Spacescifi

Often scifi is created in part because intelligent minds want to 'see' or 'create' a future they will not be around to see. Yet if a civilization lived forever with biological immortality, that gives you all the time you need to make any scifi dream one could think up a reality. Given enough time. For a rather absurd example... if it was your heart's desire to you make a planet that was shaped like a donut, if you worked ASAP with help you might.... (I say this with quite a bit of doubt) manage to do it in a millennium or two. My point is.. with forever ahead one does not need to dream of the future. In fact... their main concern I suppose would be creating the next big, bountiful future. What do you think? I will be honest.... if I had immortality I would study hard, and make every worthwhile scifi dream I ever wanted happen. Because if it is not worthwhile it is not worth doing. It must either be spectacular or incredibly useful. Hopefully both.

QUESTION ONE: Ever heard of the direct fusion drive? It sounds really awesome, like it seems to put VASMIR to shame. Is it better than VASMIR? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Fusion_Drive QUESTION 2: Just curious if one could rapidly magnetize air as it passes through the intakes would that help rocket SSTO's at all? I say this because in 2019 researchers claim they magnetized room temperature air with a circular configuration of lasers! So the obvious scifi route for me is to metaphorically see how far down the rabbit hole goes. I tend to think if we could magnetize air rapidly though the intakes then perhaps we could create an airbreathing engine that that could work equally well at both supersonic and subsonic, since the magnetized air could be slowed to subsonic as needed with magnetic fields, or directed whereever in the engine faster. What do you think? Perhaps we could even have bladeless props? Basicallty like a dyson fan only it magnetized oncoming air and threw it back as exhaust. It would either need to be huge or have uber magnetic fields, meaning it would be cheaper to scale up than down. Actually either way it needs uber magnetsm, it's just that being smaller in radius makes that requirement even higher

Contact has already occurred, is happening, and will occur. It's just not something that using technology will help you with since for all intents and purposes... they are beyond our form of existence. We came on the scene long after they did. We are like ants to them, and they are like gods.

No. Gravity curves the fall. If you launch a rocket and reverse thrust to slow it's orbit... will it fall straight down? No. Not unless you have thrust to slow it's descent and orbital momentum at the same time.. before falling again, but straight. With the underwater bullet, as it slows it will begin curving downward. The only way for it to stop in front of the other person's face would be if they swam toward it, since by the time it has slowed that much it will no longer be level with the person where they originally were.

Is not minimag orion just a magbetic nozzle with fusile or fissionable pellet propellant? Pretty much beats all other nuclear tech as an orbit to orbit craft?

Diposable razor blades are quite an advantange. I bought an old fashioned razor that can be reused and sharpened years back. Made me see why beards were so popular back in the day. Shaving with non-disposable razors is hard and bloody, at least until one passes the learning curve. Even then it is difficult to get lots of the finer hairs off witihout scraping off liberal amounts of skin. I needed bandages at one point! Compared to that... yeah I could wear a beard.

I will have a hard time suppressing laughter the day I see this... Granted... these guys likely wore beard extension wigs... but still. Only kings can get away looking this ridiculous. Back in the day it was considered fashionable. Maybe it will make a comeback?

Thank you very much! I will use that. I suppose if I want maximum thrust with the least ISP I could use liquid mercury... for when the ship is trying to escape hostile fire. As it is right now my scifi spaceships only will use rocketry for hyperspace travel and when a portal is open (hyperspace is a vast tunnel network with massive rooms), since a tweak of the hyperdrive allows for constant acceleration. When the portal is open they must rely on rocketry since the tweak won't work. How does the hyperdrive constant acceleration work? Right before a hyperspace portal opens it creates a highly magnetic point in space. Spaceships can project the magnetic point in front of them, essentially being pulled along as long as they stall the portal until they choose to open the portal. Thus, ships getting up close and personal is far more likely in hyperspace than normal space.

Just wanted to know... for scifi purposes. Here is what I think which you can correct or add to as needed. Nuclear rockets are more efficient, meaning it takes less propellant to reach a given distance... in vacuum. Yet they have less thrust than chemical rockets, which are the means we use to even reach vacuum. I am aware that NTTR attempts to increase thrust with airbreathing, but in space there is no air so that's only for launch to orbit. What I want to know is, if you want high thrust momentarily to get out if a jam in space with a nuclear engine, do you have to have a separate chemical rocket engine for that? Or can you do it by adding redundant nuclear reactors or by modifying the nuclear or chemical mix any conceivable way? No antimatter this time. My original idea was to just to add redundant small nuclear reactors in the hope that configuring it somehow will increase overall thrust. My reasoning is that nuclear reactors are more user friendly than project Orion, and thus more likely to be used if spaceships become more common, especially by mature civillian industry. What do you think?

I still do video conferencing. A beard is not an option. I also still work.

If you just want to explore the galaxy and have scifi FTL, then antimatter thermal with water is not bad. The only drawback is that refueling on the regular is required. Which means every solar system you jump to you will be on the hunt for icy moons to extract water from. Pusher plates wont have to refuel often when they can do interplanetary jumps. Furthermore reaching orbit after landing is doable. Bottom line is a better payload ratio with pusher plates. Which means more mass for science and exploration. Meanwhile any rocket alternative has to be mostly propellant tank, with less room for the whole reason I sent the spaceship to begin with.

I was referring to using inflatable liquid fuel boosters.

Haha... I would hate to fight your fleet in a scifi battle, you would hit me where it actually counts. As for long travel times... they are not an issue for me because I use scifi FTL... even to hop into space above from planet to planet. Yet it only works with 1g planets or higher, so they do have to burn or detonate to reach lower g worlds. As for ejecting from the solar system, that is just an expensive loss. For the most part I won't follow the trope of large crews, battleships will all be AI with the exception of the command vessels, which will be far less in number. To hit a command vessel would require some inside information or massive force in numbers. Since we know that realistic space combat is one dimensional and the killing starts beyond visual range. By the time I can see missiles headed my way it is probably too late to dodge them.

That would make the rings look like a bloated trainwreck. Not aesthetcally pleasing... it is whatever you want scifi to be though.

I only made this thread here so I don't hog the spaceflight thread, since KSP is not ONLY about me and what I want, and I respect that. Other posts matter. Question: Are inflatable chemical rocket boosters possible? If not now I think they are worth researching. Why? Weight. Also reusuabilty My idea of an inflatable rocket booster would be a donut shaped ring hugging the rocket ship until it ran out of fuel and was dropped off. If some of it was still inflated it could survive the fall. The rocket nozzles per modern tech would have to be hard, but if future tech allows for inflatable fabrics that are as heat and pressure resistant as solids... it's game on I say. Even better.... an inflatable rocket nozzle could be designed to expand for altitude compensation, which a solid booster cannot do. The other plus is if the entire booster is inflatable, you could store several in small spaces, which makes it easy to just fill the booster up with water and and whatever antimatter or nuclear tech on hand to boost off an Earth rated planet relatively quickly. Faster than actually building a booster from scratch. What do you think?

The easiest most feasible drive is old boom boom (AKA Project Orion). An easy scifi upgrade is antimatter bomb or even antimatter catalyzed pure fusion bombs, both of which leave considerably less fallout than a nuke. I even figured out that the pusher plate can retract the pistons in far enough if placed outside the hull, so that the ship looks like a bullet and can place rocket boosters on the hull for liftoff, and drop them later, extend the pistons and plate and do the detonations. I figured it wise to retract the plate at launch so the rocket exhaust plume won't burn the pistons.

Good point. So understanding how stuff works in a limited way is not a substitute for a specific working knowledge of the stuff. In other words... the ancients understood that magnetism existed, and even made a primitive rotating jet engine device (greeks or romans can't remember), but neither had the 'perfect storm' of technology saturation to create computers and rocketry, which complement each other. I also think you are right. Better to explore how life changes with new tech than how or why it works. Since we have no clue. Indeed.... researchers coined the term 'dark matter' because they do not know what it is. They suppose that it acts like matter....but it is not present in the sense of being detectable. My guess is that whatever, if ever, thing that allows man to do scifi stuff, will be something that will be beyond even what we can imagine now. So perhaps I should just dump extrapolations of future tech and set some clear power limits. Like a good measure of tech limits is their destructive capacity. What can they blow up using their own tech and natural resourcses only? Type 1 Civilization: A bomb with several kilometers blast. That's us. Type 2 Civ: A bomb that can scale to planet cracking but requires tons of antimatter. Type 3: ???? Perhaps the best indicator is not so much power, even though it is required, but fundamental force manipulation. It seems the more we know the more we can effect, like we are running ramshackle all over the EM force,.. gravity not so much, and same goes for the weak and strong forces. Would not be surprised if there was a 5th or even 6th force we are totally unaware of. Yes... and the easiest way to do that is with long tethers attached to habitation modules separated from the ship that we can reel out or in. I have not forgotten simple solutions to complex problems and will use them in my scifi. I actually do not require constant acceleration per se... I just wanted to see how practical it was... or if it all using extrapolations of tech.

Yeah... that's hard. But it had me thinking. Could we? Some day? Some way? Seems we can solve most rocketry problems by just throwing enough antimatter at it. What about ion engines? The problem is: The term "ion thruster" by itself usually denotes the electrostatic or gridded ion thrusters.[citation needed] Ion thrusters create very small levels of thrust compared to conventional chemical rockets but achieve very high specific impulse, or propellant mass efficiencies, by accelerating their exhausts to very high speed. However, ion thrusters carry a fundamental price: the power imparted to the exhaust increases with the square of its velocity while the thrust increases only linearly. So the question is: Can we ever increase the thrust of ion engines to 1g? Like if we put 50 kliograms of antimatter into it? And if we did, would not the ship have to be huge to deal with the waste heat? Or otherwise be a small ship with massive radiatiors? Perhaps the answer is this: No... unless you have an engine unobtanium material that can survive the massive amount of waste heat energy required to propel the ship at 1g without vaporizing it. Or the answer is... yes, a small ship with truly massive several kilometer radiators could do it. Or... only if the ship dumps heat into propellant refueled constantly, which would imply massive rocket fleet staging to get one or few ships where they actually want to go. Impractical. Perhaps you can either shed light or correct?

Really unobtanium is not required. So long as orbital speed is matched the speed difference will only be whayever it takes to scoop up the ice. Which won't be more than the nets can handle. And imagining future tech is arguably a fool's errand, since we CANNOT predict the future 100% accurately... and it is good we can't too I might add, since that would either mean we have no choice or can make whatever we wanted happen. Neither scenario sounds good, as absolute power corrupts humans, and not having any freedom to chose our outcome makes humans angry and sad. Mixing tech levels is a given anytime we use known quantities with unknown ones (fiction). Personally, I still prefer the nets, as nanobots like everything else need fuel. A net may be primitive. But it also works. On the other hand if propellant or ships are hard to come by, then the laser ablattion to station in orbit is not a bad idea at all. Indeed... the station could feed itself daily that way, since it would be located near the rings anyway. Just send a few scout ships out to get zap happy and send the ice blowing their own steam like dumb rockets.

As per the usual, I will view this from a scifi perspective, notwithstanding reality as needed. Saturn's rings have a lot of ice I have read. Ice makes water, and water is like space gold. You can drink it, or use it to propel an antimatter thermal rocket if you have one. Now it is a given that mining Saturn's rings make little sense as of the present day. The only way it will is when we have enough space assets out there that can actually put the ice to use. Same applies to a scifi setting... which plays fast and loose with reality well enough that travel times are far shorter. Reality? 6 years to get to Saturn or less... especially if you have an antimatter beam rocket. Question 1: is mining saturn's rings wrong? Just because we can does it mean we should? Maybe I should make a parody of Murphy's law and call it... Doom's Law: If something can be done, it SHOULD be done. Furthermore... besides destroying Saturn's pretty rings over time, is there any side effects that would be bad for us back on Earth? I can't think of any. Question 2: How does a vessel mine the rings most efficiently? A big catcher net and reel in the haul like school of fish? If there is a better, more efficient way, I am all ears. Thanks.

Really enlightening. Know what this tells me? That I really have to think outside the box writing scifi, or just accept the problems inherent to our newness to spaceflight. You wanna know the ironic thing? Even if we had a scifi constant acceleration drive that needed no refueling whatoever and also had an FTL warp drive that warped space at a LY per hour.... that does not mean you SHOULD reach Proxima Centauri in about 4 hours. Know why? Health. See... given how detrimental prolonged weightlessness is, I am estimating that for every hour of weightless spaceflight at warp, the ship would have to drop out of warp and accelerate at 1g for 2 hours and exercise hard to combat the body not having gravity for the previous hour. By the time they reach proxima centauri about 16 hours will have passed, adding the 4 weightless warp hours to the time spent accelerating at 1g for crew health dropped out of warp. Once they reach the solar system they will have to spend about 16 hours decelerating or maybe less... it all depends on what trajectory is needed to reach the destination. See... adding any reality to scifi space travel makes it complicated, even when we add scifi tech that is like god-mode cheating in a videogame. Of course... if crew health matters not, you can get anywhere faster, shaving days off your travel time. And crewless cargo frieghters would have the fastest travel times ever. EDIT: In addition to all that, crew will need eye protection, since flakes of metal, paint etc float around in the ship... even with fans sucking it up, it won't get it all. Somebody needs to make spacecrew PPE gear!

1. Magnetic shenanigans are possibe, but not simply magnetic. I have read that magnetizing air with only a ma gneticfield is really hard, but it can be more easily done with lasers fired in a circular way. Magnetohydrodynamics and plasma might help too. https://physicsworld.com/a/optical-centrifuge-magnetizes-molecular-gas/ 2. They tried this already. Look up Myrabo's lightcraft. It worked great going up, but past enough hundreds of meters and the laser begins to lose focus due to distance, and the craft topples over, which is bad (since that will mean it will fall out the sky). To make it work would require zepplins tetheted to the ground to fire lasers at all the up until the air ran out. Distance is a problem that can be engineered away. The funding is not there though.

Scifi is largely inspired by the navy tradition, with large crew sizes supporting various roles with 24/7 shifts for combat readiness. Merchant ships can get by with far fewer crew as all they have to worry about is gettimg from point A to point B. The environment of space though changes both of these, at least if using real rocket science. Either small multi-skilled crew or large crews of specialists is optimal I believe. In other words, you launch up a shuttle of engineers, a shuttle of cooks, a shuttle of station operators, a shuttle of medical staff etc, then dock them and unload them on the orbiting mothership. Why? Getting to orbit is expensive. It is never a resource cheap thing to do. So if and when a launch occurs, efficiency is key. Long story short, the only ships that should fit scifi tropes are either military or city ships. Merchant ships won't fit the trope. Also given how harsh space actually is, I tend to think that crews won't serve for long. In other words, 6 months in space seems harsh, especially if they have FTL. If using limited acceleration rocketry and scifi FTL, I think reasonably short tours of service would be appropriate. It is spaceflight after all. I would give a crew 2 months tops before swapping them out with a new crew. For health reasons. And also food supply reasons too. The less food carried the more propellant instead, which means ship can travel farther. Anything I missed or you wish to clarify? You may discuss.

So if the mass flow is more normal (liquid hydrogen propellant) but it looks like a pointy plume.... that's basically death ray exhaust right? The kind of thing you get when you supercharge your propellant with generous amounts of antimatter no?

So I have read several things about real rocket plumes in space: 1. Higher velocity plumes tend to be elongated. 2. The more mass in the plume the more likely it becomes visible in space. 3. Glowing plumes are'nt bad if there is a lot of mass propellant flow. If not... then your nozzle will likely overheat. Unless you are using a magnetic nozzle. Question: Is there ANY reason at all why a plume in space in real life would be pointy? I mean there is no atmosphere to constrict the plume at all... unless they got a +50 tesla magnetic field compressing the plume... I dunno. Like: Instead of the more core like this: I assume that the physics hold true no matter what rocket propellant we use. Whether futuristic AM thermal with water or hydrogen, or a more conventional nuclear thermal rocket with hydtogen propellant. You may correct or add to this as you wish. Have a great day!