Spacescifi

This is somewhat comical but also true. Some have even suggested just going naked in space, but that would be... icky. In space sweat tends to adhere to the skin because of surface tension. With clothes on it pools up up under your clothes. Without clothes? You're going to be flinging sweat globules everytime you swing your arm, leg, or move fast. Did I mention smelly? Yet going green in space? Going all low tech green in space is very ironic, which is what makes it hilarious. I once had a fictional alien race that bioengineered leaf form fitting suits, which evaporated sweat through the porous membranes so that it didn't pool up. Likewise the suits would be disposed of and also continually grown. I like your solutions though because they are real and achievable.

Well there is. What is warp? Moving space without moving. Ever played with kerbal's warp mod? It allows you to get close to planets without accelerating, although you still have to accelerate once you drop out of warp, whether through gravity or using your engine to match velocities and actually land safely. And thanks for clearing up the answers on zero g. One thing I do know is that eye pressure increases in weightlessness, so the eyes won't like it. Still though, much better than years of weightlessness as you already mentioned.

True and an awesome thought. Conversation. Cat Camera Conversation as you said. Cat means they definitely have some cat characterstics going on, camera means their brain has the storage capacity to record 48 hours of what they see and hear and can rewatch it with eyes closed, fast forwarding, pausing or rewinding at will. Also they can delete it. Even if dead, a blood sample can be taken, and given that the cells store the information it can be converted to digital format and viewed on computer or TV later. It also means that each and every one of them is a walking camera that can be used against you in a court of law.

So one day all our devices connected to the internet are hacked. On the screen are humanoid aliens. Some are male, others are female, so it's a matter of random chance with who is speaking to you. In your case the alien speaking to you is female and looks like this. They call you by name and say they have been monitoring earth for some time now. They have made their presence known because labor taxes are upon them. Meaning they must do some kind of work, whether through teaching, building, or providing something to help individuals of alien races progress in SOME way beyond their present state. Given such broad criteria, it is somehing any alien race can help with. The humanoid aliens ask you which of the following do you value most? Truth Freedom Power Peace Justice They say you may only pick one. You ask why. They say for each of those qualities there are alien races that personify each, and specialize in accepting, providing, and supporting said qualities across various cultures and customs. Thus if you pick one, the said alien race will contact you and ask you what do you want that relates to said quality? Then they will ask how will it help you progress? Last they will come and either bring you to their homeworld, or bring what you asked for to your homeworld. The question about progress is important because they have to explain to their superiors that they only provided what aliens said they wanted individually. Any bad results the aliens cannot be held liable for by their superiors, as the task requires progress in some way for an individual. Whether it is good or bad for them who can know? Not all alien races have the same needs nor the same desires afterall. So which quality do you ask for and how will it help you progress? The aliens wanna know.

Yes and no. Your comment. I am both interested in real solutions. About dealing with living in zero g, and how much zero g the human body can take before coming back to earth is a real challenge. Using google did not help so far. But if I had to guess, I am guessing a week would do it. That is like worse than being bedridden for a week on earth.

Yes I know. I think the astronaut was thinking... when we get there technologically, knowing full well we are not there yet. As for centrifuge washing machines? They have the possibility of slowly spinning your entire spaceship. When you have a centrifuge rotating, it is easy for it's force to be applied elsewhere on a spaceship unless you counter it with another centrifuge with the same mass load spinning in the opposite direction. Centrifuges are actually finicky things in space because for every action there is a reaction.

There are many ways to go about this, but the only thing I am absolutely for sure about a fictional alien race is this:5 They need to be different from us. The easiest thing to do is change how they look and call it good. Yet if you want them to act different than the average person, you need something. What I give is only a suggestion so take it or leave it. Take three words. If you can't think of any make them all start with the same letter. Next, think of how each word relates to the alien, how they are not like your average person. Granted no alien created by humans is truly alien, neither could we write what we do not know. The goal is to write a race that is different than your average person. That is all it takes. If your race is different in ways that go beyond skin deep, then that is good enough for me. Try it. Here, I will even give you some words. They all start with the letter S. Safety. Sight. Sex. Now what did you come up with? And yes, I already have all three words completed, if anyone cares just ask me.

Hours of weightless is... OK?: This is related to real spaceflight and will rely on real solutions. I saw one astronaut write something along the lines of, "We do not need a rotating centrifuge for gravity in space if your propulsion system is fast enough." I know the expanse takes that idea and runs with it. The astronaut went on to write that he would much rather have rotating stations at endpoints of travel. His reason was that rotating structures are trouble waiting to happen, and trying to fix a rotating structure while it's rotating would be a nightmare. I almost think the astronaut has spacewalk PTSD. In scifi, they have ways of getting across vast distances quickly. Like at a lightyear per hour of warp, dealing with weightlessness would not do nearly as much damage as our astronauts currently take. To Alpha Centauri that is what? A little over 4 hours of weightlessness? Surely the human body could handle that without weakening the human body to the degree that months will do. What I am saying is that if it is only a matter of hours and not days of weightlessness, the human body should have no problem walking out of the spaceship on a planet. Granted they would feel heavy and be somewhat weaker, having had their bodies do the equivalent of absolutely nothing for hours, actually less than nothing since they did'nt even have gravity. Life in zero g with no back-up: The ISS is regularly resupplied with food and clothes. A deep space mission, whether with advanced scifi or near modern capabilties would both require the ship to be self sustaining. Clothing: Gonna need to wash clothes somehow. Space wash machine anyone? Food: Plants. In space. Meat: I know this is gonna have a LOT of issues, but I think either fish or insects are the easiest source of renewable fresh protein available for space. Foodstuffs: Packaged food is a given, previous answers were about making fresh supplies. Clothing again: Sheep in space anyone? Yeah, I know this is all types of wrong, but sheep wool people! Fresh clothing for a change! It would no doubt be considered animal cruelty, as the only way to keep the animal from urinating and pooping all over the ship would be with harness restraints and diapers. Also sedative when necessary. What thoughts and solutions do you have on these two subjects? Namely, is mere hours of weightlessness so weakening that a human could not stand on earth upon landing? And how would you solve the challenges presented with deep space self sustainment of life with no backup?

I create. Why imitate when I can create? One more thing I just realized. Any race able to build a trader jump drive is able to make well traveled areas quite reachable, even planets. The first ship out to a new solar system will have a long haul, unless it comes across a near planetary astetoid to jump near. That said, all a ship has to do is drop out small satelites like breadcrumbs wherever the ship coasts to, preferably in orbit of somewhere of interest like a habital world. From there your computer only needs to log and calculate their predictable orbits and you will always know and have places to jump to that are near places of interest. Once that work is done, all it has to do is upload the data to fleet HQ on the homeworld. Periodically every ship should return for a fresh upload of jump satelites to jump to. So yeah, it is a decent exploratory FTL drive, but I could easily make a drive that was better suited to explore anywhere... including the interstellar meduim, which a trader drive could never jump to unless it found something a kilogram or greater in mass up to the ship's actual mass.

No offense taken. I am not one that needs to be right about everything so if you can beat my fictional tech by being clever more power to you. It only gives me more writing fodder. Yet it does not address the various modification counters I already added to the drive, and I have no intention of adding more. Also, I did not mention this originally but spaceships in my verse will use sublight drives that allow constant acceleration at 1g for an hour before needing to be recharged at a charging station. You can get greater accelerations at the expense of reduced usage time and risking crew comfort or life. Or you could get longer than an hour accelerations if you did below 1g. To reach earth orbit you could do 3g acceleration but that only can be kept up for 20 min (fortunately it only takes about 8 min to teach orbit). You can also do ridiculous accellerations like 20 g for about a min, but that would surely kill your crew. No inertial dampers here. Would work for a missile though. Yet it is also worth noting that the really massive vessels take longer to get up to speed unless your engine nozzle is scaled up to match it. ?????? Is this drive more for war, trade, or exploration? Also, could you explain it in plain, simple english, so anyone and everyone can grasp plainly what your drive can and cannot do?

Me too. There are site forums were cursing, bullying and insults are allowed, and instead of banning such members, they only receive at best a warning. Meanwhile other posters are either banned or their posts erased if the mods disagree with whatever they said even if if it was misunderstood to begin with and the poster already explained him/herself. I also like that KSP is not a haven for cyber-bullies nor people that worship superheroes and scifi and literally rage about who can defeat what fictional faction. Much ado about nothing really. Also I like that on KSP every single post does not have curse words for no necessary reason, as some forums tolerate. Hope the zero tolerance stays, and the moment it changes I will leave. Thank you kerbal staff. What sets you apart makes you bstter than the rest.

Hmmm... over long periods of time yes. But given that inertia has not been played with at all, it will take quite some time for that to make a difference, since a spaceship's heading will be already similar to the orbit of the planet it left. How else could it land upon it otherwise? Also so long you turn the anti-gravity field on and offf judiciously everything should be fine.

Sorry my apologies, I will be sure to only mention creative scifi stuff that does not relate to known spaceflight here. Actually regarding the trader drive, there are ways to make it not so effective for war. Some require no modifications to the story but others do. No modifications: A small bomb equipped drone can never jump within a 30 kilometer radius of a much larger warship because trader drives require the same mass level as the jumper or less down to a kilogram. A drone will never ping a more massive ship, so it could not jump near one. Yes your trader ship if the mass was less (likely) you could detect it, yet you could only jump your entire ship into the combat zone, so FTL drone sniping is only possible on low mass stuff. Changes with mods: Allow some warships to have antigravity field equipment that deflects pinging so they cannot be detected. Also allow devices that let ships know know they are being pinged. And allow 60 seconds for the trader drive to spool up after pinging, that way a ship that can detect pings has at least 60 seconds to alter their heading if the ping is inside a solar system.

FTL drives in fiction I think should be in harmony with what specific purpose the user has in mind for his ship. Namely what he is actually doing with his ship in space. So here is your opportunity to make an FTL drive and post it and be creative. It must be designed for only ONE of these purposes broadly. 1. Trade. 2. War. 3. Exploration I think that covers the bases. Each FTL drive is tailor made for its purpose with drawbacks that make it a poor choice for applications it was not intended for (like you could use a jet nozzle's exhaust plume as a plasma torch to cut a metal pipe, but it would be incredibly inefficient and would likely do more than you intended). Here is mine for example, based on Trader. Space Trader FTL drive: It is a jump drive designed specifically for finding and locating both other spaceships and asteroids. It works by sending out an FTL ping signal that reflects back to your vessel the distance and location of only objects that have as much mass as your spaceship or less. The smallest mass it can detect is a kilogram. The FTL ping travels a light year per minute, and takes equally long on the return ping reflected back to you. So for Alpha Centauri, supposing you pinged the various multitude of asteroids over there which would take about four minutes, you could get a return ping in about eight minutes. Jumping radius: A ship can only jump near an object at a 30 kliometer radius. Likewise to jump out a ship must be past the 30 kilometer radius of only objects that have the same mass or less down to a kilogram. Navigation: It is wise to ping at least twice, as that gives some indication of whether or not the object you are juming toward has a predictable orbit as well as it's velocity, which can be ascertained by the distance traveled between pings. That way when you do jump you won't have the object crashing into you at orbital speeds, as you can adjust your heading before you jump. Advantages: Great at detecting objects in space, has a max range of 7 LY. Disadvantages: You only know the mass, distance, and travel heading of a detected object, you have no way knowing what it is until you jump. Only that it has either the exact mass of your vessel or lower down to a kilogram. It also cannot detect planets or stars (unless you really do have a ship that massive LOL). Yet a planet might be inferred by a lot of orbting objects relatively close to one another. So you could jump and look. Especially with planets like Earth with a lot of orbital junk. Or Saturn, which has MUCH more. Now your turn! You can make an FTL drive made with the specific purpose of either trade, war, or exploration. Have fun!

Hmmm... is not expansion and contraction based on the surrounding air pressure and also how high velocity your exhaust is? For example, near the ground air pressure will keep the plume rather tight so you will lose some thrust efficiency with a wider plume right? But at higher altitudes the air pressure drops so it makes plenty of sense to expand the nozzle like this. Also is not high velocity exhaust less damaging to expanded nozzles? In space would a contracted or expanded nozzle win out? Or would it make no difference at all? I mean, there is no air pressure so it would seem that expanded nozzles are preferred for thrust efficiency. Squeeze more exhaust out than less concept, with no air pressure dictatinf how wide your exhaust plune actually is. Correct me if I am wrong. Thank you.

In visual scifi, jet nozzles are quite popular on spaceships. Now from my limited understanding (feel free to educate me if I am wrong), jet nozzles are ideal for subsonic exhaust flows, but for supersonice exhaust flows rocket nozzles are ideal. Rocket nozzles diverge at the throat where jet nozzles converge. In space, I am not sure what advantage a jet nozzle would have, in fact I have noticed that rockets made only for space vacuum operation tend to have larger nozzles than the ones for launch, at least with current rocket technology. So I guess my question is this, is visual media scifi getting it wrong like they so often do? Should not those sleek SSTO spaceships have rocket nozzles instead of the jet nozzles pictured below? Note: I am aware of adjustible fightet jet nozzles that can mechanically converge or diverge, yet rockets are so often not reusuable so it makes little sense to make them extra complex. A fighter jet most definitely does have a multi-mission lifetime as opposed to a staged rocket's all or nothing launch. Not to mention that adjustible mechanical nozzles are heavier and heaviness is something rocket designers dread. Last: if you can give me one legitimate reason for jet nozzles on spaceships, other than it looking cool in scifi, I am fully willing to hear it. Unless I have overlooked something, rocket nozzles are superior in space and even for an SSTO that flies in an atmosphere as well.

Or to be more precise, it would eliminate your weight altogether if it shielded it from gravity totally. At least it makes many scifi ships practical instead of rocket shapes beating any and everything all the time like in IRL.

I think the most effective way woukd be to switch the gravity shield off once enough orbital momentum was bleed off. Indeed, you could do some deep dives into atmosphere this way and slow rapidly. I would only slow enough so that the ship can be falling straight down, even if I have to switch the grav-shield off a few times. Then for landing I would turn the grav-shield on and slow my descent much faster than normal with rocket and air friction assist.

Thanks. I was thinking that saucer shaped ships may make more sense here, so long they used atmospheric plasma rockets (using atmosphere air as propellant by running it over hot engine reactor core) at least until they the air was too thin and they have to switch to stored propellant rockets. Smaller millennium falcon size ones would be practical. Massive kirk-era enterprise ones, would also work, So long they use some type of thermal atmospheric engine to not waste fuel during launch because of atmospheric friction.

Say you have a scifi spaceship that can shield itself from the effects of gravity. Your ship still uses rocket engines though to reach space, and a jump drive to cover vast distances in space that only works in outer space. With gravity reentry is a dangerous affair if you're orbiting. What about when the ship chooses to shield itself from gravity though? Reasons for this would be to conserve fuel, since I reckon that an orbital speed weightless object would be slowed faster in the atmosphere than if gravity was on, since gravity tends to accelerate you down in sync as your orbital momentum is slowed. I do not know if the g-forces would be less or more than normal during reentry with the gravity shield up. If I had to guess I would say that it migjt be either similar to g-force of normal reentry or perhaps more, at least initially. Since a weightess object smacking into atmosphere at orbital speeds I think sould be slowed down dramtically. What do you think? I am only guessing.

Well... I assumed one would not require power plant amounts of power since the special (fictional) gas medium makes light go FTL so long it is ionized. The only power imput from the ship involves ionizing the gas itself. Unless I arbitraily require vast amounts of energy to ionize this fictional gas, it should not require a lot of power to provide thrust. About the only bonus for using massive power loads to ionize the gas is that now your drive emits visible white rays like the sun in when in atmosphere. Looks awesome although blinding. Yet if lower power levels produce high thrust as I think they would, the flashlight drive simply has a white glow that obscures the reflector inside. On the other hand, I do find your inject propellant idea intriguing. I would have to adjust the physics to allow FTL light beams outside the nozzle, but the visual and sound effects would be awe inspiring. I would make the beam itself just look like an EPIC sun ray flashlight, blowing lots of air but not actually propelling the ship UNTIL, one injects propellant. Which could be accelerated at at sublight but still arbtrarily high velocities. This a new limitation comes into plat with launching. If your ship is too massive, you WILL obliterate tour launch site. If you do not want that to happen, scale your ship size down. For that matter, make massive vessels modular so can land them in pieces and launch them piece by piece as well like Ironman armour. Since orbital assembly would easy, especially with this drive.

So after considering that rockets can lift anything to orbit with enough thrust and scale, I still decided not to use them in my scifi work as it is space opera. Not necessarily war but definitely an adventure. Rockets lack reusability, and reusuable propulsion drives are what make space opera work. A fleet of staging rockets is an alternative along with electroplasma jets for air travel, but I did'nt want to go that route either. So I made up an almost tachyon rocket. I say almost because it is really photons, flying through a special gas medium that when ionized allows the light to travel at FTL speeds. The glass over the flashlight is specially made NOT to slow the light down to lightspeed as it passes through, but once the superluminal light passes through to the environment outside it instantly shifts back to lightspeed since the universe normally does not apparently permit FTL photons. The end result is a reusuable spaceship drive that can run on batteries or even a nuclear reactor. Since photons already produce thrust, but if you increased their speed dramatically then their thrust I imagine would also increase. Allowing for getting to orbit. Yet I did not want the drive to be capable of endless acceleration, so I figured a 60 minute charge that allows one to do 1g for an hour is sufficient. If one wanted to do 3g to help leave Earth for orbit that would give you a charge of 3g for 20 min, but it should'nt take that long (eight minutes about) . And if you wanted dangerous level accelerations you could do that too, but the charge would not last as long. For example, 10g would make you exhaust your charge in only 6 min. All these calculatons were based on the division of 60 based on the number of g's accelerated. So what I want to know is, did I get the math right? It is important because I need to know how much charge the ship has at any given time so I know what the ship can and cannot do. Thanks also for previous answers.

Wow. Although I still think you would need ridiculoulsly high energy levels on that gamma ray laser. In other words, I think more energy than Earth can provide. A few jupiter mass equivalents of gamma laser blasts would probably work. Come to think of it... I like both your continent propellant rocket idea and the corona mass ejection star rocket idea. These ideas are so basic in practice that virtually any scifi faction with starships capable of warp or FTL should be capable of these feats if they were willing to invest the time and resources to do so. I do not know of any good reason to move a planet other than to move it closer or farther from the sun or a doomsday weapon. Moving a planet is problematic since by the time you have moved it far enough by ejecting continents, you may have less gravity and may even lose the atmosphere needed for life. Moving a star definitely seems purely like a doomsday thing. Oh you wanna make war with me? I will cause CME'S and bring an ENTIRE sun into your solar system! Sure it may take a century or so (accelerating a star up to relativistic speeds will be anything but easy, but hey, the nearest star is only about 4 LY), but wow, that is some WMD on steroids. Thanks for the idea, I may use it in my own scifi work someday. I wonder if anyone has already? No stories I am aware of.... good ideas!

Wow. I assumed enough weight would render lift off impossible. But that is ONLY so without staging as staging makes you leave used rocket mass behind so the ship becomes ligjter as it ascends. The irony is that with big enough staged rockets and sufficient thrust, the earth itself could be moved!

According to Scott Manley, metallic hydrogen has a specific impulse of 1700 seconds. That is rocket scientist way of saying that such a rocket would go farther per pound of fuel used than our relatively quick exhausted chemical and solid booster rockets. Nonetheless, the tyranny of the to rocket equation will stiill effect any rocket no matter how powerful so long it cannot create it's own fuel. Say you want to launch a constitution class star trek starship onto orbit and it weighs 190,000 tons. Theoretically perhaps solid hydrogen staged booster rockets could do it, given how much thrust they give, but maybe even that is too much. What I want to know is, what is the upper mass ton limit that you can lift to orbit with pure metallic hydrogen, assuming you had engines that would'nt melt? Also what is the upper ton limit on what you can launch to orbit using pure fusion without a fission reaction, fission whether through nuclear pulse propulsion or nuclear saltwater rockets, or antimatter propulsion staging rockets? I believe antimatter will require the least staging for launching the enterprise to orbit, but the exhaust would be gamma ray and other radiation, and I am not sure how safe that would be for the planet. Pure metallic hydroge, being an uber chemical reaction, I do not think leaves radiation hazards in it's wake, just a really hot plume. Launch and starship service life: Although rocket staging is not often seen in visual scifi, it really is the most efficient way to lift heavy loads to orbit. You can lift more through staging than you can without it, no matter if you're using antimatter or not. So if your goal is to lift massive ground built starships into orbit, staging is the way to go. Landing is not ever going to happen unless the ship is light enough and has the fuel reserves to do so. In that sense, any thing you launch into space that massive is a resource you will not get back. Overtime I think the ship's radioactive protection would probably be defeated by cosmic rays, (unless you have 6 foot thick walls on your ship) meaning you would either have to retrofit it in orbit or retire it. Retiring it would be a massive waste of resources, unless you dissassembled it and shuttled it piece by piece back to the surface of a planet.