Need help with my Sci-Fi

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Stark
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Re: Need help with my Sci-Fi

Post by Stark »

I love when people use 'hard scifi' and '.9c' in seriousness. :v

Even putting aside elevator issues, getting in and out of a gravity well always costs an assload of energy. Moving around in orbit is much 'cheaper' in this sense, where even the cities themselves can be moved (slowly) quite cheaply.
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Re: Need help with my Sci-Fi

Post by Metahive »

Stark wrote:Jesus Metahive. Antimatter is like a battery; high density power storage. It doesn't generate power becuase you won't get as much out as you had to put in. The huge multi-kilometre mirrors and solar systems are where the power is generated.
Stop nitpicking. Also, by that definition nothing ever generates power due to the second law of thermodynamics.
And once people are in space, moving around (in the earth-moon system) is pretty easy. Once the area is full of habitats with functioning biospheres, it's definitely easier than jumping onto a Saturn V or having a supertech space elevator. All your industry won't even be inside the habitats, so it can benefit from environmental isolation whilst literally being within throwing distance of the habitat. What industry I particular do you see as being difficult?
All that require resources not available on whatever planet the space station hovers above. That's the whole stumbling block for an aspiring, self-sufficient colony. We are talking about a war scenario after all here.
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Stark
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Re: Need help with my Sci-Fi

Post by Stark »

Wow, you're a fucking moron. The society is generating power from the sun, and using antimatter as efficient storage - OH EMM GEE NITPICKING!

I think you're fundamentally ignorant of the scale of 'space station' being discussed, but why would you build space habitats over a planet with no useful resources? Why should this be a metric for 'hard scifi'?
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Re: Need help with my Sci-Fi

Post by Simon_Jester »

Batman wrote:Franky if you if you have the technology and resources to build that kind of space habitat what's stopping you from simply dumping all your waste into the sun? So it'll take a while getting there. Who cares? You're rid of it, as long as everybody is informed of its trajectory there's not going to be any accidental collisions, the sun's lifetime is reduced by another femtosecond or so. Either we have spread across the galaxy by the time she blows or we have not.
From an energy conservation standpoint, it may actually be easier to fling stuff into deep space than into the sun- flinging stuff into the sun requires a delta-v of tens of kilometers per second to cancel your orbital speed around the sun.

About the only thing you really need to be able to dispose of like this is radioactive waste, I suspect- which may be less trouble to get rid of than to use, although even then storing it in a crater on the moon is probably just as good a plan as anything else.
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Re: Need help with my Sci-Fi

Post by CaptainChewbacca »

If you don't want lots of spin, I'd suggest you do magnetic shoes but have the sleeping chambers be in a centrifuge. Some amount of gravity is good for us, and spending 6-8 hours a day in simulated gravity would counteract a lot of the negatives.
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Re: Need help with my Sci-Fi

Post by Simon_Jester »

The problem with space mining, or one of them, is rare earths. Where are you getting the selenium, cadmium, et cetera, for solar panels?

Those are subject to the same problems as uranium- they're not universally available, and geologic processes can be really helpful in concentrating the minerals into accessible forms.
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Re: Need help with my Sci-Fi

Post by NoXion »

Simon_Jester wrote:The problem with space mining, or one of them, is rare earths. Where are you getting the selenium, cadmium, et cetera, for solar panels?

Those are subject to the same problems as uranium- they're not universally available, and geologic processes can be really helpful in concentrating the minerals into accessible forms.
If my understanding of solar system formation is correct, wouldn't Mercury be a good source of such materials? A small, but dense rocky planet rich in metals with plenty of sunlight for solar power. Even if the rare earths aren't initially accessible, you wouldn't have to concentrate the local sunlight all that much to drive a solar thermal plant. The lack of an atmosphere also means one can use mass drivers on the surface of Mercury to send cargo pods elsewhere in the solar system.
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Re: Need help with my Sci-Fi

Post by ThomasP »

Metahive wrote:
Stark wrote:Jesus Metahive. Antimatter is like a battery; high density power storage. It doesn't generate power becuase you won't get as much out as you had to put in. The huge multi-kilometre mirrors and solar systems are where the power is generated.
Stop nitpicking. Also, by that definition nothing ever generates power due to the second law of thermodynamics.
The OP says he's using antimatter for fuel rather than power generation and you go into point-scoring mode with that devastating "lol still making power technically!" but you want to pull the "stop nitpicking" card?

Jesus christ.
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Metahive
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Re: Need help with my Sci-Fi

Post by Metahive »

ThomasP wrote:The OP says he's using antimatter for fuel rather than power generation and you go into point-scoring mode with that devastating "lol still making power technically!" but you want to pull the "stop nitpicking" card?
All I do is disputing that there's a fundamental divide between "fuel" and "power generation" (ever heard about coal power plants?). What's so devious or disagreeable about that? Saying that "fuel" can be used for power generation I don't regard as nitpicky, saying that "power generation" can only ever refer to power plants I however do.
DSIII wrote:Let's say you are around Venus. You can skim the atmosphere to easily pick up shitloads of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and smaller amounts of other elements. (actually you'd get carbon dioxide, but chemistry with enough input energy - from the sun - will let you break it down)
I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding here about what I'm skeptical of. I think I'll sum it up thusly:

Can every planet in the solar system have equally sized populations and industries with negligible interdependence to the extent of making a "fair" war between them a feasible idea as per the OP's scenario and be within the confines of plausible technological advancement from our point of view today? That's the question I'd like answered. Thank you.
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Number Theoretic
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Re: Need help with my Sci-Fi

Post by Number Theoretic »

If the OP's nations in the solar system possess fairly advanced material processing science, AI and robotics technologies, i'd say population and industrial power don't correlate. Destructionator already hinted at an abundance of resources needed for a fair industrial base in the solar system. So i'd say yes, the OP's scenario could support a "fair" war situation that could support an interesting plot.
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Re: Need help with my Sci-Fi

Post by Metahive »

That they could do all those things if they had only all those wonderful technological miracles at their disposal is out of the question (although I'm still mighty skeptical about the whole "fair distribution of resources" thing), but that's why I asked if those represent plausible technological advancements from our point of view today. Just what kind of advancements would mining and processing tech have to undergo to make the OP's scenario feasible for example?
People at birth are naturally good. Their natures are similar, but their habits make them different from each other.
-Sanzi Jing (Three Character Classic)

Saddam’s crime was so bad we literally spent decades looking for our dropped monocles before we could harumph up the gumption to address it
-User Indigo Jump on Pharyngula

O God, please don't let me die today, tomorrow would be so much better!
-Traditional Spathi morning prayer
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