DescentBB

Nah, that's urmom.

One thing that surprised me - is they had to factor in the displacement of air.

I doubt the air even made that much of a difference.

Did you know that a million pounds can fly? The Airbus A380 comes in slightly above a million pounds when fully loaded and fueled. The new Boeing 747-800 comes in at slightly under a million pounds with the same parameters.

Tunnelcat wrote:I doubt the air even made that much of a difference.

120+ pounds.

Given their desired accuracy, that's more than enough to need to worry about. Fascinating too: I thought they'd need to account for the local value of g, but the idea of accounting for buoyancy in air wouldn't have occurred to me. When you get that massive, those tiny percentages start to add up.

especially since they use those force transducers to measure rocket thrust. If it's off by that 120 lbs, that means the difference between lifting a payload into space, and it falling back to earth before it reaches its desired altitude.

Indeed. Unlike Kerbal Space Program, you usually can't have Jeb get out and push.

Ferno wrote:especially since they use those force transducers to measure rocket thrust. If it's off by that 120 lbs, that means the difference between lifting a payload into space, and it falling back to earth before it reaches its desired altitude.

Hmmm, I guess all it would take for that rocket to fall back to earth would be the single addition of little old me.

Until you realize that the velocity required to reach low earth orbit is 4.84 miles per second relative to the earth. Over 8 times faster than the muzzle velocity of a high powered sniper rifle. Assuming you are an average adult around 150 pounds, the amount of kinetic energy stored in your body at that velocity is about 2 billion joules, or roughly the equivalent of half a ton of TNT. (At least if I looked up the math correctly.)

And that's why we humans can't physically attain light speed, at least as rapidly as we see in most Sci-Fi movies. We'd be squished into a protoplasm smear all over the space ship's walls from just the acceleration. I'd also hate to see the deceleration results too.

Tunnelcat wrote:And that's why we humans can't physically attain light speed, at least as rapidly as we see in most Sci-Fi movies. We'd be squished into a plasma smear all over the space ship's walls from just the acceleration. I'd also hate to see the deceleration results too.

Nothing can attain the speed of light in normal spacetime, as the energy required to approach arbitrarily close to that speed trends to infinity. It has nothing to do with us being squishy meatbags.

(Now as for the acceleration part, that's why sci-fi universes like Star Trek have to come up with "inertial dampeners" and all sorts of other fun technobabble.)

Krom wrote:Until you realize that the velocity required to reach low earth orbit is 4.84 miles per second relative to the earth. Over 8 times faster than the muzzle velocity of a high powered sniper rifle. Assuming you are an average adult around 150 pounds, the amount of kinetic energy stored in your body at that velocity is about 2 billion joules, or roughly the equivalent of half a ton of TNT. (At least if I looked up the math correctly.)

Welcome to explody-ville

-----

that's why sci-fi universes like Star Trek have to come up with "inertial dampeners" and all sorts of other fun technobabble

Top Gun wrote:

Tunnelcat wrote:And that's why we humans can't physically attain light speed, at least as rapidly as we see in most Sci-Fi movies. We'd be squished into a plasma smear all over the space ship's walls from just the acceleration. I'd also hate to see the deceleration results too.

Nothing can attain the speed of light in normal spacetime, as the energy required to approach arbitrarily close to that speed trends to infinity. It has nothing to do with us being squishy meatbags.

(Now as for the acceleration part, that's why sci-fi universes like Star Trek have to come up with "inertial dampeners" and all sorts of other fun technobabble.)

Well then, what's warp speed all about if it not faster than lightspeed? If it's nothing but warping space to get from point A to point B, why have the need for inertial dampers to begin with if the ship has no extreme speeds? For sure there are the impulse engines, which do accelerate and decelerate a ship very quickly. There's also the need for protecting the ship's structural integrity and the crew with inertial dampers as they use the impulse engines and while going to warp. But even the Trek Universe says there's a need to protect the ship and it's occupants while entering warp. So it sounds like for some reason, there is the need for sudden speed to enter warp.

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questio ... warp-speed

As for those "inertial dampers", I was reading a recent Star Trek novel where they supposedly failed in some ship that was forced out of warp, which instantly killed the crew and pretty much left a ship in which the crew areas were left covered in a thin film of protoplasm. In other words, the crew's bodies became a coating of DNA slime that was spread all over the bulkheads when there was a sudden deceleration from warp. Of course, being science fiction, they made no mention of what happened all the loose equipment that would have punched it's way through those same said bulkheads during that aforementioned sudden deceleration.

As the discussion in your link notes, assuming that Trek's "warp field" operates in a similar manner to the proposed Alcubierre drive (c'moooon crazy solutions to general relativity), it seemingly wouldn't require any acceleration at all, since spacetime itself is what's being "warped" around the ship. The real answer is that Gene Roddenberry and the original writers didn't take this into account when coming up with the concept of the warp drive: to be fair, Alcubierre's work didn't come until decades later, and indeed he named his theoretical "warp drive" as an homage to Star Trek itself. If you want an in-universe explanation, it could be that engaging the warp field requires the ship to rapidly accelerate, which kind of fits what we see in the show when a ship "jumps" into warp.

In any case, moving at high speed in and of itself doesn't have any effect on the human body, since in an inertial reference frame there's no net force acting on an object (see Newton's first law). You can move at a million miles per hour relative to another object no sweat...the real trick is keeping you alive while accelerating up to that speed, and then while slowing you down afterwards.