DOA Scifi Tropes

[kerbiloid]

Any mechanical pistonned pusher plate is just a low-tech placeholder for a magnetic reflector.

It was the only realistic option in the past, but there is no reason to bring it into the future.

Edited September 27, 2020 by kerbiloid

[Spacescifi]

3 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

It would be an idiotic idea, and you failed to see the sarcasm. Leaving aside obvious technobabble, low frequency pulsed engines are useless as RCS, because their minimum impulse is large. You simply cannot, by definition, have any sort of fine control with such a drive.

If you have the technology level that you want to have, pusher plate is the worst option available to you. I don't know why you insist on using it. Orion is a very primitive way of making an efficient spaceship, but it's a technological dead end. 

 

I don't insist on pusher plates, I just bring it up as the apex of what we could theoretically do now... which surely could be easier and more reliable in the future.

Even something as old as the wheel can be improved with modern tech, more so with future tech. Same function, only more efficient or more resilent/safe.

 

As for tech levels, once the scifi barrier of FTL/warp is crossed everything we can imagine is simply out of date, inasmuch we simply do not even know how to achieve it nor if it is possible at all. So far the answer would seem a resounding 'No!', only because exotic matter and negative matter have only been theorized upon on paper.

It is arguably impossible to think of the right propulsion system for a starship that has FTL/warp ability, since rockets would be even mored dated than project Orion (also less efficient if you want both high thrust and high delta V).

People bring up advanced rocket ideas, but I tend to think that pulse propulsion where the action happens outside of the ship is better because engine walls melt at the heat levels where 1g torchships would be a real possibility.

Even if they were the mass penalty applies of massive rad fins traded for a smaller payload.

Reality is not fiction. It never was, nor can it be.

Edited September 27, 2020 by Spacescifi

[Bill Phil]

3 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

If you have the technology level that you want to have, pusher plate is the worst option available to you. I don't know why you insist on using it. Orion is a very primitive way of making an efficient spaceship, but it's a technological dead end. 

I wouldn't call it a dead end. Definitely a brute force solution, but it has some intrinsic advantages to magnetic field based nuclear propulsion. For one, it's a lot easier to build a hunk of steel. And while magnetic fields would generally be better at transferring momentum, Orion seems like it scales better, considering that magnetic fields have a limit to their strength and lose strength with distance. So for smaller vehicles magnetic nozzles are definitely the superior choice - Mini-Mag Orion for one example. But go big enough and a giant steel plate with shock absorbers starts to look very attractive in comparison. Of course that brings into question whether or not something of that size would ever be desirable, which is actually one of Orion's biggest problems in general. No one really needs that capability. At least not yet.

[Guest]

It is a dead end, for the simple reason that a hunk of metal is nothing more than a hunk of metal. This design doesn't have any room to grow, and it doesn't lead to any more sophisticated drives, because it's so crude that all it requires is nuclear bomb tech (and materials, but that goes for everything). Once you reach its limits of performance, there's nowhere to go with it.

3 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

I don't insist on pusher plates, I just bring it up as the apex of what we could theoretically do now... which surely could be easier and more reliable in the future.

Even something as old as the wheel can be improved with modern tech, more so with future tech. Same function, only more efficient or more resilent/safe.

Except you can't improve the Orion. It is a big piece of metal on a spring. You can't make it perform much better, and you don't learn anything from it to move you towards anything that would have better performance. It's not a wheel, which is a small, basic component (or really, a basic concept). No, Orion is more like a horse-drawn carriage. Easy to build, but if you want it to grow beyond what the horse can provide, you have to get rid of the horse.

Orion is a dead end. Your antimatter Orion has the same performance, same limitations and same issues as fission-powered Orion. You're not getting a 1G torchship with Orion drive, and by developing ships that use it, you're not getting any closer to a drive that could give you such performance. In fact, due to low pulse rate, Orion would be absolutely intolerable for crewed flights, making it completely useless for that purpose. And if you have FTL, you might as well have flow-stabilized Z-pinch fusion engines, or high-thrust DFD, or GCNRs, or NSWRs... 

My advice is: learn mathematics. Then, you could calculate for yourself which drive you need, what it needs and what you can do with it. In fact, if you don't want to write outright science fantasy, better get used to doing your maths. 

Edited September 27, 2020 by Guest

[Bill Phil]

1 minute ago, Dragon01 said:

It is a dead end, for the simple reason that a hunk of metal is nothing more than a hunk of metal. This design doesn't have any room to grow, and it doesn't lead to any more sophisticated drives, because it's so crude that all it requires is nuclear bomb tech (and materials, but that goes for everything). Once you reach its limits of performance, there's nowhere to go with it.

Even if Orion is a dead end, it's a dead end in the same way that the internal combustion engine is a dead end. "Better" technology exists, but it's relatively simple to build. 

Even then, Orion designs have quite a lot of room to grow, much like ICE concepts did. 

And even then, one can argue that Orion already lead to more sophisticated drives: Mag Orion and Mini-Mag Orion are both conceptual evolutions of the Orion. It also led to the concept of Medusa. Furthermore, a thermonuclear (pure fusion) concept was developed, though creating pure fusion explosives is a difficult endeavor.

Not only that, but it's very difficult to properly say that Orion doesn't have any room to grow. Only time will tell.

8 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Except you can't improve the Orion. It is a big piece of metal on a spring. You can't make it perform much better, and you don't learn anything from it to move you towards anything that would have better performance. It's not a wheel, which is a small, basic component (or really, a basic concept). No, Orion is more like a horse-drawn carriage. Easy to build, but if you want it to grow beyond what the horse can provide, you have to get rid of the horse.

Orion is a dead end. Your antimatter Orion has the same performance, same limitations and same issues as fission-powered Orion. You're not getting a 1G torchship with Orion drive, and by developing ships that use it, you're not getting any closer to a fusion drive. In fact, due to low pulse rate, Orion would be absolutely intolerable for crewed flights, making it completely useless for that purpose. And if you have FTL, you might as well have flow-stabilized Z-pinch fusion engines, or high-thrust DFD, or GCNRs, or NSWRs... 

You can make Orion perform much better - change the geometry of the plate and you can have different values for the momentum exchange efficiency. Change the length of the spring and you could have higher efficiency for momentum exchange. Change the pulse unit design and you can change performance. Scale it up and it's also going to perform better. Use thermonuclear pulse units and you can possibly gain even more performance. Perhaps introduce a system for using laser or particle beam inertial confinement to detonate pulse units that are large but not independent bombs. There's a lot that can be done with Orion.

Even horse-drawn technology eventually lead to the development of other technology. Horse-drawn railways, horse-drawn carriages, and so on all have technological descendants today.

An antimatter Orion is pretty much useless. Mostly because the antimatter isn't even needed. But an Orion can be counted as a torchship - mostly because the definition is pretty much nonexistent. If you mean constant-acceleration drive, then no. But if you mean a high thrust, high specific impulse, high thrust power drive, then yes. And while Orion does have a low pulse rate, the entire reason for the shocks is to smooth out the ride. Do it well enough and you could have a human crew just fine. It certainly wouldn't be comfortable mind you, but any Orion drive ship is only going to be firing its drive for maybe a few hours, and more shocks plus some linear motors could be built into a certain part (if needed) to make it more comfortable. 

There are numerous advantages to Orion. It's something we could do in a reasonable timeframe. It has very minimal residual radioactivity (on the drive itself). And it has a lot of room to grow - most of that room being based on scaling up the drive.

There's a strong argument that all of the technology we currently use, save for certain exceptions, are dead ends. Most of them are essentially developments of 19th century technology. Then the entire conception of "dead end" technology is almost irrelevant - what matters is whether or not said technology is doable and if it meets the requirements. Most technology is a dead end. And even if Orion is a dead end, it happens to be in a performance regime that's quite favorable for reasonably fast interplanetary travel - this fact won't change no matter what the future holds. Of course other theoretical drives are in that regime too, but Orion is something that could be done in a much shorter timeframe.

 

[NFUN]

20 hours ago, satnet said:

Knew elements with fantastic properties - No matter what planet you're on the atomic elements are the same (different ratios for certain, but the same elements). You aren't going to another planet and finding new elements, that will probably happen in a lab. If the proposed "island of stability" exists you might be able to create heavier elements, but they will almost certainly have the properties you can extrapolate from their position on the periodic table. Also my recollection is that the stability is relative and they are still short lived, just not the femtosecond lifetime you might expect. You can definitely get some materials with unexpected properties, but the trope is usually a new atomic element.

My favorite variant of this was when, in some Star Trek episode, communications or technology was being disrupted by the planet's reservoirs of astatine

[Guest]

8 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

And even then, one can argue that Orion already lead to more sophisticated drives: Mag Orion and Mini-Mag Orion are both conceptual evolutions of the Orion. It also led to the concept of Medusa. Furthermore, a thermonuclear (pure fusion) concept was developed, though creating pure fusion explosives is a difficult endeavor.

The thing is, despite having "Orion" in the name, they don't really have much to do with Orion. They both use magnetic nozzles, and utilize external (and quite complex) systems to initiate fusion. They also have a higher pulse rate. Once you do that, you lose pretty much everything that defines Orion. Nuclear pulse propulsion in general is not a bad idea, it's just that the Orion is the most primitive application.

You can do some things with the pusher plate, and you can make a better horse cart, or make it run on rails. In either case, that'll help, but, as I said, after that the only way to improve is to get rid of the horse. Medusa is the only Orion variant suitable for crewed flight (the shock absorbers on the others are too short to smooth out the pulses completely), but it's vacuum-only, and in vacuum, Orion has rather lackluster performance, compared even to nuclear-electric propulsion. Orion was thermonuclear from the start, BTW. "Classic" nukes virtually disappeared after thermonuclear explosives were successfully developed. 

Internal combustion engines are not dead ends, mostly because they lead into gas turbines, which are one of the more efficient ways of getting energy out of chemical reactions. Funnily enough, neither are steam engines, because they lead into Stirling engines, which are the most efficient thermal engines in general. Those two will stick around for a long time.

Edited September 28, 2020 by Guest

[Spacescifi]

 

Another DOA scifi tropes is scifi energy/plasma shields. And I am not bringing up the known fact that we don't know of away to deflect nor absorb energy with energy yet.

Rather... it is simple as g-force and inertia.

Even if we had scifi shields, if a shielded vessel is hit with a high yield antimatter torpedo the crew is going to feel it.

AM has high energy. Hitting a shield would knock a ship back with several g's of acceleration, which can be even enough to to turn the crew into smushy jelly against the ship walls.

In fact the only way I see a crew surviving that is with plot device inertial dampeners... which Star Trek has, and IRL is akin to adjusting the fundamental forces of the universe as one see's fit.

A more realistic way to survive is to simply have a massive vessel. Lots of mass equals lots of inertia, which lowers the g-force felt on collision.

Edited September 28, 2020 by Spacescifi

[Guest]

You're confusing various kinds of energy. An AM torpedo has a lot of energy, but it has much less momentum. It will not knock the ship back any more than any other type of torpedo. An antimatter explosion would be a lot like a nuclear weapon going off, with thermal effects being the most important, and radiation being secondary. 

Plasma shields are not only possible, but already in industrial use:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_window
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9567-plasma-bubble-could-protect-astronauts-on-mars-trip/?ignored=irrelevant
True to the form, it's pretty good at keeping air and vacuum separated. Particle accelerators use this to prevent uncontrolled repressurization in case of a leak. It is a power hog, but that's it. So, a plasma shield for spacecraft is very much plausible.

Inertial dampeners are not really needed in any kind of realistic situation, because generating 10G+ accelerations in space is very hard and rather pointless, to boot.

Edited September 28, 2020 by Guest

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

You're confusing various kinds of energy. An AM torpedo has a lot of energy, but it has much less momentum. It will not knock the ship back any more than any other type of torpedo. An antimatter explosion would be a lot like a nuclear weapon going off, with thermal effects being the most important, and radiation being secondary. 

Plasma shields are not only possible, but already in industrial use:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_window
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9567-plasma-bubble-could-protect-astronauts-on-mars-trip/?ignored=irrelevant
True to the form, it's pretty good at keeping air and vacuum separated. Particle accelerators use this to prevent uncontrolled repressurization in case of a leak. It is a power hog, but that's it. So, a plasma shield for spacecraft is very much plausible.

Inertial dampeners are not really needed in any kind of realistic situation, because generating 10G+ accelerations in space is very hard and rather pointless, to boot.

 

Consider the following:

A fifty kilogram AM torpedo collides into a scifi shield bubble that behaves predictably like an impenertrable wall.

The shields actually hold, yet since the shields are literally generated from the starship's hull, the impact provides momentum much like a nuclear pusher plate... only with greater energy, which translates into more momentum.

A fiffty kiliogram AM impact may or may not kill, humans can take a lot of g-force if momentary (race car drivers surrive 100g crashes stopping their momentum).

Even so crew will get hurt, and at the very least get whiplash if the ship is not heavy enough to offset hard accelerations from AM shield collisions.

Now if it was 500 kilograms.... crew likely dies.

Realistic electromagnetic deflector fields behave nothing like Trek shields, since they actually deflect not block.

And plasma shields would need something specific (scifi as we don't have a way I know of) done to them to block an AM collision, since otherwise the blast would blow through anyway.

AM is a whole level of magnitude  higher than plasma shielding in raw power. Unless the plasma is that hot... in which case you have other problems anyway.

Like the waste heat plasma shields that ACTUALLY blocked AM would generate.

Edited September 29, 2020 by Spacescifi

[StrandedonEarth]

3 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

In fact the only way I see a crew surviving that is with plot device inertial dampeners... which Star Trek has,

And the Star Wars Expanded Universe mentions "acceleration compensators"

[sevenperforce]

2 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

A fifty kilogram AM torpedo collides into a scifi shield bubble that behaves predictably like an impenertrable wall.

The shields actually hold, yet since the shields are literally generated from the starship's hull, the impact provides momentum much like a nuclear pusher plate... only with greater energy, which translates into more momentum.

A fiffty kiliogram AM impact may or may not kill, humans can take a lot of g-force if momentary (race car drivers surrive 100g crashes stopping their momentum).

Even so crew will get hurt, and at the very least get whiplash if the ship is not heavy enough to offset hard accelerations from AM shield collisions.

Now if it was 500 kilograms.... crew likely dies.

That is not how antimatter works. 

[DDE]

7 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

 

Another DOA scifi tropes is scifi energy/plasma shields. And I am not bringing up the known fact that we don't know of away to deflect nor absorb energy with energy yet.

Rather... it is simple as g-force and inertia.

Even if we had scifi shields, if a shielded vessel is hit with a high yield antimatter torpedo the crew is going to feel it.

AM has high energy. Hitting a shield would knock a ship back with several g's of acceleration, which can be even enough to to turn the crew into smushy jelly against the ship walls.

In fact the only way I see a crew surviving that is with plot device inertial dampeners... which Star Trek has, and IRL is akin to adjusting the fundamental forces of the universe as one see's fit.

A more realistic way to survive is to simply have a massive vessel. Lots of mass equals lots of inertia, which lowers the g-force felt on collision.

Why are you assuming an elastic physical collision when the shields run on nonsensolenium? Some settings go all the way and have shields actually absorb energy, although that's less visually satisfying.

6 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

So, a plasma shield for spacecraft is very much plausible.

But it's exceedingly unlikely to be scaled uo to be militarily useful.

[kerbiloid]

Just feed you shields with the antimatter torpedo explosions. Let it absorb the energy. Isn't it a sci-FI?

Spoiler

 

 

Edited September 29, 2020 by kerbiloid

[Guest]

58 minutes ago, DDE said:

But it's exceedingly unlikely to be scaled uo to be militarily useful.

That depends on how much power you have to spare, and what you're trying to stop. Against kinetics, it's a tall order, but against radiation it's more plausible (seeing as the original design was for that), and for missiles, they could probably be made solid enough to either set off or destroy the warhead.

6 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

A fifty kilogram AM torpedo collides into a scifi shield bubble that behaves predictably like an impenertrable wall.

The shields actually hold, yet since the shields are literally generated from the starship's hull, the impact provides momentum much like a nuclear pusher plate... only with greater energy, which translates into more momentum.

Except that's not how plasma shields work. They're not impenetrable walls, but rather a bunch of hot, charged gas held in place by magnetic fields. In case of an AM torpedo, it would cause an effect similar to suddenly hitting lower atmosphere, which would likely set off the warhead. The energy would be converted into hard radiation, which would either be stopped by the ship or fly though, into soft radiation, which would heat up the ship and vaporize outer armor layers, and into heat which would cause the missile to turn into a cloud of expanding gas. It would work like a pusher plate, but distance would not be optimal and armor would be harder to vaporize, so a reasonably sized warhead wouldn't give a whole lot of kick (and one big enough to do so would already kill the crew by other means).

Also, you're not going to have 50kg antimatter warheads. A conventional warhead of that mass would be considered too big for a spaceborne missile, and AM would require very heavy containment. That would make the missile big and slow, it would never even get to the shield before being shot to ribbons by point defense. Not that it'd help much. 50kg of antimatter is 2GT of boom. That's that's exterminatus level firepower, and it'd likely damage both the target and the ship that fired it, regardless of where it went off (as long it's not an interplantary missile or something).

[Spacescifi]

3 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

That depends on how much power you have to spare, and what you're trying to stop. Against kinetics, it's a tall order, but against radiation it's more plausible (seeing as the original design was for that), and for missiles, they could probably be made solid enough to either set off or destroy the warhead.

Except that's not how plasma shields work. They're not impenetrable walls, but rather a bunch of hot, charged gas held in place by magnetic fields. In case of an AM torpedo, it would cause an effect similar to suddenly hitting lower atmosphere, which would likely set off the warhead. The energy would be converted into hard radiation, which would either be stopped by the ship or fly though, into soft radiation, which would heat up the ship and vaporize outer armor layers, and into heat which would cause the missile to turn into a cloud of expanding gas. It would work like a pusher plate, but distance would not be optimal and armor would be harder to vaporize, so a reasonably sized warhead wouldn't give a whole lot of kick (and one big enough to do so would already kill the crew by other means).

Also, you're not going to have 50kg antimatter warheads. A conventional warhead of that mass would be considered too big for a spaceborne missile, and AM would require very heavy containment. That would make the missile big and slow, it would never even get to the shield before being shot to ribbons by point defense. Not that it'd help much. 50kg of antimatter is 2GT of boom. That's that's exterminatus level firepower, and it'd likely damage both the target and the ship that fired it, regardless of where it went off (as long it's not an interplantary missile or something).

 

When we consider plasma shields tough enough to stop kinetics we are already in scifi territory (either not possible or practical with modern tech).

So neither do I limit myself when considering advanced torpedos.

They would have AM contained by an inert form of solid mass that is inert to the specific AM contained, allowing for smaller and lighter missiles that are efficient to launch.

And yes,  such doing would make typical scifi shields working as they normally do kinda useless.

I was not considering real plasma screens, as we know scifi shields don't behave as such.

AM simply trumps just about all.

Unless you actually have a deflector field so powerful that it can deflect the blast plasma away from your vessel.

The radiation heat will still burn and likely combust the hull facing the explosion though, making that side of the ship a... primitive rocket.

What would actually kind a work is a scifi Trek cloaking device... since all light (radiation) is deflected. The plasma would still burn,  but would dissipate into vacuum too, and should be not as damaging as the radiation would have been... although still damaging.

And killing scifi tropes is all too easy anyway.

Crewed combat is a fool's errand, since combat vessels are by definition expendable, and actually human rating them reduces their combat abilities anyway.

Edited September 29, 2020 by Spacescifi

[Guest]

40 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

They would have AM contained by an inert form of solid mass that is inert to the specific AM contained, allowing for smaller and lighter missiles that are efficient to launch.

...in other words, magic pixie dust. Such material cannot exist. Antimatter is made out of antiprotons and antielectrons. Everything you can make a missile out of also is. For antimatter containment, you need a magnetic trap, and you'll be using grams of it, not kilograms. It'll still be better than any nuke of comparable size, but it's not a miracle material.

If you want to write about such things, better change your name to "Spacefantasy", because that's what most of your proposals are. 

Oh, and BTW, you probably can't stop kinetics with a reasonably strong plasma shield, but you can weaken them. A plasma shield is a cloud of hot gas. Remember what happens to things that go very fast and hit a cloud of gas? They burn up. A shield, while not thick enough to ablate a hypervelocity projectile completely (unless it's very small, which might be the case), will still strip away some of its energy.

[Spacescifi]

10 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

...in other words, magic pixie dust. Such material cannot exist. Antimatter is made out of antiprotons and antielectrons. Everything you can make a missile out of also is. For antimatter containment, you need a magnetic trap, and you'll be using grams of it, not kilograms. It'll still be better than any nuke of comparable size, but it's not a miracle material.

If you want to write about such things, better change your name to "Spacefantasy", because that's what most of your proposals are. 

Oh, and BTW, you probably can't stop kinetics with a reasonably strong plasma shield, but you can weaken them. A plasma shield is a cloud of hot gas. Remember what happens to things that go very fast and hit a cloud of gas? They burn up. A shield, while not thick enough to ablate a hypervelocity projectile completely (unless it's very small, which might be the case), will still strip away some of its energy.

 

Somewhere in my threads someone ( not me one of you) claimed if the AM was antihydrogen there actually is a kind of mass that would be inert to it... I just forgot what it was.

Fiction is fantasy. Science fiction= science fantasy. At least whenever plot devices occur and they are needed at times.

And I always have thought besides, maybe what is impossible will no longer be someday?

Humans are afterall like somone here on KSF said, "Prosthetic gods".

If there is a way we will find it. May take a long time but we will.

For what it's worth science and engineering is still an easier thing than oh say... world peace LOL.

And I don't mean by nuking all to oblivion LOL, that's the easy way LOL... because that is what woyld solve it merely like an engineering physical problem.

Edited September 29, 2020 by Spacescifi

[Guest]

45 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

Fiction is fantasy. Science fiction= science fantasy. At least whenever plot devices occur and they are needed at times.

No. Here's a hint, before you start writing, do some research about genres and conventions you want to write in (or subvert, if you can pull it off) first. For the record:

Science fiction deals with, well, science. People who want to write real, honest science fiction do extensive research into real science. I'll be frank with you, the best ones usually have university-level education in a hard science, and quite often are actual scientists. If you don't have that (and your responses so far suggest that you have trouble understanding hard sciences even at high school level), you'll have a though time. It takes place in the real world, which works according to scientific principles. This also means your selection of plot devices is constrained and you can't make technology up willy-nilly. At most, you can use things that are not quite forbidden by science, such as Alcubierre drive. Even then, you can't make up its properties without moving out of science fiction territory. In general, in this genre, you cannot tailor the setting to the plot, because the setting is, ultimately, real life (even if the story takes place in the future). You have to take what science gives you, and work with that to create your plot (it actually gives you quite a lot, but you have to work your brain to figure out how to use it).

Science fantasy is inbetween, and is not always the result of the writer not bothering with research. Star Wars is a good example (Star Trek, too, though unlike SW, it tries to pretend otherwise). The setting is, at first glance, like that of a very far-fetched science fiction, but in fact, the writer consciously decided to depart from the rules of our world. Besides impossible technology, this usually takes form of some kind of telepathy and/or telekinesis. Star Wars went whole hog with that, and introduced The Force, which is like magic by another name. It's not quite "pure" fantasy (though it's closer to it than to science fiction), because most of its wonders, while impossible in real world, are scientifically understood in universe. 

Fantasy, as generally understood, refers to settings inspired by fairytales, mythology, and certain fellow by the name of Tolkien. Lord of the Rings is the archetypical example. It doesn't have to take place in the past, and there's nothing stopping it from taking place in the future, but magic and supernatural are primary fixtures of the setting. It might have its own science, but it's incidental. It's clear that the world doesn't work like our own in a big way, and it makes no attempt at doing so.

Most of your ideas fall into science fantasy. My advice is, if you can't open up a physics journal and understand, at least on a basic level, the scientific papers therein, you probably have no business trying to write science fiction. If you try to present it as "real science", any actual scientists in the readerbase will laugh you out of the room (and a lot of SF readers are scientists, too). If you stop pretending and set out to write science fantasy from the start, your life will be a lot easier.

Edited September 29, 2020 by Guest

[sevenperforce]

There’s a continuum to be sure.

• Hard science fiction (The Martian)
• Soft science fiction (Dune, Interstellar)
• Space opera (Star Trek)
• Science fantasy (Star Wars)
• Planetary romance (Dr. Who, The Space Trilogy)
• Epic fantasy (LOTR)
• Urban fantasy (Harry Potter)

The questions you’re asking, Space, are mostly along the lines of what you’d be asking for hard sci-fi. But it seems like your setting is somewhere between soft sci-fi and space opera. Hence the incongruity.

Try to focus less on getting the specific scientific details right and focus more on making your narrative and the rules of your fictional universe internally consistent. 

[mikegarrison]

33 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

There’s a continuum to be sure.

• Hard science fiction (The Martian)
• Soft science fiction (Dune, Interstellar)
• Space opera (Star Trek)
• Science fantasy (Star Wars)
• Planetary romance (Dr. Who, The Space Trilogy)
• Epic fantasy (LOTR)
• Urban fantasy (Harry Potter)

 

This is a little over-simplified. Most science fiction starts from a premise that one or more theoretical or engineering obstacles have been overcome. Your example of "hard science fiction" includes stuff we certainly couldn't build today (most especially the ship they use to go back and forth to Mars). If the science gets too "hard", its not really SF anymore. A novel set in a university physics lab, for instance, isn't necessarily SF even if all the characters are scientists who are doing science.

Is a murder mystery which features a forensic anthropologist solving the mystery by examining a skeleton "hard science fiction"? What if it's written by an actual forensic anthropologist and references actual science as part of the plot? Most people would consider it very strange to find such a book sitting in the SF section of a bookstore or library, even though it could easily be argued that it was "very-hard science fiction".

And urban fantasy is often significantly less "fantastic" than "high fantasy" (elves and dragons and whathaveyou). I mean, your paranormal magical hero walks out of a typical house, gets into a car, drives to the supermarket, and then spots a ghost wandering through the produce section. That's a lot closer to "hard" SF than hobbits fighting orcs with magical fireballs.

I would argue that space opera is not based on the science content of the setting, but rather on the scope and nature of the story. It usually involves galactic empires or large-scale battles or ... well ... the kind of stuff people write singing operas about. A small-scale Star Trek story about a landing party running into trouble on a strange world isn't really "space opera", but a massive battle between the Federation fleet and a Borg invasion? Sure. Dune is clearly space opera, for instance.

Edited September 29, 2020 by mikegarrison

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, sevenperforce said:

Soft science fiction (Dune, Interstellar)

Imho, Dune is a pure StarWars level of scienticity.

(offtopic) Does the Spice affect jedis? (/offtopic)

***

Also where is "The Night Land" by W.H.Hodgson in this scheme?

It's neither really a fantasy, nor really a mystic horror, not a really scientific fiction. It's first two but with realistically-looking "scientific" explanations of the events and devices.
The hero is armed not with a magic fireball wand but with a chainsaw wand powered with the Earth electric current, there are fallen flying flied machines, and other tech stuff.
(Skip the first chapter, if doesn't relate to the whole book).

***

Star Trek is a road movie about the team of knights with hippie propaganda monologues.

Also such knight road movies are Orville, Lexx, and in some degree Babylon-5 (a siege of the last castle of light with periodical crusades of its knights).
(Just don't tell that B-5 is scientific.)

Edited September 29, 2020 by kerbiloid

[mikegarrison]

On 9/26/2020 at 3:46 PM, Dragon01 said:

Actually, most airliners are in private hands. It's just that the entities owning them are nearly always large companies, which use them to do business, and have appropriate (for most part) regulatory oversight. It is very rare for a plane of significant size to be actually reserved for the owner's personal use, and every one of those owners is very wealthy. Han Solo was hardly one of those types.

Ocean vessels big enough to pose a threat, especially ones transporting dangerous cargo, are owned by companies, too, and receive a lot of oversight. Sure, sometimes such a company goes out of business, and then a dangerous cargo might end up with unclear legal status, but this is a relatively uncommon event. Again, personal freighters are not really a thing. Owning a 100m+ yachts is a privilege of ultra-rich, and they're usually not involved in how these ships run, beyond telling the captain where to go. They don't carry any cargo, either, and are only dangerous to smaller vessels that happen to blunder into their path.

I'd expect starships to be the same. Large, expensive, ran by large companies. No space swashbucklers and space pirates. No smuggling, either, unless as a side business of an otherwise legitimate commercial ship operation. There are ways to be sneaky in space, but not for a simple freighter on a regular basis, so a smuggler would need a legitimate reason to come and go, at least. Occasionally, some billionaire could have one for personal use. 

I give you: fishing boats. Often owned by an owner/captain.

Likewise, pilot/owners of airplanes are quite common, but these are usually small planes. The thing is, the bigger and more expensive a plane or a boat gets, the less likely it is that it can be owned for personal use. There are people who personally own large airplanes, but these tend to be the kind of people who rule whole countries or otherwise have a *lot* of money.

In days gone by it was a lot more common for an individual to buy a ship or a plane and operate it. Hire and crew and go out whaling, for instance. Or get an airmail contract. Or hire it out as a charter service.

If space ships were cheap enough (relative to the general economy), this could be possible. 

[Okhin]

Also, there's cargo plane owned by individuals. They're usually operating illegally, but you can have arms and drugs traffickers who own their ships and rent their services to illegal activities. Such as smuggling. Which is what Han Solo is doing. He's a smuggler, and owns his private plane to smuggle stuff around, in shady deals, outside the range of authority.

Yes, it means you have black market economies and infrastructures, but then, there's already black market fuel being sold in and around war zones to anyone who wants to buy it (including legitimate actors). I reckon than a spaceport might requires a bit more than a airstrip, but if there's money to be done - and there will be money to be done in black market as long as you have regulation for certain type of product or monopolies which sells products at a high prices - I see no reason for not having them too. Sure, the security won't be at the same standards than the legitimate spaceport, but hey, at least they don't check your passport. Or your manifest.

So yes, individual owning big cargo ships for illegal purposes exists and will exists. It does nt means it's a lot of people, but in the frame of a story with heroes, it's perfectly logical to have them.

[KSK]

Personally I’m not a big fan of trying to pigeonhole particular sci-fi works into particular sub-genres. When I’m choosing a book, I don’t really care what label folks try to hang on it or how heated the arguments get between different folks trying to hang different labels on it.

To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart (who was referring to a somewhat different genre):

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [science fiction] and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the [book] involved in this case is not that.“

Science-fiction - I know it when I see it. That’s good enough for me.

Edited September 29, 2020 by KSK