Spacescifi

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?

If it were a Ferengi trader: "Yes. 'Know your enemies... but do business with them always', rule of aquisition... " Ferengi passes out as he dies.

Basically this, which is same weight. 97 thousand tons.

In this scenario you have a 97000 ton spaceship that has been outfitted with a scifi FTL drive called Shift Velocity and Location drive (SVL). Basically it moves moves vacuum over the ship's hull, shifting it's position in space without accelerating it. To drop out of SVL, the ship must encounter the three kilometer radius of another object in space (at least a kilogram or more). That is called shift lock (my play on mass lock), upon which your vessel drops out harmlessly with a speed and orbital vector identical to the object that shift locked you. Basically, your ship is standing still relative to the object that shift locked you 3 kilometers away. Even though you gained it's speed and orbital heading, nulifying any you previously had. Here is the question: Your ship regularly docks with space stations in orbit of planets. 97,000 tons of spaceship is no joke. Therefore what would be the ideal fuel, rocket engine,and propellant you would have your spaceship stocked with ahead of time? Real fuels and engines only. Even nuclear is fine... antimatter or metallIc hydrogen is NOT. What will it be? A nuclear reactor with liquid methane? How long will it take your 97,000 ton spaceship to cross 3 kilomoters from a relative dead stop? EDIT: I know your not going to wanna burn tons of fuel. But at the same time I do not think waiting an hour to cross 3 kilometers and slow to dock will be acceptable to your passengers either. You have 300 passengers. Still the more you burn the more often you will have to refuel... so. What do you think.

I meant reproduction of liquid fuels only. So assuming you had molten alluminum, then yeah, you could... no. I was thinking of a scifi way of reproducing like simple (just one element) fuels. So of you had liquid methane, you could make more by inserting a scifi fuel matrix core. Based off human bones in concept, which actually help generate more blood cells, so the fuel matrix would replicate more of the chemical fuel ot is inserted into. Of course, molten fuels would destroy the matrix, so room temp or cooler fuels are desired. How to still get good thrust? Use a separate matrix with an oxider and combine the oxider with the other fuel. Or just run the fuel over a nuclear reactor. You're not running out.

Does methane generate a lot of exhaust steam in atmosphere? Like typical booster and chem rockets? Methane seems pretty clean. Does not even leave a lot of smoke. Pretty flame too.