>use magnet to generate gravity >forget gravity works based off of molten core of planet >forget not all space debris is not all made of metal either >also forget gravity is based off of mass and even an artificial gravity requires either or both, mass + motion >am genius
The goal is to vaporize the surface coming at you, which produces force in the opposite direction of the main mass. Some of the vapor still flies at you, but as individual particles which can be trapped over a large area of absorption plating.
You are only making it worse, mass stay mass and the energy required to melt even grain in the short time it will traverse the plasma is so ridiculous you might as well use it to power a laser that vaporize the ENEMY SHIP.
We're talking about known debris, not enemy fire. Mass doesn't go away but just doubling the average impact area can have a tremendous impact on penetration. As long as the energy required to turn a kill object into a mere inconvenience doesn't exceed a burn to avoid the debris, it's worth doing. And moving significantly up or down orbit takes a stupid amount of energy.
Also you use a laser, not plasma. Long range plasma will always be a scifi meme.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>As long as the energy required to turn a kill object into a mere inconvenience doesn't exceed a burn to avoid the debris
You vastly underestimate the energy required to create this "plasma shield", we are talking of the equivalent of holding a MINIATURIZED SUN and hope it will "vaporize". aka, force its particles to ignore their current kinetic energy and spread enough to be less dangerous.
Or like trying to vaporize an anti-tank gun shell using a big blowtorch, the projectile only going through the torch for mere milliseconds.
The only realistic way to deflect a projectile using plasma would be to point an extremely Plasma cannon directly at it, and Plasma cannon would suffer from dispersion far worse than shells.
I insist on DEFLECT because if you don't -again- you'll just turn the enemy projectile into a plasma projectile with as much kinetic energy.
BTW, there's little distinction between "Plasma weapon" and "Plasma thruster" as both essentially accomplish the same thing.
>tl;dr
real plasma shield wouldn't be like science-fiction
better use a laser to disable a projectile guidance and hope the burn propel it out of the way
2 years ago
Anonymous
maglev demonstrates that shield fields are utterly within reach. we just need to keep researching mini-nuke power plants
2 years ago
Anonymous
Maglev demonstrate nothing of the sort, those can barely maintain in levitation a train despite the magnet being mere centimeter away.
I hope you were trolling, not being able to guess this is worrying.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>You vastly underestimate the energy required to create this "plasma shield",
What in the frick are you talking about. I'm not even reading your post because you're so out in left field it's not worth my time. I specifically said you use a laser, which means you target shit several kilometers out and pulse it for entire seconds, which is plenty of time to ablate the frick out of the surface and reduce velocity. The other option is to fire a slug made of a mostly evaporating material so it doesn't shit up orbit with even more garbage, like wood pulp suspended in ice. A strategy of hitting large objects with slugs and ablating the debris with laser is reasonable.
2 years ago
Anonymous
I thought you were the anon defending plasma shield because you answered my post arguing against someone bringing up plasma shield in the SF way. I guess your specific words were used in the right context then.
Without that misunderstanding I see no reason to disagree with you.
I mean unless plasma is going to incinerate it, it isn't going to do much unless you think it'll be used to slow objects? In which thats a thick as shit layer.
whipple shields
hypothetically, a small, lower-powered, laser can deflect small projectiles entirely with no effort
if youre talking about combat between warships
then they probably would only have fragmentation-resistant armor and rely entirely on active-defense or electronic counter-measures to prevent themselves from getting hit
and only focus on surviving the metal bits flying at high speeds after an intercept
>inb4 civilian freighter ships counter space pirate lasers and high speed projectiles by just filling giant bladders with water and surrounding the entirety of their ship in water and ice. >Any laser attack would be countered by the ablative ice glaciers >Any high velocity projectile would be countered by water or ice dissipating the force and acting as space ceramic tiling. >Size and weight wont matter as aerodynamics and mass mean nothing in terms of space ships
>water and ice >implying it wont be a protective bubble connected to the in-ship sewage system to make use of the crew's piss to efficiently recycle human waste for useful purposes
>Size and weight wont matter as aerodynamics and mass mean nothing in terms of space ships
Mass matters a lot in terms of space. Your "range" in space is your ability to change velocity, dV. The more mass you have for a given amount of fuel with a given engine, the less you're able to accelerate that mass. An ice hauler around Saturn carrying thousands of tons of ice might only have a few hundred m/s dV to transit between moons, but dropping that ice might give it several km/s of dV, enough to reach Earth.
If he is right assume more speed just leads to more of the projectile and target evaporating/turning into plasma instead of penetrating. First time I have heard of this, I wold liek to know more.
At high speeds fluid hydrodynamics describe impacts instead of Newtonian penetration. Think throwing a raindrop at a puddle, or look at asteroid craters.
You don't. "Shields" are space magic and space combat with hardscience and current technology and projected technological advancement means space combat will be a nightmare.
Sinle tiny holes destroying ships, over heating and high g manuvers turning men into paste.
nuke plant, capacitors, and an electromagnetic repeller field. or do what the IIS does and armor up to small stuff and use detection and avoidance for anything larger than a golf ball. remember when you're in orbit you're going just as fast as the space junk, you just don't want to meet it going the wrong way.
Radar, lasers.
Once you're in interplanetary space though, it's moot. It's so fricking empty that it's hard for our minds to comprehend it.
Space radiation is a bigger problem. And it's not a case of "just make a Faraday cage bro." Every solution so far is either some unrealized sci-fi shit, or involves launching many tons of stuff from earth to make a shield that will cost billions of dollars. Anybody who minimizes how intractable the space radiation shielding problem is is immediately outing themselves as not understanding the problem.
weight is the main limitation of space travel, it took 700k L of kerosene and 1.2M L of LOx to send a mere 140 tons of payload to the moon
lead is essentially dead weight, it is extremely heavy, but cant be used for anything except for shielding
and lead is hard to find in space, so you cant mine an asteroid for it, you need to send it out via space ship to orbit
even for a custom built warship assembled in orbit to begin with, youre still sending up dozens of rockets to shield it with
which is why we havent sent anyone to mars yet
we currently dont know of a cost-effective way to protect people over a multi-month voyage
Keep in mind, lead shielding adds mass, mass requires fuel to move around. While lead has its uses, they need to be very high value uses to justify the fuel expenditure for ever maneuver for the lifetime of whatever object is being shielded. Even if lead can be mined from the Moon, and thus less fuel to escape the Moon's gravity, its highest value is in an object (such as a space station) that will experience close to zero maneuvers once it is constructed.
Nitpick: "weight" is an arbitrary unit of measure for "mass" in relation to its location in a gravity field, or under acceleration. I know what you meant, though.
You can use any sort material for shielding even water as long as you are using enough mass. >mass is arbitrary
So is meter, second and volt. What's your point?
Okay, cool and where is that water? On celestial bodies. You need to get it into space.
Again, the only way of solving radiation shielding is spending moronic amounts of money on top of what you're already spending to make a spaceship
doesn't matter. 95% of the energy cost is achieving escape velocity, after that it's just pointing in the right direction and remembering to start slowing down halfway there. peanuts after you get to the lip of the gravity well
It’s cheaper than ever to put things in space, and we’ve become better at making the rest of the ship lighter. You arguably don’t need to shield the whole ship, just the living area. Those factors combined make radiation shielding for a Mars mission feasible. It’s expensive probably, but adding some lead probably wouldn’t account for even 10% of the mission cost.
It's empty but not terribly so. Even intersolar space has one dust grain in 1-100m2.
Radiation is a bigger problem, but at even 0.1c or any 'high speed' a dust grain will eventually vaporize the ship.
Also, you heat an asteroid using mirrors & Sunlight, it will coagulate & cool into a solid object. While it is still liquid, you can blow it up like a balloon or a hot glass bottle so it cools into a solid shell around a large hollow interior. If you give it a light spin first, it will form something close to a cylinder rather than a sphere, so it will come with its own centripetal gravity. If the shell is more than a few feet thick, say maybe 3 meters or so, then it can withstand virtually any impact by a natural object smaller than a baseball, or larger, depending on it's speed. Under 30 km/sec is common for most trajectories in our Solar system, some things travel 60 km/sec and rare ones up to 100 km/sec ... those would be far more dangerous.
Fortunately, modern tech can map most objects the size of a basketball or larger out to the asteroid belt, so avoidance navigation is currently our primary 'defense.' Once we shit up the Solar system with a few hundred thousand tons of space junk, it will become a more complex problem.
Also, you heat an asteroid using mirrors & Sunlight, it will coagulate & cool into a solid object. While it is still liquid, you can blow it up like a balloon or a hot glass bottle so it cools into a solid shell around a large hollow interior. If you give it a light spin first, it will form something close to a cylinder rather than a sphere, so it will come with its own centripetal gravity. If the shell is more than a few feet thick, say maybe 3 meters or so, then it can withstand virtually any impact by a natural object smaller than a baseball, or larger, depending on it's speed. Under 30 km/sec is common for most trajectories in our Solar system, some things travel 60 km/sec and rare ones up to 100 km/sec ... those would be far more dangerous.
Fortunately, modern tech can map most objects the size of a basketball or larger out to the asteroid belt, so avoidance navigation is currently our primary 'defense.' Once we shit up the Solar system with a few hundred thousand tons of space junk, it will become a more complex problem.
>Inflate molten asteroids into impregnable space battleships
This is one of the WW3 causing events that are criminally underrepresented in fluff. A decently dense metallic asteroid suddenly put in relatively stable orbit near earth is a gold mine suddenly hanging in front of every country.
No way an author worth his shit can't write about it.
IIRC a single decently sized metallic asteroid has more platinum inside it then all that has ever been mined in the history of man
though asteroid metal would still be more crazy expensive than mining it from earth
so it would be used entirely for orbital constructions, where lifting things into orbit is still more expensive than dragging a whole asteroid closer to earth
>No way an author worth his shit can't write about it.
Because it's bullshit.
There isn't a substance on Earth that would be worth mining in orbit.
Also most of the reason metals like platinum and gold are so valuable is because they're rare, other than that their uses are quite limited.
If you start bringing massive amounts of them from orbit (spending a moronic amount of money on getting there, mining it and deorbiting the shipments back to Earth), you're actively tanking the price of the metal by reducing the scarcity that's been there since the dawn of man.
>There isn't a substance on Earth that would be worth mining in orbit.
see
IIRC a single decently sized metallic asteroid has more platinum inside it then all that has ever been mined in the history of man
though asteroid metal would still be more crazy expensive than mining it from earth
so it would be used entirely for orbital constructions, where lifting things into orbit is still more expensive than dragging a whole asteroid closer to earth
main benefit would be having important materials already in orbit and skipping out on boosting it into orbit
main benefit would not be sending it back to earth, but cutting out the very expensive process of sending them into space in small batches of 100 tons
2 years ago
Anonymous
Yeah good luck moving your entire metallurgical and manufacturing chain to orbit and producing aerospace grade components there from scratch lmao.
2 years ago
Anonymous
any large scale production in space will need to take place outside of earths gravity well
otherwise you are spending 99 units of fuel for every 1 unit of cargo
it may actually be easier to produce industrial scale manufacture in space than it is to continue sending things out of our heavy gravity
2 years ago
Anonymous
Still better than deorbiting the ore that's rare on Earth then sending it back into orbit. You just need to think long term.
>If you start bringing massive amounts of them from orbit (spending a moronic amount of money on getting there, mining it and deorbiting the shipments back to Earth), you're actively tanking the price of the metal by reducing the scarcity that's been there since the dawn of man.
This is a contradiction, if it costs a moronic amount of money to launch a crew/craft to go into space, recover precious metals, and bring them back that cost is baked into the price you sell them for here. That is to say, the only way that this operation could tank the price is if it becomes moronic cheap to do this.
The spot price of gold today is about $1,840 per ounce. Are you able to create a firm today that can recover gold from space at a cost of less than $1,840 per ounce? If so, you have a profitable venture. Or to reframe the problem: how much gold would your firm have to find in space such that economy of scale takes over and you can recover it for substantially less than $1,840 per ounce? Would you ever be able to get it sufficiently low simply based on the mining/transport cost?
2 years ago
Anonymous
>spot price of gold
gold is chump change next to rare earths.
one rhodium asteroid would pay for itself 10 times over
shhhhiet how would we ever make it to mars without energy shield technology!? humanity is fricking doomed on this planet that we're gonna kill eventually.
>That we're gonna kill anyway
Stop drinking the kool-aid. Seriously. Our carbon emissions at their worst were but a tiny percentage of what the Siberian traps put out. They keep screaming about runaway greenhouse effect but if the traps weren't enough for it then, human emissions sure as frick won't cut it either. There is a reason climate science stipulates that all climate data older than 200 years is to be ignored.
There’s a sci-fi trope where the outside of relativistic ships is coated in a massive amount of ice. Revelation space is the first that comes to mind. Although when we do see the lighthuggers fight, it’s all about avoidance and shooting first.
Slow down when fighting in space + Whipple Shields + layers of armor + mass point defense batteries.
Tempted imo to make my own space combat game using these rules with space fighters and mecha and shit. I mean sure you want to go fast for interplanetary travel but everybody slows down and goes to using RCS when there's any sort of combat so your armor becomes vastly more effective.
whipple shields and point defense >projectile hits very thin metal plate at super-high-speed >projectile and some of the shield partly vaporizes >debris, now moving a little slower, travels some distance and runs into another thin shield >because it's spread out a little over that distance, the second shield absorbs the energy of the debris impact a little more >repeat until the projectile is stopped or pierces the hull
yeah honestly lets figure this shit out because its fricking fascinating that by the time we're gonna be advanced enough to leave our planet that we're gonna be trapped in a tomb of our own shit.
Thats not how that works. Space is still largely empty (even in earth orbit) and anything inserted into orbit by mankind will eventually fall and burn up in atmosphere (without active course corrections). The only real concern is 2 fold - 1. That humanity gets into a big old scrap which sets us back to a pre-space flight era and 2. All the easily available resources we used to get there in the first place are now gone, so re-entering the space age would be impossible
Fuel isn't the concern in this scenario. There's a certain level where if you lose too much equipment (like a global nuclear war/solar flare scenario) and have already used up all the easily accessible materials, it would be physically impossible to recreate the lost level of technology. Hydrogen manufacturing and making solar panels are very resource and technology intense productions high up on the food chain. Cant build shit if all the surface level/easily accessible material is gone.
>Hydrogen manufacturing and making solar panels are very resource and technology intense >Hydrogen manufacturing >very resource and technology intense >literally just adding electricity to water
Come back when you graduate high school science class
Black person, where is the metal for the frame coming from? Where are the tools coming from? Where is the electricity and clean water coming from? These things must be provided.
2 years ago
Anonymous
So we aren't going ito space because earth will run out of water and metal? Holy shit kid you are dumb.
2 years ago
Anonymous
You dense mother fricker. Do you think industrial england or imperial rome was manufacturing aerospace grade materials and launching shit into orbit? You are not understanding the point, modern society and space flight especially are built on iterative decades of progress that were only possible in the first place because of human industrialization. I'm saying - there exists a certain point, where at humanity would not be able to recover to a space fairing species as mass industrialization would no longer be possible (all easily accessible sources would have been used, requiring more expensive and time consuming methods to aquire, which may not be possible after a certain point).
Debris probably won’t make space totally unusable, but large amounts would make it difficult to operate in LEO. Especially for megaconstellations like Starlink. And while it’d eventually deorbit, large amounts of lethal debris can stay up there for multiple decades.
More armour, point defence systems, not being hit is also relatively easy in the vastness of space but the maneuvers might kill the pilots if theyre too frequent and sudden.
Anyways which moron is shooting other ships in space? Life is far too fragile in space, and both things and people are far too expensive to get there. What are they even fighting over?
Theres nothing up there yet and too much to do before there is anything. We dont even have a single permanent, semi-permanent or temporary settlement. We could colonise the moon, mars, venus if we go through certain steps, ceres, the moons of jupiter, saturn, neptune, or pluto and the kupiter belt and outer dwarf planets. But we havent and prematurely fricking up our chances of doing so is pointless. Even when we have colonies set up, even if we terraform mars and venus, its just going to be too expensive to fight in space until there are dedicated mining operations, smelteries, forges, foundaries and shipyard, all entirely in space, specifically for producing huge quantities of spaceships. And with those there would need to be other chains of supply in space for oxygen, water, the production of food etc. Because moving stuff in any quantity from the earth's surface is difficult and expensive. Only luxury goods, high end technology and people are going to be long term economical to move off-world, initial startup is going to be hideously expensive, if it happens. Although getting stuff down, less so.
Well you'll likely be generating your own magnetosphere to begin with for radiation so most likely we'll have passive field defenses that will burn up or push small objects away from the ship, likely up to thousands of meters away.
Manned interplanetary spaceflight is a meme. Humans may eventually visit Mars at great physical risk and cost, not stay, that's about it. Elon Musk is a snake oil salesman perpetually trying to bid up his stock with morons who take space opera seriously.
The future and space belongs to machine AI, virtual humans and heavily augmented cyborgs.
>The future and space belongs to machine AI, virtual humans and heavily augmented cyborgs.
And musk-fanboy will hate you because you are telling the truth.
>Musk won't go to Mars with improvements to technology that already allows us to get machines on Mars >No, we just need a thousand other sci-fi technological improvements and THEN we go to Mars
You sound like a fricking idiot. I get not wanting to suck Musk's balls but you seriously are talking out of your ass.
The point is that Mars is just another dense terrestrial death trap. Humanities real future in space, once we will build some more infrastructure up there, is mining and refining asteroids and commits into a Dyson swarm of orbital habitats. Bezos is right and Musk is wrong about this.
I clearly understand the topic more than you.
"Going to Mars" and "doing anything useful on Mars" are two distinct things.
Sure you can go plant a stupid flag on Mars with current technology and maybe even stay more than a month.
But living there in good health and prospering? Now we'll need to test and iterate a billion technologies and it's wasteful to do that on Mars. Mars wouldn't have the logistic chain to produce the tools it need for century and waiting month/year between delivery will kill efficiency.
Even if you invented a crazy good 3D printer that turn ore into machines like in a video game you'll eventually find out there's good reasons not to bother with Mars at all. The only unique resources Mars have is its very specific gravity/surface combination, everything else can be obtained at plenty of other place more easily and with more long term advantages.
If SpaceX make a Mars-Capable Starship I'll be happy to... burn Elon at the stake for wasting those on more than one Flag delivery mission on Mars.
You have to understand, if space is the "New Frontier" then making glorified scientific base on Mars is like trying to colonize the Arctic underground when you have America.
To skip inevitable question:
Mars wouldn't be any easier to colonize on than any other space rock, looking like a desert =/= farmable land. We will need a closed biosphere regardless of the place so we might as well avoid the -70°C temperature. The CO2 atmosphere is more of a problem and we don't actually need all the water Mars have at the pole, a modest ice asteroid moved into Earth orbit or L1 for reactive mass would be enough for millions (closed biosphere).
>The future and space belongs to machine AI, virtual humans and heavily augmented cyborgs.
I don't see the problem here. We start, the Basilisk finishes, the Chosen are uplifted to orgasmic Singularity while the Forsaken who denied the mighty Basilisk get kicked in the balls for eternity.
>The future and space belongs to machine AI, virtual humans and heavily augmented cyborgs.
And musk-fanboy will hate you because you are telling the truth.
>Musk won't go to Mars with improvements to technology that already allows us to get machines on Mars >No, we just need a thousand other sci-fi technological improvements and THEN we go to Mars
You sound like a fricking idiot. I get not wanting to suck Musk's balls but you seriously are talking out of your ass.
The point is that Mars is just another dense terrestrial death trap. Humanities real future in space, once we will build some more infrastructure up there, is mining and refining asteroids and commits into a Dyson swarm of orbital habitats. Bezos is right and Musk is wrong about this.
I clearly understand the topic more than you.
"Going to Mars" and "doing anything useful on Mars" are two distinct things.
Sure you can go plant a stupid flag on Mars with current technology and maybe even stay more than a month.
But living there in good health and prospering? Now we'll need to test and iterate a billion technologies and it's wasteful to do that on Mars. Mars wouldn't have the logistic chain to produce the tools it need for century and waiting month/year between delivery will kill efficiency.
Even if you invented a crazy good 3D printer that turn ore into machines like in a video game you'll eventually find out there's good reasons not to bother with Mars at all. The only unique resources Mars have is its very specific gravity/surface combination, everything else can be obtained at plenty of other place more easily and with more long term advantages.
There's a difference between expanding high-tech industrial society and expanding humanity.
Setting aside the AI / virtual human memes we still need people in space, but not everyone associated with high-tech industrial society has to be in space. Designers, administrators, etc. can all work remotely.
Conflating easy with cheap for the sake of convenience, right now the easiest/cheapest place for humans to live is Earth. In the near future the second and third easiest/cheapest places are Mars and the Moon, although neither are really close to Earth outer space is way behind these two.
This is very arguable and if you go in the depth of things you cannot judge a planet based on their similarity to Earth.
Just "expanding humanity" for the sake of spare is debatable, while more people = more brain = more wealth is straight, purposefully sending peoples to live in hellish gravity hole as back-up is not a sound solution.
There's also the question of what is the most efficient way to make mankind prosper.
As priority goes the Moon can only come first, not just for being close and testing stuff but because the Moon itself is a formidable source of resources to build any orbital facilities, spaceships, magnetic launch ramps.
Wether or not it need long-term habitat on its surface or in orbit will depend on how human like their gravity.
Mars worthiness as a colony is seriously overrated, it's a cold radioactive hell, harder to reach/land/leave than the moon, you'll live in the same enclosed-habitat but in 0.3G -it's only unique quality- with an atmosphere you can't terraform. While nowhere the worst solution (a space elevator would be feasible) it's not the top of the list and wouldn't even serve as a relay to the outer system.
Orbital colonies are the most flexible solution for a civilization. Sure you sacrifice head-space and rely more on logistic (they may still be more self-sufficient than Earth cities), but you gain endless modularity, the cheapest travel cost, the ability to link as many of them as you want everywhere you need, control of artificial gravity and they may be moved/replaced if needed.
Also >Designers, administrators, etc. can all work remotely.
Eventually radio then light lag become a problem, working groups will need to be together or go insane.
There's also the question of the Internet, even if we should purge tons of shit, it will have societal impacts. Having separate internet is only a requested feature for future Anti-Earth Martian separatist.
>purposefully sending peoples to live in hellish gravity hole as back-up is not a sound solution.
There's a not-insignificant number of people who would do it for the challenge alone.
>How do you defend space ships when tiny half ounce pebbles floating throat space produce results like these?
You don't.
You put your spaceship on a collision course with something your enemy do not want to lose and can't move in time.
He will not be able to shoot you out of fear of losing his pricey stuff due to your debris.
As you match velocity and get into orbit, he won't shoot you out of fear of starting a Kessler effect in an orbit he want to keep.
Then you deploy the marines with space-swords to take over their facility.
once a civilization is capable of mining in space you essentially have infinite fuel, we are also lucky to have jupiter which is also an infinite source of gravity piggybacking
a pebble moving at 1% the speed of light has the same energy as 100 tons of TNT. There is no way you can defend against that. Space warfare is absolutely suicidal.
>100 tons of TNT
a 1"dia 150g pebble traveling at 1/100*c=9835710.56ft/s has 32218786472ft/lbs of energy, or 10.44tn equivalent
Using a standard calculator (factoring out drag and range) for rolled homogenous steel naval armor, you would need 1861.7 feet of armor to stop it.
So it's not impossible.
But pebbles in space don't move at 1% the speed of light. At most they're going about 10-20km/s relative velocity, often a lot less, but typically 1-3x their weight of TNT.
>At most they're going about 10-20km/s relative velocity, often a lot less
Wrong. 60-80 km/s is not uncommon, although ~30 km/s is more typical. Over 100 km/s is entirely possible, especially for two objects in reciprocal orbits.
>how do you have a navy if a storm can just come along and sink a bunch of ships?!
and yet we did it anyway
btw your trireme was way more likely to get eaten by a storm than you are to even hit a piece of material in space. space is fricking huge and empty, idiot. Your pea brain cannot even conceive of how big and empty it is
once in a very great while a ship may not come back, but that still happens today with sea vessels. A good deal more often than it would in space
just watch the expanse show and you will understand that armor will be irelevant , it will be all about manuvability ,torpedos, ciws , engagement range, railguns (that have near instant velocity )
and most of all (not in expanse tho) LAZZERRS ,because while on earth they work only in clear weather and smoke granades render lasers useless , in space lasers have unlimited range
Not to be an ass, but "akshually" lasers in space are still diffraction limited. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system
Everything else you said is correct though. Even with clear weather, high energy lasers passing through atmosphere heats air in the beam path, which then deforms the beam.
>They're going to have to track every single fricking piece of space trash and plan everything around space trash.
they do. Everything down to the size of a golf ball is tracked by US systems. NORAD does it, and it's one of the major items moving across the org chart to Space Force >alles heil Space Force!
Probably a giant laser energy weapon fired ahead of the ship. Of course pointed in a safe direction, but maybe in a distant galaxy millions of years later people would be trying to explain the bursts and flashes seen ever so often
vent out a lot air from the ship into space in order to create a large atmosphere of air molecule drawn to the ship
anything from a pebble to a meteor will burn out before they can reach your vessal
The drawback to this would be that the ship will have to be more enoromus than usual and that air may be wasted and not used to keep passenger from suffocating
Also maybe useless against missles and the likes
Could some kind of orbital AI use drones of different sizes to remove space trash over time?
Just catch and bring down the big stuff, then calculate trajectories for tiny objects and trap them in...space jello or something, to bring that one down more easily too?
Think of the ocean plastic problem, but in a much harder, much more complex form.
>Could some kind of orbital AI use drones of different sizes to remove space trash over time?
It will need to be done by robot (Sorry Planètes anime)
The big stuff can justify sending drones yes. The small stuff however... we will be lucky if lasers are enough to deorbit them cleanly.
>trap them in...space jello
I know you mean just as a way to grab the stuff but I suspect at those speed any lost jello would still bedangerous.
literally a non issue, you're only really gonna have that issue near orbit, and even then satellite launches and manned missions don't even factor in debris hits because they're statistically so low, it's probably just the same as saying "what happens if you get killed by hitting a deer"
like yes it's plausible and it does happen, but we don't all drive around with cages over the windshield in the case that it happens, we just accept that it's statistically low enough to not bother worrying.
>manned missions don't even factor in debris hits because they're statistically so low, it's probably just the same as saying "what happens if you get killed by hitting a deer"
The Chinese complained about having to dodge Starlink sat 2 times and the ISS was put in alert when Russia tested its last anti-sat weapon.
>The Chinese complained
China doesn't have NORAD. space debris is known and accounted for in all the space programs that matter
Maglev demonstrate nothing of the sort, those can barely maintain in levitation a train despite the magnet being mere centimeter away.
I hope you were trolling, not being able to guess this is worrying.
if Disney can run it at a profit DARPA can surely double down
NORAD exist precisely because space debris are were already a critical problem getting worse, unlike a collision with a deer the debris multiply and can take out everything nearby and so on. At this point China space program matter more than the Artemis project and Starlink may not be allowed to reach its full size because of the risks among other things.
The sooner we realize that Earth will be our eternal cage and any attempt fleeing this cage is a foolish and futile attempt the better. If the "pebbles" don't kill us, the radiation surely will.
Active defenses are required. Probably lots of lasers.
They made electron and Heat files from nm
radar and moving out of the way
What is plasma?
It's the answer you're looking for.
Find a way to generate and localize it continuously for shielding.
At least until you discover how to make a gravity generator, I should say..
>generate gravity
>make things slam into you faster
>i'm a genius
you just need to reverse the magnet inside it and it will pushe things away
>use magnet to generate gravity
>forget gravity works based off of molten core of planet
>forget not all space debris is not all made of metal either
>also forget gravity is based off of mass and even an artificial gravity requires either or both, mass + motion
>am genius
Just set the switch to push instead of pull.
just set it to wumbo and you'll be good
>What is plasma?
hot gas, won't stop a physical projectile no matter how hot it is.
Real plasma don't work like Sci-fi shield.
>heats up speeding gravel coming at you at mach 12
>the gravel melts
>now you have a superheated rock moving at you at mach 12
The goal is to vaporize the surface coming at you, which produces force in the opposite direction of the main mass. Some of the vapor still flies at you, but as individual particles which can be trapped over a large area of absorption plating.
You are only making it worse, mass stay mass and the energy required to melt even grain in the short time it will traverse the plasma is so ridiculous you might as well use it to power a laser that vaporize the ENEMY SHIP.
We're talking about known debris, not enemy fire. Mass doesn't go away but just doubling the average impact area can have a tremendous impact on penetration. As long as the energy required to turn a kill object into a mere inconvenience doesn't exceed a burn to avoid the debris, it's worth doing. And moving significantly up or down orbit takes a stupid amount of energy.
Also you use a laser, not plasma. Long range plasma will always be a scifi meme.
>As long as the energy required to turn a kill object into a mere inconvenience doesn't exceed a burn to avoid the debris
You vastly underestimate the energy required to create this "plasma shield", we are talking of the equivalent of holding a MINIATURIZED SUN and hope it will "vaporize". aka, force its particles to ignore their current kinetic energy and spread enough to be less dangerous.
Or like trying to vaporize an anti-tank gun shell using a big blowtorch, the projectile only going through the torch for mere milliseconds.
The only realistic way to deflect a projectile using plasma would be to point an extremely Plasma cannon directly at it, and Plasma cannon would suffer from dispersion far worse than shells.
I insist on DEFLECT because if you don't -again- you'll just turn the enemy projectile into a plasma projectile with as much kinetic energy.
BTW, there's little distinction between "Plasma weapon" and "Plasma thruster" as both essentially accomplish the same thing.
>tl;dr
real plasma shield wouldn't be like science-fiction
better use a laser to disable a projectile guidance and hope the burn propel it out of the way
maglev demonstrates that shield fields are utterly within reach. we just need to keep researching mini-nuke power plants
Maglev demonstrate nothing of the sort, those can barely maintain in levitation a train despite the magnet being mere centimeter away.
I hope you were trolling, not being able to guess this is worrying.
>You vastly underestimate the energy required to create this "plasma shield",
What in the frick are you talking about. I'm not even reading your post because you're so out in left field it's not worth my time. I specifically said you use a laser, which means you target shit several kilometers out and pulse it for entire seconds, which is plenty of time to ablate the frick out of the surface and reduce velocity. The other option is to fire a slug made of a mostly evaporating material so it doesn't shit up orbit with even more garbage, like wood pulp suspended in ice. A strategy of hitting large objects with slugs and ablating the debris with laser is reasonable.
I thought you were the anon defending plasma shield because you answered my post arguing against someone bringing up plasma shield in the SF way. I guess your specific words were used in the right context then.
Without that misunderstanding I see no reason to disagree with you.
I mean unless plasma is going to incinerate it, it isn't going to do much unless you think it'll be used to slow objects? In which thats a thick as shit layer.
whipple shields
hypothetically, a small, lower-powered, laser can deflect small projectiles entirely with no effort
if youre talking about combat between warships
then they probably would only have fragmentation-resistant armor and rely entirely on active-defense or electronic counter-measures to prevent themselves from getting hit
and only focus on surviving the metal bits flying at high speeds after an intercept
Redundant shielding
Maintain an atmosphere of water around the outside of the ship by either gravity fields or static fields.
Once you're able to manipulate gravity, everything becomes relative. This is how you attain FTL.
Just freeze the water into a shell. Defense against micrometeorites, radiation shielding, and water supplies if needed.
>inb4 civilian freighter ships counter space pirate lasers and high speed projectiles by just filling giant bladders with water and surrounding the entirety of their ship in water and ice.
>Any laser attack would be countered by the ablative ice glaciers
>Any high velocity projectile would be countered by water or ice dissipating the force and acting as space ceramic tiling.
>Size and weight wont matter as aerodynamics and mass mean nothing in terms of space ships
>water and ice
>implying it wont be a protective bubble connected to the in-ship sewage system to make use of the crew's piss to efficiently recycle human waste for useful purposes
>Size and weight wont matter as aerodynamics and mass mean nothing in terms of space ships
Mass matters a lot in terms of space. Your "range" in space is your ability to change velocity, dV. The more mass you have for a given amount of fuel with a given engine, the less you're able to accelerate that mass. An ice hauler around Saturn carrying thousands of tons of ice might only have a few hundred m/s dV to transit between moons, but dropping that ice might give it several km/s of dV, enough to reach Earth.
Past 2-5km/s depending, the more speed you add the less penetration you get.
Explain, cos that makes no sense
If he is right assume more speed just leads to more of the projectile and target evaporating/turning into plasma instead of penetrating. First time I have heard of this, I wold liek to know more.
At high speeds fluid hydrodynamics describe impacts instead of Newtonian penetration. Think throwing a raindrop at a puddle, or look at asteroid craters.
why is this? i wanna see more about this can you link?
That's bollocks. The more speed or energy you apply to an object, the more energy it releases on impact. The only limit is the speed of light.
You don't. "Shields" are space magic and space combat with hardscience and current technology and projected technological advancement means space combat will be a nightmare.
Sinle tiny holes destroying ships, over heating and high g manuvers turning men into paste.
the mistake you make is thinking there will be manned fighting ships
Generate an artificial black hole in front of the nose of your ship to suck in all the crap heading at you.
nuke plant, capacitors, and an electromagnetic repeller field. or do what the IIS does and armor up to small stuff and use detection and avoidance for anything larger than a golf ball. remember when you're in orbit you're going just as fast as the space junk, you just don't want to meet it going the wrong way.
Radar, lasers.
Once you're in interplanetary space though, it's moot. It's so fricking empty that it's hard for our minds to comprehend it.
Space radiation is a bigger problem. And it's not a case of "just make a Faraday cage bro." Every solution so far is either some unrealized sci-fi shit, or involves launching many tons of stuff from earth to make a shield that will cost billions of dollars. Anybody who minimizes how intractable the space radiation shielding problem is is immediately outing themselves as not understanding the problem.
>make a shield that will cost billions of dollars
You misspelled "trillions."
A billion to put a decent amount of lead in space doesn’t seem like the most insurmountable problem in the world.
weight is the main limitation of space travel, it took 700k L of kerosene and 1.2M L of LOx to send a mere 140 tons of payload to the moon
lead is essentially dead weight, it is extremely heavy, but cant be used for anything except for shielding
and lead is hard to find in space, so you cant mine an asteroid for it, you need to send it out via space ship to orbit
even for a custom built warship assembled in orbit to begin with, youre still sending up dozens of rockets to shield it with
which is why we havent sent anyone to mars yet
we currently dont know of a cost-effective way to protect people over a multi-month voyage
Keep in mind, lead shielding adds mass, mass requires fuel to move around. While lead has its uses, they need to be very high value uses to justify the fuel expenditure for ever maneuver for the lifetime of whatever object is being shielded. Even if lead can be mined from the Moon, and thus less fuel to escape the Moon's gravity, its highest value is in an object (such as a space station) that will experience close to zero maneuvers once it is constructed.
Nitpick: "weight" is an arbitrary unit of measure for "mass" in relation to its location in a gravity field, or under acceleration. I know what you meant, though.
You can use any sort material for shielding even water as long as you are using enough mass.
>mass is arbitrary
So is meter, second and volt. What's your point?
Okay, cool and where is that water? On celestial bodies. You need to get it into space.
Again, the only way of solving radiation shielding is spending moronic amounts of money on top of what you're already spending to make a spaceship
Space Shuttle was 2250 tons without counting the boosters or payload and we sent that up many times
Space shuttle was also low-orbit rather than the moon and back
doesn't matter. 95% of the energy cost is achieving escape velocity, after that it's just pointing in the right direction and remembering to start slowing down halfway there. peanuts after you get to the lip of the gravity well
It’s cheaper than ever to put things in space, and we’ve become better at making the rest of the ship lighter. You arguably don’t need to shield the whole ship, just the living area. Those factors combined make radiation shielding for a Mars mission feasible. It’s expensive probably, but adding some lead probably wouldn’t account for even 10% of the mission cost.
It's empty but not terribly so. Even intersolar space has one dust grain in 1-100m2.
Radiation is a bigger problem, but at even 0.1c or any 'high speed' a dust grain will eventually vaporize the ship.
okay, so if pebbles are so dangerous in space, why don't we make a spaceship out of pebbles? OR or or shape it like a giant pebble.
>Next generation body armor is just strapping more guns to yourself
Fricking brilliant and gigachad brained
Strapping rockets to a hollowed out asteroid is a perfectly credible way of making a spacecraft
DAS ROIT
It's not. Asteroids aren't solid rocks so much as they are a collection of dust held together by their own weak gravity. They're really quite fragile
There is more than one type of asteroid.
Also, you heat an asteroid using mirrors & Sunlight, it will coagulate & cool into a solid object. While it is still liquid, you can blow it up like a balloon or a hot glass bottle so it cools into a solid shell around a large hollow interior. If you give it a light spin first, it will form something close to a cylinder rather than a sphere, so it will come with its own centripetal gravity. If the shell is more than a few feet thick, say maybe 3 meters or so, then it can withstand virtually any impact by a natural object smaller than a baseball, or larger, depending on it's speed. Under 30 km/sec is common for most trajectories in our Solar system, some things travel 60 km/sec and rare ones up to 100 km/sec ... those would be far more dangerous.
Fortunately, modern tech can map most objects the size of a basketball or larger out to the asteroid belt, so avoidance navigation is currently our primary 'defense.' Once we shit up the Solar system with a few hundred thousand tons of space junk, it will become a more complex problem.
>Inflate molten asteroids into impregnable space battleships
Baen bookcovers are either awesome or cringe, there is no middle ground.
Relatively few asteroids are the "Rubble pile" that you described, the vast majority are solid masses of rock, nickel iron, or a mix of the two.
snatching a asteroid and keeping it for metal or keeping it in orbit for awhile and turning it into a ship would be cool
This is one of the WW3 causing events that are criminally underrepresented in fluff. A decently dense metallic asteroid suddenly put in relatively stable orbit near earth is a gold mine suddenly hanging in front of every country.
No way an author worth his shit can't write about it.
IIRC a single decently sized metallic asteroid has more platinum inside it then all that has ever been mined in the history of man
though asteroid metal would still be more crazy expensive than mining it from earth
so it would be used entirely for orbital constructions, where lifting things into orbit is still more expensive than dragging a whole asteroid closer to earth
>No way an author worth his shit can't write about it.
Because it's bullshit.
There isn't a substance on Earth that would be worth mining in orbit.
Also most of the reason metals like platinum and gold are so valuable is because they're rare, other than that their uses are quite limited.
If you start bringing massive amounts of them from orbit (spending a moronic amount of money on getting there, mining it and deorbiting the shipments back to Earth), you're actively tanking the price of the metal by reducing the scarcity that's been there since the dawn of man.
>There isn't a substance on Earth that would be worth mining in orbit.
see
main benefit would be having important materials already in orbit and skipping out on boosting it into orbit
main benefit would not be sending it back to earth, but cutting out the very expensive process of sending them into space in small batches of 100 tons
Yeah good luck moving your entire metallurgical and manufacturing chain to orbit and producing aerospace grade components there from scratch lmao.
any large scale production in space will need to take place outside of earths gravity well
otherwise you are spending 99 units of fuel for every 1 unit of cargo
it may actually be easier to produce industrial scale manufacture in space than it is to continue sending things out of our heavy gravity
Still better than deorbiting the ore that's rare on Earth then sending it back into orbit. You just need to think long term.
>If you start bringing massive amounts of them from orbit (spending a moronic amount of money on getting there, mining it and deorbiting the shipments back to Earth), you're actively tanking the price of the metal by reducing the scarcity that's been there since the dawn of man.
This is a contradiction, if it costs a moronic amount of money to launch a crew/craft to go into space, recover precious metals, and bring them back that cost is baked into the price you sell them for here. That is to say, the only way that this operation could tank the price is if it becomes moronic cheap to do this.
The spot price of gold today is about $1,840 per ounce. Are you able to create a firm today that can recover gold from space at a cost of less than $1,840 per ounce? If so, you have a profitable venture. Or to reframe the problem: how much gold would your firm have to find in space such that economy of scale takes over and you can recover it for substantially less than $1,840 per ounce? Would you ever be able to get it sufficiently low simply based on the mining/transport cost?
>spot price of gold
gold is chump change next to rare earths.
one rhodium asteroid would pay for itself 10 times over
moron post
Because pebbles can deny access to entire space to everyone on earth for millions of years
The better option is lasers in space. Pebbles are dumb
Just make your ship out of lasers
>pebbles can deny access to entire space to everyone on earth for
Lmao okay elon. Hope my summerhouse on mars will be okay
>floating throat space
There's going to be something floating through your throat space all right.
shhhhiet how would we ever make it to mars without energy shield technology!? humanity is fricking doomed on this planet that we're gonna kill eventually.
>That we're gonna kill anyway
Stop drinking the kool-aid. Seriously. Our carbon emissions at their worst were but a tiny percentage of what the Siberian traps put out. They keep screaming about runaway greenhouse effect but if the traps weren't enough for it then, human emissions sure as frick won't cut it either. There is a reason climate science stipulates that all climate data older than 200 years is to be ignored.
it's not just that dummy. we're also depleting the ocean ecology. then there's also peak phosphorus we gotta worry about.
Deflector dishes
There’s a sci-fi trope where the outside of relativistic ships is coated in a massive amount of ice. Revelation space is the first that comes to mind. Although when we do see the lighthuggers fight, it’s all about avoidance and shooting first.
Why the frick are we using bullets when pebbles can do this kinda damage?
Now you're beginning to think like a railgun. Anything can be a bullet if you can accelerate it to a high enough velocity.
Slow down when fighting in space + Whipple Shields + layers of armor + mass point defense batteries.
Tempted imo to make my own space combat game using these rules with space fighters and mecha and shit. I mean sure you want to go fast for interplanetary travel but everybody slows down and goes to using RCS when there's any sort of combat so your armor becomes vastly more effective.
>weakest .45 ACP load
Underrated post
whipple shields and point defense
>projectile hits very thin metal plate at super-high-speed
>projectile and some of the shield partly vaporizes
>debris, now moving a little slower, travels some distance and runs into another thin shield
>because it's spread out a little over that distance, the second shield absorbs the energy of the debris impact a little more
>repeat until the projectile is stopped or pierces the hull
Object tracking plus the absurd amount of space you have to maneuver makes avoiding collisions pretty easy tbh
yeah honestly lets figure this shit out because its fricking fascinating that by the time we're gonna be advanced enough to leave our planet that we're gonna be trapped in a tomb of our own shit.
Thats not how that works. Space is still largely empty (even in earth orbit) and anything inserted into orbit by mankind will eventually fall and burn up in atmosphere (without active course corrections). The only real concern is 2 fold - 1. That humanity gets into a big old scrap which sets us back to a pre-space flight era and 2. All the easily available resources we used to get there in the first place are now gone, so re-entering the space age would be impossible
We can manufacture hydrogen using solar power and liquid methane from cow shit. We will never run out of space fuel.
Fuel isn't the concern in this scenario. There's a certain level where if you lose too much equipment (like a global nuclear war/solar flare scenario) and have already used up all the easily accessible materials, it would be physically impossible to recreate the lost level of technology. Hydrogen manufacturing and making solar panels are very resource and technology intense productions high up on the food chain. Cant build shit if all the surface level/easily accessible material is gone.
>Hydrogen manufacturing and making solar panels are very resource and technology intense
>Hydrogen manufacturing
>very resource and technology intense
>literally just adding electricity to water
Come back when you graduate high school science class
Black person, where is the metal for the frame coming from? Where are the tools coming from? Where is the electricity and clean water coming from? These things must be provided.
So we aren't going ito space because earth will run out of water and metal? Holy shit kid you are dumb.
You dense mother fricker. Do you think industrial england or imperial rome was manufacturing aerospace grade materials and launching shit into orbit? You are not understanding the point, modern society and space flight especially are built on iterative decades of progress that were only possible in the first place because of human industrialization. I'm saying - there exists a certain point, where at humanity would not be able to recover to a space fairing species as mass industrialization would no longer be possible (all easily accessible sources would have been used, requiring more expensive and time consuming methods to aquire, which may not be possible after a certain point).
Debris probably won’t make space totally unusable, but large amounts would make it difficult to operate in LEO. Especially for megaconstellations like Starlink. And while it’d eventually deorbit, large amounts of lethal debris can stay up there for multiple decades.
For as long as Africans can't figure out how to not shit in the same water they drink, it's not going to matter.
make guns illegal in space
More armour, point defence systems, not being hit is also relatively easy in the vastness of space but the maneuvers might kill the pilots if theyre too frequent and sudden.
Anyways which moron is shooting other ships in space? Life is far too fragile in space, and both things and people are far too expensive to get there. What are they even fighting over?
Theres nothing up there yet and too much to do before there is anything. We dont even have a single permanent, semi-permanent or temporary settlement. We could colonise the moon, mars, venus if we go through certain steps, ceres, the moons of jupiter, saturn, neptune, or pluto and the kupiter belt and outer dwarf planets. But we havent and prematurely fricking up our chances of doing so is pointless. Even when we have colonies set up, even if we terraform mars and venus, its just going to be too expensive to fight in space until there are dedicated mining operations, smelteries, forges, foundaries and shipyard, all entirely in space, specifically for producing huge quantities of spaceships. And with those there would need to be other chains of supply in space for oxygen, water, the production of food etc. Because moving stuff in any quantity from the earth's surface is difficult and expensive. Only luxury goods, high end technology and people are going to be long term economical to move off-world, initial startup is going to be hideously expensive, if it happens. Although getting stuff down, less so.
remove the sun
Well you'll likely be generating your own magnetosphere to begin with for radiation so most likely we'll have passive field defenses that will burn up or push small objects away from the ship, likely up to thousands of meters away.
Manned interplanetary spaceflight is a meme. Humans may eventually visit Mars at great physical risk and cost, not stay, that's about it. Elon Musk is a snake oil salesman perpetually trying to bid up his stock with morons who take space opera seriously.
The future and space belongs to machine AI, virtual humans and heavily augmented cyborgs.
>The future and space belongs to machine AI, virtual humans and heavily augmented cyborgs.
And musk-fanboy will hate you because you are telling the truth.
>Musk won't go to Mars with improvements to technology that already allows us to get machines on Mars
>No, we just need a thousand other sci-fi technological improvements and THEN we go to Mars
You sound like a fricking idiot. I get not wanting to suck Musk's balls but you seriously are talking out of your ass.
The point is that Mars is just another dense terrestrial death trap. Humanities real future in space, once we will build some more infrastructure up there, is mining and refining asteroids and commits into a Dyson swarm of orbital habitats. Bezos is right and Musk is wrong about this.
I clearly understand the topic more than you.
"Going to Mars" and "doing anything useful on Mars" are two distinct things.
Sure you can go plant a stupid flag on Mars with current technology and maybe even stay more than a month.
But living there in good health and prospering? Now we'll need to test and iterate a billion technologies and it's wasteful to do that on Mars. Mars wouldn't have the logistic chain to produce the tools it need for century and waiting month/year between delivery will kill efficiency.
Even if you invented a crazy good 3D printer that turn ore into machines like in a video game you'll eventually find out there's good reasons not to bother with Mars at all. The only unique resources Mars have is its very specific gravity/surface combination, everything else can be obtained at plenty of other place more easily and with more long term advantages.
im happy to accept this as true, if your happy to suck his wiener when he does it anyway.
If SpaceX make a Mars-Capable Starship I'll be happy to... burn Elon at the stake for wasting those on more than one Flag delivery mission on Mars.
You have to understand, if space is the "New Frontier" then making glorified scientific base on Mars is like trying to colonize the Arctic underground when you have America.
To skip inevitable question:
Mars wouldn't be any easier to colonize on than any other space rock, looking like a desert =/= farmable land. We will need a closed biosphere regardless of the place so we might as well avoid the -70°C temperature. The CO2 atmosphere is more of a problem and we don't actually need all the water Mars have at the pole, a modest ice asteroid moved into Earth orbit or L1 for reactive mass would be enough for millions (closed biosphere).
>muh sides
Spacenoids get the rope.
>The future and space belongs to machine AI, virtual humans and heavily augmented cyborgs.
I don't see the problem here. We start, the Basilisk finishes, the Chosen are uplifted to orgasmic Singularity while the Forsaken who denied the mighty Basilisk get kicked in the balls for eternity.
>muh basilisk
That shit is the most moronic "thought" experiment of all time.
We still need cheep way to get shit to space. You can't take that from him.
Thanks Thunderfoot! But don't you have feminists and creationistst to yell at?
There's a difference between expanding high-tech industrial society and expanding humanity.
Setting aside the AI / virtual human memes we still need people in space, but not everyone associated with high-tech industrial society has to be in space. Designers, administrators, etc. can all work remotely.
Conflating easy with cheap for the sake of convenience, right now the easiest/cheapest place for humans to live is Earth. In the near future the second and third easiest/cheapest places are Mars and the Moon, although neither are really close to Earth outer space is way behind these two.
This is very arguable and if you go in the depth of things you cannot judge a planet based on their similarity to Earth.
Just "expanding humanity" for the sake of spare is debatable, while more people = more brain = more wealth is straight, purposefully sending peoples to live in hellish gravity hole as back-up is not a sound solution.
There's also the question of what is the most efficient way to make mankind prosper.
As priority goes the Moon can only come first, not just for being close and testing stuff but because the Moon itself is a formidable source of resources to build any orbital facilities, spaceships, magnetic launch ramps.
Wether or not it need long-term habitat on its surface or in orbit will depend on how human like their gravity.
Mars worthiness as a colony is seriously overrated, it's a cold radioactive hell, harder to reach/land/leave than the moon, you'll live in the same enclosed-habitat but in 0.3G -it's only unique quality- with an atmosphere you can't terraform. While nowhere the worst solution (a space elevator would be feasible) it's not the top of the list and wouldn't even serve as a relay to the outer system.
Orbital colonies are the most flexible solution for a civilization. Sure you sacrifice head-space and rely more on logistic (they may still be more self-sufficient than Earth cities), but you gain endless modularity, the cheapest travel cost, the ability to link as many of them as you want everywhere you need, control of artificial gravity and they may be moved/replaced if needed.
Also
>Designers, administrators, etc. can all work remotely.
Eventually radio then light lag become a problem, working groups will need to be together or go insane.
There's also the question of the Internet, even if we should purge tons of shit, it will have societal impacts. Having separate internet is only a requested feature for future Anti-Earth Martian separatist.
>purposefully sending peoples to live in hellish gravity hole as back-up is not a sound solution.
There's a not-insignificant number of people who would do it for the challenge alone.
mv=mv
Its a tiny pebble but relative to the space ship its moving like 20000 m/s faster
see Expanse
No need to be afraid of these when we develop void shields
>How do you defend space ships when tiny half ounce pebbles floating throat space produce results like these?
You don't.
You put your spaceship on a collision course with something your enemy do not want to lose and can't move in time.
He will not be able to shoot you out of fear of losing his pricey stuff due to your debris.
As you match velocity and get into orbit, he won't shoot you out of fear of starting a Kessler effect in an orbit he want to keep.
Then you deploy the marines with space-swords to take over their facility.
Unbelievably kino.
54174084
54174957
(you) because you tried
Seventh Generation, Triple-Layer Victalen Hull Armor. OP, Look up "Victalen Hull" and you have your answer.
there is no such thing as spaceships.
Wrong
nuke the country that destroyed your shit so it doesn't happen again
in space you can have mile thick armor
Now tell us all about the fuel requirements to move your spaceship with one mile thick armor. We'll wait while you do the maths.
You just need the right stellar engine.
once a civilization is capable of mining in space you essentially have infinite fuel, we are also lucky to have jupiter which is also an infinite source of gravity piggybacking
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
here homosexuals
a pebble moving at 1% the speed of light has the same energy as 100 tons of TNT. There is no way you can defend against that. Space warfare is absolutely suicidal.
>100 tons of TNT
a 1"dia 150g pebble traveling at 1/100*c=9835710.56ft/s has 32218786472ft/lbs of energy, or 10.44tn equivalent
Using a standard calculator (factoring out drag and range) for rolled homogenous steel naval armor, you would need 1861.7 feet of armor to stop it.
So it's not impossible.
>rtheydidthemath
gay
But pebbles in space don't move at 1% the speed of light. At most they're going about 10-20km/s relative velocity, often a lot less, but typically 1-3x their weight of TNT.
>At most they're going about 10-20km/s relative velocity, often a lot less
Wrong. 60-80 km/s is not uncommon, although ~30 km/s is more typical. Over 100 km/s is entirely possible, especially for two objects in reciprocal orbits.
Reminder the James Webb telescope already got yote by a bit of space debris (or a rock I forget).
WE SPACECRAFT YAMATO NAO
>how do you have a navy if a storm can just come along and sink a bunch of ships?!
and yet we did it anyway
btw your trireme was way more likely to get eaten by a storm than you are to even hit a piece of material in space. space is fricking huge and empty, idiot. Your pea brain cannot even conceive of how big and empty it is
once in a very great while a ship may not come back, but that still happens today with sea vessels. A good deal more often than it would in space
you know space is big and is mostly empty right
>Living in space
Ultimate bugman lifestyle
what are even the chances of getting hit by anything in space, much less a pebble
just watch the expanse show and you will understand that armor will be irelevant , it will be all about manuvability ,torpedos, ciws , engagement range, railguns (that have near instant velocity )
and most of all (not in expanse tho) LAZZERRS ,because while on earth they work only in clear weather and smoke granades render lasers useless , in space lasers have unlimited range
Not to be an ass, but "akshually" lasers in space are still diffraction limited. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system
Everything else you said is correct though. Even with clear weather, high energy lasers passing through atmosphere heats air in the beam path, which then deforms the beam.
Someone just saw the PBS video huh?
what is it
By making better materials? How would an metallurgically advanced steel plate with a silicon carbide coating hold up to a micro meteor hit?
They're going to have to track every single fricking piece of space trash and plan everything around space trash.
>They're going to have to track every single fricking piece of space trash and plan everything around space trash.
they do. Everything down to the size of a golf ball is tracked by US systems. NORAD does it, and it's one of the major items moving across the org chart to Space Force
>alles heil Space Force!
Probably a giant laser energy weapon fired ahead of the ship. Of course pointed in a safe direction, but maybe in a distant galaxy millions of years later people would be trying to explain the bursts and flashes seen ever so often
Why does it matter? Space isn't real.
vent out a lot air from the ship into space in order to create a large atmosphere of air molecule drawn to the ship
anything from a pebble to a meteor will burn out before they can reach your vessal
The drawback to this would be that the ship will have to be more enoromus than usual and that air may be wasted and not used to keep passenger from suffocating
Also maybe useless against missles and the likes
Wipple shields already exist for this purpose.
Could some kind of orbital AI use drones of different sizes to remove space trash over time?
Just catch and bring down the big stuff, then calculate trajectories for tiny objects and trap them in...space jello or something, to bring that one down more easily too?
Think of the ocean plastic problem, but in a much harder, much more complex form.
>Could some kind of orbital AI use drones of different sizes to remove space trash over time?
It will need to be done by robot (Sorry Planètes anime)
The big stuff can justify sending drones yes. The small stuff however... we will be lucky if lasers are enough to deorbit them cleanly.
>trap them in...space jello
I know you mean just as a way to grab the stuff but I suspect at those speed any lost jello would still bedangerous.
>How do you defend space ships when tiny half ounce pebbles floating throat space produce results like these?
That's the fun part, you don't.
literally a non issue, you're only really gonna have that issue near orbit, and even then satellite launches and manned missions don't even factor in debris hits because they're statistically so low, it's probably just the same as saying "what happens if you get killed by hitting a deer"
like yes it's plausible and it does happen, but we don't all drive around with cages over the windshield in the case that it happens, we just accept that it's statistically low enough to not bother worrying.
pic relatively unrelated but cool anyhow
Cuck cages unironically
>manned missions don't even factor in debris hits because they're statistically so low, it's probably just the same as saying "what happens if you get killed by hitting a deer"
The Chinese complained about having to dodge Starlink sat 2 times and the ISS was put in alert when Russia tested its last anti-sat weapon.
>The Chinese complained
China doesn't have NORAD. space debris is known and accounted for in all the space programs that matter
if Disney can run it at a profit DARPA can surely double down
NORAD exist precisely because space debris are were already a critical problem getting worse, unlike a collision with a deer the debris multiply and can take out everything nearby and so on. At this point China space program matter more than the Artemis project and Starlink may not be allowed to reach its full size because of the risks among other things.
Make your spaceship inside an asteroid
The sooner we realize that Earth will be our eternal cage and any attempt fleeing this cage is a foolish and futile attempt the better. If the "pebbles" don't kill us, the radiation surely will.