Spacescifi

No true relationship stays static. People either drift apart or draw closer over time. And if it is a static, unchanging relationship, something or someone may not want to draw closer or... they only want the other person around for reasons that are'nt true friendship. Basically using. This is not always the case, just some of the time.

So I created a scifi drive and to make it less overpowered and more competive with more realistic options in the same universe (antimatter) I changed it's thrust time to 60 min max before needing to be recharged at a station. Here are the details: Drive can thrust up to 6g or less up to 1 hour. Two ways of recharging: Go to a moon based recharge station (same distance as our moon to homeworld). It only works on the home moon stations due to the nature of the drive (lunar unbtanium charge technobabble). Or go within 30 kilometers of a ship with the same unobtanium drive and set your drive to recharge mode. Whichever ship within the 30 kilometer radius that has the least charge will draw upon the charge of a ship with more until it's charge is full. Thrusting depletes charge at an equal rate no matter the acceleration rate (6g max or below). FTL: Spaceships also have jump drives that allow them to jump within low planetary orbit of any celestial body with gravity of 1g or higher. So for our solar system that means Saturn, Earth, and Jupiter are easy places to reach in orbit, but everywhere else is harder. Question 1: Provided you use no other fuel source but the unobtanium charge and jump drive, how far can you make it in our solar system and still have enough charge to get back to the moon station for recharge? What places are easy and what places are time consuming to reach? EDIT: I suppose if you wanted to be clever you could instail a maglev rail on the moon and launch spaceships off it at ridicoulous speed to get speed charge free... so long the trajectories line up. It essentially makes the moon the most valuable space asset in the entire solar system. Question 2: The only competing scifi drive to this that is not overpowered is a mix of gravity cancellation and antimatter thermal rocketry, beam core, or pusher plate bomb drives . Cancelling out gravity makes getting to space way easier and rockets more efficient. For that matter ships can use airbreathing engines to coast into space, minus the orbital velocity since gravity cancellation is in play. Even space rails connected to the planet and spacestations tethered to it in space all exist because of gravity cancellation. So the question is... provided this tech also gets the same FTL jump drive that allows for jumping to low orbit of worlds with 1g or higher, can it compete with the unobtanium charge drive? Like if both drives were selling, which would outsell the other? I mean on the one hand, AM goes boom if magnetic containment is lost for the anti-iron, but it also can outlast the unobtanium drive for constant thrust time, assuming it throttles down or has a lot of propellant to burn. And antimatter resupply depots can be remade anywhere there is iron ore (a lengthy and expensive process makes it anti-iron), unlike the unobtanium charge which only can be had at one system in the known universe None like it. So which drive outsells the other? Gravity cancelkation with AM rocketry, AM beam core, AM airbreathing, and pusher plates? Or the one hour thrust up to 6g or below unobtanium charge drive?

I am not surprised. German culture is renowned for both efficiency and punctuality. It's the same reason they were able to hold their own, at least for a while before losing in two world wars. Every culture has something they excel at.

What? If you want to attract a certain type of friend then you must BE that type of friend first. If you want to marry a certain ideal of a lady then you must try your best to live up to that same ideal as a guy. Like attracts like. That's the best I can give without violating forum rules.

Interesting.... that is quite good, but the irony is my scifi hyperdrive won't drop any spaceships off near any mass without a surface gravity of 1g or greater. And by near, I mean dropping out of hyperspace into low planetary orbit of a given celestial body. All the planets in our solar system with the exception of Saturn and Jupiter have less than 1g gravity. What does that mean? It means we could drop off near Saturn or Jupiter with ease, or even drop off near the sun (suicidal by the way), but to go anywhere else we would have to burn propellant. Which means I would need entirely different ships for intetplanetary orbit to orbit trips as proposed to the launch ships we have discussed at length. I know the options for that... and even with AM the performance is not that great.... unless wait time is not a problem. Of course an AM pusher plate changes that but I digress. I guess it's not bad if I really want to write hard scifi. I suppose they could find a moon around Saturn or Jupiter and refuel a water AM thermal rocket in good time.

Nice. So a proper scifi SSTO then? Takeoff to orbit, reentry and with enough propelllant left for landing? What is really interesting is that this ship is like a jack of all trades exploration ship for Earth worlds. But if flying to lower g worlds like Mars, the moon, or elsewhere you really can't refuel your water supply easily like on Earth. Which logically means that spaceships FOR Earth worlds ONLY fly to Earth worlds, and Mars ships are designed only for mars etc. Simply because exoplanet resource refueling is the only choice a near empty rocket has. Sill easier than mining and processing metal ores offworld. Want to trade cargo? Rendezvous in orbit with Earth ship and have it go back to Earth.

Interesting. So this nicely explains how specifc impulse works. The harder a rockets 'throws' exhaust the less propellant it takes to to travel a distance. The less hard a rocket throws propellant the more propellant is needed to cover the same distance. Thrust is a measure of how much mass a rocket is throwing out. So that is why an AM rocket can travel farther with less propellant than larger rocket with more propellant. Still interesting though.

So you are saying that this ship is smaller and,weighs less than Elon's starship and is better... only because of AM? Wow.

One that is quite dramatic and clever is Exam. Thankfully conditions are not as bad as that movie. In it 8 job canidates seek to get a job with a wealthy genetics company. At least one candidate says that he is sick like another candidate, and implies either he or another candidate will die sooner or later without the well paying job. Ever heard the saying 'A man's true colors show when he is tested'? Well that is very true in his movie, and in a lot of ways it is relatable to people during this pandemic. Right now we show who we truly are, for better or worse. Which is great actually... giving us pause to adjust for whatever comes next for us to do or cope with. Any other movies you recommend related to viruses? NOTE: This movie is like PG-13. There is nothing here gory and no sex, but there is some brief violence. And some language, but overall it is tame compared to shows today (considering it was a 2009 movie). Everything that happens is natural to the character arcs and not forced simply for putting content in.

Say a nuclear space faring civilization does not want to pollute and damage the environment if propellant leaks. This does matter because: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2019/10/14/20913959/rocket-launch-environment-cleanup-soil-water-pollution So what is the most enviromentally friendly propellant in case of a propellant leak? That will get you to orbit with nuclear thermal rockets.... with airbreathing turbojets if necessary. Water? Hmmm... don't think so. LH? Maybe? How bad would liquid.hydrogen pollute the soil?

I am concerned that saltwater AM thermal won't be efficient enough to loft a 100 ton payload to orbit.... and if it did, the ship would be big.... probably bigger than Elon's Starship. Splitting into better fuel processing seems inevitable. How does one go about the process of filtering out alien fish, crabs, or octopus that get sucked up up while sucking water out thr ocean? What? Let machines do it? At some point I am betting the crew will have to roll up their sleeves and get the pipe and clean it. So not only must their plumbing work, it must be designed for ease of cleaning by the crew.

Thank you. Do any of these work with plain saltwater? Because refueling by splitting hydtogen will take time. Hours or days. Like I know I know the payload will be small. It is ironic really. Using a big rocket to filled witu water to lift six crew off a planet! No such thing as small shuttlecraft IRL using rocketry! Because of several factorsm

Haha... at this point all I see is that known quanities of stuff we have and could make if we had more (antimatter) don't fit the bill for my scifi. For example, my scifi will explore civilizations where space travel is common as air passenger jet flight. Interplanetary and interstellar in reasonable time requires totally fictional stuff I make up for plot. Insert fictional drive here, but not without rules and limits. For example, the hyper drive can put a ship near any planet with 1g or greater. Anything less they can only thrust via constant acceleration to. Meaning it would take a few hours to reach the moon, but they could reach Mars in about a minute or so... just have to find what represents it in the huge hyperspace room first. Which is easy if they have done it before. Hyperspace is a system of tunnels (pathways to other solar systems) and rooms (what represents a solar system). Okay...what kind of plume should I expect to show the reader? I want scientific accuracy there at least. Is it a long plume of white steam? Or just bluish white fiery exhaust? Or both?

Hmmm. I do appreciate your effort to help but.... this is beyond my comprehension, and even though I could figure it out it seems theoretical, meaning we don't know if magnetic monopoles exist or if they can. Same goes for the Q-balls. Unlike antimatter. Overall, orion's arm gets far more into detail than I ever will in my scifi. I am far more interested in how technology effects the characters. Meaning I like to explore the implications of a said technology on societiy more than how it works.

Yes. Planets are fairly common... barren, lifeless rocky planets and planets full of gas. Earth? She's one of a kind. Are we the only intelligent life in the universe? No. But it won't be what popular science expects it to be.

1. Yes. And I still chose to go further since apparently modern technology will only allow a rocket to takeoff to orbit and reenter at leisure if it has minimal to no payload, and what payload there is is for ISRU equipment to crack LH and LOX from ocean water upon landing on a beach. Maybe a nuclear reactor would help, I dunno, but the scifi dream of a spaceship that can come and go simply by refueling off water and taking off again is farfetched and difficult. But not impossible... just might not be worth it due to small payloads. 2. I am well read and know about the uranium salts for the Nuclear Salt Water Rocket. I only chose saltwater because it is abundant, and I know it is a poor propellant choice. Why do you think I chose AM thermal to augment it? Because I figured that nuclear would not havd the needed thrust to make a difference about reaching orbit. But people are aware of the vast power of AM. Now assuming even that is not good enough because saltwater is that poor of a get to orbit propellant, onboard machines might take days or weeks to split LH and LOX from ocean water to fill propellant tanks. And then, with AM it surely would get back to space. Just takes days or weeks of propellant processing. That's all. See... I am interested in a spaceship that can land on an alien Earth, refuel with water, and takeoff to orbit again. 3. Perhaps. But the limits of modern science have forced my hand. So I am just leaving it to the future to figure out the details of anti-iron. Even so, I am sure there is a way to get full annihilation of it... even if we don't know how. Scifi need not explain how to do what even scientists can't do. If I could do that I should be richer than Elon.

Yes... but my ideal version of a scifi spaceship can takeoff to orbit and land on an Earth world repeatedly. Based on my accumulated knowledge so far, the best option would be an antimatter thermal saltwater rocket. Basically have a rocket that is mostly water tank, with some payload and crew space to spare, and a sufficient amount of anti-iron suspended in magnetic fields to add to the water propellant as needed. Takeoff to orbit. Reentry and land on a beach by the ocean. Get crew to put a big vacuum hose into the water. Suck up enough water to fill your propellant tanks. Launch up to orbit again. Getting to other worlds fast I already let fiction take care of for plot... I only need real sciencs for launch, orbit, reentry and landing. Question: Will the rocket exhaust plume be a bluish white flame mixed with steam? Or will it just be one EPIC steam rocket?

Mini-mag works best in space. In air heat will conduct and probanly damage the magnetic metal lattice nozzle. So.... based on your and my info, the best ship we could build is... two. An orion launch with a minimag attached for the ride. Released in orbit, whike if the orion crew wants to land it can detach SpaceX starship, which comes as standatd for orions.

When I think of Mars colonization many words come to mind, but the one that screams loudest besides NO is PERCHLORATES. Martian soil has that at levels that are considered industrial or worse. Long story short, the dirt is toxic, the plants you grow from it will be toxic unless you can filter out the toxins, and there is no air to breath. Matt Damon should have never survived in his Mars movie. And his plants should have been yellow, as he did not bother to dilter out the toxins. I have seen plants grown in the equavalent of martian soil. They are yellow. So Antiartica is a lot easier to colonize, besides being close. No sunlight? Nuclear reactors. Problem solved.

What are you worth? What is your value? In life it is all too easy to devalue or debase valuable things, whether people or otherwise Most of my life I measured my value by how others saw me, and other times by how I saw myself. Truth is, without ever realizing it, I and others at times value themselves based off whatever or whoever they value most. In this time of crisis, I have had time to reflect on my life, and hopefully so have you. From now on, my resolve is to be more valuable, by becoming more like the person I wish I was. Which is also the same kind of person that one who cares a lot about me wants me to be anyway. It will take work, but work never ever was a problem for me. Distraction on the other hand... but I digress. For that matter, here is some awesome music to inspire anyone to be... valuable. For me this song represents a moment the fog lifts metaphorically and I have what can be called a moment of clarity. And provided I keep the 'fog' out... stuff WILL start to happen. Don't worry. It's all good stuff!

Just wondering... for scifi. I know antimatter is by no means an 'I can do anything I want' card, I just want to know as many applications for it as possible. The scenario: We figure out how to process antimatter (anti-iron) in bulk and store it with magnetic fields. A processing facility takes 2 months on average to produce 1 ton of antimatter. On average it takes $30,000 to produce one ton of antimatter every two months. So what are the uses of this anti-iron? My guesses: I may be wrong but you will let me know. 1. Super long lived batteries thanks to anti-iron? I dunno. I do know that a magnetic field to hold the anti-iron must be made so as not to disrupt any electronic device utilizing it for power. 2. Supercharged ion craft. I still doubt if ion planes xan exist since plasma thrust is weak, and you would need colossal wing intakes to generate much thrust through mass of air alone. Planes and rockets work so well because they are combusting heavy fluids out the back so hard that the thrust exceeds any weight they have. That's all I got... what about you?

Call me crazy but I say there IS a way to make an atmospheric launched Medusa using nukes or AM bombs. Step 1: Make the large catcher net. It's going to be HUGE with tethers. Step 2: Attach tethers. From the net to the sides of the spaceship. Step 3: Attach an array of booster rockets to the edges of the net. A Step 4: Launch the net via the boosters, while the net tugs at the ship which remains on the ground, while fully stretched, the grounded ship launches a a nuclear missile to detonate in an airburst high above it where the net is hovering. Before the nuclear missile is launched the booster rockets detach and fly away from the net. Then before the net can fall back to Earth the nuke detonates, and in strange display, the ship on the ground is yanked upward as if by some massive balloon... propelled by NUCLEAR explosions. We could do it... and my details and methods may be off, but this IS an engineering problem we CAN solve.

My point stil remains. Space is one place where less is not more, it is only less, and more is always more in space. Less stuff you can launch at once the less capable your space program is. Just think. If we could launch aircraft carrier weighted spacecraft into orbit then we could turn it into an impromtu spacestation in orbit... or we could load it with SSTO shuttles. Or we could load it with propellant and use it as an orbital gas station for spacecraft. The possibiilities are not endless, but they are many. Indeed, aircraft carrier weighted spacecraft could even land on the moon since gravity is so weak. Could make a sprawling moon base. Would not even try doing Earth reentry with it though, not unless deorbited piecemeal.

As a scifi writer, 'best spaceship' means anything that can fulfill the Star Trek mandate: "To seek new life and civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before." Granted, I concede that I WILL use make believe for crossing interstellar and interplanetary distances in a reasonable amounts of time, but the STL propulsion methods need not be make-believe. As for my methods, the point of launching the Orion off the maglev at 500 mph is twofold: 1. Do not destroy the launch site. 2. Save propellant for when I really need it... like refueling my stage 2 detachable SpaceX Starship when it comes to redock in orbit after a planetary mission. To be clear, my spaceship ideal is as if we wedded project Orion to SpaceX. Two ships in one. It uses the best of both, since it can lift far more than a SpaceX Starship ever could, and also can do SSTO landings via SpaceX Starship and take off back to orbit which Project Orion would have serious difficulty to pull off if at all in one piece. Minimag I have heard positive things about, but it seems to me to be more a space only engine. Remember my idea of 'best spaceship' as a scifi writer is NOT the ship that has ultra efficient engines that can crawl from Earth to Mars in 6 months. Scifi solves that quicker with make-believe. I am interested in going to places of interest... Earth worlds, asteroid mines, Mars worlds, gas giant ballon gas refinery stations, stuff like that. The only place where real physics comes into play is where it CAN solve the problem of liftoff, orbit, and reentry. Which is exactly what my idea of 'best spaceship' was designed to do. Regarding the minimag VS project Orion discussion, I tend to favor Orion since Orion can put more tons in orbit in a single launch than minimag can. Minimag I wonder if it can even survive launch using the minimag engines. They are magnetic, and shooting out fission or fusion exhaust with a magnetic nozzle in the air might degrade the magnetic nozzle since air conducts heat. Vacuum won't have that issue, but I digress. As for antimatter powered orion pusher plates VS antimatter rockets, again I favor the pusher plates because they can put more tons in orbit. The more tons a space program can put in orbit with ease, the easier space travel becomes period I think. Since then they have more resources to allocate for stuff like reentry and visiting other worlds... all in low Earth orbit or close

It seems to me that the best we could do is mix project Orion with SpaceX Starship. Basically launch the thing off of a superheavy half tube maglev rail into the air at 500 mph, then do the pusher plate detonations to orbit. Why maglev? Easy repeat launches. To get back we could use Elon's starship as the second stage for the Orion and deorbit and land. If we had antimatter bombs it would simply mean that we could launch ever heavier, larger things into orbit. Pusher plate drive section just stays in orbit, waiting to redock with starship. Staging is NEVER going away it seems... and if it does, it won't look like a rocket. And if we wanted to be really fancy, we could land starship on a maglev runway to slow it down like a plane.