'Io' movie (2019) - with extra epic wrong science

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

Where does it dissipate the heat?

Where any orbital station or ship would? 
And unlike them, it has Io, and it's cool.

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

Europa is much better

But they don't need Europa. They a compact infrastructure. Io is just the closest moon to the mine.

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

it's aneutronic;" Who cares if you're going to park your colony in a massive radiation belt?

 

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

it gives two positive particles (p and He-4) which can be thrown in the same direction " Who cares? every ionized atomic nucleus (as in a plasma, as in every fusion reaction) is positively charged

The ship cares. It dislikes the neutron bombardment and spending the exhaust in random directions.
The positively charged things can be directed in a desired direction. That's the advantage of any aneutronic facility.

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

. " - So they have obsolete, slow inefficient craft for saving people

No. They just have obsolete, slow inefficient craft. They use it to save people because it's the best they have.

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

and they're going to take their supership with a dV budget to go back and forth from Earth to Uranus in a short time over and over again.

I never said a word about Uranus, Neptune, others. Forget them. They still can heavily reach Jupiter.
They have just created a super-expensive super-drive but don't have this unique experimental thing in mass production.

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

The extra few km/sec to leave from mercury vs Jupiter (if its even that, because of Oberth and being so deep in Jupiter's well), is insignificant if you're talking a ship that can get to Proxima in 10 years (requires a speed of about 0.5 c)

Again, they can't use the only, unique, champion, experimental drive daily. They keep it for the record jump.

They deliver as much people as possible on overloaded barges, what "few km/s" at all?
And what should they do on Mercury? No Mercury.

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

Earth's belts contain about 160 nanograms of antimatter. Jupiter's magnetic field is 18,000 times stronger... if it contains 18,000 times as much antimatter, that is 2.88 miligrams of antimatter... congrats, your can collect all of it, and your ship that gets to 0.5 c can have a dry mass of half a milligram...

It's the best particle accelerator and magnetic trap available, so it's anyway the best they have.

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

but assuming they go with He3 anyway, there's a lot of other types of fusion reactions they could use for power without touching H3 reserves..

All of them are known worse than simple D+He3. So in their time they would be studied. 

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

FYI, even Daedelus has moved on from Jupiter:

 

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

You guessed it; the best helium-3 supply in the solar system is from the "Gas Mines" of Uranus.

They are just inside the Jupiter orbit. They don't have an interplanetary drive for Uranus shuttling. In its time it will be the best.
But once you have an interstellar drive unlikely you would wait 100 years more until Uranus will get colonized.

(And thanks for the link.)

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

I'll never understand why people feel the need to try and come up with contrived explanations for obvious examples of the trope "did not do the research" (page has since been removed from TV tropes

1. Misery.
2. Challenge.

[DDE]

3 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

page has since been removed from TV tropes

TVTropes have been radically pruning itself under new management, succumbing to all the ills of a Tumblrite fandom in the process.

Enjoy the fork: https://allthetropes.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Did_Not_Do_the_Research&useformat=mobile

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

2 hours ago, DDE said:

TVTropes

Probably you also know the Russian one

https://posmotre.li

 

[Gargamel]

Ok guys, I sat down and watched this out of curiosity last night.

I actually enjoyed it some.

It is NOT a Sci-fi film.   This is an art-house piece, I kept being reminded of Waiting For Godot throughout the movie. 

Yes it's set in a post apocalyptic world,  but that is just it's setting.  I don't have the vocabulary/jargon to put what the setting really is used as, but it's almost it's own character. 

Yes the actual science in the movie is sketchy, but these are just plot points, and if they had sat down with some specialists in the respective areas, they could have easily worked out most of the stuff people are having issues with.    In particular, the fact that you can see Jupiter better with the 10" scope than Hubble can?  If you listen to the dialogue, it is easily conceivable that the view they are actually seeing is very believable, just some CGI twit put up the wrong picture. 

The dialogue and interactions of the two characters are what drives this piece.   The story could have been written a little better, and I'm still mixed on the actress's performance, but over all I found it moving. 

The twist at the very end was interesting too.

If you just accept the bad science as plot points to drive the story, then you'll do fine.   They don't harp on details here.  Just certain things are the way they are, and you just gotta deal with it.  None of the bad science is critical to the story, but it could have been dealt with better and more plausibly in some cases. 

over all..... 6.5/10.   Could use some polish in the script and the acting, that would have bumped it to maybe a 7 or 8.   The bad science is such a non factor in this movie, that it doesn't harm the story much at all. 

[KerikBalm]

17 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Where any orbital station or ship would? 
And unlike them, it has Io, and it's cool.

But they don't need Europa. They a compact infrastructure. Io is just the closest moon to the mine.

But supposedly the power plant was there before they started building this interstellar ship... On Europa they can use a convecting fluid around their radiators, making it much more compact. Io would need massive radiators, They can't go too deep before the ground is warm (and no convection), and radiating into a vacuum is pretty slow. They need a temp gradient, and there's not such a big one when you've got lava lakes on the surface. They wouldn't build a power station on Io first. If they were building a colony with the intent of associating it with an He3 mine, they'd go to Uranus. It makes no sense...

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The ship cares. It dislikes the neutron bombardment and spending the exhaust in random directions.
The positively charged things can be directed in a desired direction. That's the advantage of any aneutronic facility.

First, the neutron bombardment isn't so bad, its much less than what fission reactors make. Second all fusion reaction are going to have most of the mass of the products (everything except the neutrons) in the form of positively charged nuclei. Then There's other fusion reactions that make less neutrons (D-D makes less than D-T). There's Proton-Boron fusion (which we already have experimental reactors doing this fusion), there's D-Li6 fusion (which in theory is a net aneutronic reaction, excluding side reactions)... one of the first fusion bombs was D-Li6...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo#Deuterium_and_lithium   but it also had Li7 which they didn't think would work (it did), and it had a bigger boom and more radiation than they expected.

These fuels are all much easier to obtain than Helium3

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No. They just have obsolete, slow inefficient craft. They use it to save people because it's the best they have.

How contrived... they went directly from slow inefficient craft, to a interstellar starship using a fusion reactor with a much higher lawson criteria than D-T fusion, which would be just fine for quick trips all around the solar system. These people really are behaving really ridiculously

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I never said a word about Uranus, Neptune, others. Forget them. They still can heavily reach Jupiter.

Oh, really? " If they can get to Uranus in slow arks (probably they weren't). "

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They have just created a super-expensive super-drive but don't have this unique experimental thing in mass production.

Again, they can't use the only, unique, champion, experimental drive daily. They keep it for the record jump.

Again, this is really stupid and contrived... they make this huge technological leap, with nothing in between, and then use it as a *scout* to a location that we already know is bad (they might as well just throw it away), instead of as a workhorse for saving humanity. Also such a craft would have to operate for several years at high thrust levels to do what they say it can... Ignoring relativity this thing supposedly has a dV budget of 150,000 km/sec.. that's 10,000 trips with a 15 km/sec dV budget... or 5,000 trips with a 30 km/sec dV budget... and they use this as a 1 way disposable probe to a place we can already rule out? No, just no.

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It's the best particle accelerator and magnetic trap available, so it's anyway the best they have.

That's like saying you'll jump out of a plane with a piece of toilet paper (just 1 sheet) as a parachute, because its the best parachute that you have (lets say you have no clothes, because a t-shirt would be better than that)... When you need propellant to be about 80% of your ships mass (40% propellant matter, 40% propellant antimatter), and the total amount of antimatter (being generous) is 2 milligrams)... to get a ship of even 400 kg dry mass (the dry mass of the new horizons probe), you'd need 1,000 kg of antimatter (and 1,000 kg of normal matter to mix with it). 1,000,000 grams needed, vs 0.002 obtainable... you only need 500 million times more antimatter... assuming you can collect and store all the antimatter in Jupiter's radiation belt...

Of course, that antimatter is not just whizzing by and trapped by the magnetic fields (the fields can only deflect them along hyperbolic trajectories, you need a collision to capture/produce them), it is mainly produced by cosmic ray collisions with the atmosphere,  and then some gets trapped in the belts. So the amount produced more closely responds to surface area, not relative magnetic field strength... The large majority of cosmic rays do not originate from solar events, so we can ignore distance from the sun.

Jupiter has roughly 125x the surface area of Earth... so I'm going to scale down my estimate of how much antimatter they contain, by a factor of 125/18,000... congrats.. we now need 72 Billion times more antimatter to send a probe the size of new horizons.

And of course, those belts are incredibly massive, the idea of collecting all the antimatter that they contain? ridiculous, especially if you're space based infrastructure is limited to a single moon with 1 lackluster powerplant

Can we please forget about the idea of collecting antimatter from Jupiter's belts?

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All of them are known worse than simple D+He3. So in their time they would be studied. 

Not really, D-T is much easier to get fuel for and sustain... radiation shielding is something that can be easily dealt with. D-Li was the first fusion reaction we ever did, so that's well studied. He3 fusion reactions would be one of the worst studied, because its so hard to get appreciable amounts of He3... the other reactions would be very well studied before H3 mining starts.

To think that they begin harvesting it without using some other kind of nuclear (Fusion) drive is absurd.

He3 is only about 1 in 10,000 for helium on Jupiter, so 1 in 100,000 (10% He atmosphere) of the mass that they scoop up (actually, less since He3 is significantly less massive than He4). So for an orbiting "skimmer", its going to boost about 90,000 tons of hydrogen, and 10,000 tons of He4 to orbital velocity for each ton of He3 it mines. For something floating in Jupiter's atmosphere (and its really really hard to float in a mainly hydrogen atmosphere), you need an SSTO that can also withstand reentry from a velocity of around  40 km/sec (also, that means your SSTO has to have a dV budget of over 40 km/sec). Sure... it doesn't have to be an SSTO, but then you need massive manufacturing facilities to drop a spacecraft on to Jupiter every time you want a little He3.

Such a system basically requires that you are also fusing the Hydrogen to keep your skimmer in orbit (although, perhaps a NTR just using the hydrogen and He4 as reaction mass can work).

You won't be harvesting Helium-3 from Jupiter at all without already well developed nuclear propulsion that doesn't rely on Helium-3.

Also this again strongly argues for Uranus or Neptune, since you get 50-100% more helium per skim, and you-re saving about 20 km/sec for every ton of stuff you boost into orbit... then save even more when talking about boosting it to higher orbit/escape velocity. If you use floating He3 refineries, its much easier to float on Uranus or Neptune, since the atmosphere is a lower percent hydrogen.

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They are just inside the Jupiter orbit. They don't have an interplanetary drive for Uranus shuttling. In its time it will be the best.

As I mentioned with the challenges of getting the He3... you can't harvest He3 (particularly from Jupiter), unless you already have a drive that is very well suited for interplanetary travel, with high thrust, high dV budgets, and capable of near constant operation.

So, again, just No

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1. Misery.

2. Challenge.

1) I'll agree, these arguments are miserable

2) Its not a challenge to argue against them, its just tedious. Arguing for them... is it a challenge? is something that is impossible a challenge, or just impossible? A challenge to me is difficult, but possible. Is it a challenge in KSP to make a SSTO from  the surface of Kerbol/the sun with heating turned on and at default values? So far your arguments for this movie's premise making sense do not hold up... because I don't think they can hold up... without being contrived and arguing that the society was utterly stupid.

You might as well argue that the society was run by an insane dictator, and that's why they went to Io. Any scientist or engineer that proposed an alternate plan was executed, so the remaining ones did their best to make it work. Now the dictator is dead/gone, and the survivors are left with a colony on Io and an interstellar spaceship, so they just go with it...

There... done... We just have to have the contrived premise that these people were insane, or acting under the direction of someone who was insane...

Edited January 24, 2019 by KerikBalm

[DDE]

17 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

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Probably you also know the Russian one

https://posmotre.li

 

Well, now I do.

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