How long would it take to get to the moon in an "emergency"

[Darkrah]

Okay maybe not, what would you use for a manned mission to be a necessity.
Edit:
By this I mean I don't think anyone would want to read a story where humanity is wiped out over the course of a few days because the aliens aren't stupid enough to land on a hostile planet and they can't survive here anyway and wouldn't care if the atmosphere/ecosystem were ruined.

[Borgholio]

Well if the aliens are hostile, there's really no reason for us to send manned spacecraft. As others have pointed out, attacking the alien outpost with nukes or Chevys would be a better idea. If you want an excuse to send humans, then don't make the aliens hostile. Why not remove them from the immediate equation entirely? Have the Lunar Orbiter discover evidence of an underground complex of some kind. If it's big enough, only humans walking around would be able to adequately map the place.

[Darkrah]

Coolness so it would be like why we want to send humans to Mars even though we already have a number of robots there then?

[Borgholio]

Yeah aside from the "cool" factor, there really is no reason to do manned exploration unless there's something robots simply can't do. For instance on Mars, it takes several minutes just to communicate with the rovers. That's why after more than 10 years, Opportunity has "only" driven 26 miles or so. The limits of solar power + communication delay really slow things down. But then again, it's only examining rocks...so that's hardly something we need to rush. If we found the entrance to a massive underground alien city, sure we could use rovers to investigate and map it. But we would have to worry about how to power the rovers, how to communicate with them, how to bring back samples for study, how to interface with any machines or computers that may be there, and so forth. For examining rocks on the surface, a rover is just fine. But for a whole alien city, humans would probably be the best choice, especially if there's the possibility of contact with one of the aliens. Much better to do that face to face than through a robot with a 7 minute time lag.

[Enigma]

If the aliens are hostile then blast them, if not, then the simplest solution would be rovers until we can safely build a ship that can take a couple of astronauts over to the moon. No point really to throw oneself to get there until it is safe to meet them.

[LadyTevar]

Why is this in User Fiction? Off to SciFi you go!

[Joun_Lord]

Maybe have the machines be ignored by the aliens. They are up there doing their thang but any rovers or radios duct-taped to rockets we launch a them they just look at like "what da fuck is dis shit?". However they don't completely ignore us. Maybe have a Soyuz capsule or the ISS near enough to the moon the aliens actually give enough of a fuck to send a short message. A short message that we have no idea what is being said, could be "humans are tasty" or "want to buy some hyperdrives" or even "hey bro, where the hell I am, I got wasted and woke up on this moon missing a kidney".

Maybe its a religious or cultural thing where they only think other living creatures are worthy of flapping their mouth parts at which is why they showed the barest smidgen of interest when humans were relatively close enough to shout at with atleast just short range radios.

Because of that the only way we are going to figure out why they are here and what they are doing with the leftover moon landing stuff (my guess is pawning it for space liquor space money..........IN SPACE!!!!!!) is to actually chuck a few dudes or dudettes up there to ask them whats up.

[Simon_Jester]

What if we dragged out the Apollo plans? Replaced the avionics and electrics, replaced the motor and used the latest materials to build it? They got there 50 years ago, surely they can do it again now. Might not be the fastest vehicle we could place in space, but hopefully it'd get there.

The equipment hasn't been maintained in a meaningful sense for forty years or more so you can't use the original hardware. Building things in accordance with the old blueprints would STILL take years, if only because all those old paper blueprints would have to be translated into modern CAD software, then laboriously examined to see what does or does not have to be replaced.

It wouldn't necessarily save much time compared to rebuilding the whole thing from scratch. Plus, we have no operational-condition Saturn Vs to launch the hardware on, and the machine tooling to make them no longer exists.

Why not re-purpose the space shuttles? They would not be able to make a landing on the moon, but strap enough rockets to them and they could certainly make the trip there and back.

They are also decommissioned museum pieces that were never remotely equipped for a lunar flight.

The option was considered and it would have taken massive modifications (i.e. easier to start from the ground up with something vaguely shuttlelike) even when they were operational.

I've been trying to come up with a reason for the manned mission to be a necessity and have decided that humanity tries sending probes up but the aliens simply scrap them and use the raw materials for construction. They might also be stealing satellites out of orbit but are ignoring anything that has living inhabitants which will be why the humans feel it is safe to send people up maybe I haven't decided yet. So the aliens are thieves as well as ignoring radio waves or other attempts at communications.

If the aliens are doing that, then I'm not sure we'd want to be sending manned spacecraft to them (as you're now making them out to be actively hostile.) In that case, it might be more prudent to figure out how to target the Moon with live nuclear warheads. That, or strap thrusters to old V8 blocks, and start pitching those at the alien base ...

It might be most prudent to do both.

I mean, prepare for interplanetary war by all means, but if you can maybe reach and contact the aliens by the expedient of sending a manned crew, and if there is precedent for them not just randomly killing human crews on sight and actually avoiding harming them...

It's worth risking a few people's lives to have even a small chance of averting an interplanetary war, especially one we're not well armed to fight.

Well if the aliens are hostile, there's really no reason for us to send manned spacecraft. As others have pointed out, attacking the alien outpost with nukes or Chevys would be a better idea. If you want an excuse to send humans, then don't make the aliens hostile. Why not remove them from the immediate equation entirely? Have the Lunar Orbiter discover evidence of an underground complex of some kind. If it's big enough, only humans walking around would be able to adequately map the place.

If the story is about contact with aliens, though...

Hm. I think making the aliens thieves, but thieves whose respect for human life is demonstrated (i.e. by them leaving the ISS alone while stealing other satellites at random), works. It's debateable, there will be people both in-story and out-of-story who say "NO JUST NUKE THEM." But if you make it explicit that this is a risky mission, and for all we know the aliens are going to kill the diplomats, BUT it's the only chance to avoid war that might kill millions...

It works.

[Borgholio]

Maybe have the machines be ignored by the aliens.

That would actually work, until we sent the machines poking around where they weren't wanted and that makes the aliens take notice. That could set up a potential conflict.

Hm. I think making the aliens thieves

Or how about simply explorers taking samples of local tech? Think E.T. but instead of taking plant samples, they take samples of our tech as well for study. I think explorers would be more likely to listen to humans asking politely to stop stealing our satellites than actual criminals would (regardless of their respect for life).

[Simon_Jester]

Well, from OUR point of view they're thieves. Just as native societies the world over often see archaeologists removing the relics of their ancestors as theft, rather than scientific investigation.

But I do like the idea that they simply ignore the machines until those machines start to intrude on them, at which point they destroy them. However, the idea that they are clearly MORE respectful of living beings needs to be preserved for plot reasons, because it motivates sending a manned expedition.

[Borgholio]

at which point they destroy them.

Or what if they mistake the machines as a form of life and don't recognize them as probes? There could be some comedy in that.

[Zeropoint]

You know, everyone likes to say (regarding building new Apollo components), "Oh, we can't do that; we don't have any of the tooling any more."

Well, as near as I can figure it, they didn't have tooling for building Saturn V boosters lying around when they started the Apollo program, either. We've got to be better at making tools now than we were then.

[Starglider]

Well, as near as I can figure it, they didn't have tooling for building Saturn V boosters lying around when they started the Apollo program, either. We've got to be better at making tools now than we were then.

No but there had been an intensive R&D and mass production effort going on for over a decade, for liquid-fueled ICBMs, SAMs and IRBMs. The US built many thousands of them; the Mercury and Gemini boosters were modified ICBMs and the same design, test, production facilities and staff were available for Saturn.

Today the US still builds a lot of missiles but they are all solid fuelled and much smaller than what was being built in the 50s. The infrastructure supporting the current expendable boosters is much less extensive than what existed back in the days when the cold war was raging, liquid-fuelled missiles dominated and a new generation of ICBMs was entering service every few years. Even with unlimited money, I'm not sure that modern materials, CAD, simulation and rapid prototyping capabilities make up for the sheer lack of trained staff and dedicated facilities for large-scale liquid-fuelled rocket production.

[Simon_Jester]

You know, everyone likes to say (regarding building new Apollo components), "Oh, we can't do that; we don't have any of the tooling any more."

Well, as near as I can figure it, they didn't have tooling for building Saturn V boosters lying around when they started the Apollo program, either. We've got to be better at making tools now than we were then.

Not really.

When we say "Saturn V production line tooling" we mean things like the equipment to grab the big sheet of aluminum that is the rocket casing and bend it into a gigantic cylinder. These are specific physical objects. You have to work out the design aspects, order them, have them custom-made, then test them to determine if they're safe, then laboriously install them in the factory.

The technology to build a Big Dumb Machine has stayed fairly constant over the past fifty years.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

You know, everyone likes to say (regarding building new Apollo components), "Oh, we can't do that; we don't have any of the tooling any more."

Well, as near as I can figure it, they didn't have tooling for building Saturn V boosters lying around when they started the Apollo program, either. We've got to be better at making tools now than we were then.

You're talking about a lot of tooling. And some of this tooling is going to have to make parts with extremely fine tolerances. There is a lot of design work that goes into making tooling like that. And then you have to design and implement a whole production process around the new tools (and you're going to have to design it in such a way that a five year old can understand it ... you might be a rocket scientist, but the techs down on the assembly line sure as hell won't be. You'll be doing well if they aren't child molesters who'll spend the day faffing about on Youtube.)

Not to mention that, once you get your production and assembly process down, you'll want to thermal-test all the components of the rocket motor and fuel delivery systems (the fuel delivery systems especially ... you are going to need liquid-fueled rockets to get a manned mission to the Moon.) After that, you really want to test-fire the rocket motors; because it would sure suck if they exploded and scattered the brave astronauts all over the Florida Keys.

All of that takes time, and a lot of money. You can shave off time (some months) by cutting back on safety testing and prove-in ... but that just dramatically increases the chances that the first launch attempt wrecks your launchpad in a spectacular fashion.

It's not really a thing we can slap together in a few months ... unless you're just looking for inventive ways to kill astronauts.

[Adam Reynolds]

My fundamental question is why in the world would aliens land on Earth's moon? We obviously went there because it is so close. But aliens that had to travel interstellar distances to get here would have no logical reason to hang out on our Moon.

And in any case, if they had attacked our probes, I would agree that the most prudent response involves nuclear weapons over people.

[Darkrah]

I'm invoking authorial powers, the Aliens have tech that prevents all damage from tiny humans trying to harm them and then turn around and wipe out the human race. Honestly I haven't really decided why they're there yet, and this is for a story that I am currently working on so.

[bilateralrope]

Maybe it's an alien military outpost. While the reasons for it being in our solar system have nothing to do with humanity, placing it on the moon is to their benefit. Maybe it makes it much easier for the aliens to pick up signals from earth with their entertainment systems*, and human transmissions provide better entertainment than anything they brought with them. Maybe human signals help hide the outpost from their enemies. Maybe the plan is to evacuate to Earth should things go really badly at the outpost to keep their people alive, but if things don't go badly enough for that to be required then they are under orders to avoid all contact with humanity.

- If humans send anything that would damage the outpost its defences take care of it.
- If humans send a probe that lands some distance away and drives to the base. Aliens pick it up and move it away from the outpost, while clearly taking care to not damage it.

*Which are not the best tech they have. Just all the outpost personnel could afford and/or bring with them in the space allowed for personal items.

[Simon_Jester]

Darkrah, author fiat is a bad choice, especially if you can't think of a consistent and logical way for "tech that prevents all damage from tiny humans... and then [turns] around and wipes out the human race" to WORK.

I mean, seriously, it makes far more sense to write a bunch of aliens that don't actually want to wipe out humanity, and/or don't have the means to do so easily. Because otherwise you fall prey to readers asking "Why don't they just shoot us?" so often that it gets in the way of whatever else you're trying to do with the story.

My fundamental question is why in the world would aliens land on Earth's moon? We obviously went there because it is so close. But aliens that had to travel interstellar distances to get here would have no logical reason to hang out on our Moon.

From the point of view of an alien race, the Earth's moon is the celestial body closest to the Sun with no environmental hazards.

Mercury is blazing hot, Venus is blazing hot AND has a sulfuric acid atmosphere dense enough to crush anything less than a nuclear bunker. Neither is a good place to put a base until you're already well established elsewhere in the solar system.

Earth is cool enough that you can live there if you're not a frozen-ammonia-beast or something... But it has a corrosive oxygen atmosphere (may be a threat if the aliens don't breathe oxygen), plus a biosphere full of unknown organisms that might be dangerous, plus potentially hostile natives with nuclear weapons.

The moon lets you build a base that is close enough to Earth to observe it and interact with it, but far enough away from Earth to be reasonably secure from native counterattack. Plus, it is as rich in resources as any other space rock in the star system, so it's as good a place as any to build your initial beachhead base.

The other probable candidates are Mars or one of the gas giants.

Mars is viable but in some ways it's a tossup; it depends on whether you're specifically trying to avoid entanglements with humans, or whether you're trying to keep an eye on them.

The gas giants are good sources of resources but they're so far from the sun that solar power doesn't work well, and you're likely to be a LONG way from any place with a pre-existing biosphere, if it turns out that that matters to you.

And in any case, if they had attacked our probes, I would agree that the most prudent response involves nuclear weapons over people.

That is the prudent response, but unless there's evidence that they're spreading rapidly, one last attempt to contact them might seem to be in order.

Again, it's not that this is "the plan." It's that trying to talk to them via radio was Plan A, trying to send probe-bots to them was Plan B, the manned mission is Plan C.

Fighting a nuclear war at interplanetary distances against an opponent with vastly better spacecraft than us...

That, my friend, is what we call Plan Z.

[Borgholio]

Plus, it is as rich in resources as any other space rock in the star system

Wouldn't it just be easier to lasso a large asteroid and melt that down? Moon mining might be easier than a larger planet with heavier gravity, but an asteroid is pretty much already pure metal.

[Darkrah]

I enjoy a good: humans are the masters of war who can stomp anyone, including the super advanced aliens, story as much as anyone. That is not what this story is about though, I want a more peaceful first contact and am just not going to have us launch nukes at them. If you want to read that story write it yourself. For one, it's a stupid idea, the aliens could just drop rocks on us to do just as much damage as could be done by nukes if not more, and for two they have traveled several light years to get here and I don't think anyone wants to read about humans getting curb stomped by aliens advanced enough to do that. I'm not going to be posting the story here because my first drafts are horrific in their badness and I want to publish it one day, but I will give the spoilers that I have decided upon as a part of the story. I have to admit that the plot is still nebulous and nothing is final, but the I have the gist of it. The aliens show up on the moon one day for reasons unknown to man, they start mining in one specific area on the moon while ignoring all attempts to contact them. Humans send space probes which are then picked up and carried back out of their mining camp and then ignored. Eventually humans send a manned mission up and are talked to by the aliens, then there is a plot full of shenanigans and misunderstandings. Finally at the end of the story the aliens dig out of the surface of the moon a crashed alien spaceship that had been there for quite some time. It turns out that the inhabitants had put themselves into stasis after they had landed so hard as to dig themselves deep into the moon and the aliens were there on a rescue mission and we were completely unimportant. The reason we never saw the hole was because a later impact's ejecta covered it up.

[Darkrah]

So I have somehow lost the edit button on my last post so I am just adding this here:
Also I really do appreciate all of the input that I have received. It has helped me come up with a plot beyond: first contact happens when aliens land on the moon. I have had to reevaluate how things are going to work several times because of the fact that I have less of a background in harder (not hard but harder) science fiction than most people on stardestroyer.net. I do plan to be internally consistent and try to work within the grounds of reality for at least the humans, although my rules say that even if you can cheat the laws of the universe and travel FTL it still take some time to get somewhere and that there is no FTL communication. You either have to wait 100 years for your message to get somewhere or go by FTL in person to do it which is why the rescue aliens took so long to get here. They weren't really only 100 light years away but 100 is a convenient number. They only got the distress call from the crashed ship a few years ago, yes I know that that breaks relativity for them to get here without issues with time dilation, but that's why this is only harder science fiction, not hard science fiction.

[Purple]

So I have somehow lost the edit button on my last post so I am just adding this here:

This entire board is on a timer. You only have very little time to edit your posts before it expires and you can't edit any more. It drives me insane as well.

[Simon_Jester]

First of all, Darkrah, I think maybe you should try to break up your ideas into shorter paragraphs sometimes.

I enjoy a good: humans are the masters of war who can stomp anyone, including the super advanced aliens, story as much as anyone. That is not what this story is about though, I want a more peaceful first contact and am just not going to have us launch nukes at them...

Okay, but one details to point out...

For one, it's a stupid idea, the aliens could just drop rocks on us to do just as much damage as could be done by nukes if not more...

I will simply observe that if you have nuclear weapons handy, it is arguably more efficient to use them rather than redirecting asteroids (i.e. "dropping rocks"). If you do not have a readily available nuclear arsenal to hand, of course, the reverse is true.

But that's a detail.

More generally, it is better to say "we'll take risks with a few people's lives to try diplomacy before we provoke a war" than to say "the aliens have a supertechnology that lets them win easily."

Think about it from a literary point of view. If you say the second thing, you're basically saying "we should always attack first unless we know we'll get crushed if we try." It's a very bleak, warlike, and frankly immature way to look at the world.

If you say the first thing, you get to represent your characters making a controversial but rational decision, one that people might actually disagree about. You also avoid the need to "show without telling" the aliens' superweapons- because the story isn't about them exterminating humanity, so if you write them with that capability you have to assert they have it without really showing it on the page. Much better to leave the aliens' offensive capabilities unknown and uncertain.

So, it is known that they have spaceships and seems likely that they have weapons of some kind. But since they're not violently destroying stuff in Earth's orbit or doing anything other than acting weirdly and disrespectfully toward our probes, we're not going to launch an all out attack. And not just because we might lose, but because it's stupid to act that way. It's the equivalent of people randomly gunning down foreign exchange students that you've decided are trespassing.

[bilateralrope]

If you want to show off the alien weapons, just have them use them on an asteroid heading towards their base. But I agree with Simon, it sounds like the story would be better if humans don't know what the aliens have.

Two questions:
- Is the alien ship visible while travelling at FTL ?
While the light from the travel wouldn't be visible on Earth until after the ship arrives, it would still give humans information about the ships speed and where it came from.

- How do the aliens move the probe ?
Having aliens in spacesuits show up, instead of just sending a machine, shows that they are improvising. They didn't plan for human probes. Having the aliens clearly improvising while doing so shows that there is intelligence present.

Having them stick a bag over the probes camera, especially a bag that was clearly used for something else, sounds funny if done well. Plus it shows that the aliens know what a camera is.