What would a 'real' spaceship actually look like?

[SteveKing]

.... That's why I am so hostile to representative democracy, and no longer afraid to say to so.

And hence the previous topic about those allowed to vote![/quote]

.... The current economic and political models are luxuries we just can't afford any longer.

Most definitely agree! Economically, environmentally and socially unsustainable!

[Mazur]

as for the asteroid belt ,well it is mostly empty space. the belt is not at all like it is depicted in SciFi movies/books/TV.
but there is some interesting stuff out there. Assuming we can get out there,I dont think waiting till it gets to earth is a good idea. mining should start as it is on its way.
start boring a hole into the rock. seal it up with an airlock. start to mine. treat it like a fly in/fly out job with replacement miners and food,water ,air etc shipped in and miners and ore sent back. by the time the asteroid gets here it can be hollowed out and most of the mass removed making it easier to manouver into orbit.

this is assuming we have the technology to get to the asteroid belt in under 10 years travel time.
!

Ahem, many (most?) asteroids consist of rubble clumped together by gravitational accident: you may try to "bore" into them all you want, but you'll not get an airtight space. There will be a larger core, perhaps, but not necessarily large enough for your scheme.

No, you park your ship/living space against the asteroid, tether it somehow against inertial separation, and mine as much as possible remotely with asteroid rovers. On board you do some initial refining/compound separation, possibly, and once the asteroid is depleted you fly to the next.
There is likely a polyhedron/circular station "nearby", from which a monthly grocer comes by doing the rounds, checking whether you're still alive, selling fresh food and delivering mail/books/porn/visitors. When your holds are full, you go to the nearest station to unload/sell, and large freighters ship the stuff between the belt and Earth/Moon Base Alpha/Orbital XXX.

Or something along those lines.

[spud42]

Ahem, many (most?) asteroids consist of rubble clumped together by gravitational accident:

from what source did you get this information? everything i have read, including the link i previously posted , dissagrees with your statement.
NASA has photographs of asteroids and they are not clumps of loose rubble.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/169064

[Mazur]

Ahem, many (most?) asteroids consist of rubble clumped together by gravitational accident:

from what source did you get this information? everything i have read, including the link i previously posted , disagrees with your statement.
NASA has photographs of asteroids and they are not clumps of loose rubble.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/169064

Probably a science fiction book, and I was being too lazy to verify. I sit corrected! (I'm not standing...)

[spud42]

Ahem, many (most?) asteroids consist of rubble clumped together by gravitational accident:

from what source did you get this information? everything i have read, including the link i previously posted , disagrees with your statement.
NASA has photographs of asteroids and they are not clumps of loose rubble.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/169064

Probably a science fiction book, and I was being too lazy to verify. I sit corrected! (I'm not standing...)

was just curious as to where you got that not trying to be contrary..lol
i assume there are probably some clumps as you suggest amongst the smallest rocks. but as they say the entire asteroide belt would be smaller than the moon. but still thats a bloody big rock!!! lol

[Duggan]

Anything with mass will always travel at sub light speeds and therefore be inadequate. A thing without mass can travel faster or at the speed of light and is in effect omnipresent , therefore it wont need a ship.

[maik]

Learning to live within our own means on our own planet as a technological civilisation should have begun decades ago and ought to have been figured out by now. There is no technical impediment, just a lack of will.

Probably best we get our own house in order first, before we go thinking of spraying our biome all over the place. If we can't manage to operate a self-contained ecology the size of Earth, for which we are ideally suited, then our chances of making it as a spacefaring species are, let's face it, nil.

I'm not sure Europeans would have conolized the Americas with this mind set (note I'm not putting any moral value here). To me, it's more "to boldly go where no man has gone before". Explore and learn.

[Mazur]

from what source did you get this information? everything i have read, including the link i previously posted , disagrees with your statement.
NASA has photographs of asteroids and they are not clumps of loose rubble.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/169064

Probably a science fiction book, and I was being too lazy to verify. I sit corrected! (I'm not standing...)

was just curious as to where you got that not trying to be contrary..lol
i assume there are probably some clumps as you suggest amongst the smallest rocks. but as they say the entire asteroide belt would be smaller than the moon. but still thats a bloody big rock!!! lol

In that case, I think it was Ben Bova, "the Rock Rats", though there it's only one specific asteroid that some important characters try to hide in during a solar flare, as their craft has no ion radiation shielding. I extrapolated while thinking about it: it would be logical for slightly larger rocks to gather up smaller debris in nearly the exact same orbit around the sun within the belt, much like the planets have done in their own orbits, only in the asteroid belt it never got to the planet stage. And unless artificial gravy, sorry, gravity gets invented, staying in or on an asteroid will seriously deplete your bone structure and muscle tone. That is not relevant to the discussion here, but it is relevant to the topic overall and to the health ans lifestyle of Rock Hermits.

(edited to fix broken quote markers.)

[Disembodied]

I'm not sure Europeans would have conolized the Americas with this mind set (note I'm not putting any moral value here). To me, it's more "to boldly go where no man has gone before". Explore and learn.

I'm all for exploring and learning - and I agree fundamentally with the proposition that, as a species, we face a choice between becoming spacefaring or becoming extinct - but I think we've got quite a bit more learning to do here before it's worth going off and colonising other planets. Otherwise we're just sending all our current problems off to enjoy those new horizons.

I'm also not certain that humanity is up to the technological and sociological challenges of a terraforming project, or if it's even worth it. Planets are awkward places to get to, and get away from, and attempting to recreate a biosphere 4 billion years in the making, on other planets, in other orbits, is a very tricky, long-term project indeed. Rather than try to duplicate a planet-sized environment over several centuries ("Do dangerous, difficult, and monstrously expensive work so that your great-great-great-great-great-etc-grandchildren can maybe breathe outside without too much help!" is a tough sell), it may be more practical to adapt ourselves to suit artificial environments instead, constructed in asteroids, comets, O'Neill habitats and so on. Rather than try to change the universe to suit us, we could instead change ourselves to better suit what the universe has to offer.

[CaptSolo]

I'm not sure Europeans would have conolized the Americas with this mind set (note I'm not putting any moral value here). To me, it's more "to boldly go where no man has gone before". Explore and learn.

I'm all for exploring and learning - and I agree fundamentally with the proposition that, as a species, we face a choice between becoming spacefaring or becoming extinct...

If the core tenet of Christianity is true than humanity has another destiny: That of transcending the material.

Who said that? You cannot prove it was me. Move along. Damn you, George Lucas. And you, Gene Roddenberry, you are just as guilty! Tee hee!

[Wildeblood]

I'm all for exploring and learning - and I agree fundamentally with the proposition that, as a species, we face a choice between becoming spacefaring or becoming extinct...

If the core tenet of Christianity is true than [sic] humanity has another destiny: That of transcending the material.

That must be some kind of culturally mediated Christianity you refer to, it's not the one I'm most familiar with.

If the core tenet of Singularitarianism is true then humanity has another destiny: transcending the material. No thanks! I don't want anyone uploading my consciousness to a computer and cremating my body to make room for more computers. That future Earth really is a vision of Hell.

Of course I'm being mischievous there. That's Kurzweillian Singularitarianism. Mainstream Singularitarianism isn't as extreme. There are extremists in every religion. (The amusing thing about Singularitarianism, given the variety of beliefs, is the name including "singular".)

[Disembodied]

If the core tenet of Christianity is true than humanity has another destiny: That of transcending the material.

One of the core tenets of what many would regard as "mainstream" Christianity is resolutely material: that of the resurrection of the body. But I'm not talking about transcending the material or being uploaded: I'm talking about altering human bodies to make them better suited to other environments. It may be easier - and certainly would be more immediately rewarding to those involved - to e.g. alter the human physiology to avoid bone degradation due to living in low or zero g, than it would be to engineer an entire other planet to allow Earth-normal humans to live on it unaided.

There's also the fact that getting into space from the surface of an Earth-sized planet is hard: once you're up there, it might be better to stay there, and use the resources out there (and on smaller satellite bodies), rather than fall down another gravity well again.

[Alex]

Why all the thought?
A sphere is the ideal shape for anything moving through space.
Look out side. A rain drop is round not tear shaped. Planets, suns, even galaxies try to be spherical.

Construction:
Blow a bubble in space, It'll be round.

No brainer.

[Wildeblood]

Why all the thought?
A sphere is the ideal shape for anything moving through space.
Look out side. A rain drop is round not tear shaped. Planets, suns, even galaxies try to be spherical.

Construction:
Blow a bubble in space, It'll be round.

No brainer.

Yeah, I said upthread geodesic spheres were the go. But spherical is the shape of things just floating about, accelerating things are elongated. The best shape for something really fast is a line: the smallest possible cross-section to minimize interaction with the environment, and miles and miles of shielding. I imagine an interstellar spacecraft being hundreds of kilometres long and maybe a few centimetres in diameter.

[Smivs]

I imagine an interstellar spacecraft being hundreds of kilometres long and maybe a few centimetres in diameter.

Crewed by giant space worms?