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.
This is my skeptical face. Well, if you could see it, I would be using it.
But I would counter that 50 years into a 100 year trip, such delta-vee they might have available after they've slowed down isn't likely to get them home inside the remainder of the mission.
Also... surely they're going to be getting mighty pissed off at all the broadcasts from home.
And what happens when none of the tech on the ship can actually handle the broadcasts from home because you can't handle digital broadcasts with that level of technology?
Still, I have an extremely high threshold for SyFy shite and I would probably watch Tricia Helfer open an envelope... this probably makes me the target audience.
Bear in mind this is TV sci-fi, so they probably assume that ships in space thrust until they run out of fuel, then stop. The point of no return is probably half way there, when they have to decide whether or not to put on the brakes and do a bootleggers reverse, and thrust back Home.
But 60s technology? I suppose Orion drives might be in range of 60s theoretical tech. Maybe. Could an Orion drive spacecraft be made that could make the journey to Alpha Centauri in a century?
Of course even if it could, the launch of an interstellar spacecraft capable of holding hundreds of people would be somewhat unsubtle. I wonder how they would explain nobody noticing?
Wikipedia's entry for Project Orion cites Freeman Dyson's calculations for a trip time to the Alpha/Beta Centauri system of as little as 133 years, so it's in the ballpark.
Keeping in mind of course that the entire Project Orion concept never left the realm of drawing-board theories put forth by people who badly wanted to make the idea work, which would suggest that the actual maximum speed of an Orion spaceship, if we were crazy enough to actually build one, would have to be less than half of what Dyson thought it would be.
I don't know...Ted Taylor was the one chosen to design the bombs. Based on his history that part would have been a lead-pipe cinch. The rest of it--well, as long as they avoided the giant-spring-looks-like-a-sperm interstellar version there was no Unobtanium in the design stuff I've seen. Now the test system NASA demanded before man-rating it? THAT would scare the shit out of anyone.
I strongly suspect that some mixture of wanting to make certain that the drive didn't blow up the ship or massively irradiate the crew with worry about the political implications of detonating dozens of nukes in orbit killed Project Orion. There's a non-zero chance that using Project Orion for a mission to Mars could have get of a nuclear war, especially after the SALT II treaty (1979), which prohibited orbital nukes.
I'm sure they could explain the launch as an H-bomb test, perhaps of an exotic kind. Perhaps launch it over the Pacific during the day so that fewer people will witness the strangely regular flashes of light as it climbs to orbit.
Presumably the people back home will be aware of what the ship has, and send out translated video or whatever.
Remember the scene in Apollo 13 where they ask the Earth-side engineers to MacGyver up a solution for the astronauts, using limited materials, and dump a box of parts out in front of them? Imagine that, only when they dump out the box, it’s just a bunch of COBOL manuals.
The ship supposedly has politics. If it has politics, rather than vicious arguments about risk management and consumables accounting and people taking showers that use more than 4 litres of water, it presumably has margin. Which means it's freaking vast.
So it's quite possible that it's got a crew of ten thousand or so, or more; they're building manufacturing capability for new technology as they get instructions transmitted to them. Probably also cursing their local indium shortage.
If was going to try to make that work as narrative I'd be talking about how someone came up with direct conversion, matter to energy, but the minimum scale is enormous and the exhaust is the sort of thing you'd normally associate with the spin poles of a black hole. No one can figure out how to use it on Earth, Cold Warriors determined to preserve the species managed to launch this one ship which was just everything and everyone packed really tightly, they grabbed a big hunk of nickel-iron for radiation shielding and something with volatiles to stack behind that and are pushing the whole big mass while they make stuff they're going to need at the destination. (That's still some millions of tonnes in launch mass, it's completely crazy as a thing to do, but it's something like an explanation.)
Of course then I have to explain why the exhaust isn't making the amateur astronomy press twice a week, but that's a fairly small conspiracy as these things go. (Or it's so far into the gamma you can't see it without an orbiting telescope?)
We can say the drive flare emerges in a near-perfect collimated beam, so it's hard to spot from Earth...and when the Russians took a second look at the energy output and realized the Giant Death Laser it made they promptly shat a brick.
I notice the starship is supposed to have launched in 1963. Give the Russians a few months to freak out and organize a response...the project must have been insanely classified, only known to a few American politicians at the very top...obviously the Russian protest was lodged on December 22nd, 1963.
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.
And they’d be more comprehensible than those from Mad Men.
I’ve actually had a fanfic idea floating around in my head since my last reread of Dhalgren a few years back: The characters from Seinfeld are living in the Labrys Arms apartment building.
...and then the big door opens and they see that painted on the outside is "VAULT 76", and then an old tape recorder starts up and a deep voice intones "War...war never changes."
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.
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..."
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.
"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?
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 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.
If it's got a life support system for hundreds of people, it's likely to have a truly vast number of pipes and valves and boxes and tubes and tanks... Stuff that doesn't break down can go un-messed-with and unnoticed pretty much forever.
The best place to hide a needle is in a stack of needles.
I was thinking more "Gosh, these humans are likely to blow up their planet and go extinct in the wild. If we want to preserve a viable population, we better act now. But let's put them in an environment that makes sense to them, so they don't freak."
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.
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.
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2014-05-16 06:14 pm
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"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...
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But I would counter that 50 years into a 100 year trip, such delta-vee they might have available after they've slowed down isn't likely to get them home inside the remainder of the mission.
Also... surely they're going to be getting mighty pissed off at all the broadcasts from home.
And what happens when none of the tech on the ship can actually handle the broadcasts from home because you can't handle digital broadcasts with that level of technology?
Still, I have an extremely high threshold for SyFy shite and I would probably watch Tricia Helfer open an envelope... this probably makes me the target audience.
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But 60s technology? I suppose Orion drives might be in range of 60s theoretical tech. Maybe. Could an Orion drive spacecraft be made that could make the journey to Alpha Centauri in a century?
Of course even if it could, the launch of an interstellar spacecraft capable of holding hundreds of people would be somewhat unsubtle. I wonder how they would explain nobody noticing?
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Keeping in mind of course that the entire Project Orion concept never left the realm of drawing-board theories put forth by people who badly wanted to make the idea work, which would suggest that the actual maximum speed of an Orion spaceship, if we were crazy enough to actually build one, would have to be less than half of what Dyson thought it would be.
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OK, back to poking holes in Freeman Dyson's ad campaign for nuking the planet on the way out.
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Remember the scene in Apollo 13 where they ask the Earth-side engineers to MacGyver up a solution for the astronauts, using limited materials, and dump a box of parts out in front of them? Imagine that, only when they dump out the box, it’s just a bunch of COBOL manuals.
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So it's quite possible that it's got a crew of ten thousand or so, or more; they're building manufacturing capability for new technology as they get instructions transmitted to them. Probably also cursing their local indium shortage.
If was going to try to make that work as narrative I'd be talking about how someone came up with direct conversion, matter to energy, but the minimum scale is enormous and the exhaust is the sort of thing you'd normally associate with the spin poles of a black hole. No one can figure out how to use it on Earth, Cold Warriors determined to preserve the species managed to launch this one ship which was just everything and everyone packed really tightly, they grabbed a big hunk of nickel-iron for radiation shielding and something with volatiles to stack behind that and are pushing the whole big mass while they make stuff they're going to need at the destination. (That's still some millions of tonnes in launch mass, it's completely crazy as a thing to do, but it's something like an explanation.)
Of course then I have to explain why the exhaust isn't making the amateur astronomy press twice a week, but that's a fairly small conspiracy as these things go. (Or it's so far into the gamma you can't see it without an orbiting telescope?)
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I notice the starship is supposed to have launched in 1963. Give the Russians a few months to freak out and organize a response...the project must have been insanely classified, only known to a few American politicians at the very top...obviously the Russian protest was lodged on December 22nd, 1963.
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[1] According to people who don't know the constant radiance theorem.
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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.
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I’ve actually had a fanfic idea floating around in my head since my last reread of Dhalgren a few years back: The characters from Seinfeld are living in the Labrys Arms apartment building.
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Yes, I would consider that more intelligent than the stated premise.
(Apparently I am very cynical and bitter today.)
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(Anonymous) 2014-05-16 11:13 pm (UTC)(link)See here: [http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=alternative+three+documentary]
FWIIW,
TSM_in_Toronto
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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:
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.
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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
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?
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Re: add to the mission
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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.
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The best place to hide a needle is in a stack of needles.
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Update: Syfy orders third Sharknado movie
Enough said.
-m
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