Hard sf spaceship

>he doesn't know that there's trillions worth precious metals in the asteroid belt alone

>not having boarding actions where you have to fight pirates on the radiators

It is a LIDAR detector from MIT and DARPA. Right now most IR photonic work is for detectors and wave guides since we all ready have fuck off huge IR sources. I used that picture since broken reciprocity emitter surfaces look boring.

>touching the radiators

nigga they hot

>Needing to touch the radiators when you are in a zero gravity combat frame (Humanoid or otherwise)
>Not using them as cover because even if they don't stop bullets, the enemy won't be able to see through them in the visible or IR spectrum, and pushing the enemy into them so they burn to death.

3d EVA combat around a hard sci-fi spaceship would be pretty dope. Kind of hard to make a battle map for though, even with zones. Probably best to make a papercraft model of the spacecraft, support it from wires or on an elevated base, and then like, use sticky tack to attach units representing them hovering close to it. Units hovering father away get bases or wires like the spacecraft does.

An alternative would be using a flat map that shows the spacecraft from one angle, and either say combatants won't ever go onto the other side, or have another map to represent the other side. Or a more abstract zone map made out of nodes rather than a visual representation of the ship.

Orbital mechanics obvious won't play into this, because all the combatants will be infantry scale with only enough EVA to maneuver around the vehicle which serves as the terrain. If it fires it's engines, everyone who isn't hanging on falls off the map and is considered lost in space.

Obviously, the interior of the spacecraft gets it's own map, but it can probably be represented with a more conventional layout despite also being zero G.

Asteroid maps can be modeled with Paper Mache, and their roughly spherical nature simplifies navigation. You are either clinging to the surface, or hovering above it, orientated to the center as "Down." Again, sticky tack and flying bases allow lightweight minis to stay in pace.

I've never seen one before - no one has - but I'm guessing it's a white hole.

So what is it?

I think it's an antenna that also radiates heat. It's not some magical solution to the heat build up problem because no such things can exist according to the known laws of physics. It's just a solution to having to carry an antenna that isn't also a radiator problem.

Either way, the person who posted it is a faggot who's only trying to sound smart by dropping the name of something he just read about without explaining what it was. Implying that he either thinks it's something else, or is pretending to be an idiot to troll. It's best to ignore people like that, but you insisted. Assuming you aren't him, in which case I must admit I've been trolled.

Enjoy some sexy but probably impractically thin radiators.

>space pirates
>in a hard sf setting

Oh shit user, what are you doing?

>3d EVA combat around a hard sci-fi spaceship would be pretty dope.
It's not tabletop, but Shattered Horizon was pretty much exactly that.
Shame it didn't have more players.

>hard sf spaceship
>it's just a communications satellite

>he doesn't know that there's trillions worth precious metals in the asteroid belt alone

If we ever do mine the asteroid belt - something I find unlikely for reasons I'll get to below - we're not going to mine precious metals. If you increase the supply of precious metals on Earth then you decrease its overall value. Precious metals are precious because they're rare.

Mind, access to gold or gold in vast quantities would be great for other purposes. Silver is better at conducting electricity that copper, for example, so silver wiring would be superior to copper.

However, fun fact - the principle cost involved in getting useful metal is in the *refining* process, not in the *mining* process. Earth has, for example, more iron than humanity could go through in a million years, and it's pretty easy to get to. The cost, however, comes in refining that iron ore that we do collect into a usable, useful state.

That's why asteroid mining isn't the huge boom that some people think it will be. Having easier access to iron or copper or whatever will not meaningfully reduce the costs in refining it into a useful state.

We will be able to get better access to a few Rare Earth stuff, but nothing that will create some kind of massive post-scarcity environment.

>hard sf setting
>all the humans died off before making it into space for reals

>gold or gold

*silver or gold. Mea culpa.

I fucking miss that game so much.

>Hard sci-fi setting
>Space pirate doesn't refer to transhumans who hide in the Ort cloud where the corporate government can't come take their DRM free 3d printers and illegally download spaceships.
>Implying they wouldn't be paranoid as fuck, defending their asteroids and pirate(d) ships with 3d printed guns and 3d printed spider mecha,
>Implying they don't live in virtual reality simulations of pseudo-historical piracy on the south seas where they get to simulate plundering real booty.
>Implying the cooperate government won't have a hard time stopping pirate transmissions from earth sending pirated media and uploaded consciousnesses to the ort cloud where it's too expensive to send a physical starship to catch them.
>Implying this kind of space piracy isn't the best possible life for anybody who isn't a landlubber.

>hard sf spaceship
>it's unmanned, single use and built for a specific purpose and trajectory, using mostly gravity and the occasional short burn to accomplish its mission

> If you increase the supply of precious metals on Earth then you decrease its overall value.
Eventually. The first company to mine the asteroids would be filthy rich until the price eventually crashes when other companies start mining en mass.

>access to gold or gold in vast quantities would be great for other purposes.
Exactly, it would still be highly valuable. Not like it is now, but still valuable. Being able to use silver, gold, and titanium in every day applications would be very useful

What if you just fire all the excess heat at your enemies in a beam

Using photons and neutrinos

>All that, except it's also sometimes 3d printed illegally by space pirates who live in virtual realities hosted on ort cloud comets which are too far away for the earth's corporate government to destroy with their missiles.
>Implying said space pirates don't also sometimes simulate more fantastic forms of space piracy as wargaming scenarios.
>Implying you aren't a landlubber who will die on the same island/planet/simulation you were born on.

Indeed. And nothing prevents them from playing the diamond market angle and restricting access to the resources they mind juuuuust enough to not crash the price. If they play their cards right, they can sell their product at such a low cost that anyone mining it the traditional way can't make a profit on it, but the sheer quantity available from space mining keeps them in the black.

The even smarter thing to do, of course, is to set up a deal in the first few generations where you sell your space-mined materials directly to other spaceborne construction ventures. You need a lot of metal to build those ships and space stations, and precious metals like gold and platinum have industrial uses that spaceships will need in quantity. Use your space mining to jumpstart other space ventures, and as long as you still protect your mining rights you are going to be looking at an expanding human wave dependent on your mined materials to keep up their expansion. If your influx of resources risks overwhelming demand, create more demand.

>Hardest SF spaceship possible
>Never written about because intelligent life is inherently implausible.

The existence of intelligent life has never been proven, so...

The value is making construction off planet much cheaper. Cost to orbit is expensive for large projects like space colonies, large orbital stations, ect. Taking material from a low g environment reduces costs by reducing fuel, size of vesel as it does not need to be as big, or strong enough for atmospheric exit. True the actual value of material is not the factor, its the ease of use for construction. For example ancient mega projects like the pyramids, built using the cheapest material but was constructed on top of a quarry for ease of construction.

Fair enough, though you do run into the problem of setting up the initial refinery in space.

Yeah, very expensive, time consuming, but it vastly reduces overhead for anything built after. For example converting a factory from all manual labor, to automated costs a fuck ton, but after that costs drop, production booms making the investment well worth the significant upfront cost.

>born & raised on small preppy VR server
>trained entire life to manage satellite cluster for family business
>one day, performing troupe visits server
>put on big play
>in the middle of the performance, you convince the troupe to "kidnap" you and let you live on their secret pirate server as you've secretly had your body shipped away from the family's VR site into space.

>Eventually. The first company to mine the asteroids would be filthy rich until the price eventually crashes when other companies start mining en mass.

actually no because it takes at least a few months to get the minerals back, and the impending arrival of all that stuff would cause the mineral markets to crash ahead of them - the initial investment in space shit won't in the end be made back by raw materials.

The trick to make money off space resources isn't mining or any other kind of goldbuggery, but in being able to produce mass quantities of some *product* that previously was uneconomical because it needed the price of a rare earth metal to be 1/billionths of what it currently is.

i.e. you need to profit off of the crashing of the rare earth metal markets.

Say, have the entire energy economy based around platinum-catalysed fusion, or quantum computers that needs iridium-promethium crystals that can only be made at a ratio of 1/9000 excess of iridium to promethium and produces 9001/1 waste products that can't economically be recycled back into the process (at which point you realise that you're slowly filling earth up with space poop...)

>Ort cloud

That's like trying to plunder the Caribbeans from the moon.

>That's like trying to plunder the Caribbeans from the moon.
That sounds metal as shit ese

>>in the middle of the performance, you convince the troupe to "kidnap" you and let you live on their secret pirate server as you've secretly had your body shipped away from the family's VR site into space.
D'awwww

>hard sci-fi
>transhumans
>Ort cloud
>uploaded consciousnesses
Nah.

Perfectly feasible if you are only stealing information. The ability to transmit large amounts of data in one direction using point to point antennas is a lot easier than you think, and very hard to spot or stop.

Malcontents on earth build a directional antenna and point it at the right part of the sky. Then they start transmitting. The local authorities won't even know it's happening because the beam is only visible if you are standing in it, and the transmitters on both ends are tiny and impossible to tell apart from regular ground clutter.

The uploader keeps transmitting the same information until it receives a message from the same point in the sky saying that the data has been received.

Hiding a receiving antenna is a bit harder, but you can still make them frustratingly difficult to destroy. An array of smaller antennas connected to the internet can turn the entire planet into a receiver that the corporate government can't shut down. The space pirates can then repay people on earth for stealing data for them, by transmitting their own valuable information back to earth.

Even if the earth governments can find and destroy every last antenna and pirate server on earth, they'll have a hard time destroying the knowledge that space pirates exist, and the instructions on how to establish high bandwidth connections with them. Sooner or latter the connection will be re-established with the pirate networks, and any information the earth's corporate governments didn't want to be freely available will once again be freely available.

>YWN play shattered horizon again

Feels so bad, man. Do bots still work, at least?

Do you realize that the oort cloud is over a lightyear from earth?

>Hardest SF setting possible
>doesn't exist because a low-entropy universe is mathematically impossible

making precious metals cheaper will help other industries that need those metals.
It would only be a loss for the few mineral exporting nations, like China. Nations who need to buy minerals from other countries will be all over cheap asteroid metals.

>Say, have the entire energy economy based around platinum-catalysed fusion, or quantum computers that needs iridium-promethium crystals

you do realize that precious metals are already used in existing tehnology, both consumer technology and more exclusive stuff? And the cost of the rare metals if often a limit to the spread of a technology or to the development of the same.
There is already that drive to lower the price of rare metals.

Asteroid mining is inherently valuable because of delta-V. Anything hauled up from Earth's gravity well has a minimum price in thousands of dollars per kilogram barring space magic engines. Asteroids have sweet fuck all gravity compared to Earth. This means whoever starts mining asteroids first can start building space colonies first, or build a monstrous electromagnet to place at the Mars Sun L1 and allow terraforming the red planet. NASA has ideas on how to do that already.

>asuka's vibrator

Why would anyone build a space colony or terraform mars?

The outer reaches of it are over a light year from earth, but many of the comets inside of actually pass inside of earth's orbit, and take a very long time to reach aphelion. The Ort cloud thus can be said to encompass the entire solar system.

Park your asteroid mining rig and universal constructor onto the right comet, and you can spend thousands of years drifting further and further away from the cooperate governments of earth, all while staying within a 1 year transmission lag with the rest of the solar system.

Nobody will ever be able to commit physical violence against you, but you will have all the raw materials you need to build anything you want, and you'll be able to communicate with the rest of the solar system. The only real threat is viruses, and those can be countered with proper infosec.

Alternately, colonies on Saturn's moons would all the raw materials needed to support any kind of organic life within spitting distance. But that's still close enough for earth governments to try and send warships after you, so you'd probably have a slightly different government there that might trade with or go to war with earth. It would probably be more friendly to the Space Pirates, might even hire them as privateers if earth tries to pick a fight with them.

I don't expect Jupiter or Mars to be viable places to live. Mars will be dependent on supplies for earth, unless they go full machine life, and even then they would be close enough that earth or Saturn would want to control them, in which case it's better to just live on earth or Saturn. Illegal settlers on mars probably spend most of their time hiding and not talking to anybody.

Jupiter's problem is too much radiation and too much gravity. No organic or digital life form will want to spend much time there unless it's very well armored, in which case it's going to waste lots of delta-v getting around.

But in order for any of that value to matter, you have to establish a beachhead of critical mass of offworld assets, which costs a lot and has little profit.

>Why would anyone build a space colony or terraform mars?
To escape religious persecution?

One planet civilizations are never more than a single comet strike away from extinction.

The moon will probably be used first as a giant solar collector, and secondly as a museum archiving the history of spacefaring civilizations in the solar system, and their ancestors on earth. Lunarians (organic or synthetic) will probably start out as engineers, and then turn into uptight scholars. I would not be surprised at all the moonrunes jokes turn out to be true. They will be space Japanese.

Depending on which timeline you live in, earth is destroyed, a Utopian nature preserve/pilgrimage site, or a dystopia combining the worst aspects of communism and fascism. Either way, ultimately irreverent to solar politics as a whole once the other planets start developing their own civilizations. Too much gravity, too much symbolic importance. If it's a dystopia, people will avoid interacting with it directly. If it's a Utopia, nobody will want to allow it to be harmed. If it's destroyed, the Lunarians will tell everyone how tragic it was.

The real superpower of the solar system once it gets set up, will be the Solar Authority. A Dyson swarm made out of what used to be Mercury. Alternately just Mercury covered with solar panels on the sun facing side. If they are allowed to build enough mirrors, they can do just about anything they want with solar powered lasers, and nobody can stop them. They will probably be a machine civilization, but I bet their Apollonian nature will prevent them from wanting to exterminate humans. They'll arrogantly consider themselves to be the noble protectors of all life in the solar system.

Venus could be teraformed with extremophile nanomachines, or you could build blimp colonies in the upper atmosphere. The former would result in a planet similar to earth, but where EVERYTHING IS MADE OUT OF DIAMONDS. Imagine, beaches where each grain of sand is actually a perfectly polished diamond sphere. The nano-machines spent thousands of years turning all that carbon into something useful. There will also be lots of jungles.

>large projects like space colonies, large orbital stations

For what economic purpose.

Anti-satellite weapons already exist and tourism doesn't fund projects of that size.

Ban contraceptives and watch people fight for a spot on a colony.

Territory. If you have the means then you have the drive to take it over.

>capitalist hard sci fi
>only the most rich get access to space, the rest harvest station and craft materials in an increasingly polluted earth
>nothing is researched or shared without economic reasons
>ai becomes sophisticated enough to shill advertisements and sell a lifestyle, nothing else

Communist hard sci-fi
>none of the above ever happens anyways

>not dumping excess heat into higher dimensions

Commies got into space all right though

Politics aside, a super hard communist sci-fi story might be pretty interesting if it was full on dystopia and involved some sort of miner revolt on Mars or an Asteroid.

A small group of communist political officers desperately trying to escape a station that is quickly falling apart, with the workers hunting them down one by one.

No, Nazi scientists did. A russian was just used as a test dummy.

Nazism a type of communism all right though

thats not real communism

"taking over" something is only worth doing if that thing has value. Mars has no value whatsoever, it's completely uninhabitable and has no resources Earth does not have and still has a fairly substantial gravity well.

"Taking over" mars doesn't get you anything and the associated cost is enormous because you have to create and maintain a habitable environment there.

>Anarchist hard sci-fi
>LESBIAN SPACE PIRACY FUCK YEAR!

>"Taking over" mars doesn't get you anything
Not true, you get territory by doing so. Setting up colonies during the age of exploration was a costly affair, yet the European governments still did that partly for the potential riches partly to deny their competitors access to that land.

Why haven't the bottom of the oceans been colonized yet then? It's a lot easier than colonizing Mars after all.

probably niggers

It's easier for humans to adapt to lower air pressures than higher air pressures within the range of things that won't instantly kill you, and it's incredibly difficult to build anything larger than a boomer sub at standard surface pressure that won't implode under the weight of water.

But you don't actually get territory by doing that because mars is completely uninhabitable. In order to gain territory on mars you have to build a habitable environment and if you're able to build habitable environments in space and your goal is the exploitation of extraterrestrial resources why the fuck would you do that at the bottom of a gravity well in an environment that is uninhabitable. You may as well build orbital habitats.

Humans grow best in sunlight and strong gravity. No pregnancies in microgravity or you get belters / integral tree elves.

Mars has weak sunlight, low gravity and a trace atmosphere. That is not better than a spinning habitat simulating 1G.

Mars has a lot of meme value.

Why do you think Musk talks about sending man to Mars?

Because we don't have the tech yet
Doesn't matter if it's uninhabitable or not, once someone goes everybody feels obligated to follow or be left behind in the space race

I can see permanent human habitation occurring off planet by the end of the 21st century. I can see domestic habitation occurring by then as well.

I'm waiting for the first off world McDonalds.

No it isn't, what are you, retarded?

I'm more concerned with a nominal reduction of defense expenditure since it dwarfs everything else comically.

user, we've been dealing with 3D battlefields ever since WW2's bombing campaigns. We had means to display them since then.

Well, they aren't incorrect there. Even the gains of the Civil Right's movement ended up profiting white people first and foremost after all.

The countries that successfully stake their claim on space resources will achieve an economic superiority that no planetbound nation will ever match. If fucking Belguim taps Asteroid mining and no one else does, Belguim ends the century as an economic powerhouse bigger than the US and China combined.

As long as its a level playing field, no one cares too much. But as soon as some people have space resources and other people do not, the gulf between them is going to explode.

The meme value of mars won't be sufficient to allow people to live on it. At least not if they don't want to be second class citizens for the rest of the history of the solar civilization Forever dependent on either the centralized authority of the inner solar system, or existing as food for the anarchic forces of the outer solar system.

The ultimate Meme value of Mars, will be a bunch of buthurt rednecks. (because mars is red) disappointed that the promise of self sufficiency and independence had always been a comforting lie told to them by people who were only pretending to respect their supposed "bravery," which was in fact just stupidity. If they had gone further they could have had the freedom they sought, but instead they decided to jump straight back into the nearest gravity well after escaping from an earth which they were convinced was dying, but in fact offered more self sufficiency than they would have ever found on mars.

Meme all you want, if you can't support the infrastructure which supports you, memes will only ever be a temporary escape from physical reality. And memes which convince their hosts to do stupid things will quickly find themselves removed from the collective consciousness unless somebody maliciously perpetuates them as a weapon to use against gullible idiots.

There is a difference between 3d space over a flat plane, 3d space centered around a round object floating in a void, and 3d space centered around a complex object floating in a void.

>not becoming the new De Beers but IN SPAAAACE and controlling the world metal supply with your space monopoly

Just like everybody hurried to carry out manned moon landings.

All you can really do with that monopoly is threaten to destroy the existence of a metal market on earth, or strip mine the asteroids to be used in some sort of mega engineering project.

Most likely the Solar Authority will claim them when it wants to build a von-newman swarm. Possibly forcibly re-locating anybody who wants to hide there, or killing anybody who wants to operate an unlawful monopoly against the enlightened interest of the entire solar system.

This will happen after Mercury gets covered in solar panels, but before mercury is disassembled. At the start of the asteroid wars, they will have more concentrated energy than anybody in the solar system. At the end of the asteroid wars they will start disassembling mercury to finish their Dyson swarm, and at that point the only rocky bodies without atmospheres inside the orbit or Jupiter will be the Moons of Earth and Mars. Plenty of mirrors and servers hosting Utopian virtual realities though. And if you want to live in a physical body, you can live on Venus and relax on beaches made out of Diamond or mega jungles where every living thing is bio-engineered to be friendly to you.

Just don't ever be unfriendly in the inner system, or lasers happen. If you care about freedom and adventure and risk taking, head to the outer system where the pirates live in a virtual frontier that is constantly drifting farther and farther away from the sun's direct influence. Just be careful, according to the solar authority, they think it's fun to torture people. Probably just propaganda right? You wouldn't be coming here if you didn't like taking risks anyways.

The people with the money to do that already control the world's metal supply.

Alright I'm in.

So's the full length of my ballsack

Load of bullshit.

Yes, refining defines the price of product. But the quality of the unrefined resource defines refining costs. Difference between copper ore with 0.4% of elemental copper and one with 0.7% can be one of tremendous gain vs utter unprofitability.

The resources on Earth are inevitably shrinking. We are forced to dig for poorer and poorer ores, and while technological advancements push the limit of profitablility lower and lower, the demand and mining rates increase. At some point it is inevitable that space ores with concentrations of useful metals incomparably higher than what is left on earth will start to be economically viable for exploitation despite obvious transportation and mining technology issues.

>There is a difference between 3d space over a flat plane, 3d space centered around a round object floating in a void, and 3d space centered around a complex object floating in a void.

Eh, the issue remains the same - how to organize the data so that it becomes comprehensible. We have plenty of experience with that.

3D printing is such a meme at this point

What I mean is a flat map with height values indicated as notes attached to the unit markers might not always be the most efficient or aesthetically pleasing way to represent the kinds of zero-g battles that might be realistic at infantry scale.

How the fuck do you map this space? The interior is a torus so that can be represented with a looping rectangular map, but if you can elivate yourself above the surface and stop rotating along with it, it becomes a 3d battlefield with possible threats coming from both inside and outside the torus, and even standing on the surface of the torus, you have to worry about lasers coming from the other side, or outside the torus. To say nothing of the area on the other side of the mirror and on the outer surface of the torus wall.

Giant spheres spoil us when it comes to maps. We distort part of the sphere into a square, and then turn that square into a rectangular prism, using three Cartesian coordinates for everything. But those three coordinates only make things more confusing if you want to move around a specific curved shape inside a larger volume. For this reason spacecraft navigate using more complex maps with computer assistance and more than three coordinates at a time.

It's just the currently fashionable way to say "a machine that can manufacture the tools required to manufacture the tools required to manufacture anything you can imagine provided you have the right raw materials and enough time energy."

In this past this has been called a "universal constructor" in other less popular genres of sci-fi. And our industrial civilization, can be considered just a very inefficient form of this. Nothing prevents us from making a version that can be loaded onto a comet, and can turn the comet's mass into anything it wants if you have enough time and energy.

3d printers are a meme, but they are a meme that gets the idea across to people who aren't easily discouraged idiots.

>Hardest SF story possible
>doesn't exist because the Universe is indeterministic

>Anarchist hard sci-fi
>they get their faggy black bloc rod of godded by the space fascists while they protest against racist milk and sexist cheese

>What I mean is a flat map with height values indicated as notes attached to the unit markers might not always be the most efficient or aesthetically pleasing way to represent the kinds of zero-g battles that might be realistic at infantry scale.

Not to go into too much details, but both the German and the Brits used situation rooms that were actually room-sized cubes which could display the altitude, speed and movement of aircrafts all at the same time. They were pretty rough, but they were perfectly capable of displaying a three-dimensional battlefield with all dimensions and the required additional data.

>Communist hard sci-fi
>none of the above ever happens anyways

Hey, Men like Gods was a pretty legit space opera, basically Commie Star Trek.

And Stanislav Lem's Scifi is still among the top of the crop, so even Poland can into space.

Well yeah, because they actually work.

>needing a space station bigger than the ISS
>moon colonization
>mars colonization
>"asteroid belt" colonization
>ever bothering with the outer solar system

>not surveying, mining, and then eventually establishing a series of colonies using both private mining funds and public "doomsday prevention" funds on low delta-v NEOs using solar powered iodine hall thrusters and inflatable spacecraft as your primary means of interplanetary travel

sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273117717300236
ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20160005359.pdf

>basically Commie Star Trek
Star Trek was already commie.

>Not wanting a space carribean where all sorts of people live by intercepting asteroid miner cargo and selling it at black markets near jupiter/saturn
>Not wanting there to be wild west type shit on mars as planetary governments work to claim and settle as much as possible
>Not wanting to participate in the great space elevator heist of 2095
>Not wanting to claim hop some crater and steal all of their water
>Not wanting to be a wheeling dealing merchant in the great ionian market who just sold off 2 billion dollars worth of gold, iron, and titanium headed to the lunar shipyards
>pic semi related
Absolutely SHIT taste t b h

Star Trek is already Commie Star Trek.

Maybe you mean Soviet Star Trek.

Great idea! Now try to work out a method of converting thermal energy into a directed energy weapon. Sarcasm aside, you could theoretically harness the thermal energy in a steam generator setup or some other biz, then use that energy to power a laser weapon it something, but in the end you'd need a huge setup for very little payoff AND you'd need to get the whole thing into space to start with

tl;dr You could theoretically harness that energy, but it's not even slightly economical

What if we just build it in space? That tends to be much easier.