How do you build a starship?

[miletus12]

Darn you, Einstein.

But to start out, let us look at incompetent starship designs... typical example... Bridges. 




1. Empire. Put the bridge on the ship where anybody can blast it.  Also put it where the acceleration vector is 90 degrees to the plane of the human standing on the bridge. Splat or "I can't breath!" Who needs Vader to kill the imperials?  They auto-delete themselves. 
2. Star Trek. See 1., and the chairs do not stay put. Lots of windows, no seatbelts and the main viewer does not work at FTL.
3. Aliens franchise. We have developed TV cameras, radars and non-penetrating sensor masts for a GOOD reason. Watch that ship with all the windows in its bow bridge plow into a cliff. The Mark 1 eyeball did not work, did it? 
4. Battlestar Galactica bridge makes sense? Look at all that glass that can shatter. See 1 and 2. and better yet, notice no acceleration couches or seat belts or padding and uniforms designed to protect the bridge crew from SHARP objects. Like pens, clipboards and the shattering glass one sees. Also, like in Star Trek, electrical equipment does not have off buttons and circuit breakers. So not only is the crew sliced and diced: they are electrocuted and parboiled. 
5. Starship Normandy sure looks like a winner. (1-4 with additional problems.) Bridge at the front with lots of glass, no chairs. The command center, behind it, has arching bridges across the compartment with no guardrails, so the King-sized and clumsy Captain can fall off that catwalk and kill his skinny XO below, because he had too many fries with his hamburgers. And the compartments are stacked in the plane of acceleration; so, everybody falls towards the back of the compartment again and those at the bottom of the pile are crushed to death, again. Meanwhile in the cockpit, (See 1 and 3.) the pilot is killed when the windshield cracks and the AI goes with him as they plow nose first into that rock they could not see, because of that space flattening out as one approaches the speed of light thingy, Einstein taught us. FTL? Forget it.    
6. Rocinate from the Expanse. More windows in the command decks?  More Windows. And I do mean the computer system as well as all that silly glass in the bow of the ship. But they did stack it up deck-wise like a skyscraper! Good on you. They have acceleration chairs, scrap-off sensors, seat belts and protective clothing. Hey these show-runners have been watching Babylon 5!
7.Star Wars Lukar Holc Trade federation dreadnought. The presenter of the video praises this design; but see 1-5 and then paint a bullseye on that ping pong ball in the middle of that flying "c". Repeat after me... "Shoot the ball in the middle of the doughnut hole, boys!" That is how Wedge Antilles made General in the Rebellion after he started out as swab jockey, third class.

Stay tuned for more hilarious engineering.


       
  

[simon darkshade]

I like the approach in the Civilization series:

- Civ1/2: Habitation, Life Support, Solar Panels/Energy, Engines (Propulsion and Fuel) and all the little Structural parts
- Civ 3: SS Thrusters, SS Cockpit, SS Docking Bay, SS Engine, SS Fuel Cells, SS Life Support System, SS Stasis Chamber, SS Storage-Supply, SS Planetary Party Lounge, SS Exterior Casing. Lots of information on each civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Spaceship_(Civ3)
- Civ 4: civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Spaceship_(Civ4)
- Civ 5 and 6: I haven’t played those newfangled games

[miletus12]

Jan 14, 2022 8:13:52 GMT simon darkshade said:

I like the approach in the Civilization series:

- Civ1/2: Habitation, Life Support, Solar Panels/Energy, Engines (Propulsion and Fuel) and all the little Structural parts
- Civ 3: SS Thrusters, SS Cockpit, SS Docking Bay, SS Engine, SS Fuel Cells, SS Life Support System, SS Stasis Chamber, SS Storage-Supply, SS Planetary Party Lounge, SS Exterior Casing. Lots of information on each civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Spaceship_(Civ3)
- Civ 4: civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Spaceship_(Civ4)
- Civ 5 and 6: I haven’t played those newfangled games

I like Kerbal Space Program. 

As for gaming, I confess that I am not much interested in "non-real" simulations of the role play variety, but secretly am a fan of 4X macro games where the objective is to explore, expand, exploit the environment and exterminate threats.

And with that in mind. How about that "navy"?



If one were realistic, then robots, consigned auxiliaries and lots of missiles look to be the core of what one's warships would look like and a game of space billiards with Hohlmann orbits defines the kind of engagement format. Wet-navy parallels hold no useful model for extrapolation. More likely it will be artificial intelligence guided rockets with passive sensors and distributed network information sharing. Hiding will be impossible because every machine out there will be looking for exhaust plumes or heat. 

The beam weapons will burn out antennas and optics, while the projectile weapons users and effectors will try to kinetically kill each other. Do not laugh, artillery is a thing in space combat, at least at the autocannon level.        
 

[simon darkshade]

I greatly prefer 4X games like Civ compared to the ‘grand strategy’ games by Paradox that are neither grand nor strategic; the best of the latter is Stellaris, which does the ‘space navy’ concept well enough.

[miletus12]

Gaming designer tutorial.

Now the thing to remember about designing "starships" in a game is that the game designer wants a model that will appeal to a plains animal who has a distinct sense of up and down and whose orientation when the animal puts to sea is distinctly "down and up" with water below and sky above and the divider at the horizon line. This is one of the same problems with aircraft as a model/metaphor for spaceships. The horizon line for pilots is still the orientation and one still has an "up and down" bias due to "gravity".

On a flat 2-d game console video display, these up and down cues with an imposed imaginary mid-screen horizontal horizon line still exist. But: it only takes limited extrapolation or imagination to see that space does not have either horizon lines or up and down cues except for nearby massive objects (gravity wells) that impose orbital trajectories and acceleration forces felt, which supply the universal "down" cues to that plains animal turned astronaut/cosmonaut/tokanaut. One could say the game designer, by necessity, will design her/his starship for the terrestrial surface cues, because how many game players will understand thrust vector lines, mass symmetries or vector force sums added or subtracted when playing game pieces that look cool?

We do not even get into the minutiae of designing "real spacecraft models" such as in Kerbal Space Program, but are only interested in whether the game piece can approximate a "wet navy" analog to the "space game" function being game played. This holds true for TV productions as well. Some science fiction shows do better than others with the "rocket realities" but even the "The Expanse" does not get away from the bottom to top equals the down to up bias that we plains animals have as our frame of orientation with its inbuilt horizon line bias.

So, I am not too harsh about Star Wars or Star Trek or Buck Rogers or Space 1999, or even the comical "Lost in Space" (Which built a more realistic "flying saucer" model of a rocket; than the one used on Star Trek with the tubes hanging out the back of that abomination called the USS Enterprise.)

The object is to get the audience or gamer into the game with familiar analogs in an unrealistic science fiction setting.

How does Kerbal Space Program handle starships?



Note the mass symmetry, the force vector additives assumed, the Alcubierre "drive" or rather spacetime flexion device; and "skyscraping" of the stack and the up and down cues shown?

[miletus12]

Rocket engines:



Let us understand that Hollywood gets it wrong. All of the usual errors, previously shown, are present in the film "Interstellar", along with new ones about using Hydrazine for an RCS in the landers. If one has a fusion rocket as the thruster, then one bleeds off thrust potential as is done in the Harrier VTOl aircraft. One keeps it simple and safe, or one has an incident as SpaceX had with its manned Crew Dragon I prototype. Kaboom. Hydrazine and water do not like each other.

[miletus12]

Build a big rocket and they will come to you and ask for payload space.

How about an ORION? Not the NASA version, the one that Freeman Dyson invented.

[miletus12]

Ten concepts for propulsion.



a. light sails. Set up a giant launching laser and sail that beam to another star system using light pressure.
b. nuclear pulse propulsion. The Orion seen previously just above.
c. star-seed or linear accelerator launched micro-probes. Not an option if one wants to get human beings to another star system.
d. generation ships and current rockets. We may not have that kind of time.
e. Dyson Slingshot. Find a pair of orbiting whirligig white dwarfs or neutron stars and use their gravity swirl to impart additional velocity as one passes close to rob them of some of their gravitational energy.
f. fusion rocket. This is the Lockheed compact fusion reactor with a rocket nozzle. That could either be directly heated reaction mass or electrical power applied to a working agent like cesium ions for example.
g. antimatter rocket. Otherwise known as the hand-wavium drive since matter antimatter annihilation contains that problem of ... you know... annihilation?
h. Alcubbiere star drive. More properly a space-time tensor manipulator. They do not tell you about the need for more energy than is contained in the known universe or alternatively a form of negative mass the volume of Jupiter or that the side effect is that one might just blow a hole in reality and collapse the Higgs Field from Stable Two to Stable One, collapsing the universe into a point.   
i. black hole starships. You build a small black hole, then as it evaporates, focus the Hawking radiation into an exhaust plume and ride that rocket. Problem? See g. and 
 


Goodbye.

j. Skhadov thruster. Use a star instead of a black hole, build a Dyson sphere with a hole in it. Problem? The Dyson sphere masses more than the star.
k. traversible wormholes. This is the Alcubbiere Drive in a static frame of reference. It will not work since to inflate a wormhole means one has just created a black hole and will be ripped apart by tidal effects.
m. Halo drive. Binary black holes, a variant of n. Shine a laser at one black hole and let it gravity whip the beam around itself and use the blue shift to add velocity to the exhaust plume. Tides and radiation make it an unlikely solution, plus there is the matter that instead of trying to move one black hole, the problem is moving two black holes and keeping them from merging, which for you would locally be very bad. Refer to the illustration above.       
 

[miletus12]

The takeaway from that one is this: At 3.05 the clamshell escape pod for astronauts was based on the crazy concept used for the B-58 Hustler.




Yes: that is Yogi, the Bear. The Boo Boo, of course, is that the bear (barely) survived the test.