Indeed. I'm a gigantic booster of "Atomic Everywhere"[1] myself, so this site has always been pure catnip.
[1] To be clear, I don't favor mass production of something like the SLAM's PLUTO air-cooled reactor, spewing fission fragments and God knows what else. I'm not insane. But nuclear-electric distributed propulsion for aviation? Oh yeah.
Here's a back-tingles moment: the SLAM, with its open reactor - sans its H-bombs - is in principle almost exactly H.G. Wells' "Atomic Bombs"[1] from his The World Set Free. Radiation-jetting objects that bounce all over the place, blasting everything.
That novel has a good claim to inventing the nuclear bomb, at least the concept of it. Leó Szilárd, after reading the novel in 1932[2], talked about the possibility of a chain reaction[3] bomb with the BWO, which would later, after a long and predictably political road, lead to the Einstein-Roosevelt letter.
Wells is one of those writers whose nickel-paperback reputation hides what a peerless visionary he was, even as a largely self-educated layman.
[1] His phrasing! "Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century, than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible ... but they did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands"
Holy balls, that is still every single bit as relevant today.
[2] 21 years post publish!!
[3] Rather than the "radiant elements" used in Well's atomic bombs. Wells in 1901 had been reading the work of William Ramsay, Ernest Rutherford, and Frederick Soddy. Wells realized that although the decay (of the time) was slow, the total amount was insanely gigantic, converting the entire mass into energy. So he posited a future material that decomposed all at once. If you had a fist-sized hunk of Francium, that you got somehow, you'd get similar effects . . assuming you had a time-freezey casing to keep it from just spontaneously nuking your everything.
As a weapon . . system? . . it's hard not to gawk at this awesome assemblage of megadeath. Charles Stross gave the SLAM the honor of fighting Cthulhu in "A Colder War".
This also features another nuke engine, the ANP turbojet that would have been installed on the B-36 variant using it (test aircraft was, I believe, NB-36). Stross seems to think the ANP was open-cycle, but the (probably) most likely choice for that program would have been a closed-cycle nuclear turbojet. Any weight/efficiency loss would have been more than made up for by the . . the just general pain in the ass of having an open nuclear reaction fooshing onto the tarmac and everywhere else.
That's actually one of my issues with atomic rockets, some of its conclusions are a bit....massaged to ensure the end result it wants in terms of space combat even if it doesn't super make sense. As an example, even as an undergrad in physics the definitiveness of 'no stealth in space' struck me as implausible given what I knew about long range detection mechanisms.
Very straight forward solution one person came up with, I'm sure there are dozens of other approaches to achieve the same result. Especially if you put military level budgets into figuring this out.
The most logical form of space combat is, as boring as it sounds, undetectable suicide drones. Space battleships are both super cool sounding and also alas probably utterly impractical.
Edit:
"In terms of military tactics, introducing stealth ships is the equivalent of punching a hornet's nest. The standard fare of bright, bold warships pumping out gigawatts without care, streaking across the Solar System laden with weapons, are forced to become meek and paranoid affairs, as a stealth ship can dump a thousand tons of weapons out of nowhere, at any time."
As an aside, this is something I wish scifi writers understood - don't include stealth ships in your stories without recognizing how they change the mechanics of war completely.
Nearly every use of the vehicle as described is more effective if it is never built, just widely publicized as being built and launched in large quantity.
I’ve been binge watching For All Mankind, which takes place in an alternate reality where society kept on pushing further into space after landing on moon.
It really makes me think what could have been if we dedicated more investment towards space travel/research.
I love that series. As someone barely old enough to have watched the moon landings, those first few minutes of the first episode hit me way harder than I anticipated. I was literally near tears watching <spoiler>.
I had some gripes with the way the timeline developed later on (like why in a world where Saturn Vs and Sea Dragons are getting launched, are space shuttles exactly like our world getting made? And getting launched to the moon?) but overall I do appreciate the serious take at an alternate history work on mainstream television.
One of the biggest causes of lack of realism is the audience. People know right away that “shuttle” means “post-Apollo spaceship”, and they don’t know enough about them to understand why it makes no sense to take it to the moon.
I haven't seen this show yet, but I know a little about why the STS was developed and why it was really a bad idea (basically the military wanted the ability to launch and recover spy satellites intact without anyone seeing, and this drove the requirements).
However, if you have a big settlement on the Moon, wouldn't a "space truck" actually make a lot of sense, for carrying large cargo loads both to and from the Moon? What am I missing?
The wings, wheeled landing gear, all that aerodynamic streamlining,etc. everything that makes it useful to fly in the atmosphere is dead weight on its way to the moon. Best off sending the supplies up in a simple capsule and using something like a space tug to take the capsule to the moon
Interesting. But is that mass really that significant compared to the rest of the craft and cargo?
If it is, would it make sense to use the Shuttle (or something like it) to ferry cargo to and from orbit, and then use a "space tug" to transport it to the Moon without the extra mass of the Shuttle?
From what I read, the main problem with the Shuttle was the requirement of bringing cargo back to Earth, intact: this prevented using small, simple capsules, with disposable rocket stages like on Saturn V (or now with SpaceX, a reusable lower stage). This required a big Shuttle craft that was horrifically expensive to both build and to maintain, and we no longer use the Shuttle because they finally figured that out. However, in an alternate timeline with significant facilities on the Moon, they'll probably want to, for instance, manufacture stuff there with the low-g environment and ship it back to Earth, which would require some way of transporting such cargo safely through re-entry. Just sticking it in a disposable capsule might not be sufficient.
I think that's the idea — space tug for the Earth/Moon trip. Even the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey got that right with the Earth-orbiting space station being the transfer point from streamlined Orion Space Clipper to spherical, leggy Aries Moon Lander.
ChatGPT + wikipedia suggests that payload to LEO, dry mass for ascent (engines, fuel tanks, etc), and dry mass for return (wings, landing gear, etc) were all in the roughly 30 tons.
But by being alternate history, you're already conditioning the audience to expect divergences and that presents a great opportunity to explore more varied alternatives that were being thrown around in the post-Apollo era. The Sea Dragon alone shows they were willing to expand audience expectations. They could've played around with ideas like the National Launch System (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Shuttle_...) and different kinds of lunar tugs.
I mean, James Cameron could've gone with generic sci-fi brick or saucer spaceships for Avatar, but instead gave us the beauty that was the ISV Venture Star, which introduced a lot of people to hard sci-fi design aesthetics.
This is actually the future NASA wanted (kinda; the Sea Dragon was always a _bit_ on the fanciful side). The shuttle (or at least _a_ shuttle; early designs were pretty different) was supposed to sit alongside Saturn V descendants; the shuttle as a cheap frequent manned launcher (of course, in reality it was anything but, but they didn't know that at the time), and the Saturn V derivatives for big heavy stuff.
In the event, budgets got cut, and the Saturn V derivatives went away.
Granted, the Shuttle going to _the moon_ is a weird one, alright.
I don't really like the series. I mean, on one level it's awesome, filling the same niche as Star Trek used to, optimistic sci-fi.
On the other hand, it feels slightly odd that everything in this alt-history just falls nicely into place. Everything is better, society, technology, even little things like king Charles marrying Camilla instead of Diana. It feels like someone doused the reality in sugar.
Which is not bad per se. I had my fill of bleak dystopias. But it is starting to stretch disbelief.
"Last Tuesday I got a call from a national magazine ... What he wasn't interested in is a list of science fiction predictions which just aren't going to happen. Except in rare moods, neither am I. ..."
It got me at Belter civilization apparently being already a well-established sci-fi trope half a decade ago. And here I thought The Expanse was the first to dive deep into this idea. I need to seriously catch up with sci-fi stories from before 1980s.
Also nice that, before completely ruining the idea of the Belters, and apparently also having "science robbing sf writers of Mars and Venus" (presumably in earlier installments of this work?), he proposed a working model for independent civilization settling Jovian moons. I wonder if there's an updated version of the table somewhere, with the numbers reflecting current knowledge of the Jovian area and space propulsion.
One thing with the early sci-fi is you will have to pretend you don’t know what we now know about the other planets. Asimov (The Martian Way I think got Saturn’s rings very wrong) and Heinlein (Mars and Venus are both depicted very wrongly and still a very entertaining story in Double Star) had a few stories and novellas.
I just imagine this is not our universe, but an alternate where whatever they came up with makes sense and is internally consistent. That's what you have to do for most sci-fi, after all :)
And by applying this rule then it's all hard sci-fi: take the fluffiest "Conan" tale and just tweak the parameters of the universe until it becomes not merely possible but actually inevitable.
Indeed - I hadn't noticed the publication date before encountering the remark about Pioneer's Jovian encounter still being in the future! High time for an update; although many of the additional moons may not be of direct interest to settlers ("By most counts, Jupiter has between 80 and 95 moons, but neither number captures the complexity of the Jovian system of moons, rings and asteroids." - https://science.nasa.gov/jupiter/moons/) but the much richer picture of the larger moons and the surprising radiation environment should either grant the Jovians their empire, or sadly banish them too.
Jupiter is a bit far from Sun, it's hard to harvest energy there. Maybe Jupiter could help, at least by reflecting more light back.
Otherwise you have to first learn how to build nuclear reactors there from local materials, and how to make fuel for them; it's sort of tricky even here on Earth.
Geothermal station on Io? Harvest the radiation belts somehow? (Probably both environments are too destructive to be practical, like putting a Crockpot on the surface of Venus)
That's a fantastic article and it makes a very coherent point about why "Belter civilization" will never make economic sense, but I think it could still work very well as a society of authority-mistrusting homesteaders. Like doomsday preppers but off-planet.
The Orions Arm universe has the Hiders [1], who do not trust the ruling class for one reason or the other and set off in spaceships to hide in the Oort clouds.
If you like the Atomic Rocket site, you might also enjoy Rocketpunk Manifesto. Unfortunately it's been silent since 2017, but there are 10 years of thought-provoking posts and comment threads to read.
I read somewhere that this was a source for the excellent world building in The Expanse and also later seasons of For All Mankind. (Personal fan theory: For All Mankind is the unofficial prequel to The Expanse.)
The Expanse plays artistic license a little though with stealth. Even with the drive off you’d have to shut down pretty much everything to have stealth in space. Anything using energy lights up in the infrared due to the second law. Also those big fusion rockets would stay hot as hell for a long time after being shut off, so even if you tried to go cold you’d probably have to wait weeks after using the drive to have much chance of hiding.
Absolute stealth isn't possible, because infra-red and thermodynamics, but IIRC being indistinguishable from the noise is fairly plausible — so long as you have a direction you're confident you can beam the excess heat in with a laser or something similar (if you're wrong and there is a sensor that way, you show up like an even bigger sore thumb).
The problem with that idea is that waste energy is by definition high entropy, so it's hard to get it all to go in one direction. It's conceivable that you could spend additional energy to pump it one way, such as having an active heat pumped shield between you and the direction you think your observers will be looking from.
Yes indeed, this requires a substantial use of power to maintain the illusion, and the illusion only works from some directions.
But that's probably fine in practice, especially in fiction like The Expanse where everyone has so much fusion power at their disposal that they can waste it on gravity-by-accelerating-the-entire-ship.
I'm waiting for one of the contributors to that site to read Project Hail Mary because I'd love to read a good technical discussion of the physics involved.
65 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] thread[1] To be clear, I don't favor mass production of something like the SLAM's PLUTO air-cooled reactor, spewing fission fragments and God knows what else. I'm not insane. But nuclear-electric distributed propulsion for aviation? Oh yeah.
I dunno what you are talking about, this is a fantastic idea. It will be fiiiine.
That novel has a good claim to inventing the nuclear bomb, at least the concept of it. Leó Szilárd, after reading the novel in 1932[2], talked about the possibility of a chain reaction[3] bomb with the BWO, which would later, after a long and predictably political road, lead to the Einstein-Roosevelt letter.
Wells is one of those writers whose nickel-paperback reputation hides what a peerless visionary he was, even as a largely self-educated layman.
[1] His phrasing! "Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century, than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible ... but they did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands"
Holy balls, that is still every single bit as relevant today.
[2] 21 years post publish!!
[3] Rather than the "radiant elements" used in Well's atomic bombs. Wells in 1901 had been reading the work of William Ramsay, Ernest Rutherford, and Frederick Soddy. Wells realized that although the decay (of the time) was slow, the total amount was insanely gigantic, converting the entire mass into energy. So he posited a future material that decomposed all at once. If you had a fist-sized hunk of Francium, that you got somehow, you'd get similar effects . . assuming you had a time-freezey casing to keep it from just spontaneously nuking your everything.
AFAIR not only would SLAM arguably be a WMD in its own right but it would also be dropping multiple H-bombs along the way.
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm
This also features another nuke engine, the ANP turbojet that would have been installed on the B-36 variant using it (test aircraft was, I believe, NB-36). Stross seems to think the ANP was open-cycle, but the (probably) most likely choice for that program would have been a closed-cycle nuclear turbojet. Any weight/efficiency loss would have been more than made up for by the . . the just general pain in the ass of having an open nuclear reaction fooshing onto the tarmac and everywhere else.
Didn't work though?
http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-hydrogen-steamer-ste...
Very straight forward solution one person came up with, I'm sure there are dozens of other approaches to achieve the same result. Especially if you put military level budgets into figuring this out.
The most logical form of space combat is, as boring as it sounds, undetectable suicide drones. Space battleships are both super cool sounding and also alas probably utterly impractical.
Edit:
"In terms of military tactics, introducing stealth ships is the equivalent of punching a hornet's nest. The standard fare of bright, bold warships pumping out gigawatts without care, streaking across the Solar System laden with weapons, are forced to become meek and paranoid affairs, as a stealth ship can dump a thousand tons of weapons out of nowhere, at any time."
As an aside, this is something I wish scifi writers understood - don't include stealth ships in your stories without recognizing how they change the mechanics of war completely.
It really makes me think what could have been if we dedicated more investment towards space travel/research.
However, if you have a big settlement on the Moon, wouldn't a "space truck" actually make a lot of sense, for carrying large cargo loads both to and from the Moon? What am I missing?
The wings, wheeled landing gear, all that aerodynamic streamlining,etc. everything that makes it useful to fly in the atmosphere is dead weight on its way to the moon. Best off sending the supplies up in a simple capsule and using something like a space tug to take the capsule to the moon
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacetug.php
If it is, would it make sense to use the Shuttle (or something like it) to ferry cargo to and from orbit, and then use a "space tug" to transport it to the Moon without the extra mass of the Shuttle?
From what I read, the main problem with the Shuttle was the requirement of bringing cargo back to Earth, intact: this prevented using small, simple capsules, with disposable rocket stages like on Saturn V (or now with SpaceX, a reusable lower stage). This required a big Shuttle craft that was horrifically expensive to both build and to maintain, and we no longer use the Shuttle because they finally figured that out. However, in an alternate timeline with significant facilities on the Moon, they'll probably want to, for instance, manufacture stuff there with the low-g environment and ship it back to Earth, which would require some way of transporting such cargo safely through re-entry. Just sticking it in a disposable capsule might not be sufficient.
A lot of Apple TV is just weird. I suspect weird people have creative input, EG Apple execs, who shouldn't.
I mean, James Cameron could've gone with generic sci-fi brick or saucer spaceships for Avatar, but instead gave us the beauty that was the ISV Venture Star, which introduced a lot of people to hard sci-fi design aesthetics.
In the event, budgets got cut, and the Saturn V derivatives went away.
Granted, the Shuttle going to _the moon_ is a weird one, alright.
On the other hand, it feels slightly odd that everything in this alt-history just falls nicely into place. Everything is better, society, technology, even little things like king Charles marrying Camilla instead of Diana. It feels like someone doused the reality in sugar.
Which is not bad per se. I had my fill of bleak dystopias. But it is starting to stretch disbelief.
Haven't watched that far, but if _King_ Charles is marrying Camilla, then it obviously didn't work out so well for poor ol' QEII, did it?
I assume the thesis is that space stuff is inspiring, leads people to aspire to better things, royals to approach dating more sensibly, etc.
They send marines up there to retake a mining site from Russians without violence, but they can't even speak Russian.
https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v35n05_1974-05/page/n107/...
"Last Tuesday I got a call from a national magazine ... What he wasn't interested in is a list of science fiction predictions which just aren't going to happen. Except in rare moods, neither am I. ..."
It's that rare HN gold.
Also nice that, before completely ruining the idea of the Belters, and apparently also having "science robbing sf writers of Mars and Venus" (presumably in earlier installments of this work?), he proposed a working model for independent civilization settling Jovian moons. I wonder if there's an updated version of the table somewhere, with the numbers reflecting current knowledge of the Jovian area and space propulsion.
Otherwise you have to first learn how to build nuclear reactors there from local materials, and how to make fuel for them; it's sort of tricky even here on Earth.
> The English system of measures will be as dead as the dodo within our lifetimes.
haha oh my
The Orions Arm universe has the Hiders [1], who do not trust the ruling class for one reason or the other and set off in spaceships to hide in the Oort clouds.
[1] https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45bd1a9eb4a5c
https://www.orionsarm.com/
It's about painting future timeline for humanity that goes on for eons
https://www.therpf.com/forums/attachments/space-flight-evolu...
http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/
The Expanse plays artistic license a little though with stealth. Even with the drive off you’d have to shut down pretty much everything to have stealth in space. Anything using energy lights up in the infrared due to the second law. Also those big fusion rockets would stay hot as hell for a long time after being shut off, so even if you tried to go cold you’d probably have to wait weeks after using the drive to have much chance of hiding.
Absolute stealth isn't possible, because infra-red and thermodynamics, but IIRC being indistinguishable from the noise is fairly plausible — so long as you have a direction you're confident you can beam the excess heat in with a laser or something similar (if you're wrong and there is a sensor that way, you show up like an even bigger sore thumb).
But that's probably fine in practice, especially in fiction like The Expanse where everyone has so much fusion power at their disposal that they can waste it on gravity-by-accelerating-the-entire-ship.