Setting Jam: Hyperbolic Trajectory

[Astromancer]

In the present day they are working on quantum dot solar cells. These quantum dots are much like the quantum dots in your color TV. The present day issue is that quantum dots degrade in ultraviolet light way to quickly. However multiple groups are working on quantum dot solar cells because they have a 66% efficiency in turning sunlight to electricity.

Now solar isn't likely to outcompete fusion in most places, however there would be many useful applications for quantum dot solar cells once you deal with the ultraviolet issue. After all, not everyplace is large enough to merit a fusion generator.

On a completely different issue. Building complex protein molecules in microgravity would be a thing in this setting. Drugs not possible now, because gravity interferes with their manufacture, would be possible.

Microgravity manufacturing would be big in this setting.

[(E)]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Question: How common is human genetic engineering?

Off world at least genetic engineering is common to the point of ubiquity. Most of this genetic engineering is very minor (not enough to merit inclusion on a character sheet) a few instances of more advanced alteration are available to those with serious cash.

One exception to the current status quo exists, in the mid 22nd century there was a GE boom with dozens of companies across the globe producing very advanced designs, even by modern standards. There was a serious group of issues with the technology used at this early stage, inter-generational combination disorders. That is to say, the designers didn't pay enough attention to how stable there work was when the recipients reproduced naturally. The children of the first genetically engineered generation often had complicated and life threatening disorders. The two main ways of dealing with this was to either get the specific company to engineer the next generation or to only breed with people who had genetics from the same company.

Question
How big is a large orbital habitat?

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by TGLS

What are the social impacts of biostasis?

I don't think I can quite list ALL of them, but one major impact is the stasis crypts. Humans didn't evolve to live forever, and while medical science can do a lot, it still has limits, both in what it can cure, and it occasionally gets overwhelmed with demand. When this happens, people are put into biostasis and kept there. Many come out shortly afterwards, but others, either due to local long-term medical shortages or simply having a condition that can't be cured, stay in biostasis indefinitely.

The money of the uncurable stays in their name, but is usually managed in funds by a living agent. Control of this money is often controversial, especially after 80 years passes and the original power of attorney passes to people not specified by its owner, who is often in quite poor shape.

Additionally, the bodies are starting to pile up, stored in large buildings dedicated to their housing.



Question: What's an illness that might force someone into biostasis and can't be cured yet?



Question: Where does the atmosphere for the habitats in space come from? Oxygen can be gotten from rock, but breathing pure oxygen at 25% pressure doesn't sound like the best idea...

Originally Posted by PTTG

For some grounding, homesteading on Mars is a pretty big pull for our given technology level. We've already established that fast access to the outer solar system is only barely reaching deployment now, and previous efforts relied on multi-year transfers.

On the other hand, Earth's Trojan Zone has enough of a population that it spawned its own stock exchange, and we've got biostasis technology, so time isn't necessarily a big limitation.

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by (E)

The lunar pro-am golf tournament is due to start shortly, what kind of event is this, a unusual local holiday, a massive sporting event or something else entirely?

The Lunar Pro-Am Golf Tournament (sometimes referred to as The Lunar Open) is a month long golf tournament, tremendously popular amongst the "loonies". Due to the lower gravity of Luna, courses are generally six times larger than Terran golf courses. The extreme lengths of Lunar golf have called for reduced mechanical assistance, with regulation Lunar golf rounds requiring players to move entirely on foot.

The Lunar Pro-Am Golf Tournament is held at seven of dozen courses each year. Each course is approximately 42 kilometers long, and takes up an area of about 21 km^2. Each course selected has a mix of traditional exposed Lunar Golf and modern domed Lunar Golf. The seven courses this year are:

• Royal Golf Club of Pallas Crater
• Aurora-Optosyn Campus Club at Sinus Asperitatis
• Montes Spitzbergen National Golf Club
• Catena Littrow Golf and Country Club
• Terra Nivium Golf Club
• Vallis Snellius Golf & Tropical Resort by Uni-Orb
• The Apollo Course at Mare Spumans Links

The tournament format is as follows: All qualified entrants (a field that ranges from 500-600) are separated into four groups. Each group competes at four of the golf courses separately. After the each round of golf, the bottom 30% (ranked by strokes against par) are eliminated, until the final round, where the field is reduced to 144.

The remaining 144 compete at two of the golf courses in groups of 72 at a time. Unlike the previous rounds and Terran Golf, these two rounds are scored by time, counting time from tee off to arrival at the next tee. To avoid possible collisions, players and balls are fitted with sensors that warn when collisions are likely. The top 24 competitors advance to the finals.

During the finals, all 24 competitors compete simultaneously, with each set of four being released on to the course with five minute delays, in order of the top four to the bottom four of the top twenty four. The first player to complete the entire course wins.

In the later rounds, endurance and routing become crucial skills, sometimes leading competitors to consider unorthodox ways of traversing the course. For example, on The Apollo Course, golfers often attempt to lob the ball over the rim of the KAMP crater then climb straight up in a bid to recover lost time instead of driving the ball down the fairway.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by (E)

Question
How big is a large orbital habitat?

Orbital habitats range greatly in size, from small zero-G capsels similar to the modern space station, to small cities built in a rotating cylinder.

The most iconic size has turned out to be around a kilometer in diameter. This isn't the largest size, and there are certainly a lot more tiny capsules floating around than 1km rotators, but in terms of capacity and resource use, this is the dominant size. The length varies from 500 meters across to 8km, and its even possible to extend an existing habitat, though building one nearby is just as common.

Question: Where is the largest orbital habitat? Who built it?

Question: What is the most impressive thing done with non-human genetic engineering?

Question: What's the food source for people in space? I've got a few different ideas we could look at. Farms in habitats using the sun is one option. Vertical farming with lights is another. Shipping up food from earth is possible I suppose (though earth is probably strained feeding itself?). I've seen a scheme where you use electricty to generate methane and then bacteria eat the methane and you dry them out into something similar to algal pellets (and then in modern times fed to fish)

[ericthered]

At some point we need to make lists of all of these organizations and characters for reference!

[Astromancer]

Eric the Red,

In our present day we use glass fibers to channel sunlight into interior rooms. Holograms are used to change the nature of the light. Do you want the light inside your building to be eternally like a summer morning? They can do that now.

In this hypothetical future optical fibers could be used to channel sunlight into into a vertical farm. Holographic filters would alter the light to the specific frequencies needed by the corps in question.

It's almost doable now, it would be merely a bit of engineering to create the system and research to discover the optimal light frequencies and when they are needed.

[PTTG]

A new episode of SAVAGES has been released.

Originally Posted by ericthered

Does that mean the moon has an orbital ring, but earth does not? That actually sounds really interesting. And space launch costs are still sort of high, at least for earth.

Luna has a Tethered Ring, built on the far side. The principle is very similar to an orbital ring, but much smaller. It's simply an orbital ring which has been pulled off to the side as far as it will go.

It's successful, but the finances are complicated. It is a huge conduit for oxygen, iron, silicon, aluminum, and titanium into the orbital economy, but it probably loses money on each launch. It probably makes it up on more refined goods passing through and volatiles being shipped down, but there have been years where the administration considered shutting it down. You can see why the Earth ring is a dicey proposition.

[(E)]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Question: Where is the largest orbital habitat? Who built it?

Located at Earth's L4 legrange point, Tyson Foundry is the largest space station in the solar system.
The politicians from earth, who for some inexplicable reason didn't want a steady stream of asteroids heading in their direction, decided the L4 point was far enough away to serve as a collection, smelting and refining point for metal rich asteroids of the inner system.

The core of the station is a pair of six km long non pressurized rotating cylinders constructed with the industrial nature of the location in mind. Simplify and add heaviness seems to be the design principle with the added mass protecting the structure and it's inhabitants from what is a hostile industrial environment with debris being an ever-present problem.

The central cylinder isn't even the biggest part of the station, tethered to the station is Melissa (from the Greek for Bee) an M class asteroid some 20km across that serves as both a source of materials and a shield for the station.

Solar arrays, parabolic mirrors, solar shades and railgun scaffolding. Which even in total mass far far less than Mellissa are far more visible due to their human made nature and the fact they are measured in square kilometers.

The staggeringly large amount of resources located at Tyson Foundry are sent by ship, railgun and lumbering freight cycler throughout the inner system. Even so there is large amounts of material in storage on site. The value of this stockpile was one of the factors that contributed to the founding of TFOEB.

Tyson station, as it was originally known, was created by a group of three earth nation states in the early twenty third century. A combination of political upheaval and a devastating economic crash caused the station to be left to it's own devices. The disillusioned residents then leveraged the wealth obtained from the discovery of a rhodium rich asteroid, which had become fully legally claimable due to their abandonment, to buy their independence.

Questions
How many people live and work at Tyson Foundry? Where to they reside?

How common are drones and other robots around Tyson Foundry?

What are the cyclers like?

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by (E)

Questions
How many people live and work at Tyson Foundry? Where to they reside?

Naturally, given the remoteness of the Sol-Earth L4 point, the people who live and work at Tyson Foundry reside in space stations around the Sol-Earth L4 point. During the Suffocating Time, the fabled One Hundred Seven resided in cramped dormitories and empty maintenance pods of the foundry. Over the last century, these dormitories have been reopened and expanded as the demand for housing has grown too great.

About forty years after independence, the New Malawi Habitat was opened. Once a residence for the large immigrant community around the Sol-Earth L4, it has rapidly become a ritzy community for the hyperwealthy families that own the Tyson Foundry. While designed to house 200 thousand, it currently only houses a tenth of that.

The first of the Usyk Cylinders were opened for habitation around the turn of the 24th century, as growth outstripped the capacity of the New Malawi Habitat. Problems were evident nearly immediately, particularly with the habitat's spin gravity, but the press of population growth forced people to ignore the problems. Globbadyne constructed six cylinders before their contract was eventually cancelled in the late 24th century. Each have a designed capacity of about 110 thousand.

The Farley Dome was constructed in the mid 25th century, doming a 6.5 km crater on Melissa. Designed to fit a city of 1.3 million, it was believed that this would be the last needed habitation project for the century, as said city would hold more than the entire population of L4 at the time. Planners were in fact correct, but with no pressure to build more housing, the population has once again exceeded demand.

The current population of Sol-Earth L4 is approximately 2 million people, with thousands in temporary dormitory housing.

Originally Posted by (E)

How common are drones and other robots around Tyson Foundry?

Drones are in extensive use around the Tyson Foundry, generally abating the need for workers to perform dangerous EVAs. Robots too are heavily used, first being introduced in small numbers following the Suffocating Time. Very quickly, the use of robotics rapidly increased, growing from a small number of experiments to numbering more than a hundred thousand by the 24th century. By the 25th century, more than 40% of the entire workforce are autonomous robots, and by the present day of 2525, a majority of the workforce (53.07%!) is robotic.

The use of Robotics in Sol-Earth L4 is a point of pride for many of its inhabitants, allowing an otherwise marginal colony to grow to an economic dynamo of the solar system. They view criticism of their robotic labour practices as simple jealousy. They have more sympathy for precarious workers among their number, who face extreme anxiety that their job could be replaced by another machine.

Question:

Why do people criticize the use of robots in Sol-Earth L4?