Hey Veeky Forums, I'm playing around with a Strangereal-type of setting where delayed fiber-optic cable meant that there's a good deal of space infrastructure. You can think of it as a Von Braun moonbase alternate history.
Right now, I'm trying to come up with a good heavy-lift solution for all the space infrastructure in a vaguely 1990s setting, as well as some politics. I like the idea of having a not!Soviet Union still hanging around.
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More retro space stations
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The Sea Dragon is definitely a neat concept
>a good heavy-lift solution
Sea Dragon. One-use, water launched, build them in any shipyard. After reaching orbit, they're re-purposed for all sorts of shit.
I already posted it. I also like the outlandishly big rocket boat as well.
You posted as I wrote, so you get a gold star under your name on the teacher's big poster board for being first.
Orbital Rings
Skyhooks are more plausible desu
Not particularly plausible, but I really love that 1970s painting style
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Some comfy Soviet space living
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I think one of the key ideas is that because the world hopped on manned space stations sooner, there's larger scale but perhaps more centralized space infrastructure. With more organization and human infrastructure, there's probably some jobs for picking up debris and deorbiting malfunctioning satellites
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>I like the idea of having a not!Soviet Union still hanging around
Long live to the Soviet orbits! Glory to the science, glory to the progress! Ia niaponimae porushki tovarich!
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Bump for the good thread.
Another interesting question is whether they are on Mars?
>good heavy-lift solution
The UR-700 never got the chance to shine, after Glushko fell out of grace along with Khrushchev.
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One of the important things imo is managing the history so that manned space stations don't get abandoned in favor of unmanned systems
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yourmomsdildo.jpg
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I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I'd love to see a game set in a "realistic" 1950s science fiction setting. As in one that could've been made at the time when things like Mars and Venus being habitable was still considered scientifically plausible.
That's sort of the inspiration
I kinda like 1960s-esque atomic rockets with interstellar FTL travel working by the ancient gates of a dead civilization. It's an interesting juxtaposition.
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A base on Venus would be interesting
Project Orion launched from US deserts and russian tundra.
Hypotethically, Venus would be a pretty good place to colonize as high enough up in the atmosphere the pressure and temperature is very close to Earth's. And as oxygen is a lifting gas in Venus' atmosphere, you could build huge airships that carry their own atmosphere inside them.
Of course, everybody knows Venus is really a steamy jungle-planet full of giant swamp-dwelling lizard. And, apparently, green seal-people.
m8 if you used oxygen as the main lifting gas then the inside of your habitat would just combust
anyway, mars is a much more realistic colonization target than venus, because it's like almost there, give it a prod to thicken its atmosphere and seed some plants on it, wait a century or two and it's a habitable world with an earth-like day night cycle and everything
>Heavy Lift Solution
Have you considered skyhooks? Not as advanced as space elevators, but allow you to get stuff into orbit quickly and cheaply.
>Strangereal type setting
/aceg/?
wrong pic
Check out Traveller, it's got an amazing 80s-future feel to it.
>heavy-lift solution
ROTATING ORBITAL SKYHOOKS
Unlike space elevators, mass drivers, launch loops, and Project Orion, they can be built using real-world materials at a fairly realistic scale. The skyhook can also start small, and slowly scale-up as it is constructed, or as new materials are invented.
You still have to burn fuel to reach the skyhook, but you can use a hypersonic scramjet instead of a rocket. This is likely to be more efficient, more reusable, and safer.
One problem is that the skyhook will also need propulsion systems because each hook maneuver will degrade its orbit. So throw some solar panels and ion jets on there. Alternatively, you can balance-out the forces by sending equal-sized payloads from orbit to earth. So, an asteroid/comet mining industry could help sustain the skyhook's orbit.
The other problem is that you need to get a lot of mass up into orbit just to build the damn thing. You'll either need a couple hundred shuttle launches, or some bigger rockets. Alternatively, you could use a few Project Orion launches to bootstrap the construction before switching to more sustainable technologies.
>Strangereal type setting
I mostly want to do more of a clean slate 20th century like what Ace Combat did with the 90s-2000s. With that said, Strangereal definitely had a sick space program
Yeah, with the Arkbird and now the Space Elevator.
That being said, if you want a 91t reusable spaceplane, take a look at Rockwells Starraker project.
So, in this alternate world, I was thinking of arbitrarily delaying electronic reliability so that a Von Braun space station makes sense. using big dumb boosters to get it into orbit in the early-mid 60s.
How are you gonna keep the atmosphere from just evaporating into space without a magnetic field
While not as effective as what you can get with megastructures, I think single stage rockets are really fitting for the whole 50s - 60s sci fi setting, since that's the kinda stuff you usually see in classic art from the era.
however if you wanna keep it realistic you probably wouldn't go for something like the pointy V2-like rockets from 50s artwork but something similar to the RHOMBUS / NEXUS ssto designs, with toroidal aerospikes built around heatshield for main engines and wide fuel tanks.
You could make it so in the setting this kinda rocket provides the benefits space shuttles were supposed to provide, cheap access to space with short maintenance times before reuse, allowing for public space transport and all the stuff you need for a classic hard sci-fi setting to take place
irrelevant to humanity, you could put an atmosphere on the moon where it would be expelled far faster than on mars, and it still wouldn't matter from the perspective of humans because it would take so long
I'm not saying 50s, I'm imagining a world where instead of going to the moon, countries set up large scale space stations as their space race goals for reconnaissance, telecom, and weather observation in the 50s and 60s. Then extending that forward to the 90s.
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Bumping
Here's a question: are large scale space towns like a Stanford Torus almost guaranteed to be highly collectivist and very authoritarian societies because if people slack when it comes to maintaining life support, everyone dies?
could we get some more mars bases? planning a early future setting circa 2080..with various companies and merc groups fighting each other
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One last bump
can we get more retrofuturistic space babes like that?
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is that a diploduck?
An external plasma pulse propulsion drive can't take off from the ground because the pusher plate can't survive a point-blank nuclear explosion. You would need 100kms deep and 10-20km wide hole under the Orion to make it work. And even then, you would fuck up Earth's radiation belt with a single launch.