User Tools

Site Tools


genres:scifi:tech

This is an old revision of the document!


SciFi Technology

Contained here are some notes on the sort of technology available in a Yags SciFi setting.

Space Drives

Most of the following discussions are about reaction drives - those that work by throwing something out the back to push a space craft forwards. All require 'fuel' (actually, reaction mass, but it's the same thing for chemical rockets and fuel is easier to write), of which any vehicle will have a finite supply. This means that any reaction drive will have a maximum speed - though it can keep on accelerating, eventually it runs out of fuel. For spacecraft, this is generally known as Delta V (dV) - the maximum change in velocity possible.

A ship with a Delta V of 20km/s could accelerate up to 5km/s in one direction, coast for a bit, then turn around and decelerate by 5km/s to come to a stop, for a total of 10km/s. It then has enough fuel to accelerate back up to 5km/s back towards home and stop again using up the last of its fuel. Though it could get up to 20km/s by burning all its fuel, doing so would leave it with no more fuel to stop or manoeuvre. A missile might do this, but a space craft with crew on board probably wouldn't.

Chemical Rockets (TL 6)

Chemical rockets are the simplest form of space propulsion, and are assumed to be possible from TL 6 onwards. On Earth, they didn't start being used until TL 7, but the technology was there if there had been the necessary will. Technically, the basic physics was understood in TL 3 or 4, but the ability to build a big enough rocket to actually get into space would come along much later.

The problem with chemical rockets is that they are limited to chemical energy, which greatly limits their dV. Even at TL 8 or 9, dV for rocket ships will be limited to a few 10s of km/s.

Space Weapons

Kinetic Weapons

Lasers

Particle Beams

genres/scifi/tech.1351341877.txt.gz · Last modified: 2015/02/04 22:40 (external edit)

Donate Powered by PHP Valid HTML5 Valid CSS Driven by DokuWiki