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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2194 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 5, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I rather enjoyed Theft of Fire: https://www.amazon.com/Theft-Fire-Orbital-Space-1-ebook/dp/B0CJHQ4LZN

Rich gene-modded anime girl kidnaps tough Spacer Pirate in his own ship for a secret quest. An enormous amount of sexual tension.

Pros:

  1. Engaging from the get-go. I drop a lot of writing early on, this novel caught me and kept me. That's the most important thing a book can do, IMO.

  2. Author dunks on leftists on twitter but they're not really screeds so much as long well-written, impassioned pleas and thoughtful statements that sound that they could belong here, albeit toned down from twitter norms of hostility. The ultimate political tone of the novel is right-libertarian: holding to one's promises, anti-monopolistic capitalism. The setting is right-libertarian, there are no state govts in space and Earth is an irrelevant basketcase. No strawmen ideologies amongst the main cast though, characters are treated with dignity and the setting has the flaws you'd expect of ancapistan. I think the author only actually got noticed because he was dunking on leftists on twitter, some of the people I followed retweeted him and that's how I found out about the novel.

  3. Thematically clear and interesting, it had a variant on the Frog and the Scorpion that made me think 'this guy is somewhat thoughtful'.

Cons:

  1. It's not what I'd call 'hard' sci-fi, taking a few too many liberties with stealth-in-space, though the no-stealth-in-space principle isn't totally violated. AI is of the pre-GPT tropes of 'artificial stupidity' or 'completely human-personality tech-genius in a box' kind, which I found slightly irksome. I hope this trope is finally going to die soon. There's some implausible evasive flying later on.

  2. Some of the combat writing became a bit hard to follow but this was rather minor.

  3. Ending somewhat weaker than the middle. When I was half-way through I wished 'why can't this book be longer' and I still want to see a sequel, I just don't want it quite so desperately.

Ooo, looks interesting.

"The no-stealth-in-space" principle isnt totally violated.

Which is a shame, because that "principle" needs to be violated, since it simply isn't true. I love Project Rho as much as any sci-fi nerd, but the entire "no stealth in space" article boils down to a claim that it is trivially easy to deploy and coordinate sufficient numbers of sufficiently sensitive IR sensor platforms around any given system that any incoherent IR emissions from malicious spacecraft can be detected, picked out of all of the other emissions that are around, interpreted as a hostile craft, all in a reasonable timeframe. This to me is a significantly high dose of handwavium critically compromised by such facts as: IR emissions need not be incoherent- IR lasers are very much a thing and can make (admittedly not particularly efficient) closed-loop radiators, and also liquid hydrogen propellent happens to make one heck of a good heat sink which by the way can be expanded in a rocket nozzle to background-cryogenic temperatures whose IR emissions are indistinguishable from all the other hydrogen atoms bouncing around.

I presume you're talking about Hydrogen/Helium steamers that work through keeping hull temperatures below the noise limit for IR detectors, and potentially even at CMB levels?

In my own hard scifi novel, the K3 aliens have those, as well as far faster craft that manage to hide emissions via using neutrinos as their reaction mass in their drives, beaming them tightly and nigh-undetectably away from watching sensors, but that's a tier far above current speculative space craft (well, they're K3!).

Yes, reducing hull temperatures to background levels would be an essential component of minimizing IR signature, but this is something we do today on things like telescopes to avoid thermal distortions, its not even sci-fi tech. And highly expanded exhaust nozzles with cryogenic final exhaust temperatures are again already something that exists for simple efficiency reasons.

I think the "there is no stealth in space" meme comes from the fact that at least to public knowledge, no one has tried to build a stealthy spacecraft so there is no countervailing data to present against detector technology, wheres terrestrial stealth technologies (such as vs radar) has popped up almost as quickly as the detectors did.

Is your novel out? Im always looking for more good reading material.

I was referring to the directed neutrino emissions for heat dissipation and as reaction mass as the outright scifi part, the Steamers are just short of proof of concept!

If you want to take a look, here it is:

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/65211/ex-nihilo-nihil-supernum-original-hard-scifi-with

Maybe in principle it's possible, but in this setting they're using multi-thousand tonne ships with nuclear fusion powerplants that get up to 1% lightspeed (imagine the exhaust), in a region that really ought to be heavily watched since it's a militarized treasure trove, in the rather highly populated Sol system. They use some tricks such as covering one's burn but really...

As of 2013, the Voyager 1 space probe is about 18 billion kilometers away from Terra and its radio signal is a pathetic 20 watts (or about as dim as the light bulb in your refrigerator). But as faint as it is, the Green Bank telescope can pick it out from the background noise in one second flat.

Also, how can you use a laser as a radiator? Isn't the rule that they always make more heat than they release in energy?

IMO stealth in space needs FTL to make sense. When you're moving faster than light, you can be stealthy since they can't see you coming. You could have picket ships, scouts, messenger drones, all moving superluminally.

Ah, yeah that sounds like something not particularly stealthy, unless there is some very fancy nozzle tech going on.

The Voyager example is cited alot as some sort of definitive proof, but misses the obvious point that emissions controls (EMCON) on radio frequency emissions have been a means of avoiding detection since shortly after the first RDF equipment was invented, and the navies and air forces of the world have practiced its use for nearly a century at this point. A 20 watt RF emission is infinitely stonger than a non-existent one after all. The great thing about a vaccum is there are no pesky particles to scatter lasers, which means laser LOS communication is quite easy, and i would imagine become the default for military operations.

RE lasers as radiators- the basic recipe for a laser is to convert an incoherent form of radiation to a coherent form, with some transformation losses of energy. These tranaformation losses are usually waste heat, but if you are beaming a massive amount of IR radiation away, your thermal energy delta is negative. Gas dynamic lasers are a good example- they can arc weld quarter inch steel plate at a hundred miles in a fraction of a second, and the lasing mechanism itself becomes only slightly warm to the touch. There is definitely no free lunch in terms of energy generation, but since the problem you are trying to solve is an energy surplus rather than a defecit, thats not a particularly big deal. The simplest setup would involve a a solid state IR laser enveloped by a cooling mechanism which is in turn coupled to some form of thermionic converter that is the actual power source for the laser. This makes for what is effectively a laser refrigerator of not particularly great efficiency, but still capable of cooling a spacecraft while emitting only coherent radiation.

There is not a whole lot of literature on the subject, mostly because lasers dont make very efficient radiators and the only immediately plausible applications are all military in nature, but there is no thermodynamic prohibition on it. See: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19660023147 for the genral efficiency calculations.

The FTL interaction with stealth is definitely an interesting one, I find the way its portrayed in the Honor Harrington series to be good, essentially concluding that in a universe with relatavistic ships and weaponry anything moving in classical mechanic terms is stealthy because the light cone of detection is slow relative to the application of deadly force.

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