Real exoplanets inspire Civilization: Beyond Earth pre-order dealhttp://news.yahoo.com/real-exoplanets-inspire-civilization-beyond-200005850.html (http://news.yahoo.com/real-exoplanets-inspire-civilization-beyond-200005850.html)
Polygon
By Colin Campbell 1 hour ago
(http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/n.qmn9uMjMTVVH3hOiKnaA--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7cT04NQ--/http://media.zenfs.com/en-US/homerun/polygon.vox.com/41798c4339f3318f92e3e9b7ac8db8ae)
A pre-purchase offer for Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth is now available on Steam, offering early-bird buyers the Exoplanets Map Pack, which includes six custom maps, inspired by real exoplanets.
The custom maps include the following exoplanets (list below), with added features from the imaginations of the development team at Firaxis. Publisher 2K Games is offering Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth for $49.99 and Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Classics Bundle, which includes three previous Civilization games, for $69.99.
Civilization: Beyond Earth is a turn-based strategy game in which players settle an alien planet, while conquering or treating with neighbors and researching new technologies. It will be released on Oct. 24, 2014.
Kepler 186f: One of the oldest known Earth-like planets. Featuring lush vegetation in the game world.
Rigil Khantoris Bb: Orbiting the closest star to our solar system.
Tau Ceti d: A planet of seas and archipelagos.
Mu Arae f: Tidally locked in orbit around a weak star, half the planet is frozen while the other half is always hot.
82 Eridani e: Tectonically unstable.
Eta Vulpeculae b: A mysterious new discovery with unknown terrain.
Assuming your ship isn't destroyed by a speck of dust.Maybe somebody will come up with a self-repairing composite, kind of like a self-sealing tire.
I dunno. Hitting 12% C with Thermonuclear Orion Drive becomes an engineering challenge, really...
Even Alpha Centauri would take over five decades (once acceleration and turn-over are figured in), so five centuries in cryo isn't too implausible.
Maybe somebody will come up with a self-repairing composite, kind of like a self-sealing tire.
Publisher 2K Games is offering Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth for $49.99 and Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Classics Bundle, which includes three previous Civilization games, for $69.99.
Assuming your ship isn't destroyed by a speck of dust.
We'd need to advance our tech, but you could have a small fleet of drones (since 0 relative velocity to the 'mothership', very little delta-V is expended) with multiple radar/lidar/other sensor arrays, some drones armed with heavy lasers, others equipped with deployable whipple shielding, etc.
The ship itself could use some shielding material, like a thick caul of ice.
Anything too big to deflect with Whipple shields/vaporize with lasers could probably be dodged. Anything too small to be detected/intercepted can probably be absorbed by the ablative layers of ice.
Of course, this all means more mass to be accelerated, which means more mass to needed for bombs, which means more mass to accelerate more mass... but still an engineering challenge.
The ice itself could be gradually used as reaction mass after turnover (deceleration phase) to somewhat reduce fuel weight. One issue with this plan would be that during the beginning of turnover, your ship would be travelling at nearly .12C without an protective ice layer. As you decelerated, the risk from fast dust particles decreases dramatically, but during the initial phase of deceleration you'd have some significant vulnerabilities- perhaps possibly overcome with your drones preemptively deploying mobile Whipple shields to 'scour' the space in the path of the mothership.
As you get closer to C, the problems become more and more difficult to solve, but at .12C the problems are hardly insurmountable.
For starters, you can only deploy them once you reached cruising velocity. The whole acceleration -and deceleration phases they'll stay behind or cruise ahead.
There's the extra mass you already mentioned. But most important, whether or not you 'evaporate' an incoming object doesn't matter. It damages your ship anyway, not because of the density of the object but of the speed of impact. So that leaves only a 'shield' to deal with incoming 'mass'.
For starters, you can only deploy them once you reached cruising velocity. The whole acceleration -and deceleration phases they'll stay behind or cruise ahead.
There's the extra mass you already mentioned. But most important, whether or not you 'evaporate' an incoming object doesn't matter. It damages your ship anyway, not because of the density of the object but of the speed of impact. So that leaves only a 'shield' to deal with incoming 'mass'.
What? Even factoring in relativistic dilation (which is very small, if noticable) at .12c, it doesn't take you more than 59 days to reach .12c at 1 g acceleration... you'd have expended about 80% of your fuel mass, but that's already accounted for in the ship design... The chance of smacking into an object
Your period of vulnerability could be further decreased if you sent out massive ice-caul "road clearing" craft to reduce the amount of dust present in the path of your starship for the next half light year- they'd have to be launched years in advance, but totally feasible.
Perhaps I wrote it in an misleading way- but let me put it in different words- what happens to a rock if, say, 5% of it's mass in a certain direction is vaporized (by, I don't know, a pulsed laser?)
The remaining solid mass of the rock is accelerated in the opposite direction. And the fine mist of remaining vapor is far more easily absorbed by the ice caul than a solid rock- this is the entire principle behind Whipple shielding.
I bet you your starship drive won't give 1 g accel. The way to save on fuel mass is to increase your velocity slower. You may say 'only' .12c, but that's still 36,000 km/sec...
Of course launching a 'shield' ahead is feasable, but since everything in space is continually in motion, any vessels' trajectory is going to be different if launched at another time. Your shield must be on your starship, or you simply miss the 'road cleared' by a 'shieldship' launched ahead. Simple trajectory mechanics.
Heh, the 'vapor' would still impact at .12c with your shield. In other words, the kinetic energy would be the same as if it collided with your iceshield as a solid object. Again, we're talking 36,000 km/sec here. And the tiny deceleration caused by your laser wouldn't be enough to avoid impact anyway.
About dodging, you need RCS thrusters with enough punch to move your ship sideways in time. Detecting an object on a collision course at .12c and evading it in time might be less easily achieved then you think. It eats fuel, depending on the amount of 'dodges' you need to do, which relates to how 'dusty' the interstellar environment really is between Sol and your destination. And you detect objects with the delay of light lag. So, impossible to calculate beforehand how much 'spare' fuel you need.
Besides, current feasability projections about an Orion's performance (except the M-AM option) is well short of .12c
You want to construct and launch enough nukes into Earth's orbit to give a starship a .12c velocity? :o How many are we talking here?
And it seems you are overtly optimistic about detecting particles on long distances. 150 million km ahead? Forget it!
All the rest of your dissertation fails on those two topics.