[Jay-qu]

ok so I had a little interest in the matter so the thread is officially started.

We can officially name it later but for the moment it can be refered to as the hypo-express. It will be a manned spaceship made for multiple trips of sub-light speed travel, so mainly around the solar systems planets. It should also be capable of taking off and landing on earth (runways or straight up and down? that can be part of the design) without any extra help, strap on boosters etc.

I feel the need to make it clear that this is an exploration of imagination coupled with our scientific minds, the designs dont have to be economical or have an ultimate purpose past enjoyment. For example one might say "what is the point of visiting the planets in our solar system over and over in a ship that will cost billions of $$" its for pure fun and to see where our imaginations can take us!

So I think we should set down some major areas to cover, such as propulsion, manouvering, take off/landing gear, navigation systems, artificial gravity and phasars (we need weapons to take out any alien hostiles we meet on our journey ). To make a start feel free to add more to these areas, then we can come back to each area and get into specifics.

anything else.. well eventually I think we could get to the physical specifications of the ship - shape and size.. well that looks like it for the moment, I will check back soon - have fun with it

shotgun pilot

J

[Tormod]

Cool. Since it's a flight of fancy we can suggest anything, right?

[Jay-qu]

right anything you want - but I want scientific justification, not just sci-fi ideas

[Pyrotex]

Originally Posted by Jay-qu

right anything you want - but I want scientific justification, not just sci-fi ideas

Well, there's scientific justification, and then there's almost-nearly scientific justification, or what I call, ANSJ. Will that do?

For example, I wrote an unpublished SF story years ago, based on the discovery that a herd of "wahoots" was feeding near our Sun, inside the orbit of Mercury. They seemed to be made entirely out of plasma, held together by magnetic fields. They were almost invisible in ordinary light, but could be just detected in infrared and microwave. Eventually (after 100 years of study) we managed to capture one in a large magnetic cage. The wahoot took off like a scared rabbit, pulling the cage--and the spaceship--with it. After a few days, it got tired and stopped to feed--around another star!!! The humans in their ship had been pulled around at 1,000s of times the speed of light!!! Will ANSJ ideas like that do?

[Kayra]

Originally Posted by Pyrotex

Well, there's scientific justification, and then there's almost-nearly scientific justification, or what I call, ANSJ. Will that do?

For example, I wrote an unpublished SF story years ago, based on the discovery that a herd of "wahoots" was feeding near our Sun, inside the orbit of Mercury. They seemed to be made entirely out of plasma, held together by magnetic fields. They were almost invisible in ordinary light, but could be just detected in infrared and microwave. Eventually (after 100 years of study) we managed to capture one in a large magnetic cage. The wahoot took off like a scared rabbit, pulling the cage--and the spaceship--with it. After a few days, it got tired and stopped to feed--around another star!!! The humans in their ship had been pulled around at 1,000s of times the speed of light!!! Will ANSJ ideas like that do?

OMG, that is hillarious.
Wild west anyone?

Hitch up that team boys, move it out.. we are burnin daylight.

[GAHD]

Ok well, first off, I disagree with making it able to take off and land on any given planet; the aerodynamics of the different atmospheres, layers of atmosphere, as well as gravitational differences make the problems with orbit/de orbit a total P.I.T.A. unless you have something like Star trek's inertial dampeners. I would have to suggest at least a 2-stage design with the main components and living space being space-stranded, while smaller shuttles would have a modular design to deal with the atmospheric flight dynamics of whatever the mother ship was orbiting.

Ok, so lets make our flying turtle. It has to eat and swim through space, it's shell has to protect all the tender meet inside from all but the most nasty of world-destroying things, and it needs to maintain homeostasis(help me out if i missed one here).

One of the problems the mother ship will have to deal with is protection: In addition to high-velocity massive objects zooming around in space, there is also cosmic and solar radiation. Contrary to what Jack and Kirby say in Fantastic Four say, cosmic rads do not upgrade the human condition.

Another problem is reaction mass: propellant fuel! To move X mass Y fast you need to send X mass Y fast (or a ratio thereof) out the other side! Considering that, the ship would need to be self-refueling. Either capturing stray particles as it goes (ram-scoop theory) or by actively finding massive bodies to attach itself to and them mining/refining the fuel it gets from that. Even those methods pose problems if the kinetic energy that you absorb by taking on the fuel isn't exactly in line with the kinetic energy of the craft at the time of capture. All this thanks to conservation of momentum.

Now wegotta worry about a 100%recyclable biosphere inside. We need renewable air first and foremost, water next, and last of all foodstuffs (we need fuel too!). If you want to do *any* extra vehicular activities (like repairing the radar dish that got hit by a hail of cosmic buckshot) you are going to loose air (Murphy's law applies to pumps and seals, too). So we gotta look for ways to continually renew that air supply, maybe the same way we worry about the propellant.


In order to find our way and find the "food" our "turtle' needs, we gotta give it senses. That means at the very least "eyes" to scan the EM spectrum. A 'nose' to capture and analyze the various matter that comes near the ship would be nice too, and "touch" would certainly be an asset when it comes to things bouncing off the hull that somehow evaded detection by the other systems.

See Ion Drives and Radiation Sheilds thread for some interesting debate on these particular subjects.
See aerodynamic lubrication thread for a quick explanation of some of the basics of atmospheric flight, as well as some nifty ideas to mitigate these problems.

see the portable mass-spectrometer for info on how I'd make the sense of "smell"

See a 1999 University of Tokyo joint-paper written by Mitsuhiro Hakozaki, Hideki Oasa and Hiroyuki Shinoda titled "Telemetric Robot Skin"(pdf) for an example of simulating the sense of touch.

On the problems of renewable biosphere I'd be glad if someone who has information that could share it.

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by Pyrotex

Eventually (after 100 years of study) we managed to capture one in a large magnetic cage. The wahoot took off like a scared rabbit, pulling the cage--and the spaceship--with it. Will ANSJ ideas like that do?

That is a great idea Pyro! Kinda like a space version of the worms of Dune.

Originally Posted by GAHD

Ok, so lets make our flying turtle. It has to eat and swim through space, it's shell has to protect all the tender meet inside from all but the most nasty of world-destroying things, and it needs to maintain homeostasis.

Sweet! I get to be a space ship again! Space is where it is easiest to grow my shell, & just so our ship must accomadate growth. If a thing is not growing, it is dying. So whether we use our waste to feed biota that grow our ship, or have nano bots using the waste similarly, don't forget we will have waste disposal to contend with besides acquiring new resources. Not only what goes up must come down, but what goes in must come out.

[Pyrotex]

Originally Posted by Turtle

That is a great idea Pyro! ...Sweet! I get to be a space ship again! Space is where it is easiest to grow my shell, & just so our ship must accomadate growth. If a thing is not growing, it is dying. ...:

Well, the fact is, I have a design for a ship at home. I'll have to bring the files in on a memory chip and share them, but here are the essentials.

The outer hull is the shape of an M&M candy--an oblate shperoid, and is about 1 kilometer in diameter. The interior is mostly hollow. It contains a maglev track about .9 km in diameter on which runs a maglev train, at such a speed (approx 80 mph) so that everybody on the train feels about 1G artificial gravity. The train covers the entire track, so you have essentially a circular life support area 100 feet wide, 3 stories tall, and 2 miles long!!! In the center of the ship is the magnetic bottles holding the anti-matter. Anti-hydrogen to be precise, at 11 degrees Kelvin. Surrounding that is the toroidal water tank which serves as reaction mass for the engines. The water rotates contrary to the maglev train to minimize the "gyroscopic effect" (which would make maneuvering the ship unwieldy). The rest of the interior carries cargo, power distribution systems, and six atmospheric landers--they look like the Concorde, and are powered by tiny mag bottles of anti-matter.

Now, hook this sucker up to a team of four wahoots for interstellar travel!!
The wahoots will instinctively come out of {wherever--wahoot space} in an orbit near the star. Disengage the wahoot harness module (normally attached to the top of the ship), and the ship powers its way to higher orbits and around a planet. Then the landers are loaded up and descend to the planet surface. The wahoot harness module holds about 20 people in zero gee, and they monitor the wahoots, paying out monofilament cable so they can find the best solar winds and chow down.

If you don't like this architecture, its okay. I got a dozen more!!!

[Jay-qu]

Ok this is good.

Gahd, I didnt mean it should be able to land on every planet, just earth - but I like your idea of it just been a mother ship and smaller landers do the rest.

Pyro, The ANSJ of the wahoots is streching it but I love you idea of the m&m shell ship, so how is the train powered, is there a power plant that utilises the antimatter?

This is good stuff guys keep it coming

[Kayra]

My spaceship design radically differs from most I suspect.

First off, radiation issues are probably best handled by increasing the body’s ability to self repair. That is coming soon enough. Extreme radiation will still require that living things sequester themselves somewhere for the duration.

Instead of a hard shelled (sorry turtle) design, I have been considering an inflatable one.
Let’s face it, if a micro meteor hits a soft or hard surface, the result is likely to be the same. The main difference is that a soft shelled craft will better be able to handle large changes in tensile stress.

Them main thing required for this system is the ability to make large quantities of graphene.


My ship concept in a rather large nutshell

Make a tube of 3 (or more) layers of graphene.
The tube should be segmented with the height of the segment = 1/3 (apprx) of the diameter.
Make this tube 100 meters in diameter, and 3 KM long.
Inflate with atmosphere.
Insert another cloth tube inside of this one that covers exactly ½ the diameter of the outside one. Now we have a tube in a tube.
Make 3 more of these structures.
Create 2 structures by connecting the ends of the tubes. We now have 2 sets of 2 tubes.
Attach both sets to a spindle and rotate in opposite directions at a speed that will give you 1 G of acceleration. (like counter rotating propellers)
Attach desired mode of acceleration to the spindle.


Since acceleration basically drags the spinning tubes through space, only tensile stresses are applied to it. Something graphene is exceptionally suited to.
When holes inevitably occur, simply rotate the outer and inner cloth skin until the hole is closed. Instant repair and you still have 2 layers between you and space. Patch as required.
Using heat from the propulsion system, you can set up closed loop convection towers in each of the tubes to generate wind (and power).
Using the same graphene, you can lower a loop tether down to any planet you would be capable of landing on. Instant, cheap solution to the gravity well problem.
Room exists to create an entire micro habitat for air and water recycling.
Living quarters set up along the walls, and common space/garden set up at the base of each tube.