What makes ED such a cool game is it's accurate representation of physics and gravity. For example, an SRV is gonna have to work harder to travel along a high-density planet due to it's higher gravitational pull or you must pull away far enough from away from a planet when leaving in order for it's gravitational field not to affect your ship and you can engage your Frame Shift Drive. Even just the fact it takes distance to a real, 1:1 scale is mind blowing.
However, i had a thought while watching the latest episode of Killjoy's. In the episode, one of the main characters must use a suns gravitational pull to act as a super centrifuge in order to pull apart an important quest item (because spoilers) to learn more about it. They visualize this with the main characters ship skimming along the suface of a G-Class star. The main character eventually passes out from all the blood rushing to her feet and it got me thinking:
How come commanders don't suffer the effects of a blackout when fuel scooping a star? Wouldn't star's gravity field will pull you in and cook you well done before you could do anything useful, like fuel a spaceship or science some goop?
The Science of Elite Dangerous
There are 20 replies in this Thread. The last Post () by SWAT_OP-R8R.
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(me not science guy
) ... I would say that "sometimes" is needed do not apply "real" physics in games for have it a game which can be played -
It would also be nice to play Elite without all the damn bugs, but that's just me. I'm only pissed off because of what happened on the Gnosis, now i'm kinda stuck there
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If the speed is high enough to orbit the sun then the gravitation wouldnt pull you necessarily in as your centrifugally will always pull you away.
Also the heat shouldnt be much of a problem for such space crafts. Remember we have the Parker solar probe - which has started a few weeks ago, that will also orbit the sun and even dive into its outer corona. Even nowadays we manage to bear the heat of a satelite.
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space magic!
Well, scientifically I would say that "it depends"...
Like Huor said... gravity shouldnt be an issue if you are fast enough.... really fast... damn fast. The orbital speed around such objects at such a close range has to be incredible fast.
Parking and scooping... yeah... you are pretty much dead.
Heat... well a human body is less heat resistent than a space probe.
Most electronics today can operate fine at temperatures of 100°C... a human body can not.
Of course you can compensate part of the heat.
e.g. You can paint your ship white, which reflects a large amount of visible light. Too bad for the commanders out there that decided to take a black hull paint. Guys you are fucked.
What about cooling? Well leaving the fridge open doesnt work. When you cool down the air the energie from it has to be transported away which isnt possible in a closed system.
What you can do is to rotate your ship. So the heated parts face away from the sun (are in the shadow) and can release the energy via infrared radiation.
A combination of white paint and rotation might work on small relative dark stars. On bigger stars you are toast.
Oh... and thats only when you look at the visible light ranges.
UV radiation, x-rays, gamma radiation... you are toast with cancer.
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No not 1300 years in future. We have the knowledge today we just have to gain more experience in using it and optimize these technologies. I think the main problem is to get a power source that could offer all the energy used to generate force fields and cooling.
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The thing is that even with such a material (which might exist) you wont get rid of the problems.
Gravity is not really a force... its a property of spacetime and therefore can not be shielded. While you can develop materials that can withstand gravitational forces to a certain degree, everything inside this "tin can" would still be vulnerable to gravity.
But to be honest just alone to think about that is pointless. Fact is the entire object (ship) needs to orbit fast enough around the star or it fall straight into the star. The orbital speed is the only thing that prevents you from falling down.
You know, the famous orbital explanation. "You constantly are falling down, but because you are moving so fast you miss the ground". Yeah, thats pretty much how it works.
When fuel scooping in theory should fall towards the sun pretty fast unless you move really fast.
In my eyes fuel scooping is pretty risky for multiple reasons.
The region where you can find enough material to collect is due to magnetic forces probably the hottest region (aside from the stars core). Not only would you be grilled by the heat, the magnetic forces would require you to have a very good shielding for your systems and also your body. And whatever material (hydrogen) you collect has a pretty high base temperature that needs to be cooled down and probably even an electrical charge.
I could be wrong on that stuff. My knowledge about plasma physics is limited.
Personally I would not even consider hydrogen a good fuel. Infact without an oxidizer (such as oxygen) your spaceship wouldnt even start moving at all.
And yeah, in elite we are not scooping for oxygen, right?
So in terms of chemical rocket fuel its pointless to scoop hydrogen.
What about electrical engines? Well, yeah, maybe... but hydrogen is very volatile and way too light to be used in such engines.
It makes much more sense to use the most heavy noble gases since more mass = more thrust. -> Newtons 3rd law of motion.
Xenon would be good.
Dont get me wrong here, Im not saying that hydrogen wouldnt work... it does work... but is the by far weakest propellant.
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No not 1300 years in future. We have the knowledge today we just have to gain more experience in using it and optimize these technologies. I think the main problem is to get a power source that could offer all the energy used to generate force fields and cooling.
I dont know how to generate force fields, at least not such force fields used in scifi.
In my eyes it is possible to generate plasma shield around a ship. That would really protect the ship from radiation and micro-meteorites. All you need are a bunch of strong and fine tuned magnetic coils, a bit of ionized gas, a hull which does not corrode while this force field is active and an energy source.
It wouldnt protect you from everything but it can shield at least a bit.
The energy source depends on your location.
If you intend to power a space station, ordinary solar panels would work. Also a thermal reactor can be used in space. You could let one side of the space station face towards the sun and heat it up. Inside the hull could be a liquid (water or something else) which also heats up and gets transported via pipe system to a steam reactor. That liquid would lose energy and this energy could be used for running the station or shielding it via "force fields". It would be a pretty effective method gaining energy and preventing that the station overheats at the same time.
If the NASA needs concepts and further ideas they can PM me.
A small correction to the above... dont use water. During high solar activities water could overheat and split into oxygen and hydrogen. You dont want that to happen -> see Fukushima. The hydrogen exploded -> also a good reason not to scoop hot hydrogen from a sun (eventhough such an explosion would require an oxidizer aswell).
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in ED, it appears the shields are only heat resistant. If you orbit too close to the sun, your FSD will shut down and you get to cook a little bit while letting your engines cool down before makings sure you're well done trying to leave the orbit.
In 10 years, we may have the technology to colonize the stars and become a space-faring species. in 1000 years, what we have in 10 will be ancient tech. -
isnt plasma a bit danger as its enormous hot gas? I mean with force fields - magnetism. We could generate such strong magnetic fields already nowadays, imbed a very got gas in it could be dangerous also radiation wise - i would just go with magnetic fields for a start
I was also thinking if a generator propelled by the solar wind could be used to generate energy - probably not enough for a space station, but it would be also a constant energy source (as far as the star is living
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Actuallly a plasma shield would be pretty effective against projectiles of any kind and also charge particles.
Its the only type of shield that I can imagine to work (except for armor plating). You wont get far with only magnetic shielding. Most particles would simply penetrate that.
... and... nobody said that plasma shields are risk free.
Idielly you put the same charge on the ship hull as the plasma field has. Equal charges repel each other.
Im not sure if solar wind is a good energy source for a generator. I mean its a very tiny force.
I would think that 1m² solar cells produce more electrical energy than a 1m² solar sail generator. (its just a feeling)
U know... kinetic energy is not always efficient... there is friction... which causes heat that can not so easily be used on such a generator.
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I think the most realistic approach to space travel is to develop an ion drive that manages to achieve 1 G thrust. Thats actually not much but gets you pretty far if you burn it long enough. A bit more than one month to mars... slightly longer for locations further away. And you wont need to worry about health risks for the crew. That thrust would create the "gravity" the human body would need.
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well, i wouldnt want to sit in a ship with drops nuclear explosions behind
As soon a shock absorber has a malfunction you are slobber on the wall. Next to that is the radiation still deadly. We are not good at shielding that yet.
The Expanse does many things right. The thrust with the equivalent of 1G is all we need for space travel.
In theory this possible. Since you dont want to carry around too much fuel due to the mass the efficiency of the thruster needs to be improved. Especially in the past years the efficiency multiplied. And the development/evolution of such drives is in its early stages. Its been just 11 years since the first spacecraft with ion drives were sent into space.
These drives can burn for years if required (the longest burn so far was 6 years in laboratory) and if the power input can be increased even further such engines really could end up having enough thrust for 1G accelleration one day.
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Well, for the people outside the spacecraft (perspective of the people staying at earth) a 4ly trip would take about 5.5 years.
1G gets you to a max speed of a bit more than 94% the speed of light. Accelleration and slowing down again causes this trip to be a bit longer than simply calculating lightspeed*0.94.
Time dilation would shorten the travel for the passengers to about 3.5 years.
Not an instant jump... but in my eyes a reasonable travel time for exploratoin and colonization.
Howerver, I believe Barnards star is more than 5ly away.
Closest Star system would be Alpha Centauri and the closest Star would be Proxima Centauri.
I wouldnt suggest to do such a long trip using such an engine. At such insane speeds every space particle would rip the ship apart without a working shield technology.
And maybe even worse... every photon gets shifted into the gamma ray direction.
But for travels inside the Sol system it would be perfectly fine... you could reach all planets in a reasonable time while staying below 3% of the light speed.
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But it's still gonna take you a long ass time to get from here to Barnards Star, Sol's closest stellar neighbor (~4 light years).
Barnard's star isn't the closest stellar neighbour, not even close, that privilege belongs to Alpha Centauri at 4.37Ly, while technically speaking it's Proxima Centauri at 4.24Ly as it's a trinary system. Barnard's star is 5.97LY away. Point here really is they are all too far away if we just want to pop over for tea and biscuits, until a form of travel is figured out to cover the vast distances in a reasonable time
