08-12-2021, 10:40 AM | #41 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
No, rotary reactionless only provides 0.1 G per unit. Getting off Earth or a world with similar gravity would require 11 units and Phantasm specified that in his setting they may not be placed in a Central Hull location.
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Fred Brackin |
08-12-2021, 10:53 AM | #42 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
It might be possible to fly to orbit with wings, though it's a bit nasty.
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08-12-2021, 11:00 AM | #43 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
You probably can't do it with Spaceships. With 0.5-0.6 Gs your atmospheric max is going to be extremely low. To dupilicate X-15 performance you'd need 6 Gs and an X-15 can't actually make it to orbit.
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Fred Brackin |
08-12-2021, 11:04 AM | #44 | |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
Quote:
I think it took 16 hours or something silly like that.
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Be helpful, not pedantic Worlds Beyond Earth -- my blog Check out the PbP forum! If you don't see a game you'd like, ask me about making one! |
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08-12-2021, 11:14 AM | #45 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
The problem is mostly that you have to remain in the upper atmosphere until you are going fast enough that you can skip up and not return to atmosphere before you hit orbital velocity, which may mean trying to fly at mach 20 or something.
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08-12-2021, 02:29 PM | #46 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
My bad - I was going by memory and thought it was 0.5G per unit. Yeah, that's going to make life difficult without CG.
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
08-12-2021, 07:25 PM | #47 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Seattle, WA USA
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Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
When you get to G that low, you're probably also going to want to calculate the G of the ship itself. Figure the mass as a fraction of Earth mass (5.878e21 tons) and the nominal radius* as a fraction of Earth's radius (6.975e6 yards), then use the normal gravity equation (Gs=M/R^2, where Gs is "surface" gravity, M is Earth masses, and R is Earth radii). For instance, an SM+8 ship massing 1000 tons and 50 yards long comes to M=1.7012589316093909493024838380401e-19 Earth masses, R=3.5842293906810035842293906810036e-6 Earth radii, Gs=1.3242769649540660088465464443688e-8G or about 1.2977914256549846886696155154814e-7m/s^2, which you will note is nearly 1300 times greater than your deep space gravity figure.
(With the exception of acceleration, where I used meters/s^2 to match the unit of acceleration in the quoted post, I used standard, non-metric units to conform with GURPS units, for simplicity. I used whatever precision Google returned for the constants related to M and R, and whatever precision my calculator provided otherwise.) *Call it half the length for simplicity. The difference is actually very small between different human-scale ships. |
08-16-2021, 05:17 PM | #48 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
I actually had a germ of an idea for a setting, might get developed, might not, who knows. The basic idea was that NASA develops a working FTL warp drive in 1982. All other technology remains the same. The power requirements are low enough that you can run it with a fission reactor, but it's very slow by the usual science fiction standards, 12-16c tops. So a trip to Alpha Centauri takes 3-4 months, and an expedition to Tau Ceti takes a couple of years round trip. Project Timberwind is a huge success, so advanced fission drives are the pinnacle of reaction engines. Starships look like what we might imagine a long-term Jupiter mission would look like: large, expensive ships with spin habitats, closed-cycle life support systems, greenhouses, etc. Many of them custom-built for their missions. Still lots of brushed metal panels and white insulating fabric.
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08-17-2021, 05:55 AM | #49 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Sweden, Stockholm
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Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
Quote:
Spaceship battles are also mostly a Star Wars-style dogfight unless it is big ships sniping stations or each other with artillery. I don't have GURPS Spaceships currently, but from what I've read it is fairly realistic even with using "^"-tech, and I'm guessing it wouldn't be useful for my setting where small ships fight like WWII airplanes (fighters, bombers, ...) and the big ones are more like various (naval) ships of war that might (depending on the ship's design) even fly right up to other big space-ships and give them a broadside.
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"Prohibit the taking of omens, and do away with superstitious doubts. Then, until death itself comes, no calamity need be feared" |
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08-18-2021, 06:12 PM | #50 |
Join Date: Jul 2018
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Re: Spaceship Tech in your Setting
Not exactly tech in 'my' setting but given I stumbled across this recently and people may find it interesting...
https://www.afrl.af.mil/Portals/90/D...nce_number.pdf Its a discussion of the potential course of directed energy technologies (weapons especially) at least as far as the air force is concerned. I may post things of interest if I can find them. Two of the ideas (and how I stumbled on it) was news articles about the near future viability of Ultrashort pulse lasers by both the air force and army (meaning we're a step closer from just CW lasers to actual atomic-rockets style laser weapons.. perhaps as soon as next year by some claims I've seen) And the idea that certain kinds of directed energy technology might create a sort of 'localized forcefield' pinpoint defense - not so much a bubble shield ala Star Trek but more like Macross/Independence War pinpoint barriers or Babylon 5 interceptors. Which is still awesome because knowing what is possible or plausible is a big step to defining what you want as internally consistent technology in your setting. Or at least, in mine. |
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