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| Episode 9 storyboards, rocket science | Apr 24, 2010 5:24 AM PDT | url |
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Some squiggly storyboards for the upcoming episode:
Got to thinking about acceleration speeds in A*, like, I kind of wish I'd shown Vero being pushed back in his seat when he took off into the magnetic field at the end of the last episode. On the other hand that might have interfered with what else I wanted him to be showing, so eh. But from there I got to thinking about acceleration speeds for these spacecraft and travel times and so forth, and got kind of paranoid about it--the numbers maybe not working out when tolerable accelerations for the human body are considered, I mean--but after doing some double-checking I've reassured myself that yep if I assume my travel distances are on the light days / weeks range, and travel times in the months-ish range, then that more or less works out okay.
And I did find this Space Math page, with a nice handy calculator for figuring out actual relativistic travel times, should I ever need to get that specific (hopefully not, it's so much easier when I don't have to give numbers ;), as well as some other potentially useful calculator functions; don't really need that Schwarzschild radius calculator for black holes, though, 'cause you just rough it as 3 km (radius) per solar mass, and you're pretty darn close.
The non-relativistic parts of the rocket calculations come from what's known as the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, and if you take a look at the math there you'll see why I wanted to find a program to do it for me. ;)
As for the relativistic side of the equation, I came across some of that on a page called The Relativistic Rocket; I wouldn't bother linking it because who really wants to try doing that math...but it does have some nifty descriptions of what the observer in a near light speed rocket would see, and gritty details of the concerns of near-light-speed space flight, such as "After only a few years of 1g acceleration even the cosmic background radiation is Doppler shifted into a lethal heat bath hot enough to melt all known materials." Well! So maybe don't go quite that fast. :P
And just a few other things I stumbled across: Could NASA Get to Pluto Faster is an interesting polemic by a space industry dude talking about how you've got to switch to nuclear propulsion if you want manned space missions farther out than, say, Mars--and he goes on kind of a suspicious jaunt about how the Russians will have some kind of science-fictiony-sounding super advanced nuclear rockets by 2050 or something; and then the StarTravel page shows what certainly looks like an impressive (not free) program for calculating some rather sophisticated space flight paths around our solar system, as well as graphs of relativistic space flight. You'd think the program's target group would be pretty limited: science-minded people who really need specific numbers but can't calculate them themselves...oh wait that's hard science-fiction writers! :o
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