Ring Device

You ever see an inquisitive feline?

The first ring device was discovered in its own extremely high orbit around the brown dwarf binary Luhman 16, a mere 6.5 light years from the green hills of Earth. As an artifact, the device was impressive: fully a kilometer in diameter, and half that in transverse thickness, yet with a wall thin enough to squeeze between your fingers. From a distance, it looked, for all the worlds, like a rolled up piece of paper.

The discovering ship, U.F.P Vega, relayed news of the discovery to the recently established outpost on Luhman system’s one habitable planet, then cautiously sent a probe into the device’s aperture.

U.F.P. Vega was never heard from again.

Concerning the Subject of Lifeboats

Are you really so alive anymore?

Women and children are always the least willing to get into the lifeboats, it seems.

In an emergency, this horrific state of affairs costs lives. Death in space frequently strikes with almost no warning whatever, and quick action by all parties is the only even remotely tractable approach to stemming the hemorrhaging of precious human lives into vacuum.

All too often, a woman and a child board a lifeboat, only to have the kid forget her teddy bear in the cabin. So the kid slips away in the chaos, and the mother panics. And of course they can’t launch the boat until they’re reunited. Thirty seconds later, the reactor goes supercritical, and everyone dies horribly when the vessel explosively decompresses.

By the year 2290, such ghastly death tolls became so commonplace that the latest interplanetary liners began rolling out new standards: lifeboats would be deployed, with or without people, precisely 60 seconds after the alarms began sounding.

That got people’s attention.

By 2294, and despite escalating concessions by the United Planets Transportation Authority, international pressure was approaching the breaking point. The basic practice indisputably saved countless lives, but too many were orphans, widows, and grieving parents. The tens of thousands of ships in the fleet—and the dozens lost every year—became breeding grounds for discontent, even as passengers were snatched robotically from the jaws of certain death.

In fact, it was the survivors who argued most assiduously and caustically: better to doom the many than to devastate the few. Such, they argued, was the price of our humanity.

Causam Mortis

“What’s retirement?”

In the inchoate years of the space age, the “old age” cause of death was abrogated in favor of more precise terms: “heart failure”, “secondary infection from weakened immune response”, und so weiter.

In subsequent years, a new cause was added: “stupidity”.

Space is hazardous to the point of absurdity. Leaking atmo? Death. Forget your transfer window? Death. Out of EVA fuel? Death. The universe is cold and dispassionate, and with better tools and equipment, the human error of incompetence increasingly—and vastly—was outstripping pure technological failure.

When the report came in of another deceased spacer, the cause of death ended up being “stupidity” more than ¾ of the time. Did it really matter that he suffocated on his own vomited organs? No. It mattered that, due to stupidity, he ventured outside the shadow shield of his atom-ship. Did it really matter that her flesh slowly charred away, trapped by her own skeleton in restraints of melting steel? No. It mattered that she crammed her ship full of personal effects and didn’t have enough fuel to break atmo.

Death in space environments is final and harsh. And when a corpse can be recovered, exact specificity in cause is wasted inquiry, and never comfort to the bereaved.

The Shield

Remember Timmy, with great energy
comes great relativistic confusion.

The pinch-field generator operates on the same principle as a black hole.

Matter makes light bend. The mechanism isn’t really light bending, per-se, so much as space bending around it. So the light travels a straight line in curved space, and it only looks like it bends.

Well, it turns out mass and energy are really the same thing. This gave an engineer an idea. And his son the same idea. And in turn his twin daughters the same idea, and one of their sons the same idea, and his son the same idea, and so on for a dozen or so generations until one of the line of engineers finally succeeded, and vague speculations became ultra-secret, classified military projects. See, with a bit of trickery, energy can be made to distort space too. And by rerouting that energy, you can change the effect, in a manner impossible with ordinary matter.

Why you hitting yourself?

The basic idea is to create, preferably as far from your ship as possible, a grid of superconducting cables, then dump energy into them. Like, a lot of energy. Like, the-total-output-of-the-sun-for-a-year kind of energy. But, with Dyson spheres around a hundred or so stars, the first fully functional ship sporting a pinch-field generator was completed in the 19th year of the Human-Tassad war.


The first encounter is worthy of note. At 7550-12-12 04:07 EST, the Tassad battlecruiser opened fire with starboard laser batteries 45 through 97 at a range of 17 light-seconds and nearly zero relative velocity. The U.F.P. Dauntless, sensors tripping at the sudden heat flux, automatically deployed the pinch-field’s incomprehensible energy from the central core of the ship, out into the far distant material of the shield.

As the night watch in the Dauntless was thrown unceremoniously into null-G, to a distant observer, the Dauntless appeared to disappear in an instant. But look closely, and you could see that the area where the shield had been now appeared a reflection—a cosmic mirror.

In truth, what had happened was the light now bent through 180 degrees, while still traveling in a straight line. But, unlike any physical mirror, no fractional percentage of light was absorbed by any material. No weakness existed. In fact, any material object nearby, save the exquisitely balanced shield cables themselves, would be torn asunder by tidal forces almost instantly. Invulnerable.

The titanic blast from the 53 Tassad laser batteries came to bear on the pinch-field, and were promptly and utterly harmlessly rotated through twisted space, 180 degrees in heading. Thereupon, the fiery lasers of the Tassad battlecruiser demonstrated the meaning of that ageless playground taunt: “Why you hitting yourself?”


The Human-Tassad War ended tidily in the 20th year.

Interstellar Supercruiser

Lives aren’t worth money! Single meaning, I swear!

Your average interstellar supercruiser measures approximately 1 meter wide and 175 long.

Companies demand results, and results demand fast action. And yet fast action over interstellar distances requires years, at minimum, for light to crawl the distance. Anything faster is literally the same as time travel.

So if you’re going to ship an employee in hibernation, you need to get going fast—not only for “results”, but also to avoid, for want of a better term, freezer burn.

So your average interstellar cruiser is hurled to speed by high-energy lasers and decelerated by nuclear pulse. The narrow cross section, droplet shield, and tungsten ablator give the craft a fighting chance of avoiding direct hits from nearly all of the hundred billion or so dust particles it will relativistically encounter.

Nevertheless, mortality rates are still above 70%.

Indian Food

Grousers will be spaced.

“So I hear you like curries.”

“That’s not funny. You know I hate how space erodes your sensitivity to taste.”

“Fair enough. The rations, which are, by the way, spicy precisely to counter that effect, hit the spot for me, at least. It’s too bad there isn’t more to go around.”

“It’s a long flight and every gram counts. Cut it with water.”

“Ugh. I hate drinking our own rad shielding.”

“The rubbery taste is a bit off-putting, I’ll grant. But the ammonic tang of lightly reprocessed piss isn’t any better.”

“True enough. Pass the water. And also the aloo matar.”


Ed note: c.f. spacecoach concept IRL.

Eggshell

Well that’s depressing.

There is a terrible problem with interstellar travel. That problem is distance.

At the speed of light, faster than which no material object can dream of traveling, Earth’s nearest neighbors lie years away, and the truly interesting ones, decades or centuries. But even if the, quite frankly, absurd energy requirements to accelerate a spaceship even close to that fast were tractable—which, do not forget for a moment, they are not—there are other obstacles with which to contend.

One of these is dust. At relativistic speeds, dust particles start looking an awful lot like mountains. And hitting one of them starts to look an awful lot like detonating a nuclear warhead, point-blank, against your hull.

So you can’t cover that inconceivably vast distance by going fast. Which means you need to go slow. And there, you have another, tremendous problem: time. In some sense, this is the same problem—which is why distance and time are the same thing to a rocketeer.

To put this in perspective, the U.F.P. Discovery left low Earth orbit in the year 2401. At its (destination-relative) ludicrous speed of 0.00114c, its target Gliese 667 Cc lay 23.62 light years—and nearly 21,000 years—ahead. That’s like the empires of ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia, ancient and imperial China, the Mayans, the Romans and Greeks, Mongols, Ottomans, and the entirety of modern world history all concatenated together end-to-end.

Distance and time are the same thing to a rocketeer.

How do you build an airlock door that lasts that long? You can’t. Let alone a nuclear reactor, a computer, a rocket engine, a 3D fab, or any of the other necessities of the 25th century. You probably can’t even build a wrench.

So the Discovery really is just a tremendous steel cylinder, with walls some 90 meters thick at points—and the people and resources were just welded permanently inside. It has no guidance, no sensors, no engines, no nothing. It’s the only way the ship itself could possibly survive. It was accelerated by Mercury’s laser launching grid, beaming maximum power clear across the system for ten full months.

So there’s a self-contained biosphere, plus raw building material, out in that speeding hulk. Someday, in Earth’s distant future, they will arrive, and the Discovery, still on utterly passive guidance, will spontaneously be captured into a wide and long elliptical orbit around the system’s central two suns.

The hope is that, if any of the humans’ descendants survive tens of thousands of years of cultural isolation, they will be able to devise a way to slice their way out of their steel imprisonment—that protective eggshell—to seek their futures on the unknown worlds they may find.

Assuming, of course, that their remembered origins are not lost to the relegation of legend.

Brave New World

The thermometer says you’re hiding.

The newest Andromeda-class battlecruisers come equipped with a startling capability: stealth.

See, there’s a problem in space. Space is big and, well, quite empty. You can’t hide anywhere, except behind something like a planet—which puts a limitation of practicality, since 99% of the time, ships aren’t anywhere near the vicinity of planets.

So you’re tasked with the problem of hiding an enormous hunk of metal in wide-open spaces where anybody with an IR telescope can see you coming probably a billion kilometers away, since your 290-Kelvin hab bubble stands out like a searchlight against cold vacuum.

Well, some engineer took a look at that, and decided to just put a refrigerator on the ship pointed outwards. The trouble with that is that the heat you pull from the hull has to go somewhere, and since it can’t leave from the hull, it needs to go back inside the ship. So you’re invisible, but you’re cooking your crew.

There the matter stood, until somebody realized this is actually fine—if you have the right tactics.

You’re invisible, but you’re cooking your crew.

When the U.F.P. Relentless left her construction site in orbit above Mars on her maiden voyage, the first thing she did was turn the coolers on max. Over the long months of the Hohmann transfer to Earth, they dumped her waste heat through radiators into internal compartments of chilled Lithium (chosen for its stability, mass, and specific heat).

The situation could not be maintained indefinitely, of course, but after she had slipped into (retrograde) orbit around Earth, still all but invisible, the external radiators folded out, and the gigajoule or so of waste heat accumulated on the voyage was radiated away against the camouflaging background of an industrialized planet.

For their part, the Jovian Trade Union, comprising the confederacy of city-state greater moons of Jupiter, had dutifully tracked the thermal signature of the decoy ship which remained at Mars, flaming like a candle. And when their troublemaking frigates burned for Earth, they arrived in LEO to a surprise.

Gray Goo

“This is thermodynamically impossible.”

“No one was particularly scared of these things, since they’re so small.”

“And no one particularly should be, since they cannot dissipate Brownian energy, nor can they reproduce on such limited raw materials.”

“All true,” remarked the speaker, somewhat disgruntled. “But that doesn’t change the fact that one of our orbital research facilities has—and quite otherwise inexplicably, I might add—dissolved into a perfect sphere of uniform color.”

The slide changed. A red ball stood superimposed against the stars, a sinister crescent moon.

“Why!” Someone gasped. “That was the I.S.S Clarke!”

The speaker nodded. “Indeed, Clarke was painted red, for better visibility to near-IR scanners.”

“My condolences, Charlie.”

“So they don’t operate on individual atoms,” someone muttered.

“Speak up.”

“They operate and exist on the molecular—not atomic—level. Or else they’d have simply decomposed the pigments, and it would take some unpredictable appearance. It’d form a nanoscale metastructure, so I guess it’d be some kind of an iridescent panoply.”

“Correct. Notice that operating at a higher spatial level obviates the major energy constraints. The material-limitations ones did not apply, as Clarke is—was—made primary of steel nanofoam and composite volatiles.”

“So,” the speaker continued, “we have a real gray goo situation on our hands. So far, it shows no signs of stripping the extremely tenuous atmosphere in LEO, but eventually it will fall to Earth, and this crisis will become, quite possibly, an apocalypse. Any suggestions?”