WRT the streamlined look: if you are using a propulsion system that can take you to appreciable fractions of the speed of light----say over 30%—you are going to find that the usually ephemeral interstellar medium is now being compacted by relativity. That is, the interstellar hydrogren and other molecules floating out there will be coming at you like rain pounding into a speeding car. Now, you’re going to have to have some sort of shielding to prevent these now-ionized particles from putting millions of little holes in your ship, but streamlining of some sort would be necessary to cut down on the frontal surface area that is vulnerable to such strikes.
Bad phrasing – you’re not gonna c hange a triple point. But you can take advantage of being at different points in the phase diagram.
Actually, I raised this point in one of the Firefly episode threads but never got any comments back on it. There are at least two episodes I can think of where the pod-mounted engines are shown emitting a glowing exhaust outside atmo. Unfortunately, I’m not at home right now so I don’t have access to the DVDs to check which ones.
I imagine that the only reason they are shown this way is because the effects house thought the ship looked prettier with the blue glowing exhaust from the pod engines, but I’m gonna presume that it’s justified by their somehow being usable as low-thrust auxiliary rockets if the pilot elects to do so.
Re: the main thread subject, if we’re gonna be precise, neither Serenity (far too much wasted space and construction that’s way too heavy) nor any of the other spacecraft shown in Firefly hold up very well to scrutiny, but I don’t care, 'cause most them are pretty. As for any others shown on TV or in the movies, only Apollo 13’s can be said to be truly realistic; 2001 gets a nod for reasonably plausible designs, but pretty much all the rest I can think of are purely fanciful. The various Star Trek craft are some of the worst offenders in this regard, IMO, but c’mon, who wouldn’t want to have a Klingon Bird of Prey to tool around in?
I like the ship in Red Dwarf. It’s a mining ship the size of a small city built around an asteroid and powered using a ram scoop. It’s even constantly accelerating so convievably has realistic artificial gravity. As you never actually see how they’re oriented I’ve decided that it works :).
Also, the budget was so small they more or less HAD to have it looked lived in and built by the lowest bidder!
Ummm…who are you talking TO and what are you talking ABOUT?
Wouldn’t you like to know?
[mutter under breath] Vultures. Vultures efferyvere![/mub]
You can carry a certain volume of material, your ore is not very rich, and it takes a LONG time to bring it back. Why not refine it onsite and bring back nothing but the desired mineral?
I agree with you that processing in vacuum makes sense. It could be done inside the ship if you have a sealable, hangar-type compartment.
Or did you mean the body you are mining when said “put it on the ground”? Might not be practical on an asteroid or comet.
Precisely the point I was making.
I was giving them the benefit of the doubt by allowing that maybe they had a magical star drive that let them get back soon. But otherwise, as I noted in the post you abvstracted that from, there are “lotsa reasons to refine it there”.
Hmm… first off, in reference to B5 with it’s rotating sections, according to various people better educated in the laws of physics than I am, the rotating section bit would only work until you tried to turn your head. Apparantly the coriollis effect would make you quite nauseous whenever you tried to move around inside a giant gyro.
That said, yeah, you gotta love the Starfuries and the Flying Forklifts (unarmed industrial version of the Starfury, it shows up a couple times) It still hurts my head to figure out where the Omega destroyers store those things.
As for the ships on Star Trek: Did anyone else notice that only humans travel in flying saucers? That said, even with the big blindspots that Federation starships have, they STILL have considerably superior weapons coverage when compared to most other races’ ships, which usually have all the weapons facing fore and aft. Starfleet ships can at least shoot to the sides.
And as for torpedos only firing fore and aft, supposedly this is because they can turn in-flight and thus having them fire in every direction would be unnecessary. That said, I think we’ve seen a grand total of one Photon torpedo EVER do anything vaguely resembling not flying in a straight line.
Oh, and as for the side-by-side design of the torpedo launchers on the Enterprise-A, the previous Enterprise (the post-refit NCC-1701) did take a direct hit to one of the torpedo bays in Star Trek II (witness the crewman in the torpedo bay running around screaming because he’s on fire) and only the one torpedo launcher was disabled. (witness that for the rest of the battle, only the other torpedo launcher is used) As far as I can tell, there is some sort of protective partition between the two launchers.
I also thought it was a nice touch on Star Trek that they have airduct-like maintinance shafts running all throughout the ship.
While people complain that the ships and displays in the Star Wars prequels look more advanced than the ones in the original trilogy, it kinda makes sense to me. Under the opressive rule of the Emporer, as well as the kind of design environment you might have during a large interstellar war, folks might be inclined to spend less time making it pretty and more time making it work cheap. Why make a fancy 32 bit display when a red monochrome screen can show you the same information?
I also rather liked the Marine dropship design in Space: Above and Beyond. It wasn’t fancy, in fact, it wasn’t even pretty. Actually, it looked like you took a heavy-lift helicoptor, replaced the rotor blades with variable-angle thrusters, and then used it to carry a cargo container full of Marines around with it. In theory, you could just use different specialized containers to increase the flexibility of the transport design. Dunno about the Hammerhead fighters though, I think they were just supposed to look cool.
And of course, the relative practicality of Serenity’s design on Firefly is offset by the “Skyscrapers In Space!!!” design of the Alliance cruisers in the same series, though the impracticality of that design was supposed to be some sort of metaphor for the Alliance as a whole, IIRC.
Now, we can all agree, of course, that the best spaceship design ever was the Castle from Rocky Horror Picture Show, which apparantly flew with the assistance of a Transit Beam (which needed to be prepared before use).
Only if this radius is relatively small. For a radial component of acceleration equal to ~10m/s, the Coriolis component becomes negligable at about 5m or so. You’ll still see some effects–a stream of water will still tend to veer off to the side, but the physiological effects aren’t significant. I don’t follow Babylon 5, but I get the impression that the station is able to house tens of thousands of people, which probably makes it hundreds of meters in diameter, so I’m guessing that this isn’t an issue.
Returning to artificially-generated gravity for a minute, it would seem that any non-interial generated gravity would require enormous amounts of energy to create, and unless the system were somehow conservative (“anti-gravity” plates above the ceiling that absorb the radiated gravity energy for reuse) it would all be waste. Ultradense materials would be both technically speculative for any reasonable degree of compactness and impractical from a propulsion point of view; why haul around all that extra mass for the sake of convenience, when you can just spin the hull and get more or less the same effect?
Artificial gravity, like matter transporters, exists to mitigate the exigency for F/X artists and the television producers that set their budgets. Even if we could artificially generate gravity it’s unlikely that it would be practical to do so on a spaceship, or that we’d put it to only so trivial a purpose as keeping one’s discarded clothing scattered on the floor rather than floating about the cabin. An ability to finely direct gravitational energy would be an outstandingly disruptive weapon and a great means of surface-to-orbit propulsion. But it’s unlikely to be a possibility in any reasonably speculative future.
Stranger
Are you kidding me? The degratory effects of zero g on bone density are enough that I’d think some sort of artificial gravity would be a necessity on a ship that is lived on for any period of time – like just about any manned ship in scifi.
Ah, but think of the positive feng shui. Those weren’t rattling chains, they were wind chimes.
I’m not getting this. The only reason we have very light, very tiny spaceships is because we can’t afford better. Our rocket technology is too primitive, and we don’t have the ability to move any but the flimsiest, most minimal habitats into orbit.
In the Firefly 'verse, propulsion is obviously much more advanced, and cheap enough that you can afford to haul cattle between worlds and you can keep a ship fueled and flying with nothing more than the proceeds from odd jobs and very small scale ones at that.
If you’ve got access to space that cheaply, your spaceships are going to be heavier, stronger, and roomier. People live in them, and no one wants to live in a 7ft diameter cylinder forever. You need room both to carry cargo, and to give you some breathing room so you can live reasonably comfortably. Serenity strikes me as a very reasonable kind of ship in that environment. Practical, simple, cheap, durable. Its best features being nothing wiz-bang but mundane things like hangar doors that open at each end of the cargo bay so you can drive cargo in and drive out the other side. Makes sense. The bunks are in the heart of the ship, protected by steel all around. There are passenger quarters at one end and crew quarters at the other, with a common area in the middle of the ship for everyone, and another at the back for just passengers. Makes sense.
But it’s not just that. It’s the artistic touches. The signs that this is a ship where real people live. Look at the mess room/lounge. That looks to me exactly like what a spaceship might look like after it was outfitted to be a home. When have you seen that done right before? And look at the lighting - if you want a homey feel in a metallic ship, you might light it just like that. No bright hallways and futuristic plastic. Just a nice room. Kaylee’s painted door, the improvised workout area in the hangar.
Here’s a pretty cool Wikipedia Entry on Serenity.
It is important to note the difference between artificiallly-generated gravity–i.e. some process that distorts spacetime or generates gravitons (however you choose to model it)–and simulated gravity, which creates a normal force via some inertial effect (linear thrust or centrifugal force via rotation). As you note, the human body is evolved to anticipate a steady 1G normal force and suffers in the abscence of such. But generating a gravitational field is so far beyond current technology, even in a speculative sense, that the treatment of it concurrent with near-future technology (thrust-propelled spacecraft, projectile weapons, et cetera) is absurd.
The most rational evaluation suggests that the likely approach to long-term space habitation/transport will involve modifying the human body such that it can accept microgravity conditions indefinitely. The alternative–devoting a substantial amount of resources to recreating Earth-like conditions in a spacefaring vessel–is likely to be infeasable, even given advances in technology.
In any case, movies like Serenity and Star Wars, and shows like Star Trek, are an effort to apply conquistador/cowboy-like paradigms to a science fiction milleu and are unlikely to represent any realistic future technology and social development, any more than Jules Verne accurately described the Apollo program.
Stranger
Actually, one of the more amusing things about artificial gravity on Babylon 5 is that it is just a fortunate side effect of using a particular kind of engine technology. Until the last season of the show, Earth didn’t have that kind of tech, so they had reaction-based engines with big exhaust nozzels and used rotating bits for gravity.
I’m sorry if this is a bit of a hijack, but can you elaborate on this? As far as I’m aware Serenity has only the front bay doors and the floor hatch; the opposite wall from the bay doors leads into the living room, infirmary, and passenger dorms. Nothing I’ve seen suggests there’s another cargo door.
That’s great, unless you need to fire at multiple ships in different directions simultaneously.
That design still makes it too easy for an enemy to target and hit both bays easily. Sulu’s ship (Excelsior?) had one torpedo bay on the left side and one on the right side of the ship… makes more sense.
Ack. I think you’re right. For some reason, I thought there were front and back doors to the hangar bay because it’s sort of slung underneath everything else and because the way the show is shot is seems sometimes like they are exiting the back of the ship, and sometimes from the front. But now that I’ve looked at the pictures again, this doesn’t seem possible. The engine descends below the cargo deck in the back. My bad.