KSK

True. I do wonder how significant relativistic effects will be given that it still takes several months to get up to a decent fraction of lightspeed, even at a constant 1g acceleration but the calculations involved are beyond my ken. I think space dust, micrometeoroids and the like are one of those things that you either assume that your protagonists can deal with using available technology, or you assume that they luck out and don't get clobbered by a rock that's big enough to kill them. Or a mixture of the two - assume they can deal with dust particles and small rocks (and throw in an explanation of why if you like) but then assume they miss the big rocks. Is this entirely satisfactory? Probably not if you're looking to create a very detailed and plausible setting, but it's a useful narrative convenience because 'death by space rock' is a really lame way to kill off a character. "So what exactly did happen to the enemy flagship, Captain?" "Uh - we picked up a short duration, high intensity radiation source on the edge of the Oort cloud, Admiral. As far as we can tell, they hit a magnitude eleven object on the way in. Feel a bit sorry for the blighters to tell the truth." "At least it was quick." "Aye, sir." Edit. And sometimes it’s better to use a bit of smoke and mirrors in a story anyway. Acknowledge the problem, provide a reasonably plausible (at least on first sight) answer and don’t worry about the details because digging into the details focuses a disproportionate amount of attention on them. Using the current thread as an example, it would be weird to give a lot of page time to describing a detailed and setting-consistent way of avoiding or mitigating Oort cloud debris at relativistic speeds - and then hand waving away the problem of getting to relativistic speeds with a throwaway ‘assume we have a constant acceleration propellantless drive.’

I'd say years. The clue is kind of in the name of the distance units that you're using, assuming that your drive isn't FTL capable. Even at a constant 1g, it takes most of a year to accelerate to lightspeed, assuming that your drive laughs in Einstein's face and that we can ignore relativistic effects Back of an envelope calculation. V = U + AT, where V = final velocity, u = initial velocity, a = acceleration and t = time. Assume that we're starting from rest. Which makes no real sense but it does make the calculation easier. Besides orbital velocity is negligible compared to lightspeed. Therefore V = AT or V/A = T Final velocity = speed of light = 3x108 ms-1 Divide by 10 for convenience rather than 9.81 T = 30,000,000 seconds = 500,000 minutes, 8,333.3 hours, or 347 days.

Imperium of Man - the Emperor decrees that plasma beams are the best weapon and His will bends the universe to make it so. Orks - just paint red stripes along the plasma cannon barrel. Every ork knows that red stripes make things work better - and therefore they do. Eldar - gahhh. No reason needed because Eldar.

Yep, I wouldn't be worried about alien viruses. If a virus has evolved on an alien world, it has not evolved to live on our world. Therefore unless your alien lifeforms are extremely similar to terrestrial lifeforms at a molecular level, alien viruses are very unlikely to be a problem. In more detail: Viruses are (very simplistically) a piece of genetic material wrapped in a a protein capsid or a lipid membrane studded with proteins. They break into the host cell and then use the enzymes in that cell to duplicate themselves. Eventually the host cell bursts, releasing all the new virus particles to go out and infect new cells. So, for an alien virus to be infectious, it needs be based on either DNA or RNA, those being the molecules your cells use to store, copy, and read out genetic information. That's not completely implausible - we've found various terrestrial biochemical precursors in interstellar dust clouds for example, and it may well be that alien life tends to use much the same kind of molecules as us simply because it started off from the same precursors and a similar prebiotic chemistry. However, assuming that your alien virus is based on DNA or RNA, it also needs to use the same, or a very similar genetic code to your cells. That is, a sequence of alien DNA would need to encode the same, or a very similar sequence of amino acids which, in turn fold up into a very similar protein. Otherwise the virus is essentially a bit of junk code - it might get into your cells but the protein it codes for is not going to be a viral protein. Your cells might not even recognise it as a valid protein encoding sequence at all, so it'll just float around in your cells until its degraded - which happens pretty quickly. Therefore the virus can't replicate in your cells and it just dies out. I think the chances of an alien virus using the same genetic code as your cells are substantially lower than the chances of an alien virus using DNA or RNA but lets assume that it does. For an alien virus to infect you, first of all it needs to have a way into your cells. Viruses normally do this by recognising one protein or another on the surface of your cells and hijacking it. Even if the alien virus uses DNA/RNA and the same genetic code as your cells, the chances of it being able to recognise any of the very specific surface proteins on your cells are pretty darn low. Bacteria on the other hand are autonomous cells that don't require a host to replicate in. Provided the alien bacteria are able to make use of you as a nutrient source (and bacteria will grow on pretty damn near anything), then they could be a problem. Even then you're carrying around a whole lot of commensural bacteria that have evolved to live on you and in you. They might actually be a decent defense against alien bacteria, because the aliens would need to outcompete a bacterial population that's already very well adapted to its particular ecological niche. Edit. As an aside, this kind of thing is why I agree with @DunaManiac - colonising other life bearing worlds is a dumb idea in my opinion. Setting aside any ethical issues - which are significant in themselves, you're trying to occupy a world that none of the plants, animals or people that you're bringing with you have evolved to live in. Chances are that any lifeforms you encounter are either inedible or actively toxic and any new species you introduce (crops for example) that are edible, will be competing in an alien ecosystem that they are biologically not equipped to deal with. If we ever have the technology to go visit extrasolar planets, then I suspect we'll also have the technology to build sufficiently large space habitats that colonising planets - with all their inconvenient gravity wells and biological messiness just isn't worth the trouble.

Transfermiums - robots hydrogen in disguise!

Yes but the pixie dust has to be laced with caesium. Seems a bit harsh on the pixies to be honest. I *think* the unicorn farts are for flowing down the sides of the magnetic nozzles to prevent them melting in case of insufficient caesium doping but I’m not a rocket scientist so I’d get a second opinion on that.

You’d get a burst of gamma rays and a fairly underwhelming pulse of short-lived particles. As in half lives measured in microseconds. The gamma rays would do more harm to you than the enemy in much the same way that an exploding pistol barrel is going to hurt the shooter more than their target. The charged particles could be used as a weapon but only a severely underwhelming one. Pure antimatter rockets (where the rocket exhaust is made of the particles produced by the matter-antimatter reaction) have been studied and basically you get ludicrous ISP (because your exhaust velocity is close to light speed) but pitiful thrust (because you don’t actually have that much exhaust). In KSP terms imagine using the Dawn ion engine as a weapon. To be honest you’d be better off using that compact particle accelerator as your weapon and skipping the antimatter production.

“Hath not an antiproton substance? Hath not an antiproton charge, spin, dimensions, gauge, field interactions! Born of the same singularity, used for the same weapons, subject to the same laws, given mass by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same enthalpies and entropies as a proton is? If you collide with us do we not annihilate?“

And if the gunners / targeting computers aren’t much good: ”Curiously, the only thing to go through the mind of antiproton OnePointEight x Ten-to-the-Fifth was “oh no - not again.”

Personally, I don't think that getting hung up on the labels is particularly helpful for either the reader or the writer. From the reader's point of view, provided that the story was enjoyable, does it really matter if it was hard sci-fi, soft sci-fi, space opera, space fantasy, fictional science, or whatever? From the writer's point of view, I was at a very interesting webinar the other evening put on by our local sci-fi magazine, where one of the speakers made the point that it's possible to know too much about a subject if you want to write about it. By all means do your research and have your writing be plausible but knowing too much can lead you to unconsciously dismiss a whole lot of potentially interesting directions to take your story because 'that's not how it works in reality', when strict adherence to reality (aka hard science fiction or whatever other label you choose to apply) might not be that important. What labels are outstanding at though, in my experience, (and I'm not aiming this at anyone on this thread) is giving people an excuse to look down their noses at particular stories or styles of story because 'those aren't proper sci-fi'. Besides, you invariably get the edge cases where a story crosses genres and attaching a label to it becomes even less helpful. Take Stephen Baxter's Voyage for example, which is so firmly set in the present day that you could make an argument for it being hard sci-fi or alternate history. At the other end of the scale, take Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind. It's fairly obviously a fantasy story and yet its magic system is extremely constrained by conservation of energy. In that regard, it's far more scientific than pretty much any technology you'll see in a more obviously science-fiction setting such as Star Wars or Star Trek. And, if you'll excuse the blatant plug, somewhere in the middle you get stuff like my own short story, which combines reasonably hard fictional science with an obviously Clarke tech setting. Or my KSP fanfic for that matter which combines pretty hard sci-fi space travel (as you might expect from a KSP story) with softer sci-fi elements concerning plant science and ecology.

Whatever your opinion on cliffhangers, I submit that it could not possibly be an adaptation of a @Just Jim story without them! And I've got to say that Oraldo picked a masterful one to stop on. Not quite up there with 'Oh my God - it's full of stars' but damn close.

Thanks Dark. Coming back to post that took some guts. It's good to hear that stopping work on LATT hasn't stopped you from starting up another story. Here's to the adventures of Dylan, Calen, Kate, and Marcus; their trials, tribulations and whatever else comes their way! And likewise, here's to DarkOwl57 and you - the person behind the name. Best of luck with BeamNG, school, college and whatever else comes your way. Maybe one day, we'll get to read that big work and tell folks about how we knew the author before he became famous. Until then - stay safe.

From what I’ve read - yes! Although the Apollo astronauts apparently just used a safety razor. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/06/science/space/shaving-in-space-other-mundane-apollo-moments.html Personal hygiene and grooming in this scenario shouldn’t be too much of a problem though because it can take place in normal gravity.

As you pointed out, many sports either require gravity or would be cumbersome in zero-G, like track running. So, if you don’t mind me changing the question a bit, I would go for activities - and not necessarily sports - that either only work in zero-G, or can take advantage of zero-G in some way. After all you can go running anywhere (including this liner when it’s under thrust) but you can’t get easily get that zero-G experience anywhere but space - not for more than a few minutes at a time anyway. So what does zero-G give you as an experience? My immediate thoughts are: that floating in midair feeling, the challenge of manoeuvring in three dimensions and the challenge of aiming something at a person moving in three dimensions. You can probably come up with more. So what kind of activities would take advantage of those experiences? I have some ideas, again you’ll probably have more. 1. The Tube. Basically a long enclosed space for one passenger at a time to float along. Either transparent so you can see outside or using VR to simulate a view outside. Either way the idea is that you start yourself moving and then just keep going... and going... and going, till you get to the other end. 2. Climbing walls You could have some pretty funky climbing experiences in zero-G, including crawling along the ceiling Spider-Man style. And if you overreach and fall off the wall, or just need to take a break and hang for a bit - well that’s not a problem in zero-G. 3. Obstacle courses. A variation on The Tube but with padded obstacles in the way to manoeuvre around. Challenge yourself or compete against other passengers to post the quickest times through the course. 4. Dodgeball. In a padded room played with a lightweight sponge ball and appropriate PPE, I actually think zero-G dodgeball would be a lot of fun. LaserTag. Basically the Battle Room from Ender’s Game (the book - no idea how it worked in the film). Like LaserTag, or LaserQuest on Earth but in 3D and free fall. Just remember - the other team’s gate is down.

Robot vacuum cleaners would make total sense, especially a fairly unobtrusive, low profile one like a Roomba. And long hair in zero-G is a good point too. Making hair constraint (by suitable hair style or just using a hairnet) compulsory for long-haired passengers in public spaces during zero-G would be perfectly reasonable in my opinion. As a practical matter, I can’t imagine any long-haired passenger really objecting to that. The whole cloud of hair thing would get tedious very quickly anyway.

Guys have long hair too you know. You're reading a post by a long-haired guy right now in fact. In the context of your original post, I don't see hair as a particular problem that warrants mandatory eye protection in zero-G. If a particular passenger decides that they'd prefer to use eyewear, that's up to them of course. Most of the cruise will be spent at 1g, so hair will just fall to the floor and, if the floors are carpeted, will tend to stay there. From there, regular vacuum cleaning will take care of it and I'd kind of hope that a luxury liner on a two month cruise would be cleaned once in a while. Also, as per my previous post, you'll need forced ventilation in zero-G anyway and the ventilation system will tend to trap hair and dust and stuff. Besides, time spent in zero-g is necessarily scheduled in advance for maneuvers and could easily be scheduled in advance for entertainment purposes. If hair does turn out to be a problem in zero-g, just have a cleaning session scheduled directly beforehand.

About the protective eyewear - that's a good point and I imagine that the builders of your space liner took similar precautions. As per this article though (about wearing protective gear when opening the Zarya ISS module) its a temporary measure. Once the air has been assessed to be free of debris, the goggles come off and as far as I'm aware they stay off, unless there's another specific situation that requires them (mending the toilet for example). About the windows - from my original reply: "Or, if your ship design really does preclude transparent areas in the hull, large flat-panel screens linked to external cameras that serve the same purpose." The point I was making is that whether you're using an actual window or a screen that mimics one, you have a large area of wall that can't be padded. Not going to bother arguing about weaponized cutlery any more but here's a thought experiment for you. What other everyday items could you ban in case the passengers tried to kill each other with them? It's not hard to find some pretty absurd examples. As for your last point - quite probably. But this thread is about safety and comfort on a luxury space liner, not warships or freighters.

Oh goodness, ain’t that the truth. You can have the broad brush idea, you can have all the detailed notes, plot outlines, chapter summaries etc. that you like but turning all that into an actual piece of story is something else again. At least that’s how it was for me. Good luck with the next chapter and I look forward to reading what you come up with as and when it appears!

How often do you see ISS astronauts wearing protective eyewear? Granted, they are trained astronauts but being tidy is hardly rocket science and the ISS is far more cluttered and cramped (so more things likely to go in said eyes) than I would expect a luxury space liner to be. I get the concern but I would take a different approach. For zero-g activity rooms where the idea is to be moving around, I would give passengers a locker to stow any small personal items in and have a dress code for that room which would basically boil down to tracksuits or sweatshirt-and-pants. No shoes, no belts, no zips or buttons or other loose fastenings. Not so very different to typical sportswear on Earth in other words, especially for contact sports, or sports like trampolining, where you really don't want to be wearing anything that might get caught on something or someone. For lounge areas, I would provide areas to store loose items - think of the netting on the back of airline seats - and give passengers plenty of warning before zero-g so that they can drop things off at their cabins if need be. The space liner equivalent of the 'stowing personal items and returning your trays to their upright position' routine familiar to any present day air passenger. In both cases you adapt the familiar (and therefore acceptable and reasonable) rather than impose the new and overzealous. Helmets are an interesting one. I can see arguments for and against them, depending on how they're designed. It's not much good having a helmet that protects its wearer at the expense of causing greater injury to anyone that they collide with, for example. Floor carpeting would be cleaned regularly over a multi-month voyage so I don't see this as being a big problem. Besides, zero-g conditions will required some kind of forced ventilation anyway to keep air moving around the ship, so why not put the intake vents for that ventilation at floor level and make use of zero-G time to auto-vacuum the carpets? Cushioning the walls - again I understand your point but as I said I think a better approach is to design your rooms to remove the obvious zero-G hazards, give passengers a means to anchor themselves to the floor and then provide specific areas for the more confident or adventurous passengers to zoom around without damaging themselves or others. No need for the super-cautious 'cover everything in quilting' approach. Also covering everything in quilting doesn't work if you're providing windows or viewscreens - which I sincerely hope a luxury space liner is. In general people are sensible, especially in potentially dangerous environments. You don't see ocean going cruise liners draped with netting on the off-chance that somebody decides to climb the railings and jump off the side. Weaponized forks and spoons? Come on - how often do you hear about passengers on cruise liners, or airliners for that matter, running amok with the cutlery? I suppose it's a hypothetical risk but I'd say it's a really small one. Not worth banning spoons and forks over in my opinion, particularly (as I've already said) if you only have them in a designated dining area, which is only open to the public when the ship is under thrust.

I would start by planning to treat my passengers like adults. No sharp objects, padded walls, bare metal floors, compulsory wearing of heavy shoes - this sounds more like a psychiatric hospital or a prison to me than a luxury travel experience. A couple of ideas, assuming that the liner is big enough. General principles first. Use velcro rather than electromagnets. Soft floor furnishings that can be gripped with soft shoes sounds more relaxing that metal floors and magnetic shoes. Windows. Or, if your ship design really does preclude transparent areas in the hull, large flat-panel screens linked to external cameras that serve the same purpose. Being able to see outside is crucial to the experience. Staff are there to help where necessary, not to watch and judge. Room design should be as normal as possible with due allowance made for safety. No padded walls but no exposed pipework either, or fancy chandeliers for people to get tangled up in. More specific ideas assuming your ship is big enough. Have a dedicated restaurant or possibly even a food hall deck. Food to be served and eaten using the tableware that you would normally expect. Naturally it's only open when the ship is under steady thrust. Outside of the eating area, snacks are available from various places throughout the ship and/or as a complimentary service in passenger cabins. Those snacks of course are designed for consumption in zero-g and can be eaten at any time, anywhere. Make zero-g part of the experience for those that want it. Have one or more lounge areas for passengers that really don't like zero-g. Have a couple of stewards on hand to discreetly help passengers who aren't quite used to maneuvering in freefall and get stuck in mid-air. Have a couple of padded rooms for those who want a more active zero-g experience. Think of them as the space liner version of a bouncy castle or a space for zero-G sports activities. Have a children's play area so their parents can enjoy some private cabin time in zero-g if they so wish. Actually, children's entertainment so that parents can get away from their little darlings for a while should be on the general principles list. Build enough slack into the schedule so that transitions to and from zero-G can be handled with dignity. Better yet, have some intermediate stages between 0g and 1g. Especially when transitioning from zero-g, this allows loose items to settle gently without suddenly falling out of mid air and bonking anyone on the head. Important for passengers, really important for cooking staff! If the liner is big enough and the engines are capable of throttling down to say 0.1g, have a literal flight deck. As in, a place where passengers can strap on wings and fly like a bird.

Sorry if I came on a bit strong with that post. Comments about writers are a bit of a personal sore spot, having seen a few too many opinionated posts on this forum (which were far less polite than yours) castigating writers and other artists for what they should or should not be. That’s no excuse though - I need to back down a bit.

Yeah, their website looks like they've stitched together parts that they've lifted (very badly) from other sites. Which doesn't inspire confidence. Also check out the product advert "a 1m high model" (which is about correct) and then, two paragraphs down, their product dimensions are 543cm by 8.4cm by 8.4cm. This looks approximately as real as a three pound note.

If you're worried about onboarding new players, then the KSP 2 approach sounds exactly right to me. Have the information available in-game for players to learn from, make that information relevant and useful, and make the core gameplay elements of building and flying rockets more accessible. Then you can make the rest of the game more interesting without worrying that any extra complexity will put new players off. It's not like having to contend with two different aspects of a game is a new thing. Think of the Total War series for example - a pretty involved real-time tactical battle game and a management and logistics game, all in one. More accessible doesn't have to mean dumbing down either - the flight planner tool mentioned in the PC Gamer article (I think) is a great example. Rather than looking outside the game for a delta-V map (which implies first knowing that such things exist and are useful), include them in the game somehow. Better yet, include them as a display in the VAB so you have some immediate feedback on whether your current rocket design is capable of doing what you want it to do, or whether you need to iterate it. I have my personal doubts about what I've seen of KSP2 so far but that flight planner tool is not one of them. Edit: Purely anecdotally, I wonder how much of the difficulty in keeping new players onboard is because the game as it stands starts off being very difficult and then switches to being very boring? That was my personal experience anyway - I had a lot of fun figuring at how to play the game: how to get to space at all, how to land on the Mun, how to rendezvous and dock and use the navball, how to go interplanetary etc. But once I'd got to that point, I couldn't really muster any enthusiasm for building a differently shaped Duna lander, or going to another differently coloured ball of rock to plant the same old flag and do the same old experiments, let alone anything more complex like building a base, that's pretty much entirely ornamental. I get that KSP is a sandbox game and it clearly has a committed long-term player base who can't get enough of it. But maybe a little more structure and a little more actual gameplay would broaden its appeal?

You're right. Time management is not a part of KSP1. So thinking in terms of KSP 1 with a few time-related features bolted on here and there (mobile lab, I'm looking at you) doesn't work. For that reason, I would be against having construction time as an optional setting, although having a separate game mode which includes construction time and all the other features needed to make it work well, would be fine. In my opinion, for construction time to make sense and be anything more than a nuisance or a roleplaying gimmick, it needs to come with a package of other features. Time needs to be baked into the game from the start and it needs to matter. There need to be consequences for running out of time and there need to be mechanisms for saving time in various ways. Some of those might be down to efficient gameplay and good planning, some of them might be a more immediately straightforward, such as extensions to the VAB that the player can purchase to speed up rocket building. Now, as @Lord Aurelius points out, and I agree with him , time becomes a resource. Done properly, the player is confronted with interesting choices that affect their game. Choosing what to build and when to build it becomes a factor. Planning ahead becomes a factor. If we still have a research tree then choosing research priorities becomes a factor. Building efficient, modular rockets that don't take as long to build might become a factor, or focusing on SSTOs or reusability so that you can do more with a limited fleet of vehicles. If you're all about building the rockets and flying and iterating one mission at a time, then maybe none of the above looks particularly appealing. That's fair. But there are plenty of us who have been wanting a better management side to the game since Career mode first became a thing and, again I agree with @Lord Aurelius that time is a huge part of that.

It's mentioned near the start of the book. Federal service is either a term in the military or "a most unreasonable facsimile thereof." It's also mentioned that the government *has* to allow you to serve as your constitutional right and has a lot of dirty and dangerous 'make work' alternatives to army or naval service because most of the volunteers for such service are either not needed or not suited for it. Also, 'military service' can vary quite wildly. We see this later in the story where Rico encounters a former boot camp cadet who washed out on medical grounds and was now serving as third cook aboard a troop transport. I have a feeling that the Ender's Game series was also a counter to Heinlein's notion that intelligent species will necessarily compete, with the stronger wiping the weaker out. Unsure where I read that though so take with a pinch of salt. Agreed. I saw the film before reading the book and came very close to walking out because it was just bad - and not even in a campy 'so bad it was good' sort of way. Having read the book, I can see what the film was trying to be but IMO it came across as a lazy, clumsily executed mess of a parody. Although in fairness, I think that doing a good Starship Troopers film would be very difficult. Doing it as a straightforward military sci-fi adventure and leaving out all the political philosophy would be pretty controversial and treating the politics seriously, whether that's to deconstruct them or otherwise, could easily result in a fairly indigestible film.