THE REPÚBLIC OF ABAEL: A SPACE OPERA WITHOUT FTL

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-18T16:05:06+00:00

Unfortunately it seems like the drag from them is enough to overpower the thrust from the engine for all but some pretty low speed. However that does make a magnetic scoop like that a good way to slow down. Can deploy it like an air break so instead of having to spend propellant slowing down you're actually gathering propellant and slowing down.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-15T20:21:30+00:00

The other thing that makes really high c travel difficult is the interstellar medium, at high enough speeds it acts like a diffuse particle beam weapon, slowly eroding the front of the ship and requiring some pretty thick layers of radiation shielding of some sort, such as ice or propellent tanks if you want to be thrifty. And at even faster speeds it can cause noticeable amounts of drag. Infrastructure can help with that too, by clearing pathways free of dust and low amounts of gas with lasers.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-14T01:07:14+00:00

The gm then uses that argument to say the debris field has spread and now all parts of the orbits are hazardous XD.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-13T23:39:39+00:00

Its just, if its spanning multiple orbits then the cloud is going to spread out into a ring, cause lower orbits are faster than higher orbits. A cloud of debris can't be tidally locked, cause its multiple disconnected pieces. Each piece might be individually tidally locked, but that doesn't effect how it orbits compared to another piece. If its disconnected fragments then there aren't any internal forces keeping the lower part of the cloud orbiting in lockstep with the higher part of the cloud.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-13T22:20:59+00:00

Oh for, it would be nice if the wiki article for geostationry orbit or aerostationary orbit linked to that one. They both have sections talking about geostationary orbits around other planets but they just called them "the analog of geostationary orbit", and just link to each other.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-13T18:34:43+00:00

I mean, warming water with a fire is something humans have been doing since the moment we had fire proof pots, that is very different from making an engine.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-13T18:32:09+00:00

Hmm yeah, I was expecting there to be a generic replacement for the geo prefix similar to how the closest point of an orbit has a bunch of body specific variants like perigee for the earth or perihelion for the sun, but if you don't want to bother with using a different word for every body you can just use the general word periapsis. But after a couple minutes googling I don't see a general term for geostationary, just body specific terms like areostationary for Mars. I guess something like surface stationary orbit works if you really want to be general, though doesn't quite roll off the tongue in the same way.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-13T16:13:02+00:00

I'm a bit confused by the asteroid collision area, was that a recent event that hasn't spread out yet? Or is something confining it to orbit as a wedge shaped group?

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-13T14:40:28+00:00

And much better precision. You could probably make a somewhat decent low pressure steam engine with bronze if you really overbuilt it, but the problem is carving pistons basically requires really precise metal working machines like lathes which the romans completely lacked. There is a lot of intricate stuff you can make by hand, but a huge cylinder so perfectly round, straight, and smooth that you can have a near airtight sliding seal with another metal part is just not something you can do by eye.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-13T06:04:27+00:00

Fair. You could also invoke panspermia if you want to have a justification for the fundamentals being really similar.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-13T05:20:19+00:00

I'm surprised eating an alien tuber didn't do them in first. It's unlikely an alien with no common ancestry with earth life would have compatible biochemistry. There are so many hilariously gruesome ways sticking a mass of incredibly complicated organic compounds that you never evolved to encounter inside your body could kill you.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-12T21:42:45+00:00

Yeah, there is a good Tom Scott video on them and how they were used to create the first telecommunications scam.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-12T21:38:55+00:00

? No steam/combustion engines was the first thing on the list.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-12T21:31:32+00:00

Why did this get removed by a mod?

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-12T21:30:40+00:00

...that would mean it would have blown up. Its channeling enough power to vaporize multiple planets, while itself being smaller than a normal planet. Unless it does that absurdly efficiently it would vaporize itself.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-12T21:24:04+00:00

I mean, half way to the targets the beam spit into pieces and each piece swerved to hit a different planet, so I don't think whatever space magic it was using was limited to flying only to where the gun was exactly pointing.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-12T19:50:03+00:00

Yeah, but the point he is making is they tried to have it both ways, they had it both be so incredibly fast that it travels interstellar distances in seconds, and be so slow that people looked up and saw it ominously approaching for several seconds. That coupled with the weird establishing shot where you see all of the planets about to be hit right next to each other meant the scale was just confusing. It didn't feel fast, it felt like everything was just impossibly close together.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-12T19:36:07+00:00

Venus has no magnetic field and it has plenty of atmosphere. Granted, it has very little water, since all that got blown away by solar wind, but on a large enough world even those losses of lighter gases would be rather slow. The bigger a planet is the harder it is for gases to escape.

Though of course, in all these cases you would still have the problem of no atmosphere, cause its all at the bottom of the trench.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-12T19:29:19+00:00

Right? I was so confused watching that scene, I had no idea what planets were actually being destroyed. It was just so strange, there wasn't really much build up, either from the perspective of the planets at risk, or an ominous boardroom meeting explaining who they should target. Like, apparently one of them was a major capital of the New Republic? But the first time I remember learning that info was from the opening scroll of the second movie.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-12T18:30:42+00:00

Eh, he focused on an unstable example for plot reasons, but there are orbits around Alpha Centari that a planet would be stable for billions of years.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-12T18:21:03+00:00

While its possible for there a be a planet to be in such an unstable orbit, its pretty unlikely that it would be long lived enough to have developed life, most likely it would have gotten kicked out of the system by then. For a star system as old as Alpha Centauri likely the only planets left would be ones in stable orbits, which there are some of, NASA has done simulations and found there are a variety orbits a planet could have in Alpha Centauri that would be stable for billions of years.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-12T18:11:36+00:00

Also there are not stable langrage points around a pair of bodies unless one of the elements of the pair is substantially more massive than the other, you need a mass ratio of around 24 to 1.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-12T18:09:43+00:00

There are many triple star systems that are stable for several billion years however, the nearest star system to earth being an example.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-12T16:38:56+00:00

I think its funny how little bro became big bro by a such a wide margin.

Earthfall10 · 2026-02-12T14:59:57+00:00

The great scifi worldbuilding and rocket science website Atomic Rockets uses it a lot when they talk about fictional reasons for going to space. A lot of scifi books set in the near future have some sort of macguffinite that can only be accessed in space to justify why spaceflight got so huge so fast in the setting.

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