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DeaconBlues
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14 May 2011, 8:57 pm

ruveyn wrote:
DeaconBlues wrote:
A space-going Orion craft could be constructed using laser inertial confinement - essentially, you drop a deuterium pellet into the focal point of a battery of lasers, and the pressure of the laser beams forces the deuterium to undergo fusion. In theory, it should work - it's hard to test, though, as keeping the deuterium in the correct spot long enough works best in zero-gee, and it's hard to persuade the guys aboard the ISS to test fusion explosives...

There' drives.


With the current technology it would require more energy to power the lasers than can be recovered from the imploded pellets. So far controlled nuclear fusion has turned out to be a bust. It has been 30 years in the future since the late 1950s and mostly likely it will be thirty years in the future a century from now.

ruveyn

Orion drive doesn't use controlled reactions - the idea is to make the deuterium pellet explode in a fusion reaction, so you don't actually have to carry along the entire former Soviet nuclear inventory to power a single in-system flight (you need just as many explosions to slow down as you need to speed up, after all). If the connection of the pusher plate to the spacecraft can be overcome, it would make a good way to ship extremely large cargos over great distances, as the ISP of the drive is very high. Dyson had proposed a craft the size of a city, driven by nuclear explosions to the stars (a trip to Alpha Centauri, the usual benchmark, would take about 50 years, as the usual figure gets the craft up to about 10% of c on the way).

I still don't think Orion is really practical for in-system trips, except possibly as a way to get a mining asteroid moving toward the destination (say, an Earth-orbit factory) before you start using ion drives (using mine tailings for reaction mass).


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LKL
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15 May 2011, 5:41 pm

Bethie wrote:
iamnotaparakeet wrote:
Starship Troopers.


The most hilarious non-comedy ever made.
:lol:

RedHanrahan wrote:
Really the only reason I harrass you is that your avatar looks like someone about to forcibly bugger their opponent


It's distracting. In a really far-from-bad way. Strikes me as Steampunk-ish, and I can't put my finger on why.

Have you ever watched 'Firefly'? If you haven't, and if you like sci-fi, you are seriously depriving yourself. It's sort of 'western meets space-opera with Mandarin mixed in.' A fabulous series, and cancelling it was a serious crime by Fox.



RedHanrahan
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15 May 2011, 6:08 pm

@ LKL, I don't watch TV, don't watch many movies and don't really read 'genre' fiction very often so [the closest I get is independent comics occaisionally] so no, I haven't seen 'Firefly'. I gather it was rather good and relates to me in some way?

@ iamnotaparakeet - resounding silence? fair enough if I didn't have a leg to stand on I would ignore me too.

peace j


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16 May 2011, 10:09 am

RedHanrahan wrote:
Really the only reason I harrass you is that your avatar looks like someone about to forcibly bugger their opponent


You should like his avatar, because yours seems being forcibly buggered. :P


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16 May 2011, 11:35 am

Enough of the personal insults or there will be consequences.


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iamnotaparakeet
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17 May 2011, 3:41 pm

LKL wrote:
Bethie wrote:
iamnotaparakeet wrote:
Starship Troopers.


The most hilarious non-comedy ever made.
:lol:

RedHanrahan wrote:
Really the only reason I harrass you is that your avatar looks like someone about to forcibly bugger their opponent


It's distracting. In a really far-from-bad way. Strikes me as Steampunk-ish, and I can't put my finger on why.

Have you ever watched 'Firefly'? If you haven't, and if you like sci-fi, you are seriously depriving yourself. It's sort of 'western meets space-opera with Mandarin mixed in.' A fabulous series, and cancelling it was a serious crime by Fox.


Firefly is pretty cool. I've changed my avatar to one less potentially offensive though now. It's from this sequence of a movie which was a favorite:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk-_5U6HOTI[/youtube]



iamnotaparakeet
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17 May 2011, 3:50 pm

DeaconBlues wrote:
ruveyn wrote:
DeaconBlues wrote:
A space-going Orion craft could be constructed using laser inertial confinement - essentially, you drop a deuterium pellet into the focal point of a battery of lasers, and the pressure of the laser beams forces the deuterium to undergo fusion. In theory, it should work - it's hard to test, though, as keeping the deuterium in the correct spot long enough works best in zero-gee, and it's hard to persuade the guys aboard the ISS to test fusion explosives...

There' drives.


With the current technology it would require more energy to power the lasers than can be recovered from the imploded pellets. So far controlled nuclear fusion has turned out to be a bust. It has been 30 years in the future since the late 1950s and mostly likely it will be thirty years in the future a century from now.

ruveyn

Orion drive doesn't use controlled reactions - the idea is to make the deuterium pellet explode in a fusion reaction, so you don't actually have to carry along the entire former Soviet nuclear inventory to power a single in-system flight (you need just as many explosions to slow down as you need to speed up, after all). If the connection of the pusher plate to the spacecraft can be overcome, it would make a good way to ship extremely large cargos over great distances, as the ISP of the drive is very high. Dyson had proposed a craft the size of a city, driven by nuclear explosions to the stars (a trip to Alpha Centauri, the usual benchmark, would take about 50 years, as the usual figure gets the craft up to about 10% of c on the way).

I still don't think Orion is really practical for in-system trips, except possibly as a way to get a mining asteroid moving toward the destination (say, an Earth-orbit factory) before you start using ion drives (using mine tailings for reaction mass).


Having it outlawed eliminates any potential reward for developing the technology, so it may be as ruveyn said, always thirty years from now, at least so long as no real effort is put toward it. I don't mean to say that anything can be done if you throw enough money at it, however, if there were not a concentrated effort to devise the atomic bomb back in the 1940's or to go to the moon in the 1960's, these things would probably have never been done. Now technology and the space industry are probably going to be killed off by the Luddite environmentalists and possibly also next by people who perceive everything in general to be a weapon.



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17 May 2011, 4:57 pm

No, parakeet, you misread him - controlled fusion is always 30 years away. We just can't seem to overcome the problem of containing the plasma without cooling it to below fusion temperatures. I think he thought I was referring to the famed sci-fi "fusion rockets" - which are also constantly thirty years away, I suppose, as they require a controlled fusion reactor. Orion, however, involves using explosives for thrust. (Although, to quote the viewpoint character in Spider Robinson's novel Stardance, "You'll never get me up in one of those things!")

Inertial-confinement fusion of deuterium pellets doesn't contradict any existing treaties, as there is no possible way to weaponize it; however, it's also derned hard to get anyone to do any work on furthering the development of such a device, because there's always the emotional reaction of, "You want to set off nuclear bombs in space??" (To which the correct answer would be, "No, we want to not set off nuclear bombs in space - we want to blow up things which are not, in any sense of the word, bombs of any sort," but that would require someone to testify before Congress without going all lawyer-in-front-of-the-cameras at them.)

NERVA also shows promise as an in-system drive, but you'd have to assemble the fission reactors in orbit, because realistically nobody's going to give permission to launch an atomic reactor through their airspace. (There was enough trouble with Cassini's power source, which uses plutonium decay but isn't in fact an atomic reactor; plenty of people heard the word "plutonium", immediately envisioned Trinity (the bomb test site, not Carrie-Anne Moss), and panicked.)


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iamnotaparakeet
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17 May 2011, 5:11 pm

DeaconBlues wrote:
No, parakeet, you misread him - controlled fusion is always 30 years away. We just can't seem to overcome the problem of containing the plasma without cooling it to below fusion temperatures. I think he thought I was referring to the famed sci-fi "fusion rockets" - which are also constantly thirty years away, I suppose, as they require a controlled fusion reactor. Orion, however, involves using explosives for thrust. (Although, to quote the viewpoint character in Spider Robinson's novel Stardance, "You'll never get me up in one of those things!")

Inertial-confinement fusion of deuterium pellets doesn't contradict any existing treaties, as there is no possible way to weaponize it; however, it's also derned hard to get anyone to do any work on furthering the development of such a device, because there's always the emotional reaction of, "You want to set off nuclear bombs in space??" (To which the correct answer would be, "No, we want to not set off nuclear bombs in space - we want to blow up things which are not, in any sense of the word, bombs of any sort," but that would require someone to testify before Congress without going all lawyer-in-front-of-the-cameras at them.)

NERVA also shows promise as an in-system drive, but you'd have to assemble the fission reactors in orbit, because realistically nobody's going to give permission to launch an atomic reactor through their airspace. (There was enough trouble with Cassini's power source, which uses plutonium decay but isn't in fact an atomic reactor; plenty of people heard the word "plutonium", immediately envisioned Trinity (the bomb test site, not Carrie-Anne Moss), and panicked.)


I think I have another novel I'd like to read now...

I remember reading in an electronics magazine that there was a new timing circuit invented at Sandia labs that helped to increase the efficiency of laser induced fusion, and also that there's a second method of magnetic compression induced fusion which is more inefficient than laser induced fusion.

Most people tend not to think when they just know buzzwords in relation to topics rather than having any knowledge of said topic. Using exothermic decays in tandem with the coldness of space via a thermocouple is just not something that people in general would consider, especially since most government school students learn how to "sight read" and tune out when words that they don't know are written... at least here in the US, any desire to learn is fairly well squelched by substandard treatment of academic subjects and stress placed upon churning out of busywork and socialization. Such leads to a populace of "educated" idiots. It is no wonder that when confronted with terminology they have ignorance of that instead of seeking out new knowledge they instead react merely to the connotations of the words instead.



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17 May 2011, 5:18 pm

I'm still sad they cancelled Firefly....

But since you're talking books... totally different premise.. but has anyone ever read Lucifer's Hammer?
It's probably my most favorite book ever. Just wondering what others think of it.



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17 May 2011, 6:52 pm

BurntOutMom wrote:
I'm still sad they cancelled Firefly....


I think that's the opinion of practically everyone who had a chance to watch the show. It was pretty good, but I only heard about it a couple months ago. I'm surprised that more hadn't been made, but what was made was mostly good.

BurntOutMom wrote:
But since you're talking books... totally different premise.. but has anyone ever read Lucifer's Hammer?
It's probably my most favorite book ever. Just wondering what others think of it.


Nope, haven't read that. Has anyone ever read Enemy Mine by Barry B. Longyear? It is one book of which the movie based on it was actually better than the book.



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17 May 2011, 6:56 pm

iamnotaparakeet wrote:
I've changed my avatar to one less potentially offensive though now. It's from this sequence of a movie which was a favorite:

I've taken a helicopter ride there! On (or just above?) the island of Kauai. That's where they filmed the helicopter ride to the island, in Jurassic Park. It's spectacularly beautiful.



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17 May 2011, 7:06 pm

dionysian wrote:
iamnotaparakeet wrote:
I've changed my avatar to one less potentially offensive though now. It's from this sequence of a movie which was a favorite:

I've taken a helicopter ride there! On (or just above?) the island of Kauai. That's where they filmed the helicopter ride to the island, in Jurassic Park. It's spectacularly beautiful.


It does look quite beautiful. It would be cool to fly a helicopter myself and see landscapes such as the waterfalls there, the Grand Canyon, and such of the sort in person. If I had a pilot's license and helicopter, I could have my own transport and shipping business and that would be cool to me.



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17 May 2011, 9:45 pm

iamnotaparakeet wrote:
Has anyone ever read Enemy Mine by Barry B. Longyear? It is one book of which the movie based on it was actually better than the book.

"Yaah, Irkmann, stupid Mickey Mouse is!"

Personally, I preferred the novel to the movie - in a movie, there's only so much you can explore of the protagonist's thoughts.

I would like to second the recommendation of Lucifer's Hammer, though - a great novel about Earth being hit by fragments of a cometary head, and what happened after. It would have made a great movie, if anyone had had the guts to adapt it properly - instead, the company that bought the movie rights wound up making the far less impressive Meteor.


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18 May 2011, 10:38 am

DeaconBlues wrote:
iamnotaparakeet wrote:
Has anyone ever read Enemy Mine by Barry B. Longyear? It is one book of which the movie based on it was actually better than the book.

"Yaah, Irkmann, stupid Mickey Mouse is!"

Personally, I preferred the novel to the movie - in a movie, there's only so much you can explore of the protagonist's thoughts.

I would like to second the recommendation of Lucifer's Hammer, though - a great novel about Earth being hit by fragments of a cometary head, and what happened after. It would have made a great movie, if anyone had had the guts to adapt it properly - instead, the company that bought the movie rights wound up making the far less impressive Meteor.


Even still, the truncation and alteration of the book's ending was better, in my opinion, than the book's full version.

What somebody ought to do sometime is have a more accurate depiction of what an interstellar war between a spacefaring civilization and a civilization who's only fiddling around in LEO looks like. Namely, planetary bombardment from high orbit to wipe out the existing life, and then alteration of the planet's environment to suit the conditions of the members of the other civilization. Annihilation and then terraformation, essentially. Anyone making an interstellar trip for interstellar conquest and colonization would probably not waste time with ground warfare.