20 years from now....

[hitchcockgreen]

What do you think, BFT?
Personally I think it's off by a factor of at least 10.

http://www.universetoday.com/95099/engi ... -20-years/

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[Driving Park]

Oh man. Massive geek attack right now. The thought of EVER building a full-size functional Enterprise is an awesome one.

[hitchcockgreen]

Not a big trek fan at all but in terms of space travel it's got to beat conventional rockets, right?

And hell....lasers!

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[Sno]

Looks like the lad already has all the planning stuff set up, and I know there are many technical drawings floating around the internet. Realistically, using the Star Trek ship design would cut down on some of the design costs and time since the um -- nerd -- community already has that taken care of, it just needs to be put to the test. You fellas wanna hop on that forum and start having 3D design contests for the sake of the construction of the Enterprise?

[Blunt Force Trauma]

Apparently his website is getting slammed, it's hard to navigate the site without it dropping. But what I have seen is like like putting makeup on a pig and calling it a Victoria Secret model. Sort of like clipping and putting old playing cards on the forks of my bicycle and placing them into the spokes of the wheel and saying I have an engine because it sorta sounds like one.

For example, only the outer diameter of his rotating ring would provide gravity. Then there's the issue of getting off the rotating surface and into the rest of the ship. Also, the acceleration of Ion Drives are pitiful at the moment. He says three drives, but even he admits the ship would only get .002g. The incredible shear and moment forces on the connecting points of the large structures would be insane. All to merely LOOK like the Enterprise. Most importantly, building a ship that size and wanting to keep it the appearance of the Enterprise is probably the biggest chunk of fantasy going throughout the entire premise.

[hitchcockgreen]

I never thought star trek ships were particularly designed well for space travel, let alone whenever they'd enter an atmosphere...

How much sense does it make to have the propulsion engines mounted on spindly stalks far from the craft's central mass?
Never mind that they'd be an exceptionally easy target.

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[Sno]

I used to think the engine location was funny too, but I figured they weighed nothing and didn't matter -- but I didn't realize that when they pull forward, the only thing that's moving the ship and taking the brute force are chopsticks. Now that I think about it, there were some Star Trek ships that had the engines in a more 'logical' area. The point is to get the ship built as quickly as possible with little problems along the way. Having engines on chop sticks would complicate things, and like Green said...easy target. Especially space junk, one good whap and you're down one engine.

That another area of discussion, the infrastructure. Is 0.25" of aluminum enough to withstand rocks flying around in space?

[hitchcockgreen]

Lol not hardly.

Voyager, iirc, had engines in a better spot.

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[Driving Park]

Voyager's nacelles were still exposed, but closer to the hull of the ship. The Nebula class had comparatively good nacelle placement. Another good one was the Defiant class, which had no nacelles at all.

[Dx.]

Voyager's nacelles create the warp field, the engine was on deck 11

[hitchcockgreen]

I think Driving Park's inner Trek nerd just got spanked.

[Firestorm29]

I was looking at the design idea, and two things I don't like off the bat. First problem is everything seems to be saucer based, which begs the question what is the point of keeping the other sections. Second is if you rotate the whole saucer, I think it screws up the orientation. Instead of the bridge being two decks up, it'd be two sections to the left. A bit disorienting.

[Blunt Force Trauma]

I was looking at the design idea, and two things I don't like off the bat. First problem is everything seems to be saucer based, which begs the question what is the point of keeping the other sections. Second is if you rotate the whole saucer, I think it screws up the orientation. Instead of the bridge being two decks up, it'd be two sections to the left. A bit disorienting.

You are exactly right.

In the graphic below I have 'X'ed the torus' orientation he uses. His would be a nauseating experience. A person in the torus would feel the constant shifting of the acceleration vector as a point inside the torus traveled towards and away from the direction of travel. Additionally, as the person inside was 90 degrees or perpendicular to the direction of travel, the combined accelerations would have a lateral shear vector, increasing nausea that much more.

The proper orientation would be to place the torus axis INLINE to the direction of travel. You then design segments inside the torus to rotate up to 90 degrees depending on forward acceleration (the little red curved arrows and the grey dotted line and dashed red arrow, as I have in the red squares during accelerated space travel. The big red arrows are the acceleration vector from travel. The green square describes centrifugal acceleration during coasting shown by the blue arrow.

[Sno]

I think the USS Defiant design is better suited for space. It may not be as cool and wild as the Enterprise, but current technological restrictions would take a long time to overcome to mimic the design and function of the Enterprise. Not to mention, the sheer cost to do such research would be highly criticized by KONY Facebook people


Does this rotating design really need to be on a horizontal plane and rotate one direction?


Interesting artificial gravity articles whose theories and experiments don't really rely on a rotating structure-

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/science-f ... ewsnum=579
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/artificialgrav.php
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/arti ... -0415.html




On a side note, I can't even access the buildtheenterprise.org website anymore

But it looks like a few mentions from news companies might be the reason why
http://www.buildtheenterprise.org/forum ... gistration

[Sno]

Oh, and almost forgot the anti-matter rocket: http://www.futureoftech.msnbc.msn.com/t ... eed-771586

[Blunt Force Trauma]

No doubt research should continue, but we know a rotating living space will work, and doesn't require future technology.

As to another viable technology for artificial gravity, I would suggest a drive that provides a reasonable and constant burn or acceleration. Since I believe FTL is very unlikely (it opens the paradox of time travel), a drive with a long duration burn (anything close to a comfortable 1g) would easily answer our wishes of navigating our solar system at will, without the sacrifice of months or, in the closer planets, even weeks in a small ship.

Here's a little dynamic excel spreadsheet I whipped up that calculates interplanetary travel with a constant burn. Anything close to 1g will get you anywhere in the solar system within the time it takes to read a few novels. Try it for anywhere. Remember, a constant burn, then maybe a turnaround coast time of an hour or so, then the opposite 'de-acceleration' of the same duration. I think you'll be surprised. . .

[Sno]

Maybe I don't fully understand how one can time travel backwards. If you go faster than light, you're going faster than light can go. I guess the way I see it, arriving at point B before the light you started with at point A puts you into the future *relative of that light* you started with, but nothing absolute. If you go from our galaxy to Andromeda, you beat the light emitting from our planet and arrive at Andromeda with the view of the light emitted from our galaxy 50 years ago (wild number, I don't know how far away Andromeda is and assuming FTL travel). Going "backwards" in time with FTL travel, I just don't see.

[Dx.]

This TV show vs RL thing is getting blurry, gravity has been defined, ftl speed has been proven.

[Blunt Force Trauma]

This TV show vs RL thing is getting blurry, gravity has been defined, ftl speed has been proven.

Citation needed. Or, to make it easy and simple, show where information has an FTL capability.

HERE's a site that keeps it about as simple as possible.

HERE's a paper laying out the paradoxes in information passing from our reality to FTL and back.

HERE'S another explanation using a modified Minkowski space-time diagram.

[Blunt Force Trauma]

HERE's is another "trick" of levitation. As we saw with "Quantum Locking", this new computer modulated field allows faux anti-gravity. It is indeed impressive, but it's really just refinement of well understood principles.