Spacescifi

I will attemp to address some misconceptions. 1. It is not a jump drive. 2. It is a space moves past your vessel drive. 3. SVL navigation is as simple as steering your ship like a plane in space. Make no mistake. You are'nt accelerating, space is moving past your ship and you decide what direction space moves past based on your steering. Smaller mass ships are easier/quicker to steer. They can make tighter turns. Which is a relative thing, considering that base SVL speed is a lightsecond per minute. For FTL SVL, a vessel must clear a seven light second radius from the nearest planet. Then you can SVL at a lightyear per hour. Within a seven lightsecond radius of a planet you can only go a lightsecond per minute. 4. A vessel generates an invisible SVL field bubble while at SVL that is 3 kilometers wide. Any missiles or cargo dropped within it are subject to newtonian physics. But they will STAY in the bubble provided they do not drift out of or accelerate out of it. When that happens your vessel will shift lock to whatever mass it launched that cleared the 3 kilometer bubble first. 5. A vessel will literally stay at SVL forever until it either finds something to shift-lock to or the SVL generator overheats and melts it. Seven hours of SVL use is considered safe, but 8 hours is considered risking a meltdown. Leaving your vessel stranded in space unless it has a backup SVL generator. 6. A ship's SVL generator can cool down with heat sinks. Which may take hours or perhaps just 30 min if you have some expensive ones. 7. Say you SVL drove to a satellite and aquired it's orbital trajectory and speed. Next you SVL toward the moon, but detect four vessels trying to intercept you while in SVL. They turn tighter than your vessel and you know they WILL intercept you sooner or later since they are circling you from different vectors. You fire a missile that clears your SVL bubble radius and shift-locks you. What speed and orbital heading do you aquire? Well... during SVL you do not get ANY orbital trajectory. You can only TRANSLATE to what you shift-lock to. In your case it is the missile you fired from your own vessel. Thus you retain your previous orbital trajectory with the added speed of the missile thrown in. Just translocated to a totally different area in space, since you were halfway to the moon when you shift-locked to your missile. That is how you can do that. Now if you translated or shift-locked to the pirate vessels... yeah, you would match them for trajectory and speed at at a relative stop 3 kilometers away. 8. Pirates could still catch up to you but it would be hard if you keep spamming missiles to SVL away. Plus when not in SVL you're virtually standing still while SVL vessels are virtually making u-turns and loops at a lightsecond per minute.

I guess what I am saying is that shift-lock merely defaults to the closest object that weighs a kilogram or more. You really cannot choose what shift-locks you unless you launched the object yourself.

I really was just fetching. Dark energy is sonething we really do not understand well at all. I thought it sounded better than mixing antimatter with vacuum to make a vacuum jet. Since that sounds silly.

Well you understand the drive's abilities quite well. Although you may have a misconception. 3 kilometer radius is set. Does not matter what it is. If an object weighs a kilogram or more it WILL shift-lock your vessel. You CANNOT SVL until you clear the shift lock radius. Thus if a station did not want a bunch of dangeous ships creeping up on it it only has to launch a bunch of satellites a few hundred kilometers out. Spread them out so that they only a few kilometers out from each other and you have a massive shift-lock net. Space combat you have better grasp than I, as you understand just how lethal modern missiles are. I can still see combat being a massive missile swarm battle. Although getting free speed won't be as easy as you think in combat. Because: At SVL your ship will literally stay at SVL until you reach the 3 kilometer radius area of another 1 kilogram or more object. If you try dumping cargo, it will just SVL along with you. Now if you launched a missile or railgun slug, yeah, you could use that to shift-lock your vessel as soon as it hit the 3 kilometer radius. In that case, you would retain your ship's true original speed and orbital heading before you went SVL. So you may drift totally off target. Surely not at a relative stop to them this time. Yet it would be a tactic that could pay off if you hit your target. Which is a big if considering SVL capabilities. Two things seem to matter most here. Rate of fire and shift lock. With a good enough weapon loadout you could clear out the stuff shift locking you. Missiles would be a mixed favor of sorts, since they will shift-lock your enemy ship the same as it will to you. Worst case scenario? Shift-locked with a thousand missiles headed your way. But you are right. Something this huge get get away FAST from those missiles simply by launching high velocity railgun rounds and SVLing to them. Assuming the thousand enemy missiles were not already within 3 kilometers of your ship's radius. In that case you cannot even SVL. I hope your vessel would have good countermeasures. It would need them.

Kerbal really is not about stories It is about KSP. No I have not told details because I am still working them out, and I do not think it proper to do so anyway. Not here on KSP. I mean this is not a fanfic site, nor am I writing that. I have learned a few things here I did not know before though. Namely just enough to realize that rockets can be used... but need some truly awesome scifi assists to justify using them in a setting... given how limited they are in space. I guess if you want a straight answer... is that I intended to utilize multiple types of FTL and sublight propulsion. Not just one. Now it is easy to do this. But making them not too dangerous can be hard if one is not willing to be inventive and forces things and tech to be constrained to a single way. By now I have my answer.

LOL. A scientist tells you how the vacuum jet works. Yet you ask "Does it produce thrust?" "No." "What's the point of making it then?" "We had a government surplus okay? You happy now?!" "No?"

Under different circumstances they could allow it. But not when they have business to take care of.

Rude? Not necessarily. Chances are quite high the said aliens would announce their presence and motives to the world. In other words, you should already know that they did not come to give you an offworld trip. So continuing to ask won't get you anywhere. By the way... what is JD? Even if you offered it, you have to understand that these aliens would only be staying long enough to do what they came to do and leave. They would likely have zero interest in the JD. These are professionals after all.

True. Really it dawned on me that the whole reason why scifi likes constant acceleration is because of space being so mind boggingly huge. Really... scifi does not need constant acceleration if FTL is good enough. A translative FTL drive could jump a spaceship to the same speed and orbital heading as the target, being only a kilometer away. With that, even modern rockets with their pathetic delta v (fuel hog usage basically) would be viable. Crossing a kilometer for rendezvous withim vacuum is well within our wheelhouse of capability. And running outta fuel would not be as big a concern either. It's like take your pick: Really precise translative FTL: The pros are that a kilometer from the target is not far for a rocket to travel. The con is that your rockets are limited fuel. Somewhat unprecise FTL: Pros? Well it is FTL... even if it did'nt adjust your speed and heading, and the fact that you are a lightsecond away from your target. More pros? You have and in this case need a constant acceleration drive to reach the target in a reasonable amount of time. Constant acceleration can be used for lots of things BTW. Machines. Blowing stuff up etc. Nothing that we can access with modern technology or current understanding anyway. Scifi is all about make-believe and what-if. So I do not mind if if scifi doe not jive with we understand. Yeah... infinite compression of vacuum sounds almost like an oxymoron. However I would find it amusing to see a solid black beam issuing from behind a vacuum jet. Since once vacuum itself is expanded what do you have left? I got nothing. But I can and will make the scifi assumption that once space vacuum is expanded by the beam of pure void, that beam will be what nothing truly looks like. Pure void. No quantum fluctuations. No photons traveling through it. Just nothing. Actually the edges of the beam may glow white from light coalescing around the edges. Since light surely would'nt penetrate it.

Assuming they answered you... which they might not, the answer would be no.

"For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." What happens when our civilization meets it's opposite? What if their ideals are contrary to our civilizations? What if they are aware of all this and familiar with our civilization prior to even coming? For better or worse I can only assure you of one thing. They won't be coming to simply talk. Ready. Set. Action! The resistance will go about as well as well for the current human civilization as you could realistically would think. Guns. Missiles. Nukes. They prepared for all of that with better tech and our civilization specifically in mind. Game over. But for every ending, there is a begininning.

I suspected as much. How do you think it would look? Would it produce any visual effect in space? What science has confirmed: Space is the closest thing to a void man knows of, and yet it is'nt a true void of absolutely nothing. Researchers say they have detected what appear to be random fluctuations at the quantum scale (really small). To someone who has a working knowledge of how vacuum quantum fluctuations work (greater than current knowledge), the flutcuations would NOT be random. They could explain how, why, and even reliablt predict what the 'void' would do in the future. There arecq whole slew of seemingly crazy scifi things that at least on paper sound possible. Like one thing vacuum is full of is photons. With direct energy to mass conversion (yes I am running over the human imposed conservation of energy understanding), one could simply fly close to a star and collect and transform photons into mass. What good it would do given the heat I don't know? Unless one could replicate mass onboard like trek replicators, only with photons. Just have to get a scifi sun bath in the process and not die.

Don't ask a question unless you're prepared for the answer. Answer: Yes but no. Yes: Definitely a civilization. No: Not like us. Not what you're probably thinking when you think of scifi.

For this scifi discussion, we have a scifi jet that only works in vacuum. It sucks up and compresses vacuum, mixes it with dark energy, and then expels it out the back. Would that produce thrust for space propulsion? I guess it would depend on exhaust speed. The higher the better.

Quite true.I originally thought to do that for the sake of conforming to hunan limitations. But what you said is worth considering. I mean, what is the point of boldly going as a human if you cannot go to like hslf the places in the universe because your tech cannot cope wiyh it? I may just modify it as you said. That way the ship could go down and grab resources previously unknown and untouched to man (high pressure materials due to gravity, maybe even loads of metallic hydrogen, not that tbey woukd need it for rockets). Going here would be... awe inspiring. Assuming your ship or shuttlecraft was not torn apart by the winds.

7g is good rate of acceleration. Can allow to escape most common worlds, and even places with higher gravity. Anything high enough gravity that 7g would struggle is not a place you should go. Visit.

The ship lacks inertial dampners. Thus injury/death by g-force is a real possibility. 1g acceleration is tolerable for hours on end. 7g? I doubt it.

True. The rope net design would work better on a ship with limited fuel but a translation drive to jump a ship at the same orbital heading and speed as the planets. Rockets could land vertically, but fuel use for rockets would be intense.

That is actually a very serious matter LOL. Yet I think I addressed it with the stackable crew modules. Since they can be aligned with the gravity ahead of time. I really like the rope nets. If anyone was foolish enough to be near the edges instead of safely inside a module, while the ship rotated, he could just fall into a net. Hopefully. Beats smacking into the wall.

Open: Basically a few big open rooms with cylinder shaped cubical rooms for the crew. The nets are mainly for time spent in orbit of planets. Crawling on nets is a must in zero g when you have a big open room. Because floating is slow. Just watch the,astronauts on the ISS. They routinely use speed cams because showing real-time getting around station is too slow. Closed: True, but also can make reaching areas a nightmare in times of trouble. Vertically: Dramatic yes that is true. But it is less stable and more inclined to tip over than a ship that is shorter and broader.

So this is a discussion of which deck layout is better? For spaceships with explorers? Not colonists. Just explorers. Meaning they will observe and report and take a limited supply of cargo (they have other places to visit/sample after all). The relevant ship capabilies: Constant acceleration at 7g max or below with regenerative refueling. Can use it to land on planets. Plus an FTL jump drive that will put a ship however many light seconds away from the target planet multiplied by it's distance away in lightyears. So for a proxima centauri world, we would be jumped about 4 lightseconds from the target planet. Thus it pays to hop from system to system to reduce travel time, unless you do not mind longer in-system travel times. Just imagine. 100 lightyears means your vessel jumps 100 light seconds from your target when you get there! Time spent powering up for FTL jumps only takes 15 min. Yet the jump drive cannot do interplanetary jumps inside systems. Only interstellar jumps. Open deck plan: Decks are aligned with planet gravity but nonaligned with g-force via acceleration. A few big rooms cover the innards of the spaceship. Inside are modules that can be stacked in weightlessness to form a spine column along the center of engine thrust. This is so that before the ship lands, the crew can install/align the modules toward the planet. As otherwise all the modules would be sideways across. To make navigating in weightlessness easier, a rope mesh surrounds crew areas they can use to propel off to reach modules or room entrances. Closed deck plan: Decks are not aligned with the center of thrust, but that's what roller coaster standing chairs are for. At least landing/take off is easy. And rooms resemble earth ones (hallways and rooms galore). Alignment with center of thrust: Like a tall office building the decks are aligned with the center of thrust. While great for space travel, it will make loading/unloading on a planet harder than it would be otherwise. There is a reason warehouses are broad and flat vs tall and skinny. So which do you think is optimal?

Math is not wrong. 2 + 2 equals 4. Not 8000. Always. That said, math is a means to an end. A tool. Math is not wrong per say, but even math that is correct won't help you if you do not know what you should be looking for to acomplish what you are trying to do. If you know what to look for and are'nt looking at something that won't help nor encourage your goal, then yeah, math can only help you. This is indeed the main issue with science theories. If they are wrong, all the correct math in the world won't do any good. They will remain fiction. Only witj proven science can math be used to an advantage.

Strange question... what? For a story or something? Hope not for reals. Because in real life this could end up being suicide for both planes. The answer is... like most things in science, it depends. So yeah. You could do some damage, leading to a crash... or a two for one, with the attacker included.

In broad daylight I meant. At night is too easy.

Rockets delta v is not totally meaningless in this fictional scenario. Since how powerful your engines are and your mass ratio makes a diierence with how fast a vessel... or missile crosses 3 kilometers. Civillan vessels may not mind taking 30 minutes or longer to cross 3 kilometers. Military vessels will. They will likely be ligher in weight, packed with weaponry and a minimum of crew and life support (if any). In fact given the 3 kilometer range and factoring in inertia, missiles will be quite viable and nigh ustoppable if enough are launched. This would provide the slow-mo boat spacebattles we see in visual scifi so often, only with newtonian physics.