Channelknight Fadran

HAHA THIS ^ ^ ^ GUY KNOWS HOW TO THINK

I dart through illusions, slashing at each one. The child is far too weak to give them proper reactions at this point: sooner or later, I'll find her. The witch woman fights with surprising fury. Tsk. If I didn't somehow have even bigger problems to worry about, I'd have taken care of her already. It was that girl that served a real problem. Her power. Something... primeval. Unnatural. Like my own. But no, not even that was it. Why hadn't I killed them all yet? Y-you... can't... hurt-- "Watch me!" I growled, then darted towards Yulong at blinding speeds, slashing outwards with my knives.

Taking the sticker, Enshao decided to wait on putting it on. He strode out to the field, then took a seat with his back against the wall and brought out a marker.

He slid the shiny card across the desk. A couple sharpie doodles already marked the surface.

"Enshao Garinsch. I'm fifty." Forty-nine, but nobody knows that.

"Um... yeah." Enshao checked his watch. Then he checked the clock on the wall. Oh.

Enshao had been out front for... perhaps a little too long. "Heeeeeeee-llo?" He said to the empty desk. Whoever was meant to be there clearly hadn't arrived yet.

This is a pretty direct followup to question 3.

Previously on Space Travel: Railguns! Trebuchets! All methods we can use to traverse our local solar system. Things get complicated, though, when we try to look beyond. Halving the time it takes to get somewhere doesn't mean squat when we get to things like light-years. Let's math this problem real quick. The closest start to us is Proxima Centauri (which I knew off the top of my head, btw; FEAR MY POWER). It's just over four light-years away, or 40,208,000,000,000 kilometers from Earth (on average, anyways). That presents a problem that - fortunately - someone already did the maths for. Skyhooks, as projected, would yeet you at approximately 26.7 thousand kilometers per hour into the cold heart of space. Which meaaaaaaaans we could be there in just about... 1501897916.66 hours. Which meaaaaaaaans it'd take roughly... one hundred seventy-one thousand, four hundred forty-nine years. This is, as scientists put it, an issue. Literally nothing of value could be gained from this. Interstellar colonization? No shot. Maybe if we put everyone into cryosleep or some scud like that we could save a tiny fraction of humanity from Earth's last flaming breaths, but... yeah. That won't do for conquering the galaxy. Fortunately, we have other things to look at right now. If humanity is at all interested in colonizing other star systems, then it stands to reason that by now we've already colonized our own. Using up the available energy and resources to us in our system is a massive undertaking, but opens up all sorts of crazy things. Thus, I think it's worth taking a closer look at before we move along in humanity's grand journey. Tier II - Our System Let's take a closer look at all the cool things that us humans could do with our system given enough time and investment. Moon base: We're probably on the moon! Not even probably - almost definitely. It's not a particularly hostile environment, and there are precautionary measures we can take against the radiation and occasional meteor swarms - my favorite being "dig a hole." Most of humanity would probably live underground in massive reformed caverns, capable of creating massive structures with the lighter gravity. Entire ecosystems could be constructed within these habitats... and they'd have to, too. There really isn't any way to terraform the planet, as the gravity's too weak to maintain an atmosphere, and the electromagnetic field's too weak to protect everyone from nasty stuff like radiation. The 'outside' would have to be shielded using [something something t e c h n o l o g y], and it's likely that people would have to get used to keeping space suits handy just in case. On the plus side, though, the moon gives us tons of opportunity for other things. First of all, its lighter gravity means that it's much easier to cast off from. It's tidally locked with the Earth, so it might be worth building a massive elevator on the dark side as a sort of makeshift tether and harness the moon's orbital momentum. However, it's also just as viable to build lots of regular skyhooks around the moon. We could build a bunch of railguns on the surface (which require far less energy), and make the moon a first-stop port to the rest of the solar system. Other stuff the moon has: resources! It's got plenty of metals, which can be used to maintain its own economy as well as being shipped abroad. Solar power could work decently well in smaller scales, but by far the greatest resource the moon has is H-3. The moon could become the first fusion-reactor-powered body in the solar system, and eventually ship out the stuff to other planets as a clean energy source. Mars Colonization: Let me make one thing clear. The reason everyone's talking about building a Mars base is because its close; not because it's viable. It has very little atmosphere (comprised almost entirely of CO2), no global magnetic field, a completely insane weather cycle, and nasty storms of electrically-conducting dust particles that get EVERYWHERE. There's no way to protect against all the space radiation, it's impossible to breath, long exposure to the lower gravity could cause permanent damage, and the literal dirt is toxic. But... it's free real estate. Now, I've never played any of those space terraforming games, so maybe y'all know more about this than I do. Just bear with me here. To first colonize Mars, you'd need to build small, cylindrical structures containing the bare necessities of life. There would be no windows, literally everything would have to be recycled, and the whole thing would be completely covered in dirt to shield the unhappy astronauts from the radiation. Any work that doesn't absolutely require human hands would be done by remotely-controlled drones so as to protect the astronauts from as much exposure as humanly possible. Mars suits would be incredibly bulky, with myriads more protection than required elsewhere. They'd need to undergo a rigorous sterilization process every time an astronaut returned so as to prevent the toxic microfibrous soil from entering the habitat, or potentially never even enter the habitat in the first place (such as by attaching to the outside). Colonizing Mars would be torturous. Fortunately, there are a few things we can do. Mars has plenty of natural resources that we can mine to build things, such as massive containment areas. By far the most viable option would be to construct large reinforced buildings on the surface. Making them airtight would allow us to completely control the conditions within, which means these could be the first viable human habitats for large groups of people. Domes seem decently doable, as they could balance out the pressure most efficiently. However, they'd need to be made with several layers of reinforcement so as to protect the structural integrity of the area. It would probably behoove the engineers to construct several independent airtight chambers within the area itself, so if a breach were to occur, they could protect the vast majority of the dome. Until we can come up with perfect insulation, building underground isn't an option. Any breach could allow the toxicity of the soil to seep into the habitat, which would be... y'know. Bad. There could potentially be emergency bunkers and such built there to evacuate people for short periods of time, but long exposure needs to be avoided at all costs. However, once the planet is colonized, we've really managed to open up the solar system. Its moons are very viable for large-scale skyhooks, and the abundance of natural resources (namely iron) would make it a hub for mining. It might even become a sort of temporary home to big resource mining industries (the habitats would allow you to stay and oversee operations, meaning the planet wouldn't have much or even any regular residency). It would become a industrial and infrastructural hub, and mark our first major step towards colonizing the solar system. ... ... ... ...Venus: Venus is hell. Let me make that ABUNDANTLY clear. VENUS. IS. HELL. The atmosphere is thick. The atmosphere is toxic. It is comprised almost ENTIRELY of carbon dioxide, with an average surface pressure of 1350 psi, or about 91.86 atm. Divers can survive up to 100 atm by not breathing - but, generally speaking, if you're a Venusian colonist, you're going to want to breathe. Not that it matters, of course, because the air here would kill you in instants! Did I mention the fact that it's toxic?? Or that it is literally made of CO2??? There are clouds made of sulfuric acid!!! The CO2 is supercritical!!! The greenhouse gas effect gives the planet an average temperature of 464 degrees Celsius!!! That means liquid lead. That means you won't have time for the supervolcanoes to kill you!!!! Venus is not conducive to colonization. Venus is conducive to death. *Pant* *Pant* ...But I hear you. "Fadran, what if we just terraform it?" Here is a link. It will take you to a Kurzgesagt video. They explain the process. I'm not going to go into it, because - frankly - this article is long enough already. You wanna hear my opinion? My brother just mentioned it, and I wholeheartedly agree. The place burns at gazillions of degrees, spits geothermal forces like a teen's first pimple outbreak, and soaks up sunlight like nothing else. That said, Venus is also the PERFECT thermal battery. We should turn hell into a battery. Mercury: Mining! Don't colonize here. It's either scalding hot or freezing cold, depending on what time it is. No atmosphere. Mining only. No humans allowed. Jupiter: The moons are all perfectly viable. Like, there's tons of them, and they're all pretty cool to boot! I don't have time to go into any of them, but I think they're all decently viable for bases and such akin to the ones on our own moon. Saturn: Prettyyyyyyy!!! Skip. Uranus: Did you know that its magnetic field is tipped away from its axis by 60 degrees? Cool, huh? Moving on... Neptune: We do not need two blue gas giants. Throw some ship names down below so we can finally combine them! Pluto...?: https://xkcd.com/473/ Other Stuff: Asteroids! They're all pretty dang mineral-rich and mineable. Big ones could be viable for early interplanetary resource-gathering. Here's another Kurzgesagt video that goes into that. So is that all? We've harnessed the solar system. And... it didn't really help us at all for interstellar travel. We can build... bigger skyhooks, maybe? There's... nothing left for us to use. Is interstellar travel impossible? The Sun: ... Look forward to part two: Harnessing the power of the sun!

One board game... every two weeks? Dang. Heck yeah, I accept! As for tribute... I guess I'll just make a post. Tagging everyone seems like too much of a hassle.

Because none of them are the Lord of the Shard.

Because I'm a nice guy. That would be impolite. Please do not do that.

Should it behoove me to actually put stuff here? I dunno.

If there was a council, then I'd scarcely be your Lord, don't you think?

Kardashev.

Well shoot. That's a lot. Lemme answer the main points: Hypothetical FTL will definitely happen. I'm starting with the basics - that is, the laws of physics as we humans understand them. Future additions will contribute to more whacky, fantastical things. About the G-Forces thing... I dunno. I've basically just decided that NASA probably knows what they're doing, so there's PROBABLY a way to counterract the human squishiness quotient. Gravity Slingshots: Of course! If you mean gravity-assisted trajectories and such, then that would be all over the place. If you mean slingshots using miniature black holes to power the thrust... then sure. Why not? H Y D R O G E N Moon thing: well, yeah. Less gravity means less force means less energy required, yada yada yada. But that doesn't really help us if we can't get people off Earth in the first place. I'll get into that in the f u t u r e. (Spoiler alert: the universe has been around for a long time and doesn't seem like it's gonna blow up anytime soon)

I declare a Department of Revolution Maintenance, complete with an Office of Onomastics (keeping track of names).

Alright, let's start with the basics. To make a space opera, you have to get to space. Now, us humans have already done that... but in just about the single most innefficient way possible. We jam-packed a bunch of metal tubes with straight Hydrogen and lit it all on fire to explode a few lucky individuals into low Earth orbit. The Apollo 11 mission's Saturn V rocket was the most powerful boi ever to be yeeted into space, and burned TWENTY TONNES of fuel per SECOND as it was launching. The propellant accounted for 85% of the rocket's total weight. It took four days to get to the moon, and of the 110.6 meters of rocket that was launched initially, about ten or so actually held the astronauts. 15% by weight included the actual rocket, and less than 10% made up the bit that dropped Mr.'s Armstrong and Aldrin onto the lunar surface. I don't think I should have to say that we can do better than that. Step One: Railguns Using the physics and engineering that we know and love, our beloved NASA scientists have come up with quite the solution to the whole "rockets suck" problem. All they need is two miles of train track, a cargo jet of X-Plane caliber, and enough power to run a small town. Railguns use electromagnetism to propel objects. It's the same as any old magnet: you put south at south and they push each other apart. However, electromagnets can control for how much power this magnet has, meaning the more electricity you pump into it, the more force they push at each other with. Thus, you put a massive coil thingy engine mcbobber (I'm no technician; I don't know the details) at the end of the track and stick your plane (called a Scramjet, apparently) right there full of its stuff. Then you fire up the electromagnet, and YEET the scramjet down the track. Two miles would give it more than enough time to get up to speed (mach four), and then hurls the jet off the end. The incredible air pressure ignites the fuel in the chamber required to get it higher in the air, eventually getting the scramjet up to Mach 10. At 20,000 feet, the jet can't continue flying ('cause there isn't any... y'know... air); so this is where spaceflight begins. The scramjet fires its payload into space, then glides back down to Earth for reuse (it was projected that such a machine could be ready for use again in just twenty-four hours). From here, NASA projected that the payload - in the example situation, it was a satellite of comparable mass to the moon lander - would be in orbit in just a day, and with the same railgun they could send men to the moon on the next. But that's just the first step. Maybe that works for getting things off the ground, but that's nowhere near enough for a full-on space opera. You can't have incredibly epic space battles if it takes years just to reach the next planet over. So this is where our next epic physics boi comes in. Step Two: Trebuchets (hopefully the image actually does its thing) This is a trebuchet. It uses the most basic physics to do the most awesome thing ever: yeet things. On one side, you have your payload, whether that be a boulder, a cow, or a flaming bag of dog poo. On the other side, you have a counterweight. You lock the thing in place to load up your boulder, then unlock it to have the weight heave down and catapult the boulder into enemy lines. What's more, the engineering of these things only ever improved, increasing accuracy, distance, and power. So, naturally, we're gonna put one in space. This is the Skyhook. It's a really, really long cord (made of yada yada 'super tough fiber') extending down into low Earth orbit. At one end is a hook thingy, and at the other is a counterweight. The physics are really simple: spin. So imagine you're a payload, having been yeeted into orbit by a railgun-powered x-plane. Now you're awaiting a years-long journey so you can drop off your brand-new rover on Mars or whatever. But instead of just flying through space endlessly, you get caught by the end of a really long space rope. It's just dipped on down into Earth's atmosphere, but then continues its endless spin routine. When it was put into orbit originally, it was given a little push on one end so that it spirals in its path; and, as things tend to do in space, it continues in this spiral for time and eternity. Then the tether continues spinning, spinning, spinning... you're dragged upwards and away from the Earth, approach the apex of the spin... And then it YEETS you. Skyhooks use basic parabolic physics to simply cast things around like rocks out of slings. You get all the wondrous momentum from rotation without any of the nasty gravitational pull stuff that Earth tends to do! So now you're zooming through space at intense speeds, with no need for fuel or steering. So as long as the computers calculated trajectories correctly (which they tend to do, being computers), you'll be landing on Mars in no time. No time being, that is, about three to five months. Better than seven, though - or nine, if you're a human. So now the solar system's much more local, but even then we can't have epic space battles with just that. So... Step Three: What's Next? First of all, these things will be used to colonize the solar system. It might be possible to build some really dang big skyhooks on Mars' moons. Being tidally locked, you could have two - one on either end - and have them act like an elevator. You latch onto the close end from Mars, beam yourself up, then yeet into space from the other side. Payloads coming in could catch onto the far end and travel back down into low Mars orbit to get down planetside. These would be the most massive and effective tethers possible in the solar system, and probably act as a major nexus for all local space travel. Now, then, we do have a couple issues. What happens if something goes wrong? What if the calculations were off? What if something breaks? Could you send a luxury cruise of rich folks headed to Venus for vacation careening into the void for all eternity? Planes can make emergency landings, and boats can send out distress signals to get picked up. But in space? None of that will be any good. Imagine trying to make an emergency landing on Jupiter. Of course, there will always be a chance of things going horrendously wrong. Mid-air accidents happen and crash planes into mountains; sailors get stranded and die of starvation. What keeps people doing these things is the incredible infrustructure and technological redundancies that reduce the risk factor more and more and more. Planes never crash because just one thing got overlooked; it's always due to a myriad of errors stacking on top of each other and compounding to make things go horrendously wrong. Heck, every airliner actually has a minimum required maintenance level, meaning that a lot of planes you fly will actually have problems deemed negligible by the captain and crew to keep the thing flying. So what things can we add to interstellar travel systems to ensure that nobody gets killed in the vacuum? 3.1 - More tethers While there are eight and a half planets roaming around out there (Pluto? Hello?), they aren't the only things in space capable of maintaining tethers. If you can put a skyhook in orbit around the Earth, it stands to reason that you could put several in concentric orbits around the Sun as well. You could put them on asteroids, dwarf planets, or even each other (as dual counterweights) to create a massive network of tethers throughout the solar system. Think of it like gas stations: places you can go to refuel, buy a snack, or take an emergency pee break. If something were to go wrong on a flight, you could correct your orbit by the necessary amount to grab hold of one of these intermediary tethers and readjust your trajectory. Or, heck, they could even be mandatory stops on a trip. Maybe a several months'-long voyage really isn't all that great for your craft, so you need to stop it somewhere for maintenance; or your departure doesn't line up with where Mars is at the time, so you need to transfer between a whole network of the suckers in order to line yourself up properly. And, of course, if you're threatened with the cold heart of space, you'd have several times as many points to save yourself than you would if Mars was the only place with a tether attached. 3.2 - Better engines I think it goes without saying that we humans have had our fill of combustion. Hydrocarbons, I love ya to death... but us peoples really need to figure out an alternative already. Fusion is the energy of the future. I say that unironically, because it clearly isn't the energy of the now. Fortunately, space really opens up that opportunity for us. The moon happens to have a lot of H-3: a Hydrogen isotope that works really well for cold(ish) fusion, and doesn't let off any radiation as a bonus. A clean, harvestable, and efficient energy source? Perfect for humanity! Powerful and compact engines would allow for direct, on-board steering. Instead of correcting over the long term with minute, calculated thrusts, you could make more drastic and immediate corrections in real time. This would open up jobs such as S P A C E P I L O T S, meaning that we can finally get to - Step Four: Epic Space Battles ...Okay, I'm not actually going to go into too much detail here. There are a LOT of thoughts for how to make a spaceship as effectively as humanly possible in combat, so I guess you could say that this step is more like... foreshadowing. Fourshadowing.

Followup

Sanderfan*

"Ah," said Fadran, coolly avoiding the fact that the wizard man had just read his mind. The heck is a shark?

The heck is a megalodon?