Spaceships and Science fiction

Vierstein

What you dont like the sound they make in space?

VRROOOOMMM XD

Traz 0

I'm not sure which of the split threads this belongs in, but ...

Footfall, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell had what seemed to me at the time (1985) to be some very well thought out space combat. Human versus alien, where the aliens have superior tech but we have desperation. We launch a supermassive Orion-type carrier ship (from earth ... Desperate!) accompanied by a fleet of shuttles. The primary weapons used are x-ray lasers pumped by the orion drive. The aliens are dumbfounded by the reckless tactics.

Niven and Pournell are famous for hard SF, and if I recall correctly, Pournell worked on a real life space-based kinetic weapon system which was never deployed (or was it? ;-) ) called Thor or Thads ...

Traz 0

I just realized that I didn't define the Orion drive. Project Orion was a real life proposal to propel a spacecraft by exploding nuclear bombs behind a pusher plate. I suspect that it would be a bumpy ride ...

ImaLooser

I remember that. One of the scientists involved in launching a small chemical prototype said, "This is not nuts, this is supernuts."

Traz 0

Well, I certainly wouldn't want to live downwind of a surface launch.

As far as a Project Orion space drive, I suppose that its feasibility is partially an engineering problem, and partially political, i. e., who would I trust in possession of hundreds of nukes in space, how they could be secured, etc. Barring an alien invasion or a dino-killer space rock with our name on it, my vote would be, uh, no thanks.

Traz 0

From the Robert Heinlein wiki:

Heinlein himself stated - with obvious pride - that in the days before pocket calculators, he and his wife once worked for several days on a mathmatical equation describing an Earth-Mars rocket orbit, which was then subsumed into a single sentence of the novel Space Cadet.

Ryan_m_b

I'm not sure how that applies to the quoted sentence...

Traz 0

and previously (I don't know how to multi quote on my phone):

GTOM said, roughly:

"I read about orbital mechanics, I think it's a must have for science fiction writers ..."

See, my point was, Robert Heinlein, a pretty famous science fiction writer, seems to have agreed with both GTOM and you about orbital mechanics vis a vis SF writing, in a time when doing so took a lot more work.

I thought the thread I was following there was pretty clear ...

Riemann Metric

I'm sure there are many elegant solutions to space travel than blowing up a bunch of bombs behind a plate to launch a spacecraft at high speed-take solar sails or magnetic acceleration cannons/mass drivers, for instance. The only issues we have with these are slow acceleration+microasteroids vs. tremendous forces and huge momentary accelerations.

Traz 0

I'm sure there are more elegant solutions too.

In the novel<I> Footfall </I>, the problem to be solved wasn't spaceflight, per se. The invaders had occupied Earth, had surveillance ships in orbit, and a giant, well-protected mothership that was all but invulnerable. Engaging the enemy required a truly massive ship of our own that could sustain a great deal damage from kinetic and directed energy weapons. It also had to be built in secret, on earth, in a hurry, without a research program or orbital construction.

As far as stopping a dino-killer rock in a hurry, it's not inconceivable that we might have to substitute quick and dirty for elegant in certain scenarios. It certainly happens in the real world.

In 1992, I was managing a project to convert a government agency's antiquated applications and data to modern hardware, and there were a number of files that were weird for some reason I can no longer recall. I diagramed as general algorithm that could read any such file and create the data structure and conversion code needed, and gave it to a programmer. Rather than write that application, he looked at the files, found there were only 20 or so unique types, and wrote 20 or so separate programs. I have a strong preference for elegance in all things, and his solution pissed me off. But. The project had been underbid, we were behind schedule, and every day late cost my company money. His way <I> was </I> faster, and assuming we never needed to do the same type of conversion again, better.

Still, I'm not advocating <I> Project Orion</I> as a space travel solution, by any means, and I hope it didn't seem like I was.

Riemann Metric

Well, who knows...maybe something that seems unorthodox like Project Orion could inspire something that really does work. As it is said, necessity is the mother of invention, and I fear our efforts towards something we think we don't need will be rather negligible until our views change.

lpetrich

Isaac Asimov, in "Future? Tense!" from From Earth to Heaven described how a science-fiction writer in 1880 might write stories involving cars.
While a car as a mechanical horse seems almost too silly for us to take seriously, lots of visual-media science fiction has similar absurdities about its spaceships.

I recall when Gene Roddenberry was once asked about some of them, like never seeing spaceships upside down. He responded that that was to avoid unnerving an Earthbound audience, and that's why explosions in outer space make sounds. A soundless explosion is correct, but it would make many watchers wonder what happened to their TV's' sound.

Some Star Wars battleships look more like they could be floating than flying, with a hull and a superstructure on one side of it, the crewmembers' upward direction.

A lot of the space combat in the Star Wars series looks like it could have come out of WWI and WWII dogfights -- the fighter spaceships behave too much like airplanes.

IA also imagined:
Some Star Trek episodes are full of that sort of thing, something that some fans and critics have named "treknobabble".