# Tag Info

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There are slightly too many unknowns here for a straightfoward answer, but it can be shown that a continuous thrust transit (also known as a brachistochrone) between Earth's orbit and Mars uses up vastly more fuel than lifting from Earth's surface would, so the savings as a proportion of the fuel used are low. Earth's gravity well to Mars, keeping 1 G of ...

7

This is a bit of a frame-shift answer. I am answering as a space enthusiast, but also as a person at an aerospace company. Let's not dismiss the simple shapes, such as cylinders, as hangovers from aerodynamics too quickly! There are some important considerations, even with plentiful material and practically no gravity, which may lead to simple shapes (...

7

Yes it could. If your gravity is 1g around a 'gravitational centre', presumably your ship is a sphere, so your crew and passengers are being pulled at 1g to your 'centre'. Could in fact your spaceship be a planet? If it is physically smaller than a planet, then the radius determines how much 'artificial gravity' you need, or does it? An ultra dense material ...

6

Isolate your habitation section from your reactor section Stefan–Boltzmann defines the energy blackbody emissions as: P = AσT⁴ Or for those of us who actually like to know what our variables means: $radiantEnergy =$surfaceArea * 5.67 * $temperature^4; Common logic tells us that the correct course of action is to increase the surface area, and yes, this ... 4 One reason (well a couple of related reasons actually) why ships designed to operate beyond Mars WILL be long and spindly is they will probably have a nuclear powered engines. In that case you will want the Red Hot Glowing Nuclear Death as far from the crew compartment as possible. This is because you don't want to shield the whole reactor (shielding is ... 4 Ships can Control Surface Area and Temperature A star or planet has a (relatively) static surface, and heat will always flow from hot to cold. A ship is significantly more complex. To heat up a ship, you can cover it with an isolating material. Heat flux from the covered areas will decrease, and the rest of the ship will warm up. Conversely, to cool a ship ... 3 Fuel: I read somewhere that this would take an astronomical amount, which is why, as of how much bang for the buck we currently get, the best thing to do is accelerate of to some sort of cruising speed, coast for a while (many months), and decelerate. If you insist on going 1G then you would need that astronomical amount of fuel. But then there won't be ... 2 No. Given the specs that you've laid out, it is simply not possible for the kind of cosmoship described to suffer from a fever. Simply put, its physiology is not biological enough to suffer from the querried ailment. A fever is a disruption in homeostasis, specifically, the physiological state a biological creature, be it planetaric or cosmic, suffers e.g. ... 2 Traveling to the Moon to refuel (re-tank) is not a good way to get to Mars. At least not at the moment. The details depend on what propellants you plan to use, what infrastructure is in place on the Moon and where you are going to land on the Moon. If you plan to re-tank with LOX and LH2 (and re-tanking with both these propellants is most efficient) then you ... 2 According to Habitable Planets for Man, Stephen H. Dole, 1964, a planet needs an escape velocity several times as great as the average speed of atmospheric particles in order to retain them for geological periods of time. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/commercial_books/2007/RAND_CB179-1.pdf According to table 5 on page page 35, the ability to ... 2 Addressing some confusions in the original question This means that if the space ship uses the equivalent of all the solar energy hitting the earth (around$10^{16}\$ Watts) for life support ... First at all clarify for yourself your naive interchangeability use of energy (as measured in joules) and power (as measured in Watts). A generation ship is not an ...

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