Good source for NASA equipment?

[PTTG]

Suppose that NASA has an effectively unlimited budget as of July 21st 1969. We're talking war mobilization levels. Berlin Airlift to the moon. To take the best advantage of this resource, all you need to do is have people living on the moon, and the more the better.

What's the TL ~15 years later?

What's a good sourcebook to build off of?

(The "resource", if it matters, is High mana, but nobody has a reliable way to work it yet, so it's not really functional as life support, propulsion, or anything else, YET.)

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Suppose that NASA has an effectively unlimited budget as of June 21st 1969. We're talking war mobilization levels. Berlin Airlift to the moon. To take the best advantage of this resource, all you need to do is have people living on the moon, and the more the better.

What's the TL ~15 years later?

It would be hard to beat the funding in place in 1969. It would be alck of cuts that was the change.

Anyway, if it's 1984 the TL is 8. Changing TL progression requires a lot more than just building more of the stuff you already have. Fiat Science! doesn't work all that much better than fiat economics.

You may not have anyone living on the Moon either. To deliver more than a Lunar Module to the Moon you need more than a Saturn 5. Even using a NERVA for an upper stage (which might double the Delta-V of the third stage) wouldn't help that much with the lower stages.

It would really work a lot better to take the magic to go to the Moon rather than going to the Moon to get the magic. High Mana isn't worth all that much more than normal Mana anyway. It's nice as an environment for recharging powerstones and using self-powered Items but it doesn't look like gold rush stuff to me.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

It would really work a lot better to take the magic to go to the Moon rather than going to the Moon to get the magic. High Mana isn't worth all that much more than normal Mana anyway. It's nice as an environment for recharging powerstones and using self-powered Items but it doesn't look like gold rush stuff to me.

Depends on what the mana level of Earth is. Default is Low Mana, and that's -5 to all magic.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Anders

Depends on what the mana level of Earth is. Default is Low Mana, and that's -5 to all magic.

Or its normal mana but no one on earth has magery --- the point is that the only place you can cast magic is the moon. If you can grant immortality there, billions of dollars of private money get sent into the sky.

The point about funding may be reasonable. But so much of the moon program was research rather than reproduced results...

[PTTG]

Originally Posted by Anders

Depends on what the mana level of Earth is. Default is Low Mana, and that's -5 to all magic.

Earth is Low Mana and the Moon is either High or Very High. Anyone can do magic on the moon, and that's the only way to effectively experiment with magic since all Mages are 16 or younger circa 1985.

Most working rituals are old religious ones that haven't been reformed or modified (or modified little) since Earth last had Low mana ~1000 years ago. Many of these rituals were "blessings" to protect against sickness, and those that still work cure diseases that are otherwise very hard to treat.

Thaumurgic Lunar Technicians -- space wizards -- are still developing the field, but they've made some headway. They can't work on a subatomic level (but everyone expects that elemental alchemy such as turning lead into gold will be achieved soon).

They have made great strides in nano-scale manufacturing of materials larger than atoms, though. About a year ago they started selling thaumic capacitors that are atomically-thin layered gold and insulator -- really at the beginning of a magitech revolution -- but it can only happen on the moon.

Additionally, the Soviets are still a threat. There's a "flux tube" of mana between Luna and Earth, it's at LEAST Very High Mana, although it's little-understood. The Soviets have a permanent station in L1, where it's occasionally immersed in the mana flow.

Yeah, Fiat science! is not effective, but in this case, it's still enough money to build a LOT of Saturn 5s, and a much more developed Space Shuttle program as well.

[thrash]

Originally Posted by PTTG

What's a good sourcebook to build off of?

You should check out David Portree's history of spaceflight blogs:

http://www.wired.com/category/beyondapollo/
http://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/

He delves into the plans and schemes that never came to fruition in our timeline. You should be able to get a pretty good feel for your setting, just by making the most ambitious programs reality.

[kreios]

Let's take a first look at the question of how cheap we can make space access.

Specifically, let's turn to Magic, p. 179. Essential Fuel.

Essential fuel gives you, for 1 FP, 1 lb of fuel with 10x the exhaust velocity of normal fuel.
From my understanding, a skill level of 15 allows you to produce this for no FP cost, meaning 1 lbs every ten seconds. Let's make it five per minute, and about two hours per ton of fuel per mage.

What does that gets us? Well, let me tell you: Rocket scientists would kill for a fuel which doubles their dV. For one that gives them 10x the exhaust velocity? They'd probably sacrifice a few cities to Cthulhu.

Let's look at an example: The Midnight Sun-class orbital shuttle from Spacecrafts, page 7. It is TL9, but that only means we'll have to downgrade the control room and armour.

The shuttle itself, in the standard configuration, has 3.4mps dV. This is insufficient to take off from Earth, so it has a separate, first stage.

For reference, travelling from the Earth's surface to the moon takes 14.39 km/s dV (9.6mps), travelling back (with aerobreaking) 2.54km/s (1.7mps), for a total of less than 12mps.


Our Magic Sun-class shuttle as written has a dV of 34mps.


Modifying it by eliminating 4 of the 12 fuel tanks reduces available dV to 14.4 mps (still sufficient for any moon haul) but allows us to double our cargo and passenger capacity [1] to 16 passengers and 20t cargo. The cargo-only version hauls 40t, the passenger-only version 32.

For this, it requires a total of 240t of essential rocket fuel, meaning about 500 mage-hours (call it 100 mage-days) per trip. So, each of the passengers has to spend four working days per trip making essential fuel. This is, probably, doable.

Of course, instead of having a single shuttle lift off from Earth, land on the moon, take on fuel and return is inefficient. A shuttle service using a different Earth departure and moon transfer/landing stage would probably more efficient, and would allow us to use the far cheaper normal rocket fuel during the Earth/Moon transfer, where it doesn't matter as much.


[1] Using cabins for long-term life support.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Suppose that NASA has an effectively unlimited budget as of June 21st 1969. We're talking war mobilization levels. Berlin Airlift to the moon. To take the best advantage of this resource, all you need to do is have people living on the moon, and the more the better.

What's a good sourcebook to build off of?

Head over to Encyclopedia Astronautica, and spend some time there.

I can make some guesses about what would be done, but there's a problem to tackle first. The Cold War is going strong. The Soviets' moon programme is not in great shape, but that's mostly because it's been underfunded; it can get better with money. Both sides are going to be taking risks with rockets that are very vulnerable to sabotage. How do you keep a war from breaking out when a rocket blows up and someone decides it wasn't an accident?

There's also going to be plenty of spying, lots of loons coming out of the woodwork with wacky ideas for spaceflight, and lots of strange cultural effects as religions and social movements claim that magic is their heritage, or the work of $ENEMY.

Now, back at the rocketry, the obvious strategy is that of the Manhattan project. Take every credible means of achieving the goal and invest in them on a large scale. Some of them will fail, some will succeed, and there's no way to tell which, so you do them all in parallel.

So you order a load more Saturn Vs and Apollo spacecraft, right now. You build another two or three copies of Launch Complex 39, and all the associated equipment - VABs, Crawlers, the works - so that you can boost your launch rate. You start recruiting and training all the people you need to do that. That was the first week's planning, and it provides hardware from 6 to 18 months from now - your first six months of operations will be done with the existing Apollo hardware, because that's already being built, and you can't speed it up that much without sacrificing quality. You need that quality, because this is all pretty marginal.

Now you look at the plausible ways to improve what you have, and set a serious design project underway for lunar habitat modules. You fund the F-1A, the J-2S, the LM Truck, and everything else that looks credible. That was week 2, covering the window from 18 months to three years away.

By this time, the aerospace and rocket companies will be hammering on your door with lots of new ideas. Look at these with some care. You're going to fund several of them, but the manufacturers will try harder if they know they're in a real competition, so you have to throw out some.

[PTTG]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Head over to Encyclopedia Astronautica, and spend some time there.

I can make some guesses about what would be done, but there's a problem to tackle first. The Cold War is going strong. The Soviets' moon programme is not in great shape, but that's mostly because it's been underfunded; it can get better with money. Both sides are going to be taking risks with rockets that are very vulnerable to sabotage. How do you keep a war from breaking out when a rocket blows up and someone decides it wasn't an accident?

There's also going to be plenty of spying, lots of loons coming out of the woodwork with wacky ideas for spaceflight, and lots of strange cultural effects as religions and social movements claim that magic is their heritage, or the work of $ENEMY.

Now, back at the rocketry, the obvious strategy is that of the Manhattan project. Take every credible means of achieving the goal and invest in them on a large scale. Some of them will fail, some will succeed, and there's no way to tell which, so you do them all in parallel.

So you order a load more Saturn Vs and Apollo spacecraft, right now. You build another two or three copies of Launch Complex 39, and all the associated equipment - VABs, Crawlers, the works - so that you can boost your launch rate. You start recruiting and training all the people you need to do that. That was the first week's planning, and it provides hardware from 6 to 18 months from now - your first six months of operations will be done with the existing Apollo hardware, because that's already being built, and you can't speed it up that much without sacrificing quality. You need that quality, because this is all pretty marginal.

Now you look at the plausible ways to improve what you have, and set a serious design project underway for lunar habitat modules. You fund the F-1A, the J-2S, the LM Truck, and everything else that looks credible. That was week 2, covering the window from 18 months to three years away.

By this time, the aerospace and rocket companies will be hammering on your door with lots of new ideas. Look at these with some care. You're going to fund several of them, but the manufacturers will try harder if they know they're in a real competition, so you have to throw out some.

I like the way you think. This game is probably going to feature a good deal of player-driven history building because there aren't any historic secrets other than what the Soviets and the Chinese are up to. Not sure what to do with the Soviets yet. I want Europe to have some power, possibly to the point of them having a moon base (maybe shared with Japan), but that might be more ridiculous than having Magic be real.

One thing magic as I've ruled it can do is produce arbitrary-length carbon nanotubes, although developing that will be tough.

I'm going to start putting together a timeline....

Magery occurs naturally in 1/19654 births. There is no pattern other than this.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by PTTG

I like the way you think.

It seemed clear that the first part of the build-up has to be done with mundane technology, because you don't have the products of magic in any quantity yet.

I want Europe to have some power, possibly to the point of them having a moon base (maybe shared with Japan), but that might be more ridiculous than having Magic be real.

To get that, you need ELDO to work better as an organisation than it did historically. And then you need to give them a McGuffin. Stonehenge working as a launch site that enchants the rocket, or something like that.

One thing magic as I've ruled it can do is produce arbitrary-length carbon nanotubes, although developing that will be tough.

Well, that makes a space elevator conceivable. But it also makes very light and strong fuel tanks and combustion chambers; it has all kinds of uses.