05 September 2012

Jaded

Kilted To Kick Cancer

I love how fast sci-fi fans and gamers become jaded about technology.

I have a term that's new to me from Roberta X, "Teakettle Drive".

(I will now butcher the explanation)

A fusion thermal drive is basically a fusion source making heat and spraying it down with reaction mass, the reaction mass expands and that makes thrusties.

Roberta calls it a teakettle drive, like they are merely heating the water to boiling and spraying live steam out the nozzles.

Like I said, jaded.

That water will be heated to plasma temperatures and will likely not remain water but broken fragments of water molecules.  It will probably be a little radioactive as well.

Milk with your tea?  Sugar?

The scope of technology gets strange in space when you demand things happen faster than in a Hohmann transfer orbit.  Heating water, with fusion, hot enough to make plasma for thrust =  teakettle.

This is not the first time this has hit me.

I had absorbed the tech from Traveller pretty well.  I was accustomed to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 g drives.  I had a tentative grasp of orbital mechanics and gravity wells.

Then I saw Star Trek VI.  There's a scene where the Enterprise-A is ripping towards a planet for the final showdown.  Tearing STRAIGHT DOWN THE WELL!  Apparently in Star Trek, hundreds or thousands of g's are everyday.

I got over it and had to deal with its opposite recently.  The space setting I've created from scratch has a "fast" ship that can pull 0.13g fully fueled with a peak acceleration of about 0.45g as the fuel is running out.  Delta-V matters more in a harder science world than in Traveller or Star Trek.  I am still struck by things taking days instead of minutes because of the differences in the real-space drives.  Traveller caused me to expect much shorter normal space travel times.

1 comment:

  1. "Apparently in Star Trek, hundreds or thousands of g's are everyday."

    Yup. They tend to accelerate from 0 to significant fractions of c in just a few seconds on a regular basis. "Full impulse" is generally accepted as being 0.5c.* If we're generous and allow 15s from rest to full impulse, that's 9,993,082 m/s^2, or a bit over 1 million g's of acceleration.

    Yet strangely enough, when the inertial dampeners fail (which happens rather frequently) they're never squished into a thin red paste on the back wall by the sudden massive acceleration.

    Not that Star Trek has ever been very good about realistic physics, of course.

    * The fact that it's a measure of velocity rather than acceleration is just silly, IMO. But in reality, "full impulse" is most accurately defined as "speed of plot".

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