves. There is a radio receiver on the space freighter. Maybe a laser receiver. It translates incoming signals to binary messages. Those messages are from authorized or non authorized peers sending them. Well, a ship like this probably does need to process messages from sources that are not 'authorized'. So a competent engineer would install a separate radio and an isolated computer to respond to "unauthorized" messages. Then, for messages that are authorized, the steps are : 1. Decode the binary message 2. Verify the message is the right length 3. XOR it with a 1 time pad 4. Check if the message has a valid message type header and the CRC matches If #4 doesn't pass, reject. That's a tiny front end. A good engineer would use a very simple computer to run it, something that has too little complexity to be vulnerable to hacking at all. Period. End of story. If you don't have the 1 time pad, a random code that changes for every bit of every message, it will just ignore it. Remote Hacking would be literally impossible. The reason the computer you are reading it is hackable is because any software you have installed can send and receive network messages at will. So every single piece of software you are running is a vulnerability. So if Bonzai Buddy Desktop Buddies XL, written in a hurry by inexperienced programmers, has a bug where a certain message lets a remote attacker to overwrite the actual code used by this program, that remote attacker can then execute any instruction that BBDBXL is privileged enough to run. Since many windows applications are run as administrator, and the administrator/not security barrier is paper thin, hackers get in a lot. Now, if people boarded this automated ship from their pirate skiff, that's a totally separate story. They can just open up the panels that have the ship's remote control receivers and remove the circuit boards. They then need to install some kind of controls that they can use - the easiest would probably be to directly disconnect the main engines from the ship's control bus and install a piece of equipment such as a bootleg knockoff of the same ship control systems the ship does, except the bootleg knockoff won't demand a password. To prevent piracy, shipping companies could add ever more elaborate lockouts and even armed sentry turrets that deploy. Once the pirates have control, they would disconnect the least valuable cargo. This would give them enough delta V to send the freighter to a different destination. For this to be possible at all, there would have to be "lawless" areas of the solar system where they can have their base. Like Somalia today. The western nations all know where the pirates are based, they even know the exact town, but they are not willing to commit the ground forces for an invasion or send a bombing run.

I think the reason there are not air pirates is because the most common airplane in use - a craft with a pressurized cabin and jet engine propulsion - costs 10s of millions of dollars to even get a basic one. So it requires a tech base, a bunch of skilled people to maintain one, a place to launch them, and jet planes are incredibly expensive and fragile - a failed piracy mission, you lose a huge amount of money. Ocean piracy can be done with a wooden boat and a big engine with simple weapons. Another factor is that if jetliners passing over the ocean were being intercepted by pirates who threaten to shoot them down if they don't pay, at the moment there's no way to verify such payments or make them complete immediately in a non reversible electronic form. Bitcoins is a fix for that. Viewed that way, space piracy is pretty ridiculous. I was trying to figure out what kind of engines they might use, and I had a good chuckle when I imagined guys wearing bandanas with skull and crossbone shirts trying to maintain a fusion drive.

If you'd like to talk about another scenario, such as digital bank robbery, perhaps you'd like to create a thread? This one is intended to be about pirates, in a world where the pirates aren't impossible. The dV requirements to match velocities with a vessel on interplanetary cruise are gigantic, so I wondered aloud if perhaps you don't need to match velocities at all.

The point is to describe a scenario where space pirates make some kind of sense, and then to figure out what strategies they might use. The scenario cannot involve engineering thought to be impossible or violations of currently known physics. It also has to be one where players can make junkyard vehicles. So it basically has to be post apocalyptic, and basically has to be one where each station is it's own fiefdom (and is therefore armed) and where ships are well worn scrap heaps that may or may not have some weapons welded on.

1. I'm saying if you approach a station at only hundreds of kps, the station's uber long range lasers can blast you out of space before you get there. It has far more firepower than you do, so you won't survive a strafing run either. 2. You're not holding the asset, you're threatening the blow it up. Your pirate skiff will only make a flyby and be in weapons range for a brief period of time, and you're threatening to do massive damage to the freighter in that brief period of time if they don't pay. Obviously the freighter operators can respond by arming their freighters, just like they did back in the age of sail, but they have liability issues and probably strict limits on how many guns they are permitted. So it turns into a bluffing contest : the pirates try to make the freighter captain think he will definitely be attacked and face lethal damage if he doesn't pay, and the freighter captain tries to make the pirates think that the freighter is well armed enough that the pirate ship will be destroyed first. I'm thinking this might work in a sort of hybrid future game that combined KSP and Space Engineers with a more reliable technical engine. So the player would design ships themselves - freighters, warships, etc, limited by cost and available parts they have unlocked and a total "licensed gross vehicle weight".(to stop players from just building arbitrarily large ships with enough firepower to stomp anything that are also so large they lag the game to a crawl, they have to optimize for a fixed amount of total mass) On freight hauling and exploration missions, they would sometimes be confronted with NPC pirates. Most of the piracy interaction is actually a series of dialogue choices for bluffs and counter bluffs, and then a usually very brief space battle if negotiations fail.

I would assume large stations would have defense guns and local "space cops" (armed warships) who stay near them? Like everything, this depends on assumptions, I'm assuming that since engines are realistic and engineering is realistic, nobody can accelerate a rock to 90% of the speed of light (a paltry 2-3% is possible but it would take years and you would be able to detect the drive flare of the ship that is doing it) and nobody has relativistic railguns.