Thread 16826916

Hypothetically , of course.
lets say, a catastrophic event is gonna destroy the Earth, and some guy/s, with commonly available materials and knowledge wants to escape the planet (or if not possible, send a probe with a "message to the stars").

Can a man make a Saturn V rocket in his garage/backyard/doomsday bunker?
What will be the biggest challenges?
What can be done in those scenarios?

>>16826916 (OP)

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket)

>>16826939
>To lower the cost of the rocket, he intended it to be built of inexpensive materials, specifically 8 mm (0.31 in) steel sheeting
>The rocket would be built at a sea-side shipbuilder and towed to sea for launch
> It would use wide engineering margins with strong simple materials to further enhance reliability and reduce cost and complexity
>The noise of the engine was so powerful it was the reason the rocket was to be sea launched; on land it would have torn itself apart from the vibrations, and crushed the launch pad
>The rocket would have been able to carry a payload of up to 550 tonnes (540 long tons; 610 short tons) or 550,000 kg (1,210,000 lb) into LEO. This is enough to comfortably launch the ISS in a single launch (which weighs a "mere" 450 tons)

W-where are the blueprints?
Mad men were living in the space era...

just grab your shirt collar and yeet yourself into orbit

>>16826969
Best part of 'For All Mankind' was the Sea Dragon launch scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faTQQ-fLFgY

>>16827007
The key issue with that rocket is it's huge engines dome. The bigger the dome the higher it to build (exponentially). This is why SpaceX using many small raptors.

OTRAG is another example. Modular cheap construction as the primary design criteria. Also the potential for asparagus staging, so really a ksp esque rocket if ever there was one. No pumps, gravity/pressurized tanks meant really simple construction. The hardest part for a hobbyist would be the nasty propellant chemicals.

>>16826969
>>16826939

The sea dragon is a pipsqueek compared to project orion.

>>16827038
“
"I have been corresponding with Lutz for a few months now, and I have learned quite a few things. I seriously considered an OTRAG style massive-cluster-of-cheap-modules orbital design back when we had 98% peroxide (assumed to be a biprop with kerosene), and I have always considered it one of the viable routes to significant reduction in orbital launch costs. After really going over the trades and details with Lutz, I am quite convinced that this is the lowest development cost route to significant orbital capability. Eventually, reusable stages will take over, but I actually think that we can make it all the way to orbit on our current budget by following this path. The individual modules are less complicated than our current vehicles, and I am becoming more and more fond of high production methods over hand crafter prototypes." -- June 2006 Armadillo Aerospace Update[19]
“
I seriously think OTRAG is the answer. Would love to be proven wrong if someone knows another viable way to do it.

The other one that might win is solid fuel rockets, they can be made very simply from relatively common materials. Their problem is the whole tank needs to be extremely strong (and heavy) because it has to handle combustion inside the fuel tank instead of just in the engine.

>>16827055
the thing is, Uranium or anything nuclear related tend to be complex AND relatively harder to extract and refine. Just sayin'

>>16827055
We used to be a great nation, capable of great dreams, and of turning those dreams into reality. For an example of how Orion would work, read classic sci fi Footfall by Niven and Pounelle. In it, aliens (who look kind of like elephants) with far superior technology fight the humans. It’s a great example of thinking about an alien psychology and how different their society would be than ours. And how a properly motivated earth could do crazy things. Another example is the US production in ww2- we made about 100 aircraft carriers in the few years of the war. We also built brand new shipyards from nothing, AND trained the workforces to churn out thousands of Liberty ships (because the existing shipyards and workforces were building warships). I wonder what it would be like for a modern, technologically driven banding together if society would be capable of. I think with automation and mechanization, to do a program like Liberty ships, step one would be to build a factory that makes huge quantities of robots of all types- cnc, 6dof arms, pick and place machines for tiny stuff, 3d printers, etc. then build the infra to feed and assemble the modules. I think that’s how mars will be colonized- build a factory to build the machines that will build many factories, and make it all automated and infinitely scalable and with positive feedback loops. If you didn’t have so few machines to amortize r&d over, you could make tons of 6-figure machines for maybe 4-figures. Economies of scale get insanely powerful. Think about car engines- there’s been hundreds of millions of them made in the last 100 years and they’re orders of magnitude more reliable, powerful, longer lasting, (and those aprcs literally didn’t exist at any price 100 years ago). If you can spend the engineering effort to optimize something like that it’s almost unrecognizable from what came before.

>>16827055
was it niven's footfall where they used this ship?

>>16827195
How much acid did you eat

>>16827055
this is treated as a sci fi thing but the total explosive yield would be lower than a lot of atmospheric tests conducted in the 50's and it seems like it would work.

Shouldn't someone take it seriously?

>>16827007
the first couple seasons were actually pretty good. lots of space kino. then it sort of degenerated into a patchwork of liberal memes endlessly complaining about white guys. season four was basically just a long form union dispute inside a mars base. nothing else happened.

>>16827365
Not much, lol.
>>16827381
If an asteroid was on a collision course with earth and we had months to years to plan for it, Orion style nuclear pulse propulsion would definitely be the way to handle it. With enough mass to orbit, and with hundreds of thousands/millions of m/s delta v, you could get to the asteroid really fast, and with tons of mass for payload. You’d be able to have 3 stage nukes which have essentially no upper limit on their power which would be able to push the asteroid out of its collision course.

>>16827302
Yes. The Michael is neat, with 16” battleship guns and all.
>>16827877
>>16827381

Our inability to do great things is caused by our safety first culture (among other factors). Back in the day, you’d be able to risk some workers, or some wildlife, or a scenic vista in the name of progress. - the Empire State building, Hoover dam, the interstate system, the manhattan project, etc Nowadays, everything takes 10-100x longer and is 100-1000x as expensive.
Spacex’s Starship system is about to come online, and it will allow millions of tons into orbit, so much mass that even sci fi ships will be comically puny compared to what we put in space in the 2030’s.

>>16827469
I quit after season two. Did they really have a gay, black Elon Musk type character in later seasons?

>>16828039
he wasnt gay but yeah, he was a kenyan entrepreneur Musk sort of character, and he wasn't even all that bad. that was the black gay astronaut that went to mars. funny thing was they had him chimping out and starting fights and generally acting like an entitled homo,

>>16828376
Kek

>>16828392
the best way to travel to Hyperborea, lol

>>16826969

>where are the blueprints?

>>16827055
to anyone getting all sappy that this wasn't built:
those pistons between the pusher plate and the payload compartment at the top are only necessary for manned flight, because they turn the almost instantaneous acceleration from the nuclear blast into a gradual acceleration that the human body can withstand.
if any of those pistons fails once during the entire trip, everyone inside the crew compartment dies instantly.

also the planned manned mission to mars would just have been a second moon landing, in the sense that it would cost a lot of money, and accomplish very little besides giving us another video of astronauts basedjakpointing at a far away rock.
don't get me wrong, i would've loved if they did that, because i like space exploration for the sake of it.
the general public needs to constantly be convinced that science is an endeavour worthy of funding, though and pointless expensive and extremely cool missions don't help with that, unfortunately.
what gets funding into rocket science is government contracts for spy satellites in orbit around earth, and ICBMs.
the orion drive is just not particularly useful for either of those.

when someone figures out how to make more than just a billion or two out of the long distance trips that orion would enable, i'm sure it will return, but right now there is just not much of a reason to use it over chemical or electrical engines.

>>16826969
>>16826969
It's bullshit concieved by people with no real experience in rocket engine design. There is a reason nobody has build engines bigger than the J-2. Big nozzles have problems with flow instability, and that is about as big as you can get before the problem is insurmountable. That's why the engines on a Soyuz have 5 nozzles each, because it was easier than making one big nozzle for each engine. Keeping stable flow in a nozzle the size of the sea dragon just isn't going to happen.

>>16830135
Forgot to add

t. Actual rocket scientist

>>16830136
Also, F-1, not J-2. The J-2 is the upper stage engine. The F-1 is the big one on the bottom.

>>16830135

The sea dragon’s engines were pressure fed, not gas generator fed.

>>16830135
>that is about as big as you can get before the problem is insurmountable
interesting. i remember reading about the problems they had with the F1 during initial testing due to that. they used to trigger the instability with small explosives so it was predictably recreated iirc. wasn't the solution pretty much down to the injection plate design?

why dont you fly something like an aeroplane as high as you can and have a second aeroplane maybe you can use a nuclear explosion to accelerate out of the top atmosphere which is too thin for aeroplanes maybe in space you meed like a gyroscope or heaavy at the front to prevent the spaceship from spinning because theres no wind

>>16830725
turns out that flying small space planes up through the first 40000ft of air doesn't really save much fuel at all compared to a basic multi state rocket

>>16827195
All merican industrial capacity is gone now.
The usa cannot even make simple things.
Most electronics for the usmilitary is made in China or Asia.
That's why the usa will lose the next war.

>>16830737
yeah, but the x-plane program is a way for nasa to tap into the infinite us military budget, so it's cool in my book.
an unguided hypersonic spaceplane with a fancy newfangled scramjet engine is just one warhead away from becoming a cruise missile.
they're also very fun to build and fly in ksp, but they're unfortunately not that useful in the game either.

>>16830884
the x15 is still one of the coolest things ive ever seen. love the opening sequence of First Man that shows one of Armstrongs flights (sort of)

>>16826916 (OP)
One guy on his own without any help really couldn't get very big because of the logistics of fuel production.
For a solid motor he needs to be able to cast it on him own and monitor setting giving him ~3 days drying time max before even meth can't keep him awake.
For a liquid motor he needs to produce the oxidizer faster than it decays / boils off, if you use something stable like UDMH you just added years to the manufacturing setup if you don't want to gas yourself.

If you mean what is the largest mankind could make with unlimited resources there isn't an upper limit, you start with Project Orion and scale as large as you want. If they earth is doomed anyway you can use nukes from the surface without caring about the massive amounts of fallout.

>>16831414
if only we could figure out how to extract all the energy contained in every drop of gasoline this kind of thing wouldn't be an issue at all. once we can easily convert matter directly into energy everyone will be able to launch themselves into space.

so really if this is most likely it and the NEGATIVE on will SPLIT MINUS the thing and the POSITIVE on will ADD INTO IT
nuclear fusion probably does not create energy hmm
bonus question fusion is most likely SAFE and also this makes the sun SOMETHING ELSE THAN WE THOUGHT
saturn aliens probably look ok compared to mothership aliens who will look like mega mind from inbreeding but saturn aliens probably still look weird enough to make you want to cry and hurt yourself

anyway we need to make a free energy proton lazer effective to create nuclear batteries or its going to be expensive and too hard on resources unless shooting negatrons is cheap

anyway thinkin about it you are made of sacs which build hairs on them and the skin is hairs all stuck together and the organs are the same way like the brain is the body inside out via the anus and theres a clitoris in there not a radio antennae


conclusion i csnt work out where the neutrons are meant to be coming from to make the star begin fission and burn all that metal gas and shit


electrocute water to make acid by totally loading up with ions in effect to make the battery to replace nuclear fuel which is not efficient becazse we need to prepare the nuclear materials for fission as a space effective fuel souce

so the deposits of neuclear metals definitely came from LESS atoms and ALSO BIGGER atoms and came from space this is so.ething we know frkm desribing the circumstance of such a thing

we will definitely lose energy making radioative isotopes this is something we learn when we are children and so nuear fuel being finite until the time where it is actually expending resources more has caused the jews to inflate the price and stall until we have a lot more progress so that we are not scared of saturn and uranus making us have a war to bet on the results of

>>16832735
sorry >>16832739

>>16827017 (OP) #
maybe it yould be cheaper to use HEAT from lazers which we arrange into a hexagon shape to create a storm in a new upper layer of the atmosphere to remove gases possibly gases which create static charge when they are moved around on each other by space forces and some more storms for looking out of or maybe flying in this would be a better move than using our nuclear fossil fuels maybe we coukd find a way to un burn the sand into silicone to use instead of plastic maybe like as a large scale project to steal the sand from the desert to do this

saturn aliens probably look ok compared to mothership aliens who will look like mega mind from inbreeding but saturn aliens probably still look weird enough to make you want to cry and hurt yourself

>>16830136
Is there any possibility of ssto spaceplanes or does the limitations of chemical fuel always make them impractical? Seems like starship type reusable rockets are the only practical cheap space access, but human rating reentry on the starships very thin safety margins seems unlikely.

To;dr we need cheap space access ASAP or the species will go extinct. Wtf do we do?

>>16833286
And by cheap I mean, we need equivalent cost per kg to modern air freight. Or eventually we are going to go fucking extinct because we do not have enough resources on this planet to support the population.
Theres a binary choice for the species in the next century or two:
1. Resource shortages lead to wars and we revert to preindustrial tech and billions die, and we eventually go extinct from some kind of event.
2. We mine the moon and asteroids and billions migrate to space.

For option 2, launch to orbit needs to be as cheap as air freight.

>>16833293
The math on the resource consumption rate vs population is grim. The math makes it very clear the only option that keeps species from eventually regressing to monke is expanding into space.
Even if we hard pushed nuclear for more energy, and got cheap robots to push labor costs down, all those do is *speed up resource consumption rate*.
The only option is to expand into space and mine the moon and asteroids, ASAP. Or we go extinct.

>>16833297
Even if magic agi/asi bullshit happens, they figure out fusion magitech, this only *speeds up resource consumption rate*. It doesnt matter what tech progress you get, without lunar and asteroid mining, the species will revert to preindustrial tech levels after a shitton of wars.

>>16833300
The most critical tech for the long term survival of the entire human race is cheap access to orbit. Or else, we go war over remaining earth resources, wreck the biosphere, and eventually revert to preindustrial tech. We already overshot carrying capacity, the only option that doesnt eventually lead to mass population decline is mining the moon and asteroids.

>>16831414
>If you mean what is the largest mankind could make with unlimited resources there isn't an upper limit
more like, what can get from the planet in less than a year.

>If they earth is doomed anyway you can use nukes from the surface without caring about the massive amounts of fallout.
Something says to me that the dampening systems for a crewed Orion ship was never tested, and it would be practically unfeasible, IMO.
But, its worth the try...

>>16832735
>if only we could figure out how to extract all the energy contained in every drop of gasoline
or matter-antimatter fusion...

>>16833297
>>16833300
the
COSMIC FILTER
O
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I
C F I L T E R
also, thread theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcC6B-i28YE

>>16832740
meds, my kiddo...

>>16835350
>or matter-antimatter fusion...
you still need to get hold of antimatter in large quantities. thats hard. fully converting mass into useful energy would be better.

>>16835350
Orion drives are ridiculous.
But nuclear electric or nuclear thermal is how to reach the main belt asteroids. Cant do it with chemical rockets.

>>16837029
Highest ISP engine possible + fission drive is going to be needed to get to mars and the main belt asteroids. Starship to mars on chemical rockets is a stupid strategy. Starship is useful for cheap mass to orbit, mars and moon landing. But it does not make sense to use chemical rockets to get to Mars.