Seen another one for the Crazy Ideas club today … (actually saw it before but it hit El Reg today)
Or is it a crazy idea ?
Here’s the Register story
Here’s the home site.
If you’ve got a bit of Mad Scientist in you, they’re well worth a look. I’d love it if I could look upstairs in a telescope and see one of these in our night sky. But … as another Mad Scientist, I have to say it’s a little silly …
One tenet of engineering is : if it doesn’t serve a purpose, take it away. In this case, it’s the shape :
Enterprise nacelles are for the warp engines. They’re on the stalks to give the ship a good Look (with the excuse being that they need to be away from people. Unless we get a major breakthrough (or a gift from aliens), we aren’t going to get warp travel any time soon. So take the nacelles away and bring them closer to the main saucer.
Saucer section – awesome idea. We need Earth normal gravity to keep healthy and without another gift from aliens, our best way to do that with current tech is to step into what amounts to a tumble dryer. Quick lesson in artificial gravity :
Centrifugal force is a myth. It doesn’t exist. Newton told us “An object in motion will remain in motion until acted upon by an external force” (He’s the deadliest son of a bitch in space dontcha know). If you throw a ball, it’ll gently fall. It would go straight but it’s being acted upon by the force of gravity. If you attach that ball to a piece of string and whirl it round, it’ll go in a circle. That’s not centrifugal force, it’s “centripetal force” where the string is exerting a force on the ball so the string doesn’t fly to bits.
So if you’re in that giant tumble dryer/hamster wheel, you’ll be standing on the outside of the wheel while the wheel is spinning. If there were no floor, or you stepped in a hole, your angular momentum would make you “fall”. However, the floor exerts a force on you equal and opposite to the force you are exerting on the floor. So to your body, it feels like you’re in normal gravity. If you increase or decrease the spin or change the distance to the wheel (different angular momentum) then you change the artificial gravity.
Actual gravity is a whole different beast that works on Very Big Masses. If Earth were hollow or lighter, our gravity would be much less.
But I’m getting sidetracked yet again.
Saucer section – great idea. However … How do you go from the gravity wheel to other parts of the ship ? A point on the outside of the wheel is going at about 100mph (site calcs). You’d need to either have a Ringworld style mass accelerator/decelerator to get you down to 0mph along the ring or you’d need to go to the zero g centre and step off there.
On the spaces inside the gravity wheel, you could put all sorts of cargo bay, space for power generation or space for parasite lander craft. Or zero g work space.
Engineering section – gotta say, this is one of the things I liked about the rebooted Enterprise. In the original, you didn’t really know what this big tube was used for. But in the reboot, most of its length was shuttle bay. And that would work here.