On Interstellar Empire
As the post title should make clear, this is a discussion of space opera. It is true, according to commenters who know more than I do, that the theoretical door to FTL is not quite welded shut, but we are far outside the scope of the Plausible Midfuture, even for the most generous interpretation of that phrase.
But the heroes of high fantasy do not fight their dragons with cardboard swords. Likewise, even in operatic settings we are entitled to the appearance of plausibility.
The question of interstellar empires arose in comments on a recent post about artificial intelligence (go to the second page of comments, around #215 or 220). The thread drift concerned the use of bluntly named killbots, but my immediate concern here is not with the technology of interstellar war but its 'geopolitics' (astropolitics?).
It is a quite basic - but rather unappreciated - fact of power politics in space that, except for independent colonies located on the same planet, there are no contiguous borders. In fact, we can get a bit narrower than that: independent colonies on the same continent or landmass. Yes, borders can be drawn through an ocean, or - given a suitably holographic map - even through interstellar space, but you cannot march across them.
At least, you cannot march across them unless you have stargates of the sort that can be localized onto a planet. Unless your FTL technology permits interstellar streetcars, it likewise precludes interstellar armies. To be sure this does not preclude interstellar marines, or espatiers. But marines are fundamentally a naval arm, and espatiers are fundamentally an arm of space forces, whatever name you choose for the latter.
And this is significant ... why, exactly?
It is significant because your all conquering space legions can conquer no one - at least no one off-planet - unless they are transported by an all conquering space fleet. At which point the legions' own task is more or less the mopping up operation.
Which is significant in turn because, historically, maritime powers have been a considerably different beast than land-based powers, more or less as sailors have differed from soldiers. At least in their internal politics they have generally been more liberal, and in their external affairs more concerned with control of trade than with the direct rule of territory. Victoria, for example, became Empress of India only after indirect rule through the East India Company went pear shaped.
These political differences seem to reflect broader cultural differences, reflected even in epic poetry: The Iliad is a soldier's epic, the Odyssey a sailor's epic.
In my old Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy I made this an argument for the likely predominance of trade federations in classic FTL settings, and I think that argument still essentially holds.
Discuss.
The image of Brunhilde comes from a website, Soldiers of the Queen, which deals mainly with the Victorian British army, but also includes an opera page.
456 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 401 – 456 of 456Okay everybody...homework assignment -- what policy innovation did Q-ships lead to IRL?
Peace on Earth, good will toward men?
As I recall, torpedoing ships without warning them, and making surface attacks without submarines.
Sorry. The phrase should be "with submarines."
What I was getting at was unrestricted submarine warfare. Q-ships IN SPAAACE! would probably lead to an analogous situation -- shoot first at enemy merchant traffic, with long range weapons, before they can shoot at you. Too bad crews get killed without a chance to abandon ship, but he who calls the tune pays the piper.
As I recall, torpedoing ships without warning them, and making surface attacks without submarines.
Yup. It made the risk of fighting civilized too dangerous because a Q-ship was only effective against a sub if the skipper played by the rules and surfaced to warn the crew to man the lifeboats, they're sinking in fifteen minutes.
But there are other examples of q-ship tactics. One effectively used against pirates was using a bait ship to lure them in close. The cannons would be run out and fired at point blank range and the extra crew hidden belowdecks would come boiling up to capture the pirate ship. Don't have the link for it.
Another example was from Vietnam. The VC would be sitting in the bush off the runway and plink at incoming cargo planes. This made for some pretty dicey runs with C-130's doing high-velocity airdrops from low altitude or doing essentially a touch and go while pushing the palates out the back. Stopping to unload would get mortars dropped on it.
So around this time someone got the bright idea of turning cargo planes into gunships. Fit guns in the side, fly slow orbits over a target and have at it. One of the first uses of the gunships was supposed to have been at a hot airfield. The gunship comes in like on a drop run. The VC open up. The gunship aborts the run, lines up its guns and opens fire. The VC were so not expecting that.
Moral of the story: Q-ship tactics will probably be effective so long as the enemy doesn't have a counter-tactic you'd like a whole lot less. I know the sailors would say if the ship's going to be lost anyway, they'd much prefer begin given a chance to main the lifeboats and get the hell off before the shooting starts. The admiralty might say that the U-boats can carry more shells for the deck guns than they carry torpedoes so forcing them to sink the ships with torps will cost more than using the deck gun or sending boarding parties to scuttle the ships.
PS -- by "cost more" I mean that the U-boat would be able to sink less ships per cruise if they had to rely solely on torps versus the deck gun or scuttling.
jollyreaper:
"The admiralty might say that the U-boats can carry more shells for the deck guns than they carry torpedoes so forcing them to sink the ships with torps will cost more than using the deck gun or sending boarding parties to scuttle the ships."
That was the original thinking behind Q-ships. But after the Germans had some experience with them, they just started torpedoing everything they wanted sunk. Torpedoing defenseless merchantment -- and not a few Q-ships -- was a lot less expensive than losing submarines in pursuit of efficient kills.
Besides, two or four torpedoes cost less than 100k marks. The enemy merchant ship and cargo was worth millions. All Q-ships did was expose a false economy.
jollyreaper:
"PS -- by "cost more" I mean that the U-boat would be able to sink less ships per cruise if they had to rely solely on torps versus the deck gun or scuttling."
U-boats got bigger and carried more torpedoes. Also, the number of boats increased drastically. You might think this means submarine warfare got more expensive in terms of resources. Maybe so, but it also got much more effective. Unrestricted warfare with more and bigger boats cost the Allies 1.58 times more tonnage in 1917 than they had lost in the previous two and a half years of war.
As blogger seems to be hating me today, here is take three.
Tony:
That was what I was looking for, but the prase escaped me.
Q-ships are only practical under certain restricted conditions. These are when the enemy must close to a range where it is vulnerable (pirates), or does so for some reason (prize rules).
Prize rules made sense for surface ships. No Q-ship can really expect to deal with a surface raider, so they don't try. Submarines can be outfought by a Q-ship on the surface, so there's a point. However, there aren't any submarines in space, so there won't be any Q-ships, except against pirates.
Fundamentally, the proposed Q-ship design can only carry light weapons, so it will be vulnerable to any serious raider. Also, if the Q-ship does work, it will be seen by everyone, and avoided in the future (or, more likely, blown up).
As to evacuation warning, that's easy. "We have launched kinetics, which will impact in 30 minutes. Evactuate to your lifeboats." (We'll discuss lifeboats later. Don't go there.)
For practical reasons cargo ships will not be making the Earth MArs run in 39 days using a high power Vasmir drive, just far too expensive. A nice slow push into a minimum energy orbit will probably be the order of the day for most cargo, so long as this is done consistently the pipeline remains full and only the first and last shipments experience any market delay. Energy costs will dominate space commerce, and being the guy who can send it to you with the lowest delta V will be the winning formula for most shippers.
Space warfare may well be economic in nature, as futures traders manipulate stock and commodity markets for cargos which will arrive in decades.
For another example of how physics upends space tropes, look at the Neofuel site, a projected water carrier using a very small nuclear thermal engine to power a steam rocket starts with @ 300,000 tons of water and uses 250,000 tons as remass to get from Mars to Earth, delivering a 50,000 ton load. The ship is essentially a huge water baloon with a rocket strapped on the end; where will you hide the weapons (and with an ISP <200, how will you get into a shooting solution?).
In this case, I'm thinking about using Q-ships as both a deterrent to attacking Martian orbital space and as covert strike ships. In the case of the attack deterrent, the possibility that even half of the bulk freighters in Martian space might be packing capital-grade firepower would at least force the planners of an attack to rethink their strategies, while a covert strike ship would either force inspections of every ship coming into the Earth sphere that may have entered Martian space at some point, or it might shut down trade into Earth entirely because they can't risk the possibility that one of those self-same Q-ships might get past the inspectors somehow, or because they've started shooting at every bulk freighter approaching Earth-controlled territory on the off-chance that one of them might be a Q-ship.
Either way, it would probably be enough to cripple interplanetary relations with for a while, or if targeted appropriately, could end up as a Pearl Harbor in SPAAAAACE! scenario.
Unrestricted Submarine Warfare.
Whoops! Blogger acting up again. That comment made no sense out of context. Forget that comment........
Re: Mangaka2010
If you're talking plausible midfuture and not interstellar empire, then all of the ships will be made and operated by Earth entities. All of the weapons likewise. The only way Martians could get armed ships would be to hijack existing military vessels.
If you're talking interstellar empire, I would think the last thing you would see would be planets within the same system fighting each other. Or if you did, you would also see imperial forces showing up to restore politeness relatively quickly.
Okay, the way I see it as happening was that a generation previously, the Earth Federation ended up fighting a series of closely packed wars of independence against its major colonies on Mars, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede, with some fighting against some of the more audacious asteroid colonies in the belt. Anyways, the Federation lost and, under the terms of surrender was broken up into its constituent states.
Anyways, a lot of Federation warships had been destroyed or gone rogue by the end of the war, leaving weapons that could be salvaged, and at the same time corporations specializing in manufacturing propulsion systems, lasers and powerplants contracted with the governments that arose after the war to develop weapons with which they could defend themselves in the event that Earth got powerful and united enough to return with more warships (especially since, from Earth's perspective, they're all colonies of Earth that are still in open revolt and occupied by terrorists).
Answer your questions?
The only way Martians could get armed ships would be to hijack existing military vessels.
Probably true WRT lasers, unless you have Really Badass industrial lasers of a type suited to easy weaponization.
Less true for kinetics, because all space logistics implies the ability to throw luggage with speed and precision. This makes the kinetic equivalent of IEDs relatively straightforward.
Mangaka2170:
"Answer your questions?"
Nope. Where do mining and research settlements get "corporations specializing in manufacturing propulsion systems, lasers and powerplants"?
Rick:
"Less true for kinetics, because all space logistics implies the ability to throw luggage with speed and precision. This makes the kinetic equivalent of IEDs relatively straightforward."
Different species of the same question: where do mining and research settlements get the wherewithall to more than crudely weaponize mass? About the best I could see them do would be to accelerate spacecraft carrying some kind of inert shot and dumping it overboard before decelerating and returning to base. Enemy vessels with military sensors and propulsion could pretty easily monitor such maneuvers and ajust to avoid any launched mass by a good margin.
Well, when it takes a month (at best) for parts for powerplants, propulsion systems and lasers (not the weaponized kind) and a lot of money to ship them from Earth to Mars, it would make much more logistical sense to have factories on site to produce them, since you already have the raw materials there.
Additionally, even in a pan-humanity government, corporations will only be patriotic for as long as it pays to be patriotic. The second Earth starts showing weakness, they're already working out plans to contract with the rebels (in fact, they may have already been doing so covertly).
Even if Earth controlled all heavy manufacturing by keeping it on the Moon (for the lower surface-to-orbit cost), all it takes is one sympathetic person with access (legitimately or otherwise) to equipment and factory blueprints to smuggle them over to Mars for them to be able to get factories up and running (remember, these colonists are the descendants of people with doctorates in all manner of scientific and engineering fields, and they'll likely have a cultural mandate to continue this tradition of pursuing higher education).
The Stellar Empire trope really needs a lot of work. If we need wormholes or other exotica to get from place to place, the Empire is restricted by information and economic bottlenecks (particularly if, like the CoDominium Universe, you have to go in normal space to the edge of the solar system to access FTL).
The best you could hope to get would be a shifting coalition of systems notionally allied to the idea of Empire, or perhaps a trade league like the Hanse. Binding the various worlds through religion or cultural ties is problamatic, as cultures drift you will eventually deal with schisms in the ruleing religion/culture, leading to nasty civil wars or the Thirty Years War in space (well, at least 30 years, especially if transit times are added).
Wormhole connections to the surface of planets produces a different set of problems and circumstances, now you can't get away from the Imperial revenue service and everyone in the Human universe has access to you via BlackBerry, a fate I would not wish on anyone.
A wormhole connected Empire would also have few places of refuge from spreading civil disorder or economic disruption; if you thought the idea of Icelandic banks destabilizing the EU was strange imagine what a stock market crash in the Sirius system would do.
Mangaka2170:
"Well, when it takes a month (at best) for parts for powerplants, propulsion systems and lasers (not the weaponized kind) and a lot of money to ship them from Earth to Mars, it would make much more logistical sense to have factories on site to produce them, since you already have the raw materials there."
There's nowhere near enough competitive advantage. Technologies like ion reaction motors and simple almost-commodities like desktop computers exist at the tip of huge industrial and economic iceberg, most of which will likely still be on Earth a thousand years into our future.
Also, the assertion that the raw materials are already in hand is almost certainly incorrect. One can find the vast majority of the periodic table below lead somewhere in his own personal automobile. The mineral resources for those materials are the result of hundreds of years of systematically prospecting an entire planet. A few tens or hundreds of thousands -- or even millions -- of people are not going to be able to match that, even with a whole solar system to look in.
"Additionally, even in a pan-humanity government, corporations will only be patriotic for as long as it pays to be patriotic. The second Earth starts showing weakness, they're already working out plans to contract with the rebels (in fact, they may have already been doing so covertly)."
What corporations are these? The ones who put up all the capital in the first place, and who are likely to suffer the greatest losses if they actually have to pay people for the use of facilities they built in the first place? We already have experience of what happens with that on Earth -- the corporations pressure the government into moving in and straightening out the locals.
"Even if Earth controlled all heavy manufacturing by keeping it on the Moon (for the lower surface-to-orbit cost), all it takes is one sympathetic person with access (legitimately or otherwise) to equipment and factory blueprints to smuggle them over to Mars for them to be able to get factories up and running (remember, these colonists are the descendants of people with doctorates in all manner of scientific and engineering fields, and they'll likely have a cultural mandate to continue this tradition of pursuing higher education)."
A geologist, life support expert, or astronomer is not an industrial engineer. And it's not a matter of controlling heavy manufacturing. It's a matter of all of the manufacturing staying on Earth until there are sufficient offworld markets for it to be profitable to move large, expensive infrastructure into space.
About the best I could see them do would be to accelerate spacecraft carrying some kind of inert shot and dumping it overboard before decelerating and returning to base. Enemy vessels with military sensors and propulsion could pretty easily monitor such maneuvers and ajust to avoid any launched mass by a good margin.
I can think of some ways to improve the odds significantly. Short range spacecraft, 'taxis' or whatever (even spacesuit backpacks) are not hard to jury rig as target seekers - anything with attitude thrusters and a control unit will basically do. And any ship can serve as a bus to deploy them.
This would still be no match for a proper deep space war force. But, on outbreak of the first deep space crisis, no such force may exist. There may be no space force beyond police patrol levels, or the available space forces may be configured purely for operation in Earth orbital space, the only part of space that is of much strategic importance WRT rival great powers on Earth.
This sets up a technological situation roughly analogous to the American Revolution happening in the galley age - overwhelming superiority in galley squadrons is of little use for transoceanic power projection.
That said, I mostly agree with your other points. At least in the Plausible Midfuture, Mars would pretty much have to use available ships, service facilities, etc. Anything like a full industrial base is unlikely.
Rick:
"I can think of some ways to improve the odds significantly. Short range spacecraft, 'taxis' or whatever (even spacesuit backpacks) are not hard to jury rig as target seekers - anything with attitude thrusters and a control unit will basically do. And any ship can serve as a bus to deploy them."
I would question whether such improvised missiles would have sufficient control authority and delta-v to home in effectively. And we haven't even discussed the necessary software modifications for seeking bhavior, and whether anybody in the rebelling settlements would have the proper software tools and understanding of the already existing guidance systems to write the correct code. Certainly the average operator, even if he had programming skills and a software development environment, would not likely have source code or program documentation.
"This sets up a technological situation roughly analogous to the American Revolution happening in the galley age - overwhelming superiority in galley squadrons is of little use for transoceanic power projection."
Yeah, but what if the galley operators also had control over all technological support for the rebels? They'd just cut the rebels off and wait for them to come begging for their lives.
You significantly overrate the difficulty of writing a CBDR guidance system. I wrote one in excel without outside help.
Byron:
"You significantly overrate the difficulty of writing a CBDR guidance system. I wrote one in excel without outside help."
Please reread my comments carefully. There's a world of difference between mathematically modelling a guidance law in a spreadsheet and being able to program an existing guidance system with that law. You need knowledge of system input parameters, response parameters, translation, etc. If you don't have the engineering level software and hardware docs -- and the average user probably wouldn't, nor would techs whose job is maintenance and repair -- you have to discover all of this empirically, without at the same time testing the target device to destruction.
Also, a simple proportional law would probably not be effective with the limited delta-v available. Every maneuver requires reaction mass, which is probably extremely limited. One would have to aim at a predicted impact point, then know when to enable terminal homing on proportional law. Also, as reaction mass is used up, if there isn't a programmed thrust reduction (assuming the thrusters are throttleable, which isn't usually the case), simple proportional law would lead to an overcorrection feedback loop spiralling out of control. (Because the spacecraft, as it gets lighter, gets more delta-v out of each second of thrust.) If the thrusters aren't throttleable, you have to program some form of software compensation -- probably impulse duration.
Bear in mind that the ABM requirement for target seekers is much tougher than targeting ships in deep space.
I do think that the long term logistical problem is much the biggest one facing a colonial rebellion, short of something like replicator tech.
For that matter, I suspect that the ever popular American Revolution in SPAAACE is less likely than an Edict of Honorius in SPAAACE - i.e., Earth getting tired of subsidizing colonies, and telling 'em they are independent and on their own.
Rick:
I need a comment rescued from spam filter purgatory. I'll have more to say once it's where everyone can see it.
I suspect the industrial base in space argument is not as simple and straightforward as being argued.
In terms of getting and processing raw materials, I think the space going polity has a distinct advantage, since they can extract raw materials from asteroids with relatively simple tech. Breaking off a chunk of asteroid, wrapping it in a "plastic" bag (or metal foil) and then focusing solar energy on the container will allow the operator to boil off useful materials and ices. A big enough mirror will allow even the separation of metals through vapourization and differential cooling.
By definition, the spacegoing polity also has access to high values of potential and kinetic energy, as well as accurate targeting information just to get around, so Earth will want to keep a very close eye on things.
Turning the raw materials into value added products will be much harder to do, which means space manufacturing isn't going to be about buckytube space elevators and tethers, but rather plastic bags full of water ice repurposed as shelters and similar low tech solutions to problems. Computers and other high tech items might be treated as family heirlooms, constantly upgraded or tweaked, while machined parts will be reused over and over (there may be a market for salvaging dead space hardware in the early phase just to get valves, switches and other parts) until a manufacturing base is established. Replicators like the 3D printer EADS uses to lay out aircraft wings for Airbus will be an important part of the mix; small populations mean small production runs (or even the need to create one off items right away), so arguments about amortizing production over long runs might be mooted by the fact there are only a few hundred people in the colony.
Similar tropes will be at work in an Imperial setting, unless there are point to point wormholes allowing direct importing of finished goods and services.
Thucydides:
"In terms of getting and processing raw materials, I think the space going polity has a distinct advantage, since they can extract raw materials from asteroids with relatively simple tech."
Asteroids are made of rock. Rock can also be found in copious quantities on Earth. (That's why it's called Earth.) Rock on Earth can be mined using pickaxes and transported using oxcarts, which I am sure is simpler tech than whatever you're using on your asteroid.
Thucydides:
"By definition, the spacegoing polity also has access to high values of potential and kinetic energy, as well as accurate targeting information just to get around, so Earth will want to keep a very close eye on things."
The problem is, Earth is also a spacegoing polity. Else you wouldn't have any other polities to begin with.
"Computers and other high tech items might be treated as family heirlooms, constantly upgraded or tweaked, while machined parts will be reused over and over (there may be a market for salvaging dead space hardware in the early phase just to get valves, switches and other parts) until a manufacturing base is established."
Any colony that can't yet build its own computers definitely can't build its own spaceships.
Re: Milo
What's really amazing is the way asteroid miners use plastic or foil balloons as if plastics and metal foils grew on trees...
Back to improvised KE missiles. Earlier I explored the difficulties for end users in programming homing guidance and the limitations on such systems in space. Another big problem would be sensor availability and integration.
In a mining or research settlement, it's going to be hard to find unused sensors that can be sacrficed as missile guidance system components. But let's say we can afford to lose a selection of radars, lidars, and IR sensors. Well, then we have to program a unique interface for each combination of sensor and vehicle.
One of the big challenges is going to be maintaining sensor orientation -- keeping the sensor pointed at the target. Unless the vehicle comes equipped with orientation gyros, you'll have to invade your maeuvering remass budget to keep the sensors pointed at the target. And you can't use homin guidance law to do this, because for most of the attack you want vehicle maneuvers to be trajectory neutral. So now you have to program a second guidance law.
Back to improvised KE missiles. Earlier I explored the difficulties for end users in programming homing guidance and the limitations on such systems in space. Another big problem would be sensor availability and integration.
Here's the question: are you using the weapons as terror weapons or as useful military weapons? If you're chucking a dino asteroid (or the KE equivalent of such) at the Earth, accuracy doesn't really matter for much. If it hits anywhere on the entire planet, that's bad news. And even a sub-dino impactor would ruin everyone's week. Something like that, you get it up to speed and could fly back the thruster and guidance package.
Something I've always wanted to see in scifi is a near-hit by a ginormous warship. The canon in general has been neglectful of the planetary repercussions of giant space battles. The Forever War had a nice scene with a reletavistic ship smacking a planet. But just think of the disaster of unpowered wrecks in unstable orbit or ships deliberately impacted into the planet.
The scene I'd like to see is a crippled major warship barreling towards a planet and the crew is desperately trying to get the thrusters online so they can change the orbit. What I'd like to see is a skin-of-the-teeth atmospheric passage, where the warship dips deep in the atmosphere but retains enough inertia to make it back out. Without the last-minute thrusting, the warship would have made a direct hit.
I'm curious as to the effects something like that would have on the ground. Hull glowing like a filament in a heat lamp baking everything beneath it, hurricane winds, etc? I know it all depends on how big the ship is and how fast its traveling but it would have to make for one hell of a spectacle.
Something like that near miss happened in Clarke's The Hammer of God.
As to guidance, it should be a simple alteration of rendezvous and docking software. Instead of x=0 & v=0, it's x=0 only.
Byron:
"As to guidance, it should be a simple alteration of rendezvous and docking software. Instead of x=0 & v=0, it's x=0 only."
You have to know where in the software to make that change, probably in compiled code whose text source and maybe even compiler you don't have access to. But more importantly, rendezvous guidance is designed for much lower closing velocities than a kinetic weapon would need to be effective. And rendezvous radar is usually only has a 15-20 km range. For intercept at relative velocities of several kps (at a minimum) you would have to acquire, mount, and integrate a whole new sensor suite. And, once again, it's not only a question programming a simple proportional law intercept, but also programming a trajectory neutral sensor orientation system for the free flight portion of the attack trajectory.
Mining on Earth requires a fairly large capital investment, lots of disparate machinery and transporting ores to be smelted, processed etc.
Space mining also requires a large capital outlay, but the equipment and handling is much easier, just the ability to start with very modest rocket power (once clear of the Earth) solar mirrors and the "bags" to begin processing. Even bootstrapping (plastic or metal foil growing from trees) is easier, at least in the form of metal foils being generated starting with boiling pure metals from the asteroidal mass. While it is possible to do the same on Earth, the amount of energy available in space and the ease of capture with large mirrors makes this a practical, low cost option. Since we are already speculating about an established space presence, there will be a starting level of technology and capital to draw from.
Various tools and pieces of equipment can be built that are useful for a space colony without the ability to build a computer (and if you really want too push the point, they could build a "Babbage machine" before they could build a microchip). The colony economy will be working very hard on import substitution not out of a desire to be free from Earth, but to ensure their survival and break economic bottlenecks. Low tech solutions that employ local materials will be favoured over imports, so fuel or remass tanks might be crude blown glass bottles, for example.
jollyreaper
WRT spacecraft making grazing approaches through the atmosphere (or crashing), the would either have to be very large or moving very fast to have more than a very limited effect. Skylab, Mir and a Space Shuttle all broke up in the Earths atmosphere, leaving only scattered parts on the ground rather than a huge smoking crater. You would need an aircraft carrier sized spacecraft, or something moving at well above planetary escape velocity to have the sort of dramatic effect you are going for.
Right. The size of ship I'm thinking of is in the giant starship range, not millennium falcon but star destroyer or bigger. Seeing something like that grazing the atmosphere at high speed would be awe-inspiring. And the wreck upon atmospheric exit would be something else. Any survivors would be cutting their way out.
Re: Thucydides
All of the techniques you think are no big deal are entirely speculative.
They may be speculative in the sense that no one has done these things yet, but there is no physical reason to suppose you cannot do these things.
The space environment provides easily accessible energy and raw materials (in the sense that it does not take a lot of energy to get at them, many NEO's can be reached with less delta V than it takes to go to the moon), but as you have pointed out often enough, skilled manpower and complex machinery will be very limited.
If we are going to accept the premise that people will be going into space to do (insert McGuffinite here), then it is very appropriate to speculate on just how these people will go about living and working in that environment. For practical and economic reasons, people simply won't wait months or years for the next shipment of widgets to arrive from the Earth, but will either find ways to do without, re-purpose existing items or create low cost substitutes out of available resources.
Thucydides:
"They may be speculative in the sense that no one has done these things yet, but there is no physical reason to suppose you cannot do these things."
But more than a little engineering reason to suspect that they can't be done. For example, wannabe asteroid miners seem to be all in love with vapor deposition technology. The problem is that there is no gravity, so it would have to be done electrostatically. Except when you do it that way, you don't get a film that you can peel off of a substrate -- you get the substrate electroplated with whatever material you happen to be using. That may be acceptable for some small selection fo finished products, but as a basic refining technique? Not so much.
Also, supposedly light structures turn out not to be so light, because rigidity is an issue in most applications. So is heat management. Structural stiffening and cooling systems eat into the supposed mass savings pretty quickly.
Finally, energy isn't as abundant in space as people claim. Average insolation in the asteroid belt is somewhere between 1/5 and 1/7 average insolation at Earth's orbit. IOW, it's less than a lot of places on Earth's surface, even if steadier over short time scales. We haven't made a lot of use of solar furnaces on Earth, even at high altitudes in low latitudes. That shouldtell you something about wannabe asteroid miners' claims...
Tony, I don't want to get into another argument with you where Rick wags his finger at us, but I do have to correct you on a couple of points:
"But more than a little engineering reason to suspect that they can't be done. For example, wannabe asteroid miners seem to be all in love with vapor deposition technology. The problem is that there is no gravity, so it would have to be done electrostatically. Except when you do it that way, you don't get a film that you can peel off of a substrate -- you get the substrate electroplated with whatever material you happen to be using. That may be acceptable for some small selection fo finished products, but as a basic refining technique? Not so much."
That's not how vapor deposit refining works; it works becouse different substances melt/vaporize at different tempuratures. as one boils off, it forms a cloud and then condenses out in a seperate container; repeat as needed for each substance.
"Finally, energy isn't as abundant in space as people claim. Average insolation in the asteroid belt is somewhere between 1/5 and 1/7 average insolation at Earth's orbit. IOW, it's less than a lot of places on Earth's surface, even if steadier over short time scales. We haven't made a lot of use of solar furnaces on Earth, even at high altitudes in low latitudes. That shouldtell you something about wannabe asteroid miners' claims..."
First, sunlight is not available on Earth 24/7 like it is in space; second, Earth, having an atmosphere that heavily filters sunlight, also has weather not found in space. The reason solar furnances aren't widely used on Earth is due to those reasons. Also, the figure you were using about the amount of sunlight? ( Average insolation in the asteroid belt is somewhere between 1/5 and 1/7 average insolation at Earth's orbit) That figure is used for power levels coming from the sun, not a measure of what is measured on the ground; and, to remind you again, what reaches the ground isn't the full spectrum of sunlight that is available in space.
I'm sure you know some of this, but since I don't know what you know and what you've forgotten, I thought it would be best to simply remind you of all of it.
Ferrell
Ferrell:
"Tony, I don't want to get into another argument with you where Rick wags his finger at us..."
Ohhh...I think we can avoid that.
"That's not how vapor deposit refining works; it works becouse different substances melt/vaporize at different tempuratures. as one boils off, it forms a cloud and then condenses out in a seperate container; repeat as needed for each substance."
How do we marshall the vapor into a separate container?
How do you manage differential heating of heterogenous working pieces? To boil gold out of the interior, you may have to make it hot enough on the surface to soften or even liquify iron.
I could see centrifiugal separation solving these isues, but that would take a pretty robust industrial infrastructure...
"First, sunlight is not available on Earth 24/7 like it is in space..."
Which is why I made the following qualification, every word of which meaning exactly what I meant to say:
"it's less than a lot of places on Earth's surface, even if steadier over short time scales. We haven't made a lot of use of solar furnaces on Earth, even at high altitudes in low latitudes."
Also, according to this site, the global average of solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface in a year is 51%. Please compare that with solar radiation freely available in space in the asteroid belt (1/5 - 1/7 freelay available in space at Earth's orbit).
"I'm sure you know some of this, but since I don't know what you know and what you've forgotten, I thought it would be best to simply remind you of all of it."
Ummm...okay.
Tony,
There seem to be acceptable workarounds for most of your objections, and as for the rest, there will have to be experience to build a database of what works and what does not. WRT vapour deposition, if the user wants to create a thin film, they can look to Drexler's experiments in the 1970's where the substrate was a form of "wax" that was evaporated away once the deposition was done. Using vapour deposition as a form of electroplating may well be the desired outcome for many applications.
The other major objection you seem to have WRT mirrors is simple enough to overcome, you just create an arbitrarily large array of mirrors to do the job. Unlike Earth, this is relatively simple to do since there is no wind or gravity to affect the mirrors once in place; the bulk of the mirror will resemble a very good grade of aluminum foil. Even in the outer Solar System (or far from the parent star in an interstellar scenario) the only real bottleneck is assembling the mirror array.
While there are obviously lots of engineering details to work out, the basic ideas are quite simple in principle, so there should be no obvious show stoppers.
Thucydides:
"While there are obviously lots of engineering details to work out, the basic ideas are quite simple in principle, so there should be no obvious show stoppers."
"[S]imple in principle" describes almost every industrial process ever invented. But it almost never turns out to be simple or easy or chepa in practice. For example, where does this wax for your substrate come from? Need a pretty good organic chemicals plant for that, along with sufficient feedstock of the right raw materials.
I think the notion that mining is somehow going to be "easier" in space than on Earth is absurd, and we should drop it immediately.
Reasons for mining in space are if certain elements are sufficiently more common in asteroids than in Earth's crust, or because the savings in orbital lift (for materials meant to be used in space) are sufficient, to offset the increased technological complexity.
Also, even in space, mining is infinitely more likely to occur near places where people have settled (likely on the surfaces of planets and moons) than on asteroids out in the middle of nowhere.
I'm pretty much with Tony and Milo here. Space mining strikes me as something likely to be quite difficult in practice - basically because everything has to be done IN SPAAAACE !!!
What that means is not just the specific environmental factors, but that our existing base of industrial knowledge and experience is mostly negated: We have to learn to do every damn thing in a different way suited to different conditions.
The significance of this prior experience base tends to be greatly underestimated, IMHO.
(I guess I need to take this up in a future post, huh?)
Rick:
"The significance of this prior experience base tends to be greatly underestimated, IMHO.
(I guess I need to take this up in a future post, huh?)"
To that end, here's some food for thought (I may have mentioned this before):
The one thing that asteroid miners always seem to underestimate is the usefulness of a gravity field. It helps in chemical and metalurgical processing. (Cracking towers are all about gravity, as is the fact that slag floats to the top of a crucible.) Things stay where set them down. This applies as much to machinery as it does to materials. If you introduce coolant on top of a part being machined, it will naturally flow down over the part and the cutter, and eventually into the collection basin. Anything pressurized with two phases of matter in it -- like a presusrized water nuclear reactor -- relies on gravity for separation. It's not just a matter of relearning how to do things, it's a matter of having to redesign ans reequip almost every process to do without gravitational acceleration.
I think that what gets lost is the fact that different enviornments all need different techniques for engineering, construction, and damn near everything that humans would do there. It took thousands of years for us to reach this point; figuring out how to get the same outcome through different methods to compensate for unqiue conditions is a challange; it may take us years, decades, centuries, or even millinia to overcome, but we won't ever figure it out if we don't actually go out there and try to learn how to do it.
Ferrell
Ferrell:
"...but we won't ever figure it out if we don't actually go out there and try to learn how to do it."
Cart before the horse -- you need a rational motivation to go someplace before you actually start out.
I pretty much assume that when (if) we mine and process stuff in space, it will be to use in space, because we are already out there for whatever reason.
Tony: I had a snide response to your last post, but I've decided to simply disregard your lame comment.
Anyway, Interstellar Empires are going to be constructed by people for a wide veriaty of reasons, some even contradictury, over a span of generations. Whether it is a centeralized throne-and-crown type or a losely defined cultural empire, it can't be static or else it will die.
Ferrell
Ferrell:
"Tony: I had a snide response to your last post, but I've decided to simply disregard your lame comment."
Because I just thought it needed repeating...
Tony, thankyou for agreeing with me that your comment was lame! So gracious of you! ;)
Ferrell
Ferrell, Tony's right. We will need a reason to go in the first place. If that's why we keep going is still up in the air.
Byron, yes we do need reasons to go, but while some would argue that we don't have sufficent reason to go into space now, or that we need to work to discover a sufficent reason, I say that we already have reasons and that after we get there we will find more reasons; we don't necessarily need to know what those new reasons are yet. I know that several others may dispute this, but people do have a tendency to confound their critics on a fairly routine basis.
The first offworld bases should be scientific outposts; as they grow, I expect communities to grow around them as well. It may take years, decades, or even centuries for the Rocketpunk future to come about (if ever), but I do not see us retreat from a frontier forever. Moving into space in fits and starts, missteps, temporary retreats, and making outright mistakes before getting things right is an old pattern that we should continue for the foreseeable future, in my opinion.
Ferrell
Re: Ferrell
Don't get too cute. :-P
And you still wound up proposing a rational motivation for manned spaceflight
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The Empire v Thassalocracy question hinges a lot on background assumptions. If transporting large armies is hard there will be no Empire no matter how badly you want it.
But it's an unfortunate bug of human nature to want Empires. I'll leave the reasons for that up to primate psychologists, but we tend towards hierarchic social structures in any type of government or nation. And there's always a focus on one individual as the nominal Leader no matter how distributed the structure of power was designed to be.
So back on topic. The existence of orbital bombardment means it won't take an army of millions to rule a populated planet. The Empire merely needs local government to submit and act as their enforcers. Of course, then you have the task of keeping a sharp eye on the enforcers to make sure they are up to the task and not overtly subverting your orders. (which leads to a different sort of story, more French Underground or Cold War spy thriller than Hard-Bitten Mercs Land And Blow Stuff Up.)
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