Spacescifi

A setting where big spaceships actually land on planets. It does not utilize smaller shuttles because it is primarily a liquid tanker shaped like a thick saucer. It needs to carry as much fluid as possible so it can ship it to developing colonies inhospitable to life naturally. Also it has scifi engines with the necessary power to do all of that without nuking all in it's immediate wake. So turning in a reasonable amount of time would be reasonable during air flight. If I wanted spaceflight to have more forced encounters, I could simply have the warp/FTL method auto-adjust the spaceship's speed and trajectory to the destination target on dropping out of warp. The rest would be course corrections and slowing for landing/intercept. Afterall, that is what popular scifi already does essentially. It is not as if they ever mention adjusting for speed or trajectory before going to warp. They just always arrive that way. Yes... I realized that some form of fiction is required to make a scifi shape like a saucer work when it flies forward. Instead of inertial dampeners though... Antigrav pods: insulates a crew member from g-force via the spaceship's acceleration, centrifugal force, or even a planet or star. Makes them weightless in the small pod. Rest of ship is still normal. Only in the antigrav pods is it always weightless. The bridge is also ALWAYS weightless. Because desparate maneuvers are a lot easier to make when the crew is not effected. The only restraints now are the structural integrity of the saucer.

Of course. Sci-fi is by nature forced to tell the story that anyone wants to tell. Ideally, you would make a spaceship specifically optimal for the place it is going to. But that would be impractical if a lot of planet hopping around occurs for characters. Unless one big mothership had a bunch if parasite craft. Some optimal for gas giants, others for moons, and still others for mars and or earth or venus types.

I realize too that if you make the crew module a cylinder and put it inside a gyroscope, then you can flip the ship anyway you wan't and still have the crew being pulled toward the floor. Timing is everything. Position too, as the module/gyroscope would need to be at the ends/perimeter for centrifugal g-force. At the very least I learned that even with scifi tech, space travel physics favors small crews rather than big ones for space travel.

True. Suffice to say, a comfy crew/passenger quantity is a smaller one. Not a huge one. True. I am looking into what happpens when scifi meets up with reality. Blending the two is insightful for a scifi creator.

Well a manned scifi starship can only have a few purposes. Passenger liner, or colony transport. In popular scifi, spaceships can use some FTL jump or warp drive to get rather close to a planet. In other words, travel times would not be really long. Thus the reasons I have made my conclusions. Centrifugal gravity? Constant acceleration? It can do both. EDIT: Earth has a revolution evert 24 hours. If it were faster it could compete with gravity. But it is'nt, which is good for us. We would be dead.

Normal physics. According to google, 900 meters is all it takes for 1g via rotation. Huge ships would still subject crew to only living in certain areason the spaceship. I guess what I am saying is that a lot of the space for amassive spaceship cannot be utilized by a scifi spaceship crew during maneuvers. On the other hand, a smaller radius, or a shorter length spaceship could utilize more of it's space for the crew.

Length or radius please. If it is 97,000 tons but only as long as 8 feet then you won't get 1 RPM by rolling, yawing, or pitching. A faster RPM would be required.

With a 900 meter radius or length, simply pitching or yawing it at ONE revolution per minute creates 1g at the ends/perimeter. Thus, it dawned on me that there really is an optimal size for manned scifi spaceships. 900 meters or more means that crew cannot be located anywhere near the ends or perimeter during maneuvers. Whenever the ship pitches, rolls, or yaws, the crew would be at the mercy of falling/pulled toward the ends/outer edge. So a 900 meter saucer is a better spacestation than a starship, as crew cannot use the outer rim area anywatly during manevers. This applies even if one had a scifi drive thay could accelerate for hours on end. It would still be subject to LONG turn rates that also cause g-force along the rim. So in conclusion, as much as I like big and massive starships in scifi, they really are not practical for manned spacecraft due to long turn rate times and g-force. Who wants to take one whole minute just to roll, yaw, or pitch the spaceship? Any faster and the g-force at the ends/perimeter is higher. A more optimal size for manned scifi spacecraft is like the size of your average western home. It would take a higher RPM to do g-force with that, and I doubt anyone is going to blast their RCS like it's a gravitron ride anyway. What do you think? Are massive scifi starships practical or impractical for manned spacecraft because of long turn rates and g-force at the ends/perimeter,

Hmm... so slow speed light rocket really are a waste of breaking physics? Unless the thrust of slow light speed rocket is dramatically greater than chemical rockets. Then you could just pulse fire it to orbit like an orion battleship. The only issue I have with the direct matter to photon conversion drive is... it would nuke all in it's wake. Ideally I want high thrust that can last for hours while not nuking everything behind the ship. Seems like a direct conversion to superluminal photons is the only solution. I think one could use less superluminal photons than regular photons as exhaust, therefore avoiding nuking all in it's immediate wake.

So lemme get this straight. A mass conversion rocket that converts it's fuel mass 100% into slower than light photons would have rocket thrust but expend the fuel mass at chemical rocket rates? Which means why even bother?

Yes, we are discussing and walking on untrodden ground. We cannot go where no man has gone before, but we can sure talk about it. More than likely I am wrong about what happens to a photon once it becomes superluminal. And that's okay. I am only an aspiring scifi writer anyway. The way I see it, spacetime is the box that light inhabits. Light diffuses slowly but surely across it. If the speed of light were faster, I see either one of these possibilities. 1. Superluminal light stays concentrated for much longer. Which means FTL LIDAR and laser cannon become a practical matter. Overpowered and may break many fictional popular settings likely, but so what? We are considering the implications. 2. Superluminal light diffuses (spreads) much faster across spacetime. Which means getting it to be a laser or LIDAR would be impossible even if you put your superluminal laser right on the target to be zapped. 3. Good for space propulsion.

And we have a winner! My opinion.

That os only because I did not realize it, like most things in the western world, was based on greco-roman religion.

Sounds interesting. What would be it's lifetime? Since the most powerful magnetic coils I saw online have a problem with actually breaking (the metal coils actually snap) under uber magnetic fields. If it is scifi that is one thing. But uber magnetic fields can be created, seemingly counter productively, with dense plasmas. Stars. If only we could miniaturize that stuff!

A moon god? The comic book heroes of the ancients? Well.... they did do that with rest of the planets. But nothing saying we can't change it up.

Yes it does. Darker colors absorb more heat. Which can be a problem on long interplanetary flights. You will not see charcoal black colored spacecraft flying interplanetary missions anytime soon. Lighter colors reflect more light and are more susceptible to radiation pressure. Radiation pressure is accounted for on long interstellar flights where craft coast for long periods. If it radiation pressure was not accounted for, spacecraft would be pushed off course quite a bit. So in short, it may matter little, unless it is a long interplanetary mission and the ship has to coast a lot.

I think you would see the FTL ray after it was fired. It would just hit you much faster than light would. If the the beam traveled a LY per min it would hit you in 5 min. I never have really believed that FTL meant time travel backwards. Forwards is one thing that we know can be played with.

This will never stick but... Giant Leap? Sounds diginified... gives hope that the base will grow beyond it's meagre beginnings. If we can even build half the infrastructure we build in KSP on the moon that would be impressive.

Luna?

We can't. But I am not concerned with that. This is more a what-if scenario. Since science fiction tends to both ask and answer that. So not light. But behaves like light. Just faster. Call them quotons. The much faster cousin of photons. I am only guessing here about the effects of FTL photons? Anyone else care to share?

FTL particles amd FTL light behave differently. They are'nt the same. FTL particles I think would be inherently more dangerous as they would nuke anything they hit.

Theoretically if man could make photons faster, would that not make for a better photon rocket? The idea is to shoot out photons at a much higher speed than they normally travel. See, with a normal photon rocket, the amount of photons required is enough to vaporize/nuke anything in it's wake. With a much higher momentum (a million or perhaps a billion times faster than light), perhaps the photon quantity required would be less to produce sufficient momentum transfer? Which would mean hopefully that lighting up the FTL photonic drive would'nt nuke everything behind it. EDIT: Provided FTL photons behave like photons, just faster, then I would expect them to diffuse through mass much faster. In other words, shine an FTL beam laser on a rock and instead of burning through it, it would evenly heat the whole thing. Like Star Trek phasers. Only difference beung that you would have to put the laser right on the rock, since firing it in the air would diffuse it across several kilometers, making it useless as a cutting beam. I dunno, what do you think?

True. According to the lore of what he was referring to though, anarchy occurs when the super AI's go rogue on occasion. Also, it is my understanding that that in the lore people have much more power to do whatever whenever with whoever. Absolute freedom does NOT have to mean controlled anarchy, but that is what it means when humans achieve absolute freedom. Case in point: A teen plays a video game but it is too hard. So he cheats, and begins stomping all the enemies in the game that had defeated him in the past. This grows tiresome as it is too easy. Thus he either stops playing at all, or begins playing with less or no cheats. Absolute freedom is only the interlude between dedicated actions.

Alright... so knowledge is power. In this case, power to write scifi SSTO's that are reasonably safe enough that they are as common as passenger jets. Based on your calculations, I would just go smaller with my ships (450 ton passenger jet weight sounds reasonable). Instead of using rockets to reach orbital velocity, I won't bother. I can use jet engines because I already have antigravity to let my SSTO float like a balloon. The distance to space is only about 200 kilometers. Contrast that with distance from Texas to Calufornia (2,263.2 kilometers). A passenger jet flight from Texas to Califonia only takes a few hours (about three). Thus a trip straight up to space with a weightless passenger jet should take even less time. Once in space, I will have the SSTO fly around by using a scifi vacuum jet that does the same thing air jets do... with vacuum. EDIT: If I just want my 97,000 ton SSTO, then I must accept the fact that, barring rocket staging, it will take longer to reach space than a smaller SSTO. Because of all the drag.

Well... I tend to think that sci-fi can be a medium to share messages to the world. If I would send messages to the world then they had better be worthwhile. Fictional aliens vs humans is a study of cultural tolerance and intergration. Or lack thereof. Characters themselves would represent possible paths and outcomes that would occur in the scenarios if that stuff were actually real.