Your solution to prevent constant acceleration WMD

[Spacescifi]

I well know that constant acceleration drives have the potential to be WMD. So how can you justify average civilians having constant acceleration starships? In a scifi setting?

Especially with warp or jump drives in use? All a starship would have to do is accelerate at 1g for a year and then go to warp and drop out of a warp a light second away from a planet it wants to hit. A second is not much time to react.

Let us assume a scifi setting has both hyperdrives and constant acceleration drives on starships available to civilians. How do you prevent WMD?

Then it dawned on me. What if the starship instead used a hyperdrive that harmlessly auto-shifted it's speed on dropping out of hyperspace according to either the sun or nearby celestial bodies? Or even other vessels?

What does that mean? It means that if you drop out of hyperspace above a world, your speed and orbit will automatically match the planet you're above

Of course, since your orbit and speed matches the planet's exactly, you will fall to it like a rock. Unless you engage your constant acceleration engines to curve over the world at orbital velocity.

What this also means: So average joe decides he wants to ram his ship at 99% lightspeed into Earth because of... reasons. He spends a year accelerating at 1g, many lightyears from earth. Then he engages the hyperdrive, hoping to drop out above the planet and crash into the atmosphere at lighthugger speed.

He does drop above earth, just not at lighthugger speed. Hyperspace has auto-shifted his speed and orbital trajectory to the earth's. Thus his ship drops like a stone. Damaging? Likely, but nowhere near relativistic.

Easy spaceship interception: Now you do not have to match speed and trajectory of your targeted vessel. Since the hyperdrive will make drop out relatively at the same speed and orbit. Thus all you have to do is chase and maybe retroburn for intercept.

 

That is my solution for making constant acceleration drives with hyperdrives not WMD. For what it's worth, that is how many a common space sim could be explained away (not kerbal).

What is yours?

EDIT: I realize average joe could  drop out near mars and accelerate at 1g to earth, but he would get intercepted by hyperdrive ships long before he reached earth. Since the only way to become an RKV for a ship is to either do constant acceleration or drop out of hyperspace while autoshifting speed to a near object more massive than your vessel that is already relativistic. Not exactly an easy find, as I am sure authorities would frown on that.

 

[Thor Wotansen]

A warp dive will conserve momentum.  If you want to make your scifi obey the laws of physics, you'll have to figure some other way of fixing the problem.  One interesting thing about RKVs is that a sewing needle in the path of the missile, a few hundred miles above Earth would be enough to completely destroy it, and Earth would be saved.  Having railguns or gauss guns that can fire tiny projectiles at high speed, and the computing power to calculate an intercept in a few milliseconds would be a believable counter to a ship massed RKV that needed some run-up.

A ship is not a good RKV though.  They have a tendency to be as light as possible, so hitting the atmosphere at, say, 5%C would make a very big fireball and perhaps cause local devastation, but not really destroy the planet.  A more effective RKV would be an aerodynamically optimized slug of Tungsten or Uranium massing a few kilotons.  This would be able to release it's energy far deeper in the planet and cause massive tectonic instability and enormous earthquakes that would pretty much level any buildings and rearrange the geology of the planet suddenly enough to kill most everything.  If you want to blast the planet into little bits, you need to go big.

[FleshJeb]

5 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

I well know that constant acceleration drives have the potential to be WMD. So how can you justify average civilians having constant acceleration starships? In a scifi setting?

No physics-based limitations, but the AI that manages the starship will kill you if you try.

[Spacescifi]

2 hours ago, Thor Wotansen said:

A warp dive will conserve momentum.  If you want to make your scifi obey the laws of physics, you'll have to figure some other way of fixing the problem.  One interesting thing about RKVs is that a sewing needle in the path of the missile, a few hundred miles above Earth would be enough to completely destroy it, and Earth would be saved.  Having railguns or gauss guns that can fire tiny projectiles at high speed, and the computing power to calculate an intercept in a few milliseconds would be a believable counter to a ship massed RKV that needed some run-up.

A ship is not a good RKV though.  They have a tendency to be as light as possible, so hitting the atmosphere at, say, 5%C would make a very big fireball and perhaps cause local devastation, but not really destroy the planet.  A more effective RKV would be an aerodynamically optimized slug of Tungsten or Uranium massing a few kilotons.  This would be able to release it's energy far deeper in the planet and cause massive tectonic instability and enormous earthquakes that would pretty much level any buildings and rearrange the geology of the planet suddenly enough to kill most everything.  If you want to blast the planet into little bits, you need to go big.

 

Yeah I considered that. Want to know why I did'nt use it? It is scifi trope breaking. Many of the common ideas used and fantasized about no longer are the same or are utterly changed.

Scifi warships are no longer as much of threat. They can be obliterated light miliseconds away. Battle distances also grow so exponentially that you will never see your target. Ever. Except maybe as a dot in a telescope.

52 minutes ago, FleshJeb said:

No physics-based limitations, but the AI that manages the starship will kill you if you try.

Same reason.

That said, nothing is wrong with such a concept. It may even make for a kind of WMD moderated interstellar peace. It just makes planets potentially the strongest contenders in a scifi setting.

Edited May 30, 2019 by Spacescifi

[Xd the great]

Fling WMDs at everyone. No more people, no more WMDs.

Or ban use of intercept missiles like the THAAD.

[VincentS]

In a sci-fi setting with jump drive for a game or novel, I would go with the following set of rules :

1) FTL speed  x local speed  = c^2, both when entering and leaving FTL. Local speed is defined relative to local mass average speed (local mass contribution to the local speed decrease with distance squared)
2) FTL speed is constant during space jump.
3) FTL Trajectory is deflected only by gravity, in a way similar to light deflection close to stars but in the opposite direction. Intensity of the deflection increases according to the inverse of the FTL speed (the slower your FTL speed is, the more time you spend in the gravity field, the higher the deviation)

Corollaries :
a) The faster you are flying relative to the closest planet, the slower your FTL speed will be
b) For planet to planet jump, local speed before and  after the jump are identical

c) Any attempt at high speed collision with a planet using a FTP jump is likely thwarted by trajectory deflection from the planet gravity (high speed -> low speed FTP -> high deviation)

 

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

That said, nothing is wrong with such a concept. It may even make for a kind of WMD moderated interstellar peace. It just makes planets potentially the strongest contenders in a scifi setting.

Planets are always going to be very strong against space fleets. Why? Because they have a huge cooling advantage. All energy that a spaceship brings with it. Also, atmosphere makes it impossible to use hypervelocity weapons, because they'll be obliterated upon impact with it. To deal with atmosphere you need mass, which is at premium on ships, not to mention good bombardment weapons are poor space weapons (unless they're nukes).

If you want to learn about space warfare, check out Children of a Dead Earth. It's a surprisingly fun ultrarealistic (yes!) space warfare sim. Generally, it serves to bust several misconceptions about space warfare. First, engagement ranges are on order of megameters, but actual damage is hard to do at that range. Huge lasers can do damage at extreme range... except that not only do they need a giant, heavy ship, they also have problem actually aiming beyond 1 megameter or so. At this distance, just a tiny torque anywhere on the ship puts your laser off target, so the laser spot wanders around. Spaceships are aerodynamic with huge wings! It turns out "aerodynamic" shape is awesome for making projectiles (even hypervelocity ones) bounce off it, and high-energy reactors that you need to power those weapons need a huge radiator area, which looks kind of like a "wing" (especially once you notice that and deliberately shape them that way, which doesn't really hurt efficiency  ). Really, just play it. You can even design your own weapons and ships, to see how they'd really act. This is a low-tech setting, so you won't get torchships (without mods), but you can get a feeling for what it feels like. And it all works off real equations.

As for FTL, here's one limitation that is often overlooked: precision. Just say that it's impossible to come out of FTL with accuracy sufficient to actually "hit" a planet. In reality, everything has some sort of pointing error. Aiming telescope at a star is actually a very delicate operation.

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, VincentS said:

In a sci-fi setting with jump drive for a game or novel, I would go with the following set of rules :

1) FTL speed  x local speed  = c^2, both when entering and leaving FTL. Local speed is defined relative to local mass average speed (local mass contribution to the local speed decrease with distance squared)
2) FTL speed is constant during space jump.
3) FTL Trajectory is deflected only by gravity, in a way similar to light deflection close to stars but in the opposite direction. Intensity of the deflection increases according to the inverse of the FTL speed (the slower your FTL speed is, the more time you spend in the gravity field, the higher the deviation)

Corollaries :
a) The faster you are flying relative to the closest planet, the slower your FTL speed will be
b) For planet to planet jump, local speed before and  after the jump are identical

c) Any attempt at high speed collision with a planet using a FTP jump is likely thwarted by trajectory deflection from the planet gravity (high speed -> low speed FTP -> high deviation)

 

 

Good job. Although reaching planets now seems problematic.

Inspired by your drive, I made another.

Gravimetric hyperdrive: Can only engage it in low planetary orbit. Cannot if you achieve escape velocity. Hyperspace puts spaceship on an orbiial slingshot trajectory (like slinging a stone and watching it fly, only changing course slightly via gravity).

Leave hyperspace two ways: Run out of hyperfuel and be stranded in deep space. Or make sure your trajectories line up and drop out in LEO radius of a planet.

Oddly, hyperspace drops ships out at the minimum escape velocity on a vector directly away from the face of the planet. So even if you hyperspaced directly to a world, once you drop out you will be flying directly in the opposite direction. Thus you have to retroburn to adjust course and actually land. Which gives a planet plenty of time to respond.

Max range before needing to refuel at a station is seven light years.

Thus my drive precludes using hyperdrives in conjection with constant acceleration for WMD.

Sure you could do so slowly from say alpha centauri. But some scout ship in the system is likely to notice a ship's speed buildup. I would expect a law mandated speed limit, as there is no good reason for extended constant acceleration other than RKV's since hyperdrives exist. Accelerating for a long period would and should raise eyebrows of any nearby security force or patrol ship.

Edited May 30, 2019 by Spacescifi

[Shpaget]

So what is preventing you from warping however far out needed and accelerating to near c towards your target without engaging the warp?

If you approach from above or below ecliptic you're not going to get noticed.

[Nuke]

if you have the energy storage capacity to go interstellar distances you have a bomb. theres no way around it. however i do think that any type 1-2 civilizations that manage to produce such ships wont put them under the control of single individuals. with a price tag in the trillions ownership by single individuals would be highly unlikely. especially if these vessels depend on highly controlled hard to source materials like negative mass or antimatter. its sort of the same deal with nukes. they require hard to get materials and expensive facilities and are out of reach of the average joe terrorist cell. 

as a weapon of war im sure there are cheaper ways to take out a planet than ram a several trillion dollar space ship into it. 

 

 

Edited May 30, 2019 by Nuke

[DDE]

For starters you pretty much need to rule out FTL collisions.

Yes, YOU.

Then you probably dial down the maximum velocity of a vehicle to a non-absurd number.

After that, just accept the residual risk: atmospheres would stop most of the impromptu RKVs, and humans tend to like worlds with at least some atmosphere anyway.

[magnemoe]

8 hours ago, FleshJeb said:

No physics-based limitations, but the AI that manages the starship will kill you if you try.

One problem is that an constant acceleration with constant force is free energy as kinetic energy is m*v^2, so any reaction less drive would face this.
Even an perfect reaction-less drive is just an linear accelerator without the track. 
An solar sail even an laser pumped one is reaction-less. 

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, Shpaget said:

So what is preventing you from warping however far out needed and accelerating to near c towards your target without engaging the warp?

If you approach from above or below ecliptic you're not going to get noticed.

The drive requires you to be in LEO of a planet to begin with. In other words, it is an orbit to orbit hyperdrive. If you land in deep space at all it will be because you missed a planet and ran out of fuel. Once you engage the drive it won't stop until you drop off in LEO radius flying away from the planet or you run out of fuel completely in deep space.

In theory you could attempt what you said. But solar systems could still detect it with early warning satelites and drone ships with hyperdrives orbiting pluto. From there a drone would hyperdrive to earth to relay the message. Meanwhile lots of flack would be put in it's path as Earth has hours of response time (5 hours lightspeed from pluto). Hyperdrives go faster.

Assuming you could get past the detection satellites, sure it could work. It would take so many years or months though that the chances of interception are high.

All one has to is send out a bunch of RKV ships for intercept months in advance. Since your invading ship cannot afford a bunch of course corrections without veering way off course, this would delay it further.

Edited May 30, 2019 by Spacescifi

[magnemoe]

20 minutes ago, DDE said:

For starters you pretty much need to rule out FTL collisions.

Yes, YOU.

Then you probably dial down the maximum velocity of a vehicle to a non-absurd number.

After that, just accept the residual risk: atmospheres would stop most of the impromptu RKVs, and humans tend to like worlds with at least some atmosphere anyway.

This, note that this is an death star killer in two ways. first it would be an obvious weapons to hit an death star with. 
Secondary it would make the death star pointless outside an very nice mining tool as FTL ramming bypass planetary level shields who was the reason death star was developed. 
 

[tater]

Don't give anyone constant acceleration spacecraft with near infinite propellant.

There is no way around the problem you suggest, IMO.

Have realistic sublight drives, and if you need FTL, make it some sort of jump or stargate like system using tech unrelated to regular space propulsion.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/

^^^ the best site for this sort of thing.

List of engines:

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php

If you need to limit them even with this, the various required sensors, radiators, etc, might well be too delicate to deal with relativistic collisions (dust).

[Spacescifi]

38 minutes ago, tater said:

Don't give anyone constant acceleration spacecraft with near infinite propellant.

There is no way around the problem you suggest, IMO.

Have realistic sublight drives, and if you need FTL, make it some sort of jump or stargate like system using tech unrelated to regular space propulsion.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/

^^^ the best site for this sort of thing.

List of engines:

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php

If you need to limit them even with this, the various required sensors, radiators, etc, might well be too delicate to deal with relativistic collisions (dust).

 

If that works for you, sure. I provided a way around a common problem

[mikegarrison]

High thrust constant acceleration drives are basically free energy perpetual motion machines. Really you don't have to do anything to prevent them -- the universe already does that for you for free.

[Spacescifi]

2 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

High thrust constant acceleration drives are basically free energy perpetual motion machines. Really you don't have to do anything to prevent them -- the universe already does that for you for free.

I will be honest with you, the real reason for this is threefold.

Variety: A starship that is not shaped like a rocket is not optimal for launch. Yet if you have sufficient thrust and constant acceleration engines, you can literally fly a brick shaped cargo ship to space. Or any other shape. I like variety in my science fiction that I create.

Plotting: Rockets are so mission specific that they are optimized for one mission only. A spaceship with constant acceleration can change plans on the fly. A rocket? Literally is constrained between finishing it's mission and having enough fuel to return to base. In other words, a rocket cannot afford to change it's flight plan like a constant acceleration drive can.

Style: Rocket nozzles are nice and all, but a spaceship's constant acceleration drive need not look like a rocket nozzle. Indeed, mine does not, since no fuel is being burned out a nozzle. It does have visual effects though.

 

[tater]

Well, you can't accelerate at 1g for a year. What drive would allow that? What's the propellant? What's the I_sp of the engine?

@mikegarrison is right. If you imagine a magical reactionless drive, that's fine for your space opera, but then you can simply break physics even more, and not give it conservation of momentum. If you turn the drive off, it stops. Done. If you want it to coast with the engine off, then follow physics.

Jump/hyperdrive will always have issues with conservation of momentum depending on how you establish it. If you jump from one system to another, and there is relative motion between the star systems, then you might have a problem (our sun is moving at ~20km/s relative to the neighborhood average as I recall). So if your velocity vector is conserved, then preparing for a jump involves making sure your relative velocity is OK vs the target. It also means that if you accelerate a munch the wrong way, you might well pop out with some large velocity relative to the target system. You might not destroy a planet, but it's entirely possible to then make something jump that is big enough and fast enoug to be fairly nasty (say a few hundred km/s).

There are two concerns. Your initial one suggests relativistic missiles, which is not really a thing with any reasonable selection of a rocket engine. Hundreds of km/s is still a weapon, however, so you can get "civilian" ships capable of being a nasty asteroid impact, depending on how you work the jump mechanics. You can always make jump such that they precipitate out some decent distance from a large mass (the target star), which would make using your ship as a missile much harder due to geometry (and would give time to deal with it). Down side is more travel time, jump could even be instantaneous, but you'd spend months getting to destination from jump point to planet.

 

[mikegarrison]

1 hour ago, tater said:

Well, you can't accelerate at 1g for a year. What drive would allow that? What's the propellant? What's the I_sp of the engine?

@mikegarrison is right. If you imagine a magical reactionless drive, that's fine for your space opera, but then you can simply break physics even more, and not give it conservation of momentum. If you turn the drive off, it stops. Done. If you want it to coast with the engine off, then follow physics.

Jump/hyperdrive will always have issues with conservation of momentum depending on how you establish it. If you jump from one system to another, and there is relative motion between the star systems, then you might have a problem (our sun is moving at ~20km/s relative to the neighborhood average as I recall). So if your velocity vector is conserved, then preparing for a jump involves making sure your relative velocity is OK vs the target. It also means that if you accelerate a munch the wrong way, you might well pop out with some large velocity relative to the target system. You might not destroy a planet, but it's entirely possible to then make something jump that is big enough and fast enoug to be fairly nasty (say a few hundred km/s).

There are two concerns. Your initial one suggests relativistic missiles, which is not really a thing with any reasonable selection of a rocket engine. Hundreds of km/s is still a weapon, however, so you can get "civilian" ships capable of being a nasty asteroid impact, depending on how you work the jump mechanics. You can always make jump such that they precipitate out some decent distance from a large mass (the target star), which would make using your ship as a missile much harder due to geometry (and would give time to deal with it). Down side is more travel time, jump could even be instantaneous, but you'd spend months getting to destination from jump point to planet.

 

I can simplify this even more.

If you are ignoring real physics enough to have a high-thrust, constant-acceleration, reactionless drive, then you can also ignore real physics enough to just not worry about the possibility of ships being WMDs. You handwaved the drive, so go ahead and handwave away the consequences too.

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, tater said:

Well, you can't accelerate at 1g for a year. What drive would allow that? What's the propellant? What's the I_sp of the engine?

@mikegarrison is right. If you imagine a magical reactionless drive, that's fine for your space opera, but then you can simply break physics even more, and not give it conservation of momentum. If you turn the drive off, it stops. Done. If you want it to coast with the engine off, then follow physics.

Jump/hyperdrive will always have issues with conservation of momentum depending on how you establish it. If you jump from one system to another, and there is relative motion between the star systems, then you might have a problem (our sun is moving at ~20km/s relative to the neighborhood average as I recall). So if your velocity vector is conserved, then preparing for a jump involves making sure your relative velocity is OK vs the target. It also means that if you accelerate a munch the wrong way, you might well pop out with some large velocity relative to the target system. You might not destroy a planet, but it's entirely possible to then make something jump that is big enough and fast enoug to be fairly nasty (say a few hundred km/s).

There are two concerns. Your initial one suggests relativistic missiles, which is not really a thing with any reasonable selection of a rocket engine. Hundreds of km/s is still a weapon, however, so you can get "civilian" ships capable of being a nasty asteroid impact, depending on how you work the jump mechanics. You can always make jump such that they precipitate out some decent distance from a large mass (the target star), which would make using your ship as a missile much harder due to geometry (and would give time to deal with it). Down side is more travel time, jump could even be instantaneous, but you'd spend months getting to destination from jump point to planet.

 

Infinite fuel? No. Metallic hydrogen reactors are used with photon accelerators, making quoton rays, which are crespucular FTL rays in an atmosphere. These rays have so much pressure that their exhaust is like a rocket's, only using light rays instead of a rocket plume.

1g acceleration lasts a 1000 hours before yoy run out of metallic hydrogen. 2g is 500 and so on, but you can get more time for less thrust.

Rockets though, really are far from ideal.

So you like rockets? Then I hope you have staging, since that is the most efficient way to use them.

Your situation is very much like this with rockets.

 

Edited May 31, 2019 by Spacescifi

[tater]

You can have decently high thrust spacecraft that are at least plausible with very, very high I_sp (like 10,000-1 million seconds) (check out Atomic Rockets).

At 10,000s I_sp, a 150 tonne wet spacecraft, 100 t dry would have ~39.7km/s of dv (that's ~67 minutes at 1g). (note that this is about the size of Starship, except Starship is ~100t dry, and 1300 wet, so 150t wet is much, much more SF like, the ship is mostly crew volume.)

At 100,000s I_sp, the same craft has 397km/s, and so forth (11.25 hours at 1g).

It's possible to have sorta hard SF where the only physics you really wreck is for FTL. As @mikegarrison says, if you want to just handwave it, then do that. The more of this that happens, the more it's fantasy and not SF, IMO. That doesn't make it bad, but it doesn't bear close scrutiny. I don't scrutinize the tech in the Banks Culture series, for example. The second you make some effort to explain it... that's worse than just presenting it without discussing it, IMHO.

 

 

Edited May 31, 2019 by tater

[Nightside]

This is an interesting question, but I don't think this it is a Science or Spaceflight question (considering all the physics defying going on), but more of a fiction workshop question. 

• Given that in your fictional universe relies on a couple of unrealistic tropes common to the space opera genre of science fiction where:
  • Warp drives, and/or;
  • Constant acceleration drives not limited by propellant, heat management or the rocket equation in general (Whatever technology enables this surely allows for nearly infinite energy production in general);

are as ubiquitous as semi trucks or cargo ships. With these powerful tools granting access to the uncountable stars and their myriad worlds, why would anyone bother to go to war at all? Storytellers can always invent a new plot twist or device to ward off doomsday at the last minute, and turn around and invent and even more potent weapon or foe. 

I think the really interesting question in this setting is why would someone want to destroy a planet? Powerful and desperate nations of our own world have nuclear weapons capable of inciting a cataclysm that would end life as we know it on this planet, but they haven't been used since they were first tried in WWII because their use was an atrocity, that is to say, an act against all of humanity, not just against a martial enemy. Similarly, governments and armies would not be able to use this weapon against each other because if one tried it, the others would all retaliate and everybody's planets would get destroyed.

But your question was about what keeps a single individual from doing something like this... Well... nothing. Nothing except respect for other life, culture, and the irreplaceable uniqueness of a habitable world in the cold vastness of space. In our own time/world ignorance, fanaticism, and nihilism can certainly cause people to commit acts of violence against innocent bystanders, I think it would be a worthy subject to write a story about.

 

 

[Guest]

9 hours ago, Nightside said:

Powerful and desperate nations of our own world have nuclear weapons capable of inciting a cataclysm that would end life as we know it on this planet, but they haven't been used since they were first tried in WWII because their use was an atrocity, that is to say, an act against all of humanity, not just against a martial enemy.

This is an extremely naive viewpoint. It's not morality that's holding back a planet-killing catastrophe. It's pragmatism. Nuking Japan also was not only pragmatic, but actually saved lives (just see the projections for a land invasion they were planning at the time). The only reason the US didn't nuke the USSR right after Japan (and before USSR developed nukes) was that they weren't certain that Soviets would react like the Japanese did, and with their highly distributed industry would probably be able to survive a nuclear strike, and the thing would devolve into a conventional war (that they'd probably lose). In the ICBM era, nukes pretty much existed just to keep the other side from using theirs.

Not one person actually in charge on either side was thinking in terms of "atrocities", no matter what they said in public. They were thinking in terms of cold, hard numbers. There was one idealist among Soviet Union's leaders (Gorbachev), and as it happens, it stopped being a union because of his policies. Nobody wants a nuclear war because it's bad for business, if one nation was given nukes or a means to reliably stop any retaliation, they'd certainly use their own nukes against anyone who didn't comply with their demands (what you'd get in practice would be them being able to demand anything, on pain of nuclear death).

Politics have nothing to do with morality, and those who try to keep "moral high ground" in politics seldom last long. If someone agrees to ban a certain weapon because "it's immoral", then they most likely don't need it themselves. Notice that all nations that banned cluster bombs, for example, are also nations that never had any decent cluster bombs. Likewise chemical weapons, they're annoying (and costly) to deal with, but otherwise useless against a prepared enemy. Given that, the best way of ensuring that potentially destructive drive systems aren't repurposed into planet killers, is to introduce a weapon that could do the same, but in a far more cost-efficient way. As for individuals, give militaries a reliable way of destroying a civilian ship on approach (a nuclear missile swarm works well). Realistic drives actually make pretty lousy weapons, even torchship drives.

Edited June 1, 2019 by Guest

[mikegarrison]

15 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Your situation is very much like this with rockets.

 

I'm more than a little annoyed that they didn't call their video The Cold Equations. It's only one of the best known SF short stories of all time. In fact, not only that, but they didn't credit Tom Godwin in the credits? what?

Edited June 1, 2019 by mikegarrison