VASIMR good basis for space travel?

[Blayne]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasimir

I'm currently writing a scifi story set in the solar system with not FTL travel, so far VASIMR seems in its early prototype stage, anyone know if this could be scaled up and to what point? Like what sort of velocity could it theoretically gain as an upper bound?

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I think there's still some ways to go for material technologies to allow for high speed ion drives, but if you pair the above plasma drive to a nuclear reactor, and a huge propellant tank, and allow for long term travel, it might work.

Although in theory, one might pair a nuclear fission (or fusion) engine to an ion drive to get more kick.

[Gil Hamilton]

Sure it can be, with a few more advances. You don't even, necessarily, have to settle for long travel times. Ion drives don't have nearly as much of a hard limit on their specific impulse as chemical rockets do (which we've basically reached). If you could find a way to get a ion drive that had non-trivial thrust AND a really good specific impulse, there is no reason you couldn't get your probe up to a fair clip. After all, a few newtons of force applied over several days is still significant.

[Blayne]

I'm aiming to have 'easy' manned interplanetary travel and thus the ability for space combat within the system. The range of colonization I am aiming for is from Earth orbit to Jupitor's moons. Assuming the technical limitations are solved what kind of speed would I be looking at? I'm more of a well read layperson when it comes to this so I'm not entirely sure how to convert impulse speeds to km/s.

[Gil Hamilton]

If you are a lay person, don't worry about the technical aspects of your drive on your spaceships. It's not worth the headache. Just have them work well.

[Blayne]

If you are a lay person, don't worry about the technical aspects of your drive on your spaceships. It's not worth the headache. Just have them work well.

But I want "Shown Your Work" on my tvtropes article!

[Gil Hamilton]

But I want "Shown Your Work" on my tvtropes article!

The problem is that it's just fluff. Indulging in techie fluff about your spaceships doesn't add anything much to a story, but it can detract from it if used poorly or in place of content. You should focus on storytelling and leave technical exposition in the middle of stories to Poul Anderson.

[Zixinus]

If you want harder sci-fi, visit Atomic Rocket. You'll have to do simple math (and I do mean simple math, everything can be done by an Excel spreadsheet) if you want to plan, but it should be simple enough. "Mission Table" should be interesting to you, as it gives you a rough idea of time and DeltaV necessary for Hohmann-style travel. It also gives you a longer list of possible engines.

My advice is that as long as you try to think the little science you know trough and not afraid to ask, you should focus on the story.

[RedImperator]

If you are a lay person, don't worry about the technical aspects of your drive on your spaceships. It's not worth the headache. Just have them work well.

But I want "Shown Your Work" on my tvtropes article!

There's another term for that. It's called "I've Suffered For My Art (And Now It's Your Turn)".

A form of info-dump in which the author inflicts upon the reader hard-won, but irrelevant bits of data acquired while researching the story. As Algis Budrys once pointed out, homework exists to make the difficult look easy.

Seriously, I do understand the desire to know the limits of what your chose technology can do. I found the nomograms (warning: PDF) on Atomic Rockets very helpful for this. Just pick your mission and your mass ratio and, presto, you have the drive you'll need. Or pick your drive and your mission and see if the mass ratio makes warfare economically possible. Or chose a mass ratio and a drive and figure out what missions are possible without a tank-up. Very neat. Just don't tell your readers about it. They don't give a shit. That's the thing about hard SF--they'll notice if you break the laws of physics, but they don't particularly care about how you've chosen to work within them.

And never rely on TVTropes for...well, anything. As near as I can tell, TVTropes is edited entirely by pedantic weaboos and fanboy morons.

[Ford Prefect]

The nomograms on Atomic Rockets are fun to play around with: if you're anything like me you'll spend fifteen minutes putting the ruler in ridiculous configurations and thinking 'man I would be the worst rocket scientist ever'.

In any case, Blayne, precisely what spaceship drive you use is more or less irrelevant: you could quite safely get away with totally inventing a new drive which operates on fringe science or somewhat faulty science, so long as you adhere to other basic principles and do not willfully violate them. To give a personal example, I have written about a setting featuring magic 'fusion' drives which can freely turn energy into hundred gee accelerations, but they are still governed by mass and fuel and heat (more or less, anyway). Consistency with regarding how long a certain amount of fuel will last, understanding how much energy must be produced to manage this, how much heat this will likely produce, knowing that inefficency will creep into a system and so on and so forth is more important for writing that unrelenting scientific accuracy. After all, most mainstream science fiction is only very loosely related to science, and most readers have no real problem with that. Even a lot of apparently hard science fiction is filled with all sorts of weirdness which seems largely impossible, but this doesn't really harm the story or the setting.

Also, Red, that's an interesting link to read. It's kind of funny to see how common certain things that I do as a writer apparently are (the said thing, for example, of the 'burly detective' thing. However, you will not take away my adjectives!).

[Blayne]

If you are a lay person, don't worry about the technical aspects of your drive on your spaceships. It's not worth the headache. Just have them work well.

But I want "Shown Your Work" on my tvtropes article!

There's another term for that. It's called "I've Suffered For My Art (And Now It's Your Turn)".

A form of info-dump in which the author inflicts upon the reader hard-won, but irrelevant bits of data acquired while researching the story. As Algis Budrys once pointed out, homework exists to make the difficult look easy.

Seriously, I do understand the desire to know the limits of what your chose technology can do. I found the nomograms (warning: PDF) on Atomic Rockets very helpful for this. Just pick your mission and your mass ratio and, presto, you have the drive you'll need. Or pick your drive and your mission and see if the mass ratio makes warfare economically possible. Or chose a mass ratio and a drive and figure out what missions are possible without a tank-up. Very neat. Just don't tell your readers about it. They don't give a shit. That's the thing about hard SF--they'll notice if you break the laws of physics, but they don't particularly care about how you've chosen to work within them.

And never rely on TVTropes for...well, anything. As near as I can tell, TVTropes is edited entirely by pedantic weaboos and fanboy morons.

I take offense to the last 2. I assure you I left the Japanophile phase years ago and moved on to greener pastures... Sino & Russophile!

However I assure you that the tvtropes advice on well most literary tropes appears to be consistent and well thought out, especially the article on Mary Sues which I find helpful as comforting advice to practice restraint with my characters. Since I think the temptation is to go "wouldn't it be cool if character X could do THIS!?"

Also the article on 'bad writing' has some observations that I think may be valuable, I asked for 'On Writing' by Stephen King and 'How Not to Write a Novel' for christmas which I'll compare notes with.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BadWriting

For those curious, here's my current sources for making the backstory.

"The Soviet Military Experience 1945-1991"

Years off my life: Memiors of a General of the Soviet Army

My Just War: The Memoir of a Jewish Soviet Soldier

Inside the Soviet Army by Viktor Suvorov

Soviet Military Doctrine

A Writer at War: story of a Soviet journalist during WWII

Red Army and Society
'the sociology of the soviet military'

Liddel Hart's The Red Army

A Centuary of Ambivelance: History of Soviet Jewry

I have alot of reading to do.

[Ford Prefect]

Wow, okay, this thread could rapidly decay into another discussion about the uselessness or usefulness of the TV Tropes wiki, but suffice you should never base anything of what amounts to an endless series of list thrown to together by random people. If you're serious about writing you'll seek out proper critique from actual people as opposed to relying on, to borrow a term, 'pedantic weeaboos' talking about things they like. The TV Tropes wiki is neither a particular in-depth piece of literary investigation nor is it anything to aspire to. It's just a ludicrously effective way to lose three hours.

[RedImperator]

Wow, okay, this thread could rapidly decay into another discussion about the uselessness or usefulness of the TV Tropes wiki, but suffice you should never base anything of what amounts to an endless series of list thrown to together by random people. If you're serious about writing you'll seek out proper critique from actual people as opposed to relying on, to borrow a term, 'pedantic weeaboos' talking about things they like. The TV Tropes wiki is neither a particular in-depth piece of literary investigation nor is it anything to aspire to. It's just a ludicrously effective way to lose three hours.

On the other hand, On Writing is an absolutely brilliant book, even if you don't like Stephen King's fiction. I'll add a recommendation for Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott, as well.

I think TVTropes is fine, as you say, as a time-waster, though sometimes it's more frustrating and annoying than fun when you run into one article after another which defines some trope exclusively by linking to other tropes. But as an actual, serious writing reference? Run away as fast as you can. There are much better online references. SFWA's website, for example, is indispensable and--you'll notice--written entirely by published authors or editors. There's also Nate Bransford's blog, which focuses more on the commercial end of publishing but is still a nice resource for the actual writing part of it. There's tons more. They're not packaged as neatly as TVTropes, but they're much better resources. It's the difference between Wikipedia and a good public library.

[Zixinus]

TVTropes has its uses though, especially in regard in recognising whether your idea has been used before or how else you can use an idea. Tropes are something to build upon though, so there is much more to a story than those. But for ideas, they're not that bad.

Oh, and Red? Thanks for the links. They're handy.

[RedImperator]

TVTropes has its uses though, especially in regard in recognising whether your idea has been used before or how else you can use an idea.

I'll disagree even with this. The way you avoid repeating worn-out ideas is to be well-read. You can't be a good writer without being a good reader. Browsing TVTropes is a poor substitute.

Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, it's worse than a poor substitute. Assuming for a minute TVTropes is accurate (not a given with a Wiki), all TVTropes will tell you is that some "trope" has been used in X number of circumstances and a one-sentence summary of how (usually not even a full summary, in the interest of avoiding spoilers). It doesn't give you the context and it doesn't show you the execution, which is the most critical part. You could wind up abandoning a perfectly good idea because it has a lot of TVTropes entries, even though your take would have been completely original, or you could decide to go ahead with a worn-out Shaggy God story because you didn't see a lot of entries on it.

TVTropes is not a writing resource and was never intended to be one. You're not doing yourself any favors by trying to use it that way.

[Shroom Man 777]

Shit, man. Ideas being "used before" is a total bullshit criterion for abandoning any idea of your own that you have. Unless you are so completely inept that your idea ends up being a pale imitation of the previous idea. If you're NOT completely inept, if you do have individuality, the fact that you're not the same person as the guy who used that idea before means that your idea will be done differently. It's not the cliche or the convention or the whatever that makes or breaks anything, it's how the author/director/actor/s as individuals implement that idea with "their own twist" that makes it entertaining.

It's not merely just the bare-bones idea, but the author/director/actor/s themselves that make it worthwhile.

[RedImperator]

The real practical upper bound on a VASIMIR is the mass ratio of your ship. You can always add propellant, but eventually you're going to wind up with some ridiculous mass ratio like 20-1 and then spaceflight becomes too expensive for warfare. You can cheat around this a little with disposable propellant tanks, but presumably you'd like to go home, so you can't throw all your tanks overboard. So long before you reach any kind of theoretical upper bound on a VASIMIR, you're going to run into the largest practical mass ratio and that's going to dictate your maximum delta-V.

[Sky Captain]

VASIMR operates basically this way nuclear reaction > heat > some sort of heat engine > generator > electricity > VASIMR drive > thrust. It could be fine for a cargo hauler or deep space exploration vessel, but for a warship IMHO it`s too complex, also thrust to mass ratio will be poor limited by how much power the whole system can process without melting down.

I would want something that operates this way nuclear reaction > heat > thrust - some sort of gas core reactor engine, nuclear salt water rocket or nuclear pulse rocket. Aneutronic fusion also might be promising since it could directly create flow of fast charged particles which could be guided through magnetic nozzle to directly create thrust without touching any physical parts of the engine thus reducing the cooling requirements and allowing both high thrust and high ISP - a feature that would be very valuable for a warship.

[Stark]

Something else to keep in mind with TVTropes is virtually anything can fit anywhere. If it doesn't play it straight, it will do a slight variant. If it doesn't follow it, it will subvert it or avert it. That leaves only a very narrow set that doesn't fit in. It would be like me making a page for the number three, and also listing numbers that are less than or greater than three, in addition to numbers equal to three.

The problem is that anyone can see why that's useless; people honestly think tvtropes (or tropes in general) are useful and meaningful methods to become skilled at understanding fiction. Remember that guy who claimed that they defined the building blocks of fiction?

I'd like to second how stupid it is trying to avoid 'ideas used before'. Who cares? You want to tell a story. The idea of making a patchwork narrative out of tropes you like and trying to backport a meaningful theme is crazy.

[RedImperator]

I think it is possible for an idea to be so badly overused that even a skillful take on it would be unwelcome, but this generally happens at the tail-end of a fad where the market was saturated with this idea, and now everyone's just a little sick of it. Usually giving it a little time and then showing up with a new take on the idea is all you need to do.

Also, certain takes on ideas probably really have been done to death. If you have a story where a male and female astronaut get stranded alone on the planet Eh-dhon, you're probably not going to surprise anyone when the big twist ending turns out to be their names are Adam and Eve. But there's any number of takes on any given idea.

This is, again, where being well-read is indispensable. First, it cures you of the idea that every idea has to be completely new. Second, it gives you a good sense of what's been done before, what's been worn out, and how your story is different from everything else out there.

[Stark]

That comes back to your advice, though - if you're well-read, you're unlikely to choose a truly hackneyed idea (or a saturated one like sad vampires). I don't read that much fiction (certainly not as much as I'm aware of) these days, but I doubt I'd even be interested in the first place in a really 'dead' idea.

Then again I've never considered writing commercially, and if I'm writing for pleasure I don't give a fuck what some fatties over at tvtropes say about 'inversion'.

[Blayne]

I'ld like to point out that I did not say I was using tvtropes as more then a quick reference, also would like to point out that I have no intention of 'avoiding' past idea's. Afterall, interplanetary space combat? That alone has to have been done before.

I would want something that operates this way nuclear reaction > heat > thrust - some sort of gas core reactor engine, nuclear salt water rocket or nuclear pulse rocket. Aneutronic fusion also might be promising since it could directly create flow of fast charged particles which could be guided through magnetic nozzle to directly create thrust without touching any physical parts of the engine thus reducing the cooling requirements and allowing both high thrust and high ISP - a feature that would be very valuable for a warship.

Its not that I want VASMIR specifically, or any current theoretical design just looking to find one that could theoretically match my criterion so that in my story which takes place In The Future(tm) I could handwave the technical hurdles as being by then overcome by research or discovery. The request for a named system is so I could look at it and see roughly how it works on a basic level for story purposes and then 'scale up'.

[Simon_Jester]

For that purpose, VASIMR may be as good a name as any. Even if it doesn't pan out as a form of space drive, it's viable enough that except for a very tiny fraction of your audience, it's a perfectly good option.

Unless of course, you're writing the story entirely for an audience of actual rocket scientists.

And never rely on TVTropes for...well, anything. As near as I can tell, TVTropes is edited entirely by pedantic weaboos and fanboy morons.

Now, now, some of us are pedantic morons or fanboy weeaboos... But yes, TVTropes badly needs about ten times more competent, semi-trained critics per fanboy than it actually has. Possibly a hundred times more, though I'm not sure it's that bad.

Wow, okay, this thread could rapidly decay into another discussion about the uselessness or usefulness of the TV Tropes wiki, but suffice you should never base anything of what amounts to an endless series of list thrown to together by random people. If you're serious about writing you'll seek out proper critique from actual people as opposed to relying on, to borrow a term, 'pedantic weeaboos' talking about things they like. The TV Tropes wiki is neither a particular in-depth piece of literary investigation nor is it anything to aspire to. It's just a ludicrously effective way to lose three hours.

I'd like to expand on this:

If you were doing serious study on any other subject, you might well look at Wikipedia articles at some point. But if you want to make an honest claim to know your stuff, Wikipedia is only the starting point for an extended program of learning. If you already claim to know your stuff, Wikipedia is at best a useful reference to remind you of things you understand the context of but have somehow forgotten. For instance, if I can't remember a heat transfer equation I can look it up on Wikipedia, but only because I already know what to do with the equation once I have it. I had to take college courses to learn that.

TVTropes ought to be like this. If so, it would be of considerable use. Imagine I'm writing a story about collective consciousness in a species of intelligent beings with linked minds. I might check the TVTropes pages on the subject and go "Hey, I'd forgotten that Arthur C. Clarke wrote a story (Rescue Party) featuring a hive mind back in the 1940s! Maybe I should take a look at it!" And it is possible for an intelligent and otherwise moderately well read author to not know about that story; witness the commentary on this page of the webcomic "A Miracle of Science..." where one of the artists says that the first portrayal of a group mind he can remember is from Doctor Who.

Clarke didn't explore the idea of a group mind in depth, but he did manage to raise one interesting point in a very concise fashion: such a mind is likely to be transcendently more intelligent than any single being, thanks to its vastly greater experience and processing power. This is sometimes forgotten by naive writers who have their protagonists do things like outargue a hive mind.

The problem is that if we go to the TVTropes article on hive minds ("Hive Mind" is in fact a trope name)... the Clarke story isn't listed, at least not as of the time I am writing this. There's a big pile of recent references, including a surprisingly short list of anime references, four entries discussing Animorphs at some length, four specific examples from Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, a number of paragraph-length entries on hive minds in tabletop RPGs, and 21 video game examples.

But no reference to the Clarke story, and as far as I can tell, no references at all dating before 1959 (in the case of the novel Starship Troopers... which is incorrectly cited as a possible origin of the trope). So the historical origins have gotten buried under the limited reference pool of the majority of tropers, and there's a severe shortage of actual knowledge informing the reference material.

[Blayne]

But you can solve that. Its a wiki, go and edit it.

Although the Trope Namer I don't think means what originated the concept to its oldest recorded use but to what is the earliest use that propagated the Trope into public pop cultural consciousness. In which case it probably IS starship tropers that did it for most people.

[Bakustra]

But you can solve that. Its a wiki, go and edit it.

Although the Trope Namer I don't think means what originated the concept to its oldest recorded use but to what is the earliest use that propagated the Trope into public pop cultural consciousness. In which case it probably IS starship tropers that did it for most people.

See, that's the biggest problem with TVTropes. It can be edited by anyone, which is what led to the inundation by "pedantic weeaboos". To be honest, if I was in any position to recommend things to the TVTropes staff, I would ask them to consider whether they wanted to make it serious or lighthearted. I'll be frank and say that I prefer it lighthearted and goofy, because making it serious is undermined by about half the examples. Now, if I may digress a bit, my ideal standard for TVTropes would be:
1. Nuke the examples sections. Move the examples to the pages for respective works, with maybe a few high-profile examples. Tying into this, require people to provide examples on the works pages.
2. Nuke every example of conversation within the main pages, all unfunny jokes and memes from the main pages, and all the personal examples and misplaced details from the main pages, especially the goddamn fetish ones. I do not browse amusing websites to read about people confessing about their sexualisation of crutches. This ties in with part one, but I consider it important enough to justify its own separate segment.
3. Segregate off all the various offshoot pages. This is something that they had the bright idea to do partially, but I must admit that I think they don't go far enough, mainly because of the "Crowning Moment of X," where X equals an adjective or noun; pages, which I confess to detesting.
4. Require people to provide some evidence concerning the series' that they add. This is only a sticking point for me because of the mob of Japanese series' well-meaning weeaboos put on the site, and I am struck by a memory of somebody pointing out that, fanpersons being what they are, you could potentially fake a series up and no-one would ever know. This would probably require moderated article creation.
I hope that I'm not being too off-topic, and bear in mind that this is just my personal list.