beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Right. I have been trying to fix my spaceship so it doesn't do the thing the Enterprise always does of having a few named officers and a lot of people wandering around who may or may not be officers. And Miles O'Brien. He was chief petty officer, but only sometimes. But since I have watched a lot of Star Trek, and not much else, I feel I understand who is the boss of who out of Captains through Ensigns, but I have no idea who all else is around. Even if I'm just going to file the serial numbers off the Enterprise I want it to make actual sense. Not necessarily match, but have words in the right orders and look like it could work.

So what do all the other people do, and what are they called?

It would really, really help if I could get the hang of the real world stuff. Since that does make at least a working sort of sense. Reality has good continuity, usually.

So I looked at the Royal Navy website. ( Read more... )

I think I need a book. 'Royal Navy for Dummies' or 'Life in a ship if you're not the Captain'. Or possibly just the glossary and a little flow chart.

*big sigh*

( Read more... )
ANYway

Now I know some words, I need to find out how many of what words are likely to be on a tiny ship, and make a little organisation chart for my spaceship.



Or, obviously, I could write that romance I was planning and ignore the whole rest of the ship. That would be simpler.

I decided that my spaceships would go FTL only through having stargates. Those gates would exist in pairs, so you have to take the far end all the way out at sublight and only then can nip through. They would be wormholes, playing with gravity, so you just sort of fall through really. And they're not reprogrammable, only paired, so if you want to get anywhere it's like riding the railway with interchanges and stations and all.

Then I realised: the main limit on reaction drives is how much fuel you can carry around. But if you're carrying half a stargate with you then you only push the mass of the gate around but you never have to stop for supplies or fuel tankers cause it just goes through the gate. So what if you just put one end of the gate under an ocean on an uninhabited world? You ride the firehose through space! Even if the stargate itself is not pushed by things going through it, it would continuously refuel your ship. You'd have a fuel tank that never emptied. Your main problems would be getting rid of the stuff, including getting rid of salts or impurities or fish or inconvenient marines who find the back way in to the ship. Probably you want a small tank and a hot engine to deal with the marines and the fish. Otherwise you could just let a distant planet's gravity push water out your back end. Just like waterfall power.

So then I was thinking, ships like that wouldn't need generators, except for backup. They'd be hydroelectric.

Until they deplete a planet. That would probably take a while. I don't know, it would depend on the planet.

If stargates are scarce then not many ships could play this game. Since my stargates can spin small or wide then such a ship being captured would let people go back through their fuel gate and emerge on the refuel planet. You'd probably want to put the fuel gates somewhere thoroughly inhospitable on both ends. Above a volcano you'd get a head start on your hot water. Geothermal hydroelectric spaceships.

All this is thoroughly ridiculous but I think it's the logical consequence of the first ridiculous thing, the tethered wormhole stargate pairs. Especially if falling through such a gate adds to your speed, which I already decided it did. You'd have all the push you needed right there.

I wanted the gates to spit you out so you couldn't blockade by sitting in the middle but had to be far enough back other people could get in and start a fight. It's no fun if someone can close the door. If the two sides are both trying to control the size of the gate then they just cancel out. I also decided the gate always spits you out the middle, so if you go in at the edge and out at the middle the spin-and-stretch can tear you apart. Threading the needle requires precision, and skilled pilots. And there's a reason to keep the gates small and send small ships or ship trains. Get it too big and your outsides get squished towards your insides too hard and fast. There's a sweet spot of varying size that puts a maximum on what size ships can go FTL. Because I wanted small communities, not FTL cities, much less FTL planets.

So anything trying to get through a fuel gate would spin-and-stretch if the gate was really small and the calm area was tiny. It wouldn't have far to travel to get to the center, but the gate would want to push it into a very small area, so it would still be unconducive to comfortable travel. Anything sneaking in that way would have to be pretty tough in the first place.

Geothermal hydroelectric spaceships with a door back to a planet they can use instantly in an emergency. Hmmm, you wouldn't want your fire exit to exit to an actual fire, so maybe not on top of a volcano? Depends if you're more worried about entrances or exits.

You'd still end up with a ship that had a tiny fuel tank and only backup generators yet still an endless supply of fuel and energy. It would look like ultratech or a reactionless drive to bystanders, if they hadn't thought of the trick.

It would also leave them in trouble if the fuel supply ran out somehow. Or if the other end of the gate was somewhere hotter than ocean. Or colder, it would slow right down. Or if there were vacuum on the other side, then fuel would fall the other way. There would have to be a tank with valves for reserves, but there's no way it could handle the v the endless fuel tank could give the ship.

So, one of those ideas that's great when it works, but really disastrous when it stops.

Perfect.

... if I've understood physics at all. I only mean to tweak it the once, the tethered wormhole gate pairs. Everything else is meant to be ordinary physics. But I've only read bits of the 'for dummies' version.

I have discovered I find designing imaginary spaceships quite calming. ( Read more... )

it's like playing with doll houses without the dolls or the house and with more things that go boom :-)

( Read more... )

I've been trying to invent a uniform for my futuristic space fleet.
The trouble is so has everyone else ever. Once you add up Andromeda, B5, B7, Farscape, Star Trek and the Stargates you have an awful lot of uniforms. ( Read more... )

I looked up some body armour and a lot of it has a common shape, on account of fitting human shaped bodies, but there's also some with seriously Elvis collars. Not just the little sort that make your neck stay straight, the huge great sort that go up to meet the back of your helmet, like wearing a car headrest. Clearly this is an excuse to do something very vampire count with the collars on the heaviest armour layers. So something like ( Read more... )