Recent content by Strato Incendus

Thanks a lot for your ideas! :) I think these two are connected: There’s a simple reason to create a bunch of robots that are cheap to afford and look human: Sex sells. What drove the success of VHS and the internet will also apply to robotics. Rule 34 knows no exceptions. :wink: (This was...

The rest aren’t consigned to death; the majority of people on Earth are facing the prospect of having to live underground. The danger does not just arise from the 2 seconds of the GRB itself, but from what it does to the atmosphere and the surface of Earth, i.e. the long-term effects of the...

Fair enough, but it would be helpful for me if you completed that sentence. ;) “Why don’t they just…” …do what? Travel to a planet further away? If so, how? That’s a lot harder than going to the destination they’ve chosen, so “why don’t they just…?” seems like the wrong framing; rather, it...

This is why I posited the solar system to be on the outer edge of the gamma-ray burst's cone. Of course, the other option would be to pick the one planet with a slightly higher Earth-Similarity Index than Teegarden b as a destination (KOI-4878.01). At 1075 light years from Earth, it should be...

Whether Data in Star Trek, C3PO in Star Wars, Isaac in The Orville, or Arthur in Passengers: It seems to be a common trope that a spaceship always has “that one android character”. For Star Wars, in particular, C3PO is the only named humanoid droid in the main movies; R2-D2 and all the other...

But lower mass would still be desired, given that the ship must be accelerated to interstellar speeds? As I‘ve described in previous threads, the reason is the definite confirmation of Earth being in the line of fire of an impending gamma-ray burst from WR 104, which would affect the entire...

Pencils are a good example: A while ago, we discussed whether wood would be a precious resource on board an interstellar spaceship. Trees in general could be grown in greenhouses on various rocky planets and moons in the solar system. Regarding metals, sure, the ore is not a starship, but at...

As a proof of concept. Start out with what works, then upscale the elevator concept to the moon, eventually Mars, and so on.

Thanks for your ideas, as always! :smile: Since the tanks must also act as a radiation shield, the first question is: Does the deuterium have to be stored as deuterium, or can it be stored as heavy water? In the latter case, it would freeze at 3.8 °C. Thanks for doing the math on the...

I went with 21 in order to have three sub-spheres behind each other on the axis of the central pipe (marked here in pink): The reason being that the central sphere contains the nuclear-fusion reactor, and the on-axis sphere behind it contains the engines. The third on-axis sphere now not only...

Yes, I've heard of Rendezvous with Rama before. :wink: However, the measurements cited for the Rama really make me think of it more like an O'Neill cylinder. The property my ship Exodus has in common with the Enzmann design is not the cylinder - because the cylinder (called "central pipe") is...

The dumbbell design of my fictional generation ship Exodus, as I’ve recently discovered, bears some similarity to the Enzmann starships, proposed by Dr. Robert Enzmann in 1964. I’ve even gone so far as to label the ship part of the “Enzmann class” within my setting...

Indeed, I wasn’t thinking of pulsars in this scenario. In case of WR 104, it’s the collision of the supermassive stars which is predicted to potentially cause a gamma-ray burst (GRB). The GRB would then follow a trajectory along the rotational axis of the common centre around which the stars...

Well, in this case, the GRB comes from WR 104, between 6,000 and 8,000 light years away. :wink: Not really “near”, but arguably still close enough to do considerable damage to life on the surface of Earth. That’s why people in my story have started moving underground. Which begs the question...

Just out of curiosity and for context, what would happen to such a giant solar shield in the event of a solar flare? I’ve also heard of concepts that act more like a rim with a lid that can be gradually opened, depending on how much sun you want to let through. Such a construction (again placed...