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[PanH]

Not really no. Wind power is so weak it's almost useless (on Earth). 1% of useless .....

Also, on the power debate : you can't use only one source of power. Only nuclear, or only solar doesn't work. Satellites currently have only solar because the needs are low and constant.
If you want to sustain human life, you need base energy (nuclear would be the best for large things, I guess), I think you don't need fuel, because there's no seasons, and a more variable source of energy. Which means you would need to retract the solar panels, or something preventing them to be always fully functional.

[10ebbor10]

It's only one tenth of useless. Though technically the max air pressure is only 0.6%, and that's in the deepest vale on the entire planet.

Mars has seasons though. Not in space, but yeah. As for a Martian base, I'd probably go for a few nuclear generators, backed up by auxilary power units from batteries, which can jump in to prevent shortages, and recharge later. The main advantage of nuclear is that it produces waste heat. While this might not seem advantagous, it is when you run water through them, let it heat to about 600 degrees(I think) and TADA... Hydrogen + Oxygen. Also known as rocket fuel*. So your cooling system is usefull to.

*Not all types, but one of the more commonly used ones.

((Also, solar is not really the most stable of all power sources. Especially not on a planet. In space it's predictable, but power production still varies strongly))

[10ebbor10]

Generally you wan't your backup to activate when you need it, and not be unuseable because it's night or there's a storm. (Pretty much half the time, and these are global sand storms we're speaking about). They might make a decent auxilary power supply (Only because all the other options are worse) and are certainly usefull for mobile things.

Though a small pocket reactor doesn't weight a thing. Even several Appolo missions had one onboard, after all. (Intended to power instruments on the moon,FYI. The one the Apollo 13 carried landed in the ocean, though it did had it's own heatshield)

[MonkeyHead]

Nobody brought up orbital solar stations beaming energy to ground based stations yet? Bay12, I am dissapointed.

Of course, the prospect of a stray high energy microwave beam hitting your pressurised habitation isnt a nice one.

[PanH]

Nobody brought up orbital solar stations beaming energy to ground based stations yet? Bay12, I am dissapointed.

Of course, the prospect of a stray high energy microwave beam hitting your pressurised habitation isnt a nice one.

I'd say we go by steps : colonizing space before weaponizing it.

[MonkeyHead]

Also, all this talk of costs associated with lifting stuff and suchlike... space elevators would will make lifting costs insignifigant, especially true when stuff starts coming back down them. First thing to do when setting up a Mars or Moon colony - drop an elevator.

[Starver]

Reboot Project A119 then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_A119

Project A119, also known as "A Study of Lunar Research Flights", was a top-secret plan developed in 1958 by the United States Air Force. The aim of the project was to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon to boost public morale in the United States after the Soviet Union took an early lead in the Space Race. The existence of the project was revealed in 2000 by a former executive at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Leonard Reiffel, who led the project in 1958. A young Carl Sagan was part of the team responsible for predicting the effects of a nuclear explosion in low gravity.
Project A119 was never carried out, primarily because a moon landing would be a much more acceptable achievement in the eyes of the American public. The project documents remained secret for nearly 45 years, and despite Reiffel's revelations, the United States government has never officially recognized its involvement in the study.

You just prompted me to do a visual retelling of that scene in Lethal Weapon where Dwight was showing off to Nikita[1] what he was capable of.

Spoiler: Some time in GIMP later... (click to show/hide)

(Yes, I used an actual screenshot as a guide for the crater/explosion layout, too, though now can't remember if I made sure it was the right way round in the end... )

(PTW?)


_{[1]Yeah, a better translation would have been Murtaugh/Eisenhower having made the first shot, dead-centre, then Riggs/Kruschev is the one making a point with the eyes and mouth...  But I only thought of that after I spent half an hour in GIMP getting the archive face shots lined up and masked (esp. Riggs's hair!) correctly...}

[Starver]

Well, if the ship was automatically spinning with the same velocity in a circle around it, it would be easier, I think.
That's probably be hard as fuck to calculate and execute though.

If that shot from 2001:aSO isn't mentioned soon in this thread (still a way to go), I'd like to mention it now.  From what you just wrote, you look like you're trying to dock with the rim of a Clarke-style habitat.  It's the hub.  You just slowly rotate yourself (computers can sort out the specifics) and head for the central docking bay.  (If the station has a (counter-)rotating docking bay, you might not even need to rotate.  But for the sake of mechanical complexity I'd go without trying to do that until such space construction/maintenance has been tried and tested quite a bit on non-essential bits of space-hardware...

Of course you could perhaps depart from the rim[1] as some sort of a 'free launch'.

(And, to the prior person who posted, about "lots of dying, like in Elite", you're obviously doing it wrong.  Or being harried by the galactic police at the time, because you accidentally fired the laser while trying to dock!)


[1] Some sort of trackway/cradle thing to take the ship there, assuming that the station can handle the stresses involved in carrying it 'down', and the temporary imbalances on release.  And use its own resources[2] to react to the resulting momentum exchange...

[2] Could even be reactionless (and thus 'free' as long as you have solar power), e.g. an electrodynamic tether setup (mostly while orbiting a planet with a magnetic field, like Earth), or an 'electric sail' deployment.  Or just be much bigger than the ships that dock with you and offset the minuscule movements along with standard station-keeping/debris avoidance measures...



edit: Read through to the end of page 9, and wondering how many misconceptions can be made...  anyway, if you want to have a stationary centre and a rotating everything-else (unlike above, where I went with 'don't bother'), you just need enough energy to overcome whatever hub/non-hub connection friction thers is and make sure there's a constant relative rotation between hub and non-hub bits, while having the rim go exactly the speed you want (the 'mean' rotational momentum being somewhere in-between, perpetually, barring minor adjustments.  Electric motors would do the job.  It would be solar powered (with battery backup and other fall-back systems), and a lot of the rotation control could be through rotating gyroscope-housings.  I wouldn't want to make an air-lock interface between sections if I didn't have to, but you could probably connect a flexible umbilical if you didn't want to get out, cross the interface externally and then get back in again.  Or dock an 'elevator car' box on the craft, then dock it onto a spoke-top/bring it down a spoke to dock at the rim.

Anyway, I'm sure that conversation's over.

[Il Palazzo]

If that shot from 2001:aSO isn't mentioned soon in this thread (still a way to go), I'd like to mention it now.

Page 12.
Way ahead of you.

[Starver]

Yup, I noticed.  But I couldn't wait that long!!!

Impatient, I am...

(Why did it take that long?)


Anyway, on another subject, I say that we balance the cost-benefits of doing some of the raw material processing at source (e.g. moon), where gravity helps with some things[1], and lets you launch less mess (or "more useful stuff" for any given launch mass) via your mass-drivers, with all the useful stuff that can be done in space, away from lunar electrostatic dust contamination, etc...

Sending up completed girders is probably not what you want to do, if you don't want to risk damaging the end product during launch.  OTOH, I wouldn't just pack up regolith and fire it up.  There'd be a median point where it's best to take a part-processed set of materials and send it orbitwise for finalising, though.  (Exactly where, I wouldn't want to say...  Greater minds than mine will be working that out, once the possibilities actually exist to be quantified, refining the guesses they've probably already made after extensively studying the hypotheticals we already imagine would apply.)


We'd want people living(/semi-permanently stationed) in orbit of every place that we have people on surface of.  (Thus several orbits... apart from Earth orbit that'd be Luna orbit, Mars orbit, perhaps Venus orbit, not sure about Mercury, but if we have people on the surface...)  Some of those orbital communities could be on natural satellites (Phobos and/or Deimos) that give significant amount rock to dig into without having too much gravity to get off-moon out of, but otherwise a whole batch of Luna regolith (or waste products from space-smelting?) or asteroidal material could be used to build up around the short term solar flare protection shelter, and perhaps a lighter amount around the living quarters if it really is 'constantly' bad.

Apart from the people in orbit being able to help those on the planet (emergency supply drops), it'd also be nice to have everyone in orbit able to have a fall-back(/down) point to reach a solid surface (and another set of supplies) in case of space-catastrophe.  So it would become be an integrated thing, space colonisation.  Some people permanently spacers, some people becoming settlers on surfaces of planets/moons.  Which will probably involve some disasters, one way or another, but omelettes/eggs, right?

What we are going to need is people who would be willing to be the pioneers.  The frontiersmen/women.  Supported by governmental or government-scale funding to get them there, of course.  That latter part is the sticking point, I think, because there'd be (there are!) loads of people as mad as Ice Road Truckers who'd jump at the chance to go 'out there', but until we have the infrastructure set up to do so in sufficient quantities we're still going to be slow to start doing that.

Global catastrophe time is probably too late.  (Unless some government has some secret 'space ark' project sitting hidden under a mountain or something, ready to launch at a few months notice.)  Comfortable times won't help either.  A steady building of pressures, while there's new methods being developed (SpaceX, etc) that might service an unforeseeable demand...  That's what will work, probably.

But I'm waffling now...


[1] Separation of smelting products, although centrifuge-capable smelters in zero G could do the same thing, like a Dyson[2] or a centripetal oil/water seperator does on Earth)

[2] "...vacuum cleaner", not "...sphere".

[GreatWyrmGold]

1.Your average solar pannel doesn't have the insulation nessecary to whistand a flare. Luckily the magnetosphere protects us, but sattelites are still often damaged by an errant flare. Most precise equipment is deactivated for that reason. It was a hyperbole to state the difference between large pannels taking the brunt of the blow (also, solar pannels aren't really secure from outside interference. The circuitry is pretty close to the outside.) and a shielded reactor near the middle of the ship

Okay then.

2. I was talking about the voyage to Mars. Hopped into the middle of the discussion here. However, if you're talking about supplying a Mars base with solar power, forget it. Mars has regular dust storms, which can reduce incoming light to 10-5% of normal volumes for months at a time. A robot might survive that*, a human won't. Also, can't dig in solar pannels.

Not on Mars. A near-Mars orbital, though...

3. Let's just say that the supplies of the elements required to make these pannels are more limited than thorium and uranium will most likely ever be. And unlike thorium/uranium, these rare earths have much more uses than solar pannels.

Also unlike the uranium, you don't need to constantly replace the solar panels. Presumably you can repair or recycle the damaged panels.

Are you suggesting we fly into mars's atmosphere on top of a huge paper aeroplane?

There is so much wrong with that, but it sounds ridiculously fun.

Probably not paper. But yeah, something similair. Though it's better for freight(don't know if you want to wait a month for reentry to complete), and shouldn't be used on Mars. Athmosphere is a bit too thin.

You could theoretically do the same thing, but no it isn't practical.

Wouldn't it be easier to smelt the ores on Luna before launching them, or better--not launch them at all?

Because rail catapults DONT USE FUEL.  I explain shit to you and then it sails right through your head without interacting with the stuff in the middle.

Railguns do use energy, though. And energy isn't free. Oh, I'm sorry, ENERGY ISN'T FREE.

Nobody brought up orbital solar stations beaming energy to ground based stations yet? Bay12, I am dissapointed.

Pretty sure I mentioned it somewhere...
Before this post, I mean.

Of course, the prospect of a stray high energy microwave beam hitting your pressurised habitation isnt a nice one.

Well, I'm not sure if it would release the pressure, but yeah.


Anyways, in other news I have lost track of what we're arguing about right now.

[vadia]

Wouldn't it be easier to smelt the ores on Luna before launching them, or better--not launch them at all?

Because rail catapults DONT USE FUEL.  I explain shit to you and then it sails right through your head without interacting with the stuff in the middle.

Don't use fuel for non-fragile (like humans for example) transport -- if 'twere to accelerate fast enough for human transport it would have to be more than a mile long, if I recall correctly.

Though you could railgun half the way (not precise) and 2nd stage rocket the rest to severely decrease fuel consumption -- or maybe hit a space elevator half way or something.

[GreatWyrmGold]

That hardly sounds good for the space elevator...

More importantly: Energy is an important consideration. The amount of electricity needed to propel a good-sized chunk of rock or iron is pretty massive. The amount of uranium or solar panels needed to generate that much power? Immense.

[mainiac]

Wouldn't it be easier to smelt the ores on Luna before launching them, or better--not launch them at all?

Because rail catapults DONT USE FUEL.  I explain shit to you and then it sails right through your head without interacting with the stuff in the middle.

Railguns do use energy, though. And energy isn't free. Oh, I'm sorry, ENERGY ISN'T FREE.

FUEL freaking fuel.  Propellant.  Reaction mass.  Fucking heavy ass shit that you have to launch into space and increases your costs exponentially.

Energy costs do not invoke exponential cost the longer you use them.  If I power 1 launch a day for 1 day or for 100 days it's all the same in energy costs.  But if I'm using fuel then the second is prohibitively expensive.

This isn't brain surgery, man.

[Thecard]

Err... Any source of energy can be considered fuel...