Spacescifi

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.

Would gas giant scooping for refueling be as viable as I think it would be using grav-inverters? Or have I overlooked something? I know planets like Uranus are the places to go, since methane is easier to store than hydrogen.

Could we make a flashlight powerful enough to emit god-rays (crepuscular rays)? Not by putting extra stuff in the air (too easy), but by pure power? I think we could, but the light source would probably be plasma, since any flashlight that powerful should melt the reflector I think.

True. This was just an exercise to see what man could do if he jerry-rigged an SVL alien drive. Lesson learned is... space travel is still hard. Just not as hard as before. Translation only works in vacuum. Grav-inverters make ship fall upward at same rate it would fall down. Translation drive does the rest in vacuum. Grav-inverters are also useful for gas giant refueling, since you can scoop falling down and fallling up. Probably still need a compressor and tanks to make it liquid fuel though.

So with a ship of this weight (97000 tons), it really is impractical to fly around in space with rockets of current technology? You would be better off with a ship that weighed less? What would be an optimal large ship's weight with this translation drive? Since 97000 tons is evidently pushing the limits of steering and propulsion with rockets that need refueling too far?

It is not always about clean though. These are limbs afterall, not wood. I am thinking that cauterizing will definitely kill nerve endings and such. Not to say they won't come back, but it just seems... excessive. By the way, they do use lasers for cauterising incision lines, so as to seal them.

"Friends let friends use reactionless drives in their universes because they already have FTL, which allows anyone with it to catch up to or outrun a reactionless drive." -Me Besides, there are numerous scifi ways to neutralize the threat. Easy ones that come to mind are: 1. FTL sensors that reach 7 lightyears out. 2. A warp drive that ONLY drops your ship out at the same speed and orbital heading as the target object, regardless of past speed or orbital heading. Why? You could detect a relativistic object long before it reached you. And if a ship was moving at dangerous velocities, the velocity and orbit matching warp drive would allow for easy intercept.

Money. As it is doctors have been known to order X-ray and other tests that are not absolutely necessary for the patient.... just to get some of the cost back of buying the machine. Kind of hard to justify use of lasers to get back the cost of the machine when cheaper options are available. Like automated blades/saws. Something tells me that a cutting grade laser would be expensive. Also, from a medical point of view, you may or may not want to cauterize the flesh around a cut. With a laser you will likely end up cauterizing the surrounding flesh of the cut, so if you do not want that... you get where I am going?