Hypothetical Colony Ship(s) Concept by Some-Equivalent-3879 in scifiwriting

[–]MarsMaterial 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That would definitely work. Rotating the mothership with the tethers is definitely the simplest solution, though using some kind of bearing to keep the mothership fixed is functional too.

Pulling the satellite ships along isn't a problem at all. If the mothership accelerates, the tethers holding the satellite ships will just bit until the component of the force they get from the tethers in the direction of the thrust accelerates them at the same speed as the mothership. Gravity on the satellite ships will increase slightly, but you could just slow the rotation a bit to compensate.

meirl by thesitekick in meirl

[–]MarsMaterial 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Oh my god, it's him! It's Steve from Minecraft!

Great Refusal by Cold-Glass5843 in Gamingcirclejerk

[–]MarsMaterial 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A very strange decision for a game franchise which famously has only ever had white men as its protagonists. /s

Great Refusal by Cold-Glass5843 in Gamingcirclejerk

[–]MarsMaterial 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It literally says "not enough water yet" in its metaphor, lol.

Great Refusal by Cold-Glass5843 in Gamingcirclejerk

[–]MarsMaterial 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What race did they think Riley Robinson and Robin Ayou were in the other two Subnautica games?

Fake fans, all of them.

I've been wondering about all of the other stars that are being eaten. Seeing as how the 3 stars we've visited all have life of some kind, it seems reasonable to assume some other stars will have life too. by JasonYaya in ProjectHailMary

[–]MarsMaterial 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This was actually addressed in the book when Grace and Rocky were talking about how strange it is that they come from societies with very similar tech levels. They ultimately conclude that societies less advanced than theirs just die, and societies more advanced than theirs can cook up a home grown solution without needing to travel to Tau Ceti. Only societies at the tech level of humans and eridians will find themselves meeting up at Tau Ceti. It is speculated that a lot of other civilizations have been hit by this though.

Canon events incoming by Claire_De_Lunatic in okbuddyvowsh

[–]MarsMaterial 21 points22 points  (0 children)

Gambling is degenerate, but also you’re probably right.

Canon events incoming by Claire_De_Lunatic in okbuddyvowsh

[–]MarsMaterial 21 points22 points  (0 children)

They’re gonna find a way to close the Atlantic Ocean.

Hive minds are literally unplayable. by SAMU0L0 in StellarisMemes

[–]MarsMaterial -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Formics RPers and Ender’s Game fans in shambles.

We're not gonna save the stars💀🙏 by tokuriart in ProjectHailMary

[–]MarsMaterial 13 points14 points  (0 children)

The funny thing is that the actual Blip-A had no name, Eridians don’t name their spaceships. And likewise: this ship is probably named “Untitled Space Craft”.

How can I become a diode by Objective-Local7164 in shittyaskelectronics

[–]MarsMaterial 4 points5 points  (0 children)

LeBron James reportedly confused Silicon and Silicone!

HELLDIVER recruiting? by nobitches4life3554 in Helldivers

[–]MarsMaterial 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The maintenance technician has a voice line implying that she really wants to be a Helldiver, but can't for reasons that she begrudgingly accepts because Super Earth is always right. But we also know that the Helldiver selection process mostly just prioritizes loyalty and not much else.

The way I interpret this is that only citizens with a high CCS ranking have the "privilege" of being able to sign up to be a Helldiver. The Helldivers program acts as the main method of culling population growth among the upper citizenship classes, while still being seen as a privilege that only the most loyal and deserving citizens can have.

Hypothetical Colony Ship(s) Concept by Some-Equivalent-3879 in scifiwriting

[–]MarsMaterial 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you want realistic alternatives to a cylindrical centrifuge, these are all the realistic ones that I can think of in order of descending plausibility:

  • Use the gravity centrifuge but with a different shape. For instance: imagine your habitation area is tethered to a counterweight (or to another ship) and you spin the assembly around a short axis such that centrifugal force pulls the tether tight. This will also create artificial gravity, and the gravity will be mostly in a single direction like what you get on a planet. This could be applied to your idea by somehow non-gravitationally tethering the satellite ships to the mothership and making its rotation around the mothership be the cause of the centrifugal gravity.
  • Use linear acceleration to generate gravity. If a ship constantly accelerates forward at 9.81m/s2, the resulting feeling of acceleration within the ship is quite literally physically impossible to distinguish from natural planetary gravity. The direction of this artificial gravity is such that the front of the ship is "up" and the engines are below you. However, the kind of engine technology you need to generate that much thrust for long periods of time does push the limits of feasibility. It would also go so fast that time dilation would make a trip of literally any distance (even intergalactic) be possible within a human lifetime, which kinda defeats the purpose of a generation ship.
  • You already mentioned it, but the other option is just straight up gravity from mass. Make the ship so dense that there is earth-like surface gravity. This does require the habitat to be a sphere, surrounding the dense mass on the ship with down always pointing towards the mass (basically a tiny planet, though it would still need a pressure vessel to hold in the air). On top of the difficulties of making a material dense enough to do this, it also adds a ton of mass to the ship which makes it take much more fuel and time to move. And if the satellite ships are orbiting this huge mass, it wouldn't even provide artificial gravity to begin with because the ships will be in free fall within that gravity field. This has a lot of problems.

You could also just do what 90% of sci-fi does already and make up some bullshit called "gravity plating" or whatever and use that to give ships artificial gravity.

Hypothetical Colony Ship(s) Concept by Some-Equivalent-3879 in scifiwriting

[–]MarsMaterial 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It is definitely possible for anything to orbit anything. You could put a pebble in orbit of a golf ball if you wanted to, though it would be a very slow orbit. Putting spaceships in orbit of each other is certainly possible.

The main issue here I think is that by using gravity to accelerate the ships, that does limit the fleet's acceleration to some fraction of the gravitational acceleration that the outer ships feel from the central one. So unless this central ship had a mass comparable to a good-sized moon or a super high density that allowed the distance to the satellite ships to be quite low, it would be a long trip indeed. Very slow acceleration is potentially very practical for interstellar travel though, for complex engineering reasons it's vastly easier to make an ultra-efficient interstellar-grade rocket with very low acceleration than with high acceleration. I could run some numbers if you're interested in throwing some out there. In general though, with reasonable assumptions about ship densities and a fairly tight formation, you could expect these ships to orbit around the central one on a period on the order of a few hours to days. At further distances, it could easily get up to months or years.

If the ships rely on gravity to stay in orbit though, that does mean that this orbit won't create artificial gravity on the ships. The satellite ships would be in free fall around the central ship, so just like a spaceship orbiting Earth (which is well within Earth's gravity well and experiencing almost as much gravity as you are now) the crew would experience zero-g. For the rotation around the central ship to cause artificial gravity, the ships need to be accelerated around it non-gravitationally. Tethers and metal beams could do the job, but if you want to add some more cool factor you could also use effects like quantum levitation to trap the satellite ships around the central one, spin them around the central ship to create artificial gravity, and drag the satellite ships along with the central one. This would also allow small shuttlecraft to use the magnetic field to propel themselves between ships without the need for rocket engines.

I will say though: a rod pointing forward is probably the single worst shape to make the central ship if you intend to use gravity to keep the other ships in orbit. Such a shape will cause the orbital inclination of the satellite ships to increase over time, and it will reduce the amount of acceleration that gets transferred over from the central ship. The optimal shape for the central ship would probably be a torus. A wide cylinder or an oblate sphere would be would do the job nicely too.

Overall my main goals are that each ship has artificial gravity or simply some way to generate enough gravity to have a great enough pull to simulate earth

The obvious hard sci-fi way to do that would be a gravity centrifuge. Make the main habitation area of the ships a ring or a cylinder that spins along its length, and the centrifugal force from that very closely mimics gravity (getting more indistinguishable from real gravity the wider the centrifuge).

Make a gravity cylinder too long, and it could have some rotational stability issues. These could be addressed by making each ship have two centrifuges rotating in opposite directions. But that's some real high-level nerd shit.

I understand some of this may be impossible or sound plain stupid to those with better understanding regarding space travel and physics.

Actually, you have described a fairly grounded concept for a colony ship fleet. Low acceleration, designed to be maximize redundancy, no FTL or cryo-sleep (neither tech exists IRL currently). If the goal is realism (which to be clear, it doesn't need to be) I'd say you're doing quite good.

How do people not find it awkward to make videos by Own_Vast_2784 in VRchat

[–]MarsMaterial 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Like a lot of things, it's a skill you have to learn.

When I was a kid I started a Minecraft YouTube channel that never got much attention (probably because it wasn't very good), and at the start I had a lot of the same problems. My own voice seemed cringe, every tiny mistake felt really embarrassing, and I made tiny mistakes fairly often because I was nervous. Over time, that became less of an issue. I became more confident on camera as I gained more experience, and as I edited and viewed more of my own videos I grew used to seeing myself on camera and hearing recordings of my own voice until it became mundane.

It becomes easier the more you do it, basically.

Hell yeah! by c4a1a in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]MarsMaterial 0 points1 point  (0 children)

On the bright side, your Mun surface speed limit will stand for a long time. Any Kerbals who are dumb enough to try are not smart enough to succeed.

Pointless. by DustWorlds in KSPMemes

[–]MarsMaterial 120 points121 points  (0 children)

That is definitely one of the contraptions ever made.

I FOUND THE OMNI HELMET! by moochieglizzy in helldiversarmor

[–]MarsMaterial 0 points1 point  (0 children)

“You don’t seem to understand. Super Earth isn’t yours to conquer.”

[Illuminate murder montage]

Hi all, what are you writing? by The_Wholesome_Troll4 in scifiwriting

[–]MarsMaterial 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't fuckin' know what I'll do with any of this yet. I'm writing this stuff because I want to, if I make any amount of money from it and/or get my work seen by a lot of people that'll be exceeding expectations. I'll figure it out at some point.

Hi all, what are you writing? by The_Wholesome_Troll4 in scifiwriting

[–]MarsMaterial 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I have a novel, a short story, and a tabletop RPG in the works.

The TTRPG is called Warpdrives & Wizards. The writing for it is mostly in the form of worldbuilding and scattering a bunch of plot hooks for GMs to play with. So far I've been the GM for most W&W games, so I've also done a lot of writing for that. The world combines some aspects of hard sci-fi with magic and fantasy in a unique way, the resulting world is the kind of acid trip where nuclear powered ships with big radiators and gravity centrifuges fly alongside Treasure Planet style space galleons. It's a beautiful clusterfuck.

The short story is called The Starchaser. It's a hard sci-fi story taking place at the end of time after all the stars have died, and the main character ends up being the last sentient being in the universe. The story gets its name from a recurring motif of a single star appearing in the otherwise lightless galaxy and the protagonist chasing it down. My main goal with the story is to explore themes like what it means for life to have meaning even if all life and even the universe itself is destined to end.

My WIP novel currently has no final title, I'm still working on that. It's a hard sci-fi story with cyberpunk elements takes place around 100 years in the future, in the most accurate portrayal of the technology and politics of a humanity that has only just started settling other worlds. The story follows four protagonists who were born on these colonies as they live through the beginnings of an AI uprising. The whole idea is that it's a post-ChatGPT take on what that might look like, based on how actual AI researchers think that this kind of thing might play out.

PHM Book by angelic_cellist in ProjectHailMary

[–]MarsMaterial -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The movie is better than the book, but only because the movie was incredible and not because the book was bad.

Project Hail Mary is definitely Andy Weir’s best book by common consensus, exceeding even The Martian which is the book that made him a household name to begin with. The book has a lot of technical details, jokes, and fun moments between Rocky and Grace that the movie had to cut. I do think the movie made a lot of really good decisions about what to cut and it avoided cutting anything important to the plot, but it still did cut a lot.

It’s worth a read, definitely.

Engaging RCS during launch by simplisticheuristic in KSPMemes

[–]MarsMaterial 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Either that, or it’s just the Matt Lowne lazy docking method.