Your mission for today

[james_davis_nicoll]

Design a starship with 1950s and early 1960s level technology.

Comments

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Just crib from Flash Gordon.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

You're worried about that, when they left this nugget in there:

"as they approach the point of no return"

What a what now? They've been underway for 50 years. I'm fairly sure they passed that point some time before...

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Actually, I have seen those come up in sf before. The ship has enough fuel to get up to speed and slow down once, plus a bit. If they slow down, the can use half the delta vee from the bit to head home. It's not much, so past a certain point it would take so longer to head home than go to the target system life support would run out first.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

See The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet et seq.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

I was just going to point out that James' question was answered just yesterday (http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/05/exploring-space-before-the-moon-landing-the-wonderful-flight-to-the-mushroom-planet).

The old cliché that screen SF is fifty years behind written SF is getting truer with age, isn't it? Which means we'll be getting up to the New Wave soon, at least.

[glaurung-quena.livejournal.com]

But where would the US government have gotten the necessary 4 drops of atomic tritetramethylbenzacarbonethylene?

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Wonderful books. And apparently there's one that I haven't read, Jewels from the Moon and The Meteor That Couldn't Stay.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

It just occurred to me to wonder if the producers of that show are intelligent enough to make it all a fake -- it's actually a fallout shelter.

Yes, I would consider that more intelligent than the stated premise.

(Apparently I am very cynical and bitter today.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I'm figuring that is in fact the big twist. Of course it's been done several times, but that just makes it an SF idea with a legit pedigree.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

That wasn't a novel plot twist in 1963...but this is the SyFy network; they could well be lifting story lines from fifty year old radio dramas.

[awesomeaud.livejournal.com]

The 'fallout shelter' idea would also explain why they have Earth normal gravity at all times.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Didn't Bruce Sterling already do this one?

[(Anonymous)]

This is reminding me of that "Alternative Three" pseudo-documentary from the 1970s...

See here: [http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=alternative+three+documentary]

FWIIW,

TSM_in_Toronto

[glaurung-quena.livejournal.com]

So the premise of the show is that contrary to the moon hoax conspiracy theorists, the US had far better rockets and far better space tech than they ever let on, and there was a huge conspiracy to cover up the fact they they were so very good at putting stuff into space a full 5 years before Apollo got off the ground?

Or else the real secret is that they used Area 51 alien magic wand tech.

And that's just the problem of getting such a ship up off the ground into orbit with 1960-ish rockets. Never mind keeping the humans on board alive for a century of flight time.

Although, if the US really had the power to launch such a mission in 1960 (figuring 3 years to assemble and fuel\supply the starship), then the missile gap definitely never existed.

Given that this is from Syfy, I will read reviews of the first episode before deciding whether to watch it or not.

One last thing:

Helfer played the seductive cylon Six in Syfy’s acclaimed Battlestar Galactica reboot. Here she’ll play a beautiful, manipulative and dangerous character named “Viondra Denniger,”

So, having played a beautiful, manipulative, and dangerous robot, now she's playing a beautiful, manipulative, and dangerous human. Nah, there's no typecasting going on here.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Actually, dragging in an Area 51 or Roswell reference might make it less implausible. "Yeah, we've got a star drive. It'll move fifty million tons through space and get it to another star in a few decades. Thing is, we've only got the one..."

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

glaurung_quena is onto something here.

To dispose of the second suggestion first:

Or else the real secret is that they used Area 51 alien magic wand tech.

This would once have been intriguing, but by now it's been done so often that the juice has been squeezed out of it.

But this is well worth thinking about:

So the premise of the show is that contrary to the moon hoax conspiracy theorists, the US had far better rockets and far better space tech than they ever let on, and there was a huge conspiracy to cover up the fact they they were so very good at putting stuff into space a full 5 years before Apollo got off the ground.

Unknown to the rest of us, Eugen Sanger actually got much further than we'd thought, and by WWII's end, he and Irene were Paperclipped to the States along with a small fleet of orbit-capable skip-bombers. By 1960, starships.

No, wait-- Rudolf Nebel actually got much further than we'd thought! The Magdeburg Rocket made it into space. A coverup encouraged us to think he was merely a buffoon. Willy Ley was in charge of the propaganda.

It's 1926. Somewhere in Europe, Oberth, Tsander, Goddard, Nebel, and Rynin are summoned to a secret meeting by [pick your favorite Shadowy Figure Of Wealth from the 1920s]. They are introduced to aging mastermind Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who is only pretending to be an obscure schoolteacher. He's done all the necessary experiments, but now he needs a team to push things further.

Nebel leads a mighty international effort to build a secret infrastructure. Outwardly, he seems a harmless clown, Scarlet-Pimpernel style.

For some reason, the world is not ready to know about this. (Maybe the key breakthrough came from Persons of Color? Or a woman?) Hugo Gernsback is also assigned to the coverup, starting magazines to encourage the idea that spaceflight is fictional.

By 1935, Moon bases. 1940s, the planets.

Might need to pile on an unknown source of energy, or, as Marcus suggested, a Dean Drive, to get to starships by 1960. Though Orion might do-- this is only television, after all.

add to the mission

[redbird]

"and get it into orbit and on its way out of the solar system without anyone noticing."

Specifically, without the Soviets finding out in time to sabotage things, or anyone else finding out and publicizing the launch. (We can handwave the missing persons problem by assuming that Big Government Agency is willing to fake some deaths and blame them on car crashes, house fires that aren't investigated closely enough to show that the house was empty at the time, etc. But you can't use that to hide the launch.)

Alternatively, what are the odds that the writers are clever enough to make this a piece of the plot, that some fraction of the colonists are Communist sleeper agents, either biding their time or spreading propaganda, so the U.S. has actually funded the attempted creation of a workers' paradise in another solar system?

[avram]

Hell, the writers on Lost in Space were bright enough to come up with that!

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

A starship that might actually get live people to another star in 100 years? That's... a bit of a challenge. We have only the barest clue *today* how to go about building a self-contained structure that could get live people to a spot it never moved from, 100 years later.

So even "it's all a hoax, it's really a glorified fallout shelter" isn't all that plausible.

"It's secretly an alien zoo ship" would actually be the most believable for me.

But then I'm very far from the target audience.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

But if it's a hoaxed ship, the self-contained environmental system doesn't have to be self contained. Just rig up some black-box technobabble water and air treatment system that amazingly never breaks down and only has to have the filters replaced once a year. They just don't see that the pipes go into the black box and make a right turn to the water treatment plant and air vents on the surface.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Dean Drive, of course - John W. Campbell was right, Dean really did develop a reactionless drive, and the CIA used all its resources to discredit the technology to cover up the secret colonisation of the stars.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_drive

[avram]

Asbestos insulation everywhere. Also lots of lead paint, which at least provides a bit of extra radiation shielding.

[asyouknow-bob.livejournal.com]

Asbestos & lead everywhere, sure - - but it'd be totally worth it because they get to use NIXIE TUBES!

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

Aha! I knew the premise reminded me of something I'd read - Voyage from Yesteryear by James P. Hogan.

[malada.livejournal.com]

At the bottom of the page:

Update: Syfy orders third Sharknado movie

Enough said.

-m

[timgueguen.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the chances are that this will actually look like the ship was launched in '63. I suspect either there will be a bunch of stuff that looks too old, or a bunch of stuff that looks like it came from the '70s or later.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

This being a relativistic universe, the FTL ship is also, of course, a time machine. So they have it because it came back from the future.