Spacescifi

Scenario: We have a scifi Q-laser blaster. It fires an exotic laser beam which has extremely high repulsive force. Sounds like a loud crack since lasers obviously break the sound barrier but this one is far more interactive with mass. Because of the smaller size of the power supply, the discharge of it's energy occurs faster than larger power supplies that spaceships use. 30 seconds of continous zapping will drain your power completely, so pulse firing is recommended. How powerful is a single zap? Same power as a grenade blowing up on something at point blank range. Cannot be throttled down. Note of caution: If your gun is somehow blown up it will detonate your remaining energy supply in the gun. Question about utility: How and when would such a gun be used? I do not see it being standard issue because it is dangerous. Maybe only special tactical forces would use it or specially trained military but that's it. I don't see them used in random fire fights where you care about collateral damage. If you don't care about collateral damage and leaving craters then this is the perfect weapon though.

Let's look at this as a microcosm shall we? At work there are people we tolerate only because we have to, and people we actually like. War in nature with animals is often about dominance, who gets to have control over this or or access over that. For animals and humans the two great drivers are a desire for food and the desire to reproduce to continue the species (pretty nifty that we are made to enjoy the very thing that keeps us around and not extinct). Yet humans are more complex and have wars of dominance simply to decide who is on top. Even at work we face this... new guy on the job does well and as all of a sudden is trying to show dominance to guys who have been there before him by trying to make them obey or follow his lead. Me? I don't follow anyone unless it makes sense to me... and I don't care if they whine and get annoyed at me in the process of failing to dominate me. I may not be on friendly terms with coworkers who would love to dominate me instead, but I am no one's lapdog nor doormat and if they have a problem with that so be it. War is like that. On a macro scale. Bring. It. On.

I am no expert and I know many of you are better informed on this, but from what I have read, moving magnetic fields creates an electric field, leading me to believe that whenever Magneto does some stupendous feat with metals, they are all electrically charged. In other words, he can turn ANY ferromagnetic metal into an electromagnet or any part or parts of it, and also direct it with moving magnetic fields he can create and move at will. Results? If you touch it you probably die from electric shock. It's not in comics or TV, but it is an example of how mixing reality/fiction makes everything twice or thrice as dangerous/deadly.

On an earlier thread we established that if we could move space past a spaceship at FTL speeds so we did not actually have to move the ship itself, you would have to be moving space incredibly fast to see stars streak across the screen as in scifi. Much faster than 1 LY per hour which is actually above average warp for some scifi universes. Instead you would just see the stars slowly crawl past the side view, not so much the forward view. Main Question: I hear space is near empty but not totally. Let's assume a spaceship can move space past it at 1 LY per hour. How much hydrogen gas and dust will be hitting the ship's deflector field per second? How would it look? Would there be enough to make it look like the ship was flying through a billowing cloud of fog through space on the view screen? What if the deflector field ionized the gas and dust hitting it? How would that look? Since space has hydrogen in it, I presume... a billowing cloud of pink plasma would be left in the ships wake perhaps, only to later cool and no longer be visible to the naked eye. Thoughts?

Please explain it to me... because I can think of a few but that won't mean I am correct. 1. Cars that speed up in a parking lot knowing full well they have to slow down soon... they often do this when no car is visible ahead of them. It is foolish because of how fast that can change... because it's a PARKING LOT. 2. Cars that drive ultra slow whenever they get near their destination, blaring gangster rap the whole way to the parking spot, also blaring it while parked. After about 10 minutes of this they finally get out. 3. Cars that rev their engine while parked, before speeding off inside the parking lot. My guesses: 1. Lack of self/emotional control, also impatient. 2. They destroyed their hearing and need to blast music to hear it at all. Maybe on some level they think or like to think they are making an entrance. One time I simply passed a guy doing this.... thinking to myself, I have to be at work! The earlier the better! I don't have time for this foolishness! 3. Attention. They want it. In all cases these folks display a certain selfishness and it would do them well and make the world more tolerable and safer if they embraced being selfless a bit more. With age they usually do, since with age you simply cannot afford to do the things you used to get away with. Not forever anyway. Thoughts?

Wisest saying I have seen in days! And for me it especially rings true since all my family belongs to a high control religious group that tells them to keep little to zero contact with any family or anyone else who has left it (me). It's a captive organization, since if you choose to leave... as I did, you lose everything. But at least I am free... and get to have my own opinion... and that's priceless.

Wait... what about North Korea lol? Ever see Iron Sky? This part was hillarious... and frankly has some basis in reality with how nations actually are:

Realistically how much a spacecraft manuevers and how fast depends on the the power limits of the propulsion system and how much fuel/propellant is available for it. Because of this, quanity is roughly as good as quality in space war, since given the extreme velocities involved and the total lack of scifi forcefield bubbles to protect spaceships from attack., a bunch of less expensive weaponry will easily wreck the most expensive space vehicles and infrastructure we can make. In real life, space infrastructure would be the target of space wars, since barring safe torchdrive SSTOs, you need it to even make a beachhead in space colonization or even for ISRU. In such a case, I honestly think swarms of small spacecraft with nuclear or plasma drives, slow though they be, would dominate space war. Since they are the one thing you do not need space infrastructure to put them into orbit. It may take months or years, but once the swarm arrives it's space station or moon base target is as good as dead, unless it has good enough defenses, but offense is much easier than defense in space so the odds are against defense really. In scifi spaceships often have near or unlimited delta V while missiles are always limited. If such were true, then spaceships could evade most hostile encounters by simply avoiding or evading them altogether Battles would only be forced around space or orbital infrastucture spacecraft are seking to protect. One thing scifi often gets wrong about torchdrive spaceship battles is that it would be more about space jousting and drive bys than anything else. If a fleet is going to strike your moon base or your orbiting station the safest way is to fly fast while doing a drive by, since the slower they fly the more time the base or the orbiting station has to destroy them. Which means, amusingly enough, that instead of being pounded on by a fleet hovering above you, it will zoom past while blasting you, and then take probably hours to retroburn to make another pass and do it all over again!

This should be an interesting scenario. A scifi alien humanoid of average weight and size for a human will eat 300 pounds of food in a single sitting at breakfast, which will keep them feeling full until lunch. 300 pounds is more than people of average weight weigh. If they eat lunch it will be about the same amount lest they start feeling hungry at dinner time. For dinner they eat a bit less (100 pounds) and then go to bed feeling satisfied, so long they ate heavy with breakfast and lunch. When they have to use the restroom they excrete normal human amounts of waste... which means most of the food they eat is being metabolized into energy. If this is so for a person of average weight, how much stronger/faster would they be to a normal human? It goes without saying they would starve to death much faster, and unless their blood was thick as glue it would also beat much faster I imagine. Would their body become impractically hot metabolizing so much food into energy? Thoughts? EDIT: Assuming scifi aliens with high appetites like this existed, I imagine meal time would be taken far more seriously... meaning longer lunch periods, and little to no talking while workers chow down. I would expect most workplaces to have in house cafeterias to feed workers on site too. And since starvation is a very real possibity if one skips even a few days of eating, fasting would likely be seen as torture to them if not alien in concept altogether. Thoughts?

Inevitably someone who knows more will comment. But solids are well... a very nearly 1 trick pony.. Solid fuel can be forced to turn on and off, but it usually just burns until it is exhausted because that is much easier to design.

Thanks.... good to know. Guess that means propellant tanks need REALLY good insulation.

Imagine an inflated ball made of fabric and wire mesh, with explosives and a rocket engine inside. Is this cheaper to make and lighter weight than your standard hard shelled missile? Possibly... once you start mass production. And since it will weigh less it can reach higher speeds faster than hard shell heavier missiles. Granted, expensive longer range engine missiles you may opt for a more durable body frame, but if all you are doing is the space equivalent of a drive by, you may as well launch a swarm of cheap missiles once within a reasonable strike distance. Thoughts?

Just curious... how do they even keep propellant cold in space? Like I have no clue... since all they can use is recycled air and electricity.

Just one question... what is the shelf life of methalox or hydrolox propellant in a tank anyway? Because if it lasts so long you keep it cool then that means IRL that as long as as you have large enough radiator fins or some other coolinng method to keep your propellant chilled then it would not expire until your fins or cooling method broke.

Good points. So say we have a bunch of metastable metallic hydrogen metal rods for fuel. What you have is roughly the metallic form of a nuke for energy especially if you have enough of it for fuel on a large vessel. According to google it would be black like carbon, which makea sense considering the density of it. Probably shiny, because metallic. How one extracts liquid hydrogen from that without detonating the entire fuel rod is beyond me. So yeah... landing on ice only to use use it sounds waaay safer... unless a kraken is swimming under the ice waiting for you to break it. Personally, regarding make believe scifi drives, I am fine creating ones that just work without propellant... with the caveaut that the unobtanium metal wire used to power it must be in such massive quantitty for the needed SSTO thrust that it makes using it for small shuttle/ships impossible as SSTOs (a tungsten like unobtanium that when heated glows and when it's radiation is reflected off a mirrored nozzle gains extrene repulsive force). I am fine with a spaceship that does not worry about fuel at all, but missile designers should always.

It is a mundane problem yes... but unless you have an also mundane solution then scifi and make believe is the only option fiction writers have.

Well... scifi stasis fields where you stop the flow of time around the propellant tank when not in use could come in handy. Yet for this to truly work a stasis field would have to have an invisibility effect akin to a scifi cloaking/invisibility device. Why? Because if light hits an object frozen in time it will effect it over time and we don't want that. Even if the effect occured after stasis field shut off it would still be a cumulative wallop effect all at once. So if you had a cloaking stasis field that did not require unreasonable amounts of energy to keep it working, any propellant you you have could work so long your ship could dump enough energy from your ship's hyperdrive core to make it efficient as a torch ship. Realistically, if scifi engines can survive heat of that magnitude, then the hull should be armored with the same material.

So a slightly more realistic script... all the soldiers present near the launch suffer from acute radiation poisoning and require treatment. So that a different acto has to face off against tye evil kryptonians later since the entire military artic team is undergoing radiation treatment.

In scifi it is not uncommon for characters to activate old alien SSTO spaceships that have been under ice for millenia or at least centuries. I have a hunch that LH or LOX sitting in a tank may not fair so well over centuries of non-use. Plain old water might do just fine since it is really stable. Which means separating the power from the propellant, implying some sort of advanced thermal rocket engine design that can be used in conjuction with just about any non-corrosive propellant. Thoughts? This is not for scifi. Just laughs if you guys expose yet another scifi trope as absurdity. Or... maybe not?

It is my thinking that practicality rules in any decision that is continuous going forward in space, because space is an environment that does not really allow you to be non-practical if you want to get anything done. Shapes: Most likely a cylinder or a bunch connected together. Or perhaps a disk. Why? Because most likely wherever they are built will also be a cylinder. Processing: Will probably involve centrifuges since without gravity how else are you going to separate raw materials for processing? The First Industrial Center: Will be made from parts brought from earth, and would start from there. Best place to set up shop: In orbit of a planet or moon, since it allows you a source of resources to draw upon without being on land and having to fight the gravity to get stuff to you. Worst place to set up shop: Deep space far away from any planet or moon. Thoughts?

You have heard it said "Guns don't kill people. People do." Scifi and fear mongers may fear AI but the only thing to fear is... us. And that will always be so long humans remain human. The good news is that not all humans are evil, and that too will always be so long humans are human. So I don't fear AI. It is just a tool. As for a thinking real sentient AI... do I fear it? No. Because right now... it's hilarious... not even remotely a threat.

Some know what I mean. Put a nuke underwater. Blow it up. Let the water turn turbines. Create electricity. Realistically it's more complex, as shaped charge detonation may be advantageous, and turbines must be at the right distance to get poweres but not annihilated How long in decades would it pay for itself? Would we no longer be energy dependent on other nations?

Scifi Scenario: An intelligent scifi species is in the business of desigining and creating other sapient species. How hard or practical would it be to create a race of humanoids who are clones and ALSO reproduce clones? Male and female clones. How society handle tracking people if they all look the same with identical DNA? Perhaps they would start branding them or requiring they wear clothes with ID info on it at all times. After all that is how animals do it, one fly from another or one dog from from another of the same species or breed looks much the same, but dogs distinguish by smelling each dog's particular "ID".

Certainly it does not freeze instantly like Star-Lord from GOG 3 (don't know why people love film so much, was mediocre to me). What happens depends on where you are and for how long. First few minutes: Your eyes and tongue begin to boil. 30 min: Body is dead, and eyes are unusally dry. 8 hours: Body may start to swell up once rigor mortis sets in. Several days: After several the body will look swollen and eventually blast open releasing all the trapped decaying matter and gas. Thoughts? Could not enjoy GOG much due to immature jokes and inaccuracy of vacuum physical effects on the body.

I see. So nukes it is.