Timeline for Can a generation ship withstand its own oxygen and daily wear for many thousands of years?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
15 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 17, 2019 at 21:02 | comment | added | boxcartenant | Plus, human bone matter bonds with it well, so if you ever get bored.... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium_biocompatibility | |
| May 17, 2019 at 7:58 | comment | added | Chris H | @Nosajimiki, no, it assumes a total loss of 0.1%/year as a sort of indicative worst case. But 99.9%=100% to all intents and purposes. In fact 97%=100% to a sensible approximation | |
| May 17, 2019 at 7:49 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @ChrisH that assumes the whole ship is being replaced every year. If your average part lasts 100 years and you have 99.9% recovery, then a 3000 year trip only needs sees a 3% need for reserves. | |
| May 17, 2019 at 4:44 | comment | added | Chris H | @corsiKa, yes but that rounds to 100%. If you only recover equivalent to 99.9% of a particular reserve per year you'll have nothing left after 1000 years. | |
| May 17, 2019 at 0:55 | comment | added | Thorne | You're building a generational ship that needs to last thousands of years. Cost isn't an issue. You can't go cheap and disposable. | |
| May 16, 2019 at 23:24 | comment | added | Kai Qing | You overlooked a very important comparison: UNOBTANIUM! It's infinitely stronger, almost feather weight, flexible, and any other property you want to invent! And all you need to do to obtain it is kill off some natives and a psychic tree! Or you can invent your own metal and hopefully name it something less downright idiotic than unobtanium. | |
| May 16, 2019 at 21:55 | comment | added | corsiKa | @ChrisH You don't need 100% recovery - you need a high enough recovery to not deplete reserves. | |
| May 16, 2019 at 16:22 | comment | added | JMac | One of the key benefits of titanium is it's great mixture of these features. It's high strength and low weight for example give it one of the best strength-to-weight ratios for metals. The only place it really falls off is the strength-to-weight-to-cost ratio; due to the relative costs of titanium, cheaper metals like aluminum and steel are more commonly used. | |
| May 16, 2019 at 15:01 | comment | added | TLW | Just be careful... it's difficult to catch titanium on fire, but if a titanium fire does get going it'll be !!FUN!! | |
| May 16, 2019 at 10:30 | comment | added | Chris H | @PeterCordes the latter solution particularly appeals to me, though for living space I reckon you'd essentially never need to recast. It probably didn't experience a lot of wear, but the Pantheon's bronze ceiling lasted 1500 years before being removed by the Pope to make weapons | |
| May 16, 2019 at 9:37 | comment | added | Peter Cordes | @ChrisH: Your ship only has to last "many thousands" of years, not millions. A titanium handrail or walkway will probably take many hundreds or a thousand years before it needs to be recast, needing only a tiny bit of extra titanium from the ship's reserve of bulk titanium. Or to reduce wear, use something organically recyclable like wood or plant fiber "carpet" as a top layer over the titanium. Organic material as dust / gas can be recycled by the ecosystem. | |
| May 16, 2019 at 9:12 | comment | added | Chris H | @vsz yes, but that's rather like building the repair bots out of handwavium instead of the ship - good in the right story | |
| May 16, 2019 at 9:05 | comment | added | vsz | @ChrisH : thus, nanomachines and Universal Constructor... | |
| May 16, 2019 at 8:56 | comment | added | Chris H | The problem with replaceable wearing parts is that material is lost as dust or even gas, and the lost material from all parts is mixed together. Thus you have to have 100%-efficient recovery of mixed muck | |
| May 16, 2019 at 6:24 | history | answered | Thorne | CC BY-SA 4.0 |