Spacescifi

Just curious... do you think KSP should have a crew health mod? In other words... 1. They now need food and water to keep living. 2. Without proper or sufficieht radiation shielding they will eventually die from radiation poisoning. Doing this would up the realism value of KSP. And it is far from impossible to simulate. Afterall manned spaceflight is what fascinates us... the robotic spaceflight a bit less. What do you think,

Gravity more or less would be such a thing... if we had portals...or warp drive.

To put matters even simpler, "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." I think Newton said that, but that is conservation of momentum in a nutshell. If you must go forward you push back or throw something back or vice a versa. Recapturing spent 'pushes' or 'throws' will actually weaken the thrust you get in any given direction.

We already know light can be converted into electricity easily. Since light is electromagnetic, there is reason to believe it can be converted into magnetism as well. In fact, according to the following site, if you presume they are telling the truth (I don't think this is beyond belief), it has already been done experimentally with some losses probably due to heat absortion of the light. https://kaw.wallenberg.org/en/research/coupling-light-magnetism-nanoscale https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2019-09-laser-metal-magnet.amp They use a kind of receiver that converts EM into magnetism. Main Question: If mankind ever becomes really proficient at converting light into magnetism, what are the tech implications? Like what if we could convert 99% of light received by a receiver into magnetism? For communications tech? Computing? Space travel tech? My guess: Magnets are known to both attract and repel each other. We know light offers at best, super weak thrust. Perhaps if the light was converted into magnetism the thrust could be increased significantly? Or even if this works it won't matter because the magnetism must be super strong? Magnet breaking strong? I doubt that. Applications: Scifi tractor beams, just take an ordinary laser and shoot it at a magnetic impulse converter, and suddenly the pulled in object is attracted with far greater force than the laser beam's actual thrust from light itself. You could more or less sit still and attract ANY vessel with an impulse receiver to you all day long. Propulsion: Lots of ways. With big enough station lasers, it would be possible to magnetically push spacecraft across space and use moon station lasers to slow it for landing. Since magnets and by extension impulse receivers can be polarized. What do you think?

Forget Ironman. Wanna see how a repulsor engine would REALLY work if it adhered to it's namesake (repulsion) and newtonian physics? Yes you do! I admit I am borrowing from the KSP antigravity mod, but also expanding on it. A repulsor engine would generate thrust by repelling all mass in front of it using....repulsor 'rays' (yep I know....don't say it). In accord with physics, if mass is repelled, the ship is thrust in the opposite direction. Unlike KSP's mod, a repulsor that repelled all mass would blow much like a rocket...just minus the plume... an invisible plume if you will. Still expect dirt shockwaves to blow accross the ground on takeoff or liftoff. Since thrust is based purely on mass repulsion, once the vessel reaches vacuum, it could still repel off the planet's atmosphere, since the repulsor 'rays' travel at light speed anyway. Just expect to fly along a curve or otherwise to fly directly upward from the planet if using repulsors in space. What you cannot do is point your repulsors at deep space and fire the engines and expect to get thrust. Nothing to repel against. Borrowing from KSP's antigravity mod, I think it is a GREAT idea to drain the least power close to a planet's surface, but suck up the most the farther one gets from a planet in space, to the point of simply not having the power to operate them. Yet I will expand on this by saying that for the repulsors, power drain will be low so long a ship is surrounded by mass (atmosphere). Thrust is most needed near mass anyway, and repulsors work equally well on in asteroids in space too! In fact, one could push asteroids or even accelerate them while the ship accelerates in the opposite direction. Once the distance becomes too big the power drain would not allow more repulsion anyway. At any rate...inside an atmosphere...you could repel...I mean fly, indefinitely since the power drain would be low (mass all around you to repel against). Only once you get to vacuum will the power drain start to creep up. So there ya go. Repulsors that are more newtonian and repulsive than Ironman's, which basically look and behave like magic rockets. And for you rocket aficionados, yes the ship still needs normal rocket engines, at least if it want to thrust in space far away where repulsors would require exorbiant power to operate. Or simply to thrust in a direction where there is no mass in range to repel off The good news is... so long you also use other scifi staples *cough* like FTL/warp, the tyranny of the rocket equation is largely defeated. Although for long missions, refueling off planets or asteroids is a need for the normal rocket engines. Unlike the repulsors which could run off multiple nuclear reactors. Until the reactors died anyway or ran out of fuel.

Possible... takes longer but it saves them from hunting down sources of propellant.

One day man could convert light to magnetism. We are already seeing hints it is possible. Then gamma radiation from an AM bomb would be all you need. For thrust. Granted, the impulse receiver must still be huge to dissipate any absorbed rays. https://kaw.wallenberg.org/en/research/coupling-light-magnetism-nanoscale

Rotation g-force is where your size limit comes, since we can only build so dense anyway. If a vessel is the size of the ones seen in scifi (the enterprise, star destroyer etc), simply yawing, pitching, or rolling newtonian style WILL result in crew falling toward the outer walls. Smaller ones have less of an g force rotation effect at low speeds. Big ones will make g-force even at liw rotational speeds

Hahaha. It does not matter... size/weight matterss Notice that tiny insects can sustain 100's of g's and survive. Larger stuff cannot

To be sure, a scifi civilization SHOULD catch this. At bare mininum they should already have orbital telescopes at la grange points and cameras on the moon and what not. Something WILL notice, if to prevent just that sort of stealth. They would be aware of such a trick... since even we are.

I will put it this way... any time I see a flamey rocket nozzle SSTO take off or land and do it AGAIN and AGAIN without refueling propellant, or with a low propellant to payload ratio.... my eyes start rolling. I rather see rockets based on real science or even theoretical science since we understand them so well. If you must cheat then make stuff up, but do NOT pretend rockets can work miracles without the requisite power or propellant. Actually let me rephrase that... to do any of the stuff in the movies you need at bare minimum 2 things. 1. Requisite power. Movies and TV throw around fusion power like it's a make-it-so button. Overlooking or ignoring the melt-the-walls heat the fusion creates. No known material... not steel, not even tungston or quartz can stand up to fusion heat. Magnetic fields as so far are... slippery 'hands'. 2. Requisite propellant: The great thing about propellant is you can dump a lot of engine heat into your propellant exhaust. The bad thing is that too much will lower your payload to propellant ratio... unless you use staged dumping of rockets, but that only works ONCE. On launch. Without propellantengine heat becomes a greater issue the greater thrust you create. Gravity was good for the most part. Clooney was dumb enough to die for no good reason if IRL physics are in play. Besides having a spacesuit that had a lot more propellant gas than the ones IRL.

I find flying with the sun to your back quite clever. Old WW1 fighter pilots even did that... if you believe the movies and human intellect is capable of such deception (you betcha and sooo much more). Cannot see what is already blinding ya. Even seen it done in space flight sims. Too bad NPC's don't struggle with blinding sunlight like human pilotsm

Not with warping at lightspeed! It will allow you to skip all that useless SPACE in between and allow you to use engines for what they can get by with less ISP... orbit or land. Oh not at all... that did not happen too much... as the scifi I like most (B5 and DS9) has good enough character and plot that I can ignore the bad science.

You make a valid point. Want full honesty? I will PM you.

Yes charging speed is limited when using conventional means Using a scifi AM reactor is rather... unconventional though. Just like the battery itself is. For all we know the reactor could be doing something at the quark level with the battery to charge it faster.... very unconventional. Even more so that the battery can take that and survive. This is getting off OP though.

Thanks. So I take it I was right about orbiting objects farther from the sun orbiting slower than the inner worlds? Which means flying to an inner world will cost more delta v than an outer one usually? AM reactors charge the batteries faster than more conventional means.... that's the story I am sticking to anyway. They are scifi reactors so they must do something really amazing to charge batteries with enough power to provide thrust to engines that do not use conventional mass propellant. The fact the scifi batteries can even contain that amount of energy is also scifi.

I see what you are up to.... clever even. The scifi batteries are not rechargeable. Neither do they make a rechargeable one and for good reason. Even if someone DID make a rechargeable battery, you know it would take a long time to charge up enough power and propel any ship with a payload of reasonably profitable mass (100 tons), not counting ship mass itself. Using only solar or nuclear anyway. The industrial factories that make the batteries use several AM reactors to charge the batteries in a far more reasonable amount of time. No goverment in their right mind is handing AM reactors out to spaceships owned by civillians.

Here is the scifi scenario: We have scifi drives that run off batteries (no propellant required) that are 3 meters in radius and a meter thick, and weigh a ton each (disc shaped). Each battery provides 30 min of thrust... throttling thrust to max or low won't effect the thrust time for better or worse. It will run the battery dry in 30 minutes of constant engine acceleration either way. Thrust for the scifi engine is always sufficient for however heavy a ship is for it's stated max load to move it around efficiently. Once batteries drain you need more, otherwise you will be drifting in space with no sublight engine power. Goverment regulations: It goes without saying that scifi goverments have to regulate this kind of thing for civillian freighters and passenger liners. Civillian vessels: Are regulated to not have max engine thrust higher than 3g. Goverment vessels: Manned vessels have a max thrust of 6g. Robotic unmanned vessels can do 20g. Millitary/exploration vessels: Use a scifi reactor (not a battery) that grants... 1000 hours of thrust before reactor fuel is exhausted. Much like the battery drive throttling thrust won't effect thrust time and the drive requires no propellant. Solar system travel Regulations: Civillian ships need a max amount of batteries they are allowed to carry. Likely it will be based on their travel itinerary. So to go to the moon and back doing 1g may take about 12 batteries with a payload *fuel* weight of 12 tons. To go to Mars and back under 1g? LOL. Problematic. The rocket equation STILL MATTERS. Because at some point your battery to payload ratio becomes ridiculous enough if you just pile on too many batteries that it will go past max payload and lower engine thrust down from stated max levels. Even so, the setting does have warp drive which at least translates the ship's position across space. Changing the trajectory and speed the fastest way involves using the battery powered 30 min each battery drive. Using warp AND the battery drive, what is a reasonable smount of batteries for a civillian vessel to have? 2 hours worth (4 batteries)? Since it goes without saying that the said vessel could accelerate at 3g for 2 hours and attempt to ram Earth. Goverments have to regulate that kind of thing. What number of batteries is sufficient to explore explore the solar system? I think 2 hours worth is fine. Since warp will get a vessel close enough to it's planet of interest, and every planet in our solar system (except the inner planets like Earth) orbit slower than Earth anyway. Which means: Takeoff: About ten minutes or less to low Earth orbit using 3g. Transfer: Warp drive at light speed. Drop out in low orbit of oh... say Mars. Use battery engines to slow down for mars low orbital speed. should not take more than ten min at 3g. What have we got left? A little over an hour and a half left of battery power for sublight engines. With about ten more minutes of thrust we wiill drain our first battery... to land on Mars. So it seems that 3g at 30 min is good enough to reach LEO, transfer speed, and even land on another body... so long warp transfer of vessel's position in space is applied. What do you think on this? Did I get it right or miss or overlook something?

I already considered that. Yet I I am not sure the humanoid shape has the room for that without addons to the mark I body plan. In other words, likely some exterior pumping pushing organ, since an inner one may crowd out already vital inner organs for life. I think the human body does not have much in the way of spare space for inner additional pumpinh pushing organs (essentially a secondary heart on steroids). Not without deformation... which I know you will find a way to snark on.

I know the ISP is poor... yet warp drive merely gets a ship closer to it's location. No worry about tech mismatch. We use what we know. STand SW were are outdated the moment written, and are still even by modern tech (they never utilize drones hardly ever). So one could have the poorest of ISP's and all would be ok merely by using gravity assist for high velocity change by warping back and forth near any body with gravity to achieve any trajectory/speed desired. The nuclear thermal poo rockets are mainly for rendezvous and landing. Once landed better propellant should be sourced locally. Come to think of it, that's something KSP2 should implement. Resource fuel utilization. From asteroid laser. ablation to propellant cracking from rock to poop nuclear thermal... it's all so useful rather than constraining oneself as if there is no more propellant to be had when one can use both astronautand animal poo (provided there are useful low g animals wirh high poo content LOL). With warp of. Course

It's not for propulsion... more for a quick escape boost if swimming underwater. What if the 'waste' was a whole 7 days worth converted into gas thrust? If that is not enough.... I could always rely on different chemistries that allow for higher thrust using reactive chemicals that the humanouds produce that... combust kind of like a water baking soda rocket... only powerful enough to blow exhaust as gas only. Off subject but poop nuclear thermal rockets are viable propulsion. All you need is a renewable food source (plants), energy (sunlight or light lamps) and soil. Plant keeps on giving. Crew keeps on pooping. Viable alternative once the LH runs out. Or RCS if nothing else.

Well... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100414083539.htm https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bacteria-used-to-create-fossil-fuel-alternative/ You may be on to something we can heavily exploit. https://www.google.com/amp/s/futurism.com/purple-photosynthetic-bacteria-poop-power/amp At any rate, it seems that bacteria that can do all that for a humanoid by converting raw excrement into gas would need some sturdy inner tank and a means of compression before letting it all loose. They would have no need for toilets beyond urination. With bodies this unique though, chances are not remote that they may be able to eat stuff we can't, ans probably won't be able to eat some stuff we can without becoming ill.

I guess sometimes cats just want a playmate? It's the feral ones that are total killers... out of necessity no doubt. But even then... animal relationships go beyond predator/prey. I literally saw two cats fighting on youtube and crows watching helping one cat out by attacking the other one LOL.

This seems to be a rather hardwired trait cats have that they do either to the amusement or annoyance of their owners. I read one place on the internet where an owner admitted he had too much to drink one night, and began walking on all fours and jumping around near the corpses of prey the cat left, even swatting them around with his hand. The whole time the cat watched. He said the cat must have been satisfied, since he never left any corpses for him again, but now he leaves them for his girlfiend instead LOL. So this is just a theory, since I don't know what ticks in a cat's brain, but I reason that they do not think as we do, and thinking they do is a fallacy despite their human-like expressions and emotions. My guess? Cats really do not care if we 'appreciate' their 'gift'. The cat is attempting to teach you to hunt or stalk prey like a cat. Once the owner's cat in question saw him seemingly 'get it', perhaps the cat was like, "My work is done here." Just a guess. Have you managed to stop your cat from giving you 'gifts' in other ways? And I cannot be held liable for any weird thing the cat does if you actually do what the owner did LOL. Because every cat is unique afterall. What do you think on this?

Well.... that is a bit overpowered for my setting... but it is gas exhaust nonetheless. I mean if you had a match I am sure it would ignite... I don't reccomend it though.