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Please, please, cut me no slack!
I'll grant that any science fiction projection of technology, if it sticks exclusively to known principals, is going to come up short as a prediction because certainly when such things as interplanetary fusion driven spacecraft are common enough that there is something like a regular passenger run between Mars and Saturn, all sorts of efficiencies which we haven't discovered yet (as the detailed engineering work hasn't been attempted yet) will probably make the whole thing work better, or at least differently, than our strict projection might conclude.
However, if I do take any sort of artistic license, I'd prefer it to be taken with some real knowledge of what I'm departing from. So keep being literal and specific, this discussion is of enormous help to me!
Thanks chestera! I'll see if I can track that reference down. I'll post the details here if I find it.
Thanks Karl, I'll check it out.
I also printed out some stuff related to the voyager trajectories (I think) from the JPL website. I'll find that link and post it here in a bit.
I'd love to learn more about orbital mechanics and, well heck, all of this stuff. This is all fascinating.
It's much more fun to write this way than to just say "hyperspace!" and pop - everybody's where they want to be just like that! The problem itself sends the story in different directions.
Yeah, I need to figure out reaction mass and all that. I think I have some notes on that part of the problem somewhere.
I was also pulling info on fusion reactors off the internet, but i haven't sifted through it all yet.
I've got a bit more time than I thought to get this all right. I sat down and worked out the details on the rest of the script for the book this last couple of days, and the trip to Saturn won't occur until issue #2. My target to finish issue #1 is June, #2 by the end of the year.
If you don't mind, I may try to bounce some of the other technical problems I'll be dealing with off you. This has been very helpful.
Shaun, you are da man.
I'll give you a Technical Advisor nod in the comic when I get it done.
Thanks alot Shaun, that's exactly the kind of info I was looking for!
Actually, the fact that the travel time has gotten longer is a good thing! I had plotted the story with the idea that a trip from Mars to Saturn would be more along the lines of a transatlantic voyage in the days of sail power only. It happens regularly, but it's still not a casual commitment to take this trip. The passenger liner I've been designing is like a giant cruise ship, with all kinds of recreation built in, to keep people amused for what I was thinking would be a trip of a couple months at least.
So it was to my dismay that my math gave me only 31 hours!
(I didn't figure the doubling in the quote because the time was already way too fast, and I recoiled in horror!)
I didn't know where to find the equation to keep the acceleration within the .4 g tolerance, but I figured that would stretch my time a bit. Plus there's still the fact that it's much more likely Saturn will actually be further from Mars than the mean distance.
Your darn tootin' it gives one a new respect for Messers Clarke et. al., and I'm lucky enough that the comic book format doesn't really require that such a depth of detail be revealed mathematically, but I really do want everything to be plausable.
To write science fiction and not be a scientist seems to require that you at least have some friends who are!
Anyway, thanks! And if anyone knows of any other info along these lines, please send me a post...
I'm working on a hard science fiction comic book that has an inhabited Solar System as it's setting, and I'm trying to play by the rules.
However, I don't have a solid background in math.
In the story, there is a passenger ship that makes regular transit between Earth, Mars and Saturn. The story involves the Mars to Saturn leg, as some of the characters are on their way to Titan.
I'm using nuclear fusion as the propulsion of the passenger liner, and I'm trying to figure out how long the trip would take.
I based my figuring on these quotes from Robert Zubrin's "Entering Space":
"a rocket using the D-He3 reaction could theoretically produce an exhaust velocity of 26,400 km/s"
and,
"practical spacecraft can be designed to reach a speed about twice their engine's exhaust velocity"
So, to be conservative I set the maximum exhaust velocity of the fusion engines of my fictional spaceship at 10,495.8 km/s. I figure they have the technology, but haven't developed it to it's fullest potential yet.
From what I can figure, the mean distance from the orbit of Mars to the orbit of Saturn is about 1199.1 million km.
For a one way trip, at 10,495.8 km/s, it would take 31.736176 hours to travel 1199.1 million Km.
(Figure at 10,495.8 km/s, if you divide 1 million by that number, it comes to about 95.28 seconds to travel 1 million km. Multiply that 95.28 by 1199.1 (that's how many million km are in the mean distance between the orbits of the planets in question) and you get about 114,250.24 seconds. Divided by 60 gives you 1,904.1706 minutes. Divided by 60 again gives you 31.736176 hours.)
Is this right? 31 hours and 45 minutes? Did I figure it wrong?
It's much quicker than I was expecting.
Some caveats:
My idea is that the ship is under acceleration to the halfway point of the trip, where it makes a flip and then decelerates the rest of the way, in order to keep the passengers under "acceleration gravity" the whole way. I haven't taken this into account yet. How long would it take to accelerate to 10,495.8 km/s if you needed to make sure you didn't pull more than .4 g the whole way? I don't know how to begin to figure this out.
Also, I figured the distance to travel as the mean distance from the orbit of Mars to the orbit of Saturn, but of course the actual planets could be much farther apart from each other. The frequency of interplanetary travel in this story is greater than I imagine waiting for near passeges would allow. Does anyone know where I can find out practical information on how far apart the planets might be from each other at any given time?
Any help you folks can give me would be greatly appreciated! I don't want to short change the details in this story.
If you're interested, I have some pencil work and development sketches for the project up on this free Geocities website.
Thanks for your kind attention! -Bill
No, no this is for real.
It's a very small robot camera that is designed to fly like a bee in the martian atmosphere,
The way I understand it, "flapping", the way a bee does it, is actually a more practical solution to flying in the ultra thin martian atmosphere than a traditional wing or propeller arrangement.
Here's a link to one of the not-very-informative articles I've found so far:
http://www.cosmiverse.com/space12030102.html
Check it out, it's really interesting.
Imagine the scene, a gorgeous desolate crater, with a crescent Earth rising, as you transmit your first command and after a slight lag, your sleek, Lunar wrecking machine flips your opponent end over end in 1/6th G!
How much would you pay to operate a Battlebot on the moon for 15 minutes? How much would you pay to just WATCH robots fighting on the moon?
Camera bots to photograph the action, battle bots to play with, admission fees and advertising revenue and some pretty imaginitve testing of new rover technologies. And some fun too.
Why not?
Can anybody provide me with, or point me to, any specific details about the entomopter concept?
I've read a couple of articles online, but none of them went into enough detail.
For example, all the articles mentioned that the proposed vehicle would be using a "chemical muscle" to achieve the high rate of wingbeats necessary to get the little bug-plane aloft. What is a "chemical muscle", how does such a thing work?
What kind of wing surface is required to use this concept in the martian atmosphere, and how would that compare to designing one for Earth?
Has there been any thought to using such a thing to transport a person? I know the ones that are being talked about now are very small, and are essentially rover enhancements to help expand the field of a robotic mission beyond surface obstacles such as boulders or small ravines. Is it even practical to consider designing one to carry a person, and if not, why?
Any info or referrals would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
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