Recent content by Lothlorien

I'm not sure if you are specifically after some structural object that is to withstand Earth's atmosphere but Quartz is highly resilient and several man-made objects have been designed that can theoretically last over a million years. One notable innovation is a data storage system by Hitachi...

Here are some bits of info I found a while ago on this subject that may help you figure out something for your story: This is in Russian but a machine translation gives you a good idea. It is only for skydiving but the highest survivable point above the Earth they calculate to be some 460km. It...

Gene Roddenberry my hat is off to you. I could only imagine how difficult it would have been to work on such a show with the budget constraints and limited special effects of the time. How do we film space battles? How do we destroy enemy ships? How do we depict the ships getting blown up when...

Well yes it's quite a pickle to tacle. It's not rocket science but. Oh wait... :P It still applies, yes, but the requirement to accelerate them to at least escape velocity is no longer a requirement. They already have escape velocity. This is then allowing more of the vessel to be actual...

Ok thank you for taking the time to write this up. It may well be very impractical. I agree a space catapult as you have described it would be extremely costly, expensive and would have to achieve ridiculous acceleration that would not be very good for the cargo. What did you think of the space...

I guess megascale catapult is a good way of putting it. I imagine many of these in series, giving a rather brisk push to the craft at each stage. I thought a nice trick would be that you need to get a "partner" coming back the other way (Earth -> Mars, Mars -> Earth) of either another craft or...

Well I agree, especially for extremely advanced science fiction that is far beyond our present technology and scientific understanding. However for the near future stuff, does that then leave the option of something generally being considered "likely" to then be considered more likely if...

Currently they are way too big to be feasible. Aircraft carrier sized. So this is where we are digging in and ripping the script to shreds and seeing what we can do to improve its realism, so I'm guessing if we can work out how far in the realm of possibility we can achieve some of these...

Ok sure. I'll give the quick few-paragraph rundown: It is set in the near future. Earth and Mars are colonized with various trade routes and consumers have space corridors (series of mass accelerators / decelerators) that allow mass transit during certain earth/mars orbital positions. So there...

Thank you for this. I will have to investigate nuclear thermal. If this is the orion project then that has huge design issues all on its own iirc Finally, there seem to be a few advancements on the horizon for ion drives at the moment in terms of allowing higher thrust yet maintaining the...

Ok I understand where you are coming from. I was surely under the impression that I didn't need to answer these things in that order, especially if it is not for a real world proposal, engineering design or project? If you'd like to fill in those blanks yourself and qualify your answer that way...

After years of lurking I'm taking a bold step and registering on here to geek out in the Sci-Fi and Fantasy forum (most likely). I do enjoy Sci-Fi but with the advent of movies like Gravity and Interstellar there is really a push for more "realistic" sci-fi as opposed to the wild out there...

I was hoping for something a little better than that which is why I'm trying to go the extra mile. As long as the underlying general concepts are sound then yes I am more than happy to gloss over the specifics. However in trying to describe the general principles behind a futuristic propulsion...

I had a feeling you were doing this for such a reason. That is why I precluded my post with an explanation on why I am enquiring. It is for a SCI fi script and thus I'm more after a general opinion rather than a specific answer.

Well, if a craft had the capabilities I described earlier, for example not requiring carefully precalculated trajectories, then this means it has to be able to move at a decent pace for extended periods of time. Otherwise the thrust would not be adequate to move the craft against the natural...