Spacescifi

These are the limits of making uber electromagnets as listed below: Increasing current density is limited by Joule heating and increasing the magnetic field strength is limited by the cost, size and weight (as well as technological limitations) of electromagnets and the power available to feed them.[14][15] Cost is only an artificial factor, but the others are serious show stoppers. Why do I even care about magnets? Powerful magnetic fields can be used for many scifi technologies... like rocketry and maybe... just maybe... get a profitable fusion reaction going. One site claims scientists created a solid state electromagnet that can do 90 Tesla, although it will break itseld in time. So I thought... are magnetic fluids possible? Uber magnetic fluids? Does current physics understanding allow for it? Because if so perhaps that is what we will use in the future. Since I really don't know how you would break a super magnetic fluid beyond boiling it. You may discuss. EDIT: Wow.... I suspected as much. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-printed-droplets-of-permanently-magnetic-liquid-and-boy-is-it-trippy/amp

Only if taken to extremes... since such drives expend fuel so their are limits on range without refueling.

Scenario: Three types of scifi hyperdrives are available to you. Class I: A small drive that can be fitted on small vessels. Hyperspace travel time is a lightyear covered per 30 minutes. Yet in reality, outside 30 days passes for every 30 min of hyperspace travel. So about 2 hours would get you to Proxima Centauri, but when you arrive 4 months will have passed. Class II: A medium size drive for medium size vessels neither gigantic nor small. Hyperspace travel is a LY per 15 min, outside 15 days pass per LY traveled. Class III: Large hyperdrives for large vessels. Five min per LY in hyperspace, equal to 5 days passing outside per LY. Throttling down: You can also throttle down the hyperdrives to go lightspeed, in which there is no time variance. Useful mainly for interplanetary cruising. My analysis: Class I hyperdrives are best for explorers I think, and Class II hyperdrives could be used for cheaper shipping for longer wait times, but by and large the Class 3 hyperdrives would reign supreme in shipping. Big ships would be the fastest ever. Did I miss anything that you can add to my analysis? EDIT: I have no clue how close these travel times compare to modern sea shipping, but I have a feeling they are similar, and faster in some cases. EDIT 2: I think the ability to skip several months into the future within a few hours woukd be nice ability to have, if only to see rapid progress. Whoa... I just figured it out! Passenger ride fares would be a healthy source of income. Don't wanna wait months for your package to arrive? Hitch a ride in hyperspace and the wait will only be a few hours. Sure, months of time will pass outside, but who cares? You want your package ASAP!

Grinding on difficult games had more to do with pride for me, though I cannot speak for everyone. Grinding on games I enjoy means they must have goid character interaction Nonetheless, it is an illusory form of success even if and when someone wins. That is why I think games have become unhealthily long. Since unlike activities performed or progressing to 'levels' in real life, video games seldom give players any permanent 'buffs' in real life. At best they are a dopamine temporary happy boost that goes away in seconds. Ideally,I like games that are either intriguing, teach a lesson, or are an adventure. No mattee what they shoukd be short. This is one such game that can be beat in an hour and is intriguing. https://pinheadgames.itch.io/forever-space

The problem is most of that time is spent game grinding nowadays. Grinding JUST to beat the game. The alternative is pay to win instead of grind for days to win.... which is the STO and Star Citizen way apparently. No matter how good a game is though, 8 hours of gaming a week is arguably excessive.... but nowadays that and more is required.... or else you can't beat the game in some cases. For example, one guy did a speed run of No Man's Sky, skipping stuff he could explore just to beat the game. How long did it take him to beat the game? Over 30 hours, so basically almost 2 days! Playing virtually nonstop! That is ridiculous I say. But developers will continue this trend so long they still can...

The games that I am referring to that I admire are the console games of the 90's. The original 2-D Sonic series I think is a prime example of a game that is good that does not take too long to play. Other games of notable mention that had mutiple modes of play were the Star Wars series for the SNES. Unfortunately that series took a long time to actually beat. But it was notable for having 2-D platforming and 3-D flight in one game, albeit was just airplanes in space... but still it was a rare feature for it's time and still is as far as I know. The danger of video games nowadays is the theft of valuable time. I used to play Oolite, which is a modernized clone of the original elite with many upgrades. But I grew to dislike it since it is basically a huge grind. You can spend hours and still not get paid well enough. And even if you enable massive cheats then all you have left to do is kill stuff. As for game redesign in general, I think it would be a simple thing to include mutiple modes of play in a a game, since even old games did it in the past. The Star Trek TNG Sega Genesis game of the 90's (much better than the SNES clone) had RPG elements that allowed you to make choices that had some effect on the player's game. Basically, you had the option to at least talk your way out of starship scuffles, and if you chose to blast away every Romulan Warbird you ever encountered, you would run out of torpedoes sooner or later, your ship would accumulate damage, and you would pay by having to wait for repairs. On top of that, hostile vessels can warp in withput warning and fire on you during repairs... assuming your not orbiting a planet. The game rewards being diplomatic, since then enemies at least give you the choice to talk things out. Be hostile and they will shoot you on sight, no talking at all. The easiest thing to add in any game is a choice tree/rpg element. All it is is still screen pics with choices, which effect what level you go to. Simple. Or beyond that it could effect NPC behavior, which may be a bit harder to implement, but surely doable. Even TNG on the Sega Genesis did that... albeit in a very limited way. Be nice and enemies can be talked out of shooting you. Have a regular pattern of blowing then away on sight and they will start firing on your spaceship on sight. The game even allowed for a single save.

I prefer the games of decades ago to modern ones. Why? Time. In general, games of the past had to respect the gamer's time more because the computers had limited processing and graphics. Remember the days when you went to the video store for cartridges or Playstation CD's to rent and you could beat a game in only an hour's time? I also think graphics are overrated, some of the games I enjoyed most were only 16 bit machine games, but the game mechanics made me like them anyway. Imagine what a game could be if a designer went with 16 bit graphics while using modern computing processing to enhance the game overall? Imagine a space sim like elite dangerous but fully newtonian that did not waste your time needlessly, and had a plot to go with it? You could do it with time acceleraton enabled just fine. One could combine the best of still screen visual adventure novels while combining 2D platformer gameplay, and also 3D newtonian flight for different segments of the game. Some of my favorite games had features similar to this with mutiple nodes of play. You may discuss.

I really like the spaceship in the video. It is highly accurate of what a space freighter coukd look like... with cargo on the exterior. I will base some of my scifi freighters on the design, just rounding off the crew modules more, as well as the cargo pods to be mire cylindral. The Moon... should be more profitable than Mars for a long time coming... especially after we get a rail to orbit launching facility operational. Yes? The kind without humans, but with enough humanoid aliens to sub for them while still behaving differently in fundamental ways.

I think advertisements would be far more important, as would couriers. The supply chain is space traffic, and if you REALLY want to bury the competition then you must divert as much space traffic to your space food empire as possible. How? Several ways. 1. Stronger broadcast signals. 2. Pay courier vessels to intercept and dock with cruiser liners on their way to the competition. For that matter, you could intercept them with entire fleets of fastfood ships. They would not run out of food quickly that way.

Imagine if you will a fastfood company that has conquered so much of Earth that they want to expand their empire into space. Basically... space habitats at la grange points and also moon bases and LEO stations. Provided space traffic was good enough via constant acceleration thermal antimatter rockets, could a ruthless fastfood company conquer space? For example, the founder of mcdonalds drove the original creators of the restaurant out of business by building a mcdonalds right next to the original but renamed restaurant. Could all these shenanigans still happen? Since that implies a supply chain like no other, since last I checked, no cows are on the moon.

Provided that weight was not an issue and we had a torch drive rocket of sorts... could we avoid the fuel intensive artificial gravity method as well as the rotational gravity method by swimming inside pools in the spaceship? I know such is not viable IRL because of weight, but provided my OP scenario could swimming provide enough exercise to keep the body healthy enough while coasting? The good thing about swimming is that it exercises all the muscles, so combined with resistance weights and a breather, the crew could get a more effective workout while coasting. Without the hazards of rotation (it does have them) nor the waste of propellant via 1g acceleration. You may discuss.

The balloon network is tethered to the ground for several reasons... refilling gas among them. Several kilometer long hoses could pump fresh gas as needed. I believe the balloons could be pumped via hoses from a facility on the ground. Beyond that make the balloons of materials that leak the least.... if the balloons can be made to not leak at all make it so. And the balloons must be massive. Still easier than other non-rocket launch assist schemes I have seen... since the weight is so low weight it can actually work... nor does it have to fight the lower atmosphere.

Ouch... that stings.

Going straight up is the fastest way to get to space... I was thinking of using the ballloon floating network for getting small payload spacecraft into space using less propellant. Maybe even smaller SSTO'S. I do not know if the propellant savings is enough to justify the system, since the rocket still must fight gravity to reach orbital velocity.... it just does'nt have to deal with the lower atmosphere anymore, which is also the region that requires the most propellant in the first place. I like your analysis though. I think a floating network that was tethered at an angle would be more useful, since one could actually use it to to achieve some of the sideways velocity needed for orbit. But you are right, rockets are still needed in the end. BONUS: You coukd use the angular tethered system to SLOW spacecraft during reentry so long they have enough propellant to fly through the rings. Hmmm... suddeny winged spacecraft may make a comeback. What should I call this system? Since I don't think I it is similar to other pooular ideas like a space elevator or a space fountain (whatever that is). Magnets I think are awesome though, and the future of spaceflight, if designed by people like me... is very much magnetic. m.youtube.com/watch?v=L

Not necessarily... that is an engineering problem which is solvable. It just requires a fundamental redesign. Make the floating launch network only vertical. Station upright rocket below it on a large magnet base. Make the bottom of rocket also magnetic so that it lifts off the magnetic base, then use the ringed vertical tethered network to ascend up into the upper atmosphere where the air is sparse. The big magnet base would repel rings headed it's way. And I hope and presume one could design the magnetic accelerator rings so that they repel rings from one another. Power and cooling, if solved, would be all we need for it to works. Physics allows for it.

Take a rocket and speed it off a roller coaster track and through lightweight magnetic rings suspended by balloons. Tether the balloon/magnetic ring network to the ground. The objective, a floating magnetic railway that can be constructed on the ground and float upward into high atmosphere. Once there, rockets or spacecraft could be magnetically accelerated into space. What challenges would need to be overcome? Magnets powerful enough to accelerate the weight of the rocket thru eac succeeding ring. Tethers strong enough to not break. Honestly I say we could do this with modern technology. Save propellant on lightweight rockets and spacecraft at least. You may discuss the challenges and viability of this concept.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is held in high esteem in the classical realm of music. Personally, I favor his violin sonatas (music with a violin and piano only) above all else he did. Why? His other stuff can be quite bloated with too much music. Mozart has a way of varying notes in his music rapidly, so rapidly that if his music were a story, it would be like lots of stuff happening all at once. It is actually difficult to keep track, so that hardly any Mozart music can I hum a tune to. Why? His music changes direction so much it is near impossible to remember a tune to it. Nonetheless, I still love some of his violin sonatas, since while I cannot hum them, they are quite pleasant and pretty to listen to. Also.... probably more importantly, Mozart's music is free. If you know where to look. Just ask me and will show you where.

Good answer. At any rate the answers are strangely enough... worth looking into both for real life applications AND scifi creation. Back to your topic on batteries though... I think that metallic gases (does not have to be metallic hydrogen) are the answer. Since they may make for better super conductors... although I do not know if that means better batteries. But I do know that a cursory look at solid glass made from gas shows that it has interesting and useful properties. So there is that. I dunno... cellular computers? I read somewhere that we have managed to store more information using cells or something organic than traditional digital storage can. Makes sense actually... how else are all those crime cold cases solved?

I believe that all technologies have a growth stage that ends at a stagnation point that cannot go any further.... without making something new altogether For example: The wheel. It started out basic, but from it, we developed an artficial air bladder based wheel called a tire, which is not the original, it is something new. Yes you can improve the tire, but you can only do so much to it or risk creating something that is not a traditional tire (a sphere tire for example). That even happens at a macro scale. If you take a star and keep adding more mass what you get won't be star according to current understanding, just a dense nebula. Since the radiation pressure would be absurdly strong enough to keep the star mass from compressing enough to become a star. So what technologies do you think have maxed out their growth or will shortly? They cannot be improved upon without developing altogether different technology? You may discuss.

Such a system could be used for a kind of networked floating orbital launch ring system. Granted you would have to use helium or something, but you could save propellant that way and tether the network to the ground. Rocket could clear the lower atmosphere without propellant and engage rockets higher up. Cheap is of less concern in scifi. Nonetheless... nitrogen is weakly repelled by magnetism whereas oxygen is weakly attracted. With an uber field you could blow air with magnetic fields alone while the oxygen separated from the nitrogen. Sonething tells me if electricity arcs are in play that the oxygen might combust though... which might be a problem (explosion). Magneto would probably be on fire... as would probably any ship using an uber magnetic field with electricity arcing from it.

So I was watching some youtube vids on magnetic induced wind as well as research on magnetic repulsion of ionized air and I thought... this could make for a good rocket SSTO assist. The challenges are mutiple though, so this will be a futuristic technology. Challenges to be solved one day by future men and women are: 1. How to make or design an uber magnet that won't tear itself apart under constant operation (they break in mere moments nowadays)? 2. How to design a fuel source that has a high enough power withought being too heavy to lift off the ground for flight? 3. Partially solved. How to manipulate electomagnetic fields so that air is repelled below the the ship, generating lift? We akready have magneto aerodynamic lifters on the books, just nothing much designed yet, but at least the physics does not say no. Extreme possibility of possible realistic scifi use in the future? A donut shaped SSTO with two rear rocket nozzles at one end. VTOL is acomplished by ionizing the air around the shlp and repelling it downward while the ship lifts up. Expect a light show, lots of lightning, maybe even a scifi looking shield made of ionized plasma emitting from the hull of the ship. Maybe even an artificial aurora borealis... who knows? Point is, with a powerful enough magnetic fields and precise control, along with a way to ionize surrounding air, you can VTOL anywhere there is sufficient atmosphere. Once air gets too thin you switch to rocketry for orbit. Pros: Any planet with an atmosphere you can VTOL without expending propellant. Also with precise control over the magnetic field and ionized air interaction, you could use it to literally thrust vector in ANY direction you want, since the air is your reaction mass and the engine is rhe magnetic fields emanating from the ship while the fuel is the power source. Cons: Do not try landing on the moon unless your ship is equipped with beefy landing thrusters and propellant to match. Also do not engage fighter jets scifi style in the air on earth while using the magnetic lift propulsion. You would likely lose... hard. Since every bullet and missile shot in your direction... if ferromagnetic at all... wouls ruin your day once it got near you. It would'nt likely miss. Also because of ionization, your ship is literally leaving an ozone trail in the atmosphere in it's wake, but that would fade in time so long you did'nt go crazy with thousands of mag lifters flying everyday continuously. You may discuss. Anything I missed? Or perhaps you know about this subject. Thank you.

Tachyons are purely theoretical and probably do not exist. The only interest I have in them is using them as rocket propellant... but I have a few questions... assuming anyone knows. 1. Tachyons would go no slower than light speed and always move faster than light it is said. So if that is the case, what kind of engine would it look like? Not sure if it would even look like a rocket nozzle. 2. I ended up abandoning my idea for FTL photon scifi rockets, since someone elsewhere calculated that if the speed limit of light was ignored and we used newtonian physics to calculate, a photon's energy would also go up... in other words, you still get a death ray exhaust photon rocket even with FTL photons I thought I could get by using less FTL photons, but doing that either results in pitiful thrust if too little, or still death ray exhaust if sufficient. Question? Would tachyon rockets emit all types of deadly cerenkov radiation? Or would the exhaust be invisible and barely interact with anything? Thanks.

I thought about that after... that to a cat, three feet is like ten feet away relative to how small their bodies are. But you are absolutely right, circular pupils are the way to go for larger creatures, and no matter how cool or pretty fictional humanoids with cat eyes look, such eyes make little sense in reality. Granted cats can see far away, the image just is not clear to them until they get closer, and like was mentioned, three feet is kinda far for a cat. For a humanoid three feet is nothing, so it follows that the larger a creature is, it is an advantage to see farther away rather tgan being restricted to near sightedness. Cats can see 20 feet away, but make can only make out the shapes of objects at that distance, not the details. Result? Cats could not drive a car to save their lives. Much less an airplane.

True, I am just lointing out that such animal eyes would make haven civilization like humanity hard if not impossible. Even though they look awesome on humanoids. I once fiddled with the idea of giving cat-eyed humanoids a cone to rod ratio similar tp humans, but with cat eyes. But then I realized that the cat pupil would STILL be non-optimal. Why? Cats have a slightly wider field of vision, which makes sense considering that they have to literally turn their head to look at something (their eyes don't seem to move like ours). But the main issue is blurriness and lack of depth of focus. 'A cat's vision is sharpest between 2 and 3 feet from its face, and its focus is on the center of what the cat observes rather than on the entire landscape. This is a helpful adaptation when it comes to zeroing in on small prey. Cats also can detect motion much better than humans can.May 15, 2012 . Since the many rods in the cat's retina serve as motion detectors as well as light receptors, anything running across a cat's field of vision is more likely to be detected than something coming straight toward it. Results for a cat humanoid eye civilization? They will have to get up close to anything they want a clear view of. Like 3 ft at least, and all else except what they focus on will appear blurry. So cases of surviving multiple attackers at once diminish, since they only have a clear view of one thing they are focusing on at any given moment. Real cats have less of a handicap, since without the extra cones for color, they can detect motion greater with all the rods they have, but human activity adapted cat eyes would trade that for color vision, being no better at reacting to or detecting motion than your average human. About the only advantage they would have is the ability to focus on objects close up without getting distracted. Good for study I guess. Bird vision is an exception, but yeah, humanoids with those could do well, only drawback is having to turn the head to look at stuff since their eyes seem fixed in place. EDIT: Cats can move their eyes in the sockets like us just fine, it's many birds that cannot (although I would not be surprised if there is an exception I am unaware of).

Cat Vision vs. Human Vision Cats have 6-8 times more rods in theireyes as compared to humans, whereashumans have more cones in their eyesthan cats. Rods are responsible for peripheral and night vision, while cones are helpful in distinguishing between colors and provide better sight in the daytime.Jun 23, 2015 This is the case with most animal eyes, less color vision, but greater vision in lower light scenarios.To compensate they often have greater smell or hearing. Yet would that be enough to help them develop a civilization on par with humanity or better? With less color perception, their visual art scene would be lackluster as would fashion. The idea of matching clothing would matter a lot less as they likely could'nt perceive that anyway in some cases. Light and dark tones would be their main go to for fashion sense. As for science, lack of perception of certain colors will hurt, but one could compensate somewhat via great sense of smell. "All that molten metal looks the same, but that's iron, I can smell it. I have smelled ot before." I guess smell experience would be a greater factor for science than mere pictures, as smell indentification would be the main ID for things. Your thoughts?