Space combat, travel, living...

[zwzsg]

wouldnt you fall down like 10 times faster than on earth?

No. Despite what they teach in class, gravity is just like an acceleration. If the ship goes at 1g, (and assuming the human compartiment are pressurised as on earth), then you'll fall exactly like on earth: Try jumping out of a window, here on earth: You'll see you'll be accelerating too, the ground approaching faster and faster.

[JohannesH]

And when Chuck Norris walks up stairs, he actually pushes the earth down.

[PicassoCT]

If you really wanted to get into some sci fi ideas for this subject, I say that you would really have to have some very advanced technology that could cause people to basically teleport too. The characters would need to be able to rearrange space matter so that they could safely teleport to another location.

The absence of gravity is another huge problem. The human body is not adapted to really live for extremely long periods of time in low gravity conditions. The people could develop muscular weakness, space dementia, and animals that have produced offspring in space have had offspring that are mutated.

If a colony were to be built on the moon, I don't think that simply having a dome on the moon to simulate the atmosphere would work. For one thing, if a moonquake were to occur (the moon's crust is still active), the dome could be damaged and the colony could be destroyed, not to mention the possibility of what could happen if a large meteor were to crash into it. Advanced robots are definitely the way to go.

You can simulate Gravity by spinning things, so you just have to do a eternal barrelroll and you are on the safe side.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhVOhK_OspQ&NR=1

Why not do that on the moon for living quarters?

[Teutooni]

An X-ray laser would be very effective in space combat. You don't need enough power or exposure to vaporize the hull, only to penetrate it and radiation-kill the crew or weak components. Effective up to one light minute or something, hard to dodge. As a bonus you get the hull of the other vessel pretty much intact as loot.

Another thing about combat in space, you could just accelerate towards your enemy and dump your waste tank. Crap traveling hundreds of kilometers per second would be far more devastating than any ballistic gun ever. I don't remember the exact figures, but you don't need that much velocity to reach impact energy relative to nukes. Which means the crappiest ( ) civilian freighter can potentially take out the heaviest military space stations. If you have some sort of warp-core giving obscene amounts of energy any vessel traveling very close to the speed of light could annihilate an entire planet.

[PicassoCT]

how about catapulting some nanomaschines into the enemy biosphere and have them eaten alive? Worked with the natives on earth..

[==Troy==]

Indeed, X-ray lasers would be a good option in space.

But anyhow, considering the speed of light limitations for detection, the near-orbit or in-system fights most of the time, and the simple fact that whoever is on higher orbit wins (a lot of this is true about airplanes as well) the space fights will not be much of a real battles.


Additionally : non-metal rounds require you to have gas propultion, in space with proper railgun or gauss setup you can easily achieve speeds exceeding 4 km/s for 10m-20m of railgun (and that is a tank-round). So the choice of metal is not only limited by enemy EM shielding, but also by your own propulsion of the round.

I am surprised not many people suggest to charge your rounds. Its not very hard to pump even rounds to +20-30 Coulombs, and the odd rounds to -20 -30 C, overall charge of your own ship will remain the same, and you have plenty of time to charge the capacitors, while the enemy ship will have enormous delta currents and will effectively burn down + EMP by a single hit (and if it is hit again, everything goes backwards with another delta)


Edit : especially since high velocity medium density rounds will simply go through the ship, rather than causing it any real damage, most of the internal systems have multi-stage backups obviously, and the hull will be built to be easier to repair, rather than defend against micro meteorites.

any meteorite with energy of a nuke would go through a ship without noticing it.

[TradeMark]

For civilian ships though I wouldn't really imagine "long" ships but more like a ufo flat shape. the "front" would second as a hydrogen collector (similar to the Bussard Ramjet mentioned earlier -- which I had a similar idea before I even heard of it oddly enough) and the bottom would house the exhaust to propel the ship forwards and give it its artificial gravity.

I really hadn't thought about pressure, but I suppose air would tend to be more dense at the "bottom" than at the top but using sectionally separated ships the pressure could be easily maintained much like current passenger planes.

Yeah, ufo shape, I was thinking about this more... I think hexagon shaped plate ship would be best, even if it gets hit by asteroid etc, the whole ship wont die, only a part of it, and this would also solve the air pressure problem. And this would be really easy to construct too: just build thousands of identical elements that will get attached to each other as modules, can make any size ships.

Would be interesting to simulate such ship and see how would it work

Also the ship might use solar wind power for movement since its so damn big and flat.

wouldnt you fall down like 10 times faster than on earth?

No. Despite what they teach in class, gravity is just like an acceleration. If the ship goes at 1g, (and assuming the human compartiment are pressurised as on earth), then you'll fall exactly like on earth: Try jumping out of a window, here on earth: You'll see you'll be accelerating too, the ground approaching faster and faster.

Hmm... scary, i started to think how the earth gravity "moves" like the space ship: faster and faster all the time Blows my brain...

I don't remember the exact figures, but you don't need that much velocity to reach impact energy relative to nukes. Which means the crappiest ( ) civilian freighter can potentially take out the heaviest military space stations. If you have some sort of warp-core giving obscene amounts of energy any vessel traveling very close to the speed of light could annihilate an entire planet.

This would actually be very efficient compared to damage, and you can always just collect rocks from planets lol. stone age space war... XD

[TradeMark]

I started to twiddle with blender a bit, heres my sketch from a hexagon ship that uses fractal optimizations:

Designed for 23184 inhabitants, 4 in one hexagon room.

Or square shape:

Edit: forgot one layer of squares, now its identical to hexagon, but has 66816 inhabitants

Edit: Tripled the first model to have about as much inhabitants as the square one:

68256 inhabitants. Also added 3 big cores there, so its kinda weaker now, but offers some extra space for big stuff... maybe 3 huge engines there. I think this is the best model...

As you see there is not 1 single big core, so the ship cant get crippled by one shot.

The holes can be used for bigger engines or/and storage space etc where people come a lot together.

I just started to think how the ship would remain the shape when accelerating... might start bend a lot, although, anything can be automated by computers, so it would adjust each engine in those modules to prevent the ship from bending.

Also when it starts to slow down ,the people in the ship would fall to the ceiling, right? the gravity direction would swap.. so the insides of the ship must be identical from bottom to top
Edit: i thought it more, and the ship could as well just flip when in the middle way of the trip... but im not sure how the people would feel when it does this... other side of ship would feel small gravity pushing them at the ceiling and other side feels just weaker gravity than before, and middle part has zero gravity...

Edit: i think the biggest middle (hole) parts could be used to build more module elements in case the ship gets damaged

Sick.. im already thinking how all this would be automated by robots when the ship is built on that shape... each element flying around in the space individually controlled by AI, while people are inside there waiting when the ship gets finished in about 10minutes...

The modules could be sent to the space from the earth by some long elevator, while people are in those modules. Really efficient space ship building and fucking fast...

Oh and at the end of the trip the ship would disassemble itself and send the guys on the other planet the same way they came off the Earth: elevators. So all you can see is going in elevator and out elevator Since there probably wont be any windows in the ship...

[Panda]

If you really wanted to get into some sci fi ideas for this subject, I say that you would really have to have some very advanced technology that could cause people to basically teleport too. The characters would need to be able to rearrange space matter so that they could safely teleport to another location.

The absence of gravity is another huge problem. The human body is not adapted to really live for extremely long periods of time in low gravity conditions. The people could develop muscular weakness, space dementia, and animals that have produced offspring in space have had offspring that are mutated.

If a colony were to be built on the moon, I don't think that simply having a dome on the moon to simulate the atmosphere would work. For one thing, if a moonquake were to occur (the moon's crust is still active), the dome could be damaged and the colony could be destroyed, not to mention the possibility of what could happen if a large meteor were to crash into it. Advanced robots are definitely the way to go.

You can simulate Gravity by spinning things, so you just have to do a eternal barrelroll and you are on the safe side.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhVOhK_OspQ&NR=1

Why not do that on the moon for living quarters?

I don't think that simply building a structure on the moon that spins to simulate gravity would work because I have doubts about whether or not our molecular clocks (DNA, proteins used to make physical structures, suprachiasmatic nucleus in the brain that controls circadian rhythms) would be able to properly adjust to an environment that is so dissimilar to Earth. Plus, I, for one, know that I tend to get sick after riding on the Gravitron too much at fairs.

In addition to that, our molecular clocks work like this:

If you were to heat up DNA, the strands would separate. If you allowed it to cool and if the nucleotides matched up it would reform. Once reformed the DNA would not reassemble to be exactly the way it was before it was heated.

Living on an artificially create space station with simulated gravity would not have exactly the same effects that heating and cooling would on our molecular clocks, but it would affect the form and functioning of our molecular clocks. Humans are very adaptable, but living in outer space for an extended period of time under such conditions may be going too far when it comes to our ability to survive. We probably would not be able to handle that at this time and who knows how long it would take us to adjust to that if we could at all seeing as though we are adapted in an inexact way to living on Earth. Some Earthly environments have their quirks such as a midnight sun at the poles (in which people don't adapt all that well too), but even that is not as extreme as an artificial environment in space.

However, if someone were to try and build something for travel that did not involve teleportation, I would think that it could be useful to model the exterior after those dirty snowballs of comets. If a person could safely ride in and operate such a machine and the machine had the capability to properly send and receive signals to the person about the environment, it's condition, and needed adjustments, it would work. Our neurons can do that.

[1v0ry_k1ng]

u mad? voyager was in the delta quadrent for like 15 years and everyone was fine

[Panda]

u mad? voyager was in the delta quadrent for like 15 years and everyone was fine

What's your point?

[KaiserJ]

you'd have to be 70 to consider captain janeway "fine"

the robot though, id nail her for sure

[knorke]

i see what you did there.

[TradeMark]

waffel spaceship! awesome

[PicassoCT]

borgbuttercube appears, it spills might maple sirup on the waffleship. We will add our own distinctive tastyness to yours, your food will adapt to be served. Resistance will defile everything nearby.

[Panda]

If scientists learned more about how tardigrades go through cryptobiosis (ametabolic state of life entered by an organism in response to adverse environmental conditions such as desiccation, freezing, and oxygen deficiency. In the cryptobiotic state, all metabolic procedures stop, preventing reproduction, development, and repair.) and find out a way to apply it to humans, humans could travel more effectively through space without dieing. We could also discover, new a new and possibly more effective form of surgery, cryptosurgery.

[TradeMark]

I think its pointless to move our bodies to somewhere else in the vast space when its so hard. We could just move our consciousness wirelessly through the space with speed of light, no need for epic spaceships with all kinds of problems. Although, someone has to go to the other place via robots at the first place, and that gives more questions: why bother? we have everything we need on this solar system already

It would be so much easier/safer/cheaper to create a virtual reality where you can do all this kind of scifi things if you wanted to. This is a very good reason why nobody has or will never contact us from outer space, they think the same: why bother?

[PicassoCT]

Ehem, the point of the speed of light is, that it is - in fact slow as fuck. Universe has no cable, it still beeps at modemspeed. So you have a probe on alpha centauri only six light years away from us- and we gave it the order to lift a rock we see on screen, you get time for a six year long coffee break, before a robotic arm moves (to grab a object that was there twelfe years ago, when it took that picture, so your drone grabs at nothing and you get a phailtale error, six years later, so in fact, 18 years after you wanted to lift a stone on alpha centauri, (meanwhile you changed job, country, family, drug-habbits, sexual orientation and gender) you got to watch yourself in the tv-news phailing twelfe years ago.

Lightspeed just seems so fast, because we are so small, so fucking insignifficant compared to space, and it is good that way, because our egos couldnt stand the shrink.
For further references look at the Guide: Total Perspective Vortex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology ... ive_Vortex

[Gota]

There are things that move faster than the speed of light unfortunately none of them are what would allow us to move information.

Lets say you have a lamp and you put your finger in front of it so a shadow is projected on a wall.
When you wag your finger the shadow will move faster than your finger.
If your finger moves parallel to the wall, the shadow's speed will be multiplied by a factor D/d where d is the distance from the lamp to your finger while the capital D is the distance from the lamp to the wall.
If the wall is far away the movement of the shadow will be delayed cause of the time it takes the light to travel to the wall but the shadow's speed is still increased by the same ratio.
the shadows speed is not limited to be less than the speed of light.
Aim a laser at the moon and swirl it around now calculate the speed of the laser's spot considering the moon is 385k from us.
There are examples from nature where light moves faster than the speed of light.

Speculations about FTL movement:

Tachyon theories, although problematic, have not been ruled out as a possibility for FTL travel.
Techyons supposedly,locally move faster than light.
A spacecraft might use such particles to move faster than the speed of light,maybe even instantaneously.
Worm holes are also a possibility, but for those to be possible we'd probably need a theory of quantum gravity to change the topology of space-time.
warp drives...the main catch with them is the same one with the worm holes.
Wed need exotic matter with negative energy density.
Though even if such a matter exists how to implement it for a warp drive is also unanswered.

[TradeMark]

Speed of shadow? you gotta be kidding me.