Post by Ravished Improbability on Mar 16, 2020 21:57:08 GMT
Interplanetary Travel
Getting to space is easy with the advances of rocket and other launch technologies. Its certainly cheaper as well, with reusable rockets and space planes, expendable big dumb rockets able to lift thousands of tons in a single launch, and if you don't mind an hours long ride you can even take an elevator right up to geostationary orbit or beyond. There is even a sizable used spaceship market, if you don't want to craft your own as a weekend DIY project in the garage.
Getting anywhere still takes time, skill, and specialized equipment. Just handling the rocket fuel the wrong way is enough to get you killed and generally the whole neighborhood as well. The fuels are incredibly energetic materials with assorted additional hazards like being highly radioactive, explosive, cryogenic, toxic, and or carcinogenic to just name a few. Won't even get started on the hazards of the engines, lots of things that can kill and maim you and if your really stupid put the rest of the town you live in at risk as well.
It might take just 10 minutes to get into orbit with a rocket, faster if you don't mind feeling like your being seriously crushed the whole time. If you burn your engines for 1 earth gravity of acceleration the whole time it takes 4 hours to just get to the moon. Hope you got big enough fuel tanks on your spaceship or your just going to be a fresh impact crater on the moon if your lucky and still manage to get to the moon. Most likely your going to sling shot yourself into a very inconvenient elliptical orbit around the sun, certainly not going to the moon anytime soon. Hope you pack more than just a bag lunch and some scuba tanks of air, its going to be a few days before anyone might be in position to rescue you.
Two hours might not seem like much. Lets see what it takes to get to Mars the next most popular historic visitor attraction. Mars at its closest point is 55 million kilometers away. That's 40 hours of continuous burning from are 1G acceleration engine to land there successfully from earth on the fuel hungry least time approach. You can shave it down to 30 hours if you skip turnover and keep accelerating all the way to the surface. Of course you'll be hitting the surface at about 3.7 million kilometers per hour, kind of slow for an interplanetary missile. Though quite fast enough to make a rather impressive crater as a grave marker.
Mars is very rarely at its closest point doing so about every 13 to 15 years. It gets relatively close about every 2 years and 2 months. That is a lot of waiting if you want to save fuel and space trip time. If you have a big enough space ship its a lot nicer than a road trip, specially since there wont be any rest stops along the way to get out and stretch your legs every few hours. If you decide you want to start your trip to Mars on any odd (or even) day, it is more than likely its going to take you closer to 8 days, and if its on the other side of the sun from earth, it might take a few weeks worth of running your engines. That is a lot of rocket fuel, hope your getting good gas mileage on your spaceship.
Its also probably a good time to mention that Aether, that convenient unlimited power source down on earth, isn't available up in space. So pack a lot of batteries or find some other power-source to keep your entertainment devices and ship systems running for the duration of the trip. You wouldn't imagine the tow charges for getting your spaceship back to the nearest space station. Not to mention, you can't just open your airlock and flag down the next passing spaceship for a jump start, fuel, or even a lift to the nearest station. Nor can you just space walk yourself over to the station to get gas, batteries, and some questionable gas station grade hot dogs or nachos.
As you imagine its rather expensive to ship things that fast between planets. If feel like doing some mining in the belt it will take you 4 days of running your engine if you point your rocket straight away from the sun and head toward the nearest point in the belt. If your looking for a certain asteroid its going to take you a while, the asteroid belt is very large. It also wont be to much of a sight seeing trip, as the rocks are upwards of a million kilometers apart. Also beware the giant asteroid destroying death-rays being bounced out from the sun. Things are so much easier if your not trying to shovel sand and gravel in micro-gravity. They wont do your spaceship any good to fly through one of them, if it doesn't destroy your ship, its going to do a lot of damage to you and your ship, and prove to be a rather toasty experience as you get a taste of what its like being a roast in the oven.
Very few spaceships are design for such high speed runs, and fewer captains would want to spend so much fuel, engine life, and generally ship life on such stressful runs. A lot of trips are going to take a lot longer, unless you got a lot of money or have the skills to get hired as crew on a small runabout/express carrier going the right way your not going to be traveling by the least time route anywhere in the system.
The captains and owners of the majority of ships balance costs and time, burning only long enough get on course and a head of any reasonable delivery deadlines then letting spin gravity keep the crew and guests comfortable for the weeks or months long trip through the solar system to the destination. The ships are built quite spacious and comfortable for the reason of these long trips.
Interplanetary travel harkens back to the era of sea going ships. With space between planets filled with mostly cruise liners, freighters, and warships.
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Interstellar Travel
If you thought traveling between planets is slow, its nothing compared to traveling the expanse between the stars. There are two ways of going interstellar. One has you traveling for decades through the interstellar void; the other you still wait decades but you get to stay at home till the ground work is established to bridge the gap between the stars then its moving day.
In the early days of interstellar expansion, colony fleets consisted of huge slow ships piloted by automated systems with a large crew that is rotated in and out of cold-sleep to maintain the ship and large cargo holds full of cold sleepers and other supplies vital to setting up colonies light-years from home. Ideally 2 to 3 ships would form a colony fleet to reduce the risk of damage to one ship crippling the future colony before it can even settle into the new system. Reality is hardly ideal. It is unknown how many single ships left the system headed alone to distant stars. Limited by the effectiveness of their drive, shielding, and point defenses the early colony fleets took decades or even hundreds of years to reach their target stars. Some may even still be in route. Ghostly ships with vaults full of colonists in suspended animation, preserved between life and death till they arrive at there target systems to start there new lives. Others are literal ghost ships, gutted by the not so complete emptiness of the interstellar void, as some failure in the point defenses or engines leave them to be ravaged by relativistic grains of sand with vaults full of corpses.
Future and current colony ships are much improved with the last know fleets only taking 20 to 60 years to cruise the interstellar void to the next star. Contact is pretty much lost with the distant colonies as as light speed signs would take decades and even so the communication protocols to talk with such distant pre FTL colonies no longer exist post collapse.
No one in the sol system is known to be willing to invest the resources or if they even have the resources to put together such an expedition. Especially with the invention of FTL systems for interstellar travel and communications.
The invention of FTL travel through folding space into a wormhole changed the equation some. Interstellar travel is still incredibly expensive undertakings. The FTL core requires expensive exotic materials to construct, be it installed into a Gateway or installed into a mothership to warp entire fleets between the stars. The wormhole is so incredibly energy demanding that takes years to decades to collect the needed power require to open the gate. The power requirements are somewhat reduced when there is a receiving Gateway on the other side. On the other hand it no longer took decades to start building a colony and twice as long to learn of its success or failure. The fleet can start work in months, the only delays being detailed surveys of the colony sites and the time to travel from the FTL Gateway to the stable locations where the stored elements of the colony can be unpacked from the freighters.
With the Gate, investments can be a bit more gradual. And final purchases can be delayed till the power needed to cross the stars in one jump has been amassed. Time that the money can be invested to grow additional capital for when the time comes to invest in the ships and supplies. With no need to actually sail a fleet across the interstellar void, there is no need to make custom behemoth colony ships. Used or newly built interplanetary starships can readily work for the needs of the new colony fleet. The second biggest investment in a proper colony is the FTL core for the other side. Even if they only use it to send the occasional communications back home.
The energy costs to send a message or unmanned probe back is still pretty steep though much or reasonable compared to the full-sized wormhole needed to send a colony fleet. A message drone once a year or two sure beats the dozen or more years needed to radio a message back home at light speed. And that one drone can carry more data back home than two years of light speed communications literally light years.
Even with FTL Gateways and other worm holes many times its a one way trip for the colonists, as the average colonists can hardly afford to buy a ticket back home. Many have there slots in the colony sponsored by a corporation, usually in exchange for serving them for some length of time within the colony.
Only a handful of ships make regular use of the FTL drive. Survey ships take 100 year or longer patrols through uncharted stars. Jumping blindly to a new star, then doing science in the system till they can recharge the FTL drive for another jump to repeat the process in the next system on the survey route. Ten thousand crew usually increasing to 20 thousand by the end spending years in each system mapping and exploring to catalog the star systems for future mining or colonization. Some of the CCSS's largest battleships are said to have been fitted or the ability to fit FTL cores inside them to serve as the mothership for invasion fleets sent secretly between the stars. Tau Ceti's or in common terms the Tau Space Pirates has jumped in an invasion fleet to the sol system that seems to be stranded here for the time being do to a lack of resources to return home as well as a general sense of making a name for themselves by fighting. It is rumored that other more secret organizations have the resources to acquire their own FTL equipped ships to pursue their own initiatives.
Getting to space is easy with the advances of rocket and other launch technologies. Its certainly cheaper as well, with reusable rockets and space planes, expendable big dumb rockets able to lift thousands of tons in a single launch, and if you don't mind an hours long ride you can even take an elevator right up to geostationary orbit or beyond. There is even a sizable used spaceship market, if you don't want to craft your own as a weekend DIY project in the garage.
Getting anywhere still takes time, skill, and specialized equipment. Just handling the rocket fuel the wrong way is enough to get you killed and generally the whole neighborhood as well. The fuels are incredibly energetic materials with assorted additional hazards like being highly radioactive, explosive, cryogenic, toxic, and or carcinogenic to just name a few. Won't even get started on the hazards of the engines, lots of things that can kill and maim you and if your really stupid put the rest of the town you live in at risk as well.
It might take just 10 minutes to get into orbit with a rocket, faster if you don't mind feeling like your being seriously crushed the whole time. If you burn your engines for 1 earth gravity of acceleration the whole time it takes 4 hours to just get to the moon. Hope you got big enough fuel tanks on your spaceship or your just going to be a fresh impact crater on the moon if your lucky and still manage to get to the moon. Most likely your going to sling shot yourself into a very inconvenient elliptical orbit around the sun, certainly not going to the moon anytime soon. Hope you pack more than just a bag lunch and some scuba tanks of air, its going to be a few days before anyone might be in position to rescue you.
Two hours might not seem like much. Lets see what it takes to get to Mars the next most popular historic visitor attraction. Mars at its closest point is 55 million kilometers away. That's 40 hours of continuous burning from are 1G acceleration engine to land there successfully from earth on the fuel hungry least time approach. You can shave it down to 30 hours if you skip turnover and keep accelerating all the way to the surface. Of course you'll be hitting the surface at about 3.7 million kilometers per hour, kind of slow for an interplanetary missile. Though quite fast enough to make a rather impressive crater as a grave marker.
Mars is very rarely at its closest point doing so about every 13 to 15 years. It gets relatively close about every 2 years and 2 months. That is a lot of waiting if you want to save fuel and space trip time. If you have a big enough space ship its a lot nicer than a road trip, specially since there wont be any rest stops along the way to get out and stretch your legs every few hours. If you decide you want to start your trip to Mars on any odd (or even) day, it is more than likely its going to take you closer to 8 days, and if its on the other side of the sun from earth, it might take a few weeks worth of running your engines. That is a lot of rocket fuel, hope your getting good gas mileage on your spaceship.
Its also probably a good time to mention that Aether, that convenient unlimited power source down on earth, isn't available up in space. So pack a lot of batteries or find some other power-source to keep your entertainment devices and ship systems running for the duration of the trip. You wouldn't imagine the tow charges for getting your spaceship back to the nearest space station. Not to mention, you can't just open your airlock and flag down the next passing spaceship for a jump start, fuel, or even a lift to the nearest station. Nor can you just space walk yourself over to the station to get gas, batteries, and some questionable gas station grade hot dogs or nachos.
As you imagine its rather expensive to ship things that fast between planets. If feel like doing some mining in the belt it will take you 4 days of running your engine if you point your rocket straight away from the sun and head toward the nearest point in the belt. If your looking for a certain asteroid its going to take you a while, the asteroid belt is very large. It also wont be to much of a sight seeing trip, as the rocks are upwards of a million kilometers apart. Also beware the giant asteroid destroying death-rays being bounced out from the sun. Things are so much easier if your not trying to shovel sand and gravel in micro-gravity. They wont do your spaceship any good to fly through one of them, if it doesn't destroy your ship, its going to do a lot of damage to you and your ship, and prove to be a rather toasty experience as you get a taste of what its like being a roast in the oven.
Very few spaceships are design for such high speed runs, and fewer captains would want to spend so much fuel, engine life, and generally ship life on such stressful runs. A lot of trips are going to take a lot longer, unless you got a lot of money or have the skills to get hired as crew on a small runabout/express carrier going the right way your not going to be traveling by the least time route anywhere in the system.
The captains and owners of the majority of ships balance costs and time, burning only long enough get on course and a head of any reasonable delivery deadlines then letting spin gravity keep the crew and guests comfortable for the weeks or months long trip through the solar system to the destination. The ships are built quite spacious and comfortable for the reason of these long trips.
Interplanetary travel harkens back to the era of sea going ships. With space between planets filled with mostly cruise liners, freighters, and warships.
------------
Interstellar Travel
If you thought traveling between planets is slow, its nothing compared to traveling the expanse between the stars. There are two ways of going interstellar. One has you traveling for decades through the interstellar void; the other you still wait decades but you get to stay at home till the ground work is established to bridge the gap between the stars then its moving day.
In the early days of interstellar expansion, colony fleets consisted of huge slow ships piloted by automated systems with a large crew that is rotated in and out of cold-sleep to maintain the ship and large cargo holds full of cold sleepers and other supplies vital to setting up colonies light-years from home. Ideally 2 to 3 ships would form a colony fleet to reduce the risk of damage to one ship crippling the future colony before it can even settle into the new system. Reality is hardly ideal. It is unknown how many single ships left the system headed alone to distant stars. Limited by the effectiveness of their drive, shielding, and point defenses the early colony fleets took decades or even hundreds of years to reach their target stars. Some may even still be in route. Ghostly ships with vaults full of colonists in suspended animation, preserved between life and death till they arrive at there target systems to start there new lives. Others are literal ghost ships, gutted by the not so complete emptiness of the interstellar void, as some failure in the point defenses or engines leave them to be ravaged by relativistic grains of sand with vaults full of corpses.
Future and current colony ships are much improved with the last know fleets only taking 20 to 60 years to cruise the interstellar void to the next star. Contact is pretty much lost with the distant colonies as as light speed signs would take decades and even so the communication protocols to talk with such distant pre FTL colonies no longer exist post collapse.
No one in the sol system is known to be willing to invest the resources or if they even have the resources to put together such an expedition. Especially with the invention of FTL systems for interstellar travel and communications.
The invention of FTL travel through folding space into a wormhole changed the equation some. Interstellar travel is still incredibly expensive undertakings. The FTL core requires expensive exotic materials to construct, be it installed into a Gateway or installed into a mothership to warp entire fleets between the stars. The wormhole is so incredibly energy demanding that takes years to decades to collect the needed power require to open the gate. The power requirements are somewhat reduced when there is a receiving Gateway on the other side. On the other hand it no longer took decades to start building a colony and twice as long to learn of its success or failure. The fleet can start work in months, the only delays being detailed surveys of the colony sites and the time to travel from the FTL Gateway to the stable locations where the stored elements of the colony can be unpacked from the freighters.
With the Gate, investments can be a bit more gradual. And final purchases can be delayed till the power needed to cross the stars in one jump has been amassed. Time that the money can be invested to grow additional capital for when the time comes to invest in the ships and supplies. With no need to actually sail a fleet across the interstellar void, there is no need to make custom behemoth colony ships. Used or newly built interplanetary starships can readily work for the needs of the new colony fleet. The second biggest investment in a proper colony is the FTL core for the other side. Even if they only use it to send the occasional communications back home.
The energy costs to send a message or unmanned probe back is still pretty steep though much or reasonable compared to the full-sized wormhole needed to send a colony fleet. A message drone once a year or two sure beats the dozen or more years needed to radio a message back home at light speed. And that one drone can carry more data back home than two years of light speed communications literally light years.
Even with FTL Gateways and other worm holes many times its a one way trip for the colonists, as the average colonists can hardly afford to buy a ticket back home. Many have there slots in the colony sponsored by a corporation, usually in exchange for serving them for some length of time within the colony.
Only a handful of ships make regular use of the FTL drive. Survey ships take 100 year or longer patrols through uncharted stars. Jumping blindly to a new star, then doing science in the system till they can recharge the FTL drive for another jump to repeat the process in the next system on the survey route. Ten thousand crew usually increasing to 20 thousand by the end spending years in each system mapping and exploring to catalog the star systems for future mining or colonization. Some of the CCSS's largest battleships are said to have been fitted or the ability to fit FTL cores inside them to serve as the mothership for invasion fleets sent secretly between the stars. Tau Ceti's or in common terms the Tau Space Pirates has jumped in an invasion fleet to the sol system that seems to be stranded here for the time being do to a lack of resources to return home as well as a general sense of making a name for themselves by fighting. It is rumored that other more secret organizations have the resources to acquire their own FTL equipped ships to pursue their own initiatives.