Spacescifi

"Babe... I love ya, but I rather stay home because I'm tired." What happens next? Does she give me a death stare? Or pressure or nag me until I do? Or just go without me? Realistically? I would go anyway. If I chose her then I want to spend time with... no matter what Im doing.

Nah... the ship would probably vaporize just like with pure metallic hydrogen fueled rockets. They could do a nuclear pulse pusher plate style though.

Often it is fun to say that many spacecraft that have not been built are merely engineering problems, not something that known science will prohibit. So what are the practical design challenges of taking the nuclear pulse orion concept and fusing that with a submarine? For a basic proof of concept, let's say the proposed vessel will carry the same payload as the Sea Dragon project, 550 tons. The concept I have in mind is to build the vessel in a shipyard, and then have it use onboard nuclear reactors to propel itself through the water from the sea docks until it is far enough away to launch. Once it is it tilts it's nose upward above the water and detonates a bomb below the pusher plate for the inital launch. Getting to orbit using nuclear pulse is arguably the easy part. Getting back? Possible, but only by using water propellant and nuclear thermal rocketry to land on the ocean. I suspect air augmentation intakes added to the rocket would also help, perhaps placed downward? So that as the vessel fell from the sky it's intakes would gulp or suck up the air before feeding it to the nuclear water thermal rocket sea landing engines. What do you have to say on this? Wait a minute... is it not possible to do an NTR underwater propelled sub? It sounds feasible, not sure how practical that is for thrust over just using propeller blades underwater instead.

Nice.. so there can be positives to human stupidity. They die so that those who are wise won't do whatever they did and survive.

If life has taught me anything it is that humans often show a lack of fear of their own demise, which often leads to it. Alls well until... it isn't. Time and again. Should have listened.

Hahaha... that is rather telling! Personally, I consider Enterprise lower than Voyager. Those two capped off a great TNG/DS9 run with many forgettable episodes. Dealing with humans is fine, but adding the bells and whistles of humanoids either can be interesting or even parody if done right. It saddens me that THIS version of Gowron never was on any Star Trek TV, just a game.

Yeah.. they had their differences though. Aliens: B5 aliens acted like real human individuals from human cultures and were hardly monolithic. DS9 aliens were monolithic and consequently more or less more alien than 'alien' behavior in B5... with Vorlons being an obvious exception. Those guys were weird. The Shadows were just death incarnate with a chaos agenda. The Cardassians of DS9 reminded me a lot of the Centauri. Just more monolithic. Villians: B5 had a lot of them, but also tended to kill them off. Whereas DS9 had less and tended to keep villains alive for as long as possible. I must say that B5 never had a Gul Dukat... though Londo came close... but ultimately Londo was never a true villain. Dukat was. He had his 'good guy' moments though. He loved his daughter. Yet ultimately... after she died Dukat had no more facades left to play... mentioning her briefly.... and later succumbing to the evils he had suppressed, if only because Ziyal gave him unconditional love despite his glaring faults. After that he went downhill. Going downhill....

Wow Vanamonde! You usually go out of your way to be kind and polite. No pity for this series eh LOL? For what it's worth, I think they screwed it up. I don't know how they can produce shows with equally interesting characters and plots like DS9 but screw up royally here. I blame it on greed... since the pilot episode was lackluster due to the use of a certain character as little more than an emotionless object of male gratification. If directors thought the lure of libido was the way to lure potential fans, they were wrong. Fans like that will come but won't stay, as there are so many other options for that. Honestly I think Trek animation is a better choice, but it should be taken seriously. Like if they merely used STO graphics and improved the character models a bit for realism along with voice acting... people would watch! Above all... special effects would be so much cheaper! We could do a lot of zero gravity scenes that we normally do not see in live action TV. Actually... that's how they should have done Enterprise. NASA... with warp drive. No shields, phasers, or photon torpedos. No artificial gravity either. Just pure space exploration and human cleverness and ingenuity being the only thing that saves them... with a Vulcan 'told you so' rescue every now and then.

Earth... but if we are counting other ones Titan. Super cold thick atmosphere, so thick it has underwater pressure just walking the surface. It would be a nuclear airplane's dream! Goodbye engine overheating, not going to happen on Titan. Just don't turn it off. It will freeze over.

Um... bits of thermodynamics are followed rigorously (gotta have big flashy explosions) but that is unsurprising.

Yess... I remember that fiction can date itself badly when they rely on theories that are little more than educated speculation, or guesses. Like even the first Marvel Avengers movie has Loki ask Thor how much 'dark energy' did it take to travel to Earth since the Bifrost bridge was crushed by Thor movies ago. It's rather odd to ask, since a race as advanced as Asgard should know very well what dark matter or energy is. It would no longer be a mystery to them. Nor would exotic energy or matter be called that likely.

The tribesmen would not care as much... but they would be miffed over not having WIFI because someone messed it up with no sysadmin to fix it

I think you are saying that ton for ton, you will never get MORE than what a ton is made of via it's components. You can add energy to it in the form of acceleration or heat, but that requires taking energy from somewhere too. It's like the chicken or egg paradox.... only much harder. Since: 1. We get photons from mass either reflecting or emitting it. 2. So the only way I can see mass coming from photons is to have a massive amount of them colliding in an organized fashion. Basically like a very organized big bang, since photons flying willy nilly won't help to collide them to create mass. And going from there who knows.... I was not around when the universe was born. Edit: Maybe light is it! Maybe we really are made of photons! That is actually funny! So... if you deconstruct all mass to it's most basic form... we are lifeless radiant energies. How about that LOL.

So I roll up into my favorite ice cream parlor amd learn I cannot have my favorite chocolate nut dipped waffle cones anymore. All because of COVID-19! This has to stop... in the ever so timely words words of Quark, "The line must be drawn here!" If I were a billionaire I would be pouring billions of dollars into a cure... this is... upsetting me.

Does it require absurd power requirements? Then again... it might not. If not, then we may STILL not have sustained fusion, but we can sure as well do pulse propulsion via whatever new subatomic shenanigans we get up to... without nuclear perhaps. What about energy into matter?

Very nice. I think human technology advances not only interationally, but also based on access. Like once we get access to the gas giants with our nuclear machines, THEN our space propulsion systems will advance much farther. Like you said, resources can either grow or inhibit tech advancement.

I was wrong, they have not converted any energy to mass yet apparently. There was an experiment in 2014 that basically was a proof of concept or something. https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2018-03-underway.amp Now they are underway to attempt to play God on a small scale and create mass from not nothing... but something. Because light is something. All light comes from mass, so it does not seem too weird that we may be able to invert the process somehow. Basically this is like taking a piece of fried chicken and turing it into a hatchable egg. Hard. Even seems like straight up god-tier LOL.

Hmmm... what if I had a few tons of antimatter at my disposal... or is it time to throw in the towel and admit defeat already? LOL.

Some theorize that the universe was created through a process of converting energy into mass. Einstein's famous equation apparently shows that mass and energy are interchangeable. So you can convert mass into energy, or energy into mass (harder to do apparently). I have read that human science has on very small scales managed to turn energy into mass. Main Question: How much solar energy would it take to convert it to a ton of liquid hydrogen? How long would it take to refuel at say... one light minute from the sun? Eight light minutes (Low Earth orbit)? Let's presume that we have scifi tech that can flawlessly convert 100% of the solar energy absorbed via black scifi solar panels into liquid hydrogen through an energy to mass converter. This is at best, a scifi solution to not having enough propellant to get around the solar system. I would bet that it could even work with starlight, but starlight is less intense and would take much longer to fuel up. It goes with without saying that the closer one gets to the sun the faster they can refuel. One could even coat the ships hull with the scifi panels and it would be immune to all lasers and radiant energies. At worst it's LH tanks would burst and spill LH everywhere. What do you think? Bonus Questions: What kind of fundamental force manipulation would the ability to convert energy DIRECTLY into mass 100% imply? All four forces manipulated? Or just some of them?

A bigger scoop? If this is anything like the massive rad fins imply, what... an epic magnetic field that stretches hundreds of kilometers ahead deflecting stuff? At some point this reality mod became a monstrousity of a vessel... now that it has rad fins longer than some countries and magnetic fields that stretch as far. So yeah... it probably could work... but it turns into such a station sized monstrousity that it hardly looks anything like scifi. Might as well call it Rad-ship, which while kinda cool sounding, betrays the fact that the ship's glowing red rad fins dwarf it in size by a factor of a 1000×. In other words, from a distance the ship will appear tiny compared to it's massive glowing radiator wings.

Hey.. you gotta break a few eggs to make a setting remotely plausible. Another solution would be a fictional gas that literally converts heat into solid mass. And as you probably are aware, it would take a while before the gas room was chock solid of some solid mass (let's make it ice). Since energy into mass perfect conversion no heat losses is fiction for us, but it would also be very handy for such a vessel.

It's not contrived. It's real IF you stick with known science. In scifi you can ignore that like most popular media SF do... big shiny spaceship without massive rad fins that can FTL warp accross the galaxy. Where does the waste heat go? Who knows? Maybe an alternate dimension, since portaling it to other worlds would nuke everything on the other end of the portal gate. Make stuff up. It's necessary at times in scifi. And I never said I was using a photon drive in my Scifi. I rather make up stuff that is more user friendly.

Going through several bus load tons of antimatter is not exactly propellantless... but I digress. That is the kind of power needed. Roughly. Actual calculations may be farther or closer to this, but it's in that ball park. Basically more than enough to energy to create a nuclear winter on Earth, or make brand new craters miles across that dwarf anything seen. For that matter, that is enough energy to glass some smaller countries entirely... literalky burning them to ash with a push of a button.

Even 1% waste heat requires VAST radiators with 1g photon rockets. That is about the most energy inefficient drive known theoretically. We are talking perphaps 100 kilometer or longer radiator fins, lwhich cannot be afford to get hit because then you cannot do 1g anymore. The bussard ram jet last I read does not have enough hydrogen in interstellar space to make it practical. Near a star it could work great. Either way... 'fast IRL' is too slow sometimes for what a writer needs. Moden tech and feasible plans is barely human rated for travel within our own system. Trying to reach the next with only it is pushing the achievment bar rather high I think.

I never mentioned one. I mentioned a scifi constant 1g drive with no propellant. I added no details. I know it's fiction... and I also know it is NOT a photon drive which has great challenges.