/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10523350
Inspired by the following links.

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-10-11

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-09-11

>>10523350
Space is called space for a reason. You don't need to worry about efficient utilization of space. What matters is mass of the colony. Of course if you're going to have people living in it for a long time then you build that shit to be durable. Safety > efficiency. Near term the torus design is pretty nice. You can have an unspun radiation shield around the outside.

>>10523467
The solar system doesn't have an infinite supply of material, you know.

>>10523350
stay on earth

>>10523592
there's quite a bit of material available. It will be very difficult to exhaust all the material in the solar system.

>>10523592

There are enough for trillions of space habitats.

>>10523350

How large would a rotating station need to be for atmosphere to stay in the ring without any barrier between habitable area and space?

>>10524080
>>10524115
But if we never develop FTL, it'll start running out eventually...

>>10523592
By the time you've used up half of the easily obtained resources in just the asteroid belt you could have walked to alpha centauri.

>>10524260
That's still no reason to just waste materials if you don't need to, especially if accessing it is difficult.

>>10524239
By that time we will have probably made it to other solar systems. Shit jupiter's like 10^27 kg. Gonna be a while before we can deplete that. Plus we'll run out of phosphorus long before we run out of materials to build space habitats. Without phosphorus life as we know can't exist.
>>10524598
Cylinders are pretty fucking ideal in terms of livable area. It's a big pressure vessel filled up largely with air.

>>10524598
It isn't wasting. You could always reuse it. It's not like we are throwing shit into the sun. Though we could if we wanted to for sport or something, still wouldn't run out

>>10524188
I'm assuming you're thinking of a ring habitat with large walls on either side, which would need to be at least 100 km high to minimize atmospheric loss. At the bare minimum, you'll be needing at least a 400 km diameter ring - this will probably look like a doughnut from the side. To maintain 1 g of gravity, however, it would need to rotate once every 15 minutes. If you're using a local star as the main source of light for the ring, you'd need a complicated set of mirrors and sunshades to give an artificial 24 hour night/day cycle.

If you wanted it to appear as an elegant ring like the ones in Halo, you'll be looking at about 5,000 kms diameter or more, but even a 10,000 km ring will have a rotational period of 1h15m.

Going further, if we wanted to make a ring with roughly the same surface area as the entirety of the Earth, you could make a 103,000 km ring with a width of 1600 km, and that would give you a 4 hour "day" cycle. Finally, to make an artificial ring with a 24 hour day, you'd be looking at a diameter of 3,708,670 km. For reference, this is about ten times the distance from the earth to the moon. If one were to make this ring with, say, a width of 20,000 km, you would have the equivalent living space of 450 Earths. Building a structure of this size would require a bit less than the mass of Mercury, not counting the atmosphere, oceans, and other geography you want to fill it with.

Now, by my reckoning, using the mass of Mercury to build a habitat that could support upwards of 6 trillion people is actually quite an efficient use of matter, provided you could ever build such a megastructure.

>>10523467
>there's so much empty land, you doin't need to worry about efficient utilization of land
>SPACE KOWLOON

Intriguing.

>>10523350
Elysium is actually a good design, but the only problem is it is so goddamn big and massive that it will be impractical to launch for the foreseeable future, even the movie's timeline.

Maybe an O'Neil cylinder, but smaller scale; so Bezos can give us a Gundam-like future.

>>10524239
That's a long eventually anon, so long as to be almost irrelevant.

I never understood why science fiction focused so much on inter stellar travel. We could become a space-faring civilization and not develop FTL for millennia, or never encounter aliens and it would still be interesting.

>>10524239
No we won't. You can colonize entire galaxy clusters without FTL.

>>10525399
Really? How?

>>10525287
>Elysium
What?

>>10525603
Sleeper ships.
Generational arks.
Extreme longevity through technology.

Very fast sub light ships like .90c

>>10525625
You see that big round space station in OP's pic with the tapered pylons? It's from a movie.

>>10525603
Generation ships, long-term cryogenic storage, and digital copies of brains, to name a few. As long as we're patient enough and build our ships to be robust and reliable, we can colonize the entire Milky Way eventually.

At that point, getting to other galaxies is just a matter of determination.

>>10525638
This except for the digital brain nonsense, and travelling to other galaxies--those other galaxies aren't just sitting there anon, they're moving away from us. Trying to reach another galaxy without an FTL drive would be like trying to reach the finish line by running on a treadmill.

It matters not, there is enough of the Milky Way for humanity and the techonologally advanced descendants to explore for millions and millions of years, but it's only a possible future if we can sustainably get enough of us from this planet first.

>>10525287
Yes. Launching that mass from Earth is retarded.

If you have that kind of launch capacity, you can colonize the moon and get the materials from there.

Also, holy shit that movie had a bad plot. Every second of seeing the main characters just made me root for the citizens of Elysium, regardless of whatever flaws they might have had.

>>10525661
I thought that, but if they are pulling their resources from the moon or asteroids why did they build Elysium in the first place? Why not make a Lunar colony?

Yeah, the movie was a huge fucking disappointment. But at least it was visually interesting.

>>10525674
>why did they build Elysium in the first place?
Only reason I can think of is to have minimal travel time between Earth and Elysium, and to simulate Earth's gravity.

>>10525681
OK I guess it would have been hard to have a nail biting dramatic flight to Elysium when it takes you more than 3 days to get there.

Also regarding sleeper ships and generation ships:

The distance to the nearest star is kind of large at 4 light years, but space is three dimensional. If you increase the radius you can reach to 100 light years, you suddenly have access to >11 thousand stars.

At 1000 light years from Earth (still small compared to the thickness of the galaxy, you're looking at tens of millions of star systems, or more worlds than GW states that the Imperium of man has in warhammer 40k. And close enough that it is feasible to travel between if you have fast relativistic ships, or to colonize with just generation ships.

>>10526104
How would you make generation ships as efficient space-wise as possible then, so they can fit as many people as possible to preserve genetic diversity?

>>10526165
Huge rotating ships with bountiful supplies and enclosed biosphere propelled by matter/antimatter drive.

The weirdest thing about a situation like this would be society. You see typically we have a few generations entering and slowly growing up while simultaneously older ones die off. Greatest Generation and Boomers age out while Gen X and Millennials take their place in the adult world. With sleeper ships, in addition to the births of a new shipboard generation of babies at the same time some preserved geezers might wake up. Like going to the hospital to see your wife give birth then passing Ben Franklin in the waiting room when you check out.

>>10526165
You don't really need more than, say, 5000 people on board to maintain enough genetic diversity for the continuation of the human race without the effects of inbreeding.

If you were going for maximum space efficiency, build the thing like a huge tower; with powerful enough engines, you can simulate gravity by accelerating at 1g.

Without powerful engines, however, I wouldn't focus on space efficiency: it's more important to have a comfortable living space for the crew, so a pair of rotating cylinders with a variety of biomes and a carefully managed biosphere would be pretty comfy. You could also change the speed of the cylinders to simulate the gravity of your destination planet/moon, giving the colonists ample time to adapt to those conditions. You'd only need a cylinder 2 km across and 6 km long to house upwards of 5000 people, and larger ones would mean you have room for a natural population increase as the years pass.

Don't forget, these ships are also important in that they serve as safe havens for the colonists while they're getting the ground-based colony up and running. They might even house people in orbit for generations more as their host planet is terraformed, so you want to make a place that's nice to live in rather than packing everyone in like sailors on a nuclear submarine.

>>10526253
You'd have to CONSTANTLY accelerate though to keep it at 1g, that's why I like the rotating cylinders idea for stimulated gravity best. No matter what fuel type you're using that constant acceleration would gobble it up quick.

>>10525276
>SPACE KOWLOON
You might like Blame!

>>10523350
Never

>>10526253
you want a lot more than 5000 if you end up with a particularly bad disease. Say you have a disease with a <1% immunity rate, you're instantly fucked due to having only 50 people to run the ship, and that's assuming you didn't get unlucky and have the entire population die

>>10526262
Cylinders are the master plan
The important thing about cylinders from a material standpoint is they're basically some of the most efficient living area for your material area, strength of material can become a limiting factor in holding the ends of the cylinders together

>>10526253
>You don't really need more than, say, 5000 people on board to maintain enough genetic diversity
Say who?
Most estimates about sentinel island population range between 50 and 200.
They have survived without any problem for thousands of years.

>>10526644
Yeah, but the kind of people who will probably build and live in these ships are also the kind of people who don't want to fuck their cousin in order to continue their genetic lineage.

>>10526262
1G of constant acceleration was just an ideal hypothetical scenario, since by the time we're building generation ships, we might have found something better than relying on Newton's 3rd law to get us moving through space.

>>10526658
Yeah, a wider genetic net is best. Besides, I heard somewhere that even if that were to work in the short term, you'd want more diversity in the LONG term.

>>10527586
Exactly. More is better, and if I was given an unlimited budget and resources to make such a generation ship happen, I'd go with a population of at least 20,000 per ship, with each ship built to house 40,000, and send a fleet of at least four ships to the destination system. Even in a worst-case scenario, you'd be able to refuel and resupply from local resources and head off to another star system if your original destination turns out to be uninhabitable.

>>10529219
There's zero question of mounting a colony mission until you know if the planets are inhabitable. Telescopic investigation should be enough to tell you that.

very comfy thead

>>10526644
But they're an island of retards

>>10529239
Yeah fair point, you'd probably want to send probes there before launching an actual colony mission as well, although the patience and forward planning required will be unachievable for at least a couple of hundred years.
I really hope for immortality in our lifetime, anons. I want to visit the stars.

>>10525674
>why did they build Elysium in the first place?
Space suburb for the upper class that still had to manage things back on earth.
Little suborbital aircraft are able to easily travel back and forth so it's really just a closer commute.

>>10529239
>assuming you want to colonize planets
Survey the system for significant asteroid rings, and comet belts and just build more space habitats.

>>10523350
>Eventually, humans will need to develop space habitats to move off-world

No they fucking don't.

Kikes like you are trying to convince people its okay certain people are allowed to pollute and rape the earth because "lol, we'll just move."

No we fucking won't. 1. no one here will ever be allowed off planet because it's too far off and will be elitist for a long time to come 2. there will never be anything as bountiful and utopian as earth. all you'll get is a coffin in space that will kill you any moment or severely limit your life span.

FUCK YOU. FUCK SPACE. BLOW UP ALL THE ROCKETS. KILL ALL THE SCIENTISTS. SAVE EARTH.

>>10530634
t. Space Defense Front brainlet