Spacescifi

Have you seen a diagram of how railguns work? It involves literally two rails that the projectile is launched from from off what is called an armature (a metal piece that pushes the projectile as it is accelerated from the rails below). Basically we are talking friction. Lots of it. Do that again and again and you melt your rails. So if you have spare rails and the means to reprocess melted ones back to tip top shape, you can fire away and view rails as expended ammo lol... reprocess them at your leisure. Hopefully when not in a combat situation lol.

Not necessarily.... humans are there to make judgement calls or a the very least someone to cast blame upon in case something goes wrong. Imagine if the pilot's home city is at a risk of getting fined or bought out if he does something illegal while piloting the spaceship? Even if the pilot dies in flames aboard the vessel, now the company that owns the vessel can shift blame to the pilot's home town and cover some of the cost of the lost vessel by fining or buying parts of his hometown outright? Yes this is not exactly.... something some countries governments would be OK with, but in space fiction, any kind of policy you want can actually be a reality. As it is, real life is brimming with policies terrifyingly brutal by civilizations otherwise considered the epitome of a civilized society. For example, I tend to wonder if one of the reasons the British have such polite manners is because back in the day the opposite end of polite was what happened to William Wallace. Braveheart may as well be rated g, since if they really showed what actually happened, it probably could not be shown in a movie theater. By comparison fining or buying out parts of or an entire town or city in recompense for a pilot's recklessness leading up to possible if not complete destruction of a company spaceship is rather tame.

I think that is a more an exclamation than an actual question.... since the answer I am about to say you no doubt know even better than I. But what so ever, I will say it anyway. The genetics we are born with is kind of like playing the lottery. Some have healthier genetic lines than others, and that to some degree I was told in high school had to do the with the history of families going way back. Not anyone in the present's fault, you cannot go back and yell at your great, great, great, grandpa or grandpa to stop.... doing things that won't bode well for the gene pool in the future of their genetic lineage. And also sometimes even if one has good genetic lineage that should enable them to live to a ripe old age, they put very 'high mileage' on their body, leading it to break down (die) earlier than if they maintained it with regular 'oil changes' (exercise actually recycles your blood) and good 'fuel' (quality food).

A single pilot of a big spaceship is ideal since it minimizes life support while maximizing cargo payload. The second thing it does is that it.... kind of provides insurance if something goes wrong.... since human pilots are usually a bit more reasonable than stupid and stubborn AI. It is rightly assumed that human pilots have a sense of self preservation and want to complete the mission and go home.

Fast enough not to need gravity is standard fare in scifi.... but given how that opens up a can of worms (RKV=any spaceship capable of that) I find it makes space travel even less interesting from a fictional point of view. And I see about the gravity. 100 area meter inner habitats it is. One of the bonuses is even if ypu land a spaceship with it on the moon you can still enjoy stronger gravity thanks to inner habitat rotation.

5. Refueling depots are very much part of any rocket based space propulsion. How it is done matters most. I favor propellant farms on airless moons, that fill up tanks and spin launch them to orbit for the spaceship in orbit that needs it. Meanwhile the orbiting spaceship drops it's empty tank and deorbits it for moon shuttle retrival to refill it later for the next ship. Reusable interchangeable tanks for spaceships.... not a bad idea if they use the same propellant farms.

Scifi is fun and all, but given how much even we know about what space travel really entails, I kind of am annoyed at how.... easy it is in scifi. I mean I KNOW why. Money. Not a cartoon. Real actors. Blah, blah, blah. So here I wish to discuss at least two things I would love to see in scifi. The simple truth is that there is little in scifi land that CANNOT be simulated using real technology. And here we go for examples! 1. Artificial gravity: You do not need fantasy gravity manipulation. All you need is a vessel with a habitat area inside that is at least 30 meters wide, although 60 meters is preferable. Gravity by rotation of an inner cylinder habitat that is preferably 60 meters will do (30 if you wanna be a cheapskate). You likely won't get 1g for fear of dizziness, but some gravity is better than none and keeps the doctor away. 2. Spaceships.... at least manned, SHOULD be big. Why? Because you need a lot of space for life support and artificial gravity via rotation. The less you have the worse off you are as a human. This does not necessarily mean they must be as heavy as possible either, unless you want some type of project orion SSTO that must be heavy to avoid killing the crew with excess acceleration. 3. Space warships would have tiny crews if any. Why? Humans take up a lot of space when it comes to life support and food. And if a space warship requires REGULAR maintenence by flesh and blood crew, then frankly that is a handicapped space warship. Space travel is a lot of drifting, more drifting than thrusting. Doing nothing is not hard. Doing something is harder on a spaceship, and that is all crew ever do inside one. I would go so far as to say that a big space battleship only needs a crew of I dunno... four? The less crew the more space for weapons after all. Also the less the crew consumes and the more likely they can survive a batte since they can be better protected too. 4. Seriously... optimize! I saw a scifi short from DUST (The Beacon) wgere a large space freighter only a had a single pilot. And I thought that quite right. Why pay for more when it is a glorified 18 wheeler in space? Makes sense no? Thoughts are welcome. Space travel is it's own enemy. You hardly even need space war on top of that to show how dangerous it truly is.

Who is he?

So I was at a restaurant last night. I went to the bar section because in my experience service is faster than if I sit in the guest tables or booths. Plus a chair was off to the side on the floor so it was was not raised like the rest of the bar, making it like a stretched table for me. I sit down and I gaze blankly at the TV screen above. It's baseball. I have zero interest in baseball, but it was TV so I gazed anyway. Within less than a minute of me sitting my butt down I hear a voice. "Hi." said a smiling blond lady with her entire left arm covered with tattoos. She also had a a double ball stud nose ring. I just was a bit surprised, since she was about 5 seats away from me, so I felt, wow, aren't you bold? "Hi." I responded back and went back to gazing at the TV. I had come solely because I was hungry and had no interest in chatting. Did not matter. "Like baseball?" She was gazing at me again and had to turn from watching the TV to do so. "No. If there was something else on I would actually be interested." I frankly replied. I went back to waiting for my food and I noticed her movements out of the corner of my eye. They were mimicking mine slightly, and I can read body language. If someone is mimicking your body language they have an interest in you. I had only minimal interest in her. Why? 1. A fully tatted out arm is not appealing to me. Neither are nose rings. Beyond that she was somewhat attractive. Had nice hair. 2. Even if I was interested in her I was tired and was seriously not in the mood for chatting with a female stranger who may want more than chatting. Nor am I the type to try to pick up bar girls. I seriously am cautious and have no interest in precarious relationships or contracting diseases. Nonethless I was not above a friendly chat. After I went to the bathroom and came back I asked her what team she wanted to win, and she somewhat sadly answered the team, no doubt realizing I was not interested in her. She did tell me bye after leaving, which was more than I expected. In my life I have noticed a pattern. I apparently attract females with tattoos like a magnet. She is not the first. I attract flirts, wildchilds and so forth. The funny thing is, what I actually desire is someone.... I dunno... more of a dreamer or artist, but at the same time with a certain physical fitness and atheleticism.

Well the reasoning is certainly interesting. since it shows that reaching ever increasing speeds inside a vacuum coil tube has it's own challenges. Which can still be surmounted by the way. 1. How to reach increasing speeds with coils? Simply space them out at spots where you know the speed will so high that it will require more spaced out coils for acceleration to work. 2. How to avoid becoming a red smear? Just limit the max speed. I also think going to orbital speed at the equator inside a vacuum chamber tube would be awesome. Just hope an accident would not happen. That would be terrible.

So the latest stupid thing I seen... well at least I think it is stupid is what this guy does who frequents the gym I visit. Every day without fail, even during the time he SHOULD be working a job (I took a day off) he is riding his bicycle in the parking lot, blaring really loud vulgar rap music. The guy is perhaps 20's to 30's by the look of him. He rides blaring the music and will without fail ride to pass by people who enter the gym, and frequently lifts his bicycle wheel into the air for extra attention while riding it. It drives me mad! It does not matter if it's 12 noon or 10pm, this guy is out there blaring and riding. The obvious solution is to visit another gym where this guy does not exist, but while I will contemplate that and plan on it, what I want to know is WHY? Some reasons that come to my mind? 1. He loves attention. Some guys just have an inordinate desire to be noticed and given attention. I am not one of those guys, and frankly I tend to detest such a trait but that is just me. I don't even like it when others try to flatter me with praise constantly. It's actually a surefire way to get me annoyed with anyone who tries. 2. He thinks he looks awesome and wants everyone to see how awesome he looks riding his bicycle and playing loud 'awesome' (utter garbage in my option) music. And before anyone thinks I am being hateful I am not, I just do not find any honor in mindless vulgarity being blared all around by traveling bicycle by a guy who is oblivious to the fact that what he is doing is anything but glorious. Yet he obviously thinks it is so....

Interesting... I was considering a large country on par with the USA or Russia. Anyways, spoiler alert! I wanted to know if it was theoretically possible because theoretically possible is MORE than good enough to make something a 'reality' in scifi. Furthermore I intended to use such magnetic linear tubes to 'fuel' a new scifi drive for space travel I had in mind. Infinity Drive: So called because you could almost use it to accelerate for infinity, but realistically you would not and could not. Normal rocket based engines require fuel, but this scifi drive is literally fueled by converting stored past accelerstion into current acceleration. How it works: Set the vessel to charge mode, put it inside a 4g magnetic tube, a really long one, since you will want as much acceleration you can get if you are going to want near torchship levels of delta v. Before the vessel begins decelerating, cut off the 'charge mode' and the vessel's acceleration rate will be locked at 4g for a max time of however long the tube was before it decelerated the vessel. Next crew enter the vessel, belly chemical rocket thrustere VTOL it as it tilts it's nose skyward at an angle and then it engages it's scifi drive and begins accelerating at 4g nose first into the sky. How? By the vessel splitting in two with a gap between the halves and one half chasing the other... it's a kind of diametric drive that is literally fueled by the last charge rate of acceleration that was NOT using the ship's scifi drive that nonetheless accelerated the ship for a length of time. One can even steer with RCS while accelerating even though the halves are separated, since they are so attracted and repelled by each other that they keep alignment as if they were joined together when steering. To cut acceleration you just cut it off and the ship joins together again. In so doing you will save 'charge' until you decide to use it again. Limitations: You are locked in at your acceleration rate, so you want 4g to quickly get to orbit and escape earth's gravity, but the scifi drive cannot be throttled down so you would merely use it to get up to a certain coasting speed desired by the crew and then begin coasting. Implications: 'Fueling' these not-a-torchship-but-just-as-good vessels is relatively easy on a homeworld with magnetic vacuum acceleration tubes. Refueling in space is a whole other kind of level of hard though and virtually impossible unless some long linear magnetic tubes are already built on various airless moons. Coincidentally, apart from missiles becoming far more potent using this scifi drive, it makes manned spaceflight easier but not too OP either, since obviously comfortable long accelerations at 1g are not happening because you need higher than 1g to escape Earth's gravity anyway. And the technology of the entire setting would be considered far future as well, such as secondary aces of humanity created for certain purposes, one of them designed with a melding of the human abilities of intuition and reason combined with the computational ability to process and calculate information quickly. So that if you played one of them at chess they would absolutely slaughter you... since they have both computer level processing and human reasoning to their advantage. Which means while a normal human can only see a relatively small number of outcomes of a given move, this descendant of humanity can literallly think of hundreds and understand how each might occur.

Suppose some company decided to build magnetic coil tubes that have a vacuum inside on earth? The idea is extremely fast overland travel, basically accelerate at 1g to 2g for an hour or a few or less, and wind up across the country faster than if you flew. Is this viable theoretically? I can't care about the ridiculous cost because I am a dreamer... not Elon. Elon would shed man tears over this lol.

That is excellent advice... yet hard to do when most of yourself is telling you not to do the responsible thing. Although not completely related, Agent Smith's quotes apply. "We are not here because we are free. Purpose created us. Purpose defines" And I would add, defines us. Without it just what are we anyway? No one wants to be a nobody who does not even matter... we all believe we matter and try to ensure that we do For a villain, Smith is definitely the only I have seen speak so eloquently about matters of great depth and substance. He was excellently written, since like a real program he had an obsession with purpose, since all IRL programs MUST have a purpose to be written in the first place. He cared about and I dare say even enjoyed the inevitable, since the one thing every program relies upon... and in Agent Smith's case craved... it's absolute certainty and inevitabilty. So in life I believe choosing a purpose matters most, then doing the have to's to ensure it, and after the want to's If one does not choose their purpose then either circumstance or others will choose it for them.... THAT is inevitable. There is no escaping it. Of course old age and death are part of that... like taxes, that's a circumstance compelled upon us that gives us purpose in order to avoid negative consequences. But I dare say that being proactive is far better to being reactive to circumstance, although we surely cannot be prepared for all possibilties, being prepared for likely ones is most wise.

Haha... I don't know if getting rid of ALL procrastination is a good thing per se... since sometimes taking time to de-stress is better than forging ahead when you are not in the best of moods. Like someone else once said, moderation is key. Extremes are to be avoided.

I recently deleted my emulator I had used to play old games, since I realized that it was eating more of time than it should, and more importantly, it was merely a form of procrastination for me. According to the internet procrastination occurs because: We procrastinate on tasks we find “difficult, unpleasant, aversive or just plain boring or stressful.” If a task feels especially overwhelming or provokes significant anxiety, it's often easiest to avoid it. Another reason people procrastinate, Sirois said, is because of low self-esteem. So in summary, because a task seems difficult, unpleasant, stressful, or just boring, we avoid it by doing something else first, saving the harder task for later... or never or until too late. Or we stay away from the task because we have low self esteem and do not wish to be faced with a hard task (basically a test) since we do not have much faith in ourselves anyway and do not wish to put it under further strain. Currently I am on a break from the emulator games, and I find I have more time. I know that when it comes to gaming, after I beat the game, I have little reason to keep playing it (especially with older games that used a different style of play that modern games do not use). If you have seen one ending you have seen them all, the only difference being the difficulty level based on which character you decide to play as. I think ultimately for myself anyway, sometimes the task I need to do scares me, or is stressful, so video games were and are an escape.... a kind of de-stresser, even though paradoxically trying to not get killed from lethal level traps in level design and hoards of enemies is also stressful while playing games. We cannot avoid all stress, nor should we, but we can manage it. I have read advice to the effect that if a task seems stressful but is necessary, then the best thing to do is to just break it up into smaller chunks and set aside time for each of them and check them off as you complete them. That is what I will attempt to do from now on. Because I feel much like the song in AJR's Bang. I am too young to lie here forever, but too old to try to be 'whatever' (at least the days of being able to do whatever because I have both the time and the energy are over).

The answer depends on how steep the reentty dive is as well as how chilled the balloon is. Why not use tungsten foil instead? Resists more heat.

Yes... but I am hinting that EVEN if we had the power we are still not off to the races as it were. The heavier an SSTO is, the more heat it's super duper power source will generate in the process of giving it lift. At some point you will break the hull from heat damage, so you simply cannot build however large you want with MHD unless yoy are using some other technology to assist it to make up for that. Rockets could fill that a role but at the cost of making the MHD virtually useless deadweight.

So a new video by this guy touts MHD and other plasma research as good enough today to manage an SSTO. I am skeptical, since otherwise someone WOULD have done it for money by now. I read elsewhere that the power required to lift a mere ton would require several gigawatts. MHD is more or less an ion aircraft, which requires turning air around the hull into plasma so that the air can be moved over the hull fast enough to generate lift. Questions: Assuming we had a compact multi-gigawatt power source to install on an MHD SSTO, how would the air plasma surrounding the SSTO even look? My guess? The hull would glow... from the heat, and the air near it also would, perhaps a broad hull width plume forming opposite the direction of acceleration. I presume even with the multi-gigawatt power source that is compact that we do not even have.... you would need a way of cooling the hull so it won't melt. Which means means using chilled tanks of propellant as heat sinks likely, likely to cool the hull itself too. Leading to a maximum weight where due to melting limits of hull/MHD, you can only build he SSTO so heavy or you will melt and crash it.... unless you start using propellant, but you're suppose to save that for high atmosphere and space travel... otherwise it defeats the whole point of MHD. EDIT: The comment in the video about tge MHD craft using it's own lasers to ionize the air around it I found amusingly ironic. Because doing that is a GREAT way to blind anybody at the launch site watching it lift off lol.

Interesting yet.... since realism is involved I will point out one thing. Low g humans, or rather those born in low g conditions will be ill suited for higher accelerations. What I am saying is that it won't so much matter if a spaceship can do a 4g acceleration burn if the humans on it were adapted to say... mars gravity. Low gravity humans would I think be restricted to slower accelerations by default, which means it would take them longer to get around the solar system than mark I humans from Earth. Remote controlled, drone, and robot spaceships by comparison would be the fastest spaceships known. An expanse type of scifi is interesting of course because human adventures go to weird environment of space. Yet when reality is applied it leads to the boring fact that humans are so ill suited for space that robots and drones would be prevail in space and humans would be secondary to them in importance for space travel. Because 1. Robots and drones do not require life support. 2. Do not require anywhere near as much fuel. 3. And can get from point A to point B much faster. I honestly think the only way humans would be more common in space than drones would be if speeds were equalized thanks to scifi inertial dampeners or some other scifi conceit. In other words, then humans could actually survive high g acceleration without injury or discomfort and accelerate as fast as drones, robots, or even missiles. Although doing so would be more fuel costly then going slower.

Physically yes, especially for anyone who had an abusive father as I had. But losing money via a scam? Strangers are far more likely to do that to you, since I would assume we know family well enough to see that trick coming a mile away.

A a hammerhead project orion SSTO. Uses inner rocket engines for VTOL, then flips in midair to use it's nuclear pusher plate to reach orbit. Landing is the same process but in reverse... namely nuclear pulse to deorbit and slow in midair for landing before finally flipping horizontal to slow for a rocket powered descent. How many times you can even do reentry depens on how much fuel you have... since the VTOL rockets have a smaller ISP compared to the nuclear bomb explosions hitting the pusher plate.

Inflatable water filled station walls. That's all I have to say. Giant water bed station FTW! It will be bouncy everywhere except where hard panels are needed.

The elephant in the room is how far away do you orbit the station? Farther than LEO: You won't have to re-boost the giant thing with rockets to keep it from deorbiting due to air friction nearly as often. On the other hand if problems occur help is that much farther away unless another station is nearby. LEO: Re-boosting on a regular basis is a must or you will crash back to earth. The more massive the station the more fuel will be required to reboost quickly... although it may also be possible to do it slowly over a month or months with some kind of advanced ion thrusters.

Makes sense considering how many generations they go through in a single year. When you are at loss for human level intelligence, raw reproduction numbers and adapting for poison immunity compensates. I would also add that some insects are clearly smart as they need to be gor what they are. I have seen roaches stick to the shadows and run away from light and especially from the big scary human who has yet to attack them but will soon.