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.
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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.