Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Relativistic Spaceship

dmytry.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 500 posts

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#421

Post by [deleted] »

sudhirj wrote: post #288
abhibeckert wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every proton would have the energy of a baseball I wonder if you could capture that energy and use it to generate thrust. Most of the energy is coming from your thrust so it'd be a lossy process however if you're able to capture all of the energy then there won't be anything left to damage the ship.

There's two different kinds of energy here - the kinetic energy of a moving thing hitting you in opposition is a problem. No way to capture that as far as I know - it's like running into a wall and asking how it can help you go faster. But then there's e=mc^2, so if the stuff you're running into is the fuel source for your fusion engine (could be a fission engine, but unlikely you'll run into heavy atoms like Uranium…

[deleted]

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#422

Post by mihaaly »

noduerme wrote: post #382
mihaaly wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the way I see it. If I accelerate modestly (0.2m/s2) to just above 30% of c where the movement is noticable enough and then put the direction of travel just beyond one of the corners (e.g. just beyond the top right) by turning the view then the direction of travel will move slowly towards the center of the screen on its own - giving a slight sense of turning in the beginning - as one would expect of current veloc…

>> the diagonal of the two can never go beyond c Sure, from the observer's system (home planet "stationary" the speed is measured from) it can't go faster than c... but that's where I don't think it's accurate. From the flyer's perspective, if you're close to c (as viewed from home) and suddenly accelerate at a 90deg angle, that shouldn't bleed off your speed forward, or be limited by your speed forward. Only from th…

The near c component of the velocity remains near c with applying 90 deg acceleration, hence that the velocity vector will remain towards this near c regardless of 90 deg acceleration characteristics. For a significant change one need to apply acceleration that has very significant deceleration component to this near c velocity vector (significant amount of >90deg acceleration applied, best to be close to 180deg).

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#423

Post by sydbarrett74 »

adrianN wrote: post #411
kypro wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I wrong to think it seems probable that such things aren't realistically possible given the fact that the universe seems to be so lifeless? If the practical limits of rocket technology don't allow life to much beyond their own solar system then given the vastness of space that would be a good reason why we don't see any evidence of intergalactic civilisations or large feats of engineering. All other explanations f…

Sending humans across thousands of light years seems almost impossible , but sending von Neumann probes throughout the galaxy should be possible with some reasonable improvement to our technology.

Yes. That's my assumption: a sufficiently advanced race won't send members of its own species into the inhospitable furthest reaches of space, but rather probes that can report data back to the home-world. That was always my issue with the Kardashev Scale: isn't the technological level of a species better dictated by how little energy they use to accomplish some goal?

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#424

Post by MilStdJunkie »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #374
heads wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re doing 2e8 m/s, your ship is long and thin with a 1m3 nose cone, and space has 100 baseballs per m3 then you’re being hit by 2e10 baseballs a second. How do I get an idea for what 20 billion baseballs (2TJ) feels like? Apparently bullets are about an order of magnitude more energetic than baseballs (800J vs 80J) so I guess I could try to build my intuition based on being shot ~2 billion times a second instea…

It's clearly not a solvable problem with current ideas about technology. No amount of ice, rock, magnetism, or Magic Unobtanium is going to make this practical. I'm not even sure about warp drives. Bending spacetime one way means it has to squish back the other way. The energy released might not affect the ship - possibly - but I'd be surprised if it didn't affect the spacetime it had just passed through. Some kind o…

It's been literal decades since I saw it, but the premise of K-Pax always seemed neat: aliens move their consciousness around through some sort of superliminal signal[1], but it looks an awful lot like madness to us humans.

Until he starts solving cosmological problems . . I sort of felt like the truth of the matter should have been more ambiguous than was presented. More Shining, less Friday the 13th.

I remember the premise being far superior to the film, but maybe the novel is worth a look.

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#425

Post by Enginerrrd »

jemfinch wrote: post #305
wincy wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another good one for me is that a cubic light year or butter would immediately collapse into a black hole with a Schwarzchild radius larger than the observable universe.

It's impossible for your fact and the fact you're replying to both be true. Water is denser than butter, and the nearest star to the sun is about 4.3ly away; if your fact were true, the universe would be a black hole. A cubic lightyear is about 8.468e+50 liters, and butter weighs 911 g/L, giving the mass of a cubic lightyear of butter to be 7.714348e+50, whose Schwarzchild radius is about 121,103,293 lightyears, abou…

The schwarzchild radius of the observable universe is indeed roughly the size of the observable universe.

Now, since the universe doesn't appear to be a blackhole, we assume there's an equal amount of stuff outside of it pulling it back into flatness.

The hoop conjecture doesn't apply in a small region of a very homogenous universe

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#426

Post by Chris2048 »

taneq wrote: post #391
MilStdJunkie wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to embarrass myself horribly here, but I've only seen the series, so I'm not a hundred percent clear on how much acceleration they're pulling in cruise[1]. If it's something like .3 g then they're fairly close[2] to the limits of something like a fusion pulse drive (tiny nodules of deuterium or whatever, ejected out the back of the ship, then lasered into fusing, then the reaction pushes on the whatever - m…

Didn’t the guy who invented the drive essentially squish himself flat (too many G’s to lift his hand and reach the ‘off’ button, anyway) with his first prototype being efficient enough that it was still going during the story?

There's a scene about the discovery: He disables voice control (or switches it to Chinese) so at high-G he cannot hit the stop button, nor command it to stop.

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#427

Post by M_bara »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #64
robertlagrant wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that old Arthur C Clarke novel, The Songs of Distant Earth[0], where they travel with an ablative shield in front made of ice, and they can make new shield segments by finding planets with water. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Songs_of_Distant_Earth

Alistair Reynolds also used this in his ship designs.

Pushing ice… a brilliant book - my first foray into hard sci-fi

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#428

Post by fifticon »

qayxc wrote: post #97
floxy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Roundtrip Interstellar Travel Using Laser Pushed Lightsails" https://ia600704.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24... "A one-way interstellar flyby probe mission uses a 1000 kg (1-metric-ton), 3.6-km-diam. lightsail accelerated at 0.36 m/s2 by a 65-GW laser system to 11% of the speed of light (0.11 c), flying by a Centauri after 40 years of travel. " "...The third mission uses a three-stage sail for a roundtr…

Holy cow! I just read the energy requirements of that third mission. Total electricity generation capacity of the entire world is about 12TW today [1], whereas that 3rd mission would require a "formidable" - as the author admits - 45,000TW at least. A mere three orders of magnitude more :) [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267358/world-installed-p...

I have a confused question here. I asked chatGPT what the approx terawatt output of the sun is. It claims it is 384.6 terawatts. I find that hard to reconcile with the earth having 12TW production. Given that your number is probably OK, that would suggest the sun output calc is way off. I wonder if any non-AI contributors have better ballpark estimates for the sun's energy output.. Hmm, I found a non-chatGPT source, which claims the same.. https://www.rmg.co.uk/file/2277/download?token=KyEQPN9O

If this relation is really true, I am somewhat shocked - us burning 1/30th of the suns energy output, can that really be true..?? If so, scary. And also 'illuminating' concerning how unsustainable what we are doing is..?

I do hope my numbers are off.

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#429

Post by MilStdJunkie »

kaashif wrote: post #315
heads wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re doing 2e8 m/s, your ship is long and thin with a 1m3 nose cone, and space has 100 baseballs per m3 then you’re being hit by 2e10 baseballs a second. How do I get an idea for what 20 billion baseballs (2TJ) feels like? Apparently bullets are about an order of magnitude more energetic than baseballs (800J vs 80J) so I guess I could try to build my intuition based on being shot ~2 billion times a second instea…

> A kiloton of TNT is 4GJ, so it’s also like a 500 kiloton bomb going off every second. Funnily, my first reaction to this comparison is that it makes it seem more plausible to me that this is possible. After all, a Star Destroyer can take gigaton level hits! But the problem with that is Star Destroyers are fictional. I've been spending too much time on spacebattles.com.

The canon energy levels given for Star Wars weaponry are so inconsistent with the presentation that one either ignores canon or accepts that the Star Wars galaxy has fundamentally different physics.

Extreme geek caution: I've been running a Star Wars pen and paper RPG since . . oh dear. . 2015, in an ancient simulationist[1] game system, and the only way I've been able to make anything consistent is dialing everything down to WW2 levels. 7.62x5X, .50 BMG, 46 cm/45 Type 94 capital ship weapons. All except for exceptional plot items, like lightsabers and doomsday weapons, which behave . . well, they're magic. Sensors are likewise pretty primitive, enhanced with canon exotics like Kronau radiation, so engagement ranges are (relatively) piddling, hostiles zip by each other all the time. Electronics and technology in general must be barely understood by literally anyone, with the powerful assemblies - hyperdrive cores, droid motivators, repulsorlift "sand" - being exotics, possibly xenotechnology from the deep past mined by xenoarchaeologists[2], but hooked together by varying degrees of "competent 1950s electrician".

In short, it's a fantasy setting with guns that players get excited about. And a community of worldbuilders that is, let's not dice words here, insane. That second point is huge if you're not 24 or otherwise gifted with a combination of hubris and spare time.

[1] All the kids today with their streamlined narrative-focused games! Seriously, though, I get it. The physics simulationist in me that brings me to HERO System says more about me as a person than my players.

[2] Archaeology a much more valuable degree in the Star Wars universe.

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#430

Post by checkyoursudo »

dtgriscom wrote: post #257
jcadam wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could use such a ship as a time machine (well, that only goes one way).

My comfy chair is a one-way time machine.

Best thing is that it works in real time. No need to futz with fancy formulas. Just wait long enough and bam you're in the future.
Post reply on HN