Spacescifi

Obviously this is known. Astronauts take hours to catch up and dock with the ISS. Playing Space War (old gravity space sim) shows that slowing will make a vessel orbit a world faster until it falls right into it. Speeding up will slow orbital speed but also put you on course for deep space or a very high but slow orbit. So to intercept I presume means slowing to below LEO speed, while still not enough to fall into the atmosphere. Or perhaps they launch timed so that the ISS is passing by and they launch in its wake to catch up by lower orbits? What is most cost effective?

In lieu of making a new thread (already have three on one page) I thought it best to post this here: Scifi Alternative To Constant Acceleration: It seems the more I know the more of a headache science gives me when it comes to scifi spaceflight. On the one hand, I find orbital and newtonian dynamics very attractive, even graceful. On the other....the tyranny of the rocket equation is more or less a show stopper for scifi tropes. High thrust constant acceleration drives seem like an attractive solution, but as I discussed in another thread, they would be far too dangerous to be commonplace, even if they had limited delta v. Solution: Time warping. Basically time forwarding like in KSP, only the crew inside the time warp experience much less time. Example? Want to fly to Mars but only have enough food supplies to last a day? No problem. You in orbit? Great! Plot a trajectory for Mars and once you're on course, engage the time warp. Every minute spent inside the time warp your vessel generates makes TWO MONTHS pass by outside. Result? You reach Mars subjectively in less than hour, after throttling the time warp back down to normal. No longer do you need to worry about long flight time, and you can save precious propellant for when it is most needed. Wanna know the cool thing? Thanks to time warping, you would seem like you are traveling really fast, planets would whiz by, and you would even see them rotate several revolutions quickly in real time! So time warp VS dangerous constant acceleration....which would you rather be common for civilian scifi spacecraft to have? Personallly, I think time warp is safer for the public at large. Constant high thrust acceleration is the kind of thing bad guys dream about when they want to make things go boom.

It is really interesting that the greater part of scifi must be fiction to even justify a large presence of life where it is not supposed to live. It's not even 50% science, 50% fiction. Not even that amount would jusfify a large amount of folks risking their lives with a lower quality of life than they were born with. I suppose the ratio would need to be more like 10% science, 90% fiction, since if space is not made relatively safe, no large amount of folks will go.

Thanks. I was unaware of heart problems. My prior concern was eyesight even though I did not state it. In LEO astronauts lose some visual sharpnesss over time, and the damage STAYS even when they go back to Earth. I want my space miners to have good enough tech to go mine in space, come back to homeworld, and be just like they were before they left. No worse for wear. I thought about going the fictional grav boot root (by increasing the gravity force attraction of whatever it touches), but I thought it good to see if there were any good IRL options first. Seems grav-boots are the most optimal to justify a large miner presence. I reckon even working 8 hours a day in low g is probably bad for the eyes, and likely bad for the heart too. Given all these issues, IRL we would only send people to fix broken automated machines. Automated machines would work alone without us...until they break. It matters because I want to get the color right when I write it! Although in my work it's an alien moon that is pink in color. So the concrete will probably be very pale pink. Not likely to be red.

Premise: Assume excellent lightweight scifi radiation protection is a given. Also assume the moon is a mining base. Dealing With Low Gravity: Since moon gravity is low, would it be reasonable for miners to wear heavy enough metallic or otherwise heavy suits even inside crew cabins just so they can be ALMOST as heavy as they would be on Earth? I dunno...make the suit with heavy lead plating and other dense heavy materials? Color Of Moon Concrete: Provided lunar ice is used to make lunar concrete, what color would it be? White? Or gray still? Are not all concretes naturally a lighter color than the original stuff it came from usually? Thank you.

Colonization=conquest. Same thing. Good you are aware of that.

Well...when is the last time you saw chaos create anything without some type of system of order or organization already in place? If you had to ask...I am definitely more in alignment with what the Vorlons believed than the Shadows. Although their methods left things to be desired at times. Since birth through chaos without order is like shaking a box of paint around for days and expecting the Mona Lisa to come out.

The belters will require Earth just to become the Belters. Even once established they won't have all their resources in one nice package like Earth does, which will severly limit what they can create when Earth comes for them. Simply put, size and variety of resources matters. Earth has lots of both. The belt? Less of both.

Good questions you asked. Is the answer worth the time to bother investigating? If your last day was today, would you not want an answer?

You may disagree. I personally find that a temporary escape is not bad, but when it has become a form of therapy then it is clearly a symptom of an underlying need that the game can never truly recitify. Examples? 1. A player is lonely so plays games where he interacts with virtual characters. He feels good doing it, but the more he does it the less and less time he has to make IRL friends. 2. A player is frustrated by IRL failures so plays a game to compensate by winning in game. When the player loses in-game they take it badly, since now they can't even win at unreality. They either throw a bunch of time away to soothe their ego by winning ingame despite challenges, or switch to another game to feel better by beating a challenge. Still no substitute for actually confronting and managing IRL issues.

Oh...you are saying if behavior and society is unlike ours there must be a compelling motivation for it to be the way it is. Which? On the one hand, having kids is a normal desire. But on the other hand...regarding a purpose, that truly is a unique concept. In the animal world predators exist to keep the non-predators from over expanding and eating up all the vegetation. Get rid of all the predators and you will have a population explosion that will deplete resources bad enough that creatures and or plants will die of depletion or starvation anyway. So having predators at least keeps a balance of order in the animal kingdom. As sapient beings are higher than animals...that is one natural purpose for them right there. To manage the affairs of lower life forms for their good. Bab5 did this with the Vorlons vs Shadows.

Gaming can be, has been, and is used for escapism by humans, including myself , but it can be used solely for recreation as well. The choice is up to the user's intent. It is unhealthy as an ongoing regular escape. That was my point all along.

That requires resources...which planet Earth or it's equivale bt will win if they want to bad enough. Nothing like the Expanse...if Martian humans win at all it is because we allow it.

The future looks like a lot of mirrors in space. Why not? Free energy! Use it. If KSP taught me anything it is that spacecraft need to be as low mass as you can manage. Going heavy like starship makes trying to land the thing a good deal harder.

Well...if space war is expensive it would be rare. And met with a lot of MAD scenarios. Scifi shields that work as advertised in fiction simply only work that way if you use mass. And mass hitting mass hard? And staying intact without conducting all that heat back? To get a legit scifi shield you need a fictional invisible material that can absorb both kinetic and thermal energy without breaking,while radiating excess heat 100% back light. If we had a such thing, it would be invisible except for when blocking. Then shine blinding flashes of light. Coincidentally scifi shields also make great radiators.

I tailor make my scifi aliens to do what humans cannot EXACTLY for this reason...to fit the setting. I also think changing the 'face' of every alien race I create but subjecting them to all the limits of IRL humanity to be....restrictive and unnecessary. This IS fiction so let creativity fly I say. Within acceptable limits I accept anyway...like I am not going into pure fantasy superhero tropes.

Not bad as far as plans go. My response? Column missile formations for intercept. Sure, the debris ring shoud wreck the first, and perhaps the second, but a column of missiles will be denser than the debris field and fly right on through to Ceres. Ceres is a big rock, so you chose wisely. Yet trajectories will make a big difference too. If the missiles are fired so that Ceres is flying toward them, the kinetic energies involved upon collision will be worse than if the missiles were only chasing slow Ceres to smack into her.

All living things known eat to survive...that is less trope and more just known.

Wow...you could make a funny comedic scifi writer with lines like that! Late great filter? What does having children have to do with that? Keeping up with the Jones kids? Yeah I suppose that would always be a factor, since even lower creatures (animals) compete to be the best at what they do, there is no reason to think immortals won't. Which also means experts in many fields of endeavor will be numerous. I am not sure the concept of immortality has been explored adequately beyond the 'keeping the mortal status quo because is immortality is bad' trope. I find immortality as a concept fascinating in part because it is barely trodden ground. Such a race would be a bit more in mind and behavior than the modern nation state acting civilizations we see in SW or ST.

Might take longer depending on it's location than the Earth rockets getting there. Asteroids are notorious for being far apart. about 600,000 miles Astronomers estimate that the average distance between two asteroids in the asteroid belt is about 600,000 miles (966,000 km). This is about 2.5 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. That is a lot of space between two neighboring asteroids! Plus Earth rockers can dodge a lot better than the asteroid. Even in gaming I do this kind of thing. If I have a big slow ship, I invest in like 40 small fighters and let them rip against anything I want to blow up. The times I lose are when spaceships get past my fighter screen because fighter damage is weak ingame.

On heat I agree with you. Regarding asteroid mining, even if such 'water' rocks are common enough the environment of space combat still makes logistics hard...especially the more hard science we go. For example, how do you protect it? If a war is fought in the same solar system a homeworld could put hundreds of missiles into space on a trajectory for that rock to deprive the opposing factiom that has it of resources. The attack would take months of inertial drifting, but there is no way the asteroid could stop it, they don't have the reources to get out the way...unless they used their own rock as rocket propellant to get away, Which also dries up the ISRU resource. And laser zapping hundreds of orbital velocity missiles with limited effective laser range is easier said than done in a window of limited time. Long story short, homeworlds will drown lower resource equipped foes with their virtually unlimited resources to win everytime they want to win. So the only way to beat them is to convince the powers that be that you are not worth fighting.

Oh it gets worse...much worse.

They have nearly closed loop power production for their starships, which need recarging of their propulsion system via a natural resource which is found in random solar systems across the galaxy. Usually one out of every fifty solar systems. Their home system is one. Local moon has the highest concentration, easily mined from the surface. As for birth control...they have greater self control than we do, and yet they are not emotionless Vulcans. If one does not eat food for a few days then although they may have relations...their body's reproductive capacity will be sterile until they start eating again for the same amount of time. It only has to take place for one partner, as the other could be normal, eating everyday. Space colonization is primarily for those who decide to have kids. There are those on the homeworld who do not have children at all. It just means a lot of people fasting on the regular and that normal eating of food is the time they must avoid sex if they don't want a baby.

So I fully intend to use both mortal and biologically (can't die of old age) immortal space faring races in my scifi. That said...I was wondering about the max population of an Earth-like world with immortals. Like if no one died but people where shipped out to colonize space on the regular, what is the max Earth population of residents who can just stay? My thoughts: Large oceans like ours could actually be habital if they built a bunch of floating cities across the oceans. To get even more crazier hey could make a bunch of floating cities too like this: Your thoughts?

ISRU with what? To do ISRU on Earth is relatively easy becuase we have water, and water is often one of the components of of most industrial processes we have on Earth, including metallurgy. Space is drier than the driest desert, except where you find ice. You can make concrete with space rock and water, and metal is also possible but I reckon harder unless you find ore. Nevermind the waste heat of blacksmithing in space....but in a soft science fiction this is easier.