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Gliese 581 d and e. Recent discovery indicates we should send in Kevin Costner
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Besides, what is a better way to go then die in space?
Then your final thought could be "at least none of my ancestors went like this!"
- "Proving once again the deadliest animal of all ... is the Zoo Keeper" - Philip J Fry
Nah, that's boring.
You have to die in space while setting off the nuke that destroys the asteroid.
That's the best way.
Fun fact: Freezing wouldn't play a part in it at all. As in space you can only loose temperature due to it radiating away (slowly), as there is no matter (basically) to absorb the temperature from your body via contact.
It's like how if you put a vacuum on the headspace of a body of water, it'll freeze.
- "Proving once again the deadliest animal of all ... is the Zoo Keeper" - Philip J Fry
Maximum Attainable KE density of ship = ln(total mass/final mass) * engine efficiency * energy density of fuel
KE density to travel at V = KE = (c^2)/(1-v^2/c^2)^0.5 - c^2
The changing mass of the ship really makes a surprisingly huge and helpful difference. I think my confusion was that all the rocket equations you provided where to do with rockets with conventional exhausts in classical reference frames, which isn't what we have with any of these super ships. Most of them are effectively being accelerated by collisions with gamma rays on the pusher plate in the same direction as them.
This system doesn't work for a ship which can somehow operate without a mass loss, such as a bussard ramscoop. I'm fairly confident that it has to obey my previous equation since you effectively won't get any extra energy once it takes the same amount of energy to grab a particle from the vacuum and speed it up as that particle can liberate in energy.
Adding this factor for a reasonable ship (90% fuel) effectively bumps the KE up by a factor of 2.3, which doesn't help much for our antimatter super ship, but means fission or fusion drives get to a better speed.
No way, riding your spaceship into a Sun is a better way.
Or a black hole.
Steam PSN: DerWaffleMous Origin: DerWaffleMous Bnet: WaffleMous#1483
We'll just have to test this then so we'll know for sure what'll happen.
Any volunteers?
All rockets are powered by collisions with a pusher plate. Super ships will still obey the rocket equation in a classical frame, which is the kind of frame we're discussing. Just thought you should know.
Not really, I've seen this done (well, low pressure, not vacuum). Thing is in water the molecules have different speeds, so the faster ones, as pressure decreases, can 'get away', ie boil, meanwhile the slower ones will stay, untill that they freeze.
- "Proving once again the deadliest animal of all ... is the Zoo Keeper" - Philip J Fry
I mean, I WANT to see a black hole up close, that shit is just infinitely interesting to me.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html
a fading melody - my indie platformer for the xbox 360
STOP AGAIN (probably way easier than building 0.9x c rocket engines) ==> Space travel of 100-200 years IS NOT A HUGE PROBLEM. So we can get to the other planets, we just need to stop our cells from dying, there are other cells that do this (or close enough anyhow), so we just need to copy, we don't need to invent the wheel.
- "Proving once again the deadliest animal of all ... is the Zoo Keeper" - Philip J Fry
Of course, if we do come up with that technology, extra-terrestrial colonization will immediately become much more important.
a fading melody - my indie platformer for the xbox 360
And I'm not talking immortality, I am talking stopping aging. Aging is really only a few processes that our cells go through that causes them to die, and us to grow old. Stopping that means living untill a couple hundred won't be too hard, and that means space travel will be way way easier, since we don't need super magical engines or energy sources, since we don't need to get there in less than 50 years, suddenly a 200 year trip is reasonable and we can go at speeds we've already managed (though for smaller ships).
- "Proving once again the deadliest animal of all ... is the Zoo Keeper" - Philip J Fry
It'd blow my mind if we could get fly by images of planets in another star system. Blow my mind even more if we could get a probe which could decelerate and establish orbit. Even more if we could send landers.
I mean, seriously - taking images of planets in other star systems. That right there would be an AMAZING accomplishment.
Its really not that simple. You stop cells from aging quickly and you know what happens? they all start getting cancer. So its like the reverse of what you actually want to happen. Long life will be attained when we can figure out how to stop our bodies repair mechanisms from breaking down.
Micro blackhole engine (ie an engine which is a blackhole somehow suspended behind the ship which evaporates at the exact rate you put fuel into it) would be just as as good as an antimatter engine, and allow us to simply use normal matter rather than antimatter + matter. The black hole itself would have a tiny mass, but you'd still face a maximum speed set by your fuel energy density and the fuel/ship ratio of your ship.
A 90% fuel antimatter/black hole ship still tops out at 0.77 c. A 99 % fuel ship can make it up to a scorching 0.88 c. A dynamically evaporating black hole drive is both safer (even if you dropped it in the earth it wouldn't suck in mass fast enough, this thing would be tuned to need to be fed like a bastard. The lighter the hole, the faster you need to feed it to stay stable, and we would want to feed it fast for high accelerations) and 'easier' than an antimatter drive. However we have no idea really how to make either. Black hole energy at least allows us to do direct matter to energy conversion, but at least we have a basic idea how to make anti matter.
How would you drag the hole behind you?
Another source.
Well, err, wizards. I mean, just making and maintaining the black hole would be an act of near insane technology. I guess you could somehow charge the black hole by injecting a net negative charge, and set up an electric field to precisely match the acceleration force of the ship. Another option might be to inject the matter with a slight asymmetry, so the hole continually accelerated forward towards the ship while the radiation would be ejected uniformly, causing the same acceleration on hole and ship. The momentum asymetry needed to accelerate the tiny hole by the same as the massive ship would be insignificant and wouldn't really slow the ship that much.
I mean, its kinda like asking how the warp drive can be cooled due to the heat it creates. Or how we would address the manufacturing problems with making Flemitronioum Core elements en masse. We don't even know anything about how to practically create and tune the mass of a black hole, let alone transport and move one. The only thing we do know is that it would be an eminently useful power source if we could build one.
That would work too, although the hole would need to be enormous. The pull on the ship of the hole and vice versa goes up with mass, the power output of the hole goes down with mass, you'd need to pick the crossover point and it might mean a very low acceleration.
Although, now I do the calculations our black hole ship faces another problem. To achieve a low enough conversion rate, say a few kg per second of mass means the black hole needs to weigh a few hundred tonnes. It actually means we want our ship to be titanically huge so we can use an enormous mass of fuel each second and get our black hole mass low.