Spacescifi

Do you have diagrams or pictures? What exactly? The injector nozzle is shaped like a forward facing cone with the hole in the middle? Or metal halves that slide up off rails to cover the nozzle tube after each ejection? My personal suspicion is that ablation will be an issue sooner or later since the cone armor is no where as thick as the pusher plate.

I want to know more about Mini-mag orion... since Project Orion gets all the love and attention but mini-mag is virtually unknown except to space enthusiasts. Questions: 1.0. Is mini-mag orion feasible RIGHT now or not? 1.5. if not what would it take for it to be feasible now? 2. What would it allow or how would it change known flights to... the moon, mars, etcetera? 3. I am aware mini-mag was designed because the original had a massive nozzle radius because it involved using nukes and magnetic fields from nozzles (more massive than original project Orion). If I guessed correctly, mini-mag can be scaled up, it just cannot use nukes. Just fuel that can be magnetically pinched to cause a fusion blast. Right? 4. Mini-mag is at best a second stage. Could it be an SSTO on the moon? My guess is it that the mini-mag is kinda low thrust? Or is it better than the much talked but weaksauce nuclear thermal rocket? If it is better than nuclear thermal... great! Since maybe it could SSTO off low grav airless worlds, since aired ones would wreck the mini-mag in the blast. So we are talking a mini-mag spaceship with detachable reusuable, refillable boosters as shuttles for aired worlds. DidI understand this right? Please correct or clarify..... thank you all. This is NOT for scifi necessarily, I am just comparing mini-mag against the much ballyhooed Project Orion.

One thing I do not understand about Project Orion... the hole where the injector pops out the bomb is not far from where the plasma plume hits the plate. Meaning some will fly through the hole and hit the injector. That sounds like a problem waiting to happen, since every pulse the injector is flashed with what remains of a focused plasma cone. It sounds like the only way to mitigate this is to increase the piston length holding the plates and keep the injector closer to the ship's main body... meaning the bomb travels farther before passing through the plate to detonate. Am I right or wrong?

Great. So cut travel time down even more for manned scifi interplanetary flight. I wonder what is the limit? 3g? 4g? 5g? Obviously unmanned could go faster still... but sleeping on the back I wonder...

If one had a fictional constant acceleration drive, would upping the acceleration for 8 hours while the crew slept be OK-ish? I mean why not? Everyone but the helm control crew are sleeping on their backs anyway? Then revert to 1g when they wake up. Still not sure what the effects would be if done routinely. Probably not good. Then again if crew is all young and healthy (no one over 45 years and must be healthy and fit) then that may be mitigated too.

Thanks... it's always fun to live vicariously through the stories of others. What you said about rough living... I met an italian once. Was visiting the states in the hope of finding an Ametical lady to date and marry. One problem... he was only here a week... which is hardly enough time. He was short, and not exactly handsome, but not ugly either. Just... short and kinda pudgy. One of the things he had difficulty with (beyond communication due to a thick accent) was when he suddenly washed his hands and face, and brushed his teeth and spat in the kitchen sink, since where he was from they only had ONE sink and none in the bathroom. I think he may have made a few more cultural miistakes because people were... sadly holding back barely suppressed chuckles at him. He ultimately failed to find an American lady to date amd went back home.

And now I want to know more.... sorry... I am a curious person... and you just piqued my curiousity. Hopefully you can either find a way to say it via the forum rules or respectfully decline but I will ask any how. 1. You wiped with WHAT? Because I am aware of various options... some more optimal and safer than others. The ancient greeks? Used shards of hard clay I read... ouch. Romans in rome shared communal bath toilets with plumbing and shared multiple sponges... sanitizing them by dipping them in vinegar. That... probably contributed to shorter lifespans, unless the Romans were just that tough... probably were LOL. 2. You must have bathed somehow or wiped somehow. i know people sometimes dip in a body of water or wipe with a rag and call it good. Not a proper bath but something better than nothing no? Otherwise you would have had rashes where you.... do #2.

I agree. Humans are so tough they went without toilet paper for most of their existence. Yes..... they stunk more, but that's why France became really good at making fancy perfumes. Besides... the initial toilet paper shortage due to Covid-19 made me research modern alternatives to toilet paper... they do exist. If nothing else, if Joe is a former marine, then he surely has seen the fringes of civilization. Perhaps he has even done. #2 without toilet paper too LOL.

A nuclear exchange sends many countries back to the 19th century... but won't end all tech. People would rebuild. Want to know the great irony? An Earth nuked silly is still more habital than mars... and I reckon without Earth support a mars colony WILL die unless they have a bunch of ships resupplying them and also processing stations elsewhere in tge solar system to make more ships. That is tge problem witu space colonies... no one world but Earth has all you need to make a proper man-rated spaceship. You literally need multiple world colonies and thrn ships to transport the precious ingredients to the processing stations that are also precious. Anything going wrong can kill tge colony or handicap it enough to mission kill it.

Wow.... great story. A kerbal would consider that scenario acceptable LOL.... because.... they get to go to SPAAACE today!

JFK is known as arguably the president in modern history who is most strongly associated with space travel due to the Apollo missions. Consider this alt history scenario: JFK is said to have had several mistresses beyond his actual wife. In this alt history, his wife jacky cheats on him in revenge.... with a spy from the Soviet Union and literally goes to live there under asylum. This pushes JFK over the edge, so when he sees the Orion project, instead of recoiling in horror he is like, "When can you start?" He also provides as much money for project as reasonably possible, at the risk of the USA economy suffering some. If that happened, how would the world be today? This vid looks more realistic though. My opinion: 1. JFK would be a much more controversal figure in history, no longe only like a legend in American history... but infamous. 2. The fed government is sued over and over by any American with cancer they claim is from Orion project launches. What else happens? Assume WW3 does not occur since that outcome is well scripted and obvious.

I wanted to say we may be able to make a thermal space only rocket with it, but combustion is an isssue so maybe not. On the other hand, I reckon charging a dead 3000 terawatt battery would be... hard? Like, you don't plug it into the wall... would take too long. Would likely drain a city or maybe even entire countries of power charging the thing LOL. "Mom... why is the city out of power?" With a heavy sigh mom says, "Kirk is charging his phaser... again."

Suppose someone gave the USA a battery that could be charged with and store 3000 terawatts. The battery would also be capable of discharging the power at ANY ratio... including 100% (not recommended for staying alive reasons). Like real batteries, too much heat can cause the battery to combust, unlike real batteries, it suffers no extra heat during discharge, but can take on extra heat from it's environment (like whatever it is attached to that is heated from the discharge of energy). So how useful is this impossible battery? Ideally you would have super materuals that could survive high discharge rates (but if we had that we would also have fusion so... ), but since we do not... what can we do and how far can we utilize this impossible tech?

Doubt we will have fusion reactors in say... Somalia etc. Given the heat loads, I reckon a great amount of steam would be billowing into the air constantly. Whether or not it adds to global warming depends on how powerful the fusion reactor is and how many of them are available.

You are referring not to HLHL, but VLHL. I do agree on low grav airless worlds that VLHL is very much possible and practical. On Earth or similar though... or going to an Earth analogue, it would seem you are better off, for the sake of simplified engineering and less possible points of complexity that can fail... to use wholly either HLVL or VLVL. For HLHL ramps are a possibility to reduce runway size, just burn for a some seconds, let inertia take the HLHL vehicle up the ramp till it is vertical and burn upward into the sky. Landing would involve standard gliding and runways or could involve the ocean if an amphibous vehicle. VLVL is something Elon has well covered though I think... unless anyone has anything to add to it who is not Bezos...

I am referringto horizontal launch/landing versus all vertical ones with spaceflight. It seems going either all vertical or all horizontal is the best approach for either. Thoughts: VLVL can work anywhere, whereas HLHL does not work so well in places with low atmosphere since often HLHL relies on wing interaction to glide or guide to a safe landing. The main advantage of HLHL is easier egress of cargo and personal before launch.... something one may want with a mature future regular manned presence in space, but not now. Now what do you know?

Metalkic hydrogen or some similar future uber non radioactive propellant would work. Just be huge ship is all.

I know... I an just saying how a torchship will actually look... using known physics. Regnerative cooling and a high propellant flow rate are known ways of keeping the nozzle from melting. Alternately... the irony is that torchships begin to have a lot in common with project Orion. They scale up great, but they don't scale down well without melting or ablating.

While I am aware why 2 staging is superior, if we actually did have rocket engines powerful enough to enable SSTO's, would they not be huge? Which is ironic since smaller nozzles are preferred for launch, but a heavy SSTO would likely need a big nozzle to diffuse the torchship heat from melting it. I suppose with torchship energies, launching with a giant vacuum nozzle into orbit is your only option, since smaller nozzles may melt. Why make heavy torchship SSTO's? Seems to me SSTO's are basically best for ferrying or shuttling payloads to or from planets. SSTO' torchships should NOT be designed for long distance cruising in space. Rather actual long distance space cruisers should be 2nd stage vehicles. While SSTO's should be shuttle ships, but huge, unlike the tiny van-size ones Star Trek uses. Likely real future spaceships will be stacks or racks of spaceships linked together, detaching at will for whatever mission is required. There won't be jack of all trades vessels, rather, spaceships will be like a combo pizza or swiss army knife with various tools... in this case ships of various kinds will link as a supership. No mothership, just a bunch of ships stacked or linked together, because in space you can link stuff on indefinitely... so long the inertia load is not greater than engine thrust. You have endless amounts of free space... may as will use it efficiently. You do not need a big cargo hold in space since you can literally just link up with anything you want. The only ship that needs a large cargo hold IS an SSTO. Scifi miseducates the public in so many ways it's not funny. Everyship needs a cargo hold in pop scifi... when in reality it pays to optimize space only ships and then shuttle only ships. Huge Shuttle SSTO freighters will be a thing. Millennium Falcon? No. Since making a full on optimized war vessel would do better than an SSTO optimized for doing SSTO with weapons added on as an after thought.

You don't need a gigantic gravity ring to get gravity from rotation... all you need is to separate the main ship into halves with a kilometer long tether and rotate the halves at 1 RPM (1 rotation per min). Only downside is you can only do this while drifting... not accelerating.

So you are saying bones that adjust their metal crystals to magnetize or demagnetize at will? Clever, but I don't really need a fully magnetic skeleton, and not sure if doing that at a crystal method is harder biologically than some other method. At any rate, thank you and others for input. At least I know the idea is somewhat plausible with permanent magnet looping more than electromagnets. For biologic magnets

Nice... so I can use this instead of electromagnets. So they will lose the shock ability, but will retain the suction plate glow via bio-luminescence when the magnetic field aligns. They will use a type of chemical permanent magnetic fluid that is flows back to their bones when they do not want to do the magnet trick. Their bones likely have a lot of metal content too... with lots of iron. Likely have to be some weird alien bones that grow and repair like normal bone but heavier and more durable. Harder to break.

Not sure why you presume a higher iron content implies they would not have to mine and process it like we do. Giving them niche abilities does not mean they will be incredibly useful right away. In fact without processing iron the only ability that they really can still utilize is electric shock. Rust is not magnetic, however if the rust is not fully rusted it still will be attracted. Take a magnet near partially rusted metal and you may be pleasantly surprised how much rust... that still has some ferromagnetic qualities in it... is attracted. I know this from experience. As a kid I killed a bug with nothing but rusted metal dust and a donut magnet. Dusted it with so much rust that his body BECAME attracted to the magnet as some of the metal became stuck in folds and creases. It died... for science. After being drawn to, sucked, and finally colliding with the magnet one too many times. I am not convinced gecko feet are an option to retain humanoids similar to us. Sure if you lower the weight, but I was not doing that, since they would have to be smaller or else more hollow. At first I thought it would be cool to shoot lightning too from the sucker plates... but I though that stretches plausibility too far. Shocking via touch is fine. Also I presume shocking in water is to be avoided for obvious reasons.

Rare? It has iron concentrations similar to a planet in our own solar system! It's like a 1g mars with breathable air and plant and animal life imported over. Adhesion while retaining the humanoid look is simply impossible. Why? Surface area required to adhere is greater than hand width, and even high tech adhesive tech we have made is still wider like basketball wide). Magnetic is the only way to retain the human form.

They were settled millenia on the 1g world they call their homeworld. Unlike Earth it has a lot more iron, so much that the planet has orange soil and yellow plants and grass all over. From space people would see a lot of yellow, with blue ocean and patches of orange deserts. All life on the world was settled there... nothing is actually native living there. as the planet itself was one of many that was terraformed ages ago. The environment has enough iron in it that does not take long for the humanoids living there to figure out they can stick to ferromagnetic metals. As an ability, it most useful for niche situations, like working and repair high off the ground, and the static shock is useful for self defense. Electromagnetic... as in they can turn it on and off at will. When on the suction plates glow and will also shock if they touch a person.