Starship propulsion

[Kessie]

I pulled out an old story to finish up writing it, and realized I had a problem. It's a bunch of people on a starship, cruising deep space on a terraforming mission from star system to star system.

Unfortunately, I used the same propulsion as the ship in Stargate: Universe, where it just flies through a star and sucks up lots of solar juice. I don't remember borrowing the concept and I was mortified.

How would a starship be powered, anyway? Nuclear power? Rocket fuel? Space travel being what it is, you'd only need a few long burns and then inertia would do the rest. I'm just not sure how my ship would refuel way out in the boonies.

I really liked the star-hopping idea. I guess that's why my subconscious latched on to it. :-p

[eph612]

Why not invent a system that uses the gravity of stars as the mechanism of propulsion? Imagine if all the stars were connected by strings, and this ship had the ability to attach itself to those strings. Then as long as it could see the star, it could be pulled toward it. It needs some flushing out, but it might work.

[Bainespal]

I think this is one of the defining questions of the space opera genre. When you think of any given space opera, how the ships get from solar system to solar system is one of the most memorable aspects of worldbuilding.

Apr 9, 2012 20:26:38 GMT -5 Kessie said:

How would a starship be powered, anyway? Nuclear power? Rocket fuel? Space travel being what it is, you'd only need a few long burns and then inertia would do the rest. I'm just not sure how my ship would refuel way out in the boonies.

I don't think rocket fuel would be very believable to modern readers. There was probably a time when "space ship" was synonymous with "rocket ship," but I think that time is long over. Nuclear power also sounds a little old-fashioned, but since we know that nuclear technology can unleash tremendous energy and we really haven't discovered its limits and boundaries, I think nuclear propulsion could be convincing if it could be characterized uniquely.

In regard to inertia carrying the ship after initial propulsion, you may want to do some research on the physics of light. I'm horrible at science (I'm currently failing the physics course I'm taking), but I have heard that Newton's classical mechanics are only true at speeds below light. If you want your ships to cruise from solar system to solar system, they almost certainly need to go faster than light, so you may want check and see if the science offers any opportunities for you to characterize your portrayal.

[firestorm78583]

The use of gravity is a good idea. I'm reminded of the scene in 2010 with Roy Scheider where they use the gravity of one of Jupiter's moon to slow the ship and put it in orbit around Jupiter.
I'm also reminded of my favorite quote from that movie (which is also in this scene) "It looks good on paper. Unfortunately the people who put it on paper aren't out here to test it with us".

As far as other kinds of power, there is solar. If not for propulsion, then as a way to keep the batteries charged. While the ship is in the vicinity of a star, it can recharge the batteries that run the day-today equipment on the ship.

[newburydave]

Kessie;

The two most common "Starship" fuels are Methane/water to fuel advanced controlled fusion reactors and Antimater.

Antimater is not as problematic as it may appear. NASA space probes have found an "Antimater" belt high up in our troposphere where our plantetary magnetosphere seperates and isoloates antiprotons into a sort of plasma belt. It could be mined using some kind of magnetic scoop and concentrated to fuel matter/anti-matter reactors.

Methane/water can be mined from any gas giant planet by dipping into the "atmosphere" and scooping it in.

The Idea of scoop mining the heliosphere of a star (assuming you have the shielding to survive the trip) for actual plasma from the star's nuclear furnace is also viable since plasma is almost pure energy with very little mass.

In all the schemas the key is to get a means of extracting large amounts of energy and storing it somehow.

Rockets that rely on reaction mass to generate thrust are limited by Physics and relativity to low mass rockets travelling mostly by gravitational "Pipes" slowly between planets in a solar system. You reach a point where the mass of propellant becomes the whole mass of the rocket and you have no payload.

(ref: see the planetary transport network in Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network for examples of how limited reaction mass rockets are. Basically the space probes we've sent stretched the limits of reaction mass propultion systems to send very "small" payloads to the ends of the solar system)

But in the SF universe once you have large amounts of energy you can hook it up to some kind of whizz-bang drive system that doesn't rely on reaction mass to generate thrust and "Zoom" you're off.

One last note: you don't have to understand how your drive system works under the hood. The only ones who need to know that are your story world's engineers and technicians, and you must RUE how that watch works to your readers.

Your Action Figure POV's only need to know how to use it to Zip to the scene of the action and Zap the bad guys. It's the character's internal journey and personal development that makes the story, not the internal workings of the Fragalistic Integrating Trans-stellar Ocilliframbulator drive technology. Let us have no 23rd century "steam gromet factories" coming out of Team Anomaly please. (Ref the Turkey City Lexicon of Gaffes and Tropes to avoid)

Write on sis.
(I didn't know you fancied Space Opera, I knew there was something I liked about you.)

Bear His Flame, Be the Light

SGD
dave

[Kessie]

Baines and Dave: Thanks for the ideas! I knew you guys would point me in the right directions.

I love space opera, but hard sci fi scares me off. I've had bad luck yanking random titles off the shelves at the library and I don't know how to find the good stuff (stuff like the Halo novels by Eric Nylund, which are like the ultimate in character-driven space opera).

Dave: You're right about not needing to put all this stuff in the story, especially since this is for a short story keeping to about 6000 words. But I like to write like an iceburg. I know way more than is actually shown. This is for my own curiosity. Plus it does have a bearing on just how the good guys try to escape the aliens, and how fast they can get back to Earth afterwards.

[torainfor]

The problem with traditional linear travel is any significant distance and you're looking at a generation ship. That's why wormholes and such are so popular. The nearest star is 4.2 years away at light speed--but we can't get anything close to light speed.

Check out Orson Scott Card's "How to write Science Fiction and Fantasy," Ochoa and Osier's " Guide to Creating the SF Universe," Or even Mary Roach's "Packing for Mars" for more.

[Kessie]

Hmm. Do you think a tesseract is a valid form of travel? You know, bending space and stepping across the fold. I imagine it'd take an enormous amount of power, but it'd amount to teleportation.

[birdnerd]

Gordon Dickson used the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: You can't know both the location and the vector (speed) of an object with absolute certainty simultaneously.

He applied that by having the ships come to a dead stop. If you knew the vector was absolutely 0, you could be located anywhere.

[newburydave]

... Assuming that anything could be at a "a dead stop" relative to every reference frame (planet, star, etc) in the universe that might work; but I think the math would be something only God could handle

Actually Jesus is Worthy (Gr. Axos - the immovable center around which everything else roatates.) Therefore anyone fully in Christ is at the center and hence at a dead stop relative to everything else.

How about a star drive that has at its core a group of totally, entirely, completely Sanctified people . Now there's a plot line I'd like to see.

On another note: bending space is how Herbert did it in the Dune series of books, and others have used it too. Some used drug enhanced mental giants (like Herbert; he wrote in the first age of widespread LSD usage) others used machines.

The idea of generating quantum events so your ship can shuttle step across vast distances without having to actually travel the whole distance is another that I've seen. Sort of like a series of small microjumps into quantum space then back to realspace displaced by a finite distance in no time. I use that in one of my story universes.

There are others: Bubble universes that are navigated by quantum sailing ships (Lt. Leary series), moving to other dimensional level (Started by Doc Smith back int he 1950's), wormholes, and the old standy used by almost everyone Hyperspace. Hyperspace bands as in Webber's Honorverse or as a seperate sublevel dimension needing special gates to enter and exit as in Babylon 5.

Hey, use your imagination, the speculation is endless...

Bear His Flame; Be the Light!

SGD
dave

[yoda47]

My personal favorite is hyperdrive:

aarondemott.com/encyg/hyperdrive.shtm

In my Guardian Universe (by the the way, let me know if anyone has any ideas to help me re-name them...) the ships are powerd by helium fusion reactors. It's clean and high energy. (and should be aviailable in most nebula...)

In the next book or so, one of the sub-plots will have them working on zero-point (or vacume) energy. Look that up on Google (or just watch a random episode of Stargate Atlantis) for how that works.

[Kessie]

Is zero-point energy also what Syndrome used in the Incredibles with his little ray that froze people and made them weightless at the same time? Like in that scene where he bounces Mr. Incredible off the landscape. :-)

[yoda47]

I think they just randomly pulled that name off the interwebs, as, no, it's nothing like that...

[newburydave]

There's a company along Rte. 128 (America's Technology Highway) in Burlington, Massachusetts called Zeropoint Energy. I used to commute past it every day. I think they're actually developing that technology for the government, have been since the 1990's at least.

SGD
dave

[tris]

If L'engle could use tesseracts to get people from one place to another, it could work with starships. The thing to keep in mind (because most folks, even physicists don't want their story to bog down in details) is to keep it simple.

What my son (who is a physics professor) said to new writers is: use an adjective to describe what it does: pulsed light cannon, a cannon that fires pulsed light. anti-matter engines, engines that run on anti-matter, neutrino star drive, a star drive engine that is powered by neutrinos.

Then you don't have to get deep into the actual physics of the thing...most folks will assume the plausibility of the drive. After all. We're' reading science fiction. It doesn't have to be possible, just plausible.