Star ship building: What elements are needed to build the ship?

[Khatti]

Okay I have two questions that I plan to post separately. The first question is simple: what elements will be needed to further space travel in the future? Does anyone care to comment on what base elements would be necessary to build the starship Enterprise? I should explain the reason why I'm interested is because I like the idea of using mining colonies as a background for stories, and it would be a good idea to know what those miners might be mining.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

If you want a setting with starships like the enterprise then you’re looking at a soft SF setting. In this situation defining capabilities and limitations is way more important than technical detail. The biggest thing is cheap faster than light travel. Not only is that a staple of how ships in Star Trek are used and designed it would allow for situations where it is economically feasible to maintain industrial outposts at interstellar distances.

All other detail depends on your setting. For instance: do you want there to be FTL communication separate to travel? If not then communication will be by courier and any polities will be more akin to age of sail nations.

 

[Khatti]

If you want a setting with starships like the enterprise then you’re looking at a soft SF setting. In this situation defining capabilities and limitations is way more important than technical detail. The biggest thing is cheap faster than light travel. Not only is that a staple of how ships in Star Trek are used and designed it would allow for situations where it is economically feasible to maintain industrial outposts at interstellar distances.

All other detail depends on your setting. For instance: do you want there to be FTL communication separate to travel? If not then communication will be by courier and any polities will be more akin to age of sail nations.

Oh come now, certain elements are going to be necessary for spaceflight under any circumstances; Carbon come immediately to mind for building hulls. I don't know about Iron, but it occurs to me that if you need to hold your energy matrix in a magnetic field some element needs to be the base for that magnetic field. There have to be other elements and other applications that the folks here can reasonably speculate about.

 

[Rive]

Oh come now, certain elements are going to be necessary for spaceflight under any circumstances; Carbon come immediately to mind for building hulls. I don't know about Iron, but it occurs to me that if you need to hold your energy matrix in a magnetic field some element needs to be the base for that magnetic field.

Technobabble: you are doing it right! Exactly those elements are what's needed the most

 

[BWV]

Just tell a story, no one cares to read details about made-up technology. You are writing space fantasy (which is what star trek is) as it does take some real scientific background to write good hard SF

 

[Nik_2213]

If you invoke the 'ONE impossible thing' waiver on 'Hard-ish Sci-Fi', choose your tech carefully, and be sure to map out the cascade of consequence...

 

[snorkack]

Oh come now, certain elements are going to be necessary for spaceflight under any circumstances; Carbon come immediately to mind for building hulls. I don't know about Iron,

Why should hulls be carbon rather than iron?

 

[DrStupid]

Carbon come immediately to mind for building hulls.

You don't need carbon for the hull. Metals can be used as well. In Star Trek: First Contact it was mentioned that the Enterprise is made from titanium. I don't think that there is an element that is essentially reqired for building a space ship.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

Oh come now, certain elements are going to be necessary for spaceflight under any circumstances

Very broadly yes-ish. Life support, an airtight hull, electrical systems etc. Exactly what is needed depends entirely on what kind of activities one wants to engage in. The requirements of a transport designed to take astronauts between two different stations in orbit of the same world are going to be very different to a habitat capable of transporting a self-sufficient society across interstellar space for thousands of years.

Whatever fictional science exists in a given setting will change both the capabilities in demand and how they can be fulfilled.

Carbon come immediately to mind for building hulls. I don't know about Iron

The only defined activity you've stated is "make the enterprise". I'm not sure what makes you think that "carbon" would be needed automatically for the hull, beyond the fact that carbon is a very commonly used material. A fictional setting with a starship like the enterprise would also have to have a lot of fictional science to allow for faster than light travel/communication, artificial gravity etc. As I said above deciding on the limits and capabilities of these things are more important to a good story than the minutiae of how they work.

but it occurs to me that if you need to hold your energy matrix in a magnetic field some element needs to be the base for that magnetic field.

"Energy matrix" doesn't mean anything. It's technobabble. What it does and what it requires have to be defined by the author. Give it some capabilities (i.e. converts matter to energy) and some limitations (i.e. is 90% efficient) and you can begin filling out the details of how a starship would work in the setting (capable of being powered by any matter fed to the matrix but requires extensive radiators to deal with the 10% waste heat, furthermore starships are forbidden to approach populated planets to reduce the risk of an attack where in several kilos are fed into the matrix at once creating a devastating explosion. The social and political consequences of this are...).

 

[member 656954]

I should explain the reason why I'm interested is because I like the idea of using mining colonies as a background for stories, and it would be a good idea to know what those miners might be mining.

Given starship-building of the Star Trek kind, it's unlikely that you're mining on planet, or that anybody could fund a mining colony because it's not economic. Expect asteroids, or even small rocky planets such as Mercury, being subsumed by nanofactories. The mined materials from an asteroid could be delivered via mass drivers with very little human oversight. Getting out of the gravity well of a small planet is harder, but energy overcomes gravity, and if you pick one in close orbit to its sun, you've a lot of solar radiation to power everything.

 

[hmmm27]

I'm not sure it's a matter of "what's needed", so much as "what's available and what can we do with it".