NASA tries a dropship

[TheJamsh]

It's my understanding that Ion engines have a much larger capable range too, although their initial acceleration is slow, then can reach much higher velocities than a chemical rocket ever could, and subsequently travel a hell of a lot further due to their efficiency.

Up until a couple of months ago I thought Ion engines were the brainchild of Star Wars and purely fiction

[Psychedelic Rhino]

When I offered up the accelerator excel file, I suggested plugging in 1g, but you can plug in the acceleration a VASMIR or Ion Drive might provide.

They are amazing systems in regard to efficiency. While nowhere near as amazing as the possibility of someday having a earth gravity, 24/7 drive to keep life normal and healthy in a spacecraft, as well as providing only days to a few weeks to anywhere in the solar system, they still will be a major jump in interplanetary spaceflight.

[GSH]

And now the rover has a sarcastic twitter feed. Note: some harsh language at the link.

-- GSH

[TheJamsh]

And now the rover has a sarcastic twitter feed. Note: some harsh language at the link.

-- GSH

I saw that earlier. Why the uneducated take the p*iss out of this project I'll never know.

[Psychedelic Rhino]

I saw that earlier. Why the uneducated take the p*iss out of this project I'll never know.

The masses need their greasy fast food fries for the brain.

[Red Devil]

nice little vid:

http://www.spacecenter.org/marslive.html

[Psychedelic Rhino]

For anyone with any interest in the Spirit and Opportunity 5 year story, here is an outstanding 4 part NGC 720P documentary with outstanding CGI with modeled terrain taken directly from the collected images.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80RtdA2EQoo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pSIZItDhts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn8biVC9dpw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vlE7e8rXII

[TheJamsh]

For anyone with any interest in the Spirit and Opportunity 5 year story, here is an outstanding 4 part NGC 720P documentary with outstanding CGI with modeled terrain taken directly from the collected images.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80RtdA2EQoo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pSIZItDhts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn8biVC9dpw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vlE7e8rXII

Blocked in my Country. FFS National Geographic...

[Zero Angel]

Blocked in Canada too. Natl Geographic + MPAA = big fail.

[Red Spot]

Iow: only visible to those in the US.

[Psychedelic Rhino]

Ahhh, a youtube science personality finally uses Celestia to illustrate some aspects of the solar system and beyond.

I mentioned it sometime in the past at BZU, but I'm surprised he didn't mention the velocity needed to achieve the parallax background shift of stars to have the effect in you see in Star Trek. Which, by the way, even WARP 10 doesn't even come close to achieving, let alone seeing it at a leisurely 1000x light speed.

[MrTwosheds]

Obviously its all nonsense of course. "Power usage approaches infinity" this is the point at which colliding with anything at all creates a "big bang" and a new Universe is born...Presumably a collision at "Maximum safe speed" would only obliterate a few galactic super clusters or so. Curious definition of safe.
Someone recently calculated that just the "shock wave" of light reflecting from a near c object of any significant size, would probably be enough to cook an entire planet. So any search for intelligent life in a ship capable of light speed is only ever likely to discover that there was some here before we turned up and destroyed it.
This does not mean interstellar space travel is impossible, just that it isn't going to happen in the time frame our impatient little species want it to.
The obvious solution is to live much much longer, indeed to be a different species entirely. Not what anyone wanted to hear. Its a harsh Universe.

[Psychedelic Rhino]

My favorite FTL of all sci-fi scenarios is from 'A Fire Upon the Deep'.

It is intentionally or unintentionally a modified version of the Alcubierre drive in which a ship dips space-time in front of the ship and equally raises space-time behind.
Vinge's FTL essentially does the same, but generates and collapses the field at a high frequency rate in the megahertz range. The ship has little to no actual inertial-based velocity, the ship 'pops' forward only a modest few tens of thousands of miles per 'jump', but does so at a high megahertz frequency.
With this technology it appears to those inside the ship they are traveling in a standard, inertial-based "normal" way, albeit at an extreme FTL velocity. Since the ship flickers in and out of our space-time dimension in the megahertz range, at a frequency far beyond the ability for us to physically sense any strobe effect, planets and close stars glide smoothly past. No inertial effects are felt stopping and accelerating to speed.

Battles between ships are esoterically bizarre.

To actually fight another ship, (fire energy weapons or physical weapons) you must be synchronized with the enemy ship. So. . not only matching the enemy ship's vector is critical, but also the frequency. Ships not in sync, or drifting in and out of resonance will flicker and fade in and out of existence. Firing a physical weapon (missile) may appear to do damage, but unless the explosion is a surface contact detonation, the wave front may not reach the enemy ship before the next jump, leaving the blast wave many tens of thousands of miles behind the next millionth of a second.

Quite a mind bender to read some of the battles in the book.

[Nielk1]

A stuttering Alcubierre drive? That would be version of the drive less likely to cause you to crash into something. Granted, no one knows a way to get something into or out of the required distortion bubble.

[Psychedelic Rhino]

He explains the drive cannot sustain the field but a few millionths of a second before collapse, but the re-generation of the field is 'easily achieved'.

During battle, physical weapons (missiles, drones and mines) generate their own field. But the appearance of detonation is non-existent. Once the weapon explodes, the field is lost and the explosion is left hundreds of thousands of miles behind. So . . .in both cases, the destroyed ship and/or the weapon's explosion is never actually seen since both the weapon and enemy ship's drive is destroyed. All the surviving ship sees is the instantaneous disappearance of both. I think of it as sort of a stone skipping along the surface of a pond.

Here's a small snippet of one of the battles;

Johanna Haugen was the first to achieve synch with the new targets.

Glimfrelle opened the main window on the Lynsnar‘s data stream: The view was almost natural, a night sky of slowly shifting stars.

The target was less than thirty million kilometers from Lynsnar, but about a millisecond out of synch. Haugen was arriving just before or just after the other had jumped.
“Drones away,” Haugen’s voice said.

Now they had a true view of Lynsnar from a few meters away, from a camera aboard one of the first weapons drones launched. The ship was barely visible, a darkness obscuring the stars beyond — a great fish in the depths of an endless sea. A fish that was now giving spawn. The picture flickered, Lynsnar disappearing, reappearing, as the drone lost synch momentarily. A swarm of blue lights spilled from the ship’s hold. Weapon drones. The swarm hung by Lynsnar, calibrating itself, orienting on the enemy. The light faded from around Lynsnar as the drones moving fractionally out of synch in space and time.

Tirolle opened a window on a hundred-million klick sphere centered at Lynsnar. The target vessel was a red dot that flickered around the sphere like a maddened insect. Lynsnar was stalking prey at eight thousand times the speed of light. Sometimes the target disappeared for a second, synch almost lost; other times Lynsnar and the target merged for an instant as the two craft spent a tenth of a second at less than a million kilometers removed. What could not be accurately displayed was the disposition of the drones. The spawn diffused on a myriad trajectories, their sensors extended for sign of the enemy ship.

“What about the target, is it swarming back? Do you need back up?” said Svensndot. Tirolle gave a Dirokime shrug.

What they were watching was three light-years away. No way he could know. But Jo Haugen replied, “I don’t think my bogie is swarming. I’ve lost only five drones, no more’n you’d expect from fratricide. We’ll see—”

She paused, but Lynsnar’s trace and signal remained strong. Kjet looked out the other windows. Five of Aniara were already engaged and three had completed swarm deploy. Nuwen looked on silently from Out of Band. The godshatter had had its way, and now Kjet and his people were committed.