Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
Spinning space station design
Carl-E:
The nascent air force suffered the first airplane related death ever. Orville was demonstrating the new flyer, and a lieutenant flying with him died when the plane wrecked. Orville was injured, but recovered.
The naval air corps eventually decided on Curtiss flyers instead...
Akima:
--- Quote from: Carl-E on 07 Feb 2012, 14:26 ---An before the shuttles, it was rockets, rocket, rockets!! Except when it was saucers.
--- End quote ---
Reputedly Gene Roddenberry didn't want the spaceship that would become the Enterprise to look like a "rocketship" with fins, and the designer Matt Jeffries wanted to avoid the "flying saucer" cliché, yet arguably the Enterprise ended up looking like a combination of both.
My pet peeve with most fictional spaceships (at least in TV shows and movies) is that they are imagined with the decks parallel to the direction of travel like aircraft or marine ships. That makes sense for a space-plane type vehicle which actually lands or takes off like an aircraft, but otherwise, not so much. Even if you handwave "artificial gravity" and "acceleration compensators" it's hard to imagine that the technical problems would not be simpler with gravity and acceleration forces along the same axis. This would produce designs with decks stacked like the floors of a skyscraper with the engines in the basement, and much simpler turbolift design. Firefly took the whole "you must fly parallel to the floors" thing to a ludicrous level with its Alliance cruiser design in which the ship is shaped like a collection of skyscrapers but flies sideways!
Is it cold in here?:
Whedon said the design was deliberately inefficient to show the nature of the Alliance.
DSL:
Wondered the same thing, Akima ... why complicate matters that are complicated enough?
Also (and I can't claim originality on this; someone with more letters after their name than I said it before I did) if you have artificial gravity control (powered by Unexplainium, not spinning) -- you HAVE your propulsion. No reaction motors or whatever "impulse drive" is, because you're already controlling acceleration.
Maybe simple reaction motors for attitude adjustment and the so-called "inertial dampers" or "dampeners" are just an automatic fine-tuning mechanism built into the gravity control, like a car's shock absorbers or an airplane's trim tabs.
I kind of think Spacedock from the ST movies would be a fine design for a starship, with the mushroom cap facing forward as a space debris shield (and the hatches on the underside, naturally). Habitat and such tucked up under the mushroom cap, other stuff further aft. Would make sense for everything from the reactionless drive to one of Larry Niven's ramscoops to Arthur C. Clarke's constant-acceleration spaceliner from "Imperial Earth."
Carl-E:
--- Quote from: DSL on 08 Feb 2012, 08:36 ---...attitude adjustment...
--- End quote ---
Sorry, been dealing with unruly students today. So this phrase popped out for me.
Mine's in a bottle at home... :angel:
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