tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74945442638971509292024-03-19T00:19:09.179-07:00Rocketpunk ManifestoDays of Future PastRickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.comBlogger314125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-54941479382072810522017-07-04T15:45:00.000-07:002017-07-04T18:38:41.334-07:00Republics and Maritime Hegemonies<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGK0tT-KiHLfKvpx9ZpAKf5j2VoAHqdqM-csIrTIFJJLE5qYvPs0qN3XdlBJQ_f5B63iBo3plnKfq1Vg3GebR4Odtvv8piSHkFBeYbFEPaBJFhRBwnc4TAp_e2Cl8gtjmGbE-A3s-XBmWC/s1600/Trireme+Olympias.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Trireme Olympias" border="0" data-original-height="1043" data-original-width="1600" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGK0tT-KiHLfKvpx9ZpAKf5j2VoAHqdqM-csIrTIFJJLE5qYvPs0qN3XdlBJQ_f5B63iBo3plnKfq1Vg3GebR4Odtvv8piSHkFBeYbFEPaBJFhRBwnc4TAp_e2Cl8gtjmGbE-A3s-XBmWC/s320/Trireme+Olympias.jpg" title="Trireme Olympias" width="320" /></a></div>
Two hundred and forty-one years ago today, a maritime hegemony ran into some heavy going. Squalls had been building for a year, and the hegemonic elite probably saw nothing special about a proclamation issued in Philadelphia on that particular day.<br />
<br />
And, indeed the sun was still rising on the British Empire; full day would only break some decades later, after an artillery officer from Corsica was forcibly retired to St Helena. Only far along the plausible midfuture of 1776 would the United States take its turn on Neptune's throne.<br />
<br />
Now that hold is being shaken, from the most bizarre of causes. Of all the many subplots of our current national nightmare comedy, none can be funnier or more nightmarish - or just plain surprising - as the ascendency of self-proclaimed <i>nationalists</i> who seem to regard American maritime hegemony as a dreadful thing that should be done away with, in favor of a world order <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(or disorder)</span> dominated by 'spheres of influence'.<br />
<br />
To be sure, this would be an understandable perspective for, say, Chinese nationalists. Or nationalists from another well known Eurasian power distinguished for its achievements in space. But for <i>American</i> 'nationalists' to share this perspective is ... remarkable.<br />
<br />
I know there were in late Victorian days 'Little Englanders', about whom I know only the name, though a quick google shows that the term has been revived in the context of Brexit, offering some context. Indeed, some factions in ancient Athens point in a rather similar direction - providing an unexpected segue to my broader topic.<br />
<br />
I could say a lot more about the current American moment, but there are lots of places for that discussion, and not so many for the one I will now segue to.<br />
<br />
To paraphrase Thucydides <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(the ancient historian, not the commenter on this blog)</span>, the Athenians were the first polity that we know to have possessed a maritime hegemony. There is a line of speculation - with roots in Thucydides - that Minoan Crete might have had something of the sort. The unfortified palace of Knossos perhaps gives a hint in that direction, as do some frescoes, including one suggestive of a harbor ceremony, in the '<a href="http://www.ancient.eu/article/673/">House of the Admiral</a>' on Thera.<br />
<br />
A hegemony, in general, is an empire that favors indirect rule and a relatively modest profile <span style="font-size: x-small;">(as empires go)</span>. A maritime hegemony, naturally, is one sustained through sea power, which broadly understood extends beyond battle fleets to the 'soft power' of sea trade.<br />
<br />
There is a certain logic to maritime hegemony: 'distant storm-beaten ships' are inherently less in your face than tanks rolling down your street, And perhaps it is rooted in the differences between soldiers and sailors.<br />
<br />
This is reflected in myth. The <i>Iliad</i> is a soldier's epic, all about the dangers and comradeship of battle, and what happens when a commanding officer disrespects his troops. The <i>Odyssey</i> is a sailor's epic, all about the perils of the sea and the will to reach homeport.<br />
<br />
The most notable maritime hegemonies, in Western tradition, have been Athens, Venice, the Netherlands, Britain, and the US. (Not all sea-ruling nations have been classic maritime hegemonies. Rome and Spain, in their heydays, were more about legions and <i>tercios</i> than quinqueremes or galleons. Sea power was a byproduct of their power on land.)<br />
<br />
A curious and striking fact about those maritime hegemonies is that four out of the five had republican political systems.* Even the fifth, Britain, was something of a crowned republic, the monarch a sort of hereditary Doge.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
* <span style="font-size: x-small;">It is an odd fact that the ancient Greeks had no word for <i>republic,</i> at least no familiar one. We call Plato's book by its Latin name, which surely would have puzzled the old guy. Its Greek title, <i>Politeia</i>, gives us our word 'polity' - not an everyday term, and its modern meaning is any form of political entity in general - not necessarily an open, collective order, a public thing, <i>res publica.</i></span></blockquote>
<br />
Sea power, it appears, does not call for Caesarism. It is true that the Roman Republic had met its Ides of March well before the Battle of Actium, but - in spite of Cleopatra and her Egyptian squadron - Actium was fundamentally the last act of a Roman a civil war. And Napoleon's intended conquest of Britain met its watery Waterloo a decade before he himself met one on dry land.<br />
<br />
<br />
All of this, as you may not be utterly surprised to hear, has potential relevance to <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-observatory.com/spaceguideS-Z.htm#trade_federation">space and space opera</a>. Space is not an ocean, and spacehands are not sailors. But (unless you have planet-surface stargates) it is even harder to march across a few AU or light years of space than it is to march across the lagoon of Venice or the English Channel. <br />
<br />
As I noted in <a href="https://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346">comments to last post</a>, your all conquering star legions won't conquer anyone if a <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-observatory.com/spaceguideS-Z.htm#trade_federation">maritime hegemony sends some battlecruisers</a> <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(by whatever name)</span> to zap them all <i>en route.</i> Or even pepper them with target seeking kinetic cans.<br />
<br />
On individual planets, old fashioned overland conquest can be perfectly viable, depending on local geography. (On an pelagic planet, a world of islands, you presumably need boats or aircraft if you want to make everyone build huge statues of you.)<br />
<br />
But to dominate the star roads, or even the planet paths, you need a capable <i><a href="https://www.blogger.com/profile/13196257853962186227">astrale</a>,</i> or whatever you choose to call your space fleet. And in the long term big picture the best way to get one is probably to foster the sort of society - broadly, perhaps, a richly complex and open society - that has historically been associated with the great maritime hegemonies.<br />
<br />
Not precisely the blessings of liberty, as such, but perhaps helpful in making the space opera come out your way.<br />
<br />
Discuss:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[On edit:] Ten years ago today, I speculated on the <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2007/07/long-may-she-wave.html">future prospects of the American idea</a>, through the plausible midfuture and beyond.<br />
<br />
The image of <i>Olympias,</i> a modern reconstruction of an Athenian <i>trieres</i> ('trireme') comes from the present day <a href="http://www.hellenicnavy.gr/images/istoria/ploia_mouseia/triiris_olympias/TRIHR011.jpg">Hellenic Navy</a>. How cool is that? Click to see in full embiggened glory. <span style="font-size: x-small;">(And minor note that I flipped the source image.)</span>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com120tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-48924520064143904692017-06-01T15:30:00.000-07:002017-06-01T15:31:02.318-07:00Jutland at 101: Day of the Dreadnoughts<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZH1-ohtOhSIZdQhP3OThLdqYD2fNjCqnzDIvCeS2_E5RSougUBtDpVKwrbgAuY2RcSHVjnwlrtkzSgGNVzwXzKj-EseZvDldDsKjjuyaSyk-AuSSgwPl8tMoNBv_hF8f6Q_brazzBhuRX/s1600/Grand+Fleet.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Grand Fleet at sea" border="0" data-original-height="756" data-original-width="1200" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZH1-ohtOhSIZdQhP3OThLdqYD2fNjCqnzDIvCeS2_E5RSougUBtDpVKwrbgAuY2RcSHVjnwlrtkzSgGNVzwXzKj-EseZvDldDsKjjuyaSyk-AuSSgwPl8tMoNBv_hF8f6Q_brazzBhuRX/s320/Grand+Fleet.jpg" title="Grand Fleet at sea" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
A
century, a year, and a day ago, giants clashed across the North Sea. It
was the single grand set-piece engagement
of the big gun battleship era. Nothing like it was ever seen again, or probably
ever will be.<br />
<br />
Battleships and their dreadnought
cousins, battlecruisers, loom large in our collective imagination. They
were and are inherently operatic. Space opera, in particular, emerged as
a genre during the dreadnought era. And while it may often favor
swords or space fighters, on some level space opera is really <i>all about</i> Dreadnoughts in SPAAACE !!!<br />
<br />
If you doubt this, take a look once again at the opening scene of the original <i>Star Wars</i>
movie. No lightsabers are to be seen, nor even a space fighter. What we
see is a spaceship - no small one - in desperate flight ... to be overtaken by a truly looming,
immense, unmistakable battlecruiser.<br />
<br />
We know it is a battlecruiser, rather than a battleship, because of its hunting-down role, something that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fisher,_1st_Baron_Fisher">Jackie Fisher</a> would have identified without hesitation as a battlecruiser mission.<br />
<br />
And yes,
franchise canon describes this majestic ship as a 'star destroyer' but we are
not fooled. Perhaps George Lucas was hazy on his 20th century naval
terminology, or perhaps he felt that, in those days, <i>battlecruiser</i> belonged to the rival Star Trek franchise.<br />
<br />
No longer. While battlecruisers continue to have a somewhat sketchy reputation
among seagoing dreadnoughts <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(see below)</span>, they have clearly overcome their slower if
more heavily armored cousins in the battle for the stars.<br />
<br />
Google <i>battleship,</i> click Images, and you get pictures of historical seagoing battleships. Google <i>battlecruiser</i>
and you mostly get renditions of operatic spaceships, with a mere
scattering of seagoing vessels. (<i>Battle cruiser</i> as two words brings up a
slightly different sequence of images, but equally space dominated.)<br />
<br />
It
is not quite clear why, of the two dreadnought* types, battlecruisers
have become so predominant in space. Perhaps, for Americans at least,
Pearl Harbor looms larger than Jutland. If battleships only ever existed
in order to be obsolescent sitting ducks for Japanese carrier planes,
their potential as terrors of the spaceways is diminished. <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">*<i> Dreadnought</i> is used inclusively here, applied to all big-gun
capital ships, though the term was not often applied to new
battleships once pre-dreadnoughts had faded from the scene.</span></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
On
the other hand, the US Navy never had any battlecruisers, or at least
never admitted to having any. Six were under construction during World
War I, but under terms of the Washington Treaty two were finished as
aircraft carriers while the others were scrapped before completion. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska-class_cruiser"><i>Alaska</i></a>
class of World War II was described officially as mere 'large
cruisers', and their wartime service was brief, uneventful, and
overshadowed by the much larger <i>Iowa</i> class 'fast battleships'. <br />
<br />
Independent
of their role in science fiction, dreadnoughts have their own
mythology. As recently as 1991, a book with the evocative title <i><a href="https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/2020407">Sacred Vessels</a></i>
repeated the popular <span style="font-size: x-small;">(pseudo-)</span> contrarian argument that dreadnoughts were an
inherently bad idea, impressive and expensive but with little actual
fighting value.<br />
<br />
The fact that there was only ever one
grand clash of dreadnoughts - Jutland - and that it was not a
classically decisive battle, is often implicitly offered as evidence of this
proposition. In fact, battleships and battlecruisers mixed it up on
multiple occasions in World War II, though in much smaller numbers than
at Jutland. Running fights with one to three capital ships ships on a
side was the usual pattern.<br />
<br />
This makes Fisher's
original conception of the battlecruiser somewhat prescient. In the
early 1900s he argued that the time for stately formal engagements was
passing, and that future war at sea would be, in modern terms, 'kinetic'
- reliant more on speed and shock than pure mass. The experience of the
1940s generally bore him out.<br />
<br />
And - again, quite apart
from science fiction - battlecruisers have their own mythology, a myth
that has undergone considerable evolution.<br />
<br />
Three British
battlecruisers exploded at Jutland, and went down with nearly their
entire crews. These disasters were long attributed mainly to
insufficient armor protection, and the whole battlecruiser concept was
often denounced on this grounds.<br />
<br />
In recent times, however, much more of the <a href="http://www.informationdissemination.net/2014/12/the-enduring-myth-of-fragile_16.html">blame for the battlecruisers' losses has been placed on operational and doctrinal errors</a>.
The British battlecruiser force put great emphasis on rapid fire of
their main guns - which doctrine, like the ships' speed, was part of the
emerging kinetic vision of war at sea.<br />
<br />
But the emphasis
on rapid fire led gunners to ignore safety precautions such as properly closing
anti-flash doors, so that when turrets were hit the resulting internal
fires spread down to the magazines - with predictably catastrophic
results.<br />
<br />
The modern source linked above perhaps
overstates the conspiratorial element in the traditional story about
armor. I have 'always' known that flash protection was also lacking, so
the shift is less a matter of new revelations and more a re-evaluation
of what was already known. <span style="font-size: x-small;">(Though perhaps it wasn't clear that flash doors were already in place, but not correctly used.)</span><br />
<br />
This
is often how scholarship proceeds, a cycle not unlike the fashion
cycle. Perhaps by the 2060s a re-re-evaluation will again say that
battlecruisers blew up because they were eggshells armed with hammers. <br />
<br />
In
the meanwhile, battlecruisers may well continue to rule the spaceways - as they deserve to. And
readers of this blog may continue to suspect that laserstars, for all my
disclaimers to the contrary, and details of armament and configuration,
are still essentially Dreadnoughts in Space.<br />
<br />
Play the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhHwr1tLrrY">Jupiter theme from Holst's </a><i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhHwr1tLrrY">The Planets</a>,</i> and decide for yourself.<br />
<br />
Discuss:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /><br />
The image of the <a href="http://www.britishbattles.com/the-battle-of-jutland-part-i-the-opposing-fleets/">British Grand Fleet at sea</a> comes, unsurprisingly, from a web account of the battle.<br />
<br />
And we previously considered <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/search?q=last+battleship">the last battleship</a>, along with the proto-battleships of the <span style="font-size: x-small;">(actual, historical)</span> <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2012/08/the-steampunk-era.html">steampunk era</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com176tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-25268734308249647122017-01-27T12:00:00.000-08:002017-01-27T12:10:46.104-08:00Rapid Transit on Trantor<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR8HsdMce0L7hXxoTQYRvS2fTwSSpBdfzLqjUtyGkmb0bM5jCzwL2R2cLrAcEComi7H3T_3Gqah0SqvONu_PyY8WxKPuoXj_rQp2y0GTPnuFzXIwF8Q-Kn4yK7zFiiE8g3kzM9_wVc3L9w/s1600/Second+Avenue+Subway.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Second Avenue Subway" border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR8HsdMce0L7hXxoTQYRvS2fTwSSpBdfzLqjUtyGkmb0bM5jCzwL2R2cLrAcEComi7H3T_3Gqah0SqvONu_PyY8WxKPuoXj_rQp2y0GTPnuFzXIwF8Q-Kn4yK7zFiiE8g3kzM9_wVc3L9w/s400/Second+Avenue+Subway.jpg" title="Second Avenue Subway" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
In our last exciting episode <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2017/01/trantor-big-town.html">we visited Trantor</a>, or at least a city world that could pass for Trantor, an ecumenopolis of a trillion people for whom the Galactic Empire is something of an afterthought. But having come this far we ought to see more of it than just the inside of a spaceport gate or elevator foyer.<br />
<br />
The Foundation 'verse has no teleportation
tech (if you exclude jump-style hyperspace), so to get anywhere on a
planet you have to <i>go</i> there. And if our ecumenopolis is a real <i>city</i> - not a mere planetwide suburbia <span style="font-size: x-small;">(how boring!)</span> - this means a public transit network. <br />
<br />
Cars will not do, not for general use - not even Futuristic<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><b>[TM]</b></span> skimmer cars or whatever. Not even robocabs, which did not exist in that 'verse anyway.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://humantransit.org/2011/03/how-universal-is-transits-geometry.html">It is all about geometry</a>. Cars and highways are fine at low population
density, such as tract-home suburbs - say, 5000 people per square mile =
2000/km2. But once you get up even to townhouse urban density, about
10,000/mi2 = 4000/km2, parking and roadway space become a major hassle.<br />
<br />
Putting everyone in robocabs instead of private cars would help with parking, and the robo part would allow
more roadway crowding before gridlock sets in. (Robots should drive better than
we do.) Boxy little cars would help a bit, too. But these measures only
get you so far.<br />
<br />
Yes, in principle you could have
multiple layers of parking garages and underground roadways below the
dwellings. And since Asimov's 'verse <i>did</i> have aircars, you could move the garages to the top floors and the traffic jams into the air. In the Future, car accidents never happen.<br />
<br />
But in practice, at some point it gets easier and faster to simply take the bus.<br />
<br />
Which brings us to transit technology. In rocketpunk days it was taken for granted that even ground vehicle would never use anything so primitive as wheels. As late as c. 1990, the agency building the Los Angeles rail transit lines insisted that artists' conceptions avoid showing that its trains would run on <span style="font-size: x-small;">(gasp!)</span> <i>railroad tracks.</i><br />
<br />
Now, of course, tracks are back, including streetcars (trams, to some of you). Depending on the state of the tracks or pavement, streetcars usually have a smoother ride than buses, but don't go any faster. Their chief virtue is that a streetcar, running on rails, can be longer than a bus and thus carry more people.<br />
<br />
But this only really matters for very busy lines, which is why most streetcars vanished around the rocketpunk era.* In any case, by the near future - no need to wait for the plausible midfuture, let alone the Galactic Era - technology could blur these distinctions.<br />
<br />
The rocketpunk era is associated less with fading streetcars than with two other forms of urban transit. One, monorails, needs little discussion here. They are just elevated (usually) rail lines with a track too narrow for most idiots to try walking along. <span style="font-size: x-small;">(The wheels are also neatly hidden from view.)</span><br />
<br />
Much loved in the abstract, monorails never became popular in real life because people hate els running above their street. This is too bad, because you see a lot more of the city from an el than you do from a subway. But most people hate on els anyway, and still hate them even when the tracks are narrower and don't blot out quite as much sun. Which is why monorails remain rare.<br />
<br />
The other great rocketpunk transit tech was the slidewalk, a pedestrian conveyor belt resembling a flattened out escalator. Step on and be carried along. These are more interesting, as a real departure from conventional vehicular transit. For one thing, slidewalks run continually, so unlike a bus or train you don't have to wait for it. This is a big deal, because people hate waiting, and long wait times can effectively wipe out the advantage of high speed.<br />
<br />
Like monorails, some slidewalks actually exist, but also like monorails they have never really caught on. The problem is that if they are fast enough to save you much time over walking, people will stumble and fall all over when getting on or off.<br />
<br />
Heinlein (and probably others) suggested multiple side-by-side strips, so you could start on a slow 'local' strip, then cross over to faster express lanes. Alas, unless Trantor has UBT - universal ballet training - this side-step across a speed differential is also a guaranteed pratfall generator.<br />
<br />
With suitable magitech you might improve on the situation. Clarke's far future city of Diaspar has slidewalks made of flowing 'anisotropic matter'** that you can stand/walk on, while allowing a smooth transition from slow edges to the faster center express section.<br />
<br />
Slidewalks are still limited in speed unless your magitech also moves the ambient air along so riders aren't facing a gale-force relative wind. Rapid transit they are not, but if you can solve the pratfall problem they might have a place along busy corridors like Seldon Street.<br />
<br />
Indeed, for window shoppers and <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur">flaneurs</a>,</i> Seldon Street might even have slidewalk cafes and such. But this is more <strike>tourist attraction</strike> urban amenity than practical transit for people who just want to get where they're going.<br />
<br />
Otherwise your basic local line, the service that goes everywhere and stops at your corner, is essentially a plain old bus. Even though the smelly diesel bus has surely gone the way of the 19th century horsecar, which also emitted a noxious exhaust.<br />
<br />
And so a bus it is, though heavy Trantorian ridership levels - especially along busy Seldon Street - might justify streetcars/trams. We will also suppose that heavy ridership allows TERTA to provide frequent service, so you only have a short wait when connecting between lines.<br />
<br />
But the local bus can't be very rapid, not for techological reasons as such, but because it has to fight its way through traffic, automotive or pedestrian. Even if separated from other traffic, it must stop every few blocks to let riders on and off. And it can't get up too much speed between stops because of a basic human limit.<br />
<br />
Back in the 1930s, the R&D program for the classic American <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCC_streetcar">PCC streetcar</a> determined that the highest comfortable acceleration for transit straphangers is about 0.2 g, or two meters/second^2. The maximum acceleration of the PCC was thus set close to this level - quaintly expressed as 4.75 mphps (miles per hour per second).<br />
<br />
For surface vehicles that 'push against' the road or track, power needed for a given acceleration rises with the square of velocity; to avoid wasteful design, average acceleration for all but the most local service will be about half the maximum, a nice even one meter/second^2 or 0.1 g.<br />
<br />
Absent magitech pseudo-gravity to allow high acceleration without
bowling passengers over, technology cannot dramatically change these
constraints, which is why present-day transit lines are not much faster
than those of 100 years ago. <br />
<br />
Between the acceleration limit and the need for frequent stops (with 'dwell time' for riders getting on or off), the average or service speed of local transit is limited to about 15 mph / 25 kmh or thereabouts. Fighting through traffic makes it a good deal slower, unless the the line runs on its own reserved speedway in a boulevard median - an arrangement both useful and rather elegant.<br />
<br />
To get around this practical speed limit, large present-day cities have a two-level transit heirarchy. The local bus runs everywhere. Layered above it - or more often below it, in a subway - is a rapid transit or metro system, unimpeded by other traffic, with lines and stations more widely spaced, typically in the range of a kilometer to a mile apart.<br />
<br />
Because the rapid transit trunk lines have heavy ridership they are
commonly served by multi-car trains, not individual buses. So we will
simply call the rapid transit vehicles <i>trains,</i> without further ado.<br />
<br />
Longer runs between stations allow higher top speed for the same acceleration, and rapid transit service speeds are in the range of 25 mph / 40 kmh.<br />
<br />
A two layer transit hierarchy is enough for most present day cities. Paris has a third, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9seau_Express_R%C3%A9gional">RER</a>, and London is developing one, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Overground">London Overground</a>, upgrading and connecting suburban commuter lines for frequent all day service.<br />
<br />
This heirarchy is not rigid - 'light rail' and 'bus rapid transit' both tend to be intermediate or hybrid cases - but it provides a starting point for discussion. And as commenters on the last post already anticipated, Trantor will need multiple layers in its transit heirarchy. Just how many is hard to say; we don't have even semi-ecumenopolitan examples to guide us.<br />
<br />
We can start by considering a performance level that is not remotely magitech. Suppose a train accelerates at an average 0.1 g to a maximum 150 m/s, about 330 mph, then decelerates at the same rate - the public transit equivalent of a brachistochrone orbit. (This only loosely resembles how rail vehicles move, but gives us a first approximation.)<br />
<br />
Travel time is about 300 seconds, five minutes, and the vehicle goes 22.5 km. If we let the train cruise at top speed for another 150 seconds, we go 45 km in seven and a half minutes. An express run, passing intermediate stations, can go nearly 160 km - 100 miles - in 20 minutes.<br />
<br />
For comparison, the fastest existing transit line, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train">Shanghai airport maglev</a>, runs 30.5 km in 7:20, hitting a top speed of 120 m/s. So the model performance is only modestly above current rail practice. These high speed lines can form the third layer of the rapid transit hierarchy. Below them, heirarchically, are regional trains that stop every few miles or km, then the primary metro subway (and finally the local bus).<br />
<br />
Allowing time to get from your home to the high speed rail station, and from the destination station to wherever you're actually going, this type of system - local bus plus a 3-layer hierarchy of rapid transit, will get you pretty much anywhere in the extended neighborhood within an hour, where the extended neighborhood extends a hundred miles or so.<br />
<br />
At typically modest Trantorian urban density, up to half a billion people live within this radius (fewer if there are geographical constraints like a coastline, large park, or the Imperial Palace grounds.) So within an hour's ride are a corresponding number and variety of jobs, restaurants, potential lovers, and whatever else the city has to offer.<br />
<br />
But to really get around town we need to go faster. Suppose now a one hour 'semi brachistochrone' - 20 minutes accelerating at 0.1 g, 20 minutes cruise, 20 minutes decelerating. This takes you nearly 2900 km, 1800 miles, about the length of Seldon Street. Top speed is 1.2 km/s: rapid transit, indeed! <br />
<br />
The currently popular technology for this type of service is a hyperloop. Unfortunately, in current proposals the accent is on <i>hype</i> - not because the tech is modestly speculative, but because promoters tend to shamelessly lo-ball things that are not speculative at all, such as the cost of building elevated viaducts.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">(The name <i>hyperloop</i> is unfortunate in another way; it sounds more like an Awesome roller coaster ride than a practical transit service for people who may be package-laden, tired, tipsy, or all three.)</span><br />
<br />
But all that said, some such technology should be viable - essentially a genteel cousin of a mass driver or coilgun - and TERTA knows how to estimate construction costs. With a nod to London, the Mother of Rapid Transit, I will simply call these Tube lines.<br />
<br />
For the longest trips, a two hour nonstop Tube takes you up to 11,500
km / 7000 miles, nearly a third of the way around an Earth sized planet.
Allowing for all connections and wait times, you can get from most
locations on Trantor to most other locations in perhaps five or six
hours.<br />
<br />
A 'local' Tube running 30 minutes between stops will go a quarter as far as the baseline model, around 700 km / 400 miles. This service thus runs the length of Seldon Street in two hours, with three intermediate stations.<br />
<br />
Conventional high speed express trains connect these stations in turn, with another four or so intermediate stops, and so on down the hierarchy to the primary rapid transit that stops every mile or less. Then there are the buses and streetcars, and perhaps slidewalks, along Seldon Street itself.<br />
<br />
Thus a two hour trip - about the maximum for casual
daily travel, whether commuting to work or meeting a friend for lunch -
will get you more or less anywhere within a thousand km / 600 miles. If
your destination lies close to a major transit hub you can go two or three
times as far, because it will be served by top level lines, and you
won't need to work your way back down the hierarchy.<br />
<br />
The cityscape will reflect the granulation and heirarchy of the transit system. Most rapid transit stations will be nuclei of urban villages, neighborhood centers for errands, entertainment, and general public social life. Major stations will draw larger and denser condensations of the world city, some perhaps on a scale that would match our grandest Zeerust visions of the urban Future.<br /><br />
And while Trantor falls short of being a single practical commute zone, something in the range of 10-50 billion people probably live within two hours of wherever you are. Long distance travel might be constrained by high fares, but perhaps TERTA runs like the semilegendary subway of Gotham on the Origin World: a nickel takes you all over town.<br />
<br />
Although not part of the urban transit system, a word about space elevators. I have argued that they are only suited to truly enormous volumes of space traffic. Well, here we are: If any world has the requirement, Trantor does. We can imagine numerous elevator lines rising from the equator, probably with ring lines connecting them at geosynch level. Commenter Eth noted last post that the elevator cables could also support a ring of solar collectors or radiators if needed for power or heat management.<br />
<br />
Enough about the elevators; back to TERTA. <br />
<br />
The system is extensive, with bus and rail lines totalling hundreds of millions of miles, served by up to a couple of billion buses and subway cars. The Tube network, serving only long haul trunk routes is a mere million miles or so, interconnecting perhaps a thousand stations - few enough that dedicated enthusiasts will have visited all of them.<br />
<br />
These major stations should be suitably impressive. The levels of the
transit hierarchy must become literal here, the long-haul Tube lines
probably running deepest, with local lines being closer to the
concourse and street entries. As with major airports today, a transit system
might be needed simply to get around the station itself.<br />
<br />
And at times it will seem as if all those trillion Trantorians are trying to catch the same train that you are.<br />
<br />
But
from suitable locations you can look down along some of the lines, with
their diverging and converging switching networks and crossovers. The
utter coolness of which is justification enough for this visit to
Trantor.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiijQmgtRdysv0X6wp5U3yyrT7a8hAsYaQGAqsOvCmFICUts7u2ZhS33-TeErL5N_SlnOelwoW92y2pSairnudbTya8tJ_G6LsqIb3gg0tQQMW9hh1b_04dzTXA3dRaJS1haeDphjSs3_Xs/s1600/to+all+trains.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="To All Trains" border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiijQmgtRdysv0X6wp5U3yyrT7a8hAsYaQGAqsOvCmFICUts7u2ZhS33-TeErL5N_SlnOelwoW92y2pSairnudbTya8tJ_G6LsqIb3gg0tQQMW9hh1b_04dzTXA3dRaJS1haeDphjSs3_Xs/s320/to+all+trains.jpg" title="To All Trains" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
* The Great Streetcar Conspiracy was real, but played only a minor role in their demise. Streetcars were unfashionable in the 1950s, and most systems were old and badly run down. So it was simpler to bus convert even the few lines busy enough that streetcar modernization would have been preferable.<br />
<br />
** Anisotropic matter is also a term in relativity and cosmology, but I have no idea how it relates to the stuff you would use for slidewalks.<br />
<br />
<br />
Discuss:<br /><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The image of the <a href="http://www.mta.info/news/2016/12/19/governor-cuomo-announces-time-opening-second-avenue-subway">Second Avenue Subway</a> comes from the New York City transit agency. Because even tiny villages like NYC can benefit from rapid transit!<br />
<br />
The eastside Manhattan line, first proposed about a hundred years ago, opened on New Year's Day, and cost about $5 billion for a couple of miles of line - outrageously expensive even for subway lines, which are never cheap. But even at train robbery prices it will be worth the wait for the good citizens of Gotham.<br />
<br />
And as a curious example of Google time lag, there are not yet any good post-opening images of the line, which explains the odd absence of New Yorkers on the station platform.<br />
<br />
"To All Trains" is from the <a href="http://www.nytransitmuseum.org/visit/">NY Transit Museum</a>. Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com65tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-54362845527509536652017-01-15T12:45:00.000-08:002017-01-15T12:50:37.067-08:00Trantor: the Big Town<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf1kN-K1nel4j85rVdKb-CXKxUeMl5WU64i4YwSs5kstxCHlX0necha2C8Xe3Ii7mhkcvpzbBRUepijYIT7FCg-b7bn72agibq7HTpixYX8lsim1sMglG_aNQtPsbzTA7IawCyx_-iZAFw/s1600/Trandor+-+coruscant-e1411691792626.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Trantor" border="0" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf1kN-K1nel4j85rVdKb-CXKxUeMl5WU64i4YwSs5kstxCHlX0necha2C8Xe3Ii7mhkcvpzbBRUepijYIT7FCg-b7bn72agibq7HTpixYX8lsim1sMglG_aNQtPsbzTA7IawCyx_-iZAFw/s320/Trandor+-+coruscant-e1411691792626.jpg" title="A vision of Trantor" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
As Earth awaits the official debut of America's nightmare comedy,
this might be a good time to talk about other planets. So here we go! <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(Again!)</span><br />
<br />
One minor but durable trope in science fiction is the planetwide city. (For which the geek <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(and Greek)</span> term is <i>ecumenopolis,</i>
'world city'.) For now - until the Star Wars prequels mercifully fade
from popular memory - most people will associate this trope with
Coruscant. But accept no substitutes: really it means Trantor, capital world of the
Galactic Empire in Asimov's <i>Foundation Trilogy.</i><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Just for the record, this discussion obviously lies <i>waaay</i>
beyond the Plausible Midfuture. Also a disclaimer that I am not trying
to specifically reconstruct Asimov's Trantor, but a more broadly
Trantor-esque world.</span><br />
<br />
I bring up this trope because one of my interests, which has gotten oblique mention here before, is urban <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2010/03/rapid-transit.html">rapid transit</a>.
And while TERTA - the Trantor Ecumenopolitan Rapid Transit Agency -
never got any mention in the books, it reasonably ought to be ...
impressive.<br />
<br />
As useful background for a transit ride, a few words - well, quite a few - about the overall cityscape, starting with its population. The Good Doctor A slipped up badly on this score. His canonical figure for Trantor - 40 billion - is laughably low, only a few times current world population. We want a global <i>city,</i> not a world of ten-acre exurban ranchettes. <br />
<br />
Donald Kingsbury does much better in his <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/search?q=splendid+wisdom">unofficial Foundation sequel</a>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Psychohistorical Crisis.</span> His version of Trantor, called Splendid Wisdom, is home to a nice, round trillion people. Spread over the whole surface of an earthlike
planet, even this comes out to merely suburban average density.
But if we leave the oceans wet and only urbanize the land surface, we
get roughly the population density of San Francisco.<br />
<br />
Now we're talking. San Francisco, outside the Financial District, lacks the glass and steel canyons look, but cityscapes can vary considerably for a given density. Central Paris apparently has about the same population density as Manhattan, but a very different urban look. Likewise a modest urban density could still have an impressive skyline.<br />
<br />
The image of Trantor <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(nominally Coruscant)</span> above - click to embiggen - hints at one way of finessing this. Most of the city seems to be low-rise, or at least of roughly uniform height, but with monumental structures rising above the rest for added zip.<br />
<br />
Another consideration is that an ecumenopolis surely cannot be like
an ordinary habitable planet, where humans merely skim the cream off a self-sustaining natural ecosystem. It will need something more
like a spacecraft life support system, on a suitably giga scale.<br />
<br />
The details are far above my biology pay grade, but may well imply vast sublevels of, essentially, plumbing. The subways could thus run through what amount to basements rather than true tunnels. And the oceans may effectively be sewage treatment / oxygen regeneration ponds - nothing you would want to swim in, which at least would keep shorefront promenades from being impossibly crowded.<br />
<br />
Parts of the life support system might rise to or above surface level, and some of the megastructures could well be the equivalent of rooftop air conditioning equipment.<br />
<br />
Also, the population density need not be uniform all over town. If you <i>really</i>
don't like urban living, Trantor is not the planet for you. But many
neighborhoods (totalling millions of km2 and a couple of hundred billion
people) might well be at suburban density, balanced by high-rise urban
districts, thus accommodating people who want a yard as well as those
who prefer living near good shopping and restaurants.<br />
<br />
Kingsbury
mentions one such commercial district on Splendid Wisdom that is suitably
Trantorian in scale. I forget its name, but since Splendid Wisdom is a
rebuilt Trantor of the Second Empire, I will call it Seldon Street.
Though technically a pedestrian mall, functionally it is a suitably
giga-scaled version of Market Street or Wilshire Boulevard, extending
for some 3000 km. <br />
<br />
That being a long, long stroll,
expect some serious transit lines to run along the Seldon Street
corridor. <br />
<br />
But before we ride, a few more thoughts on the cityscape. First, a couple of annoying practicalities. Realism<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[TM]</span> is not really a key issue in this exercise, but we should give it a superficial nod.<br />
<br />
On a world without farmland, how do you feed a trillion people? Asimov's Trantor imports its food from 20 agricultural worlds, but they could only supply <i>this</i> Trantor with delicacies. For basic food supply you need a planetwide array of oscillating hands: <i>something something hydroponics, something something algae.</i><br />
<br />
And, of course, all this stuff should really be on the surface, with the city life below, but we want a planet that <i>looks</i> urban. We will delicately assume that technology originally developed for spacehabs and such will solve food supply along with the rest of the life support challenge.<br />
<br />
Energy supply turns out to need less handwaving than food supply. An earthlike planet absorbs on order of 10^17 watts of insolation (instellation?) from its parent star. Current average US energy usage is about 10 kw/capita, scaling to 10^16 watts for a trillion people. So cover the rooftops with solar panels and you more or less get there. Waste heat disposal is not a problem, because you are merely using energy the planet would absorb anyway.<br />
<br />
And energy consumption on Trantor can be relatively modest. It is not an industrial world; as the Imperial capital, its chief manufactured product is government. Large cities also tend to be energy efficient - not least because people ride the subway instead of driving.<br />
<br />
From these material concerns we can turn to social considerations. An ecumenopolis must have substantial <i>overall</i> social stability to function at all, but Trantor presumably has its good neighborhoods and not so good, perhaps including slums the cops only enter in army-corps strength.<br />
<br />
Or - another familiar urban SF trope - class stratification might be literal, with the down and out living among the plumbing sublevels, while the upper classes live on upper floors, the richest in penthouses. This lends itself to a transit subtrope that goes back to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar's_Column">1890</a>: dismal subways for the poor, elegant els for the rich.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Note that the district shown in the image above must be served only by subways; there are no hints of elevated lines.</span> <br />
<br />
Given a world of a trillion people none of this needs be an either/or: Within vary broad limits, Trantor's cityscape and social life can be as varied - including the charmingly urbane <i>and</i> the dystopian - as you want them to be. <br />
<br />
On yet another note, Isaac Asimov was famously agoraphobic, and his Trantorians rarely went up to the open surface. Depending on how the life support system operates, 'rarely' might be <i>never,</i> at least without a quasi space suit.<br />
<br />
But this too is not a given. An ecumenopolis, or neighborhoods thereof, may have rooftop gardens and dining patios under the solar awnings, and even (shock!) open air streets instead of roofed over corridors. When I speak of the Seldon Street corridor I say nothing about its architecture, only that it is an elongated urban district.<br />
<br />
Trantor might even have parks, though the only open space on Asimov's version was the Imperial palace grounds. But we have not come all this way to an ecumenopolis to visit a <i>park.</i> You can find those on any garden colony world. So in our next exciting episode we will head for Seldon Street.<br />
<br />
And since it is already mostly written, you won't need to wait until the Galactic Era to read it.<br />
<br />
Discuss:<span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Yes, knowing this blog's commenter community - if you have not all given up and deserted me - the discussion will work itself around to space battles.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The cityscape image comes from a <a href="https://storiesbywilliams.com/tag/trantor/">blog review of </a><i><a href="https://storiesbywilliams.com/tag/trantor/">Second Foundation</a>.</i> Alas, I know nothing of the artist who created it.<br />
<br />
<br />Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com65tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-84467174092624481592015-08-06T07:30:00.000-07:002015-08-06T07:30:01.177-07:00Darker Than a Thousand Suns<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbS_HMCC8KStK73UC1SNefET4vxcsOZQugottzrw9GUyxqJmBm0SxrriBWhxb-0Q43sMqtsvr_5COEnemXGo0aAVu_li-ilTPjVm7EiSubaEyTL_EIwtqNYPhUmYY3f3gVtfRB5qMy6EDz/s1600/Hiroshima+Cloud.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Hiroshima" border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbS_HMCC8KStK73UC1SNefET4vxcsOZQugottzrw9GUyxqJmBm0SxrriBWhxb-0Q43sMqtsvr_5COEnemXGo0aAVu_li-ilTPjVm7EiSubaEyTL_EIwtqNYPhUmYY3f3gVtfRB5qMy6EDz/s320/Hiroshima+Cloud.jpg" title="Hiroshima" width="280" /></a></div>
<br />
Seventy years ago, a nuclear weapon was used against human targets for the first time. Seventy years ago less three days, one was used for - so far - the last time.<br />
<br />
The mythology of nuclear weapons and nuclear war is, understandably, much bound up with the <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2007/08/i-am-become-death-destroyer-of-worlds.html">element of surreal horror</a>, from stellar temperatures and energies to lingering death from radiation. This is probably as it should be: those things stick in the imagination.<br />
<br />
But what really sets atomic bombs apart is not the exotic horrors they release on top of the ordinarily horrific effects of blast and fire, but the mundane fact that <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2010/08/limits-of-post-industrial-war.html">nuclear weapons make devastation cheap</a>. Individually they are expensive, but no more than the aircraft and missiles that carry them, and one nuclear-armed delivery vehicle wreaks the havoc that previously called for a thousand.<br />
<br />
The good news - again, so far - is that the combination of vivid terror and stark economics has been enough to prevent a third use. It has become harder for elites to retain their illusion of invulnerability. Not only does the bomber usually get through, but if it does, a bomb shelter is unlikely to provide sufficient protection for you, your family, or your assets. These facts seem to be fairly well understood, at a fairly visceral level.<br />
<br />
Which is a fairly thin sliver of hope to rest on, but it is the one we have.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The image of the Hiroshima mushroom cloud comes from <a href="http://www.atomicarchive.com/Photos/Hiroshima/image1.shtml">Atomic Archive</a>. Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com72tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-89133662903809040592015-07-27T10:00:00.000-07:002015-07-27T10:05:12.854-07:00Stick and Gimbal: Handflying in SPAAACE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4vWOip70vt4/0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Snoopy at the Controls" border="0" src="http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4vWOip70vt4/0.jpg" height="240" title="Snoopy at the Controls" width="320" /></a></div>
Do the human roles in space include piloting spacecraft in the traditional sense of maneuvering them via direct control inputs, AKA handflying?<br />
<br />
In an old post I said that '<a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2008/02/hard-sf-so-hard-its-impossible.html">handflying a spaceship is a ding waiting to happen</a>,' alluding to a <i>Progress</i> supply ship that banged into the <i>Mir</i> space station during a Russian test in 1997. But the story is <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(as usual)</span> a bit more complicated than that.<br />
<br />
In Russian practice, handflying has always been strictly an emergency backup. And certainly their experience gave them no reason to change their approach. In the American space program, however, things were different. <br />
<br />
Cosmonauts and astronauts were both originally chosen from among test pilots, for the same sensible reason. The basic mission was to test and exercise human capabilities in space, for which you want highly capable people. Familiarity with complex technical systems that go really, really fast was also seen as helpful.<br />
<br />
But for institutional and cultural reasons, the early 'Murrican astronauts had much greater influence on how things were done. Mostly it was the whole hot-pilot mystique: <i>Use the Force, Luke!</i><br />
<br />
A scene in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Stuff_%28film%29"><i>The Right Stuff</i></a> - a title that encapsulates this mystique - conveyed the effects it had on American thinking about space. A German-born rocket scientist describes the prospective occupant of a Mercury capsule as a 'specimen,' but his 'Murrican audience hears it as <i>spaceman,</i> a term richly evocative of Romance. <br />
<br />
A related factor might have been the historical accident that the Russians used dogs, most famously <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laika">Laika</a>, for space research while the Americans used monkeys and apes. Following in the pawprints of Man's Best Friend was one thing. Going boldly where our relatives from the primate house had gone before was a bit more awkward.<br />
<br />
In any case, the upshot was that astronauts fiercely resisted being spam in a can, and got their way. Handflying was integral to American human spaceflight from the beginning, and right through the retirement of the Shuttle.<br />
<br />
Moreover, it contributed significantly to Americans winning the 1960s moon race. Successful handflying of Gemini spacecraft in rendevous and docking maneuvers emboldened NASA to choose an Apollo architecture that required rendezvous on lunar orbit, and the savings in mass allowed the whole thing to go up on one Saturn V. In the mid-60s state of the art, when this decision was made, automated rendezvous and docking at lunar distance was surely a nonstarter.<br />
<br />
Fifty years later our space technology, most of it, is not much different, but automation is obviously a different story. In the age of Google Cars, handflying is out of fashion, and new
generation US spacecraft, both Orion and Dragon2, will reportedly follow the Russians in
automating maneuvers, including rendezvous and docking.<br />
<br />
So is handflying in space an idea whose time has come and gone? Just behind this question, of course, lurks the much larger one of whether human spaceflight itself is an idea whose time has come and gone. Our voyages of deep space exploration have now reached the <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2015/07/the-heart-of-kuiper-belt.html">Kuiper Belt</a>, and the <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2011/12/distance-119-au.html">fringes of interstellar space</a>, without their operating crews ever leaving Pasadena or its terrestrial counterparts.<br />
<br />
It may be that at some point we will send '<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Specialist">mission specialists</a>' to the planets without any need to send spacecrew along to fly their ships. For that matter, even if ship-operation spacecrew are needed, their tasks may not include handflying. But for now, let us consider handflying, as one of the classic skills we once expected of professional space travellers.<br />
<br />
It is pretty much a given that automated systems can fly routine space maneuvers, including complex ones like rendezvous and docking, more smoothly than human pilots. And probably more safely as well, since robots are less prone to unaccountable lapses that can cause routine operations to go pear shaped.<br />
<br />
The first question, and the traditional fallback for human intervention, is when things are <i>not</i> routine, and particularly when they have already gone pear shaped. This is nothing to dismiss lightly. So long as things go well, space lends itself to automation, what with Newton and all that. But once things go awry, from instrument failure to erratic maneuvers by another spacecraft, the ability of machines to easily predict the predictable is less helpful.<br />
<br />
Moreover, a large part of contemporary AI is expert systems, essentially an encodings of prior human expertise and experience. Expert systems are convenient, cheap substitutes for scarce human experts. But it is less certain that the projected wisdom of skilled pilots who are not on the scene of a particular emergency should or can trump the judgment of a skilled pilot who <i>is</i> on the scene. <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(And setting aside the question of who trains the expert system if humans no longer practice something.)</span> <br />
<br />
Perhaps even more to the point, the purposes for which we go into space are human purposes, and at some point we probably want human judgment involved. In an earlier post I chose a somewhat extreme example, deciding who to rescue if not everyone can be taken. <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2015/07/ships-for-orbital-patrol.html?showComment=1436592044758#c2765440306324334888">Commenter Brett</a> rightly observed that the case was somewhat unlikely.<br />
<br />
But more practical human decision points could easily arise at the scene of an emergency. Suppose a damaged, tumbling spacecraft has injured people aboard in need of emergency medical attention. The rescue ship can break the tumble, a time-consuming process, or perform a somewhat risky maneuver to put medics aboard while the crippled ship is still tumbling. An AI can help weigh the risks, but as Spock might say, cognitive abilities alone are not enough to make that call.<br />
<br />
And if the decision is to attempt the maneuver, how is it managed? You probably want AI assistance in performing such a tricky maneuver, but giving verbal instructions would be awfully clumsy. A better alternative is to give the pilot something like a 'smart glove'. The glove learns the pilot's reactions - for example, distinguishing between a random muscular twitch and the beginning of a volitional action, allowing more responsiveness than a bare hand on the joystick could achieve. And if the AI packs up or starts singing 'Daisy' the pilot can disengage it and still fly the ship, even if their spirited steed turns into a carthorse plug. <br />
<br />
This basic technology is something we are at least very close to having now, if we don't already have it. And it harnesses AI as what I believe it fundamentally is: a human mental <i>enhancer.</i> For routine operations we can step back and let AI handle the job. For non-routine operations the AI helps us to do a demanding job more effectively.<br />
<br />
To be sure, the rescue example presupposes that there are humans in space to be rescued. But the basic reason that human spaceflight is so limited, and controversial, is that it is astronomically expensive. If it becomes merely expensive the justification bar will not be set so high, and in some cases the cost of human presence may fall below that of developing and providing a robotic alternative.<br />
<br />
All of which still leaves some complex decisions to be made about handflying. If routine operations are automated, how much actual handflying experience do pilots get? And if they mostly sit passively overseeing automated operations, how alert will they be in a sudden crisis? This has already become <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2009/07/subway-accidents-and-space-pilots.html">a problem for highly automated operations such as rail transit systems</a>.<br />
<br />
As with handflying, so I suspect with much else, not only in space but here on Earth: AI will change many things, but probably in ways quite different from those imagined in conventional speculation about robots.<br />
<br />
Discuss:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
I previously wrote about <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2011/01/what-do-ais-want.html">what AIs want</a>, or might not want, and the relationship between <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2012/09/artificial-intelligence-human.html">human and artificial intelligence</a>. The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vWOip70vt4">image of Snoopy</a> comes from a snippet on YouTube.Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com61tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-79248210381216300592015-07-20T07:37:00.000-07:002015-07-20T07:37:24.093-07:00Luna Rising<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0709/saguaroMoon_seip.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Saguaro Moon Rising" border="0" src="http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0709/saguaroMoon_seip.jpg" height="270" title="Saguaro Moon Rising" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
Forty-six years ago today, the first human being walked on the Moon. And more than 40 years have passed since the last human did so. <br />
<br />
Those of you who have followed this blog for a long time may have noticed a quiet shift in my position regarding Earth's orbital companion. In the past I have been rather negative about returning to the Moon, while more recently <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2015/06/the-weekly-moonship.html">The Weekly Moonship</a> portrayed a space future that included, well, weekly travel there.<br />
<br />
So what has changed?<br />
<br />
Most obviously, it turns out that there is a lot of water on the moon; at least a lot of ice in polar areas where sunlight does not reach. The stuff of life is not everything, but it is a big thing, and in particular it can be cracked to make rocket fuel, something that large scale space travel can't get enough of.<br />
<br />
Provisos apply. <i>A lot</i> means one thing to a scientist, something else to a mining engineer, and we have no idea <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(yet)</span> whether lunar ice will be available in concentrations that make it suitable for processing. And anyone who thinks that such processing will be cheap or easy needs to cash a reality check: <i>Nothing</i> in space is cheap or easy. Space travel is the most difficult technical challenge that we have surmounted as a race, which is exactly why July 20, 1969, like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_1">April 12, 1961</a>, has lasting significance. <br />
<br />
All of that said, I have revised my perception of the Moon in the human space future, and not only for merely practical reasons. Aesthetics is also a factor, and not unjustly. <i><a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2015/07/the-heart-of-kuiper-belt.html">New Horizons</a></i> has reminded us - not for the first time, not for the last - of the sheer wonder and beauty of the Universe, including those parts of it that are already within our reach.<br />
<br />
The beauty of Earth's companion, as seen from Earth, does not need me to expound it. Poets beat me to that punch thousands of years ago. The Greeks identified Selene, as they called it, with the goddess Artemis, mysterious virgin huntress of the night. <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(They gave Venus, with its hellish conditions, to the goddess of love. So far as I know, poets have not yet exploited this entertaining fact. When they do so it will be one more indication of our maturation as a spacefaring civilization.)</span><br />
<br />
Seen from close up, at least in the most familiar images - those from 46 years ago - Luna seems rather less enchanting. It is about the color of a parking lot, no inducement to poetry. But while every picture tells a story, those images may say more about the circumstances than the locale. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tranquility_Base">Statio <span class="st">Tranquillitatis</span></a>, as it is officially designated on lunar maps, is just about the most boring location you can find on the lunar surface. This is for extremely good reason: <i>boring,</i> in astronautics, is a technical term meaning 'probably safe for landing on.' The first human mission to Mars will also land somewhere boring; likewise the first human mission to a planet of Alpha Centauri. <br />
<br />
Related factors also influenced those first images. The equipment was designed by people who <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(surprise!)</span> had never gone where it was meant to be used. And the people using it were trained primarily as spacecrew, not photographers. All of which is to say that the Moon can doubtless be as lovely close at hand as from 384,000 kilometers. But the images that will one day enchant us have yet to be taken.<br />
<br />
Other reasons will, in due course of time, impel us to return to the Moon. And yet others will only be discovered after we do so.<br />
<br />
All of that said, I am in no particular hurry to send humans back to the Moon. But then, I am in no particular hurry to send them anywhere. At our current development stage the only <i>truly</i> good reason for humans to go into space is to learn what we can do there, which is what the ISS is all about. The time for first-hand human space exploration will come when some planetary studies postgrad goes into her advisor's office, tosses her notes onto the desk, and says 'Okay, this is really bizarre.' <br />
<br />
Yes, there are other reasons to go to the Moon that are not 'truly' good, merely good enough, and truly human. Such as the reasons we went for the first time. I think the current betting odds are that the next visitors will come from China. One more small step for mankind, but a huge one for any emerging space program: decisive claim of a place at the big kids' table.<br />
<br />
We will return to the Moon. Not in this decade, probably not in this generation, perhaps not in this century, but surely in the fullness of time.<br />
<br />
Discuss:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
I previously grumped about the Moon - but, really, more about <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2009/05/lonely-luna-not-feeling-love.html">ill-advised hype that ended up setting back our space effort</a>.<br />
<br />
The image comes from the <a href="http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0709/saguaroMoon_seip.jpg">Astronomy Picture of the Day</a> archives.Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com80tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-6113288397412302362015-07-14T12:13:00.000-07:002015-07-14T16:17:15.506-07:00The Heart of the Kuiper Belt<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmf3IL3YDGOXi_JXmlmIOYINYB44ddimbMVDCybSyDJexJO4OT-7sNTg5VG0me5ZICXiW-ar0cII2J2AukznEOoRvDyAfS1tA_YzyYtMzaFIHT1xo37PYaRo2F8zB3dKob0YThj5WALbRb/s1600/Pluto+Heart.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Pluto - King of the Kuiper Belt" border="0" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmf3IL3YDGOXi_JXmlmIOYINYB44ddimbMVDCybSyDJexJO4OT-7sNTg5VG0me5ZICXiW-ar0cII2J2AukznEOoRvDyAfS1tA_YzyYtMzaFIHT1xo37PYaRo2F8zB3dKob0YThj5WALbRb/s320/Pluto+Heart.jpg" title="Pluto - King of the Kuiper Belt" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Probably by now most of you have already seen this image, from the <i>New Horizons</i> probe, showing the remarkable heart-shaped feature on the surface of the King of the Kuiper Belt.<br />
<br />
'Remarkable' is fairly weak tea, but my personal stock of superlatives has long since been worn down by the eye candy sent back from our ongoing preliminary reconnaissance of the Solar System. So it will have to do.<br />
<br />
And I think we can declare Pluto's pity party to be officially over. Future generations of schoolkids will not remember that the largest member of the Kuiper Belt was once classed as the ninth* 'major' planet - and will be increasingly aware that there are planetary systems out there that would scoff at even mighty Jove.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
* <span style="font-size: x-small;">For much of my adult life, in fact, Pluto was not the ninth anything, since for a quarter century or so its orbit carried it sunward of Neptune.</span></blockquote>
If anything, some of those kids might be puzzled by old books, including much rocketpunk-era (and later) SF, that called it simply the ninth planet, back before anyone came up with our current subcategories.<br />
<br />
Most of all, we can now officially add the Kuiper Belt to the list of places we've been, albeit so far only vicariously. <span style="font-size: x-small;">Going there in person will be a demanding mission, and a ways down the road. <span style="font-size: xx-small;">Well before that time comes, we will return to our previously scheduled discussion of Earth's orbital space.</span></span> Previous missions have passed through the Kuiper Belt, but <i>New Horizons</i> went there specifically to take a look-see. And the heart on Pluto is one of the first things we saw.<br />
<br />
Discuss:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The image was snagged from <i><a href="http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/new-horizons-buzzes-pluto-2015071423/">Sky & Telescope</a>.</i><br />
<br />
We previously <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2010/02/plutos-revenge-dish-best-served-cold.html">considered Pluto</a> here, while it also came up incidentally in <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2010/02/pluto-in-news-again.html">an amusing context</a>. And even the phrase '<a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2008/05/lets-get-around.html">heart of the Kuiper Belt</a>' got a previous outing here, albeit in a different sense and context, not specific to Pluto.Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-51733025183696478302015-07-10T20:08:00.000-07:002015-07-11T17:05:53.165-07:00Ships for the Orbital Patrol<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKU2uth8Kv8yGCnN1S52liGmx4ZtIgOZEYlGuaZGcUL6pJW4SbShcO-1yp5DrdLALk7wdNKCc1Wlpplvj4TCaGkbxGAnVzqRqqMDlSbgh8rYrZ5a8CBwoKzRqChcfvsiZFq6W7EXzI88qq/s1600/patrol+ship+close+up.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Orbital Patrol Ship" border="0" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKU2uth8Kv8yGCnN1S52liGmx4ZtIgOZEYlGuaZGcUL6pJW4SbShcO-1yp5DrdLALk7wdNKCc1Wlpplvj4TCaGkbxGAnVzqRqqMDlSbgh8rYrZ5a8CBwoKzRqChcfvsiZFq6W7EXzI88qq/s400/patrol+ship+close+up.jpg" title="Orbital Patrol Ship" width="400" /></a></div>
Over the last three posts we have looked at ships and travel in <span style="font-size: x-small;">(mainly)</span> Earth's orbital space, and sketched one possible path to an orbital patrol service. So now we come to the post I originally intended to write before necessary preamble took charge: the potential characteristics of Orbital Patrol ships.<br />
<br />
The image above is unabashedly intended as a rocketpunk-era interpretation, not a strictly realistic conception of a ship built for aerobraking. Hence the forward section inspired by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_B-36_Peacemaker">B-36</a>. Note the spacewalker casting a shadow on the nose. Also note a similar craft serving as forward-end rider atop a deep-space ship in the RM header image.<br />
<br />
Even more unabashedly, our ship is ready to deliver something considerably more forceful than a warrant. Space warcraft you want, space warcraft you get.<br />
<br />
Before going on to particulars, a reprise of the maneuver performance requirements table from <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2015/06/adventures-in-orbital-space.html">Adventures in Orbital Space</a>, with one difference:<br />
<table 100="" border="2" bordercolor="#000000" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3" px="" style="background-color: white;" width:=""><tbody>
<tr></tr>
<tr><td><span style="background-color: white;">Low earth orbit (LEO) to geosynch and return</span></td>
<td><span style="background-color: white;">5700 m/s powered</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">(plus 2500 m/s aerobraking) </span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="background-color: white;">LEO to lunar surface (one way)</span></td>
<td><span style="background-color: white;">5500 m/s</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">(all powered)</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="background-color: white;">LEO to lunar L4/L5 and return*</span></td>
<td><span style="background-color: white;">4800 m/s powered</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">(plus 3200 m/s aerobraking)</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>LEO to low lunar orbit and return </td>
<td><span style="background-color: white;">4600 m/s powered</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">(plus 3200 m/s aerobraking)</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Geosynch to low lunar orbit and return*</td>
<td>4200 m/s<br />
(all powered)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Lunar orbit to lunar surface and return</td>
<td>3200 m/s<br />
(all powered)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>LEO inclination change by 40 deg*</td>
<td>5400 m/s<br />
(all powered)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>LEO to circle the Moon and return retrograde*</td>
<td>3200 m/s powered<br />
(plus 3200 m/s aerobraking)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Mars surface to Deimos (one way)</td>
<td>6000 m/s<br />
(all powered)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>LEO to low Mars orbit (LMO) and return</td>
<td>6100 m/s powered<br />
(plus 5500 m/s aerobraking)</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
* Not in source table; delta v estimates are mine.<br />
<br />
The difference is that I have expressed speeds <span style="font-size: x-small;">(more precisely <i>changes</i> in speed, or delta v) <span style="font-size: small;">the way professional spacecrew probably will, in meters rather than kilometers per second. I do this for a reason: 3.2 km/s sounds picky, even a bit petty - a mere 0.0000107 of the speed of light. In the conventions of operatic space SF, hardly worth asking the diva to fire up her lungs.</span></span><br />
<br />
But call it 3200 meters per second and it sounds like exactly what it is - <i>fast.</i> As in blink-and-you-missed-it fast, <span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>much</i> faster than a speeding bullet</span></span>, more than ten times jetliner speed. </span></span><br />
<br />
And our baseline ship will be good for nearly twice that much in power burns, plus aerobraking when the mission allows it. A hydrogen-oxygen engine and 75 percent propellant fraction (mass ratio of 4) gives it a total powered delta v of 6100 meters per second, sufficient for all the missions listed.<br />
<br />
To flesh out the ship, a few 'design rules' for spacecraft, based on a judicious mix of current practice and sheer guesswork:<br />
<br />
Engines: Typical chemfuel engines, e.g. for kerosene and liquid oxygen, have a thrust/mass ratio of around 75-80. For H2-O2 the ratio is somewhat lower, about 50 - the higher specific impulse means less thrust per gigawatt of engine power output.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Fuel tankage: This is most of the ship, by volume and (loaded) mass. The figures below, from the <a href="http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/basicdesign.php">Atomic Rockets 'basic' design page</a>, give tankage mass as a percentage of the propellant mass they hold: </span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"> 4 pct: Kerosene-LOX and other common propellants</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"> 6 pct: H2-O2 (because liquid hydrogen is bulky)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;">13 pct: Liquid hydrogen only (for atomic/electric propulsion)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;">25 pct: Solid fuel - casing is also the motor </span></li>
</ul>
These figures are for expendable rocket stages. For reusable vehicles structural fatigue becomes a concern, not so easily guesstimated, but let us handwave that progress in materials and design will allow reusable tank structures in The Future to weigh no more than expendable tanks do today.<br />
<br />
To a zeroth approximation, engine and tankage mass <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(and the propellant!)</span> are all you need to model a rocket stage. For those playing along at home, try simming some space boosters, bearing in mind that while low orbit velocity is about 7900 m/s, losses from gravity and aerodynamic drag mean that you need about 9700 m/s worth of delta v to place a payload in orbit.<br />
<br />
A complete, reusable space vehicle will need additional mass for needed features and equipment. Allow 15 percent of ship mass, while aerobraking, for the heat shield.<br />
<br />
For Earth surface recovery, I'm allowing 5 percent of landing mass, compared to 4 percent of (total) mass for aircraft landing gear. I say Earth 'recovery' to emphasize that even if these ships land on a runway, like the Shuttle, they are not really airplanes. In particular, they cannot take off and fly into orbit; they need a booster stage or two. And recovery by parachute may be more robust.<br />
<br />
I'm also allowing 5 percent for Luna/Mars landing gear. It may be that ships also tail-land on Earth, using the same gear, but in that case they'll need some propellant for the final descent burn, so we will keep Earth recovery and Luna/Mars landing as separate requirements.<br />
<br />
Finally, we must allow for all the systems and equipment a robust spacecraft must have - electric power supply and equipment, attitude/maneuvering thrusters and their propellant, and so on and so forth.<br />
<br />
I am simply going to ballpark these as up to 20 percent of mass without <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(most)</span> propellant - not precisely 'dry' mass, since it includes payload and consumables. Spacecraft with limited capabilities - such as a recoverable top stage that merely reaches orbit, releases its payload, and heads back down, can get away with less.For aerobraking craft I'll also say up to 5 percent for aerodynamic control surfaces, fairings, payload bay doors, and such.<br />
<br />
Whatever is left over after deducting for these structures and fittings is payload, or at least gross
payload, including the crew compartment and life support, if fitted, and
internal bay capacity for any payloads that must be aerobraked.<br />
<br />
So.
Here is a ship based on an unfueled mass of 100 tons, suited to launch
into orbit atop a heavy-lift launch stack. In fact, the powerful
engine may allow the ship to function as a second stage to orbit, needing
only the big booster stage to send it on its way. (But in either case it will need to refuel to proceed beyond low orbit.)<br />
<br />
We will call it simply
a patrol ship, since the Navy has patrol aircraft, so designated, albeit with a different mission.<br />
<br />
<table 100="" border="2" bordercolor="#000000" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3" px="" style="background-color: white;" width:=""><tbody>
<tr></tr>
<tr><td> 7 tons main engines </td>
<td>= ~3.5 meganewtons, ~7.5 gigawatts (770,000 lbs thrust; 350 tons)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> 15 tons heat shield</td>
<td>15 pct of re-entry mass</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> 5 tons Earth recovery</td>
<td>(5 pct) parachutes / landing gear / retro</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> 5 tons landing legs</td>
<td>(5 pct) for Luna / Mars, etc </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> 20 tons miscellaneous</td>
<td>(20 pct) attitude thrusters, electrical, etc </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> 5 tons aerodynamics</td>
<td>(5 pct) controls, fairings, etc </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> 18 tons tankage body </td>
<td>6 pct of 300 tons H2-O2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> 75 tons base vehicle</td>
<td>less gross payload </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> 25 tons gross payload</td>
<td>includes cargo bays, crew cabin, etc</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>100 tons unfueled mass</td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>300 tons propellants</td>
<td><span style="background-color: white;">4:1 mass ratio = 6100 m/s delta v</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>400 tons total mass</td>
<td>with full propellant load</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
A
couple of notes to make. This ship has heat shielding only for its
unfueled mass, so it is implicitly designed for 'low-high-low'
missions - starting from low Earth orbit, heading outward to do business, then
returning to low orbit (or recovering to Earth) at end of mission.<br />
<br />
If a
ship must aerobrake and then return to higher orbit, it will need
shielding for the mass of its get-home propellant, a heavy hit to
payload. This ship would need 16 more tons of shielding for the propellant needed to reach translunar space from low Earth orbit after aerobraking, leaving only 9 tons for gross payload.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, ships optimized for high
orbits and lunar space can delete aerobraking and be built as 'pure' spacecraft,
using the saved mass for more propellant or a heavier payload.<br />
<br />
Our
patrol ship is not economical for commercial or logistics
service. Most traffic will go in ships optimized for their specific
missions - design propellant fraction configured to the mission; no landing or recovery gear for orbit-to-orbit ships; no heat
shielding or fairings for ships operating on and around the Moon. Even a
patrol service may use primarily mission-optimized craft. But I think
there will be a place for some ships that can go anywhere in orbital space
if need be.<br />
<br />
As for the design and appearance of
these and other ships in orbital space, they will generally resemble the spacecraft we already have, or have had. Non-aerobraking ships can be assemblages of engines,
tanks, and modules - more compact, probably, than deep space ships of
similar mass, and more sturdily built, since they must stand up to
the jolting acceleration of big chemfuel rocket engines.<br />
<br />
Aerobraking
ships are different - in an appropriately 60s-era expression they are aerospace vehicles, and must have a proper airframe. Their shapes are
also more constrained. Broadly I think there are two main configurations: a stout cone,
like a space capsule re-entry module enlarged to the size of a townhouse; or a more elongated
wedge, like the Shuttle and of comparable size.<br />
<br />
The patrol ship, if capsule-shaped, might be 12 meters high
by 14 meters in diameter; as a wedge, perhaps 40 meters high (or long)
by 25 meters wide by 8 meters deep. For both configurations, interior
volume is about 1200 m3, three quarters of which is propellant tankage,
while surface area is around 800 m2. <br />
<br />
It
will be up to the 3D graphics designers to flesh out these shapes - the
wedge types surely with wings or fins. Aerobraking ships can freely open
bays and extend panels or equipment while in space, but not, <span style="font-size: xx-small;">obviously,</span> in atmosphere.<br />
<br />
It is tempting to give civil types the blunter capsule form, reserving the sleeker wedge shape <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(if you could call the Shuttle <i>sleek</i>)</span> for military or quasi-military craft. This fits the ancient maritime distinction between sail-only round ships for trade, and oared long ships for war. But that is metaphor, not engineering. I am not sure how the trade-offs, probably modest, would actually play out.<br />
<br />
Larger spacecraft may favor the wedge form simply because it is easier to place on top of a booster stack for initial launch, compared to the very wide and blunt cone. Ships designed for aerobraking will not be assembled in space, not in the early days - building airframes is advanced shop, not like snapping Legos together.<br />
<br />
Gross payload is 25 tons. As a cargo ship - which it isn't - actual cargo capacity might be 20 tons, allowing for the payload bay structure and fittings. My rule of thumb for a limited-duration (two weeks max) crew compartment is two tons per person, so the ship might carry a crew of 5 plus about 12 tons of removable payload, or a crew of 10 and 4 tons of payload; adjust to taste.<br />
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My presumption is that spacecraft have a pilot or crew only if their payload is human - either passengers or the crew itself, for missions that require a human presence. Patrol missions are likely in that class, if only because there are some decisions that are specifically human, not for an AI to make no matter how smart it is.<br />
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Such as, if not everyone can be rescued, deciding who gets left behind.<br />
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From that sober reflection we may now step back to contemplate the standard patrol ship. And coming full circle, the most wonderful thing is how much it is a true, Heinleinian rocket ship. Granted it cannot lift itself into Earth orbit without a booster stage. Otherwise it can do pretty much everything that rocketpunk-era spaceships were supposed to do.<br />
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And it does them without violating a single law of physics, or even invoking magitech engineering. Given the requirement and the funding we could probably build it now.<br />
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In a rocketpunk setting it could even have the classic winged V-2 look. For Realistic<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><b>[TM]</b></span> aerobraking you might want to flatten the ventral side, in aviation terms the belly, and fair the wings in to that side so it can surf its own shock wave, but visually it still comes thundering straight out of the 1947 of imagination. <br />
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We might also have a smaller version, scaled down by a third, weighing in at 25 tons
unfueled, 100 tons full load. This model can be launched fully fueled atop the heavy-lift booster, ready to proceed on its mission. It might carry a crew of two, or pilot and passenger, plus a couple of tons of additional payload.<br />
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Prosaically it might be a VIP transport, but you know and I know that more colorful duties are possible. Hollywood has a name for handy little ships that perform such tasks, but I will call them
gunships.<br />
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And coming up we will look more closely at some of the missions that patrol ships and their gunship cousins might be called on to perform.<br />
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Discuss:Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-28004238281866473052015-07-04T07:06:00.000-07:002015-07-05T07:44:51.686-07:00The Space Authority and the Orbital Patrol<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://www.nycroads.com/crossings/triborough/img17.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Triborough (Robert F Kennedy) Bridge, Port Authority of NY & NJ" border="0" src="http://www.nycroads.com/crossings/triborough/img17.gif" height="175" title="Triborough (Robert F Kennedy) Bridge, Port Authority of NY & NJ" width="320" /></a></div>
Longtime commenter Ferrell made an observation about growing space traffic in the discussion on <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2015/06/adventures-in-orbital-space.html">Adventures in Orbital Space</a> that fits neatly into the setting portrayed in <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2015/06/the-weekly-moonship.html">The Weekly Moonship</a>:<br />
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<i>At some point, traffic control and enforcement would be needed to
keep ... impending chaos under control. As more people start working in
orbit, the more positive control will be needed, traffic growing
exponentially. </i><br />
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In a word, yes. A rudimentary framework for space traffic control already exists; I believe that orbital slots, at least in geosynch, are assigned by the International Telecommunications Union. But as space traffic grows, so will the need for traffic management and enforcement, as well as emergency response services. On land these tasks are commonly divided between police and fire agencies; at sea they are combined in the Coast Guard <span style="font-size: x-small;">(at least in US practice)</span>.<br />
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The mission will eventually call for suitably configured and equipped spacecraft. And like the Coast Guard and its cutters, the agency and ships will in some broad sense be quasi-military in character.<br />
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Okay, let's be honest. This blog does not encourage war in space <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(or anywhere else)</span>, but that certainly hasn't kept me from writing about <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2012/07/space-warfare-xvii-blockade-in-spaaace.html">space warfare</a>, or kept you from reading about it. But here I specifically want to look at what may be called 'organic' military or at least quasi-military activity in space - missions that relate to other human space activity, not just earthly power politics.<br />
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The distinction is important in more than one way. Navies have historically been 'organic' to sea trade (even if the first mission of the Royal Navy was and is to prevent another 1066). For that matter, armies have generally been 'organic' to the lands they defended, oppressed, or both.<br />
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Even more to the point, several great powers <i>already have</i> large military space armadas, and have for half a century. We call them ICBM forces, and neither as spacecraft nor as weapons are they really all that interesting. This isn't just Armageddon aversion - their 1950s predecessors, the B-52 and TU-95 Bear intercontinental nuclear bombers (both still in front line service, though mainly in other roles) had just as horrific a mission. But they were and are seriously cool airplanes, indeed acknowledged classics. You can enjoy and agree with the message of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove">another Kubrick movie of the 1960s</a>; those B-52 sequences <i>still</i> totally rock. <i>Yee-haaaa! Yee-haaaa! Yeee-haaaaaaa .....</i><br />
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I think we can draw a broader message from this. The spacegoing equivalent of a coast guard cutter may not match the <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2007/04/genre-with-no-name.html">Romance</a> quotient of a 44-gun frigate close-reaching to windward, a bone in her teeth and her guns run out. But it is probably more interesting technologically and operationally than a robotic battle station designed to vaporize other robotic battle stations or the occasional city.<br />
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And, most of all to the point, the coast guard cutter is in almost every case a far better delivery vehicle for a payload of adventure.<br />
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So how does it emerge? I will start with the agency that deploys it, the Space Authority. This rather bland name is inspired by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, an agency that in its mid-20th century heyday, under <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses">Robert Moses</a>, was notoriously powerful and independent, and reshaped New York City (albeit in ways that are now widely deplored).<br />
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The Space Authority was founded in 2022 - or it might have been 2012; I haven't double-checked, and in its early decades the Authority was all but invisible. Its overall mission was and is to co-ordinate space activity, assigning orbital slots, enforcing safety regulations, and such. The Authority was set up by the major space launch players, but its guiding force was - and this is <b>not</b> a contradiction in terms - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun">a shrewd, tough, and above all visionary bureaucrat</a>. <br />
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To avoid endless wrangling over a tiny budget, this individual proposed a dedicated funding stream, a $10,000 fee for every ton placed on orbit. To the power players this was convenient and cheap, the fee coming to about 0.1 percent of contemporary launch cost. Even to penny-conscious Elon Musk it was chump change (and Musk might well have seen through the game and still figured it was worth playing, and paying).<br />
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And since space traffic had been fairly steady for decades, a few hundred tons annually, hardly anyone expected conditions to change. The Space Authority had just enough money, a few million per year, to rent some office space in Geneva or wherever, and hire a couple of sharp young attorneys as staff. Space law enforcement, in this early era, did not mean spacecraft with flashing red lights. It meant a letter, hand delivered on real paper <span style="font-size: x-small;">(lawyers likes that stuff)</span>, directing attention to Section 28, Subparagraph h(3), 'Penalty for Noncompliance'.<br />
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Time marched on, and space traffic volume grew. By the time the moonship <i>Henry Mancini</i> is docked to Airlock 10-A, 100,000 passengers and 70,000 plus tons of cargo payloads are going into space every year, plus the upper stages of the shuttles that put them there. The Space Authority budget is now on order of a billion dollars a year, current value. Still chump change by Pentagon standards, but this is a real budget, enough to charter or buy and equip a couple of ships for special missions - and develop a more capable, purpose-built model. The need may not yet have fully arisen at the level I described, with its 6-8 passenger ships operating beyond low Earth orbit. But it is clearly on the horizon.<br />
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The primary mission of these first Patrol ships will likely be the noblest: space rescue. Rescue in deep space is problematic at best; the distances are simply too vast. By the time you reach a stricken ship or outpost it probably won't have any survivors left to rescue. But rescue in orbital and local space is a different matter.<br />
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We have already had a case where space rescue could have made all the difference. Had the extent of damage to <i>Columbia's</i> heat shield been recognized, a rescue mission would have been feasible in principle. I sadly suspect that NASA closed its eyes and grit its teeth because no rescue was possible in practice. Even the Russians, with their simpler, robust architecture, could not have cued up a double Soyuz mission in time, and <i>Columbia</i> was on an orbit that Soyuz, from its high-latitude launch site, probably could not reach.<br />
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But once space rescue is practical it is necessary, and the Authority needs a ship or two that is up to the job. This means sacrificing operating economy in favor of flexibility and performance, specifically the ability to deploy on short notice and reach as many orbits as possible, meaning plenty of maneuver capability, AKA delta v. Onboard equipment and facilities, in addition to sick bay, likely include storage and support for taxi craft and robo pods used to work around crippled, possibly tumbling spacecraft, plus a miniature onboard Mission Control for directing operations. <br />
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The first such ships will be handbuilt prototypes, thus costly; the Authority might need to issue revenue bonds to fund the development program. Follow-ons will be less expensive, though still more than commercial models since the mission is more demanding. Say $200 million per ship for a 100-ton ship (unfueled), and $60 million per year to keep each in service, plus propellant for training missions. Perhaps $150 million annually per ship, all up, so the Authority can keep three or four in service.<br />
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And it possibly has not escaped your attention that the major characteristics of these ships - their flexibility and performance - are very much what you would expect of warcraft. <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(May the Episcopalian <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/search?q=midfuture+of+religion">God</a> of my childhood forgive me, agnostic that I am, for perverting angels of mercy into angels of wrath.)</span> Throw in fittings like those (potential) weapon bays and CIC or tactical control center and you have the raw material of a handy basic space warship.<br />
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Even militarized, these Patrol ships would be no match in sheer firepower for the sorts of weapon platforms the great powers might deploy. But they are far better suited to exerting a presence in orbital space. Ãœber battle stations leave policymakers with a pretty stark options menu - nothing between issuing a sternly worded letter of protest or blowing someone up. A Patrol ship can switch out the medics for a SWAT team, go out to any orbit, <i>arrest</i> someone, and haul them in to face charges. <br />
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And that is how you effectively and flexibly exercise power, or dare I say Authority, across local space.<br />
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What are the chances of some such agency and some such ships emerging? Given the scale of space activity I have portrayed - hardly a <i>given</i> - I'd actually rate the chances moderately high, say five percent to 20 percent. Someone will need to do it. The great powers won't trust each other, and won't want to spend their own money on forces suited to keeping order in orbit rather than overawing their terrestrial rivals. Business interests will want some law and order up there without getting too entangled in international power politics. Yet the outcome suggested also would mark, quietly, a beginning for <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2010/04/transport-nexus-ii-prince-versus.html">space-centric political structures</a>.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">On Independent Orbit?</span></b><br />
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Potentially, at least for purposes of opera, it might be a good deal more than that. As noted here before on this historically significant anniversary, the <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2010/07/revolt-of-colonies.html">Revolt of the Colonies</a> has been a long-standing theme in space-oriented SF; particularly, for obvious reasons, 'Murrican space SF. <br />
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In the rocketpunk era the Space Patrol was commonly understood to be an arm of the <strike>American Empire</strike> Terran Federation. As such it would be cast in the role of the Redcoats in any Independence Day scenario. (<span style="font-size: x-small;">Though, notably, Heinlein in <i>Between Planets</i> did not call the Federation forces, or any component of them, the Patrol; that name was reserved for stories where the Patrol and the Federation itself were good guys.</span>)<br />
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But the Patrol as outlined above arises in different circumstances, where there is no Federation, certainly nothing like a world state, only the great-power muddle we have known since <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia">1648</a> - or perhaps even a more thorough muddle, known to students of international affairs by the wonderfully <i>Game of Thrones</i>-esque name of <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2007/06/whither-course-of-empire.html">neomedievalism</a>.<br />
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In such circumstances, as suggested above, the Patrol is not an instrument of any terrestrial power, but one that arises from the circumstances of space itself, politically embodied in this account by the Space Authority. No one on Earth quite owns it, or can even agree on who <i>should</i> own it. <br />
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There would likely be no Declaration of Independence, no need for a gifted rhetorician to remake poor old George III into Caligula. Possibly the last thing the Authority wants is to call that kind of attention to itself and its expanding role, and gaining a seat in the UN General Assembly, or successor body, is the least of its priorities. <br />
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Unless, of course, the overriding demands of story call for a Concord, a Saratoga, a Yorktown. In that case, have at it.<br />
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<a href="http://www.signal8-2.com/PATCH.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Port Authority Police Patch" border="0" src="http://www.signal8-2.com/PATCH.JPG" height="200" title="Port Authority Police Patch" width="165" /></a></div>
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Discuss:<br />
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The image of the Robert F Kennedy or Triborough Bridge, built by the Port Authority in the Robert Moses era, comes from a <a href="http://www.nycroads.com/">blog about NYC area highways</a>. Apart from my institutional reference, what does it have to do with space? Who cares? Bridges are always cool.<br />
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The image of a <a href="http://www.signal8-2.com/">Port Authority police patch</a> comes from a police officers' organization website,Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-34127799525106656402015-06-26T19:03:00.000-07:002015-06-26T19:06:02.904-07:00The Weekly Moonship<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.fantastic-plastic.com/VonBraunMoonShipIllustration.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Von Braun Moonship" border="0" src="http://www.fantastic-plastic.com/VonBraunMoonShipIllustration.jpg" height="239" title="Von Braun Moonship" width="320" /></a></div>
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The phrase sticks in my mind. I surely read it in an SF novel, or more than one, and perhaps in a variation like <i>daily moonship.</i> Since it is an evocative phrase, at any rate to me, let us evoke something from it.<br />
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<i>The weekly moonship.</i> Just the name tells us a good deal about Luna's place in human affairs: we go there every week, at least most weeks. It might be more; perhaps connecting flights depart from Cape Canaveral on Mondays, Baikonur on Tuesdays, and so on. But let us modestly stick to a single weekly moonship.<br />
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Not only do we know that we go to the Moon weekly, we can venture a broad guess as to how many people make the trip. Our moonship surely carries more than a couple of passengers, fewer than a thousand; a broad range might be 10-200. We will say fifty: our moonship has the seating of a 1950s airliner or transcontinental train coach. <br />
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Since the Luna round trip takes a week, weekly service probably means
two passenger ships taking turns, with a third - perhaps an older model,
less economical to fly - in reserve. For landing on the lunar surface, a
shorter mission, one lander will do, with one in reserve. One or two
ships suffice for other distant orbits, so altogether we have a generous half dozen passenger ships working the Moon and other locales in the outer reaches of Earth's <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2015/06/adventures-in-orbital-space.html">orbital space</a>.<br />
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And we will suppose that these ships mostly fill their seats, unlike the rather similar spaceliner in <i>2001</i> that carried Heywood Floyd to the Moon in solitary VIP splendor. So about 2500 passengers travel to Luna each year, at least to lunar orbit; most continue on down to the surface. At this stage nearly all are making the round trip; if most are serving six-month rotations we have about a thousand regular residents of Luna Base and its outliers.<br />
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Passengers making shorter stays nudge up the lunar population - as does anyone staying on past six months. Add a few hundred people in lunar orbit, or other distant orbits, for a total of roughly 2000 people in the outer orbital zone.<br />
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Beyond that zone we might suppose that about fifty people are on or orbiting Mars, with a similar number aboard exploratory missions elsewhere - perhaps a half dozen active deep space ships that carry human crews, plus some robotic freighters that can take slower orbits.<br />
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If the deep space missions use electric propulsion they depart from high orbits or at least refuel and take crew aboard there; if they use chemfuel or <span style="font-size: x-small;">(properly shielded!)</span> <a href="http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/">atomic rockets</a> they blast straight out of low orbit for maximum Oberth effect. In that case the human presence in outer orbital space may still be confined largely to the Moon itself, and lunar orbit.<br />
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But we are not mainly concerned here with deep space. Anyway, you cannot yet buy a ticket aboard the biennial Mars ship the way you can with the weekly moonship.<br />
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Looking inward, towards Earth, we can expect to find more people.<br />
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Geosynch is economically important but surprisingly difficult to reach - nearly twice as hard as jumping over the Moon, as Apollo 8 did. Geosynchronous orbits are awkwardly placed: High enough that it takes a big burn to get there, close enough, thus with high orbital speed, that it takes sizable burns to match orbit, then head back down. So geosynch traffic is purely utilitarian, and the human presence perhaps less than in lunar orbit. A single passenger ship can serve this route, with one in reserve. <br />
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Low Earth orbit is a different matter. It is the closest place in space, the easiest and cheapest to reach, and for many purposes and most passengers that is enough. Tourists can float and gawk as well here as anywhere. Virtual tourism is also served; Xollywood can and will use low Earth orbit as stand-in for the universe.<br />
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So ... taking a not too deep breath, let us say that there are 10,000 people in low Earth orbit at a given time, ten times the lunar population. For those who are staying weeks or months in space, this corresponds to a tenfold increase in traffic volume, about 25,000 people going up every year for fairly long stays. <br />
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But low Earth orbit allows quicker trips than the week-long journey to the Moon. So let us say that about ten percent of the people in low orbit are visiting for short stays of less than a week, adding about 50,000 annual trips, for a total of 75,000.<br />
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And let us round things out by adding 25,000 tourists who simply go up and down, never exiting the shuttle, but going back with memories.<br />
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Thus, 100,000 (!) passengers to space every year, a few hundred daily. If our passenger shuttles also carry fifty people, there are five or six daily flights to orbit worldwide. Allow, 'conservatively,' a one week turnaround, and there are about forty shuttles in the service rotation. Perhaps fifty in the active fleet, allowing for maintenance cycles, some in reserve, and so on. <br />
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In human terms this is some serious traveling. We can suppose that the baseline human lift cost to low orbit is perhaps $50,000 <span style="font-size: x-small;">(in present day USD)</span>, but that is an average. Business travelers will pay another $20K for a reserved ticket and 'complementary' cocktail; most pay cheerfully because they <i>aren't</i> paying; their company picks up the tab.<br />
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Tourists fly standby and bring their own libations. They also benefit from the economics of unsold seats on the bus. The seats go into orbit whether or not any passengers are floating above them. The <i>direct</i> cost of lifting each passenger is really only a ton or two of propellant, at Earth industrial price, plus an airline meal. <br />
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Which means that some seats will be sold pretty cheap, and even us peasants can pass on that new car, and instead spend a day looking the universe in the eye.<br />
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The payload we care most about is us, but we must say a little about cargo traffic as well, especially since much of it also involves us intimately: food and shelter.<br />
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At this level of development, growing food in space is still in trial stage; daily sustenance comes up from Earth. My baseline 'cheap' orbit lift cost is $100,000/ton, $45 per old fashioned pound. That is roughly ten times the grocery store price of everyday goods, but not much more than the price of luxury items.<br />
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People in space will eat well, because the lobster doesn't cost much more than the rice you serve it with. In general, everyday economics has the boom-town combination of sky high all-around prices with peculiar twists.<br />
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You also need a place to stay. The most massive and crucial structural works in space are not ships but dormitory habitat modules: where you live, if you are living in space or on the Moon.<br />
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My baseline guesstimate for these is about 20 cubic meters and 10 tons per person. If you stripped all the laboratory equipment and such out of the International Space Station, beefed up life support, and fitted its pressure modules out like a Pullman train, it would have roomettes for some 45 people, which sounds about right.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">(For really long term occupancy, including children and pregnant women, you need another 5-10 tons of radiation shielding. On the Moon you can just pile up regolith, AKA lunar dirt, over the hab structures. But at this stage we only need a few fully shielded habs.) </span><br />
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Booking a hab roomette as a hotel room might come to about $10,000 per night minimum - more inflated than the price of food, because the thing is so heavy. There may be bad hotels in space, but at this level of development there are not yet any cheap ones.<br />
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For 10,000 people in low orbit, thus about 100,000 tons of habitat, plus we might suppose another 100,000 tons of other facilities such as those Xollywood sound(less) stages. Annual orbit lift needed to support, maintain, upgrade, and expand it all might come to 30 percent of the total, 60,000 tons.<br />
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Suppose we have two main classes of cargo lifters. Most carry up about 25 tons, and are cargo counterparts of the passenger shuttles. About a fifth are heavy lifters, 100 tons to orbit, carrying about half the total load. Average payload is 40 tons, so 1500 flights per year, about five daily including one heavy lifter.<br />
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The fleet of cargo shuttles comes to about forty vehicles, so altogether our orbital shuttle fleet approaches a hundred (two-stage) vehicles. <br />
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The thousand people on the Moon, and the other thousand or so elsewhere in orbital space, also need room and board - coming to some 40,000 tons of imported structures, and about 12,000 tons per year in up-bound cargo traffic from Earth, half of it going to the Moon.<br />
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To carry this cargo up we will need a few more shuttles, and to take it on outward we need a small fleet of cargo ships. Let each carry 60 tons of cargo - comparable, for these longer trips, to the 50 seats aboard the passenger ships - and we have a couple of cargo moonships per week as well as the passenger ship. Altogether the cargo fleet working beyond low Earth orbit will number about a dozen ships - add the passenger fleet for a total of around 20.<br />
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So we come full circle to the weekly (passenger) moonship. A ticket will not come cheap, because lunar propellant is probably not yet competitive for use on low Earth orbit.<br />
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Propellant sent up from Earth to an orbital depot is a relatively simple bulk payload suited to maximum streamlining of operations, and the price might get pushed down to $50,000 per ton. A ton of lunar propellant delivered to low Earth orbit needs at least another ton or so to get it there, even with solar electric kites for the second leg of the trip, so the price point to match for lunar production is around $25,000 per ton at the source.<br />
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Moreover, rocket propellant uses a larger proportion of hydrogen than ice contains, thus perhaps two tons of ice per ton of propellant extracted. Altogether, to make lunar propellant competitive in low Earth orbit you may need to bring production cost down to $250 per ton of lunar regolith that must be crunched to obtain the ice - a pretty demanding order for mining on the Moon.<br />
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Lunar propellant is much more competitive in lunar space, versus propellant lifted all that way from Earth, but low Earth orbit will favor Earth-sourced propellant for a long time, even permanently if launch costs come down enough.<br />
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Our weekly moonship needs about four tons of propellant per passenger, costing $200,000 on orbit (and not counting, for Earth passengers, their ticket to orbit). All in all, upwards of a quarter million on average to fly to the Moon. Robert Heinlein, writing in 1949, pegged the full <a href="http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/surfaceorbit.php#id--The_Hefty_First_Step">Earth-to-Moon lift</a> at $30 per pound - equivalent, at current prices, to $299.75 <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(almost exactly 10x inflation)</span>, or $660,649 per ton. So we are beating Heinlein's price hands down.<br />
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That said, even filling that last empty seat will set you back a minimum of $30,000 in propellant to lift you and your baggage. But hey, a best-case total of maybe $50K or so to fly to the <i>Moon?</i> Not shabby. <br />
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Stepping back, the vision I have sketched here looks very much on the same scale as what Kubrick and Clarke gave us in <i>2001: A Space Odyssey.</i> One estimate for the <a href="http://members.tripod.com/aries_1b/id66.htm">mass of Space Station V</a> in the film comes to 68,000 tons, about a third of my estimate for total low-orbit presence. <br />
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The operating technology I've presumed - chemfuel rockets for all routine operations - is speculation-free, aside from the bit of magitech faerie dust needed to make space operations <i>routine.</i> We probably could have done it by 2001, had space development continued at the white hot pace of 1968.<br />
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The whole shebang - shuttles, orbital stations and habs, moonships and Luna base, all of it - has a combined mass somewhat less than 300,000 tons. By my million-dollars-per-ton guesstimate, which applies to commercial airliners - and expendable rocket stages - today, it would cost us not quite a third of a trillion dollars to build it all, and $100 billion or so to operate it each year.<br />
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In an earlier development stage, when spacecraft are still largely handbuilt prototypes, the same money will only buy about a tenth as much - still a respectable start: a thousand people in space, a hundred on the Moon, the cost falling and development expanding as experience is gained and economies of scale kick in.<br />
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But enough of the big picture, except for the biggest picture of all,
the one outside the viewport. Ladies and gentlemen, moonship <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq0KBtzvdNA"><i>Henry Mancini</i></a> is now ready for boarding at Airlock Ten-Alpha. Please glance at the ticket scanner as you pass by, and have a wonderful trip! <i>Damy i gospoda, kosmicheskiy korabl' na Lunu </i>Genri Manchini <i>gotov ...</i> <br />
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<a href="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/v2dsN4cJ/1195580180/shot0030.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Kubrick's Moonship" border="0" src="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/v2dsN4cJ/1195580180/shot0030.png" height="225" title="Kubrick's Moonship" width="400" /></a><br />
<br />
Discuss:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
I had intended to write about <i>Ships for the Orbital Patrol.</i> But the whole subject of 'local' space keeps expanding, and what can I do but expand along with it?<br />
<br />
The first image, from an <a href="http://www.fantastic-plastic.com/">online model store</a>, is a 3D rendering of the <a href="http://www.fantastic-plastic.com/VonBraunMoonShipIllustration.jpg">Von Braun moonship proposal</a> of the 1950s. It carried about fifty people, but obviously did not aerobrake on the return trip. The second image, from <a href="http://spacecollective.org/">Space Collective</a>, shows the lunar liner from <i>2001.</i>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com68tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-53225977217904965002015-06-22T10:22:00.000-07:002015-06-22T10:22:30.260-07:00Adventures in Orbital Space<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNaqxSXg9Yvug-dju7txMJEYZiv1ynGy7MS68HnqaBMY0Pvd6G29oo5_be1nGGySkyY1X8XTTkthfIo-VR83MR8s1ZoMUvTdLCDUW6KuIK0TTOCu89YEKz9QPpu6aUTC3BhPV__alRFv3M/s1600/Apollo+8+above+moon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Apollo 8 above Luna" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNaqxSXg9Yvug-dju7txMJEYZiv1ynGy7MS68HnqaBMY0Pvd6G29oo5_be1nGGySkyY1X8XTTkthfIo-VR83MR8s1ZoMUvTdLCDUW6KuIK0TTOCu89YEKz9QPpu6aUTC3BhPV__alRFv3M/s320/Apollo+8+above+moon.jpg" title="Apollo 8 above Luna" /></a></div>
<br />
Space is vast. But most of it is empty, and we pass through only to
get somewhere. The people who live and work in space will mainly do so <i>somewhere,</i> in some region of local space, most often a planet's orbital space, including the moon systems of giant planets. <br />
<br />
So to celebrate my return to regular blogging <span style="font-size: x-small;">(touch wood!)</span>,
some old fashioned goodness: ships and travel in orbital space, mainly Earth's: exactly what
it says on the tin. <br />
<br />
But first of all I want to thank all of you who have visited <i>Rocketpunk Manifesto</i>
during my prolonged absence. Especially I thank the commenters here
for keeping the conversation going, and in exemplary fashion. You are why I am back here to talk more about space.<br />
<br />
Orbital and
local space get lip service, with most of our attention drawn to the
grandeur of interplanetary or interstellar travel. But orbital space,
and the ships that ply it, deserve more attention.<br />
<br />
Every journey from
world to world passes through orbital space; indeed begins and ends
there, unless your starships land directly on planets. A routinely
spacefaring future will surely have many stations and other habitats in
orbital space, or on the Moon or a counterpart. And every world's orbital space is unique, shaped by its particular circumstances. Mars has two tiny moons, close in; Earth has a single enormous one at the far fringes of its orbital space. <br />
<br />
Local space may also emerge in regions far from any large body, perhaps because of interesting concentrations of small objects, e.g. asteroids, or simply because habitats have congregated there. Wherever people gather in space, with regular traffic
among them, there is a region of local space.<br />
<br />
This traffic has a tempo and flavor quite
different from deep space travel. Travel times are short: four hours to
geosynch, the popular geosynchronous 24-hour orbit; three or four days to the Moon.<br />
<br />
Spacecraft in orbital service will range from moonships down to what I call taxis, minimal space capsules used to move between larger spacecraft that have made rendezvous but are not docked together. Most local craft will
be fairly small, because they can be. Passengers can be accommodated
coach fashion, in airline type seats (or just above them,
loosely strapped in). Crews may have a little more room
to float around, but probably do not live aboard their craft between missions.<br />
<br />
Maximum
design endurance is perhaps two weeks, the current standard. The
distinction between ships and stations, which can be a bit blurred in
deep space, is sharp in local space: stations and habs you live in
versus craft you travel in.<br />
<br />
Passenger ships surely have viewports, because the views are spectacular. Orbital space itself is vast, a thousand times a thousand miles across, but it does not quite share
the chill loneliness of deep space, weeks and many millions of
kilometers from anywhere. In all, there is something comfortably human about travel in local space, especially a world's orbital space. <br />
<br />
And this travel will most likely be aboard plain old chemical-fuel rocket ships, surely into the midfuture,
and even in what the commenter community here has dubbed the PFF, the
plausible far future.<br />
<br />
My text for this sermon is the set of <a href="http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/mission.php#id--Delta-V_Maps">delta v maps</a>, especially the first of them, at the <i>still</i> ever-growing <a href="http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/">Atomic Rockets</a>
site. These maps show the combined speed changes, delta v in the biz,
that you need to carry out common missions in Earth and Mars orbital
space, such as going from low Earth orbit to lunar orbit and back.<br />
<br />
Here is a table showing some of the missions from the delta v maps, plus a few others that I have guesstimated myself:<br />
<table 100="" border="2" bordercolor="#000000" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3" px="" style="background-color: white;" width:=""><tbody>
<tr></tr>
<tr><td><span style="background-color: white;">Low earth orbit (LEO) to geosynch and return</span></td>
<td><span style="background-color: white;">5.7 km/s powered</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">(plus 2.5 km/s aerobraking) </span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="background-color: white;">LEO to lunar surface (one way)</span></td>
<td><span style="background-color: white;">5.5 km/s</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">(all powered)</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="background-color: white;">LEO to lunar L4/L5 and return*</span></td>
<td><span style="background-color: white;">4.8 km/s powered</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">(plus 3.2 km/s aerobraking)</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>LEO to low lunar orbit and return </td>
<td><span style="background-color: white;">4.6 km/s powered</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">(plus 3.2 km/s aerobraking)</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Geosynch to low lunar orbit and return*</td>
<td>4.2 km/s<br />
(all powered)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Lunar orbit to lunar surface and return</td>
<td>3.2 km/s<br />
(all powered)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>LEO inclination change by 40 deg*</td>
<td>5.4 km/s<br />
(all powered)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>LEO to circle the Moon and return retrograde*</td>
<td>3.2 km/s powered<br />
(plus 3.2 km/s aerobraking)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Mars surface to Deimos (one way)</td>
<td>6.0 km/s<br />
(all powered)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>LEO to low Mars orbit (LMO) and return</td>
<td>6.1 km/s powered<br />
(plus 5.5 km/s aerobraking)</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
* Not in source table; delta v estimates are mine.<br />
<br />
Two
things stand out in this list. One is how helpful aerobraking can be if
you are inbound toward Earth, or any world with a substantial atmosphere.
Many craft in orbital space will be true aerospace vehicles, built to burn off excess speed by streaking through the upper atmosphere at Mach 25 up to Mach 35.<br />
<br />
But what <i>really</i> stands out is how easily within the reach of chemical fuels these missions are. Chemfuel
has a poor reputation among space geeks because it barely manages the
most important mission of all, from Earth to low orbit. Once in orbit, however, chemfuel has acceptable fuel economy for speeds of a few kilometers
per second, and rocket engines put out enormous thrust for their weight.<br />
<br />
In
fact, transport class rocket ships working routes in orbital space can
have mass proportions not far different from transport aircraft
flying the longest nonstop global routes.<br />
<br />
A jetliner
taking off on a maximum-range flight may carry 40 percent of its total
weight in fuel, with 45 percent for the plane itself and 15 percent in
payload. A moonship, the one that gets you to lunar orbit, might be 60
percent propellant on departure from low Earth orbit, with 25 percent
for the spacecraft and the same 15 percent payload. The lander that takes
you to the lunar surface and back gets away with 55 percent propellant,
25 percent for the spacecraft, and 20 percent payload.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">(These figures are for hydrogen and oxygen as propellants, currently somewhat out of favor because liquid hydrogen is bulky, hard to work with, and boils away so readily. But H2-O2 is the best performer, and may be available on the Moon if lunar ice appears in concentrations that can be shoveled into a hopper. Increase propellant load by about half for kerosene and oxygen, or 'storable' propellants.)</span><br />
<br />
Propellant thirstiness does impose odd logistics and economics, because every ton of payload needs three or four tons of propellant to dispatch it on each leg of major
trips. Inter-orbit tankers and other bulk cargo can ride slow
solar-electric kites, taking a couple of weeks to spiral up and down to geosynch, a month or more to the Moon and back. But these are not
for human travel; besides being slow, they spend days at a time in the
Van Allen belts.<br />
<br />
Nuclear thermal rockets, NTRs - the
original atomic rockets - are one alternative, but a limited one. For local operations their
engines must have all-around shielding, because an unshielded nuclear
reactor poses a low-level but significant long term radiation hazard out to an
amazing distance in space - about 100,000 km radius for a gigawatt
reactor. This would not make for good neighbors in local space.<br />
<br />
Heavy shielding limits nuclear propulsion to
larger spacecraft, probably in the thousand-ton class, and with relatively
sluggish performance: landing even on the Moon is problematic. Big ships
do get the most saving from halved propellant consumption, but nuclear
propulsion is not a panacea for travel in local space. Torch-level drives would be worse; torchships must normally stay out at the fringes of a world's orbital space, met by rockets to ferry passengers up and down.<br />
<br />
Other
possible options - laser propulsion or other beamed power, mass
drivers, and so on - have their own constraints. And even outright magitech
drives will be hard put to match the flexible power of rockets for people in a hurry. Not to mention that if you want opera, big
rockets are positively Wagnerian.<br />
<br />
This is <span style="font-size: x-small;">(almost)</span> the final thing to note about travel in orbital and local space: how operatic and rocketpunk it is. <i>Rocket ships!</i> A world swelling up in the viewport, becoming a landscape below you as your ship arcs down to a surface landing ... <br />
<br />
Aboard a ship that might even be streamlined, with wings or fins, built for aerobraking as well as landing on airless worlds. Ordinary transport types would not combine these features, but emergency response craft, built for versatility rather than economy, might well do so. We will look more closely at such ships in our next exciting episode.<br />
<br />
But the most astonishing thing about travel in local space is that it not only is operatic and rocketpunk, it is also <i>real.</i> Forty-six years ago next month we carried out the combined lunar orbit and lunar landing missions, returning safely to Earth. So the only real matter for speculation is not whether we can cross orbital space to the Moon, or even (details aside) how, but only when we will decide to go back again.<br />
<br />
Discuss:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The image comes from a blog post reflecting on <a href="http://wctechblog.com/?p=2199">Apollo 8</a>, which as the author says deserves to be more remembered. I remember looking up at the half moon at twilight on a clear Christmas Eve, in awe that there were <i>people</i> up there.
Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-35903502096450185652014-10-26T15:09:00.000-07:002015-06-09T15:33:37.865-07:00Catherine of Lyonesse<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1h1H5sUIHgP7EZOFN38Mr0u0lnT6plyJJz6isgN5Whcm7hFxKNvwzkgr_v6YX3tFTo4qsFqqv3nnNykrjU8jueaHNZLhq2zVu6nRspFOks2NWtKtff5jonTMX5YhlwhnswyKZoWTIyq5l/s1600/CoL+Cover+Image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1h1H5sUIHgP7EZOFN38Mr0u0lnT6plyJJz6isgN5Whcm7hFxKNvwzkgr_v6YX3tFTo4qsFqqv3nnNykrjU8jueaHNZLhq2zVu6nRspFOks2NWtKtff5jonTMX5YhlwhnswyKZoWTIyq5l/s1600/CoL+Cover+Image.jpg" width="258" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
Is that a gorgeous cover, or what?<br />
<br />
Considering that the book has now been out, in the UK, for about ten weeks, it is high time and then some that I highlighted it here, (But possible good news on my sluggish posting - fingers crossed! - below.)<br />
<br />
How it is selling, as yet I have no idea. On <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Catherine-Lyonesse-Rick-Robinson-ebook/dp/B00ITVYHTC/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=">Amazon</a>, not very much, but I am told that it is not a "major channel" in British trade publishing sales, and the fact is that a first novel depends heavily on old fashioned sales off the bookstore shelves.<br />
<br />
A public acknowledgement and thanks is due - and overdue - to Tamora Pierce, official Friend of this Blog, and the faerie godmother of Catherine over many years. Also to blog reader and occasional commenter Anita, who originally worked out the genealogy at the front of the book. But I assert sole credit for mistakes.<br />
<br />
I should also tip my hat to a reader, 'Gracie,' who posted a wonderful reader review at Amazon. Five stars are always wonderful, but her elegant and insightful comments even more so. Courage and panache, indeed!<br />
<br />
And also a tip of hat to a couple hundred of Tammy's fans who responded to her wonderiffic <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22729398-catherine-of-lyonesse">Goodreads</a> review by putting CoL on their to-be-read lists.<br />
<br />
Finally, I should say that while the ebook version is not currently available in the US (pending a hoped-for US edition), the paperback version can be ordered from anywhere. :-)<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Biochemistry Note</b><br />
<br />
As I've noted here previously, the <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2009/10/spaceship-design-102-life-support_31.html">life sciences</a> tend to get relatively short shrift in space discussions. I rarely remember life support ecology getting anything like the detailed discussion given to shiny stuff like propulsion systems. <br />
<br />
But these things matter, as I have been reminded by being diagnosed with diabetes (type 2 - the kind that doesn't require daily insulin), AKA the American disease, the result of a lifetime of bad dietary habits coming back to bite me. I seem to be responding well to treatment, but one effect of the disease, relevant to this blog, is fatigue. <br />
<br />
So, as treatment progresses, I hope to overcome that and start posting here more frequently.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>And a Return to Space</b><br />
<br />
Those loyal readers who still drop by here from time to time will surely (?) be glad to hear that I have lately been reading and thinking more about space again. I hope to post some of the results here soon. Meanwhile, I encourage everyone to (re)visit the wonderful <a href="http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/">Atomic Rockets</a> website, which has been greatly expanded over the past few years even as this blog went relatively quiescent. <br />
<br />
Talk to you again soon!Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com457tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-22747835659146309302014-07-09T19:03:00.000-07:002014-07-09T19:03:18.988-07:00Worldbuilding and the Hazards of Canon Fire<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSDwSyIrZ0EyJgNSoLRO-pnSEjT_pC-hkByvtFCMiRoeGx-v_Wvcr0biy9ikGhkKQb2bjCzBCQh3Ity9vs1VAhzLd4Ulk-TV3ulnenkR-c1FO-LgidaAe9O1PPG8FL-5QzWGGnjeS-fFyg/s1600/Mary_Rose_Guns_ForeBronzeCulverin_RearWroughtIronCannon.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSDwSyIrZ0EyJgNSoLRO-pnSEjT_pC-hkByvtFCMiRoeGx-v_Wvcr0biy9ikGhkKQb2bjCzBCQh3Ity9vs1VAhzLd4Ulk-TV3ulnenkR-c1FO-LgidaAe9O1PPG8FL-5QzWGGnjeS-fFyg/s1600/Mary_Rose_Guns_ForeBronzeCulverin_RearWroughtIronCannon.png" height="187" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<i>The Moving Finger writes, and having writ,</i><br />
<i>Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit</i><br />
<i>Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,</i><br />
<i>Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.</i><br />
<br />
<i>-- Omar Khayyam </i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The moving finger can even, as in this case, return after an indecently long interval to write more.<br />
<br />
But most to the point, the moving finger, by hitting the <i>publish</i> button, establishes canon. What previously were tentative, fluid possibilities are transformed into either fixed facts or equally fixed nullities. Even the digital era has not, so far, changed this in essentials - ebook editions, at least from commercial publishers, are as fixed as their print counterparts.<br />
<br />
Thus, in the course of the spring, <i>Catherine of Lyonesse</i> has taken on its final, official form, the text gradually setting like concrete. Events and details that previously were fluid, contingent, subject to revision, are now fixed in place beyond the reach of piety or wit. Now they are canonical, or will be come the official publication date - August 14 - and the release of the book.<br />
<br />
This effect of canonicity does not depend on the technology of print: Omar Khayyam wrote long before the printing press. But print - generating numerous identical copies of a text - surely amplifies this effect. Getting the first couple of copies of C of L off the print run was a wondefully solid experience.<br />
<br />
Even more wonderfully the copies <i>smell</i> like books.<br />
<br />
And the canonical version is right there in cold print.<br />
<br />
In <i>Catherine of Lyonesse</i> I did little worldbuilding of the classic SF/F sort. The world of the book is meant to be evocative of our own, similar enough that the mechanics did not need to be worked out and tested for fit. The population and technology of Renaissance France were sufficient to support the French royal court; given a comparable kingdom, the royal court of Aquitaine did not need to be explained, only invented.<br />
<br />
<br />
As a result, I nearly got caught by a stray round of canon fire. At some point in writing the manuscript I needed to mention a former king of Lyonesse, one of Catherine's ancestors, and made him Edmund II. The name was intended simply to evoke the Edwards of Plantagenet England.<br />
<br />
Much later in the process I drew up a family tree, and merely listing successive kings hinted at a background arc: a failed king; a son who conciliates his subjects; a grandson who takes advantage of the revitalized monarchy to beat up on the neighbors. And so it turned out that the Agincourt-esque battle mentioned in the book would fit better with Edmund III.<br />
<br />
By then I'd long forgotten that the manuscript itself still said Edmund II. I didn't catch the mistake until the very end of the proofing process.<br />
<br />
Did it even matter? Within the book itself, not at all. Nothing in the text would tell the reader that Edmund <i>le Conquérant</i> should refer to Edmund III, not his father, "Good King" Edmund II - who is not mentioned in the book at all, not even indirectly.<br />
<br />
But if I had not caught the discrepancy, I would have been put in a slightly odd quandary going forward. If there is a sequel, it probably <i>will</i> mention Good King Edmund. But then, which Edmund would he be? Would I keep the history arc I inferred from the genealogy, and ignore the regnal number given in the first book? Or accept the printed text as canon, and mentally reconstruct the dynastic history to fit?<br />
<br />
Since I <i>did</i> catch the discrepancy before the book went to cold hard print, I was spared that sort of reconning. At least in this case. No doubt further journeys in sequel-land will reveal things I'll <i>wish</i> I had done differently in the first book, but that is a different matter.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
More elaborately constructed worlds give their authors a better chance to catch mistakes - but also expand the universe of possible mistakes, so the tradeoff is probably a wash. And canonicity itself is arguably a geek obsession. Major sloppiness in a setting can break the spell - the willing suspension of disbelief - especially if readers can't be sure what merely factual matters in the story they can rely on. But most concerns about canon are just pedantry fuel. Which won't keep me from fretting about them.<br />
<br />
Discuss.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The image, via <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_artillery">Wikipedia</a>, shows modern reproductions of 16th century naval guns from the wreck of Henry VIII's <i>Mary Rose.</i>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com84tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-1451222159902173822014-01-04T19:22:00.000-08:002014-01-04T19:22:03.519-08:00Wine-Dark Sea<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJOzPcOyXYkQDExUyeF3PzGnsWIr6kjienil2mZU6hWn7DIrqn1gYIeOm1Ie7X67CpVVsMyxP2ZJUHApB7dGGPqvIRJWu8MzeafI5l5_qa4PAnXPzI84SrLAkE7HZjLg_pYnJloL0wcj1q/s1600/Geometric+Vase+Galley.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="131" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJOzPcOyXYkQDExUyeF3PzGnsWIr6kjienil2mZU6hWn7DIrqn1gYIeOm1Ie7X67CpVVsMyxP2ZJUHApB7dGGPqvIRJWu8MzeafI5l5_qa4PAnXPzI84SrLAkE7HZjLg_pYnJloL0wcj1q/s320/Geometric+Vase+Galley.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Not to belabor the obvious, but I have taken a long and unplanned vacation from this blog. After more than six years it has become a challenge to come up with topics that have not already been beaten to death here.<br />
<br />
So I will make absolutely no promises about frequency or consistency of posting, but here you go!<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
There is a curious enchantment to Dark Ages. They are dark mainly to us, with few if any written records, yet they loom large in our imaginative heritage.<br />
<br />
The Dark Age of Greece - by convention it is in the singular, not 'Dark Ages' - might be dated with traditionalist pseudo-precision as running from 1174 BC to 776 BC. The end date is the first Olympiad, the earliest recorded date of 'historical' Greece. The start date is ten years after the fall of Troy, when Odysseus finally gets back to Ithaca, last of all the surviving Achaean heroes to make his way home.<br />
<br />
The traditional dates for the Trojan War itself, 1194-1184 BC, were an estimate by Eratosthenes, better known in geekdom for his impressively accurate computation of the size of the Earth. But the first curious thing about the Dark Age of Greece is that his date for the fall of Troy is also impressively accurate, even though it was based on premises that were shaky, obscure, or both.<br />
The current archeological dating for the <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=mVw4nVJRd7wC&pg=PA94&lpg=PA94&dq=troy+viib2&source=bl&ots=-6p7jbfE5X&sig=1NdiZzMQ-Pgc3EJOIdwLhRuG8bo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=aiPGUqqwHJTdoATc4oL4Bg&ved=0CEsQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=troy%20viib2&f=false">destruction of Troy VIIa - a destruction apparently due to war</a> - is given as 1230-1190/1180 BCE, a range that just neatly overlaps the traditional date.<br />
<br />
True that Eratosthenes' dating was only one of several classical estimates for the fall of Troy, and if you include enough of the others you can make a plausible case that Eratosthenes merely got lucky. If you scatter a dozen estimates over a 200 or 300 year period, one of them is likely to fall within a couple of decades of any given date.<br />
<br />
But 1184 became the <i>standard</i> traditional date for the fall of Troy. Score one for Eratosthenes, not to mention Homer.<br />
<br />
To us the oddest episodes in the <i>Odyssey</i> may be when Odysseus' son Telemachus visits Sparta and finds Menelaus and Helen living in comfortable domesticity, as though all that awkward business about Paris of Troy had never happened. Other homecomings, the <i>Nostoi</i> in Greek tradition, were more turbulent.<br />
<br />
Odysseus, not home yet, would have his own troubles, though they seem to end well for everyone except those annoying suitors (and the servingmaids who had been overly friendly with them). Most notorious of the homecomings was that of Agamemnon, King of Men, finished off in his bath by wife Clytemnestra. (She arguably <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iphigenia">had good reason</a>.)<br />
<br />
To judge by the archeological record, however, practically all of the homecomings must have gone badly. Every Mycenaean palace was destroyed, with the sole exception of the (rather minor) palace at Athens. As a further complication the wave of destruction - one scholar has dubbed it simply the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/End-Bronze-Age-Robert-Drews/dp/0691025916">Catastrophe</a> - peaked right around 1200 BCE, slightly <i>before</i> the putative date of the Trojan War.<br />
<br />
What sticks most in my mind is <i>sandy Pylos,</i> the city of wise old Nestor. Telemachus also visited Pylos in his journey, where he found Nestor leading his people in sacrificing bulls <span style="font-size: x-small;">(or was it oxen?)</span> to Poseidon. All seems to be going well for the Pylians - if Homer had wanted Foreshadowings of Doom in his narrative, he could have provided them, and he doesn't.<br />
<br />
In fact, however, sandy Pylos went down in flames circa 1200 BCE. And unlike Mycenae, which struggled on through a couple of archeological destruction layers before final abandonment, Pylos went down for the count. <br />
<br />
Left in the smouldering ruins were clay tablets, fortuitously baked in the conflagration, on which scribes had carefully recorded all the unromantic details of Bronze Age palace management.They also provide the Foreshadowings of Doom that immortal Homer does not: Watchers have been dispatched to guard the coast, some 600 rowers are being mustered, and there are hints of an emergency human sacrifice. <br />
<br />
<br />
The fashion in the fairly recent past was to downplay any real connection between Bronze Age events and the Homeric tradition. The magisterial Moses I Finley dismissed any Bronze Age element in the epics as a mere few Mycenaean 'things.' Lately the scholarly fashion cycle seems to be going the other way, helped along by other fire-preserved clay tablets, from Hittite archives, that mention a place called Taruisa or Wilusa, and troublesome people called Ahhiyawa - evoking Troy, its alternate name Ilios, and the Achaeans, sackers of cities.<br />
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For historical, or para-historical fiction, this would be more than enough. A lot of plausible reconstruction of events can be slipped through the error bars in archeological dating. If Troy fell in 1230 BCE, then whatever happened to Pylos happened a generation after Telemachus' visit, give or take, and had no reason to be hinted at in the <i>Odyssey.</i> Perhaps it belonged to a different story line.<br />
<br />
But that is the mystery and enchantment of the Greek Dark Age. Moses I Finley may have been wrong to dismiss 'Mycenaean things,' but he is right in saying not to judge a culture only by its material poverty. <br />
An oral tradition persisted and developed through its obscure generations.<br />
<br />
The tradition did not preserve everything. If there was ever an epic sung of the fiery end of Pylos, it vanished nearly without trace. (A sketchy account held that Nestor's descendents were exiled from Pylos, turned up in Athens, and eventually founded Ionia.) But the tradition did preserve some things, however much refracted by oral transmission.<br />
<br />
It is unlikely that we will ever find a source document that directly records the specific people and events that have come down to us as the wrath of Achilles and the wanderings of Odysseus. We glimpse them - vividly so - across a wine-dark sea of time.<br />
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<br />
Discuss.<br />
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<a href="http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php">Obligatory space reference</a>: When your subject is Odysseus, the Major Tom of Bronze Age heroes, you don't really <i>need</i> an obligatory space reference. But I provided one anyway.<br />
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The image of an archaic era Greek galley comes from a <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33098">Project Gutenberg</a> ebook.Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com359tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-44585208101124405112013-09-23T17:33:00.000-07:002013-09-23T17:33:33.819-07:00Vandenberg Spaceport<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
I'm <i>baaaaack!</i><br />
<br />
Yes, the hiatus has been <b>far</b> too long - I kept thinking 'just another day or two,' after a move, working on <i>Catherine of Lyonesse,</i> an annoying and voltage-draining sinus infection, and, well, work.<br />
<br />
The move means a regretful farewell to the F line streetcars, 100,000-ton containerships, and more places to eat than we could ever possibly try. On the other hand, the Central Coast does have a justified reputation as a corner of paradise.<br />
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Of more interest to most readers here, the move puts me back within decent viewing distance of launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base.<br />
<br />
Alas, relentless California coastal summer fog rendered the late-August launch of a Delta IV Heavy invisible. As the seasons turn, bringing Indian summer to the coast, I have better hopes for the upcoming Falcon 9 launch, postponed from midmonth and now scheduled for September 29th.<br />
<br />
For those who live near the West Coast, or simply want to keep track of launch schedules, here is a <a href="http://www.spacearchive.info/vafbsked.htm">Web page listing scheduled Vandenberg launches</a>.<br />
<br />
This launch schedule also provides some important - and frustrating - lessons about the practicalities of space flight.<br />
<br />
The most important of these lessons is that space launches are rare. Not counting ICBM test flights (one pending, and one I slept through and missed a couple of nights ago), three launches are scheduled between now and March. Throw in the late-August Delta IV launch and it comes to four launches over an eight-month period. <br />
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This is surely not an 'efficient' usage of facilities and resources. A space launch center must be broadly comparable to a large airport. The vehicles it handles are about the same size as jetliners, and at least as demanding. They must be prepped, serviced, and sent on their way, using a lot of specialized equipment, and - even more expensive - teams of human expertise.<br />
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If a major airport handled one flight every other month ... airline tickets would not be cheap.<br />
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In fairness, Vandenberg is not the most heavily used launch center. It is used for polar-orbit launches, particularly for spy satellites, though also for some types of geosats for which maximum coverage of the Earth's surface is important. Polar-orbit launches cannot benefit significantly from Earth's rotation, so they are avoided unless specifically called for.<br />
<br />
But sometimes they <i>are</i> called for, meaning that all traffic cannot be consolidated to a single launch site. Worldwide there have been <a href="http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/">rather less than 100 launches in each of the last few years</a> -74 in 2010, 84 in 2011, 78 last year, and 52 so far this year.<br />
<br />
This includes a handful of failures each year; out of 286 attempts this decade, 18 were failures, a 6 percent failure rate. This is, I believe, a somewhat higher failure rate than in the last couple of decades - at least in part, I'd guess, because of more new and inexperienced players in the game.<br />
<br />
But any way you cut it, space launches are not an everyday event - more like one or two per week, worldwide.<br />
<br />
The problem of low traffic volume does not just drive up the cost of <i>launching</i> rockets. Production of any one given type is only a dozen or so per year - up to 19, in 2011 for the Russian workhorse Soyuz (R-7) and China's Chang Zheng. Individual Western booster types rarely see more than half a dozen launches per year. Forget production-line efficiencies.<br />
<br />
This traffic volume also puts paid to reusable launch vehicles. Quite apart from technical challenges, there just isn't the traffic to keep them busy. (And since payloads vary widely, you'd really need a stable of types, just as with expendables.)<br />
<br />
In fact, given the traffic level, a stable of expendables is the most cost-effective approach. For any given individual payload they are far less expensive than a reusable vehicle that has to not only get the payload up, but then get itself back down.<br />
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Yes, this is a dead horse I have beaten here many times before, and will no doubt beat again. But actually living where I can watch space launches brings some immediacy to the topic.<br />
<br />
On the bright side, we are sending some 80-odd missions a year into orbit and beyond. More than that, in fact, since many launches carry multiple satellites. As also noted here before, we have sent missions to every major planet in the Solar System, and a good many other objects.<br />
<br />
And I am looking forward to Sunday morning, when that Falcon 9 is scheduled to go up. With a little bit of luck the sky will be clear.<br />
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Discuss:<br />
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The image, via <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/dvids/7060752471/">Flickr</a>, shows a Delta IV Medium launch from Vandenberg, last year.Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com450tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-47833489240437129312013-07-14T12:11:00.000-07:002013-07-14T12:13:46.716-07:00Worldbuilding on the Fly?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
This blog is devoted in substantial measure to world building. The worlds it assists in building may lavish disproportionate effort on fighting space battles, but this is by no means unusual, and is arguably by popular demand.<br />
<br />
For this world building task Rocketpunk Manifesto has implicitly advocated for an exacting - some would say anal - approach, calling for careful attention to background conditions and disciplines ranging from physics to economics.<br />
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In none of this is this blog unique, or even particularly original. There is indeed an entire cottage industry devoted to arguing for this approach, and occasionally providing some tools alleged to be helpful in the task.<br />
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<br />
Yet when it came to actual worldbuilding for a novel (and prospective series) I cheerfully ignored my own advice. I do have a map for <i>Catherine of Lyonesse,</i> and I have worked out <span style="font-size: x-small;">(or friends and fans of the book have worked out)</span> some genealogies and coats of arms. But I did not formulate most of my background by writing/sketching it out. The greater part of it thus remains impressionistic, often only implicit, rather than exact and formalized.<br />
<br />
For that matter, aside from a handful of specific references there is very little obvious connection between the subject matter of this blog and the subject matter of the book.<br />
<br />
Which raises the question of how important detailed world building actually is to SF or fantasy fiction, and what the relationship is between stories and the worlds they are set in. <br />
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<br />
Could this be a right-brain / left-brain sort of thing? <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(Does anyone even speak that way any more? Or has all of that gone the way of the leisure suit?)</span> I certainly feel that creating interactions between characters calls on a quite different set of imaginative capabilities from, say, creating the technological characteristics of space warcraft.<br />
<br />
These differences are not unrelated, perhaps, to those I have those I have suggested between <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2011/01/what-do-ais-want.html">AI as it was traditionally imagined</a> and <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2012/09/artificial-intelligence-human.html">AI as it has actually developed</a>. In a nutshell, we supposed that a computer able to play winning chess would do so in the same still-mysterious way that human chess masters win. Instead, as it turned out, plain old brute force - if you have enough of it - is quite sufficient.<br />
<br />
And humans are capable of thinking in a brute-force way, which is why we can program computers. Yet computer programming itself remains an art, much to the frustration of management types in the industry.<br />
<br />
In fact, <i>Catherine of Lyonesse</i> springs ultimately from the same geeky interests that animate this blog. Eons ago, in college, some friends and I came up with a naval-centric 'world game' based loosely on a 16th century setting. Lyonesse, a loose synologue of Tudor England, was my country in this setting.<br />
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The game itself met a common fate: It was too complex to design, much less play, and soon faded away. But in the meanwhile, by way of background flavoring, I had endowed Lyonesse with its loose counterpart to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_I_of_England">Gloriana</a>, with a suitably period name: Catherine.<br />
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And as in actual history, once she is allowed to exist, even imaginatively, Gloriana steals the show. The idea stuck in my mind until I finally decided to try writing it, and found that I liked the results.<br />
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And for <i>story</i> purposes, it turned out that Catherine was very much more interesting than, say, her ships. Certainly <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2009/08/yesterdays-tech-revolutions-galleasses.html">the ships have their own interest</a> - very much characteristic of what I have discussed in this blog. And I could have written stories about them. But Catherine stubbornly insisted on the story being about <i>her.</i> (Egotistical, yes, but what you expect of a royal heiress?)<br />
<br />
So here I am.<br />
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<br />
In short, detailed world building is at least semi-independent of the stories which it allegedly is designed to support. Like building a model railroad layout, it can have <a href="http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php">satisfactions</a> entirely independent of stories. And, on the flip side, stories do not necessarily call for that sort of background detail.<br />
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Stories - at least in SF/F and kindred genres - do call for some level of world building, or at least world-consciousness on the author's part. We wish to avoid glaring inconsistencies, or plot holes that a containership could pass through.<br />
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But the knowledge a story calls for is usually impressionistic. Whether a narrative space battle works will ultimately depend on whether it <i>feels</i> convincing. Technical specifics, beyond what the crews would be thinking about in action, are more likely to get you into trouble than out of it.<br />
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Discuss:<br />
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The image of Henry VIII's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Rose"><i>Mary Rose</i></a> is from the so-called Anthony Rolls. These contained (fairly mediocre) sketches of each royal ship, along with such information as tonnage, armament, and crew. All in all a fascinating precursor to <i>Jane's Fighting Ships,</i> though alas only for the English navy. Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com65tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-33209950543722186862013-06-09T20:58:00.001-07:002013-06-09T21:06:40.885-07:00How Much Do We Know?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I've finished the first round of editorial revisions to <i>Catherine of Lyonesse,</i> so I'm back to these haunts again after a somewhat excessive absence. <br />
<br />
The question in the title has come up here before, though my Google fu falls short of finding all relevant links, but it at least appears in the <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2011/01/ferry-to-hogwarts.html">comment thread to this post</a> from a couple of years ago.<br />
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It was brought to mind by an email from a friend (<span style="font-size: x-small;">actually, my brother-in-law, who reads cosmology and theology for pleasure</span>), with the following quote, from theologian Karl Rahner:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"...what is called
knowledge in everyday parlance, is only <a href="http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1648">a small island in a vast sea</a>
that has not been traveled... Hence the existential question for the
knower is this: Which does he love more, the small island of his
so-called knowledge or the sea of infinite mystery?"</blockquote>
Vast untraveled seas should be near and dear to the hearts of most readers here. For, whatever formal arguments we make, isn't this the core motivation for interest in space travel?<br />
<br />
So ... how much <i>do</i> we know? Obviously we know almost nothing about the details of the Universe. The Kepler mission has not yet found an Earth equivalent (<span style="font-size: x-small;">in size, mass, and relative orbital distance from its primary</span>). It has found several near-misses, and those are out of a very limited survey. Even with instantaneous anywhere-to-anywhere travel, however, an <i>exhaustive</i> search for earthlike worlds would be ... exhausting.<br />
<br />
The more immediate question is how much we know in broad outline, or to put it another way, how much do we know at the level of basic physics. Do we know a lot? Or only a tiny part of what there is to be known, even on a general level?<br />
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<br />
As often happens here, there are cogent arguments to be made in both directions. As <i>also</i> often happens here, the arguments for each position are not simply contrary, but more nearly orthogonal to one another. The arguments differ on a meta level.<br />
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Thomas S. Kuhn, author of the <i>Structure of Scientific Revolutions,</i> has much to answer for when it comes to political and bizz-speak cliches: He launched the word <i>paradigm</i> on its course of infamy. But his core insight was that major developments in the sciences do not just extend our understanding: They transform it.<br />
<br />
This insight suggests in turn that just as Einstein supplanted Newton, who supplanted Aristotle, so the next physics revolution should supplant Einstein. Familiar realms will still be well approximated by the older physics. <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(When your car runs out of gas, its behavior is Aristotelian, not Newtonian.)</span> But entirely new realms will be opened.<br />
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The strongest contrary argument (that I am aware of) does not try to refute this point, but instead seeks to render it nugatory. Why should we expect 'the next physics revolution'? Until nearly Einstein's day, fundamental physics was essentially a hobby; since his day it has been an industry.<br />
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Once lots of smart people put enormous effort into something, chances are they will figure it out pretty well. The Age of Exploration relentlessly stripped the map of its <i>Here be Dragons</i> blank spaces. The Lost Civilization subgenre of Romance, contemporary with the dawn of SF, was its last gasp.<br />
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Parallel reason suggests that if a century of industrial-scale physics research has not superseded Einstein, perhaps the reason is that Einstein essentially got it right. Which is a something of a bummer for FTL (<span style="font-size: xx-small;">even if FTL is <i>not</i> absolutely precluded</span>), and a bummer on a broader philosophical level as well.<br />
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On the third hand ... so far as I can tell, there is a good, robust reason to think that Einstein did <i>not</i> essentially get it right. Proviso that I am going way beyond my physics pay grade here, but I am given to understand that General Relativity and quantum theory are <i>mutually contradictory.</i> On a fundamental level, that is, they cannot both be right.<br />
<br />
Indeed, more than that, <i>they must both be wrong</i> - because if either one were valid, we could either dispense with the other or else reconcile them.<br />
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God, as Einstein supposedly said, does not play dice with the Universe. To which one famous response is supposed to be, Not only does He play dice, but He throws them where we can't see them. (Another response, attributed to Neils Bohr, was "Stop telling God what to do.")<br />
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In short, our fundamental physics is a cobble. It is a magnificent cobble, but still a cobble, a world-view or Universe-view constructed out of contradictory and necessarily flawed theories.<br />
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<br />
I find this quite refreshing, because on some conceptual level it restores the blank space to our maps. Superseding the muddle of General Relativity and quantum theory may be exceedingly difficult - almost certainly is, since a lot of bright people have been trying to do so for three generations, so far without success. But our physics is still a muddle.<br />
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To be sure, this does not <i>necessarily</i> mean that any 'next physics revolution' is awaiting us, even in principle. Theists, at least, can fall back on what the Evil Website calls <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BellisariosMaxim">Bellisario's Maxim</a>: <i>Don't examine this too closely. </i>Though I am not sure how comfortable orthodox believers in the Abrahamic faiths would be with a God who, like mortal SF writers, handwaves His way past contradictions in world building.<br />
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Anyway, <i>that</i> would make the Universe even more mysterious.<br />
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Discuss:<br />
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Whether or not the Universe is ultimately mysterious - or even whether or not we already have learned much about its basic workings, it is is certainly full of Cool Stuff. The image comes from <a href="http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130604.html">Astronomy Picture of the Day</a> (APOD).Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com184tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-29489215582289909822013-04-28T19:51:00.003-07:002013-04-28T19:57:56.892-07:00The Balance of Technology<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In comments on the <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(relatively!)</span> recent post on <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2013/03/high-kings-and-galactic-emperors.html">monarchy in SF/F</a> I remarked on <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2013/03/high-kings-and-galactic-emperors.html?showComment=1363193238414#c214751187834319217"><i>balance of technology</i></a> as a key element of successful worldbuilding. Regular readers will not be surprised that the subject has come up before, explicitly so in <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2011/04/space-warfare-xv-further-reflections-on.html">Space Warfare XV: Further Reflections on Laserstars</a>. <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(Three years ago - yikes!)</span><br />
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The particular example I gave there of 'unbalanced' technology came from a science fiction novel I once had, in which figured a World War II era heavy cruiser that had been refitted with smoothbore guns.*<br />
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This is something you probably do not want - unless you <i>do</i> want it, perhaps because (as in the book) you are dealing with a post-apocalyptic setting having a mix of surviving high-tech artifacts and the much more rudimentary technology that the survivors can contrive on their own.<br />
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Needless to say, 'unbalanced' technology has its own interest and appeal, which is one of the factors that has made the post-apocalyptic subgenre so popular. And, to get really pedantic - something this blog never fears to do - unbalanced technologies also have their own logical balance.<br />
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My personal guess, for example, is that people who could maintain a steam turbine power plant in operable condition would also be able to keep precision-machined guns in working order, and even provide ammunition and powder, if perhaps in limited supplies.<br />
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Likelier 'unbalanced' technologies might include sailing vessels with auxiliary motors available for limited use, and a limited, perhaps dwindling supply of modern weapons. Or drones with canvas wings on aluminum-tube frames, powered by lawn mower engines and controlled by smartphones. <br />
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What is not particularly likely, I think, is a simpler linear regress, such as <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2012/08/the-steampunk-era.html">steampunk-era ironclads</a> (cool though they are). Building a 10,000 ton ironclad requires the ability to harness resources on a large scale, and a massive if unsophisticated industrial base. And anyone who has those things can systematically research more advanced technologies, especially if even a few artifacts have survived for reverse engineering.<br />
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Disclaimer and proviso: Of course the rule of cool trumps all these considerations, which is why post-apocalyptic futures tend to be heavy on punk rockers and motorcycles.<br />
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<br />
Which brings us back to <i>balanced</i> technologies. Alas, having brought you this far, I really don't have magic solutions to offer for keeping a futuristic setting's technologies in balance. The further you get from a souped-up present day, the less obvious it is what technologies should fit together neatly.<br />
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Does FTL imply that you 'should' also have torch drives for normal space operation? Or normal-space propulsion as demi-magical as FTL itself is? Or could <a href="http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php">a future starfaring civilization</a> <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(linked on general principles)</span> be using two-stage expendable rockets to get into orbit, and rendezvous with upper stages to get to wherever the jump points are?<br />
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In this case there are plausible <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(at least plausible-sounding!)</span> arguments going both ways. On the one hand, FTL implies a revolution in fundamental physics, which ought to enable a whole range of new technologies involving pretty much every aspect of life. On the other hand, a century after Einstein, Newton still provides a pretty complete explanation of how our actual space propulsion technology works.<br />
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What I can say - unhelpful though it may be - that the general principle of balance of technology also applies to other aspects of the speculative subgenres of Romance. Other things equal, magic too should be in some kind of balance: If every hedge witch can work powerful spells <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(even if not always reliably)</span>, it is hard to then turn around and have magic effects be few and far between. <br />
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A bit more vaguely, I feel that this principle applies to social and political worldbuilding as well - suggesting that it is a bit problematic to project agrarian-age institutions such as feudalism or the Roman Empire into a post-industrial future.<br />
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On a more cheerful note - from a writer's perspective, not necessarily that of your characters - the balance of technology is dynamic, not static. No small part of the entertainment value of the 16th century is that its technology was in rapid transition, as indeed was its broader culture. Early-modern tropes, such as royal musketeers, existed alongside medieval tropes such as knights in full armor.<br />
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And in an encounter it is not always a given that the more 'modern' combination would prevail. The same is broadly true in any era of rapid technological and social change. <br />
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Discuss:<br />
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* Does this story element ring a bell with anyone? As I recall, the book <span style="font-size: x-small;">(which probably dates back to the 70s, at least)</span> also had an attempt to launch a space ark, which did not end well. <br />
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The image, from a site called <a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?sa=X&biw=1366&bih=639&tbm=isch&tbnid=WHwitui6tkslOM:&imgrefurl=http://www.damngeeky.com/category/featured/page/18&docid=ciLDq5DO_CTcYM&imgurl=http://www.damngeeky.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Project-APASF-A-Post-Apocalyptic-Steampunk-Future-PC-case-mod.jpg&w=600&h=400&ei=UNR9UbqWKMiUiAK434DACA&zoom=1&ved=1t:3588,r:33,s:0,i:195&iact=rc&dur=519&page=2&tbnh=175&tbnw=275&start=16&ndsp=20&tx=120&ty=73">damngeeky.com</a>, is described as a post-apocalyptic PC case mode. To me it looks more like a steam powered laser. And no one should be surprised that <i>most</i> Google Images under 'post-apocalyptic technology' involve punk rockers, motorcycles, or both.<br />
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<br />Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com325tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-63848236714659494982013-03-31T20:47:00.000-07:002013-04-01T19:33:58.445-07:00Let's Get Whimsical<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In comments on the last post I stepped into Large Predators enclosure at the zoo by remarking that the idea of 'uplifting' - genetic fiddling to produce animals with human-level intelligence - struck me as essentially whimsical. <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(More specifically, I said that it was all about the coolness of talking animals.)</span><br />
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Whimsical is probably not entirely the word of choice for a trope that has firm roots in the early days of self-aware SF. And no, I do not plan to discuss uplifting here. If I did, the post would have a different title ... say, <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_Doctor_Moreau">House of Pain</a>.</i><br />
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In fact, 'whimsical' is not the most accurate, fully inclusive term for what I <i>do</i> intend to discuss, but that is the word I thought of, so I will stick with it. The topic is, roughly, the sort of fiction that does not even pretend to be Realistic<b><span style="font-size: xx-small;">[TM]</span></b>. Which, comes to think of it, specifically excludes uplifting, which at least makes a claim to realism.<br />
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But we will stick with talking animals for the moment. In non-sfnal form they go back at least to Aesop's Fable, but last century must have been a golden age for the talking animal trope. In spite of Mr. Ed the talking horse, and his progenitor Francis the talking mule, rabbits seem particularly favored - and, as we shall see, notably significant.<br />
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At least in American popular culture the most famous talking animal is surely Bugs Bunny. <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(Not Mickey Mouse, a corporate logo that is all but forgotten as an actual character.)</span> While I don't exactly think of Bugs as <i>whimsical</i> - a term that, at least to Americans, has distinctly British connotations - surely he and the rest of the Warner Bros gang qualify in practice.<br />
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Realism, in any ordinary sense, is not even dimly in view here. Yet whatever is going on, it certainly works, and has stood up to time pretty well.<br />
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I do not know whether <i>The Wind in the Willows</i> is whimsical, though it is certainly British. It is, sad to say, on that dreadfully long list of books that I have not yet managed to read. The part about simply messing around in boats sounds whimsical - and also a good enough reason to get off my aspect and read the book.<br />
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Bugs Bunny and the Willows crowd have in common that they are nominally aimed at children. The Warner Bros cartoons notoriously have plenty for the grown-ups, supposedly flying under the kiddie radar. <span style="font-size: x-small;">(This is surely true of most great kidlit, yet probably less important than claimed. It merely gives us permission, as adults, to still watch or read.)</span><br />
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Are children actually more open to, say, talking animals as characters? Because they don't yet know the boundaries of Realism<b><span style="font-size: xx-small;">[TM]</span></b>? Or, like the pop-culture references in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, is this just a pose designed for adults so that we can pretend we are above the talking-animal stuff? <br />
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What we call realism is, after all, itself a pure literary convention. This applies both to the kind of realism I deal with on this blog, details of spaceship design and such, and also - I will cheerfully assert - to the 'higher realism' to which serious, non-genre literature is presumed to aspire.<br />
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The 'willing suspension of disbelief,' as Tolkien called it, seems in fact to be only loosely related to any sort of realism. There may be benighted souls who can't come to grips with Bugs Bunny because rabbits don't talk. And we can pity them, but they are surely not typical. Most of us have no difficulty with such tropes, any more than we do with the idea that a private detective probably will solve the murder by the end of the book.<br />
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The entire Evil Website is, in a way, a meditation on the place, and non-place, of Realism<b><span style="font-size: xx-small;">[TM]</span></b> in fiction.<br />
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But to bring this discussion around to the more typical themes of this blog, consider one of the more interesting talking non-rabbits in children's literature: <i>In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. </i><br />
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Tolkien, whose opinions on the subject of hobbits are reasonably authoritative, does not mention talking bunnies as part of their background. (Quite surprisingly, he does mention Sinclair Lewis's <i>Babbit,</i> a character I'd never have thought of in relation to hobbits.) The word hobbit fits into a tradition of English words for mythical creatures; compare hobgoblin.<br />
<br />
Still, it is hard not to imagine that at some subconscious level, at least, <i>The Hobbit</i> shared some kinship with <i>The Wind in the Willows,</i> and distantly with Bugs Bunny himself. <br />
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Having said that, it is hard to see much whimsical about Middle-Earth.<br />
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Discuss.<br />
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Note: For the first time I have a good excuse for being behind in posting here: I am working on editorial revisions for <i>Catherine of Lyonesse.</i><br />
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The image of messing about in boats comes from a blog by '<a href="http://czechingin.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/simply-messing-about-in-boats/">An English lady in Prague</a>.'Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com57tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-3532068636758235172013-03-03T20:44:00.002-08:002013-03-03T20:44:27.046-08:00High Kings and Galactic Emperors - Monarchy in Science Fiction and Fantasy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Science fiction has been rather curiously given to monarchical government. 'Curiously' in the sense that <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(at any rate to 'Murricans)</span> it is a form of government associated with the past, and certainly not with rocket ships, monorails, food pills, cyborgs, or the rest of the retro-future paraphernalia that <i>sci-fi</i> still loosely connotes in the popular culture. And even, with a reservation or two, in SF fandom.<br />
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The situation in fantasy is somewhat different. In spite of urban fantasy and all the rest, fantasy still connotes first and foremost a setting rooted in a medievalesque past, where kings - and the occasional queen regnant - are perfectly at home.<br />
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I have read a number of arguments over the years suggesting that the widespread practice of monarchy in SF says something about the authors who use the trope, and probably not to their credit. <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(Sorry, no links, but if you want examples, Google is your friend.)</span> Similar critical remarks have been made not just about fantasy authors, but its readers, and the very existence of the (sub)genre.<br />
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For my purpose, the virtues or defects of monarchism as a political position are fairly beside the point. Kingship has certainly been widespread, suggesting that it was a workable default position, at any rate in the agrarian age. For an intellectual defense you probably still can't do better than Hobbes' Leviathan. Not to mention that as a critique of anarchism and its cousins, it is hard to improve on <i>solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.</i><br />
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But I would argue - in fact, I <i>will</i> argue - that the roots of monarchism in SF have less to do with political philosophy than with basic story considerations.<br />
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Bourgeois representative democracy, classical Athenian-style democracy, classical Roman-style republicanism, medieval oligarchical republicanism <i>a la</i> Venice, military juntas, fascistic <i>fuehrerprinzip,</i> Leninist dictatorship of the proletariat, nominally Communist party-committee oligarchy, pure bureaucratic functionary-ism, and both Iranian and al-Queda style theocracy, all have at least one thing in common: The likelihood of a teenage girl becoming head of state under any of these systems is pretty much nil. <br />
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Yes, that particular consideration has rather narrow applicability. But it is part of a broader point: Leadership in all of those systems is in some broad sense a workday job. To be sure, rulership is, in contemporary biz-speak, a 24/7 position. But it is walled off, at least in principle, from all the other dimensions of a ruler's life. <br />
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Yes, that principle may be honored in the breach: Presidents and dictators do indeed have personal lives that can and do spill over into their official roles. The spillover can even, at times, be substantial, and have some real consequences. But these are the exceptions, not the rule. <br />
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Hereditary monarchy is a different beast. Quoting myself from an <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2009/05/mary-mary-quite-contrary.html">earlier post here</a> <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(and, originally, a now-defunct website)</span>, hereditary monarchy is a political system that takes sex out of the bedroom and puts it in the history books. <br />
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Admittedly there was not much sex in midcentury SF <i>or</i> F. But the authors of these works knew their history, at any rate Western history. Which, from the Julio-Claudians to the Tudors and beyond, offers ample enough demonstration of the uniquely colorful potential of hereditary monarchy.<br />
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Someone in the back row is pointing out that the Principate under the Julio-Claudians was not really a hereditary monarchy. <span style="font-size: x-small;">(Nor did the Empire ever quite become one, even under the Paleologi more than a thousand years later.)</span> But that was <span style="font-size: small;">sort of the problem, wasn't it? With no other constitutional mechanism at hand, a kinda sorta hereditary </span>succession was the least worst alternative, with an added element of uncertainty that ramped up family dysfunction even above the usual royal standard.<br />
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And on the flip side, monarchy brings grandeur to family dysfunction. Consider <i>The Lion in Winter.</i> The actual story line has all the makings of a squirm-inducing soap opera. But because it is the royal Angevins <span style="font-size: x-small;">(and, yes, brilliantly written)</span> it transcends its soap opera plot. <br />
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Or, to put it another way, hereditary monarchy is singularly well-suited to Romance. By fully entangling the personal and the political it provides great story fuel. And story trumps futurism, or even political philosophy, every time.<br />
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Discuss:<br />
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The <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/flow14/3714092493/">Flickr</a> page for the royal headgear above describes it as 'Not THE crown, just a crown.' But the lighting is appropriately cool.Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com353tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-80453445341455539602013-02-18T18:20:00.000-08:002013-02-24T08:43:39.776-08:00Technology Revolutions, Trends, and Twists<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Each of the last <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2013/01/is-science-fiction-tired.html">two</a> <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2013/02/a-force-of-nature.html">posts</a> has spawned a particularly interesting comment thread. I will, a bit arbitrarily, reserve the one about monarchy <span style="font-size: x-small;">(and other political systems)</span> for a future post, and take up here - not for the first time, not for the last - the question of the limits of technology. <br />
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As regular readers know, I tend to be a technological conservative. This may be, at least in part, a generational thing. Those of us <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(old farts)</span> who grew up expecting that controlled fusion, scheduled Moon flights, and Real <b><span style="font-size: xx-small;">[TM]</span></b> AI were all Right Around The Corner are perhaps inclined to be cynical about claims for new technologies. We have been stung before - repeatedly.<br />
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If, on the other hand, your tech experience started with PCs, then the Internet, then the mobile Web, and now apparently credible progress toward automated cars, claims about the Next Big Thing probably look rather more convincing.<br />
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Let us look at a few familiar and popular technologies, and how they have or haven't panned out: <br />
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AI, in the old Asimovian robot or HAL 9000 sense, has to date been a pretty complete bust. The Web offers the perfect environment for the classic Turing test, and so far no prominent blogger <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(or even obscure one)</span> has been outed as an AI.<br />
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But the flip side, as previously noted here, is that <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2012/09/artificial-intelligence-human.html">capabilities we once regarded as the sole province of human-like intelligence</a> - such as winning at chess, or even <i>Jeopardy!</i> - have turned out to be within the reach of brute-force computing power. If we get driverless cars in the near future, or even midfuture, they will utilize a combination of sensors and processing power that would have seemed fanciful or at least unaffordable in the 1960s.<br />
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The computer revolution also has a third side: the Gutenberg-on-steroids impact it has had on communications between <i>people.</i> Rocketpunk-era SF predicted AI that we don't have and aren't even close to. It did not predict the Internet, not even kinda sorta. <span style="font-size: x-small;">(One or two stories hinted at the idea, but it never emerged as a trope.)</span> <br />
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Fusion power is also high on the disappointment list. There was a time when the joke was that it had been 20 years away for the last 40 years - now make that the last 60 years. My (somewhat hazy) understanding is that they are making progress, and getting fairly close to the power break-even point.Whether a technology so demanding will end up as a practical power source <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(or space drive)</span> is another matter, and it is hard to be really sanguine about the prospects.<br />
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Astronautics is yet a different matter. Something to remember as we pine for those scheduled moonships is that, on a purely technical level, most of what the space evangelists promised us in 1955 has worked out just fine. Multi-stage rockets can and do reach orbit, routinely, a hundred or so times each year, even if only a handful of their missions carry humans. We have largely scouted out the Solar System, and are moving on to more detailed investigation, such as putting vehicles on Mars.<br />
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What failed to pan out in this case were optimistic assumptions about ease and - especially - cost. There is no need for this post to beat the mummified remains of that particular horse.<br />
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Now, on to biotech. I can't claim even an informed layperson's knowledge of things bio-, so I have no formal basis for believing or disbelieving much of anything. That said, my first-blush reaction is to regard pretty much everything from radical life extension to 'designer organisms' as hype.<br />
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After all, I would argue, the devil is almost always in the details. I tend to picture biotech as most likely providing such agribusiness miracles as flavorless cubical tomatoes <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(for more efficient packing)</span> that remain blandly edible for decades.<br />
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I can even point to a preliminary - and perhaps premature - hint or two in that direction. Genetic technology has not, in its first decade or so, produced the patentable and profitable drugs that Big Pharma was eagerly predicting a few years ago. <br />
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The prospects may, however, be more complicated than that. Commenter Thom S, who has a professional background in the field, <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2013/01/is-science-fiction-tired.html?showComment=1360567926208#c3106826955676918956">sketches out a few possibilities</a>. <br />
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When I first read the comment, I confess that I was merely grumpy. On a second reading, however, it dawned on me that hardly anything described fit my stereotype of biotech pipe dreams. Nor are they mere cubical tomatoes. In fact, these informed projections compare to my vague stereotypes roughly as the Internet compares to HAL 9000.<br />
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Some technology revolutions never deliver on their early promise. Others deliver in spades. And yet others deliver not what was predicted, but instead deliver something rich and strange.<br />
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But dammit, <a href="http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php">I still want spaceships</a>.<br />
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Discuss:<br />
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The quite cool image comes from <a href="https://plus.google.com/photos/106553160519531437288/albums/5752265682024409537/5752266590279162658">Luke Campbell's Google+ page</a>. Because, come on, when it comes to biotech, as with other fields, wouldn't you <i>really</i> want to do the Cool Stuff?Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com154tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-22493235153418095202013-02-11T19:09:00.000-08:002013-02-11T19:09:39.776-08:00A Force of Nature<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
-- Teresa Nielsen Hayden </blockquote>
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What the former Tor managing editor <span style="font-size: x-small;">(now consulting editor)</span> and <a href="http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/">Making Light</a> blogger says about plot surely applies with even greater force to genre. At least in the familiar sense of 'the genres' in the the book trade, which I have argued are all somewhat arbitrary subgenres of Romance.<br />
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As the title suggests, however, this post is about that much more primal literary force, <i>story.</i> To make one long story short, I have been offered a book contract.<br />
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The other and more relevant story, <b><i>Catherine of Lyonesse,</i></b> is quite a bit longer - 135,000 words <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(prior to whatever editing <span style="font-size: xx-small;">will be</span> called for</span>), somewhere around 300-400 pages of the old fashioned physical book it will be. <span style="font-size: x-small;">(There will no doubt be an ebook version, too - ebooks have more or less taken the place of the old mass-market paperbacks of yore.)</span><br />
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No need to click over to Amazon.com just yet - getting the contract is only the start of the process. And the pace of the book industry tends to be ... stately. <br />
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It will be published as a YA historical fantasy novel by David Fickling Books, perhaps best known in the SF/F 'verse for Phillip Pullman's <i>His Dark Materials</i> trilogy, <i>The Golden Compass</i> et seq. And because the publisher is British, the final version will presumably have colourful spelling and the like. <br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">(And I shall be paid in pounds sterling, which gives me good personal reasons to be annoyed with the Tories, who are fully living up to Walter Bagehot's celebrated description of them as the Stupid Party. And also annoyed with the LibDems, whom an Anglican God evidently created to demonstrate the utter uselessness of third parties. But I digress ...)</span><br />
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The eponymous protagonist, Catherine de Guienne, is a teenage girl, a fact of which she is blissfully unaware, the concept of 'teenager' not yet existing in her Renaissance-esque world. She is also a royal heiress, a fact of which she is all too acutely aware: Its consequences can sometimes be gratifying, but are all too often alarming.<br />
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The basic argument for hereditary monarchy is that it averts succession crises. As the recently reported discovery of Richard III's body under a parking lot demonstrates, it has not always been effective in this regard. When the 'apparent' successor is <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(what we would call)</span> a teenage girl, the succession can be ... problematic. And there are other complications, such as being raised in a foreign court.<br />
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There are no space battles. <span style="font-size: x-small;">(On a happier note there are no vampires, sparkly or otherwise.)</span> The original draft did have a couple of early 16th century sea battles, which alas ended up on the cutting room floor.<br />
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All of which is to say that the book has pretty much nothing to do with the topics I have usually discussed here. <i>Story,</i> as said, is a force of nature, which brushed aside with cool indifference any impulse on my part to write about something else.<br />
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Also, I have been holding out on you, my readers, as the book went from wishful thinking to theoretical possibility to impending reality: My agent advised me against a premature announcement. Which explains, whether or not it justifies, my more sporadic posting over the last year. Blogs, like sharks, need to keep moving, but a lot of the topics I most wanted to talk about would make no sense out of context.<br />
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I do not intend to wrench Rocketpunk Manifesto entirely away from its existing course, or turn it into a blog about the book. (At some point I will likely as not spin off a <i>Catherine of Lyonesse</i> blog.) But I will certainly re-broaden the scope to more nearly match the topic range asserted at the top of this page, and explore the host of ways in which the book has more in common with space travel than might be obvious at a first glance.<br />
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<a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2009/08/yesterdays-tech-revolutions-galleasses.html">This earlier post offers</a> one example.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEhJTwTO63fK2Vv7BD-RW4djM1Nmx8glXswc3oOHosfrVTUM5yma6YmvOAyWTM6Bc4AublCsSM5SAoEDbI7CD9JzG91KDJcrfS7Oqgdcd2rFbyjfMz5gIJMenH21XPh2HCu2yqb1sP16d0/s1600-h/Galleass+Hart+1546.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="English galleass Hart, 1546" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5372583336700592898" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEhJTwTO63fK2Vv7BD-RW4djM1Nmx8glXswc3oOHosfrVTUM5yma6YmvOAyWTM6Bc4AublCsSM5SAoEDbI7CD9JzG91KDJcrfS7Oqgdcd2rFbyjfMz5gIJMenH21XPh2HCu2yqb1sP16d0/s320/Galleass+Hart+1546.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 264px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
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As does this one, which includes <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2008/02/stumbling-across-stream-of-time.html">a snippet from the draft version</a>.<br />
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Which is enough for now. Of course I am chuffed, and chuffed people often make themselves boring. I will try to refrain, but make no promises.<br />
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The image of the Royal Arms of Lyonesse was created by me - I got the heraldic lions and other detailing from somewhere, but alas I don't recall where.Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com81tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-2825140045831543682013-01-20T19:31:00.003-08:002013-01-20T19:32:34.688-08:00Is Science Fiction Tired?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghM5W0E-dEwi5mFH7vkxkBik5e1cxkYmTkmk3tCZhBlIsWDIIczO4MAFG7kMwOH1WdEJhYp2TLyeaMs0Z03GHmMfZEfcY2FbVDFKgXpWBP0iPY5LVvPHaknrVPvsSetWfNnbCaAvFnh1QZ/s1600/Hugo+Award.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghM5W0E-dEwi5mFH7vkxkBik5e1cxkYmTkmk3tCZhBlIsWDIIczO4MAFG7kMwOH1WdEJhYp2TLyeaMs0Z03GHmMfZEfcY2FbVDFKgXpWBP0iPY5LVvPHaknrVPvsSetWfNnbCaAvFnh1QZ/s320/Hugo+Award.jpg" width="179" /></a></div>
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There is much more to say about extrasolar planets, especially given the Kepler findings that are now rolling in. And I intend to say some of it in due course. For now, however, this blog's attention has been distracted by a remark in the <i><a href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=904&fulltext=1">Los Angeles Review of Books</a>:</i><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
THE OVERWHELMING SENSE ONE GETS, working through so many stories that
are presented as the very best that science fiction and fantasy have to
offer, is exhaustion. </blockquote>
Yes, a book review based in Tinseltown is an invitation to snark, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler">however unfair</a>. And the author of the review quoted, Paul Kincaid, is pretty grumpy even by the standards of critics, for whom grumpiness is arguably part of the job.<br />
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The review deals with several 'Year's Best' anthologies, and as the quoted line suggests, officially it deals with fantasy as well as SF. But the line that most got my attention is specific to SF:<br />
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<i>The problem may be, I think, that science fiction has lost confidence in the future.</i><br />
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Which brings us to the question of a decelerando. But before proceeding, <a href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=904&fulltext=1">go read Kincaid's article</a>. This blog post will still be here when you get back.<br />
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Okay, then. Also a confession before proceeding: I have read almost no SF written in this millennium. But that should be no bar to this discussion - after all, I'm not purporting to analyze works of science fiction, only a discussion <i>about</i> science fiction. <br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">(Meta is sooo handy!)</span><br />
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Science fiction as we know it came into being in the decades bracketing the turn of the last century - roughly speaking, from Jules Verne to John W. Campbell. Not by coincidence, this period - as I have suggested here before - was <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2010/12/accelerando.html">the real Accelerando</a>. <br />
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There is a natural tendency to suppose that if the great accelerando brought SF into being, the <span style="font-size: x-small;">(relative)</span> decelerando of the current era is killing it. Take the particular example of space travel, simply because it is so awesomely cool. At midcentury, in the rocketpunk era, it was easy to project the technologies of aviation and high-performance rocketry forward, and suppose that in a few more decades we could fly to orbit and beyond as easily and economically as we were then beginning to fly across oceans.<br />
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It turned out to be not so easy and not at all economical. Which makes interplanetary travel more problematic as a story element. The reader doesn't need to be convinced that it is possible, as it certainly is, but that it can be cheap, which at a minimum can't be demonstrated with high school physics. <span style="font-size: x-small;">(Or else the story has to accept <i>expensive</i> space travel.)</span><br />
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Kincaid, as it happens, does not blame the exhaustion of SF on a decelerando, but nearly the opposite: SF, he argues, "has lost confidence that the future can be comprehended." And, to be sure, that is one of the big arguments that swirls around Singularitanism. A post-Singularity world of super-genius computers (or hybrid cyborgs, or whatever) would be incomprehensible to us unevolved apes.<br />
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But not all SF is Singularitan, and Kincaid makes another argument that strikes me as more to the point. SF has become less interested in 'the future' than in its own tropes.<br />
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Space fighters, anyone?<br />
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As much as I have beaten up on space fighters here, in the broader picture I don't think there is anything so dreadful about classic SF tropes. And this blog, like the <a href="http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php">Atomic Rockets</a> website, is largely devoted to one such trope, Realism <span style="font-size: xx-small;">[TM]</span>. Which by no means implies that all SF need adhere to that particular trope.<br />
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To climb up on one of this blog's oldest soapboxes, SF, fantasy, and their kindred genres are all subgenres of Romance, which cheerfully admits to its ranks everything from whimsy to hardboiled detective stories. <br />
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Which, by the way, answers another of Kincaid's grumps, about stories that in his view didn't 'need' to be science fiction or fantasy. Romance lends itself readily to genre-bending, which is why efforts to pin down what SF is all about are so inconclusive. Subgenres of Romance that are plot-centric are rather easier, such as mysteries or for that matter romance in the usual sense. SF and fantasy, whose identities are more setting-centric, lend themselves to ambiguity.<br />
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Whatever happens to SF as such, Romance - including Romance with space settings - will probably continue to do just fine.<br />
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In fact, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/jan/03/science-fiction-predictions-2013">a cheerier essay on SF</a>, in Britain's <i>Grauniad,</i> suggests on the one hand that SF is going mainstream, and on the other hand that space-oriented SF could be due for a comeback. Points which need not be mutually contradictory.<br />
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Discuss.<br />
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The image of the Hugo award is from <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/3810585050/">Flickr, apparently Cory Doctorow's pages</a>. Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com113tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7494544263897150929.post-19400042181401390142013-01-05T18:45:00.002-08:002013-01-05T20:31:34.096-08:00Worlds of Tau Ceti? Habitable For Whom?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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With the solstitial holidaze safely behind us ...<br />
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Tau Ceti has an enduring whiff of the Sixties about it. Peace, love, dolphins. The connotations are not a fluke: Tau Ceti was lifted out of back-of-the-Greek-alphabet obscurity in 1960, when it and Epsilon Eridani shared the distinction of being the target stars for the Project Ozma SETI experiment.<br />
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Yes, that was years before the Summer of Love, but - especially in that pre-Internet era - it took time for ideas to filter into the science fiction popular culture. Before Project Ozma, I doubt that many people had heard of Tau Ceti.<br />
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It got the attention of Project Ozma's designers because it is close to Sol (11.9 light years) and similar in spectral type (G8.5). Alpha Centauri is closer and more similar, but the prevailing view at the time was that double <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(and other multiple)</span> stars went poorly with planets. Indeed this remained a cause for hesitation right up until planets were found in multiple-star systems, recently including <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2012/10/a-planet-of-alpha-centauri.html">Alpha Centauri</a> itself.<br />
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And now planets - five of them - have <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(possibly)</span> turned up around Tau Ceti as well. They have minimum masses between 2 and 6.6 times Earth mass, and orbit between 0.11 and 1.35 AU from the parent star.<br />
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Tau Ceti radiates at just over half (0.52) solar luminosity. Thus the fourth planet (at 0.52 AU) and fifth planet orbit respectively at the thermal-balance equivalent of 0.76AU and 1.87 AU from Sol.<br />
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A bit farther out than Venus, and considerably farther out than Mars. Neither sounds like Paradise World, but depending on a host of secondary assumptions they might both be in the habitable zone.<br />
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Minimum masses are 4.4 and 6.3 Earths, which for the inner planet is all too suggestive of a super Venus. The outer planet could be more promising, and if it has a deep hydrosphere the surface gravity could even be comparable to Earth's.<br />
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Proviso time: <a href="http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/Planets-Around-Tau-Ceti-184287751.html">Sky & Telescope</a> throws some cold water on the whole planetary system. The detection method is experimental, and the indications suggesting planets are no louder than the noise in the data. This does not rule out valid detection, but makes it the equivalent of eavesdropping on an interesting conversation at a loud party.<br />
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In this case my gut feeling is that S&T is being a bit too cautious - that the Tau Ceti planets will likely turn out to be real. And along with the Alpha Centauri finding, it seems as though extrasolar planets, including kinda sorta Earthlike ones, are - so to speak - creeping closer to Sol. <br />
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Reaching Tau Ceti with any semi-demi-plausible drive is outrageously difficult. Refer to the <a href="http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2012/10/a-planet-of-alpha-centauri.html">Alpha Centauri</a> post and comment thread for speculation. But it is perhaps time to assess just where we stand when it comes to planets and life.<br />
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According to the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, there are now 854 known, that is to say confirmed, extrasolar planets. (The Tau Ceti system is not listed in their main catalog.) Extrasolar worlds thus outnumber 'major' Solar System planets by a hundred to one, an impressive balance.<br />
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Planets are common. Planetary systems are odd. So far as I can tell, we have not yet found any systems that look a lot like ours - rocky inner planets, larger gas or ice-rich outer ones, most or all in near-circular orbits. This may be a mere selection effect.<br />
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And in spite of the Kepler findings we have not yet found an 'Earth' - a planet of similar size orbiting at a distance closely equivalent to 1 AU. This could be a different sort of selection effect. We are finding a decent number of kinda-sorta Earths, and hitting bingo depends on the constraints you set.<br />
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As for the biological implications? Alas, we still have a data set of precisely one. Which means that we don't really have a clue as to how common life is, or what conditions are needed for it to appear.<br />
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Project Ozma, like rocketpunk-era SF, lay in the bright glow of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment">Miller-Urey experiment</a> in 1952. This experiment showed that, given an atmosphere similar to what was then thought to be Earth's primordial atmosphere, the simpler molecular building blocks of light were easy to produce. Life in a test tube seemed just around the corner.<br />
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As with controlled fusion and human-like AI, things have not worked out that way. On the other hand, I don't get the impression that biochemists have made a major research project out of trying to brew up living organisms. The project has no obvious application except to generate media hysteria, not good for funding proposals.<br />
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Behind all discussions of life lurks the Fermi Paradox. Yes, it is specific to intelligent <span style="font-size: xx-small;">(or at least interstellar-signaling)</span> life, not life in general. But the more common life is elsewhere in the universe, the more opportunities it has to make its presence known. And the harder to explain why it hasn't.<br />
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Discuss: <br />
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The image of dolphins comes from <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/49595179@N00/263812558/sizes/o/">this Flickr page</a>. Back around the 1970s, <i>National Lampoon</i> magazine included dolphins <span style="font-size: x-small;">(meaning dolphin intelligence)</span> in a list of Great Disappointments. True? False? Irrelevant?Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.com45