02-23-2020, 10:28 PM | #21 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
Enforcement will need to be truly draconian, immediate (and if you have an accident that leaves you out of control and on a collision course with something important, tough luck), and thorough.
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
02-23-2020, 11:10 PM | #22 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
The problem with the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation is that sometimes you don't want anarchy, you just want a more tolerant regime. Replace the Tyrant with a more easy-going ruler.
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02-23-2020, 11:23 PM | #23 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
Quote:
As for WMDs, a distinction needs to be made. 'WMD' covers everything from one-kiloton mininukes to R-bombs that can shatter planets. Reasonable mass orbital and interplanetary vessels are certainly WMDs, but they tend to be WMDs on the lower end of the scale. Let's say you've got a 1000 metric ton ship moving at 100 kilometers/sec. That's a nice clip for interplanetary travel, beyond current state of the art. It'll hit with a force of about 1 megaton, if I didn't slip a digit in my BOTEC. OK, that's certainly a WMD. It's as big as a biggish strategic nuke. But the flipside of that is that we already have 1 megaton nukes. We've had them for over half a century. So such a ship doesn't really add anything to the picture that isn't already present, and it would be an inefficient way to deliver a 1 megaton boom compared to a nuke. Such ships would imply very good space traffic control. There would be radar nets and other sensors tracking ships, trajectories would be filed and approved, etc. Ownership could be anything, as long as the operations are prevented from doing damage. But such vessels, which would be fully sufficient for a Solar System wide civilization, would not really change the WMD big picture much. Where Jon's Law really starts to bite is when you start getting up into thousands of kilometers/sec, or ships with enormous masses.
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02-23-2020, 11:50 PM | #24 |
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Ronneby, Sweden
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
How much would it help to have rather fragile (and not "streamlined") space ships that would break up in atmospheres? And while real life shuttles are "streamlined" they are still pretty fragile if not deorbited in just the right way so you'll use similar crafts (and elevators etc) to get up and down.
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02-23-2020, 11:54 PM | #25 | ||
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
Quote:
Quote:
In September 2001 I was running an SF campaign in which the PCs were involved in counter-terrorism in my usual Jon's-Law-obsessed interstellar SF setting. One of my players was from New York. I had to end the campaign abruptly.
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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. |
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02-23-2020, 11:55 PM | #26 | |
Join Date: Jul 2007
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
I tried to at least alleviate the WMD problem by cribbing from Poul Anderson et al:
Drives IMTU (In My Traveller Universe) Quote:
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02-24-2020, 12:07 AM | #27 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
My plan is to have the m-drive kill your velocity relative to any large mass 'nearby', to avoid tricks involving building up huge vectors some-place else, and then lining up the ship and turning off the m-drive (a trick you can do with 2300AD-style stutterwarps and the like, if you've the patience).
This also gets around questions about matching orbital velocities with planets and adjusting for relative stellar velocities when your main drive doesn't add real velocity.
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
02-24-2020, 12:15 AM | #28 | |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
Quote:
Here's the Earth Impacts Effects Calculator. It's really intended for meteors and asteroid impacts, and if you model spaceships as chunks of ice they don't seem too terrifying. However, your spaceship security has to contend not only with spaceships that are in space deciding to land without retrorockets, but also with spaceships with enough fuel and propellant to fly to Mars deciding to take off into the side of a government building instead of into space.
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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. |
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02-24-2020, 01:41 AM | #29 | ||
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
Quote:
Also in real space factors, the distances of any trip aren't short, and the times aren't all that short as a result. You only need immediate enforcement if somebody is going to plow into something at kps on the same level of immediacy, and you should never have allowed a flight trajectory that would let them abruptly change from 'safe' to 'ramming' in anything close to your reaction times in the first place. Any kind of enforcement of anything needs to be thorough, in proportion to the degree that you actually want to prevent it rather than occasionally using it to justify doling out punishments. You probably do genuinely want to prevent hyper-velocity kinetic strikes, so yeah. And the fact that no modes of interaction between 'talk to them' and 'destroy them' are really possible with a ship at high relative velocity, 'draconian' is the only option on the table. That said, both of these things apply to ATC as well, and they scarcely ever ask for a plane to be shot down and usually are not considered irresponsible in that practice... There is a space where you've got pretty short time-frame problems if you have high-thrust main drives. At some point many ships want to come very close indeed to potentially delicate space habitats. If our 100-ton suicidal shuttle has 1g acceleration and suddenly burns from rest towards a hab 35 km away, it won't be going at ridiculous speeds when it gets there a minute later but 500+ m/s is probably plenty to cause some major damage. Quote:
Although with reasonable information you should be able to judge the total payload mass, you probably can't externally tell whether it's a 100 ton cargo of plastic sheets or a 100 ton tungsten cannonball. The OP's proposal literally keeps the rocket equation in! The only thing it changes is not having a high-energy exhaust stream.
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02-24-2020, 02:01 AM | #30 |
Join Date: Dec 2007
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
No. I would not use coolant. My explanation for why my reactionless engines have an upper speed limit is that interacting with the dark matter that they use for virtual propellant creates drag and at at sufficiently high speed drag equals thrust.
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