06-13-2019, 10:20 PM | #11 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Nuclear Age Space Exploration [Space/Spaceships]
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Environmental effects of the microwave beams passing through the atmosphere on a steady basis. Practical cost of maintenance of the solar arrays in orbit. Degradation of the arrays over time. Vulnerability to sabotage/attack. Etc. Advocates have their answers for these points, but all such answers are mostly hypothetical. We just don't know if there's any practical way to make SPS economically competitive with ground-based solar, much less ground-based nuclear and fossil fuel. It doesn't look hopeful.
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HMS Overflow-For conversations off topic here. |
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06-13-2019, 10:32 PM | #12 | |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Nuclear Age Space Exploration [Space/Spaceships]
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As for the SPS, it only requires Saturn V technology, so there was nothing new required. It would have taken a few dozens launches to set up the lunar base, but they could have set up a few production lines during the late-70s if they had possessed the courage and vision. Heck, they might have even dusted off the old Sea Dragon design and just went with that 30,000 ton monster (scaling up from that to 100,000 tons would have been a piece of cake given the simplicity of the designs). With 3,000 tons every launch into LEO, building the lunar base would have been a piece of cake. |
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06-14-2019, 12:16 AM | #13 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Nuclear Age Space Exploration [Space/Spaceships]
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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06-14-2019, 08:21 AM | #14 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Nuclear Age Space Exploration [Space/Spaceships]
Which is just copying the prototype, which is covered in Basic (p. 474). It costs the retail cost of the object to create and half the time as the original prototype. In the case of a Saturn V, it would take 3d/2 to create each copy, assuming enough people working on the project, but you could always have multiple groups working on multiple copies. Remember, the Apollo Program employed 400,000 people, so they could have easily transformed everything into production lines had they had the need.
In any case, you could have easily designed a SM+10 reusable variant that would have been capable of delivering 300 tons to LEO for a launch cost of ~$30M, or $100,000 per ton. With 400 such vehicles, each launching once a month, you would have been able to move 1,440,000 tons into LEO every year at a cost of $144B per year, which is ~1% of GDP for the USA (GURPS constant $). If we assume a lifetime of 5 years per vehicle, you would need 10 production lines to sustain the fleet (producing 80 vehicles a year), and a ramp up time of five years, giving five years for creating the production lines, maintenance facilities, etc. It would have been quite possible for late-TL7/early-TL8, it was just that our leaders lacked courage and vision. |
06-14-2019, 09:43 AM | #15 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Nuclear Age Space Exploration [Space/Spaceships]
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Complaining about lack of "courage and vision" among the people who actually managed those very difficult moon landings only serves to discredit your arguments. Complainging about a lack of vision and courage among the politicians of the time (or current ones either) is not particularly outrageous but still rather like being annoyed that rain is wet.
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Fred Brackin |
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06-14-2019, 10:02 AM | #16 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Nuclear Age Space Exploration [Space/Spaceships]
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Why not? It's not like you need every launch to carry two men and their consumables. Most of them would, of course, be unmanned cargo flights.
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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06-14-2019, 10:36 AM | #17 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Nuclear Age Space Exploration [Space/Spaceships]
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If you want some sort of number.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo...Specifications ....near the bottom (5.2) has a brief mention of a proposed "LM truck" which would have been a one way descent stage to deliver cargo witha capcity of 11,000 lbs. That's still not a lot when you consider you started with an entire Saturn V. .
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Fred Brackin |
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06-14-2019, 10:52 AM | #18 |
Join Date: May 2007
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Re: Nuclear Age Space Exploration [Space/Spaceships]
I think the point is not that they couldn't put a moonbase there, but that any moonbase would not be industrially productive- there's not much you can mine or manufacture on the moon that can't be obtained far more cheaply on earth. We could have built a moonbase with Apollo-era tech, if we really wanted to, but it would have been done for the same combination of research and national prestige that motivated the actual landings rather than because it made "economic sense".
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I predicted GURPS:Dungeon Fantasy several hours before it came out and all I got was this lousy sig. |
06-14-2019, 11:15 AM | #19 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Nuclear Age Space Exploration [Space/Spaceships]
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This claim, though...it's certainly true if the place you want the goods is on earth. But that was never the proposal. The industrial purpose of the moonbase is to produce materials for the orbital power constellations - and for that there is a very large savings from not having to boost products from Earth's surface. Not necessarily enough to make a moon facility pay for itself (especially if you don't have a space source for water), but not trivially out of the question.
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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06-14-2019, 11:49 AM | #20 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Nuclear Age Space Exploration [Space/Spaceships]
NASA already did the work up in 1977. Just look up NASA SP-413 Space Settlements: A Design Study. While they were thinking of using a space shuttle rather than a Saturn V variant, they built a dang good economic case for something that could have been done with 1970s technology.
So, what type of setting would evolve if the USA had built such an orbital solar power array? The USA could have 10 TW of electricity production under its control, enough to supply the developed world with all of its energy needs (assuming that plentiful and cheap electricity would have prompted earlier investment in electric vehicles). The space industry would be worth over $4 trillion per year by 2020, and the US government would have had control over the vast majority of it. What happens in a setting where the US government has no debt and it controls 60% of the energy production on Earth? |
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