Sublight Starships Atomic Rockets

This page is for starships that travel at conventional speeds. The fact that interstellar distances are so astronomically huge means the main problem is the voyages will take many thousands of years. And that's for the nearby stars, others will take millions of years. The main problems are that human astronauts will die of old age long before the voyage ends, and most spacecraft are not built to last that long. The starships in this page come under the headings of "Go Slow", "NAFAL" (not as fast as light) and "Apocee" (far from c). For arbitrary reasons I am defining an Apocee starship as one which cruises at a speed below 14% of the speed of light (0.14c).

This is because that is the speed where the relativistic gamma factor reaches 101% (γ = 1.01). I warned you it was arbitrary. The first of Gordon Woodcock's methods of interstellar travel is "go slow". Distance between stars is huge, traveling said distance slower-than-light will take a huge amount of time, human beings have a very limited lifespan. And it is much easier to travel at 10% the speed of light than it is to travel at 99.99999% the speed of light So you give someone an inch and they want a yard.

Given them a rocket ship and suddenly they want a star ship. SF writers want to use exotic settings on alien planets, but the real estate in our solar system mostly looks like a bunch of rocks. "That's OK," the writer thinks, "There are a million-jillion other solar systems in the galaxy, surely they are not all a bunch of rocks (I know they are there, I've got a map). I know that those spoil-sports at NASA have ruined our solar system for SF writers since their nosy space probes failed to find dinosaur-infested jungles of Venus and scantily-clad Martian princesses. But they haven't sent probes to other stars yet! Why not turn my rocket ship into a star ship?"

Unfortunately it isn't that easy. The basic problem is that interstellar distances are freaking huge. The introduction begins like this: "Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

Listen ..." and so on. Consider: a single light-year is an inconceivable abyss. Denumerable but inconceivable. At an ordinary speed — say, a reasonable pace for a car in a megalopolitan traffic, two kilometers per minute — you would consume almost nine million years in crossing it. And in Sol's neighborhood, the stars averaged some nine light-years apart. Beta Virginis was thirty-two distant.

Let's make a mental model. Say the scale is such that one astronomical unit is equal to one millimeter (1/25th inch). There is a glowing dot for the Sun, and one millimeter away is a microscopic speck representing the Earth. The edge of the solar system is about at Pluto's orbit, which varies from 30 mm to 50 mm from the Sun (about 1 and 3/16 inch to almost 2 inches). Imagine this ten-centimeter model floating above your palm. Yeah, I know ya all want yer freaking-huge testosterone-soaked genital-amplifying Omega-Death-Dreadnaught-of-Doom with Kill-O-Zap Destructo-rays and ten metric tons of truck-nuts dangling off the rear.

But if your knowledge of space warfare is limited to Star Trek, yer gonna embarrass yourself. You gotta do your homework! Warship spacecraft are not boats, one person ships are not fighter planes, and they ain't gonna name the ship types after the ones in Battle of Jutland. In the section Ship Design Analysis we will examine what spacecraft warships will need, what they won't need, and what sort of tasks they will likely be required to perform. In the section Ship Types we will examine the thorny issue of the terminiology of the various types of spacecraft. The placement of weapon mounts on the warship is discussed here.

In the current "wet" Navy, a "Fleet" is more of an organizational fiction rather than an actual entity. A group of ships belong to a fleet. But what is generally encountered at sea is a "Task Force." A few ships from a fleet are "detached" to form a task force charged with performing a specific mission. When the mission is completed, the ships of the task force are dissolved back into the fleet. Going off of a very rough historical comparison to WW1 and earlier naval organizations try: If you want to roll your own, you might find the following useful.

Noted physicist and Hugo & Nebula award-winning SF author Geoffrey A. Landis has created a catalog of every kind of StarDrive that has ever existed in science fiction. It appears here with Dr. Landis' permission. The EMF (Erik Max Francis) classification This is a satirical classification system for FTL drives.

But it has a lot of truth in it. It was created by PeetesCom. Drives in the left column move through each distinct position in space between start and destination. Drives in the right column vanish at start postion and materialize at the destination, without passing through the space in between. Drives in the upper row are somewhat non-scientific, drives in the lower row have some shreds of scientific plausibility. The previous section had just the bare basics of spacecraft design.

This section has some of the fine details, as well as a few far-out science fictional concepts. (ed note: this is science fiction, but some of the principles are sound. The most glaring fiction is the "traction drive" which is some kind of handwaving reactionless thruster forbidden by the laws of physics. It is described as "non-Newtonian", which is a dead giveaway that it is bogus science. Anyway that is why the described ship has no propellant tanks, which in a real spacecraft would dominate the design. In the story, Starling and her parents owns the largest momentum tether in space, and make a good living at slinging cargo all over the solar system.

Unfortunately the advent of traction drive ships is going to put them out of business. So Starling's foster father Gampy wants to invest in an unconventional new type of spacecraft as a business move.) “So, kiddo,” Gampy poked again. “Is a spaceship cost-effective?” “Yes and no. I mean, a traction drive isn’t that hard to fabricate.

We could even print a couple dozen ourselves. There’s enough open-source matrices on the web, we’d only have to choose one, maybe adapt it for our needs, so it’s mostly a problem of raw materials and energy. And we wouldn’t have any problem fabbing new solar panels, three or four racks and probably a dozen new capacitor farms, so it’s only a problem of raw materials and we can cannibalize most... I’m guessing we could do it in 24 months or less. Worst-case scenario is 48 months. If we double up on the fabbers, I bet we could cut the production time to 16 months.”

For some good general notes on designing spacecraft in general, read Rick Robinson's Rocketpunk Manifesto essay on Spaceship Design 101. Also worth reading are Rick's essays on constructing things in space and the price of a spaceship. For some good general notes on making a fusion powered spacecraft, you might want to read Application of Recommended Design Practices for Conceptual Nuclear Fusion Space Propulsion Systems. There are also some nice examples on the Realistic Designs page. For less scientifically accurate spacecraft design the Constant Variantions blog has a nice article on historical trends in science fiction spacecraft design. Like any other living system, the internal operations of a spacecraft can be analyzed with Living Systems Theory, to discover sources of interesting plot complications.

The improvised space warcraft are the type that seems to hold the most story potential. These would, as mentioned, likely be built by colonies that are in conflict. As they do not have to operate in an atmosphere, and are built by relatively poor colonies, they are likely to be rather crude. The basic components required are structure, propulsion, weapons, life support, power, sensors, control, and communications, and each will be briefly discussed in turn. Among science fiction stories with space flight, the overwhelming majority are about combat, both between spacecraft and between futuristic ground troops. Not to mention the occasional starship marine assault trying to board a hostile ship while in flight.

Yes, there are a few non-combat stories, mostly about exploration, but space combat is here to stay. This is just the natural continuation of the process of militarisation of space Which naturally leads to questions about the space branch of the military of various nations. The "astro-military" in other words. Some may start out as a subdivision of an existing branch and eventually grow large enough to split off (such as how the US Army Air Corps spit off to become the US Air... Some may grow large enough to absorb other branches of the military, others may be reabsorbed into other branches.

In William Keith's Galactic Marines series one of the themes of the early novels is how the US Marines fight being absorbed or eliminated. Their solution is diversifying their mission to include performing assaults on Luna and Mars. There will generally be something like a "space navy" who deal in combat spacecraft (with a sub-branch for space fighters, even though those are unlikely). There will be "space marines", who generally are found on board combat spacecraft. They are generally elite fighters, since spacecraft usually can only carry a limited number of them. There will be a "space army", which are usually just the old ground army troops ferried to combat zones on other planets on huge lightly armed troop carriers.

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