Which deck plan is best?

[Spacescifi]

 

So this is a discussion of which deck layout is better? For spaceships with explorers? Not colonists. Just explorers. Meaning they will observe and report and take a limited supply of cargo (they have other places to visit/sample after all).

The relevant ship capabilies: Constant acceleration at 7g max or below with regenerative refueling. Can use it to land on planets. Plus an FTL jump drive that will put a ship however many light seconds away from the target planet multiplied by it's distance away in lightyears. So for a proxima centauri world, we would be jumped about 4 lightseconds from the target planet. Thus it pays to hop from system to system to reduce travel time, unless you do not mind longer in-system travel times. Just imagine. 100 lightyears means your vessel jumps 100 light seconds from your target when you get there! Time spent powering up for FTL jumps only takes 15 min. Yet the jump drive cannot do interplanetary jumps inside systems. Only interstellar jumps.

Open deck plan: Decks are aligned with planet gravity but nonaligned with g-force via acceleration. A few big rooms cover the innards of the spaceship. Inside are modules that can be stacked in weightlessness to form a spine column along the center of engine thrust. This is so that before the ship lands, the crew can install/align the modules toward the planet. As otherwise all the modules would be sideways across. To make navigating in weightlessness easier, a rope mesh surrounds crew areas they can use to propel off to reach modules or room entrances.

Closed deck plan: Decks are not aligned with the center of thrust, but that's what roller coaster standing chairs are for. At least landing/take off is easy. And rooms resemble earth ones (hallways and rooms galore).

Alignment with center of thrust: Like a tall office building the decks are aligned with the center of thrust. While great for space travel, it will make loading/unloading on a planet harder than it would be otherwise. There is a reason warehouses are broad and flat vs tall and skinny.

 

So which do you think is optimal?

 

Edited July 7, 2019 by Spacescifi
FTL. Lightseconds to lighyears. Interstellar.

[Nightside]

Open: Seems like a lot of the ship would be inaccessible when on planet, but maybe I'm not picturing this right. If you have to climb everywhere on nets you could have a nice pirate ship kind of environment, and some opportunities for swashbuckling fights.

Closed: Doors and corners. Lots of places to hide and sneak around, good for spies and stowaways.

Center of thrust: This plan seems mainly useful only when a ship is spending an extended period under thrust such as a Brachistochrone trajectory, not so for FTL, unless crew experience acceleration while FTLing. Vertically landed space ships look much more dramatic than horizontal ones.

[Spacescifi]

23 minutes ago, Nightside said:

Open: Seems like a lot of the ship would be inaccessible when on planet, but maybe I'm not picturing this right. If you have to climb everywhere on nets you could have a nice pirate ship kind of environment, and some opportunities for swashbuckling fights.

Closed: Doors and corners. Lots of places to hide and sneak around, good for spies and stowaways.

Center of thrust: This plan seems mainly useful only when a ship is spending an extended period under thrust such as a Brachistochrone trajectory, not so for FTL, unless crew experience acceleration while FTLing. Vertically landed space ships look much more dramatic than horizontal ones.

Open: Basically a few big open rooms with cylinder shaped cubical rooms for the crew. The nets are mainly for time spent in orbit of planets. Crawling on nets is a must in zero g when you have a big open room. Because floating is slow. Just watch the,astronauts on the ISS. They routinely use speed cams because showing real-time getting around station is too slow.

Closed: True, but also can make reaching areas a nightmare in times of trouble.

Vertically: Dramatic yes that is true. But it is less stable and more inclined to tip over than a ship that is shorter and broader.

[kerbiloid]

Brief version: "Where to put a toilet bucket to keep it vertical?"

[Spacescifi]

33 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Brief version: "Where to put a toilet bucket to keep it vertical?"

That is actually a very serious matter LOL. Yet I think I addressed it with the stackable crew modules. Since they can be aligned with the gravity ahead of time.

I really like the rope nets. If anyone was foolish enough to be near the edges instead of safely inside a module, while the ship rotated, he could just fall into a net. Hopefully. Beats smacking into the wall.

[kerbiloid]

4 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

That is actually a very serious matter

Agreed. Because if the toilet floor becomes a wall on ground or under acceleration...

[KSK]

Land tail first and align decks with centre of thrust. Make them closed decks for simplicity and ease of use when you are in zero-g, although that probably won't happen very much. With a 7g drive and regenerative fueling, you can basically stop dead in orbit, point your tail at the planet and descend vertically, so there are very few occasions where you won't be thrusting along the ship axis or landed and in a gravity well. 

Doesn't much matter if the ship is warehouse shaped or tall and pointy - you've already mentioned that you're not off-loading significant amounts of cargo. Just make sure you've got an elevator from the crew quarters to the ground, or near enough to it that descending the rest of the way by ladder is feasible.

A BattleTech style spheroid dropship design would work quite well.

Edited July 7, 2019 by KSK

[Spacescifi]

27 minutes ago, KSK said:

Land tail first and align decks with centre of thrust. Make them closed decks for simplicity and ease of use when you are in zero-g, although that probably won't happen very much. With a 7g drive and regenerative fueling, you can basically stop dead in orbit, point your tail at the planet and descend vertically, so there are very few occasions where you won't be thrusting along the ship axis or landed and in a gravity well. 

Doesn't much matter if the ship is warehouse shaped or tall and pointy - you've already mentioned that you're not off-loading significant amounts of cargo. Just make sure you've got an elevator from the crew quarters to the ground, or near enough to it that descending the rest of the way by ladder is feasible.

A BattleTech style spheroid dropship design would work quite well.

 

True.

The rope net design would work better on a ship with limited fuel but a translation drive to jump a ship at the same orbital heading and speed as the planets. Rockets could land vertically, but fuel use for rockets would be intense.

[Scotius]

7 g of acceleration? That's one heck of a torchship you have there, son With such a drive and (essentially) unlimited fuel you can build your ship as a vertical stack, and spend entire time in space generating your own gravity via thrust. As KSK mentioned, Battletech-style speroid\ovoid Dropship would work pretty well.

[KSK]

From my back of an envelope calculation that 100 ls trip will take a little over 11.5 hours at 7g. That's assuming burning half the journey at 7g, flipping over and braking for the rest of the journey at 7g. 

Obviously that's extremely rough and doesn't take account of time requirements for throttling the drive up to full or flipping the ship over midway through the journey.

Even so, that 7g drive will probably take you 100 ls in much less time than it took the Apollo astronauts to get to the Moon.

[Spacescifi]

13 minutes ago, KSK said:

From my back of an envelope calculation that 100 ls trip will take a little over 11.5 hours at 7g. That's assuming burning half the journey at 7g, flipping over and braking for the rest of the journey at 7g. 

Obviously that's extremely rough and doesn't take account of time requirements for throttling the drive up to full or flipping the ship over midway through the journey.

Even so, that 7g drive will probably take you 100 ls in much less time than it took the Apollo astronauts to get to the Moon.

 

The ship lacks inertial dampners. Thus injury/death by g-force is a real possibility.

1g acceleration is tolerable for hours on end. 7g? I doubt it.

Edited July 7, 2019 by Spacescifi

[KSK]

In which case, why bother specifying that the drive can pull 7g?

Besides, with suitable precautions, 7g is tolerable if not pleasant, although the crew certainly won't be moving around whilst the ship is under thrust. 

You could also smooth out that flight profile some - spend a couple of hours at 7g, before cruising most of the way at 1g (for creating artificial gravity) and then brake at 3-4g as a compromise between crew comfort and journey time. 

For comparison, that same back of the envelope calculation, assuming constant 1g acceleration gives me a journey time of around 31 days for a 100ls journey.

You'd likely still be crossing star systems in days and weeks so your journey times will be pretty acceptable even if you can't do in-system FTL jumps.

[Spacescifi]

31 minutes ago, KSK said:

In which case, why bother specifying that the drive can pull 7g?

 

7g is good rate of acceleration. Can allow to escape most common worlds, and even places with higher gravity.

Anything high enough gravity that 7g would struggle is not a place you should go. Visit.

[KSK]

11 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

 

7g is good rate of acceleration. Can allow to escape most common worlds, and even places with higher gravity.

Anything high enough gravity that 7g would struggle is not a place you should go. Visit.

Good point, although that still covers quite a range of high-G worlds that would be just as uncomfortable for your explorers as spending extended periods of time under thrust. If they have the technology to cope with visiting >1g worlds, they should also have the technology to cope with travelling at >1g acceleration.

 

[Spacescifi]

4 hours ago, KSK said:

Good point, although that still covers quite a range of high-G worlds that would be just as uncomfortable for your explorers as spending extended periods of time under thrust. If they have the technology to cope with visiting >1g worlds, they should also have the technology to cope with travelling at >1g acceleration.

 

 

Quite true.I originally thought to do that for the sake of conforming to hunan limitations.

But what you said is worth considering. I mean, what is the point of boldly going as a human if you cannot go to like hslf the places in the universe because your tech cannot cope wiyh it?

I may just modify it as you said. That way the ship could go down and grab resources previously unknown and untouched to man (high pressure materials due to gravity, maybe even loads of metallic hydrogen, not that tbey woukd need it for rockets).

 

Going here would be...  awe inspiring. Assuming your ship or shuttlecraft was not torn apart by the winds.

 

[Scotius]

Acceleration tanks could be helpful. One hour per day at full thrust would shorten time travel considerably, while for the crew it would be an hour spent in a nice, relaxing bath.

[KerikBalm]

On 7/7/2019 at 1:59 AM, Spacescifi said:

an FTL jump drive that will put a ship however many light seconds away from the target planet multiplied by it's distance away in lightyears. So for a proxima centauri world, we would be jumped about 4 lightseconds from the target planet. Thus it pays to hop from system to system to reduce travel time, unless you do not mind longer in-system travel times. Just imagine. 100 lightyears means your vessel jumps 100 light seconds from your target when you get there! Time spent powering up for FTL jumps only takes 15 min. Yet the jump drive cannot do interplanetary jumps inside systems. Only interstellar jumps.

Why doesn't it work in system? Cross the galaxy: 100,000 light years, so you arrive 100,000 light seconds short... ok, set your target 100,000 light seconds farther forward, win. Ok, you'll say it needs some mass to lock on to... ok, but what stops it from working 100,000 light seconds away from the target? that's no longer in system.

Even for short jumps like 4 light years, why does it stop working 4 light seconds from the destination? seems very contrived. Also, the whole point of jump drives is that you don't travel through linear space, so what's with these linear distances short of the target...

ok so lets say you modify it to be a matter of longer jumps are more inaccurate, thus the farther you jump, the odds are you end up farther off... fine.. shorter jumps could allow you to recalculate.

Even so, why can't you recalculate and jump again after getting somewhere in the vicinity of your target? To cross the galaxy, you'd be off by (lets say an average) of 100,000 light seconds, or just under 28 light hours. With a torchship going around .1c, that means the destination will be reached in about 10 days. Doing 10 LY star to stars would require 10,000 jumps, so to compete with the simple single jump and then torchship drive, you'd need to do 1000 jumps per day, which is 41.67 jumps per hour, which is nearly 1 per minute.

Sorry, but if you're giving your sci fi setting a torchship drive, and an FTL drive, you'll need another contrived scenario to make the preferred way of travel to be system to system hops (as in EVE online for example). Also torchship drive + FTL is just begging for easy time travel.

This is the problem with contrived fictional science scenarios, putting in a little thought makes the way things are done in the universe quite dumb.

[Spacescifi]

 

No legitimate reader reading for entertainment will care why it does not work in system.

Okay they might... but the whole job of a scifi writer is to manipulate and focus what the reader cares about. They won't focus on minutia about why the drive cannot do this or that. They will focus reader attention where it is due. Plots and character.

If a reader is looking for stuff to critiicize or find inconsistent they will ALWAYS find them.

 

[KSK]

6 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

No legitimate reader reading for entertainment will care why it does not work in system.

Okay they might... but the whole job of a scifi writer is to manipulate and focus what the reader cares about. They won't focus on minutia about why the drive cannot do this or that. They will focus reader attention where it is due. Plots and character.

If a reader is looking for stuff to critiicize or find inconsistent they will ALWAYS find them.

Not in my experience. Nitpicking worldbuilding consistency and technical details is the favourite pastime of many a fan. See the 'bad science in science fiction' in this very forum, for an example.

And a big part of manipulating reader focus and suspension of disbelief is about throwing in the right level of detail. If you do want to get into the technicalities, then make those technicalities self-consistent as far as you can and follow their implications logically.

Examples:

Joe Haldeman's Forever War. His spacecraft are powered by tachyon drives that let them accelerate at up to 30g (for later models of ship) and achieve relativistic velocities. Most of the story arises from the time-dilation that that causes and the space battles (such as they are) are basically one-off high speed drone passes, under computer control, whilst the meatbags spend the entire voyage in an acceleration tank praying that their skinsuits are fitted exactly right (because wrinkles cause nasty injuries at 30g). We're never once told what a tachyon drive actually is - we just know what it can do and everything follows logically from there.

Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage II. Basic premise is that a crewed submarine is miniaturised and injected into a comatose scientist. Miniaturisation is achieved through a miniaturisation field which reduces the size of Planck’s constant for anything inside it. The field is metastable - the more energy you pump in, the smaller you can go but the higher the probability that the field will collapse, releasing its stored energy.

Total made up science - but the implications of those field properties are followed through consistently and thus reader belief is happily suspended. The most plot critical point is that a collapsing miniaturisation field releases it’s energy as waste heat. Spontaneous deminiaturisation will quite literally cook you and controlled deminiaturisation has to proceed slowly enough that the heat can dissipate. Stuff like that. The story hinges on the technical details but they’re self consistent enough that you can overlook the entirely fictional science at the core of the story.

On the other hand, the more edge cases and extra rules you need to invoke to make your fictional science work within your story, the less convincing it becomes and the more your readers will care.

 

 

Edited July 8, 2019 by KSK

[Spacescifi]

58 minutes ago, KSK said:

Not in my experience. Nitpicking worldbuilding consistency and technical details is the favourite pastime of many a fan. See the 'bad science in science fiction' in this very forum, for an example.

And a big part of manipulating reader focus and suspension of disbelief is about throwing in the right level of detail. If you do want to get into the technicalities, then make those technicalities self-consistent as far as you can and follow their implications logically.

Examples:

Joe Haldeman's Forever War. His spacecraft are powered by tachyon drives that let them accelerate at up to 30g (for later models of ship) and achieve relativistic velocities. Most of the story arises from the time-dilation that that causes and the space battles (such as they are) are basically one-off high speed drone passes, under computer control, whilst the meatbags spend the entire voyage in an acceleration tank praying that their skinsuits are fitted exactly right (because wrinkles cause nasty injuries at 30g). We're never once told what a tachyon drive actually is - we just know what it can do and everything follows logically from there.

Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage II. Basic premise is that a crewed submarine is miniaturised and injected into a comatose scientist. Miniaturisation is achieved through a miniaturisation field which reduces the size of Planck’s constant for anything inside it. The field is metastable - the more energy you pump in, the smaller you can go but the higher the probability that the field will collapse, releasing its stored energy.

Total made up science - but the implications of those field properties are followed through consistently and thus reader belief is happily suspended. The most plot critical point is that a collapsing miniaturisation field releases it’s energy as waste heat. Spontaneous deminiaturisation will quite literally cook you and controlled deminiaturisation has to proceed slowly enough that the heat can dissipate. Stuff like that. The story hinges on the technical details but they’re self consistent enough that you can overlook the entirely fictional science at the core of the story.

On the other hand, the more edge cases and extra rules you need to invoke to make your fictional science work within your story, the less convincing it becomes and the more your readers will care.

 

 

Good points.

I am inclined to just make a ship with super levels of vacuum thrust in space. Basically it can casually reach a lightsecond per min speed in ten seconds of acceleration.

Grav-neutralizers included, so no g-force is felt. About the only way to get it is by rotation.FTL can be a simple displacement jump drive. Since even if jumped a few light hours out, a sublight drive this fast could still reach anywhere within a readonable amount of time.

Planets people care about would be artificially shielded

 So near luminal ramming could ve defended against.

Missiles with the super vacuum drive woould be common.

Shields are included on ships.

Want gravity? Hover over a planet without orbiting or just land.

[KerikBalm]

On 7/8/2019 at 10:13 PM, KSK said:

the more edge cases and extra rules you need to invoke to make your fictional science work within your story, the less convincing it becomes and the more your readers will care.

This.

One reason the expanse works so well (at least the first season), is that all we have to accept is a fusion reactor with a ridiculously high reaction rate and energy efficiency... that's pretty much it. The more arbitrary rules you add in, the more the reader will find the story to be contrived.

Pulling off FTL is hard. A writer can at least try to lampshade the problems that result from it, depending on the intended audience, and their likelyhood to realize it.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging

But generally giving easy FTL and easy relativistic drives is a recipe for ridiculousness. I'd say you can have one but not both.

[Spacescifi]

9 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

This.

One reason the expanse works so well (at least the first season), is that all we have to accept is a fusion reactor with a ridiculously high reaction rate and energy efficiency... that's pretty much it. The more arbitrary rules you add in, the more the reader will find the story to be contrived.

Pulling off FTL is hard. A writer can at least try to lampshade the problems that result from it, depending on the intended audience, and their likelyhood to realize it.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging

But generally giving easy FTL and easy relativistic drives is a recipe for ridiculousness. I'd say you can have one but not both.

Indeed. I tend to agree with you.

 

How about this? A simple, less rules drive that is still quite powerful.

Galaxy drive: You can jump however close or far you want to any point of light you see in space. Even if it is old starlight. Know that you are jumping where the star was when the light first was emitted that is hitting you at this second. So if the star is thousands of LY away, that is a thousands of years old position in space. Try not to get lost... you can even jump to other galaxies.

 

Upon reaching your jump point, your speed and trajectory is shifted to match the target's, whatever it was.

Important rule: To shift jump, your target must be a lightsecond or more away. So that rules out getting easy free speed tbrough missiles or railguns. Takes a while to cross a lightsecond with limited rockets and raiguns.

No FTL sensors: Yet one could still detect relativistic starships movin in space if scanned from the side.

All you need is starships on patrol in star systens that are known to have high speed celestial bodies or gravities. However controls those has all tje relativistic firepower they want... for free.

EDIT: Actuallu this system makes relativistic attacks hard if not impossible. Every jump shifts your speed and trajectory to the current target, so you cannot simply stack on more and more speed at will.

Furthermore the fact thay a target must be a lightsecond or more to shift-jump to means that stacking speed with missiles becomes kinda impractical for homeworld attacks.

Even if your ship had constant acceleration for months on end it would have a difficult time utlizing such speed. For one, what are you gonna do? Shift to Pluto and just accelerate your way to Earth? A fleet can and would shift to you, intecepting you long before you arrived. The best you could do is shift above Earth and let loose some epic bombs and shift out again.

That kind of thing would be hard to prevent.

I suspect either a planetary shield or a truly awesome orbtial defense grid would be in order. Perhaps both.

 

EDIT: This drive does allow for hopping around systems as well as long jumps. For no other reason than to find your way. Kind of have to since old light jumps get more precise the closer you get.

 

Edited July 10, 2019 by Spacescifi