SPACESHIP 101
How about a bit more SCIENCE, in Science Fiction?
Almost everything you see on TV and in movies… It just doesn’t work that way!
TV and Movie Spaceships are very COOL looking! However, “Cool Looking” does not cut it when it comes to efficiency. The video producers have reasoned that a pointed bow or a wedge shape would be as efficient as a war machine. (Like the Imperial I-class ‘Star Destroyer’ that was chasing Princess Leia at the beginning of Star Wars, ‘A New Hope’.) https://i.stack.imgur.com/gjKV2.jpg
All your weapons are mounted along the sides in ‘pillboxes’. It would allow you to aim ALL your weapons at a single point directly in front of the ship, as well as to the sides.
That is great, but only if you are the one doing the chasing! However, if you are being followed, having all your weapons only able to be aimed from the front and the sides, then your propulsion system will take a pounding! Oh, well! Except for any weapons designed to fire to the rear of the craft, you would not be able to return a devastating fire.
A spherical Spacecraft in war is a good compromise, half of your weapons can be aimed in any one direction at a time.
Perhaps the most efficient spaceship configuration is a SPHERE, (or secondly a ‘Borg’ CUBE) for deep-space spaceships because it would contain the most internal spacial area, as well as the least amount of surface area, it is mass versus volume. There is no need or use for wings or aerodynamic configurations unless the spacecraft is designed to be flown in an atmosphere and/or landed on the ground like an airplane.
MOVIE REVIEW: Ad Astra: Who wrote this?
The hero leaves his ship while orbiting Neptune, using a shuttlecraft to get to his father’s ship on the opposite side of the asteroid belt that he travels through. (Get closer and on the same side!) Then because the docking ring is damaged, instead of tying up the shuttlecraft, he abandons his craft and allows it to drift off.
On the return, he is later shown jumping off his father's ship and traveling many miles back through the asteroid belt to return to his ship. Do you know how impossible that is? The farther you need to jump, the less accurate your aim! Sure, you could jump off and travel many miles, which is the easy part, but to ARRIVE at a specific destination and at a moving target would be uncannily accurate! Both vessels are orbiting Neptune at different distances from the planet and thereby traveling at different speeds. You must head out in the direction of where your target will be when you get there, not where it is now, and there is no way to tell. Let alone be approaching the ship at a perfect angle to skirt along its length!
The chances of all this happening as portrayed are less than 0.000,000,000,001%. If you mess up even slightly there is no conceivable way for a do-over! Absolutely no steering is possible in this situation. You are dead, drifting through space for eternity! At least the writers of Ad Astra did not resort to scientifically doubtful 'technology’ as done by many Sci-Fi writers!
Certainly, some of the highly advanced technology as presented in the movies and TV programs will eventually come to fruition, however: Science Fiction writers rely too heavily on made-up technology, with no known scientific principles. Real scientists do not have a clue as to how and where to begin any research to create such a thing. Imagine Renaissance scientist Leonardo Da Vinci (1452 – 1519) trying to create a modern electronic computer or cell phone!
WARP SPEED
“On Star Trek (depending on the source) “Warp 1” is equivalent to the Speed of Light, Warp 2 is eight times the Speed of Light, and Warp 3 is twenty-seven times the Speed of Light. Yet according to what the writers portray, objects coming towards the observer at Light Speed (or many times faster), the object can be seen and/or detected from a distance.
Of course, this is quite impossible. That would be like hearing a distant sound before the sound reaches your ear.
Recall the hundreds of times the “Deflector Dish” came up in the many seasons, episodes, and movies. It pushes the dust and bigger items out of the way that normally would cause a horrendous crash.
How? Sci-fi magic.
Ponder the possibility of a ray of light that can travel at many times FTL (Faster Than Light) speed and push all debris that is over two hundred million miles away, along your direction of travel, before you strike it at FTL speed! Why would it not cause the same effect to all those probes that they always send out on Star Trek, let alone remove or cause damage to other objects like Space Stations or other spacecraft?
Ensign Pavel Chekov: “Captain, the Deflector Dish just sent the Science Station into the planet’s atmosphere causing it to crash into the planet!”
Captain James T. Kirk: “Oopsie!”
HITTING a GRAIN of SAND at the SPEED of LIGHT
From a Quora Post by Kevin Lux Aug 22, 2020 – (Edited)
Large hailstones can dent a car. Half the speed of light is about 335 million mph. Think about an asteroid at the distance to the moon. It is invisible at that distance. At only 0.5c (one-half the speed of light), it is about two seconds away. Spaceships in some movies have a kind of energy shield that vaporizes most of the asteroid, but they usually depict a closing velocity on the order of hundreds or thousands of miles per hour when the reality would have been a nearly instantaneous and immensely spectacular collision.
Now get THIS!
GOING WARP 5000?
“Hey, guys, anyone care to visit the Andromeda Galaxy for lunch?”
On Star Trek, they show ‘stars’ whizzing past the viewports at several stars per second. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year. When considering that in our Milky Way Galaxy, the average distance between stars is around 5.5 light-years apart. To accomplish this, the Enterprise would have to be traveling well over ten light-years per SECOND!
Not at all feasible!
TRUTH: At the spectacular speed of one hundred times the Speed of Light it would still take 3.65 days to travel just one Light-Year! Therefore, to reach the average distance star would still take about 15 days of travel.
“It takes light from our sun an average of eight minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth. That may not seem like very much time but given how fast light travels — just under 300,000 kilometers per second, or over 186,000 miles per second — it's not insignificant.
For comparison, light from the moon reaches Earth in just a little over one second. The moon is only 238,855 miles away, though. (The distance varies a bit as it orbits, but that is the average cited by NASA.) The sun, meanwhile, is approximately ninety-three million miles away — hence the eight minutes and 20 seconds it takes for light to make the trip.
Still, that pales in comparison to how long it takes sunlight to reach the outer solar system. On Neptune, which is an average distance of 2.8 billion miles away, sunlight takes four hours to reach the planet”. -- Source: Phys.org
How Fast Is 'Warp Speed' Really? https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/tv/a28108/star-trek-warp-speed-comparison/
SPACE HELMETS
They cannot get something as simple as a helmet right, in most Sci-Fi videos they have the helmet face-shield lit up from the inside so you can see the face of the person wearing the helmet. This would cause the light to obscure anything beyond the face shield, completely ruining the person’s vision. You can try this at home. Just stand in front of a window at night with a lamp between you and the glass.
“WHAT’S UP?”
“Any direction away from the center of a source of gravity” such as a planet or star. Or as here on Earth: “Any direction away from the center of the earth”.
However, once you get far enough out into a zone of free fall or orbit, there is no such thing as ‘up’ or ‘down’. A spaceship under acceleration does have artificial gravity throughout the entire craft: However, the force of this “gravity” is solely dependent upon the amount of acceleration. “Up” would be the direction of travel, and “Down” would be toward the stern, or the engine’s thrust. There is no exception when the craft is reversed when slowing down to approach your destination, then the direction of travel is towards the stern because the craft is decelerating while reversed, “Down” is still towards the rear.
Otherwise rotating all or part of the craft around its centerline will create artificial gravity. “Down” would be towards the outer hull, with the most gravity being the ‘floor” nearest the outer hull, and the least amount of gravity, to zero gravity being along the centerline. All ‘floors’ would be curved inward, and it would appear as if you were in the bottom of a valley, from the vantage point of an observer on the floor. This is the only practical way to induce anything simulating gravity as science can produce today.
HOORAY! Some Science Fiction Movies get this right, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, filmed in 1968!
However, some movies get this very wrong, they have two capsules out on the ends of rotating arms.
Usually, they are either an open lattice gantry structure or cables for the arms, but with no possible way to get into the capsules or leave them without donning a spacesuit and leave the confines of the spacecraft!
Rotating Open Latice Gantry
Spacesuit Design
The outdated spacesuit design weighed approximately 280 pounds on the ground - without the astronaut in it. In the microgravity environment of space, a spacesuit weighs nothing. Putting on a spacesuit (in the recent past) took 45 minutes, including the time it takes to put on the special undergarments that help keep astronauts cool.
A couple of years or so ago, NASA unveiled its next-generation space suit that will be worn by astronauts when they return to the moon in 2025 or later as part of the agency’s plan to establish a permanent human presence on the lunar surface.
The Extravehicular Mobility Unit—or xEMU—is NASA’s first major upgrade to its space suit in nearly 40 years and is designed to make life easier for astronauts who will spend a lot of time kicking up moon dust. It will allow them to bend and stretch in ways they could not before, easily don and remove the suit, swap out components for a better fit, and go months without repairing.
YOU CAN NOT DEFY THE LAWS OF PHYSICS OR THE LAWS OF MOTION TV and movie “Spacecraft” cannot behave like that in real life. You cannot fly in an effective circle or a curved line, (There is nothing in space to get the required friction.) On the opening credits of “Star Trek: Enterprise”, the Enterprise is shown as doing several ‘banking turns’, which is quite IMPOSSIBLE to do in outer space!
You use the steering rockets to turn the spacecraft, but you have not done anything to change the direction of travel, by simply rotating the axis! All that you have done is rotate the craft.
First, turn in the direction the ship is to be headed, then accelerate.
Then you must accelerate in that direction, but you are still not traveling in the actual direction your spacecraft is pointed! More on that below. ①
Of course, orbiting is certainly possible, but only IF the object being orbited has enough gravity to allow that! If you were to orbit a small moon or asteroid, it would need to be extremely low and slow. The faster you travel in an orbit the farther out away from the orbited body would you travel, until you head out in a straight line.
Sure, science may somehow find a way to invent a method of “Inertia Dampeners” and true “Artificial Gravity” but as for now, no one has a clue as to what those scientific principles would be based upon. It is entirely fictional. A true artificial gravity would simulate the conditions on Earth, so that you could not detect any difference whether in a spaceship or on the ground, like in the filming of most Science Fiction movies, because it is expensive and difficult to simulate Zero Gravity!
In Movies and TV, the spacecraft is shown to accelerate and decelerate at what would be extremely high G-Force rates that are impossible for people to withstand.
“In the Space Shuttle era and beyond, astronauts experience varying amounts of G forces during launch and landing. Normally, the highest G forces are seen during landing, not launch. The Shuttle crew would see about 3 Gs during landing. Now that the shuttle is retired and the US astronauts are flying exclusively on Soyuz craft, they experience about 4.5 Gs during descent if things go correctly. If not, the Soyuz will enter what is called a ballistic descent or a ballistic reentry. During a ballistic reentry, an astronaut can experience upwards of 8 Gs. Just imagine having seven clones of yourself sitting on top of you and trying to move. Though these types of reentries are extremely uncomfortable for the astronauts to experience, they are rare, and, in the end, they all come back safely”.
https://www.quora.com/When-is-the-maximum-g-force-experienced-by-an-astronaut
Therefore, the Sci-Fi writers ‘invented’ “Inertia Dampening”. This would be required to keep everything from smashing into the front or rear bulkheads, like a bug splattered on your car windshield. However, using known scientific principles a spacecraft should not change its rate of speed beyond about Three G-Forces.
In the world of Science Fiction Movies and TV, the actual G-Force as indicated would be many times greater. At a G-Force of three times the normal gravity, a person weighing two hundred pounds would then weigh six hundred pounds, at 10 G the same person would weigh two thousand pounds! Now try to operate the controls… Let alone breathe!
There must be a severe lack of scientific knowledge by some of the Sci-Fi writers… Han Solo’s famous boast that the Millennium Falcon “…made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs” may have sounded impressive, but from an astronomical perspective, it made no sense at all. A parsec is a unit of distance, not time, so why would Solo use it to explain how quickly his ship could travel?
A parsec is a unit of length used to measure large distances to astronomical objects outside the Solar System. A parsec is defined as the distance at which one astronomical unit subtends an angle of one arcsecond, which corresponds to astronomical units. One parsec is equal to about 3.26 light-years in length.
However, there is an “explanation” written to “prove” such a thing is indeed possible… if you do some after-the-fact gymnastics…
HOW THE STAR WARS KESSEL RUN TURNS HAN SOLO INTO A TIME-TRAVELER https://www.wired.com/2013/02/kessel-run-12-parsecs/
BREATHING AIR
Many times, on Star Trek the “Environmental Control System” (this regulates atmospheric conditions such as heat, breathing air, air temperature, etc.) goes out of order and people start suffering immediately due to lack of oxygen or being overcome by excess CO2 and are just minutes from dying. The fact is that cramped little WWII Submarines could remain underwater for 48 hours, or more if pressed. You can breathe the same air many times! In a sealed ten-foot cube (one thousand cubic foot) space one person could survive for over 17 hours. Therefore, why would the people in a very spacious spacecraft be suddenly out of oxygen or overcome by CO2 poisoning, just because the Environmental Controls go offline?
Note from QuadGMoto: “The Last Jedi” lost me with the use of slow-moving heavy bombers that were supposed to use gravity (in space, which does not have such gravity!) to drop bombs onto another ship. Even worse, those stupid bombs were armed while they were still in the ships. Even In WWII, pre-computer dumb bombs did not arm until they were dropped. It was idiotic and yes, haphazard.
FOLLOWING THE LAWS OF PHYSICS
Sir Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion:
(1.) An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted on by an unbalanced force. An object in motion continues in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. This law is often called “the law of inertia”.
(2.) Acceleration is produced when a force acts on a mass. The greater the mass (of the object being accelerated) the greater the amount of force needed (to accelerate the object)
(3.) For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
WHEN YOUR ENGINE IS FUNCTIONING, YOU ARE ACCELERATING!
Continuous acceleration is NOT required! Even a rock in space needs no acceleration to keep moving, except for the acceleration that it was originally given, it will just keep traveling on, at its constant speed and direction until eventually affected by gravity or collision. You blast your engine until you get up to the speed you want to travel then stop accelerating (To quit using precious fuel). You then coast, until it is time to reverse the spaceship and blast in the opposite direction of travel. This is the way you slow down to a stop, to halt your movement at your destination. ––Newton’s First Law
The heavier a rocket is, the more fuel and thrust it takes to get off the ground and it requires an exponentially increasing fuel supply to push it up to orbital height.
There is always a point of diminishing returns until you reach the point that the rocket engine has not enough power or thrust to launch the rocket. However, (unlike a toy rocket, that fires like an arrow), that is the proper place to start from, just below the point of the rocket engine’s ability to launch. That is why the rocket lifts off so slowly and gains momentum as it burns off the fuel weight. Otherwise, the G-Force would crush you immediately upon launch. ––Newton’s Second Law
① In space, changing direction to a new heading requires that unless you first LOSE all your previous directional momenta, you will continue in the direction that you were originally heading, but now you would be including the new acceleration direction of travel, but that is not your heading!
Think of a graph showing a straight horizontal line from the left near the bottom, to the right edge is your current heading and destination, now draw a line somewhere near the middle going straight up from your original line. That is your new acceleration direction, but it is NOT your heading! Because you have not lost any of the original direction and heading or speed, considering that IF you were now accelerating in the new direction and blasting for just as long and with the same power as you used previously, then the new heading and destination would be approximately 45 degrees from the original heading and about 45 degrees from the new acceleration direction. About halfway in between! Why the approximation and not exactly? It is because you had to accelerate from Zero (in the new travel direction) to your resulting full speed in the new direction. Of course, any difference in thrust (time or power) between the old and new acceleration would change your actual heading and destination.
① You would be traveling in an exceptionally long lazy curve until you get to your cruising speed. When using any of the eight steering thrusters to adjust your heading, you would use one or two of the four thrusters in both the front and the stern (if using two, on an end, they would be at 90 degrees from each other) while also using the ones on the opposite sides in the stern.
Then to halt the course adjustment from setting up a continuous spin, you must use the thrusters on the opposite sides at the same thrust and duration. ––Newton’s Third Law
However, you must still accelerate in that new heading direction, or you will not be going in that direction! You lose momentum the same way you gained it, but by reversing your direction of thrust. You cannot just “Come to a halt” suddenly! Imagine going Warp 8 and stopping immediately… preposterous! (“All engines stop” as in Star Trek), you will just keep coasting along. ––Newton’s First Law
Neither can you turn around and immediately go back the way you came. You can stop the engine, but you cannot stop the momentum that way! It takes just as much time to lose your speed, as it did to be at your then-current speed or employ a humongous increase of the use of energy, to slow down to an eventual stop, just as you cannot stop a car that is going downhill, by putting it in neutral and shutting off its engine.
When leaving the orbit of a planet, you cannot just leave at any time you want. You will be orbiting the planet on an outward spiral, as you accelerate. You must wait until you are properly positioned to accelerate in the direction of where you want to go. (Where your destination will be when you get there.) Otherwise, you could be on the wrong side of the planet, going in the wrong direction, when you leave the planet’s gravity.
SPACE BATTLES would be completely different from movies and TV. They would be finished rather quickly. The tactics at the beginning are not overly complicated. It would be exceedingly difficult to come alongside them for any length of time, matching speed, and direction. No matter what direction you approach your quarry from any angle including from behind. (You would necessarily have to be going faster than they are to catch up to them from behind.) Then you would continue to fly in a straight line past them, shooting all the way. (If you came from behind) Now they are chasing you! Going back for a return engagement is where it gets complicated. It would require you to get well out of range, slow down to a stop, then come back to where you think they will be, by the time you get there.
You would be adjusting your heading direction continuously because they are trying to outmaneuver you too. If you miscalculate where they will be, you will have a difficult time catching up to them. Meanwhile, they are either trying to escape from you or outmaneuver you, to attack you. Unlike in the movies, blown-up spacecraft that were in high orbit outside of the atmosphere do not immediately fall away to crash on the ground.
Whenever you maneuver in space, you must head to where the location of your destination will be, by the time you get there, not head to where it is now!
FIRE is certainly possible in space, if there is sufficient oxygen or an oxidizing agent to burn… certain materials will even burn underwater. Or are you one of those who believe that rockets do not work in space?
A spacecraft that has a hull breach that is open to space, will quickly vent all available atmosphere. Any fire will continue to burn, then it will self-extinguish when the oxygen is depleted to sixteen percent... except for any fires burning self-oxidizing material.
EXPLOSIONS IN SPACE: Since explosions have a shockwave effect, and you are in a breathable atmosphere, the shockwave would impact your spacecraft, the air, and the material that the spacecraft is made of, would convert that back into sound.
SPHERICAL SPACESHIPS would be built on the same principle as a “Highly rigid and lightweight structure as a geodesic dome, which is a hemispherical thin-shell structure (lattice-shell) based on a geodesic polyhedron.
The triangular elements of the dome are structurally rigid and distribute the structural stress throughout the structure, making geodesic domes able to withstand very heavy loads for their size.”
There would be very few external and internal main structural components, and they would mostly all be the same, size and shape, simplifying construction and transport to a spaceport construction site.
One other reason for a spherical spaceship is because it is easier to steer, using eight rotating or omnidirectional steering rockets, you can change your direction of heading with the least amount of stress on the ship’s structure.
Sci-Fi MOONS
Strangely, no environmental protection is needed!
I find it highly amusing that whenever a space crew needs to immediately land, there is always a handy moon to land on, and it normally has oxygenated air, water, plants and trees, Earth-like gravity, etc. All are compatible with Earth's conditions. However, the mass of any planet determines its gravity, and gravity determines how much atmosphere a planet or moon can retain as well as the other requirements for life!
BLACK HOLES Look at all the wild and fanciful things “scientists” have Black Holes supposedly capable of doing. They are just ordinary, but humongous “Gravity Wells” not much different than another gravity well that we are all quite familiar with, the only exception is in its power and strength; I am talking about the good old Earth!
While some gigantic stars make our own Sun look extremely puny by comparison, they have no unusual gravitational effects, just higher gravity. Every star or planet has an Event Horizon, that once crossed will cause another mass to fall toward it, that is why we have meteorites and ‘shooting stars’. Spacecraft can escape the event horizon of any gravity well depending upon how close they are and their ability to accelerate.
When a massive star collapses into a ‘black hole’ it has already sloughed off much of its mass in a nova explosion. Scientists claim that what remains will collapse back on itself and will cause what is known as a ‘black hole’. Before this massive, humongous star became a ‘Black Hole’ it gave off plenty of light which was “escaping” from the star. However, now the collapsed star is much less massive than before it became a black hole. Then scientists claim that light cannot now escape?
The Event Horizon is now closer in than before the star’s explosion, but still not in any way anything different than normal gravity phenomena. Scientists claim it is now highly condensed or compressed rock. I believe it has no more gravitational pull or exhibiting any strange or unusual phenomena than any other mass of a similar quantity.
According to ‘scientists’ a “Black Hole” has gravity so intense that not even light can escape, and a teaspoon full of Black Hole material would weigh a million tons, yet is still capable of ‘Mass Ejection’???? It is to laugh!
PUBLISH OR DIE!
It seems that scientists are in a contest to produce the latest un-provable theory on why something is, as it is, (such as Black Holes or the “Galactic Alignment”) they have little testable data or scientific tools to prove or disprove their wild theories.
“…funding for cosmology comes from very few government sources controlled by a handful of committees that are dominated by Big Bang theorists. These theorists have spent their lives building the Big Bang theory. Those who openly question the theory simply don't get funded.”
You must remember the way it is with scientific research on the leading edge, to vie for funding you must do research, develop a theory, then publish your theory. You may become famous, which gets you more research funds, which also gets you speaking engagements, which gets you more money, and then you can do more research. On and on!
Science has devolved from posing a theory and setting about proving or disproving it, to a vote by people dependent upon government or the educational establishment grants seeking to please their master in the hope of keeping the funding spigot open.
TILT OF THE EARTH There is no known NATURAL reason, except for forces currently outside and way beyond the earth for the earth’s axis to suddenly tilt, there is a slight wobble in the earth’s axis, but it takes twenty-five thousand years to make a full circle called “Precession of the Equinoxes”.
To move the tilt of the earth like that would take a major jolt from a minor planet. We and everything else would be dead from the shock, buildings would be thrown down far from their foundations and tidal waves would cover most land masses everywhere, washing most of whatever is left, far, far away.
POLE REVERSAL There is a normal slight wobble and wander in the earth’s magnetic poles; this has been known to be going on since shortly after the actual location of the North Magnetic Pole was first discovered near Baffin Bay, Canada.
Compasses cannot become even slightly out of alignment with the location of the North and South Magnetic Poles. (Which has absolutely no relationship to the actual North and South Poles) All we will need to do is recalculate the Earth’s Declination Lines (The offset needed to align a compass and/or map, to True North) which occurs continuously.
Part of the theory of Magnetic Pole Reversing includes the possibility that without using a compass, no one would even notice that it happened!
Currently, the Magnetic Pole continuously wanders around and there is no resulting difference to be noticed, except for changes in Declination. One thing no one has even broached is: WHY this so-called “Major Disaster” of Pole Reversal will occur, which we will probably not even be able to notice even after we are told it has happened.
What this calamity was “supposed” to be at the end of the Aztec Calendar in 2012 was pure speculation based on doubtful ancient predictions. Probably the same kind of calamity that always occurs every January first when you change your wall calendar!
No one knows what “disaster’ was supposed to happen when the alleged “Planetary Alignment” supposedly occurred from the center of the galaxy.
Don’t worry about something that we know nothing about. What will happen, probably nothing at all! If something extraordinary does happen, it will probably be over and done with before you have a chance to worry about the consequences. You will either survive, or you will die in the blink of an eye!
There is nothing to get your knickers in a bunch about!
DON’T PANIC: The Official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
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