Author Topic: EP381: Elias, Smith and Jones  (Read 20313 times)

Max e^{i pi}

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Reply #50 on: February 26, 2013, 07:30:49 AM
I did end up loving Firefly because it was exceptionally well written series despite the very heavy-handed space western aspects.  The science was pretty awful, and when it comes down to it I prefer my heroes to be the scientist, engineers, and explorers.
Wait, what? The science in Firefly was pretty awful? Compared to what? Firefly has the best track record for good science in my book. Once you accept a single element that requires the suspension of disbelief, all the science works beautifully.
In the future the Grand Unified Theory of physics was able to include gravity with electromagnetism. Basically they can now control gravity just as easily as we control electric current. We can make magnetic fields, we can make opposing magnetic fields. Same thing with them and gravity. That allows them to walk around on their ships, it allows them to easily take off and land their ships and it allows them to control their inertia to some extent.
Aside from that all the science works. Flying around the system isn't just about drawing straight lines from here to there. It's about thrust, and burn time, and direction, and gravity wells, and being where the planet is going to be when they get there. It's not like Star Wars/Trek where they can just sit there in orbit and fly wherever they want in whatever direction they want and do complex battle maneuvers.
Space is silent. No screaming ion engines, no big booms from explosions. Nothing. All we hear is the radio in the suit and maybe background music.
Supplies are scarce. Some planets have little water, there is very little water on board ship. We see them recycling water, using a very little bit. Mining materials by actually going down into the mines and hacking away at rock. No magical beams that can separate ore from rock and take it aboard your ship in orbit.
Actual doctors do actual medical stuff. They cut people open, give them medicine, perform complex scans that require huge, expensive pieces of equipment. None of this waving pieces of plastic with flashy lights and you're magically cured.
They have guns that shoot projectiles. With recoil. And jams. Missiles that can be aimed, dodged and shot down. A laser beam is a very complex, expensive and impractical weapon. And what the hell is a stun beam?
Is that enough?

Mods, I'm sorry about this. I would have started a new thread in the general science fiction subforum, but I'm too distraught.

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SF.Fangirl

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Reply #51 on: February 27, 2013, 01:30:39 AM
There's an awful lot of human habitual planets in a single system (and most of them look like the American west of the 1800s for some reason.)  Just saying.  Still, great writing, "Out of Gas" has got to be in tops of all television episodes.



Scattercat

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Reply #52 on: February 27, 2013, 03:28:32 AM
There's an awful lot of human habitual planets in a single system (and most of them look like the American west of the 1800s for some reason.)  Just saying.  Still, great writing, "Out of Gas" has got to be in tops of all television episodes.

Canonically, they're actually terraformed moons, IIRC.



Max e^{i pi}

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Reply #53 on: February 27, 2013, 10:45:20 AM
There's an awful lot of human habitual planets in a single system (and most of them look like the American west of the 1800s for some reason.)  Just saying.  Still, great writing, "Out of Gas" has got to be in tops of all television episodes.

Canonically, they're actually terraformed moons, IIRC.
They are. That's why the ark ships decided to stop in this system, lots of moons that could be (relatively) easily terraformed. And if you think about it, it makes sense. They were teraformed by humans, so human-relevant plants would be there, those brought from Eart-That-Was. The Central Planets were the first to be terraformed, and had the most resources and so look nice and green and flourishing. The Border Planets had less resources to start with, and so terraforming was less complete. The result: a parched, arid landscape filled with the few types of flora that would thrive there, ergo, the American west.

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El Barto

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Reply #54 on: March 02, 2013, 03:39:50 AM
I'm a few weeks behind the crowd listening to this one and I see you've already covered most of the fertile discussion ground.

I too really liked this story until the awful letdown of a twist at the end.  (In addition to being disappointed at the concept, it was hard to suspend disbelief and imagine that his MyPod came with an adapter that would work with the engine.)

Also, it would have been nice to know anything about WHY he decided to essentially give the secret away instead of protecting it like the recipe for Coke.  (I made up my own reason, and it's that the news was coming out anyway somehow.)

As for the physics discussion, for a good time, check out NASA's Landing and Impact Research Facility http://gftd.larc.nasa.gov/facilities/landir.html.  I had a chance to visit it when I was test flying a new automation system as part of a NASA research study.  The week I was there they were dropping the new Orion capsule from the gantry which was quite cool.  Here's a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzTQo_4XIGc&feature=youtu.be







Gamercow

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Reply #55 on: March 05, 2013, 02:36:30 PM
I'm very late to the scene, but I did like the story, warts and all.  I did have two sub-threads running in my head during the story however.  

1) The physics of impacts.  I have a paper, somewhere, on hypervelocity impacts in microgravity, and was meaning to look it up after the story, but have not gotten a chance to.  CryptoMe already did the science for us, and has enlightened us all.  I still maintain that interstellar particles will be the biggest hindrance to interstellar travel, even if interstellar space has a mass density of about 1 hydrogen atom/m^3(I think?).  Well, that and fuel.  But with ion drives, perhaps one problem can be used to solve another?  Some sort of magnetic matter scoop feeding the ion drive like some sort of interstellar ram jet?  I don't know.  I spend a lot of time pondering interstellar space travel, and I'm just not smart enough to come up with any answers.

2)As some of you probably realize by now, I'm an accent hunter.  I was trying to figure out where the narrator was from, given the accent he gave to Elias, and I guessed Mississippi.  Looks like with some research, that it's Alabama, so I wasn't too far off. At first I thought that it was a Virginian accent, but that was just because it was soft, and not too twangy.  

Also, how has no one mentioned the "flashback noise" for lack of a better word.  I loved it.  Simple, easy to hear, but did not take you out of the story.
« Last Edit: March 05, 2013, 02:38:10 PM by Gamercow »

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CryptoMe

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Reply #56 on: March 16, 2013, 07:48:17 AM
Big thank you Scattercat for the Moon Mappers shout out on episode 386!



Max e^{i pi}

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Reply #57 on: April 20, 2013, 07:18:50 PM
Well, it turns out we were a little bit mistaken, and the mistake was chiefly mine.
It turns out that 1/8 c is relativistic speeds, and therefore we need to use different equations.
So, thanks to Wolfram Alpha I got the following results:
0.195 g of mass traveling at 0.125 C has 138.55 Giga-Joules of energy. link
1 gram of TNT has 4.184 kilo-Joules of energy. link
Now we get to play with decimal places!
1 kilo-gram (1000 grams) of TNT is therefore 4.184 mega-Joules.
1000 kg (1 ton) of TNT is therefore 4.184 Giga-Joules. (Which I could have found it if i had read the Wikipedia article.)
So, 138.55 GJ is roughly equal to 33 tons of TNT. link
Now, I'm feeling just a bit too lazy to find the yield of the smallest atomic bomb ever used, but here's my reasoning:
The first atomic bombs were much simpler, because everything was simpler "back in the day". So let's have a look at the first atomic bombs.
The Trinity bomb test, the first ever detonation of an atomic device yielded about 18-20 kilo-tons of TNT. That's around 80 TJ (Terra-Joules).
Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, yielded 16 kilo-tons (67 TJ).
So, even though I made an initial mistake (and you all followed me! For shame! (Except for CryptoMe)), the result is the same.
A collision at 1/8 C with a pea-sized rock massing 1/5 g will yield around 138 GJ of energy, equivalent to 33 tons of TNT. Deadly, but still three orders of magnitude less than an atomic bomb.

Thanks go to my father, always ready to find a mistake in my calculations ;), for pointing this out.

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