Space ship design

[thegayhare]

Hi Hi all

I was reading the Deathstalker series and one thing mentioned was the Deathstalker's Final Standing.  The final standing is a massive stone castle, that doubles as a hyperspace capable starship.   

This reminded me of the Tyr starships in Madness Season.  These where massive stone ships again capable of traveling in hyperspace.

I've also read another story which featured a massive hollowed asteroid as a generational  colony ship.

this got me wondering about the possibility  of stone space craft.  I don't think a construction like the final standing would work well since it would be easier I think to construct a ship from more conventional materials, plus In the deathstalker series it was used in space combat, which a stone ship would also seem to be out of place.  My thoughts were ships smiler to the madness season, and rolling thunder.  The tyr's ships seem to be quarried from whole stone, but again it seems in efficient (but they were using tech they don't understand, stolen from an older species)  My thoughts were to use small asteroids fitted with engines and honey combed with tunnels and chambers, all reinforced.   They wouldn't be used as warships more like the generational colony ship from rolling thunder,  or large trading colonies.  more traveling trading posts, they slip into orbit around  planet,  trade with the nations and break orbit to the next colony work.   It would be a fairly cheap way to construct a large scale vehicle with some of the building material mined from the asteroid itself

So what do you folks think would it be workable?  I don't know the science of it really

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Building ships out of asteroids is something that has been planned for a long time. After all, refining enough metal to cover a stick that is 2km long takes a wee while.

Building a ship that can _fight_ out of an asteroid is simpler, in a way. You start with a bigger asteroid, and you don't make as big a hole in the middle. After all, this is space we're talking about. Scaling up is how the universe works. Of course, the bigger you go, the slower it moves, so there's a tradeoff there, more so than with generational ships.

[Tezkat]

Carving rock to some practical end is not a particularly difficult task. We've been doing it for millenia, and translating those procedures into space is not overly challenging (compared to the difficulty of getting into space in the first place). Assuming that you have the life support problem worked out (which is a prerequisite for space travel anyway), the feasibility of your hypothetical asteroid craft is thus dependent entirely on the Sufficiently Advanced Technology being used to propel it. Granted, the propulsion problem is not unique to asteroid ships. It's merely exacerbated by designing around something other than weight efficiency.

Modern spacecraft are, relatively speaking, thin fuel containers with lighter payloads like sensor packages and life support facilities added on. A carved ship will be less mass efficient than a constructed one, and most of it will be dead weight. You'd probably be using the asteroid's bulk itself as the primary structural support and shielding, as carving out an asteroid only to heavily reinforce it with manufactured materials sorta defeats the point.

A kilometer long asteroid that's been partially hollowed out would have a mass in the billions of tons. To put that in perspective, if you dropped a megaton nuclear bomb off the backside and were somehow able to capture 100% of the energy as forward thrust, you'd accelerate the "ship" to the speed of a highway driven automobile, enough to make the cosmologically short trip from the earth to the moon in a few months. Drop a million of those, and you could make it to Jupiter in a year. Tactical maneuvering and rotational control could be even more expensive, so in combat it would function more as a mountain stronghold than a ship.

[thegayhare]

In roling thunder the colonay ship was a mix of generational and stasis transport,  most of the colonists were kept in perfect stasis.  It's a concept I used myself  thousands of colonists in cryo with the crew of the ship serving and maintaining the vessel till it arrives.

a generational ship or stasis ship wouldn't have to be very fast


a year in transit from earth to Jupiter   would be about right for my thoughts,  the Idea was to have the ships moving between colonies in a single system , no star drives,  so a bout a year transit would feel about right.  the engines could be explained as sufficiently advanced tech,  plus  I'm thinking that part of it could be that the ship never stops moving  it's doesn't stop of slow down,  once a new ship reaches it's optimum forward momentum the drives would be used to maintain the velocity  It takes less energy change direction  then to stop 

[Turnsky]

if any of you have watched the flick "sunshine", debatable premise aside, that'll prolly be some of the earlier feasible starship designs right there.

at least until proper radiation shielding is developed.