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[RyanJT]

So you are stranded on a planet, preferably a moon. Your small shuttle crashed but you have the tools to fix it to veer back into space. Essentially, with what little oxygen you have left, the goal is to survive and get back into space.

This is currently a small mission in a project I am currently playing around with. But I have one problem; I lack the knowledge of space flight and the mechanics that goes into a space shuttle. I would like this space shuttle to be quite real, but only to an extent; I would not want to turn off many due to the complexity of getting the shuttle ready for flight. Of course, you would choose the occupation that best fits you. While the more experienced users would be mechanics and perhaps the newer users would focus on preserving the oxygen supply.

So, what are the essentials for a space shuttle? Of course, you have the generators, engines, and thrusters. But what more would you expect in a fun, semi-simple, game?

[alway]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is the space shuttle's cockpit. It would take a month just to learn the buttons; you can't just build one on the fly. If one tiny part broke, sure, you might be able to fix it.  Spacecraft need massive plants to create the parts for them, something you just can't do with tools fitting in anything smaller than a Goa'uld Ha'tak mothership.

But as for crashing, spacecraft would rarely, if ever, "crash." If something goes wrong in orbit, they stay stranded in orbit. If something goes wrong on the way down, the craft breaks apart, and the charred individual peices fall in chunks a few inches in size in a radius of several miles, or alternatively slams into the ground and forming an impact crater full of even smaller bits than the atmospheric breakup.

[Armok]

What alway said.

[Jopax]

Well it can be done so it looks a bit realistic, he was exploring a planet and was shot down while in very low orbit, the shuttle has failsafe systems to prevent this so it deploys some parachutes or something to slow the descent, it gets trashed but it's mostly functional.
Also it can be done in a Notrium style, where you have most complex stuff lying around, you just need to know how to put it togheter.Besides what you listed you would also need some form of navigation, the steering and most importantly life support

[Lord Dullard]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is the space shuttle's cockpit. It would take a month just to learn the buttons; you can't just build one on the fly. If one tiny part broke, sure, you might be able to fix it.  Spacecraft need massive plants to create the parts for them, something you just can't do with tools fitting in anything smaller than a Goa'uld Ha'tak mothership.

But as for crashing, spacecraft would rarely, if ever, "crash." If something goes wrong in orbit, they stay stranded in orbit. If something goes wrong on the way down, the craft breaks apart, and the charred individual peices fall in chunks a few inches in size in a radius of several miles, or alternatively slams into the ground and forming an impact crater full of even smaller bits than the atmospheric breakup.

Our current space shuttles are built on/with technology so dated (electronics-wise) it's ridiculous. If the human race had actually been doing a decent job of maintaining a space program up until now, it's doubtful that space flight (and learning to master space flight) would still be such a difficulty. The inside of that shuttle looks like someone glued 5000 'Tandy' computers together in 1970.

[Ironhand]

Nah, we're making Death Stars out the wazoo.
The government just doesn't want you to know about it.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Firstly, there's a difference between "a" shuttle, and "the" shuttle. The Shuttle, as in one of those actually used by NASA, is something that cannot make an unassisted takeoff from anywhere with enough gravity for its wreck to settle - much less fly anywhere afterwards. It doesn't carry enough fuel for that. Now, a generic futuristic "shuttle" might.

Speaking from a layman's standpoint, I think a "shuttle" only really needs an airtight cabin (not even that is a requirement if our spacesuit can connect to an external tank), generators/accumulators to supply power for all the electronics and controls, main thrusters, cold thrusters or equivalent for steering in space, and enough reaction mass (fuel) to get up to speed and stop when it reaches the destination. Heat shielding and rudder/ailerons optional, for atmospheric reentry.
If your shuttle somehow carries enough reaction mass to match velocity with whatever planet it's landing on, it may skip the heat shielding since it'd just be dropping at a reasonable speed, not tearing into air like a meteor.

Now, if the shuttle has "crashed" and is actually repairable, the things I'd expect to have to repair are the hull, the fuel lines, the viewports, the undercarriage, and the computer systems. The thrusters, if they are like modern liquid-fuel rocket thrusters, would likely be terribly hard to repair if damaged, and quite unreliable even if repaired, since they're under significant stress when working. You may have to patch holes in the hull, seal the broken viewports and set up screens with external cameras in their stead (both mercilessly ripped from some unlucky piece of scientific equipment you were carrying, most likely), replace the undercarriage with makeshift sleds, and gut the life support computers to get parts for emergency repairs of the flight control hardware. Remembering to drain and de-gas the fuel lines before welding them, or to close the valves on internal oxygen supply tanks before everything escapes through the holes everywhere, would also be nice.

(note: I don't know how real Shuttles actually operate. I'm speaking with regards to a "fun, semi-simple game")

[Azzuro]

In my opinion, this depends on the type of shuttle we're talking about here.

Is it a shuttle for moving from station to station in space? Because if it is, it likely wouldn't even have landing gear or be able to withstand the heat of re-entry. In a more extreme case, it wouldn't have enough energy to escape the gravity well of the planet, so you're essentially stuck forever.

Alternatively, if it's a shuttle like our space shuttle, able to take off and land, then things are much simpler. Here, it depends on what needs to be fixed: if it's a small section of hull or a faulty wheel or something like that, then it'll still be fixable with some effort. On the other hand, if it's a nuclear engine gone wrong or a thruster completely missing, then you're screwed, unless you happen to have an extra of the part that malfunctioned. It depends on what you want the realism of the game to be; if we're talking about "real-life" kind of realistic, then repairing a shuttle without extra help would be nothing short of impossible. I think that the picture up above perfectly conveys the sheer complexity of just the controls of a shuttle, the engines themselves would be much more complex. Unless you carry around a mini-factory in a shuttle, then even a single part missing would be impossible to replace. Also, bear in mind that jury-rigging parts into place isn't really an option for repairing spacecraft; non-specialized parts would likely not survive the strain of operation for long.

[alfie275]

What might be more realistic would be to convert the shuttle into a transmitter and broadcast a message telling them where you are.

[alway]

What might be more realistic would be to convert the shuttle into a transmitter and broadcast a message telling them where you are.

This.
Any mission into space, even one as mundane as a delivery trip 100 years in the future, will be a relatively large investment between the cost to build the craft and the cost of fuel. As such, governments and corporations will be tracking them similarly to how aircraft are tracked today. Thus they would know what planet to look on, but wouldn't know exactly where to look (comms interference during re-entry and the highly variable flightpath therein). If there was no beacon signal, there may be a small search, but likely they wouldn't bother, since as I mentioned above the chances of being able to find even a shred of what was left combined with the tiny chances of survival would mean such an endeavor would be a waste of resources. Most orbit to surface wrecks would never be found, or would have chunks a few meters in size found about 150 years later when settlers arrive on the planet. So sending a beacon signal of some sort would be essential to surviving, assuming technology is advanced to the point where space travel is common and another craft can be re-routed from it's course in a timely manner.

Trying to make a non-launch-worthy craft capable of making it into orbit is something which, quite frankly, shouldn't be attempted. Unless you've got a crew made up of people at least as smart as Stephen Hawking, you will almost certainly explode before making it 10 meters off the ground (which as videos of early rocketry attempts show, can happen even with an army of rocket scientists). And if we're talking futuristic space craft, the complexity just goes up exponentially.

[Retro]

This thread is too thinky. I say stick a laser cannon on the front.

[Sean Mirrsen]

What might be more realistic would be to convert the shuttle into a transmitter and broadcast a message telling them where you are.

This.
Any mission into space, even one as mundane as a delivery trip 100 years in the future, will be a relatively large investment between the cost to build the craft and the cost of fuel. As such, governments and corporations will be tracking them similarly to how aircraft are tracked today. Thus they would know what planet to look on, but wouldn't know exactly where to look (comms interference during re-entry and the highly variable flightpath therein). If there was no beacon signal, there may be a small search, but likely they wouldn't bother, since as I mentioned above the chances of being able to find even a shred of what was left combined with the tiny chances of survival would mean such an endeavor would be a waste of resources. Most orbit to surface wrecks would never be found, or would have chunks a few meters in size found about 150 years later when settlers arrive on the planet. So sending a beacon signal of some sort would be essential to surviving, assuming technology is advanced to the point where space travel is common and another craft can be re-routed from it's course in a timely manner.

Trying to make a non-launch-worthy craft capable of making it into orbit is something which, quite frankly, shouldn't be attempted. Unless you've got a crew made up of people at least as smart as Stephen Hawking, you will almost certainly explode before making it 10 meters off the ground (which as videos of early rocketry attempts show, can happen even with an army of rocket scientists). And if we're talking futuristic space craft, the complexity just goes up exponentially.

Actually, depending on how futuristic the craft is, there may actually be LESS complexity. After all, if the technology is advanced to a point where space travel is commonplace, wouldn't it make sense to have space travel technology be sufficiently simple to allow midflight repairs by an average pilot? I can think of a multitude of scenarios that may work out in a sufficiently advanced future.

For example, your ship could mount an LDS drive (alcubierre for those who haven't played Edge of Chaos) for in-system travel, with safeties built in to prevent catastrophic failure when approaching a planet's gravity well. Disable the safeties, point the ship away from the planet, kick LDS into high gear to outspeed the planet itself. You may suffer minor injuries and the LDS drive will meet its demise a few decades before the manufacturer-set expiry date, but you'll be off the planet. With a tiny chunk of ground too, if you didn't bother to take off. That's unscientific, of course, but relatively plausible given some leeway in terms of physics laws. Of course, if your ship has LDS, it's likely to have a reactor of some sort to power it, so if your thrusters are also powered by that you can just accelerate until you reach escape velocity of whatever you're stuck on.

Also, speaking of unlikely collisions and egressing problems - it could be a lot more plausible if your shuttle was conducting research of, say, Ceres. Or equivalent. Accidentally crashing into a massive asteroid is possible, and surviving the crash is possible if you were chasing it instead of meeting it head-on.

[NRN_R_Sumo1]

survival situations are usually glorified when it comes to games.

In real life, making traps to catch squirrels certainly isn't the first thing you would do if you were lost in the woods.
If you were stranded on an island, repairing a boat probably wouldn't be the best option either.

in a futuristic setting, a shuttle should have both a short range and a long range transmitter. Short range could still transmit quite a ways and be used more for hailing space stations that you are docking, or threatening the guy at the warpgate infront of you that if he doesnt hurry up you'll blast him with your pew pew lazorb33msz.
Long Range I would imagine to be used for emergency calls using non-specific signals. If the long range was damaged, the short range could be modified with the available parts, or the short range could be used to repair the long range.

in a modern setting I believe that there are back-up systems of the long range specific signal transmitters, so even if they were all damaged, you should have enough mangled parts to build a single one out of.


Of course, this all relys on their ability to send out help to you, but it would be much easier to fix that radio than fix the rocket.

[Muz]

I considered making a game like this once too but can't figure a way to make a space shuttle crash or even fix it. It's tough enough trying to build a ship if you're trapped on an island with abundant supplies, harder even when trapped on a planet with no supplies.

If you're going to do it, at least make it on a small moon or other place with minimal gravity. Or heck, an asteroid. Asteroid has minimal gravity and people are more likely to believe that a craft crashed into one, rather than into a planet.

Just make things up. What I'd do is just stick some super power source to launch the craft into space. Stick a nuke up the craft's butt and use it to propel itself through free space. Navigation is a problem, but I suppose you could just follow that big blue orb back to earth.