Subject:
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Re: Hypothetical design question
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.space
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Date:
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Tue, 24 Jun 2003 12:08:52 GMT
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Viewed:
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690 times
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In lugnet.space, Jonathan Mizner wrote:
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But you’re going at .95c, which means you’re hitting lots of particles per
second. If your ship has a frontal area of 9 sq meters, and 90000 square
centimeters, that’s 90,000 molecules you’re running into for every centimeter
forward in space you travel. At .95c, one is traveling quite a few
centimeters forward per second. Heat would accumulate enormously fast,
almost instantly fast at such a speed, and would probably fatal to the craft.
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Jonathan,
The craft would indeed contact a lot of particles (about 2.85x10^14 per second
per square meter of frontal area at 0.95c) but the energy per particle is very
small. So the total energy of those particles seems manageable in principle, in
the department of ‘if you’ve done six impossible things this morning...’
I should note that I don’t think you could necessarily make do with mechanical
shielding alone, or would want to if you could, in part because smashing atoms
together at near-light speeds would not seem to involve kinetic heating alone.
In terms of the thought exercise of what the starships from “Revelation Space”
would/should look like (assuming they wouldn’t be instantly vaporized), I think
there would be the ‘streamlined’ forward shroud, radiators as the most
conspicuous exterior feature aft of and in the ‘shadow’ of the shroud (which in
the absence of heating would tend to get very cold in interstellar space), and a
rear drive module, also probably in the shadow of the shroud.
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The main problem is making the edges, I’d say. Although someone did make a
highly impressive A-wing-like racer on brickshelf a while back (using a few
clone parts, but quite forgivable in the circumstances) using all-tiled
surfaces with many angles.
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Agreed. At nanoscale, you might get some mileage from cones, cylinders, and
antennas. Otherwise, the builder would seem to have to carefully manage plate
and tile gaps. There would be more design freedom for the parts that didn’t
have to be streamlined.
Regards, Tom
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Hypothetical design question
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| (...) But you're going at .95c, which means you're hitting lots of particles per second. If your ship has a frontal area of 9 sq meters, and 90000 square centimeters, that's 90,000 molecules you're running into for every centimeter forward in space (...) (21 years ago, 24-Jun-03, to lugnet.space, FTX)
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