The thread for space cadets!

[r16]

Am i the only one who thinks that Oumuamua is an advanced scout for a Yuuzhan Vong Fleet coming to conquer earth?

no , it's not the Vongs . But then putting a red light to port and a green to starboard would have been too simple .

 

[Cutlass]

I would think that putting something in Saturn's rings would be an awful risky endeavor. Why not just go to Jupiter which has a stronger gravitational force to be harnessed and much less debris? The radiation there is awful at some altitudes but still.

An essentially endless supply of raw materials? Isn't most of the rings ice and dust rather than rocks?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

My question to myself was that if they had magic powerful enough to generate anti-matter then why not just blast people altogether with it.

Or just generate the anti-matter inside your enemy outright, or run any other number of mundane but obviously lethal applications of the tech/magic combo available. I think this is why most fantasy writers avoid the issue, make mundane weapons obsolete/incapable of doing anything meaningful, or overpower their chosen weapons.

Otherwise, you get conclusions like whatever energy is sufficient to generate antimatter could also just be used directly on a target...and would need a reason that won't work but antimatter will (and isn't countered by enemy magician doing the magical equivalent of flak spam to cause the antimatter to collide and annihilate before reaching intended target etc).

 

[uppi]

Yes, it is my understanding that a wormhole would require negative energy and we have no way to create it except through the casimir effect (and @uppi correct me if I'm wrong) but at the moment we have no way to actually harness and use said energy of any practical quantity.

We don't even know whether the energy can be negative enough for wormholes to work. There is a huge disagreement between quantum field theory and general relativity how big the vacuum energy is, so nobody knows how much energy is there that could be removed to create space with negative energy. There is no way to tell, whether the numbers plugged into wormhole solutions are actually physically possible.

In addition, it is not clear, whether the equations for the wormhole solutions are even valid in the extreme conditions that are necessary. Even for the much simpler black hole solutions (and those actually exist), there are paradoxes that haven't been resolved yet. It might be that wormholes are in a parameter range that would require quantum gravity for an accurate description. But once you start postulating extensions to the currently accepted theories, you can formulate theories that allow stable wormholes without negative energy.

Finally, wormholes need curved space to be able to connect to distant regions in the universe. However, space seems to be in general quite flat in our universe. So even if wormholes were possible, there might be no regions in space where you could actually use them for travelling any significant distance.

In summary, we don't know much about wormholes at all. Which probably makes them good for science fiction, because you can justify about anything about them.

Otherwise, you get conclusions like whatever energy is sufficient to generate antimatter could also just be used directly on a target...and would need a reason that won't work but antimatter will (and isn't countered by enemy magician doing the magical equivalent of flak spam to cause the antimatter to collide and annihilate before reaching intended target etc).

The advantage of antimatter would be energy density. You could accumulate antimatter over years and release it in a single attack. 1g of antimatter would contain the energy of a nuclear bomb, so even a foot soldier could carry enough firepower to level a whole country.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

The advantage of antimatter would be energy density. You could accumulate antimatter over years and release it in a single attack. 1g of antimatter would contain the energy of a nuclear bomb, so even a foot soldier could carry enough firepower to level a whole country.

Sure, but giving THAT to a character or worse making it commonly held weaponry creates a lot of problems for the story. If we're using magic to create it then the magic either needs bounds/rules or you wind up with generating that 1g as-needed.

You can go the dragonball z and later route of just plotholing the heck out of your contrived powers and making them inconsistent even with themselves, but to me that's pretty shoddy. If characters are going to have these things their usage should make sense in the context of the fictional universe that allows them.

 

[Cutlass]

Not to mention what happens to all the grunt's pals if someone zaps the grunt while he's still packing the antimatter bomb.

 

[Takhisis]

I'm kind of ignoring the material of the rings for energy uses. I do not see a practical way to get energy out of the boulders themselves, I only see them as an obstacle to avoid.

But being in the gravity well (where the rings are), would allow you to use elecrromagnetic tethers to generate huge energies from the planet's magnetosphere.

The space shuttle did this once and the tether generated so much current that it melted and snapped in half.

I'll ask you questions about solid worlds with planetary rings later on, once I've gotten to that part of the story. But I'll keep this in mind.

Or just generate the anti-matter inside your enemy outright, or run any other number of mundane but obviously lethal applications of the tech/magic combo available. I think this is why most fantasy writers avoid the issue, make mundane weapons obsolete/incapable of doing anything meaningful, or overpower their chosen weapons.

Otherwise, you get conclusions like whatever energy is sufficient to generate antimatter could also just be used directly on a target...and would need a reason that won't work but antimatter will (and isn't countered by enemy magician doing the magical equivalent of flak spam to cause the antimatter to collide and annihilate before reaching intended target etc).

The bolded happened when I really thought it out. The few people whose magical skill and raw power would be sufficient to create or manipulate antimatter could simply use that very power to level an entire city by themselves.

Sure, but giving THAT to a character or worse making it commonly held weaponry creates a lot of problems for the story. If we're using magic to create it then the magic either needs bounds/rules or you wind up with generating that 1g as-needed.

Nah, never. It's a fantasy world but it still needs some internal coherence.

Not to mention what happens to all the grunt's pals if someone zaps the grunt while he's still packing the antimatter bomb.

That, too.

 

[Cutlass]

Or, you can go the Star Trek route, and power your warp drive with antimatter. But not trouble your pretty little head with the downsides of it. I find it a bit ironic that the space combat scenes in TOS were (unintentionally, I'm sure) more accurate than any of the later versions of Trek. Why? Because when you blow up a ship with an antimatter fueled warp drive what you're going to get is one big huge flash of light that will take out everything for many miles around it. What you are not going to get is a reddish fiery looking explosion and large fragments being thrown off. Nor are you going to get a ship breaking into chunks. In the Search for Spock, when Enterprise is crashing into the plane's atmosphere and burning up, guess what? In the following microsecond it would also burn up that entire planet, and everything within maybe a half a million miles. And yet in the later movies they just kept crashing versions of Enterprise into ever more planets.

 

[Takhisis]

Star Trek

No.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Rocket Labs has stood down from further launch attempts until 2018. Weather and glitches pushed them out of their 10-day launch window and they decided they didn't want to force their employees to work through the Christmas break.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

There is this government agency called the Export-Import Bank. It provides financing for large American manufacturing firms and their foreign customers in order to facilitate economic activity. This bank has been very important for the US commercial launch industry as it helps lower barriers to making sales to foreign companies that want to launch payloads on American rockets.

In the rush to Stop Obama At All Cost, the bank was threatened with shutdown attempts by the Republicans and then allowed to go without a quorum on its board. Without quorum, the bank cannot approve loans in excess of $10 million which has the net effect of shuttering the bank. Obviously foreign governments have not had these problems and it has been shown that the loss of Ex-Im Bank's financing ability has caused multiple launch contracts to go to overseas providers.

Trump tried to appoint a man who has made a career out of attacking the Ex-Im Bank to lead the bank. He was backed by the 'drain the swamp' Bannon faction in the administration and his appointment was an obvious attempt to destroy the bank from within. Thankfully, the Senate rejected him today but the bank's future is very much in doubt.

I guess Make America Great Again doesn't count for our space industry...

http://spacenews.com/senate-committee-blocks-controversial-ex-im-bank-chairman-nominee/

 

[Broken_Erika]

I guess they'll just have to go with MASA instead.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

 

[hobbsyoyo]

So I worked on one of the side boosters, the center core and the second stage of this beast. The other side core was processed at the Cape and Texas only and I can't remember if I worked on its original build or not. The side boosters are re-used with new nose cones and grid fins. The center core is brand new as it required some changes from the side boosters.

I designed tooling that allowed technicians to weld together tubes that go in the rocket for the center core and side booster. For the second stage, I was rolled in as support for a few weeks to review and approve planning documents that the technicians follow to assemble the rocket in addition to designing a smaller set of tooling. I also created and reviewed planning for the center core and side boosters.

It flies next month and will deliver a cherry red Tesla Roadster to Mars orbit. Super stoked, this rocket has the largest payload capacity seen since the Saturn V by a large margin.

 

[Cutlass]

You mean they aren't bringing the roadster back to earth so we can see how it drives after?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Nope, it's never coming back. Here it is on the payload attachment fitting.

 

[Cutlass]

Now, see, if Elon was really cool, we would have got this:

 

[Takhisis]

I'll sound like an ignorant buffoon, but what's the purpose of taking a car into orbit?

 

[Cutlass]

Publicity stunt.

 

[Takhisis]

*facepalm*