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1 hour ago, DShomshak said:

 

Flying might be cool, but yeah, the incredibly cold hydrocarbon environment raises safety concerns. (Though for "extreme athletes" that might be another selling point. Like skiing on the great peak of Miranda.)

 

I had a Traveller character who came from a frozen hydrocarbon world like an Earth-sized version of Titan. They made just about everything out of plastic: Metals scarce, but a whole world of organic precursors. Big plastic bubble habitats covered with ice for protection. For pets, people had plastic robot animals. Standard punishment for minor violations of safety rules was to send the perp out-dome with a space suit for a few hours to reflect about the hard necessities of life on their world. For major violations, you didn't get the spacesuit.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

When it comes to a place to settle down, I'm a fan of having an atmosphere of some sort vs not having any atmosphere.

 

Maybe I'm being optimistic but the ability to get free nitrogen and hydrocarbons out of Titan's atmosphere would have to come in handy sooner or later.

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On 3/17/2019 at 8:05 AM, archer said:

 

When it comes to a place to settle down, I'm a fan of having an atmosphere of some sort vs not having any atmosphere.

 

Maybe I'm being optimistic but the ability to get free nitrogen and hydrocarbons out of Titan's atmosphere would have to come in handy sooner or later.

 

Not to mention that an environmental breach is much less of a problem if it's not going to decompress the entire habitat forthwith.

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11 minutes ago, Sundog said:

 

Not to mention that an environmental breach is much less of a problem if it's not going to decompress the entire habitat forthwith.

 

I'd have automatic doors on sensors everywhere in a habitat that was outside of an atmosphere. That's one thing I think the original Star Trek series got mostly right.

 

You might vent a short section of corridor or a single room. But you aren't going to lose a significant fraction of your air to a limited breach.

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20 hours ago, archer said:

I'd have automatic doors on sensors everywhere in a habitat that was outside of an atmosphere. That's one thing I think the original Star Trek series got mostly right.

Star Trek pretty much just copied the concept of Bulkheads from seagoing vessels. And updated it to Automatic Emergency Force Fields.

 

There is a lot of design/psychological overlap between Navy Service and space exploration/colonisation. Submarine service in particular.

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On 3/19/2019 at 7:56 AM, Christopher said:

Star Trek pretty much just copied the concept of Bulkheads from seagoing vessels. And updated it to Automatic Emergency Force Fields.

 

Thereby making it worse: steel bulkheads don't go away when the power fails.

 

On 3/18/2019 at 11:22 AM, archer said:

I'd have automatic doors on sensors everywhere in a habitat that was outside of an atmosphere. That's one thing I think the original Star Trek series got mostly right.

 

I'd also keep as many of the airtight doors shut at all times as I could get away with, to be opened only when someone is passing through and then closed immediately.

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2 minutes ago, Zeropoint said:

Thereby making it worse: steel bulkheads don't go away when the power fails.

If power fails, Gravity and Life Support will fail. And each door seems to be de-facto a bulkhead.

 

Meanwhile Forcefields can patch just about any hullbreach on the outside, not loosing that much internal space.

In Discovery they had a hull breach on the bridge. One guy got blown into space before it sprung to live. Then the bridge was fully functional. 0 loss of internal space.

Even when the ship was drifting to it's doom without engine power, the Forcefield held.

Emergency Forcefield also do not weight anything.

 

They still use Bulkheads, btw. You can see them here in TNG and the movies to TOS.

 

2 minutes ago, Zeropoint said:

I'd also keep as many of the airtight doors shut at all times as I could get away with, to be opened only when someone is passing through and then closed immediately.

Ideally you want that to happen Automatically. Maybe with a certain sound effect...

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When I mentioned the "automatic doors on sensors" I was speaking about places like the door leading from the transporter room into the corridor.

 

I specifically was not talking about force fields which replaced such things as the door to cells in the brig. That was a particularly ridiculous plot contrivance.

 

I think Automatic Emergency Force Fields could be a useful supplement to doors because you never know when or where a hole might be blown into your ship: stopping people from flying out into space could be useful (not to mention being able to pressurize that interior portion of the ship while making repairs). But high tech should never be a complete replacement for basic safety.

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"high tech should never be a complete replacement for basic safety."

 

I feel like I should elaborate on that.

 

I once had the idea of making the most flexible mission Federation vessel ever: the power plant, some gravity plating, and holo-emitters were the only real objects inside the entire ship. The rest of the interior of the ship would be a re-creation and could be reconfigured for any use instantly.

 

You need extra sickbay beds: create a new sickbay.

You need extra cargo room: create more storage areas.

You need to seal off whole decks of the ship from intruders: delete doors, corridors, and empty space.

You need extra hull: create extra layers of it on the interior.

You need a new central computer: create one.

You need more holo-emitters: create more holo-emitters.

 

Then about five minutes later I thought about what would happen during a momentary power disruption as your command crew would be falling seventy decks to splat upon the bottom level of the ship.

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On 3/23/2019 at 10:23 AM, archer said:

I think Automatic Emergency Force Fields could be a useful supplement to doors because you never know when or where a hole might be blown into your ship: stopping people from flying out into space could be useful (not to mention being able to pressurize that interior portion of the ship while making repairs). But high tech should never be a complete replacement for basic safety.

Each of the doors does seem to act like a Bulkhead. The force fields meerely supplement them to keep the whole area pressurized.

 

Let us take this scene from Nemesis, where data jumps out of the ship.

The corridor itself has 3 kinds of exits:
- space, currently block by a emergency forcefield

- the various side doors to seperate rooms

- bulkhead doors leading to and from the corridor to other corridors (and stuff like Turpolifts).

 

The Corridor is still fully presurized. So if anything in the corridor or the adjacent rooms needs repair, a technician can go there without needing to grab a space suit. The hallway is still walkable, that alone is a huge advantage.

If the force field emitters should fail, there are plenty of other emitters that can react. Since there is already a force field active with power flowing the direction, those other emiters are propably on "high alert".

If the forcefields should completely fail, only this corridor will be depresurized. The rest of the ship is still quite fine.

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I really liked the boat story.

 

 A lot of things made of wood just disintegrate into nothing over time so it's tough to figure out whether some of these ancient guys were telling the truth or not when they described something. Sometimes they saw things in person, sometimes they repeated rumors, sometimes they would repeat rumors as if it were something they witnessed themselves, sometimes they would make things up because it made for a good story...and it's many times tough to tell which is happening when reading their writings.

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On 3/25/2019 at 5:39 PM, Scott Ruggels said:

I can not really read the answer out of the text, so I thought I ask:
Does that mean Qunatum Tunneling follows the Lightspeed limit or not?

 

On 3/25/2019 at 5:39 PM, Scott Ruggels said:

That effect does not require Magnetic Senses nessesarily. One of the first rules about Magnetism and Electricity is:
"Where there is electricity, there is magnetism.

Where there is magnetism, there is electricity."

 

External Magnetic fields are the primary source of Noise in Electronics. Now our brain is at least somewhat electro-chemical. So it will experience that kind of noise.

Our brain is also pretty good at filtering out unintersting stuff. It does so on most of our seneses 24/7. So it would propably adapt to counter the Magnetic Field noise. And having literal milennia to adapt to it, it might even shift the Adaptation pre-emptively when we move our head.

Such a adaptation does not require a Magnetic Sense. If turning the head left means +0.5% noise on the left and -0.5% noise on the right side, it could just work with that.

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