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Realistically, when do you think the first viable space "cruiser", "destroyer", etc would be viable and/or be made? Like EVE or Star Wars/Trek on a smaller scale due to the constraints of Earth's resources.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 03:21 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 10:20 |
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Never, because physics.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 03:22 |
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Fame Douglas posted:Never, because physics. please do not ruin my hype for space
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 03:24 |
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imo the iss counts as a cruiser because i would say it technically cruising and i bet any of the astronauts in there could drive it by another space vehicle and pick up hot dates w/ it
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 03:25 |
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bird. posted:imo the iss counts as a cruiser because i would say it technically cruising and i bet any of the astronauts in there could drive it by another space vehicle and pick up hot dates w/ it you're brave if you'd date an astronaut
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 03:27 |
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As soon as humanity collectively stops being afraid of nuclear power and we can start building nuclear thermal rockets. Until then, we're stuck piddling around a sphere a hundred million kilometers in diameter except for whenever we throw a probe towards the outer planets.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 03:32 |
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Fame Douglas posted:Never, because physics.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 03:34 |
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Kazinsal posted:As soon as humanity collectively stops being afraid of nuclear power and we can start building nuclear thermal rockets. Until then, we're stuck piddling around a sphere a hundred million kilometers in diameter except for whenever we throw a probe towards the outer planets. but nuclear power is scary, the ?????? told me that
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 03:35 |
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once there's war in space you're going to want to be in the smallest and fastest thing possible. there's a reason made-up energy shields factor so heavily into sci-fi wars.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 03:45 |
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Do Not Fear Jazz posted:you're brave if you'd date an astronaut
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 03:49 |
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Shrecknet posted:what are they gonna do, put on a diaper and drive 1200 miles to confront me if I break up with them? yes, actually
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 03:50 |
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Do Not Fear Jazz posted:yes, actually o fucc
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 04:14 |
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future ships will probably just be boring rear end drones shooting around space just calculating things
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 04:19 |
Fame Douglas posted:Never, because physics. i disagree. as soon as we start to construct vehicles in space out of space foraged materials, they can suddenly become large, almost unbounded. the most sensible result is some sort of borg-cube like assortment of manufactured and captured habitats. current status quo makes it feel like the most likely outcome is some sort of drifter hellscape like titan ae rather than star trek fully automated space communism, but who knows.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 09:47 |
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Fame Douglas posted:Never, because physics. Correct, read this if you want more details http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarintro.php
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 11:49 |
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There certainly aren't any physics reasons you can't build a big spaceship. They were going to build an entire fleet of the things during the Cold War, because of general Cold War insanity. https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2714/1 quote:In late 1959, Captain Mixon laid out the evidence for General Thomas Power, the commander in chief of SAC, and obviously convinced him. On January 21, 1961, General Power signed a SAC requirement for a “Strategic Earth Orbital Base” (SEOB) based on the Orion propulsion system and roughly following the space force deployment concept. The SEOB would be “capable of accurate weapon delivery” to “include the capability to attack other aerospace vehicles or bodies of the solar system occupied by an enemy.” The SEOB would also be able to orbit “extremely heavy useful payloads” on the order of 5,000 tons. These are the ship roles they were planning: quote:STATIONED IN SPACE Some extremely pro classified concept art: It might actually have been cool and good because there's no military reason to build a giant space fleet in the foreseeable future, so it would funnel military funds into something militarily pointless while opening up the way to the solar system. There were also civilian applications for Orion, of course. They wanted to fly to Mars and Jupiter and such.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 12:43 |
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Is there a size limitation to something like a nuclear thermal rocket? Or even a nuclear reactor?
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 15:07 |
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If there's ever space combat I think it's gonna look a lot like the Expanse. Whole buncha missiles and miniguns and boarding. Except the ships are still gonna look like the ISS or something I bet.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 15:12 |
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Honky Dong Country posted:If there's ever space combat I think it's gonna look a lot like the Expanse. Whole buncha missiles and miniguns and boarding. Except the ships are still gonna look like the ISS or something I bet. I really want them to not look like the iss what can I do to change this
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 16:47 |
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Do Not Fear Jazz posted:I really want them to not look like the iss what can I do to change this I only think that because there's no reason at all to build sleek looking stuff since aerodynamics don't matter. It'd be more cost effective to just build ugly rear end poo poo than go to the trouble of building everything in a pleasing sleek hull. Plus then you can do poo poo like decouple parts that have been boarded
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 16:51 |
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Honky Dong Country posted:If there's ever space combat I think it's gonna look a lot like the Expanse. Whole buncha missiles and miniguns and boarding. Except the ships are still gonna look like the ISS or something I bet. I would imagine space combat would mainly consist of a whole bunch of floating around and waiting and then a few tense seconds of battle during which everything gets destroyed ridiculously fast. Not so sure a military ship would look like ISS though since it would probably also need some type of armour and isolation to survive smaller skirmishes. A bigger ship is also less likely to be set adrift when impacted, so while the other guy here who said fighters will need to be small and fast, that'd be offset by their ridiculous vulnerability.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 18:02 |
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Pope Hilarius II posted:I would imagine space combat would mainly consist of a whole bunch of floating around and waiting and then a few tense seconds of battle during which everything gets destroyed ridiculously fast. This is firmly in the sci-fi realm, but I remember a book that featured a space-combat scene where they made small jumps with the ship and their pursuers would jump mines ahead of them into the spots they thought they would be, which was terrifying to me.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 18:35 |
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Pope Hilarius II posted:Not so sure a military ship would look like ISS though since it would probably also need some type of armour and isolation to survive smaller skirmishes..... Which is why it wouldn't really make sense to have military ships in space, at least not the way we think of them. The reality is that the better method in space would just be to stay really far away from everyone else, as getting anything like armor into space is just to "expensive" (in terms of energy cost). You'd need a pretty massive leap forward in getting stuff off of earth in order to have armored ships. Or I guess you could do space mining, but the logistics of that seem pretty far off. Even then you have the problem of adding mass, which means you just need that much more energy to move stuff. Space is a real bitch.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 19:29 |
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I always thought John Harris's illustrations of military space ships looked like a reasonable compromise between "ugly and practical" and "cool".
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 20:02 |
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Pope Hilarius II posted:I would imagine space combat would mainly consist of a whole bunch of floating around and waiting and then a few tense seconds of battle during which everything gets destroyed ridiculously fast. So like all military combat, except now we're all floating. Sounds about right.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 20:35 |
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A space warship (or a large civilian ship for that matter) probably wouldn't look a lot like the ISS because if you have something that's worth calling a space warship it kinda implies there are things in space to fight wars over which implies we probably don't need it to be launched in tiny self-contained modules on small rockets. It's an extreme level of modularity that's not necessarily the best choice for most things.
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# ? Feb 24, 2021 15:19 |
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With 3d printing tech coming along pretty well, ship printers could probably be put in space in a relatively soon timeframe I would guess. I think the hard part is still getting a concerted effort to have any type of permanent space scaffolding set up, with zero g mining required. Who knows how long that's going to take to get off the ground. After that, most of the military ship sizes would probably be fighter sized, since that's all you need to take out satellites, missiles, and other fighters. I think maybe a cruiser would be needed once we became interplanetary, since you would need something to threaten other populations and would need the firepower and ability to hit ground targets with force.
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# ? Feb 24, 2021 16:35 |
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Pretty much the only thing in space worth shooting is other people's satellites. There's also the potential for bombardment of the surface of earth from orbit. So early military spacecraft will probably be some sort of "space plane" that can gently caress with opponents satellites and a bunch of satellites capable of launching kinetic penetrators, conventional explosives or nukes. So nothing new.
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# ? Feb 24, 2021 22:59 |
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What if we shoot lasers from our battlecruiser and miss the enemy? Where do the lasers go? They've gotta hit something, right?
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# ? Feb 25, 2021 21:41 |
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Cobra Commander posted:What if we shoot lasers from our battlecruiser and miss the enemy? Where do the lasers go? They've gotta hit something, right? Absent perfect optics they'll diffuse into harmlessness after several dozen kilometers. With hypothetical sci-fi perfect optics you'd still be diffraction limited due to quantum effects, so the same would happen but take longer. Optical weapons don't really miss, though.
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# ? Mar 3, 2021 07:33 |
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Delta-Wye posted:i disagree. as soon as we start to construct vehicles in space out of space foraged materials, they can suddenly become large, almost unbounded. the most sensible result is some sort of borg-cube like assortment of manufactured and captured habitats. current status quo makes it feel like the most likely outcome is some sort of drifter hellscape like titan ae rather than star trek fully automated space communism, but who knows. Yeah so like they said - never
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# ? Mar 3, 2021 07:51 |
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Conspiratiorist posted:Absent perfect optics they'll diffuse into harmlessness after several dozen kilometers. With hypothetical sci-fi perfect optics you'd still be diffraction limited due to quantum effects, so the same would happen but take longer. Here's a mirror for a laser intended to shoot down Soviet nuclear missiles, and Reagan talking in front of a mockup of the full satellite. This was part of the Star Wars program and is the kind of very stupid thing that could start a nuclear war.
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# ? Mar 4, 2021 01:46 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 10:20 |
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Oh, I was referring to thermal lensing effects degrading beam quality, and preemptively countering the hypothetical "but what if futuretech materials science??" because even a perfectly focused stream of photons will diffuse. RE Star Wars, funny thing about lasers is that for all the fanfare they've had for decades they'd probably be pretty bad at intercepting space missiles once the tech is accounted for, since you can just armor them up.
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# ? Mar 4, 2021 17:31 |