What A Star Wars Setting Would Really Be Like....

[Spacescifi]

Scenario: Apparent rocket based drive equipped vessels regularly SSTO to and fro from planets.

Two stage to orbit no longer is used at at all... since even heavy vessels can SSTO.

Radiation pollution from exhaust is not even an issue since exhaust is NOT radioactive.

 

How is this even possible?

 

Indulge me a bit in my imagination if you will. I do like this idea and think it is one of my better ones... since you can literally take ANY chemical rocket today and pair it with it and it would work!

Mono-Repulsive Rocket Nozzles: All rockets blow out hot gas. Imagine if a rocket nozzle could be designed so that it would passively repel the exhaust as it shoots out much faster than the engine is shooting it?

The only requirement is that nozzles are paired to only repelling one type of exhaust. This means that if your exhaust is hydrolox then guess what? That is the only propellant you can ever use with your nozzles and expect a big increase in efficiency and thrust. This means you absolutely need hydrolox... fortunately water ice is common in space if you know where to look.

Amount of Thrust: Is based upon how much energy each nozzle contains and how much of it is being used to repel the exhaust. This can be adjusted via computer controls.

Nozzle Energy Source: Nozzles are provided energy via electric charging. Unlike normal metals, mono-repellant nozzles can charge enough electricity to equal it's own mass as translated into energy. So once a 3 kilogram nozzle was fully charged it would weigh 6 kilograms. Basically the nozzles convert their electrical charge directly into repulsive thrust toward the exhaust with no lost energy middleman.

Thrust efficiency: On par with antimatter/matter annihilation. Which means less propellant used for higher thrust. Thrust can be throttled as to how much energy you want to exhaust from the nozzles at once. In theory you could exhaust all your nozzle energy at once, but that would be hundreds of gees and kill everyone on board as well as damage certain ship components. Good for RKVS though.

Dangers: The nozzles are cryogenically cooled, but if they were ever heated enough so that they began to melt that would release the nozzle's stored energy with a catastrophic explosion equal to however much energy is stored in the nozzle. PS: Never fly too close to the sun. You WILL die. Also try to avoid getting your nozzles zapped by an uber laser... because again... that is like an insta-kill.

Due to safety regulations nozzles are rarely ever fully charged (because who really needs multiple nozzles with their weight's worth of energy on par with matter/antimatter annihilation).

Missiles: Would dominate such a setting. Who needs fighters when missiles are cheaper? Instead you would get missile buses.... carriers of missiles to fire them off at closer ranges. Missile range and acceleration would be ridiculous since it would use the same nozzles the starships use.

Consequences: No Han Solos. Ships powerful enough to make TSTO obsolete are city wreckers.

Thus every ship is government or company owned. End of story. Anytime you get a ship like this it has bom-like energy stored so it must be treated that way.

Challenges: Charging a nozzle via electricity enough to equal antimatter/matter levels of energy would take forever using modern tech. Fortunately scifi settings have access to greater energy production abilities.

At best if Spacex starship were given mono-repellent nozzles it could use them so long they had charge... but it lacks the power to properly charge them. You would need nothing less than a scifi industrial powerplant to properly charge the nozzles in a reasonable amount of time.

 

 

Edited February 7, 2023 by Spacescifi

[darthgently]

4 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

Scenario: Apparent rocket based drive equipped vessels regularly SSTO to and fro from planets.

Two stage to orbit no longer is used at at all... since even heavy vessels can SSTO.

Radiation pollution from exhaust is not even an issue since exhaust is NOT radioactive.

 

How is this even possible?

 

Indulge me a bit in my imagination if you will. I do like this idea and think it is one of my better ones... since you can literally take ANY chemical rocket today and pair it with it and it would work!

Mono-Repulsive Rocket Nozzles: All rockets blow out hot gas. Imagine if a rocket nozzle could be designed so that it would passively repel the exhaust as it shoots out much faster than the engine is shooting it?

The only requirement is that nozzles are paired to only repelling one type of exhaust. This means that if your exhaust is hydrolox then guess what? That is the only propellant you can ever use with your nozzles and expect a big increase in efficiency and thrust. This means you absolutely need hydrolox... fortunately water ice is common in space if you know where to look.

Amount of Thrust: Is based upon how much energy each nozzle contains and how much of it is being used to repel the exhaust. This can be adjusted via computer controls.

Nozzle Energy Source: Nozzles are provided energy via electric charging. Unlike normal metals, mono-repellant nozzles can charge enough electricity to equal it's own mass as translated into energy. So once a 3 kilogram nozzle was fully charged it would weigh 6 kilograms. Basically the nozzles convert their electrical charge directly into repulsive thrust toward the exhaust with no lost energy middleman.

Thrust efficiency: On par with antimatter/matter annihilation. Which means less propellant used for higher thrust. Thrust can be throttled as to how much energy you want to exhaust from the nozzles at once. In theory you could exhaust all your nozzle energy at once, but that would be hundreds of gees and kill everyone on board as well as damage certain ship components. Good for RKVS though.

Dangers: The nozzles are cryogenically cooled, but if they were ever heated enough so that they began to melt that would release the nozzle's stored energy with a catastrophic explosion equal to however much energy is stored in the nozzle. PS: Never fly too close to the sun. You WILL die. Also try to avoid getting your nozzles zapped by an uber laser... because again... that is like an insta-kill.

Due to safety regulations nozzles are rarely ever fully charged (because who really needs multiple nozzles with their weight's worth of energy on par with matter/antimatter annihilation).

Missiles: Would dominate such a setting. Who needs fighters when missiles are cheaper? Instead you would get missile buses.... carriers of missiles to fire them off at closer ranges. Missile range and acceleration would be ridiculous since it would use the same nozzles the starships use.

Consequences: No Han Solos. Ships powerful enough to make TSTO obsolete are city wreckers.

Thus every ship is government or company owned. End of story. Anytime you get a ship like this it has bomb like energy stored so it must be treated that way.

Challenges: Charging a nozzle via electricity enough to equal antimatter/matter levels of energy would take forever using modern tech. Fortunately scifi settings have access to greater energy production abilities.

At best if Spacex starship were given mono-repellent nozzles it could use them so long they had charge... but it lacks the power to properly charge them. You would need nothing less than a scifi industrial powerplant to properly charge the nozzles in a reasonable amount of time.

 

 

By what physical mechanism do the nozzles repel only specific molecules/atoms?  Sounds like ion thrusting given the "charge" requirement.  Having difficulty suspending disbelief 

[jimmymcgoochie]

Star Wars: where hundred mile wide planet-killing space stations get taken down in a climatic battle scene that's copied almost exactly from The Dambusters only with X-wings instead of Lancaster bombers and a militaristic totalitarian dictatorship instead of- hang on...

I was hoping this was going to be a thread more related to what it would be like to live inside the Star Wars galaxy, but instead it seems to be trying to find even the most tenuous scientific justification behind literal "space magic" for why Star Wars spacecraft can just go wherever they want to. It's space magic, leave it at that.

 

[darthgently]

5 minutes ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

Star Wars: where hundred mile wide planet-killing space stations get taken down in a climatic battle scene that's copied almost exactly from The Dambusters only with X-wings instead of Lancaster bombers and a militaristic totalitarian dictatorship instead of- hang on...

I was hoping this was going to be a thread more related to what it would be like to live inside the Star Wars galaxy, but instead it seems to be trying to find even the most tenuous scientific justification behind literal "space magic" for why Star Wars spacecraft can just go wherever they want to. It's space magic, leave it at that.

 

My bad, I didn't note the topic when responding, thought I was in KSP2 ideas topic

[kerbiloid]

The SW definition of "SSTO"

Single Stage Too Overkill

Single Stage Too Overpowered

[KSK]

3 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

The SW definition of "SSTO"

Single Stage Too Overkill

Single Stage Too Overpowered

Set Science To Off?

 

[DeadJohn]

I enjoy Star Wars, but it's a magical setting pretending to be sci-fi.

Tiny ships have enough fuel to warp all over the galaxy, land, and return to space. They can do this in remote regions that have no fuel depots so we can't assume off-screen refueling. Fuel only exists to further a plot point.

Orbital physics are usually ignored. A ship can be in orbit, then suddenly shed all horizontal momentum and dive straight down to the planet's surface. Let's attribute that to their magical engines that have unlimited power, unlimited fuel, and some form of inertial control so that pilots don't get pulped inside their cockpits.

If Earth had such technology today, travel to the moon and other planets would be trivially easy. The ISS could be immensely larger. Earth itself would be transformed; replace expensive, polluting power plants with spacecraft engines.

Star Wars engines don't even seem to significantly heat up in use. There are many scenes showing  someone working on an engine while it's running.

[Terwin]

As far as I can tell, the StarWars universe has anti-gravity tech that is pretty ubiquitous and used in everything from wheel-barrows to starships, with no real energy requirements.

I do not believe that any StarWars vessels actually get up to orbital velocities, and just sit there on anti-grav instead.  (this is why they can 'fall out of orbit' if they get too damaged, and also why a bomber can drop bombs on them from above)

Hyperspace probably involves some sort of Albercurrie drive using the same tech.  The 'engines' at the back are more akin to fairy-dust vents than actual engines, and may only be relevant for hyperspace.( perhaps venting something that helps prepare the area for hyperspace?)

 

If you give me that magical anti-grav tech, I could get you a family-car sized vehicle that can SSTO to the moon and back, possibly using a compressed-gas thruster to ease the transition between the earth-dominated and moon-dominated gravitational domains.

[KSK]

I have no idea how canonical it is, but Wookieepedia has an interesting article on repulsorlifts, aka magical StarWars antigrav tech.

And yeah, they seem to be pretty much as you describe. They also ‘push’ against gravitational fields, so that compressed gas thruster might not be needed. With that said, I bet the Falcon has one strapped to it somewhere, no doubt maintained and repaired using aerospanners.

[KSK]

Thinking about this a bit more, I rather like the Wookiepedia description of repulsorlifts, even if  it is a blatant bit of post-hoc world building.

It does provide a very nice explanation for the ‘wheelbarrows to Star Destroyers’ ubiquity of repulsorlifts, even if the actual tech is magic by another name.

I know it’s already been said elsewhere on these forums, but that’s one definition of good worldbuilding - the wider implications of a given piece of magitech are explored and shown on-page, rather than the tech just being used as a plot McGuffin.

[Spacescifi]

7 hours ago, darthgently said:

By what physical mechanism do the nozzles repel only specific molecules/atoms?  Sounds like ion thrusting given the "charge" requirement.  Having difficulty suspending disbelief 

Atomic level engineering... I dunno.

 

The nozzle is paired with the exhaust of choice so that it only repels that specific exhaus which it is designed for.

 

The electrical charge thing I added so that the energy does not come from no where.

 

Like always... adding any sort action/reaction/consequence to scifi leads to a more serious setting than the usual cowboy in space with a spaceship setting.

[Gargamel]

Here’s the thing a lot of aspiring sci fi writers can learn from Star Wars:

While there might be a lot of technical discussion and details in the wookieverse, the main canon (the main films) pretty much ignore the details.    The engines just work.    Nobody questions it.    Nobody asks for details.    The fighter combat is based on WWII dogfights.     Nobody cares cause it looks cool.  
 

Forget the details.    Quit explaining things in ways that don’t work and annoys the audience.    If a detail isn’t needed, lose it.   

Edited February 8, 2023 by Gargamel
Typo

[jimmymcgoochie]

11 hours ago, KSK said:

‘wheelbarrows to Star Destroyers’

This is Star Wars in a nutshell: anti-gravity technology so ubiquitous that even dirt-poor farmers on some backwater nowhere-planet have it and thus nobody ever questions how it works or why. It’s space magic dressed up as pseudoscience and trying to explain it properly won’t work because it was never meant to be explained.

[KSK]

10 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Like always... adding any sort action/reaction/consequence to scifi leads to a more serious setting than the usual cowboy in space with a spaceship setting.

Yes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to go into great detail about the technology especially if that’s just going to open up a bigger can of unintended consequences than you want to deal with. 

I’d say it also depends whether the detailed practicalities of spacecraft engines are the serious part of the setting. 

One of my favourite examples here is Joe Haldeman’s Forever War.  It’s a setting with relativistic spacecraft and the consequences of that which matter to the story (principally the consequences of time dilation but also the practicalities of space combat at relativistic speeds and the essential uselessness of crew for such vessels) are dealt with very seriously indeed.  Other consequences (mainly the problem of accounting for relativistic kill vehicles) are ignored because they’re not relevant to the story.

And the technology behind the spacecraft?

Tachyon drive.

We’re not told any more than that, other than the fact that one particular spacecraft can hit 30g. The details aren’t important, so far as the story is concerned, the reader just needs to know that it makes things go Stupidly Fast.

 

 

[steve9728]

It probably will be like:

orhttps://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1P8411t7js/?spm_id_from=333.788.recommend_more_video.1&vd_source=6fef304b8d0c4737896e6b702ddfbfb3

orhttps://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1zM41167Bx/?spm_id_from=333.999.0.0

[Nuke]

i have a theory that star wars is actually a post-science universe. everything that can be understood about the universe is understood to the point its taken for granted. it would explain why so many ships do things that defy reason or have features that dont make sense for its setting. they just arent taking a scientific approach to engineering. ship designs are kind of treated more like recipes rather than designs. ships need all these parts and you are just sticking them together in a way that gets everything it needs in it. its kind of like space lego. nobody is employing any kind of scientific methodology. 

[Spacescifi]

21 minutes ago, Nuke said:

i have a theory that star wars is actually a post-science universe. everything that can be understood about the universe is understood to the point its taken for granted. it would explain why so many ships do things that defy reason or have features that dont make sense for its setting. they just arent taking a scientific approach to engineering. ship designs are kind of treated more like recipes rather than designs. ships need all these parts and you are just sticking them together in a way that gets everything it needs in it. its kind of like space lego. nobody is employing any kind of scientific methodology. 

 

Ya know... I just realized something... the fact that the uber repellant nozzle is accelerating the exhaust will add heat to it.. right?

 

Which means it will be going so fast it will probably be ionized anyway.

Edited February 10, 2023 by Spacescifi

[Nuke]

yea im pretty sure starwars engineers are just spitballing everything. 

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, Nuke said:

star wars is actually a post-science universe

A biocyberpunk post-apoc.

[StrandedonEarth]

On 2/8/2023 at 2:44 AM, jimmymcgoochie said:

This is Star Wars in a nutshell: anti-gravity technology so ubiquitous that even dirt-poor farmers on some backwater nowhere-planet have it and thus nobody ever questions how it works or why. It’s space magic dressed up as pseudoscience and trying to explain it properly won’t work because it was never meant to be explained.

This. And then they give R2D2 jets for hovering instead of repulorlifts. I’m sure they had their reasons.   

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

This. And then they give R2D2 jets for hovering instead of repulorlifts. I’m sure they had their reasons.   

Spoiler