[Bio-Tech] Human Genetic Engineering When?

[scc]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Start the necessary research and development now and have it take however long you think it should take. Longer time periods will be more credible than shorter ones but breakthroughs are possible.

It might not matter since you've got a lot of things yet to be invented for the vehicle's propulsion system and development of space-based construction (or even jsut assembly) of said vehicle.

Well I've decided that this is prompted by the discovery of an alien megastructure in Alpha Centauri by the James Web Space Telescope, so this has Apollo Program levels of dedication.

And assembly is easy, this civilization has access to whatever unrealistic reactionless drives every space opera setting has that are useless for this type of thing and has started build solar power satellites.

Originally Posted by Varyon

Offhand, let's say within the next 5 years there's the discovery both of an animal that has some human-compatible (although that wouldn't be immediately known) bio-stasis* genes as well as whatever method your drives end up using to reach Alpha Centauri, study it, and come back. I'd imagine each would need at least 10 years of study before they'd be ready for proper testing, but let's say the time from now to the time they're ready for proper testing is about 10 years. At that point you are able to splice the genes into the rat genome and get them to express the bio-stasis proteins; you're probably looking at a minimum of 5 years to confirm the bio-stasis functions in rats without serious deleterious effects (or find ways to avoid/mitigate the deleterious effects). Then you've got to do experimentation on something that is closer to human - perhaps pigs and/or primates - which is going to take longer than the rat study, even if things go rather well. Minimum 10 years, I would think. While all that was going on, you would have needed to convince the populace and their representative lawmakers that human testing for this would be a Good Idea, so now that your breakneck-rate testing phase is over, you can start human trials. That's going to take longer than the pigs, particularly as you need to make certain this doesn't screw with mental and physical development as well as confirm the stasis function works, so I'd imagine a minimum of 30 years, if everything goes perfectly. If you can draw your explorers from the first batch of experimental subjects (meaning you've probably been trying to train all of them for this mission), you could be ready to go at this point. So, at basically breakneck, reckless developmental speed, your crew would be ready to go somewhere around 55 years from now, or 2077. By that point, you'll also need to have perfected the drives, and established sufficient space infrastructure to be able to launch such a mission; I think 55 years to do that, provided the new drive technology makes space travel more economical early, is fast but not quite as extreme as for the biological component of it all.

*I'm using this term because I don't think hibernation slows aging much, and that's what we really need here.

I've realized from other posts in this thread that gene-engineering this capability in in the time frame I want is likely not possible, so I'm resorting to drugs and/or cybernetics, which can likely force the body into a dreamless near death sleep state to prolong age.

I agress on the 10 years thing, it's what I figured would probably be the time required for any survey, which will cover the survey of Alpha Centauri, the investigation and activation of the megastructures found in the system (A wormhole stabilizer and a hyperspace gate) and the exploration of the solar system on the other side of the wormhole.

Convincing people to go along with this isn't going to be hard, a megastructure of unknown design and purpose in Alpha Centauri wil deal with that rather well. Those with strong beliefs that oppose this aren't likely to be strong enough to stall the project.

Originally Posted by whswhs

For biostasis I would start by looking at tardigrades (water bears). They have really radical suspended animation capabilities.

Unlikely to be workable, process likely doesn't scale.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by scc

Well I've decided that this is prompted by the discovery of an alien megastructure in Alpha Centauri by the James Web Space Telescope, so this has Apollo Program levels of dedication.

And assembly is easy, this civilization has access to whatever unrealistic reactionless drives every space opera setting has that are useless for this type of thing and has started build solar power satellites.


.

You can gloss over anything you want but the Apollo program took advantage of 2 or even 3 decades of serious military development of liquid fuel rocket motor development that came before. Unless your setting has the equivalent of that just saying "Apollo program" shouldn't let you get everything done in a single decade instead of four.

The solar power satelites might have developed the capability to assemble other big structures in orbit you need but your peculiarly limited "reactionless drive" is still conceptually troublesome to me.

If it was limited to wokign only in significant gravity fields it would do the lifting you appear to want but you still want apace fighters don't you?

[Varyon]

An aside, is the reason you want your reactionless drives to have poor performance just because you want WWII-style dogfights in space, and you recognize that if they had the sort of performance needed for interstellar flight, this wouldn't happen? I had a similar conundrum for my Harpyias setting, and what I opted for there was that the drives typically functioned as high-pseudovelocity boost drives, but near a planet or within a certain (not-yet-defined) range of another ship it suffered interference that prevented it from working properly, switching to a pseudoatmospheric mode that somewhat-matched the performance of WWII-era vessels (the high-energy, low-efficiency version matching fighter planes and the low-energy, high-efficiency version used on most cargo and capital ships matching naval vessels). It's possible to get multiple vessels to modulate their drives such that they won't interfere with each other, allowing for nearby ships to maintain operation in the pseudovelocity paradigm, but as this basically requires all the ships in such a fleet to slave their controls to a single member, it's not something that can be taken advantage of to allow for ultra-high-pseudovelocity fights between belligerents - virtually all space combat takes place in the pseudoatmospheric paradigm. Might something like this work for you?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Varyon

An aside, is the reason you want your reactionless drives to have poor performance just because you want WWII-style dogfights in space, and you recognize that if they had the sort of performance needed for interstellar flight, this wouldn't happen??

Pondering this I come up with a limited superscience setting using the Rotary Reactionless Drive at .1 G per system and contragravity.

You can lift anything you want off Earth though it will take you more than 3 hours to hit escape velocity.

You can build a "space fighter" with 1 Control room, 3 armors, 5 rotary reactionless drives, 5 fuel cells to power them for a limited timespan. 1 Contragravity system, 1 Laser with another fuel cell to power that or the CG during ascent to orbit and 3 missile launchers.

It's acceleration of .5 G would actually have been pretty good for a pre-1970s jet figther but it would have to avoid more modern fighters. It can do this though because of its' unlimited ceiling.

Your interstellar STL vessel can get by with only 1 drive and an accel of .1G. Previous discussions have suggested that .4 C might be a practical limit for STL flight. At .1 G that takes 4 years to hit and the total flight time to Alpha C would be around 18 years. Note that unless you can exceed .4 C putting more drives in for high accel does you little good.

I would prefer to take a nap through an 18 year flight time but at least cold sleep for that period might not stress plausability so much as a voyage of centuries might.

Is this even close to what scc wants? If it is the main virtue is it uses all stock Spaceships components.

[scc]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

You can gloss over anything you want but the Apollo program took advantage of 2 or even 3 decades of serious military development of liquid fuel rocket motor development that came before. Unless your setting has the equivalent of that just saying "Apollo program" shouldn't let you get everything done in a single decade instead of four.

The solar power satelites might have developed the capability to assemble other big structures in orbit you need but your peculiarly limited "reactionless drive" is still conceptually troublesome to me.

If it was limited to wokign only in significant gravity fields it would do the lifting you appear to want but you still want apace fighters don't you?

And you don't think that access so space is this easy and cheap that military organisations are going to start thinking they should probably look into developing deep space power projection?

And my drive isn't peculiar, it's present in every major space IP.

Originally Posted by Varyon

An aside, is the reason you want your reactionless drives to have poor performance just because you want WWII-style dogfights in space, and you recognize that if they had the sort of performance needed for interstellar flight, this wouldn't happen? I had a similar conundrum for my Harpyias setting, and what I opted for there was that the drives typically functioned as high-pseudovelocity boost drives, but near a planet or within a certain (not-yet-defined) range of another ship it suffered interference that prevented it from working properly, switching to a pseudoatmospheric mode that somewhat-matched the performance of WWII-era vessels (the high-energy, low-efficiency version matching fighter planes and the low-energy, high-efficiency version used on most cargo and capital ships matching naval vessels). It's possible to get multiple vessels to modulate their drives such that they won't interfere with each other, allowing for nearby ships to maintain operation in the pseudovelocity paradigm, but as this basically requires all the ships in such a fleet to slave their controls to a single member, it's not something that can be taken advantage of to allow for ultra-high-pseudovelocity fights between belligerents - virtually all space combat takes place in the pseudoatmospheric paradigm. Might something like this work for you?

Actually it came about because I realized that despite how space actually works, spacecraft as normally depicted in it have a top speed that they hit fairly quickly when making maneuvers.

My drives will be pseudovelocity, but I don't think my thinking aligns with the boost-drive concept. Rather eventually someone will figure out a low thrust, high speed alternate mode, but switching the drive on or off, like to change between modes, kills ALL existing velocity. This means that deep space battles become either high speed slashing engagements where the enemy can't pursue you but you lack maneuverability or a traditional pitched battle.

A couple of other things are that military vessels, even auxiliaries, will frequently have a reaction drive, nuclear pulse or better, to supplement their reactionless drive, allowing them to go beyond whatever limits the drive has (because my hyperdrive is a speed multiplier to real-space speed, so the higher your real=space the faster you go in hyperspace). And drive-field tuning is a thing, allowing you to trade off between tactical acceleration, tactical speed, manuverbility, strategic acceleration, and strategic speed, so you can have a fighter with phenomenal dog-fighting performance that can't get far from a mothership, at least not easily, and as later version of the drive are plasmatronic and fighter can't carry a reactor in my setting, that's a real problem (I was on a Homeworld kick when I was working some of this out)

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Pondering this I come up with a limited superscience setting using the Rotary Reactionless Drive at .1 G per system and contragravity.

You can lift anything you want off Earth though it will take you more than 3 hours to hit escape velocity.

You can build a "space fighter" with 1 Control room, 3 armors, 5 rotary reactionless drives, 5 fuel cells to power them for a limited timespan. 1 Contragravity system, 1 Laser with another fuel cell to power that or the CG during ascent to orbit and 3 missile launchers.

It's acceleration of .5 G would actually have been pretty good for a pre-1970s jet figther but it would have to avoid more modern fighters. It can do this though because of its' unlimited ceiling.

Not really. Contragravity, if available, would an application of reactionless drives, akin to balancing atop a column of thrust. Spacefighters should also have armor, ECM and tactical arrays. Plus due to top out issues, reaction drives may also be present. Most importantly it should have a thrust greater then 1G to get off a planet.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Your interstellar STL vessel can get by with only 1 drive and an accel of .1G. Previous discussions have suggested that .4 C might be a practical limit for STL flight. At .1 G that takes 4 years to hit and the total flight time to Alpha C would be around 18 years. Note that unless you can exceed .4 C putting more drives in for high accel does you little good.

I would prefer to take a nap through an 18 year flight time but at least cold sleep for that period might not stress plausability so much as a voyage of centuries might.

Is this even close to what scc wants? If it is the main virtue is it uses all stock Spaceships components.

Top speed issues for reactionless drives mean that when planning begins on the mission after 30 seconds of thrusting in a straight line. By the time of mission launch a technique for cutting acceleration amount by 10 for a 6 fold increase in top speed, so 30 minutes of constant acceleration and speed stops improving. This probably works out to about 1 MPS.

Please stop trying to apply strict real physics to these drive, those don't apply to X-Wings and TIE fighters and that's what I'm trying to model.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by scc

Please stop trying to apply strict real physics to these drive, those don't apply to X-Wings and TIE fighters and that's what I'm trying to model.

It seems really odd to want both to have the imaginary physics of SW fighter planes in SPACE and to have physically realistic issues of years-long travel times between stars. Why not just have the imaginary physics of FTL too?

[scc]

Originally Posted by whswhs

It seems really odd to want both to have the imaginary physics of SW fighter planes in SPACE and to have physically realistic issues of years-long travel times between stars. Why not just have the imaginary physics of FTL too?

FTL comes later on, in fact this expedition brings back working hyperdrives, it's how the crew will get back well before they die.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by scc

And you don't think that access so space is this easy and cheap that military organisations are going to start thinking they should probably look into developing deep space power projection?

Sure they will but only after the whatever principle that makes your drive possible is discovered. I was only trying to indicate that saying "Apollo program investment" wouldn't do everything necessary in 10 years after the astronomical data came in.

The problems I and others seem to be having with your drive aren't really about real physics. we use superscience drives all the time. It's just problems with consistency with this "launch anything and do space fighters too but not useful for anything else". That's how I ended up with contragravity or another sort of gravity-limited reactionless drive.

The 40% c figure is more about engineering than raw physics. Even hydrogen atoms will start to damge the front end of a spce vehicle at some speed and 40% c was suggested as that speed.

[scc]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Sure they will but only after the whatever principle that makes your drive possible is discovered. I was only trying to indicate that saying "Apollo program investment" wouldn't do everything necessary in 10 years after the astronomical data came in.

Drive is developed in 2020, megastructure is discovered this year or next.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

The problems I and others seem to be having with your drive aren't really about real physics. we use superscience drives all the time. It's just problems with consistency with this "launch anything and do space fighters too but not useful for anything else". That's how I ended up with contragravity or another sort of gravity-limited reactionless drive.

That, yeah that's problematic, but I'm emulating what appears in movies and TV, so *shrug*

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

The 40% c figure is more about engineering than raw physics. Even hydrogen atoms will start to damge the front end of a spce vehicle at some speed and 40% c was suggested as that speed.

Well this mission will be dispatched at about 7% C, so that's not really an issue.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by scc

Drive is developed in 2020, megastructure is discovered this year or next.

.

So you're at a probable minimum of 2050 to 2060 for your vehicle to be ready.

Then 7% of c commits you to something more than 60 years for one way trips.

I will note that even 7% of c is quite hard to achieve for anything other than a reactionless drive of some description.