Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Arts & Talents => Topic started by: Black Wolf on May 04, 2007, 02:04:30 am
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I have a sleeper ship travelling at 0.2C for sixty years to get to Epsilon Indi. I need my people to wake up for one day out of every two months to exercise to prevent muscle atrophy (I'm not sure if that's enough, but they'll be in simulated (i.e. rotational) gravity so I'm assuming they wont lose muscle mass anywhere nearly as quickly as modern day astronauts do). The problem, however, is that if they're waking up every two months, and somebody is awake at least once a week (If everyone got up at the same time, respiration rates would go through the roof and overstress the life support) then there's no reasonable way to assume that earth wouldn't be keeping up regular contact with them. I need one. My entire story idea rests on the fact that the sleepers wake up at Indi, they will have no idea about what has been happening on earth for the past several decades.
So, come up with a reason for me. I can;t really think of anything other than a malfunction, which seems both a little deus ex machina (though I can live with that) but also bloody hard to imagine... I mean, these things would have backups, right? You'd think anyway. So, err, any other ideas?
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Sabotage.
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Interference from nearby stars/nebulas...loos of signal..background radiation?
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Use a futurama style stasis freezer or a red dwarf stasis field, that way, they wont lose muscle and earth wont be able to contect them. Then have a malfinction make them wake up.
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The propulsion system creates an electromagnetic field surrounding the craft that helps to protect it from cosmic radiation - a la the Earth's protective electromagnetic shielding - but also distorts and deflects most radio wavelengths approaching the craft, rendering communication impossible whilst the engine is active.
You could also fall back on a micrometeoroid shower damaging the transceiver early in the voyage, downing communications for the duration. Or possibly stellar phenomena interrupting communications, like an abnormally prolonged period of heightened stellar variance generating a communications blackout.
Honestly, if you want a reason outside of a deus ex machina or technobabble solution, you'll be hardpressed to find one.
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Hmmm...
Well, stasis fields and whatnot are out. I want this to be low tech space travel. I need to have stasis for the basic premise to work, but I want it to have disadvantages. Plus I need my guy to form friendships on the trip out there.
Interference from nearby stars and stellar phenomena and whatnot are out, since the ship's only going to Epsilon Indi - 11.3 light years away. If Alpha centauri is next door, then Indi is, well, across the road. There's nothing in between us and it.
Sabotage is a possibility. I'm trying to "foreshadow" later events in the story as much as possible in the first part, and sabotage would work well for that, if I could do it properly. It'd be strange to have the communications system be the only thing damaged, but it could be worked in.
Micrometeorite collision is also doable. The ship will have to pass through the Oort cloud after all, so there's a nice convenient source in roughly the right spot (about 10% of the journey, five or so years in, too late to turn back if nothing critical was damaged).
Hmm, well, I'll pick one. Cheers guys.
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[late response]
Muscles are exercised by tiny electric shocks. No need to wake up.
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It could be a top secret project and everyone involved was arrested or killed, like in Idiocracy
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[late response]
Muscles are exercised by tiny electric shocks. No need to wake up.
Would that even work? Sure, you could make them contract, but would that do the trick if you're not generating the impulses yourself? After all there's no energy being used, so... hmm, I wonder...
Anywya, it's no good as I need my people waking up in order to develop relationships with other members of the crew, getting to know each other.
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Of course it would work, They sell stupid belts with battery packs for lazy fat people. Boditek etc :D
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Would that even work? Sure, you could make them contract, but would that do the trick if you're not generating the impulses yourself? After all there's no energy being used, so... hmm, I wonder...
The electric shocks are merely the signal to contract. The contractions use energy. The muscles are working, so they don't atrophy. :)
Anywya, it's no good as I need my people waking up in order to develop relationships with other members of the crew, getting to know each other.
Err... but people shouldn't be interacting, forming relationships, etc., because that'll stress the life support. :confused:
If you want to make this a sleeper ship, the primary purpose should be sleeping, not getting up and talking to everybody. Besides, wouldn't they have formed relationships during training, before they left?
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Perhaps a certain number of them take turns (work in shifts) as an awake monitoring/maintainance force? Maybe a group of 4-8 ppl stay up for a month, then go to sleep when the next crew comes awake, etc... unless you really want to trust George*... y'know, he's got a mean streak. ;)
*autopilot
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Well there's always this old, proven option... :p
Onboard computer: I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours.
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Linky for AE35 unit (http://www.2001spacesuit.com/AE-35.html).
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It's like jr2 has said - you stagger the awakenings so that the entire group isn't awake at once. On a ship with 1500 odd people, with 60 24 hour days in there means you can get away with 25 people per day. I'm going to have more than that (either by increasing the crew size or by having one day on, one day off) but still, there'll not be an entire colony's worth of people awake at any given time.
I need them to form relationships on the ship because it means you'd get a diverse range of people to make up the cast of characters for later on in the story. When you're forming relationships at a training stage, you can choose who you spend your time with, and, in most cases, you tend to stick to people who are broadly of a similar mindset to yourself, which is a problem. Basically, the gist of the storyline is that the sleeper ship spends 60 years in space, and arrives at the colony, only to find that humanity developed FTL technology while they were gone and colonized the planet 40 years ago. The result is that they have to reintegrate with a society where they will have essentially no connections left - the only ones they'll have are those with people who were on the ship - and that has fundamentally changed since they left. I need a group of people who are diverse enough that their reactions to what has happened will be across the board, so I need to throw my main guy in with a bunch of people that he didn't choose to spend time with.
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Well if you're willing to make the ship go faster and further, you can use the relative time difference to your advantage. 40 light year journey at 0.55c would take round'bout 72.7 years in Earth time, 60.7 years in ship time due to time dilatation. Just upon arriving to the distant system, the ship would be receiving signals from Earth that were sent 40 years ago... or 32,7 years after the ship left.
Assuming the FTL travel also introduces FTL communication, there would be no way to contact the ship with FTL comm systems since they don't have one. Although the neocolonists could possibly reach the ship with signals as the journey gets closer to it's end, it's not certain they would be using suitable frequencies, or that the original colony ship would be trying to pick anything special up - or be able to.
AS to what comes to disabling/destroying comms... I'm afraid there's no way of destroying or disabling all redundant comm systems AND repair facilities on the ship so that it would be believable, without massive damage to the ship, which would somehow leave the life support and propulsion fully functional...
A possibility is that you make Earth cut off communications for some reason. Political change, a world war or something like that. Perhaps the colony ship was a top secret project committed at utmost stealth and secrecy, and only a select group knew about it and was killed in an accident or something. Or perhaps a world war occurred (wars always speed up scientific research and developement by the way) and communications facilities were lost, and following some trajectory change of the ship in the Oort cloud, there would be no way to re-detect the ship with traditional measures. And without the exact position of the ship, it would be extremely difficult if not downright impossible to hear radio signals sent from the ship, even if they were directed towards Earth with parabola antennae, the Earth antenna would still need to be pretty closely aligned to the signal to receive a good signal. So it's possible they just lost it, or purposefully abandoned the attempts to re-establish communications.
Pick one, or all. ;7
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I do want to point out that this exact story has been done before. A. E. van Vogt, I believe? You might read that one for some pointers as to cliches to avoid - I'll try to dig up the title.
This is not a reason to not do it, however - in fact, the idea is timeless. Most of SF consists of new perspectives and takes on old stories, after all.
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I didn't know the story had been done before, but, well, I guess it's not all that original - not surprising someone else has thought of it before. Ultimately, it's very similar to the Forever War. Personally though, the basic idea is timeless - you put a normal person into an abnormal world and see what happens.
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Make them used modern-day radio, so all they can do is send back regular radio updates that take several years to reach Earth to advise them of their situation.
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Eh, I like HT's idea, how about doing it this way: Have the ship do an emergency last-minute manuver to avoid a collision with a chunk of an asteroid that broke off from two larger asteroids colliding elsewhere. This manuver had to be performed before they could send Earth a transmission about their new trajectory, thus their lock on Earth's radio was lost. (although, they should be able to re-aquire it using calculations based on their manuever... maybe if some of the debris hit them & knocked them further off course... IDK, it's hard to think of a way to cut comms...)
How about radio interference caused by an equipment malfunction that is accessible only be going outside the spacecraft, which they elect not to risk.
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All that matters is that Earth can't talk to them, not that they can't talk to earth.
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Ah, right.... so that should work... because by the time they transmit their new coords to Earth, and Earth replies, they'll be there.. almost.
Umm, BTW, I was wondering, how fast does a beam of light/radio wave travel if fired forwards from an object moving quite fast? (eg, .55c?) Normal speed, or 1.55c?
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Umm, BTW, I was wondering, how fast does a beam of light/radio wave travel if fired forwards from an object moving quite fast? (eg, .55c?) Normal speed, or 1.55c?
Exactly at c, of course*. In every inertial frame, too. But let's not turn this into a science debate (unless Black Wolf agrees to that); you can ask that question in own thread and I'll provide more physics... ;7
*"of course" here can be derived from two physical principles; the first being the generally accepted assumption that laws of physics must be same to everyone regardless of their inertial co-ordinates, and the second being the fact that the speed of light is a constant at vacuum.
Those two things combined will produce the special theory of relativity, which states that light's vacuum speed is constant to all observers.
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Hank 4000
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Maybe the ship was recieving transmissions all the time, and someone was sinisterly throwing them away? (Need a bad guy?)
Could also be a plot device that reveals this conspiracy, where they find logs of all these hundreds of communications that they recieved but never got to read, letters from family, updates on world events?
Of course, motivation for hiding or discarding them would have to tie more into the character and how they fit into the framework of the story.
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Exactly at c, of course*. In every inertial frame, too. But let's not turn this into a science debate (unless Black Wolf agrees to that); you can ask that question in own thread and I'll provide more physics... ;7
here (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,47361.0.html) is the thread I started. I still don't understand...
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It doesn't matter if there are actually humans awake to report what is happening. Every spaceship transmits some kind of signal to its ground control. It's been that way since Sputnik. You want exact coordinates of your ship at all times, and with the near-future tech you're talking about the spaceship would undoubtably be transmitting status reports every second of the day. It doesn't matter if humans are awake to transmit them, that would be redundant.
You're right, it is hard to find a believeable way to do this, although equipment failure may work, as obvious and boring as it sounds. I mean, when you're going at over .5c, there's going to be tons of space dust and space debris in your way. A collision with space dust while going at half the speed of light... not good. So if a spaceship only has 1-2 transmitters, those flimsy things are going to be gone pretty fast unless you have some kind of shields or super-armor.
Alternatively, the crew really doesn't want to talk to Earth in the first place. The captain has always been a rebel against his repressive government, and as soon as they get far away from Earth, he says, "OK, screw them, we're starting our own society here, throw the radios through the airlock". Personally I like jr2's idea the best.
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Bottany Bay anyopne?
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Every spaceship transmits some kind of signal to its ground control.
There are a few exceptions. Current spacecraft on long voyages sometimes have to shut down for extra long periods to conserve energy or defend themselves from solar radiation storms.
Depending on the nature of this spaceships engines and where its traveling, it might also have to turn off its communications gear and be forced to transmitting or receiving the minimal signal needed to maintain operations.
Stuff like news and letters from home would be bumped by more important things like "I am here" and "my systems are still functional".
I also think its a misconception that you could beam a radio wave across the galaxy and still get perfect reception.
Without FTL communication then any signal you get would be years old. Also, without sensitive equipment and big dishes you could expect what comes through will be horribly degraded in quality.
It might make more sense to pack up that gear for now and deploy it after you've made safe orbit at your destination. Its not like the crew would be able to do anything about events back home.
...and in the nature of those events being controversial, theres a good chance ground control would not want to trouble the crew with any informaiton that could harm the mission.
If a civil war 2 were to break out in the US, the last people to know would likely be ISS or lunar crews. You don't want to spread the chaos there too.
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The reception would come in fine, I think. Remember that there isn't really anything to block EM waves in space; we can get crystal-clear images of stars and nebulas dozens of LY away. NASA is still getting tracking signals from its Voyager probes, and they've gone beyond our solar system.
There are a few exceptions. Current spacecraft on long voyages sometimes have to shut down for extra long periods to conserve energy or defend themselves from solar radiation storms.
Huh? What spacecraft? It takes almost no energy to send a radio signal, anyway, relative to all the life support and propulsion functions that the craft is going to be doing. There wouldn't be a need
I also think its a misconception that you could beam a radio wave across the galaxy and still get perfect reception.
True that. But he's talking about "near future" space travel as far as I can tell. Not those kind of extreme voyages.
Regardless, any further replies are practically necros, as the guy who started this thread has obviously stopped looking for help. But it's an interesting chat.
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I haven't. I'm not writing this part at the moment - I have my plot nailed down, but I'm still fleshing out the science I want to use and trying to get my head around Post-Voyage human society, as well as trying to pass uni this semester. I'm not even going to start character sketches for my supportings until after exams in a few weeks. So the specifics of this particular detail are still very much up in the air.
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we can get crystal-clear images of stars and nebulas dozens of LY away.
Thats like comparing a heavy metal band to a mouse fart.
Voyager 2 for example is still inside the heliopause and nearing the end of her reactors useful lifespan. Thirty years is a long time for a machine and what power she has left has been dedicated to a few instruments and keeping oriented.
Astronomically speaking she's not even past our doormat and her signal can be easily lost in the background noise if you don't know what your listening for.
For a manned spacecraft based on what we have today, your talking about something that has no payload or amperage to spare. They wont dedicate tons of equipment and vital juices from a degrading reactor just to get CNN updates.
"Communications" would likely be a simple ping that goes off during crew rotations or at some set interval. They might suspect somethings up back home if they stopped getting a return ping, but theres nothing you could realistically do about it at that point.
I'd think with a mission that would take so long there would have to be a contingency plan or two for dealing with a loss of guidance from home.
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Good points. But if we have spaceships that are powerful enough to travel at high percentages of c, then, correct me if I'm wrong, they should have plenty of reactor power.
And aren't there scientists sending radio signals to nearby stars trying to find UFOs? If they assume that their signal can reach these stars, doesn't that mean a spaceship wouldn't have trouble transmitting back over the same distance?
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Good points. But if we have spaceships that are powerful enough to travel at high percentages of c, then, correct me if I'm wrong, they should have plenty of reactor power.
And aren't there scientists sending radio signals to nearby stars trying to find UFOs? If they assume that their signal can reach these stars, doesn't that mean a spaceship wouldn't have trouble transmitting back over the same distance?
They're listening to radio signals. Also bear in mind that they listen using massive radio telescopes (or even arrays of them).
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No, there was one time when a group scientists transmitted a signal, too. Don't remember the details, but it's fairly well known.
With ultrasensitive future recievers, I think that a spaceship could transmit a signal to a ground reciever a good distance away. It all depends on how far said ship travels. But I could easily see your "sleeper ship" traveling 40+ lightyears from Earth and no longer being able to communicate effectively. So no need for a plot device.
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For a manned spacecraft based on what we have today, your talking about something that has no payload or amperage to spare. They wont dedicate tons of equipment and vital juices from a degrading reactor just to get CNN updates.
Eh... they have reactors that can power a city. If they decided to colonize someplace, here's betting they'd build one with close to that power output on board, if not more (modern reactor, instead of the current, 30-40 yr old designs).
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If they had unlimited resources aboard this ship, it wouldn't be putting along at 0.2C.
I think its safe to assume the designers would have already looked at every possible means to lighten things so they save money and shorten the journey.
Long before they've gotten around to filling the tires with helium, drilling holes in every panel, sawing your crews toothbrushs in half and calculating exactly how many changes of fresh underwear are needed, you can bet they would have chosen the smallest possible reactor that can still feed the needs of the ships basic systems.
The reactor might be putting out some fantastically large number, but you can argue that every drop of that output has been accounted for just to make this mission feasible.
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The problem with space ships is not power, it's energy.
As in, they can sure make a power output sufficient for a city, not a problem (heck, nuclear submarines are able to do that), but doing that for 60 years or more is a totally different thing. Basically, even if they transformed matter into energy with optimal rate (using anti-matter as storing medium of energy like in Trek) they would want to make their systems as energy efficient as possible, so that they have more margin of error in mission parametres, and can go further with less "fuel".
And you need also to remember that with conventional propulsion, the ship needs lots and lots of propellant in addition to a long life energy source. Even if you have huge amounts of energy at your disposal, you can't go anywhere without propellant to drive your ship, assuming you can't break the conservation of momentum. Most of the gross weight of this kind of space ship would consist of propellant at the beginning of it's journey.
Also, the structural mass (or dry mass) of the ship would need to be as small as possible, as part of making propulsion energy consumption as small as possible. Likely, most part of the structural mass of an interstellar conventional space ship would consist of impact shielding concentrated on the frontside of the ship, but also on sides to some extent - and definitely on propulsion system! Most likely this impact shielding itself would be some lightweight matter (multiple aramid-aerogel-aramid layers might be interesting) but there would sure be a *thick* layer of the stuff. It would probably also be tested for some time with unmanned probes using different methods of protection.
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As in, they can sure make a power output sufficient for a city, not a problem (heck, nuclear submarines are able to do that), but doing that for 60 years or more is a totally different thing.
True, nuclear subs have to be refueled... every 20 years!
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Do you even need an excuse? After all, if Earth suddenly stopped talking to them halfway through the voyage, it's not as if they can turn around and go home, since waking all the people early would, as you stated, put too much of a strain on the ship's systems, so having contact suddenly stop for no apparent reason would just add to the eeriness of it. I suppose it depends on 'what happens' and whether it is something that could justify going from 'normal communication' to 'silence' in the space of a single broadcast.
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Having valid excuses would be good if one character is trying to rationalize the whole thing. He might be delaying the eeriness for a chapter or two, building up to some more unsettling scenario.
If your on a boat and the radio goes dead you still don't wake up the entire crew (mainly because the night watch would be rather pissed at you).
You sooner think to yourself "well maybe the radios gone bad"
*check radio, it works fine*
"or maybe theres some interference"
*scan channels, nothing else broadcasting*
"or maybe..." *gets near harbor, sees mushroom cloud rising from city* "...yea, that might be it"
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Did you ever play silent hill 2, Radios are EEEVIL !! :eek2: :nervous: :shaking:
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No. Why are they evil? (Use spoiler tags if you must, but I'm prolly not gonna watch this movie, so tell me plz.)
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Do you even need an excuse? After all, if Earth suddenly stopped talking to them halfway through the voyage, it's not as if they can turn around and go home, since waking all the people early would, as you stated, put too much of a strain on the ship's systems, so having contact suddenly stop for no apparent reason would just add to the eeriness of it. I suppose it depends on 'what happens' and whether it is something that could justify going from 'normal communication' to 'silence' in the space of a single broadcast.
Well, they catch up with Earth later. Logically, the first thing they would ask would be "Why did you stop talking to us?"
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No. Why are they evil? (Use spoiler tags if you must, but I'm prolly not gonna watch this movie, so tell me plz.)
No, the game i meanz :lol:
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Hmmm.... I'll have to look for it. You could still tell me, though..
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Techno-luddites (perhaps the Wahabbi Islamo-fascist terrorists who currently make many speeches about how they're gonna take over the world- dragging it back to the 17th century, except *they* will still have modern shiznit like weapons and mini-puckups to shoot from and RPGs) manage to do what they want and in the process use anti-satellite missiles to take out the orbiting laser communications platforms. (What's the best way to destroy a single use weapon? Fire it at the infidels or infidels' stuff- like those nasty infidel comm satellites!)
*poof* Contact with the sleeper ship- lost!
Once civilization comes back and pounds the Wahabbists into the sand (possibly including turing many hectares of said sand into glass), rational people get with the program and invent your FTL drive in time to greet the sleeper ship at its destination.
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Solar flare or micro-meteorite storm could also do the trick..*POOOf* ..no more comm sattellitle..and it would take som time to get a replacement
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Who mentioned HAL and the AE unit? :confused:
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Well there's always this old, proven option... :p
Onboard computer: I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours.
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Techno-luddites (perhaps the Wahabbi Islamo-fascist terrorists who currently make many speeches about how they're gonna take over the world- dragging it back to the 17th century, except *they* will still have modern shiznit like weapons and mini-puckups to shoot from and RPGs) manage to do what they want and in the process use anti-satellite missiles to take out the orbiting laser communications platforms. (What's the best way to destroy a single use weapon? Fire it at the infidels or infidels' stuff- like those nasty infidel comm satellites!)
*poof* Contact with the sleeper ship- lost!
Once civilization comes back and pounds the Wahabbists into the sand (possibly including turing many hectares of said sand into glass), rational people get with the program and invent your FTL drive in time to greet the sleeper ship at its destination.
That is really, really good. It fits perfectly into what I want to do with Earth :). Congratulations, sir... you've just justified my plot device :D
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We have a winner !
So how long til yu release a beta? :D
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That is really, really good. It fits perfectly into what I want to do with Earth :). Congratulations, sir... you've just justified my plot device :D
Aww, you mean we've all been spoilered about your story? Dang nabbit.