Radiation energy and heliospheres

[Hoovy]

To start off with, I have suggested things for other games before, however, most of these are fantasy games. This is a realistic game, and thus, if my suggestions are hard to read, and you have a stroke reading this and die, then sorry for my bad "ordering" and explanations. I've also never really talked about physics much before, which is another reason this might be hard to read.

Anyways, radiation. We know what it is, you get too much of it and you die. We also use it for power, which is why I think that some of the more efficient EC generators later in the tech tree should be powered on radiation, maybe not by radioactive materials, but radiation in space. Or this radiation could be used to turn a non-radioactive material into a radioactive material, which can then be used for EC generation. There could also be a toggle for kerbals to get radiation poisoning if exposed too much radiation, and if you don't get them to an area with mostly no radiation "quickly", they could die (or go MIA on easier difficulties). However, if this toggle is on, there needs to be some form of having radiation bounce off of ships, or radiate out of the ship during interstellar travel, due to what is known as "heliospheres."

Basically, stars have atmospheres. Yes yes, the suns corona (which fun fact is hotter than it's surface) is an atmosphere, but it also repels radiation out of its most outermost layer of its atmosphere, which extends well past the Keiper belt. Most stars if not all have these "astrospheres" or "magnetospheres" (which the earth has its own magnetosphere), and outside of this, is an astronomical amount of cosmic ionizing radiation. Basically, if you decide you want kerbals and parts to be affected by radiation, if you dont have practically 9000 layers of 50 feet thick lead, or any other material good at stopping radiation, you will instantly be vaporized. While the astrosphere doesn't stop all of this radiation from entering it's system, it stops a large majority of it (excluding uncharged gamma rays), which means that if that setting is on, if 2 years of floating around the sun between duna and kerbin in no ship were to give a kerbal radiation sickness, being outside this heliosphere would cut that time down to a very short time. Personally, I don't know the exact specifications, but it would probably be a matter of seconds.

[Pthigrivi]

We don't know yet what will and wont be in the game, but there are hints that radiation will be a factor in craft design (as in not putting your antimatter engines forward of your crew cabins). Most EM power supply systems I've seen involve long tethers, and I've heard mixed reviews on its applicability IRL, but its possible something like that could be included. As to radiation in interplanetary and interstellar space goes I think it could be a cool mechanic so long as players could map it and prepare for or avoid the most dangerous bands. It'll probably be lite though. The devs have put a strong emphasis on making the game non-punishing and I I don't think it would be fun for players to fly all the way to another star system to find their whole crew dead. Maybe just very grumpy and unproductive. 

Edited July 6, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[Bej Kerman]

21 hours ago, Hoovy said:

you will instantly be vaporized

Citation needed. The Sun's heliopause should have a surface area of 3 square light years or 1.9×10^5 square AU (very rough estimate), I doubt a shell of energy spread over such an incomprehensible distance would have much of an effect on Kerbals.

 

EDIT: Probably also worth mentioning that Voyagers I & II were completely fine passing through the heliopause. They picked up a little "bloop" on their instruments and that's it.

Edited July 6, 2022 by Bej Kerman

[t_v]

I like this idea for gameplay implications too, because I always thought that while going to other planets in a little metal chair was fun, it kind of messed with the consistency of the game. Why develop pods if kerbals are comfortable sitting in their spacesuits for years? Having to compensate for radiation between planets already creates new design problems to think about (although the difficulty should be tweakable so that players can just design a reasonable ship and no problems occur) and making that problem more relevant in interstellar space is a good way to stop people from strapping a kerbal to a xenon tank and letting them coast for a century or more. 

[Hoovy]

On 7/6/2022 at 8:49 AM, Bej Kerman said:

EDIT: Probably also worth mentioning that Voyagers I & II were completely fine passing through the heliopause. They picked up a little "bloop" on their instruments and that's it.

I mainly meant your lifeforms will be gone quite quickly, not that the materials will just vaporize themselves. Only low quality materials that can be affected by radiation would get vaporized.

[Bej Kerman]

48 minutes ago, Hoovy said:

On 7/6/2022 at 3:49 PM, Bej Kerman said:

EDIT: Probably also worth mentioning that Voyagers I & II were completely fine passing through the heliopause. They picked up a little "bloop" on their instruments and that's it.

I mainly meant your lifeforms will be gone quite quickly, not that the materials will just vaporize themselves. Only low quality materials that can be affected by radiation would get vaporized.

Can you link whatever told you that the tiny amount of energy at the edge of the heliosphere is enough to vaporize life? 

[Ember12]

I don't think there's enough radiation out there to vaporize anything.  Sure it could cause some damage to kerbals and maybe electronics, but  not structural damage.

[Hoovy]

2 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Can you link whatever told you that the tiny amount of energy at the edge of the heliosphere is enough to vaporize life? 

Sorry, re-read what I saw and it appears that I partially mis-understood what it said. So, you could still get vaporized, but not instantaneously. Another factor of that would be the plasma that is apparently there as well, and that would be more capable of vaporization.

[Ember12]

Both Voyagers went through the heliopause without taking any noticeable damage at all, so it seems unlikely that vaporization would be a problem for a starship traveling orders of magnitude faster.

[Bej Kerman]

13 hours ago, Hoovy said:

15 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Can you link whatever told you that the tiny amount of energy at the edge of the heliosphere is enough to vaporize life? 

Sorry, re-read what I saw and it appears that I partially mis-understood what it said. So, you could still get vaporized, but not instantaneously. Another factor of that would be the plasma that is apparently there as well, and that would be more capable of vaporization.

Honestly it sounds like you're assuming that the heliosphere would vaporize things because "heliosphere" sounds like a scary name. It will not vaporize anything, at all.

[Pthigrivi]

I was curious and check out what solar radiation actually looks like:



And here's what it looks like around Jupiter:

Edited July 8, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[Hoovy]

12 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Honestly it sounds like you're assuming that the heliosphere would vaporize things because "heliosphere" sounds like a scary name. It will not vaporize anything, at all.

Nah, I don't mean the astrosphere, I meant outside of the suns atmosphere/astrosphere. And again, as I said previously, I misinterpreted what I read. Its not much to vaporize material, but it could quite possibly end a life fairly quickly without the proper precautions.

[Hoovy]

Also Pthigrivi, nice diagrams you found there. I also like how in the upper diagrams, it shows CMEs. Fun fact, in 2012, a CME missed us by roughly 9 days, which if it had hit, while it wouldn't be the end of the world, it still would have shut down most electronics and servers, wiping lots of data off the earth, a long with non data based machines (I.E. telegrams, sure they are technically data based machines, but they dont store data) functioning while being unplugged, and seeing aurora borealis much closer to the equator. This exact reason is one reason why I am personally excited for photonics, which while it might be possible to be intergrated into ksp2 as "faster" or "stronger" probe cores, or electronics more resiliant to radiation. I don't know if photonics actually get damaged by radiation like regular electronics do, but if they don't, then that could be a good option for interstellar probe travel.

[Ember12]

I think I'm missing something here.  Are you talking about only the effects of being extremely close to a star?  If so, I don't see what interstellar probes have to do with it.  Both Voyagers are fine, and they're protected only by aluminum foil.

Edited July 9, 2022 by Ember12

[t_v]

4 hours ago, Ember12 said:

I think I'm missing something here.  Are you talking about only the effects of being extremely close to a star?  If so, I don't see what interstellar probes have to do with it.  Both Voyagers are fine, and they're protected only by aluminum foil.

The star has its own solar wind and other effects that push back cosmic radiation. It’s like going into interplanetary space from LEO, you get a sharp increase in the amount of radiation the ship is exposed to. I’m not sure about vaporization, but radiation sickness will onset much faster out in interstellar space, and delicate, unprotected digital systems could have a lot more problems. I think that it could be a great gameplay mechanic that naturally gates interstellar progression to later game technology and makes the people who reach a new star with tier 5 equipment even more impressive. 

[Bej Kerman]

8 hours ago, Hoovy said:

21 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Honestly it sounds like you're assuming that the heliosphere would vaporize things because "heliosphere" sounds like a scary name. It will not vaporize anything, at all.

Nah, I don't mean the astrosphere, I meant outside of the suns atmosphere/astrosphere. And again, as I said previously, I misinterpreted what I read. Its not much to vaporize material, but it could quite possibly end a life fairly quickly without the proper precautions.

Great, can you link whatever taught you that? Because I still do not believe that.

EDIT: It has to be from a scientific paper, no untrustworthy news sites please.

Edited July 9, 2022 by Bej Kerman

[Hoovy]

2 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Great, can you link whatever taught you that? Because I still do not believe that.

EDIT: It has to be from a scientific paper, no untrustworthy news sites please.

Ok, so, I just searched up what interstellar space is called, figured out that it is the interstellar medium, which of the voyager 1 was the first manmade object to reach. Heres the wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_medium#CITEREFHaffnerReynoldsTufteMadsen2003

Here is the encyclopedia britannica (For those who don't know what it is, it is literally just wikipedia but people are hired to work on it, not public work so it can't be messed up entirely for a time.)

https://www.britannica.com/science/interstellar-medium

I just skimmed through this, so I don't know how accurate it is, but here is a white paper on the subject.

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1307/1307.0712.pdf

[Bej Kerman]

3 minutes ago, Hoovy said:

3 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Great, can you link whatever taught you that? Because I still do not believe that.

EDIT: It has to be from a scientific paper, no untrustworthy news sites please.

Ok, so, I just searched up what interstellar space is called, figured out that it is the interstellar medium, which of the voyager 1 was the first manmade object to reach. Heres the wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_medium#CITEREFHaffnerReynoldsTufteMadsen2003

Here is the encyclopedia britannica (For those who don't know what it is, it is literally just wikipedia but people are hired to work on it, not public work so it can't be messed up entirely for a time.)

https://www.britannica.com/science/interstellar-medium

I just skimmed through this, so I don't know how accurate it is, but here is a white paper on the subject.

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1307/1307.0712.pdf

Sorry if I didn't clarify myself, I meant specifically what told you that the heliopause is strong enough to cause harm.

[Hoovy]

3 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

3 hours ago, Hoovy said:

Ok, so, I just searched up what interstellar space is called, figured out that it is the interstellar medium, which of the voyager 1 was the first manmade object to reach. Heres the wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_medium#CITEREFHaffnerReynoldsTufteMadsen2003

Here is the encyclopedia britannica (For those who don't know what it is, it is literally just wikipedia but people are hired to work on it, not public work so it can't be messed up entirely for a time.)

https://www.britannica.com/science/interstellar-medium

I just skimmed through this, so I don't know how accurate it is, but here is a white paper on the subject.

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1307/1307.0712.pdf

Sorry if I didn't clarify myself, I meant specifically what told you that the heliopause is strong enough to cause harm.

I don't remember ever saying it was the heliopause that caused any damage, I mean the interstellar medium instead, or rather, what is on the outside of the heliopause. And even then, again, as I've said for the third time now, I re-read what I saw, and it doesn't instantly vaporize you, but it has a large amount of radiation which would easily cause radiation sickness to occur much more quickly, as well as starting to ruin electronics if not prepared properly (See the voyagers, personally not sure how they dont get ruined by the radiation, but they don't)

[Bej Kerman]

4 minutes ago, Hoovy said:

personally not sure how they dont get ruined by the radiation

Perhaps because the radiation isn't as strong as you think it is. I have yet to see you quote anything that tells me the radiation would be strong enough to harm electronics and living things.

[Hoovy]

20 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Perhaps because the radiation isn't as strong as you think it is. I have yet to see you quote anything that tells me the radiation would be strong enough to harm electronics and living things.

 

Fun fact. In low earth orbit, astronauts are already at high risk of radiation poisoning. The astronauts on the ISS typically receive 12-28.8 milli rads per day, even with how close they are to the earth and how well built the ISS is. Radiation sickness takes place at about 100 rads, with it getting lethal at about 400 rads. Sure, 12-28.8 milli rads per day isn't much, and someone could stay on the iss for quite a while before they get radiation sickness, but the ISS is quite close to the earth, and still within its magnetic field, meaning radiation could affect someone more the further out they are from the earth, or any planet with a magnetic field. For example, on the moon, one would take a substantially larger amount of rads in per day than on the earth, taking about 2.6x more rads on the moon than the earth, being on average, approximately 30-100 milli rads per day, if my math is correct. The reason I took a 100 rather than a lower number, and rounded down to the 30, is due to the fact that for part of the month the moon is (at least) partially in the earths magnetic field, or completely outside of the magnetic field, and also because I cant find anything about the more exact milli rads per day.