Lore: somewhat out of place

[Vavrik]

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch/16238-New-United-War-On-Water

I find some of the lore to be a little out of place, or very thin. For example, this most recent story about a drought on Yar. For heaven's sake it's not 2017 anymore, we have 930 years of advancement, spaceships all kinds that can travel at least at 20% of C, all over the inhabited systems (supposedly...)

Water is among the single most abundant resources in the universe, for heaven's sake, and if you can't find actual water, it's constituent parts are Hydrogen and Oxygen - two of the most abundant elements in the universe. And there's a drought on Yar? How quaint.

Not that I'm advocating a revolution, but It sounds like it might be time for someone on Yar to do something about the obviously incredibly incompetent government...

 

[Printimus]

Planets, systems, and moons are HUGE! And there are not a whole lot of us (humans) to cover it all. Just look at the scale of the moons we will be getting in 3.0. I agree that Hydrogen is pretty abundant in outer space, but oxygen? Not so much. I'm not for or against the lore, but you try making an entire universe out of thin air, not everything will be hunky-dory in all the systems. If it was, it would be boring. This will give us motivation to go assist Yar and provide jobs to the people.

 

[Deroth]

All I could think was:

Ice Pirates?!

...just no space herpes please...

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

Well now I know where to go sell all this useless piss water thats been building up in my ships tanks.

EDIT - Well of course the first thing I think of when you say there is a planet wide drought is "How much is my waz worth?"

I don't want to touch down on that planet and go to the lav only to be flushing good money down the drain litterally.

 

[Bambooza]

I can see droughts be a thing even 1000 years in the future with the existence of terraforming. Water is a bulky heavy mass that cant really be compressed and the amount of water needed to create any impact on a planetary scale is substantial.

The Hull E has a cargo capacity of 98304 meters cubed. The Ogallala Aquifer that supports a large amount of the United States agriculture in the Midwest has a size of 450,000 Km2 and has a current usage rate of 26 Km3 which is 26,000,000,000m3 which supports 30% of the agriculture production of the USA. This would mean it would take 264,485 Hull E trips a year to supply enough water to support 30% of 300,000,000 people or 90,000,000 individuals food production requirements. Or 1 Hull E full of water for 340 individuals water needs for the year.

 

[Deroth]

Well now I know where to go sell all this useless piss water thats been building up in my ships tanks.

EDIT - Well of course the first thing I think of when you say there is a planet wide drought is "How much is my waz worth?"

I don't want to touch down on that planet and go to the lav only to be flushing good money down the drain litterally.

If they add in planet Bethselamin you'd want to make sure to save up some before visiting too.

 

[Vavrik]

I would have ignored this but the article struck me as really odd that in 2947 they don't know that Oxygen is the third most common element in the universe, and Hydrogen is the first - and Oxygen's primary source in the universe is in the form of molecules of water. A star is a fusion reaction, and because of the way fusion reactions work, Hydrogen is more abundant than Oxygen but the 4 most abundant resources in the universe (our galaxy included) are:

1. Hydrogen
2. Helium
3. Oxygen
4. Carbon

Comets average somewhere between 60 and 80% water, and average size is around 10Km diameter. It's true that their density is about 60% of liquid water, they are frozen dirty snowballs after all. They're also fairly easy to find. So that's not an ocean worth of water, but its still a pretty good sized lake. This doesn't even take centaurs into consideration. Centaurs are associated with rocky planet formation. These are icy asteroids, that both exist near rocky planets and have an average diameter of about 250Km.

Now, since Stars are gigantic fusion reactors - and our ships are powered by small fusion reactors ... and MISC is on the very next planet, it shouldn't be too hard to find a handy dandy factory for the lower elements, like Hydrogen, Oxygen in 2947. Just sit there with your engine running, and collect the by product. Quite honestly, the exhaust should be mostly helium, and water and carbon dioxide because the exhaust is hot and would combust in the presence of the oxygen.

You see though, this story makes no sense even without that. Maybe piracy is the cause. Except Yar exists in the Centauri system, it is Centauri II. Centauri III is Saisei - a populated Terrrestrial planet, and the home planet of MISC - famous manufacturer of what kind of ship? That would be armed transport ships. And the system is under control of the UEE.
By the way. Yar is an exhausted resource world, and the only population that remains - according to the lore - live on research stations. That can't be a very big population to provide water to.

This also raises the question, if the Government of Yar is maintaining only research stations, then they are doubly incompetent, because they also didn't take into account that the planet was resource drained, and would need to have resources shipped in. Unless someone is blockading the planet, under the noses of the UEE. So, either one of two things have happened. (Applying Occam's razor)

1. The planet Saisei is engaged in a blockade of Yar, with the at least tacit permission of UEE.
or
2. The government of Yar is so incompetent that the UEE itself should step in on behalf of the research scientists that live there. Research scientists after all, are a valuable resource.

 

[Takeiteasy]

There is no war, TEST decided this is our home planet and base of operations, we have to brew our beer using something!

 

[Shadow Reaper]

I think if your point is, someone could just redirect an asteroid for water, it may be helpful to look at the energy for such a thing. I suspect you'll find any useful amount of water requires too much energy to be plausible. Certainly running a fusion reactor for it's by-products is not an answer within any star's lifetime. It would take longer than the age of the universe to create a useful amount of water that way.

Besides, Yar has water. You're presuming weather control is a thing and the lore is that it is not. I think you have made some assumptions that just don't jive with the SC universe. Players are people, not godlings.

 

[Bambooza]

Players are people, not godlings

Well besides @Montoya

 

[Vavrik]

I think if your point is, someone could just redirect an asteroid for water, it may be helpful to look at the energy for such a thing. I suspect you'll find any useful amount of water requires too much energy to be plausible. Certainly running a fusion reactor for it's by-products is not an answer within any star's lifetime. It would take longer than the age of the universe to create a useful amount of water that way.

Besides, Yar has water. You're presuming weather control is a thing and the lore is that it is not. I think you have made some assumptions that just don't jive with the SC universe. Players are people, not godlings.

Sure, but that's not what my point is. I was pointing out that the story doesn't jive with either science, nor the game's own lore. Even if you discount science totally, the dots simply do not connect.

 

[Shadow Reaper]

Yes well, maybe the loremasters are planning to steal from Dune and have a subterranean ocean that is uncovered? Who knows?

The simplest way to add water is open a wormhole inside Venus' atmosphere and route it to wherever you need it, like Mars. We could do that. . .

 

[Phantomoftruth]

I'm all for helping Yar with water by delivering asteroids. Does SC have a Variable Gravity Well Generator yet?

 

[Vavrik]

I'm all for helping Yar with water by delivering asteroids. Does SC have a Variable Gravity Well Generator yet?

Perhaps. Did you ever notice that when you engage your ship's quantum drive, that your field of vision changes very quickly and very dramatically? Everything kind of compresses. Also you don't become a red stain on the back wall of your cockpit.

The only thing I know of that works in Newtonian physics (i.e. Inertial physics or Mechanics), is artificial singularities. They'd have to be somewhere in the range of several hundred thousand gravities, but as it happens the top speed of 20% of the speed of light for quantum drive makes sense in Newtonian physics. First, you wouldn't notice any relativistic effects at that speed. Nor would you feel any inertia, since you and your ship would be both in free fall in the same gravitational field. You'd also consume fuel as you travel, since the vacuum of space isn't a complete vacuum. Sound kind of familiar?

Anyhow, if you can control that kind of artificial singularity, that you can accelerate a ship to 20% the speed of light, then you can also theoretically pull something like an asteroid or comet around with one too. There is no game mechanic for that at the moment. We really don't need a whole lot of more-massive-than-Chicxulub scale events here though, so if you'd be so kind as to just park it in orbit?

 

[Gabgrave]

Reminds me of the Tank Girl movie, where they used water extractors on humans.

Honestly though, water is a constant resource as pointed above, since if you drink it, you piss, sweat or bleed and it returns to the air. if the desertification is causing the air to dry up there must be something sucking all the moisture and storing it. Also, the lore is lacking in describing what happened to all the fauna and flora, those would be the first to be affected by the change in water density, and also the first source of fluids for the inhabitants. Otherwise, there's a hundred solutions ready to be used just thinking about all the movies and novels humans have written to date by the 21st century.

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

The only thing I know of that works in Newtonian physics (i.e. Inertial physics or Mechanics), is artificial singularities.

Now this is a question I have long wondered: Will gravity effect inertia in real life? Or are they two unrelated forces meaning even if you use gravity to counteract inertia the energy contained in inertia may not be totally accounted for by gravity leaving undesired side-effects, like if you convert electrical energy to sound energy you get a bit of heat energy too?

Basically, even if you pull left with grav while turning right will inertia still cause you to feel the G effect? We call G-Forces caused by sudden movements G forces but they are not caused by gravity, they are caused by inertia... Perhaps pulling on people with tractor beams would have as good an effect?

EDIT - Thinking about this, throwing a ball in the air gives the ball kinetic energy which bleeds off in to Potential energy which when it reaches equilibrium has the ball in-between traveling upwards and falling downwards... Perhaps we don't need Gravity, we need Potential Energy storage....

 

[DarthMatter]

I would have ignored this but the article struck me as really odd that in 2947 they don't know that Oxygen is the third most common element in the universe, and Hydrogen is the first - and Oxygen's primary source in the universe is in the form of molecules of water. A star is a fusion reaction, and because of the way fusion reactions work, Hydrogen is more abundant than Oxygen but the 4 most abundant resources in the universe (our galaxy included) are:

1. Hydrogen
2. Helium
3. Oxygen
4. Carbon

Comets average somewhere between 60 and 80% water, and average size is around 10Km diameter. It's true that their density is about 60% of liquid water, they are frozen dirty snowballs after all. They're also fairly easy to find. So that's not an ocean worth of water, but its still a pretty good sized lake. This doesn't even take centaurs into consideration. Centaurs are associated with rocky planet formation. These are icy asteroids, that both exist near rocky planets and have an average diameter of about 250Km.

Now, since Stars are gigantic fusion reactors - and our ships are powered by small fusion reactors ... and MISC is on the very next planet, it shouldn't be too hard to find a handy dandy factory for the lower elements, like Hydrogen, Oxygen in 2947. Just sit there with your engine running, and collect the by product. Quite honestly, the exhaust should be mostly helium, and water and carbon dioxide because the exhaust is hot and would combust in the presence of the oxygen.

As previously pointed out: Making anything atom by atom (which making water from fusion-byproduct) is not practical. We have the technology today to create paper molecule by molecule, but it would take years (can't find the source with the exact number). Compared to that, fusion would be a lot quicker, but no way near anything a single adult would need on a daily basis (given how many reaction is needed to take place and how much energy you get out from a single nuclear reaction).

Even if oxygen is 3:d most common, it is still no way near as common as the two above (numbers for the Milky way galaxy:

). And most of that is not easily accessible, drifting in gigantic diluted clouds or trapped in compounds.

And oxygen is hard to find in usable forms. It may be 3:d most common element, but that doesn't necessarily make it usable. We have a lot of carbon on Earth, but not all of it is usable as fuel. It has to be burned as coal or oil (or similar) to be usable in that regard. Burning diamonds is not helpful (even if de Beers didn't inflate the prices due to their monopoly).

Water would be able to be found on comets and space-rocks in (probably) all star-systems, but the trick is getting it from there to a planet. It's not like you can take a pick-axe, jump on a ship and go out to a rock and start to "mine water/ice". Comets spew out a lot of water ("almost 100,000,000 kg per day around perihelion"/when closest to the Sun - ESA, Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet) among dust and other contaminants. If it was only water, it would probably be fine, but because of the contaminants (which can be anything from small molecules to complex biological molecules) and the danger small particles at high speeds in space produces, and the logistics of getting a ship capable of that and the logistics of getting it to a suitable comet... it doesn't look too good.

 

[Shadow Reaper]

Now this is a question I have long wondered: Will gravity effect inertia in real life?

Mach's Principle (MP) was named by Albert Einstein when he was working on his General Theory of Relativity (GR). MP claims that the quality of all mass that we call "inertia"--what makes matter have mass--is the consequence of the universe's gravity field. So in this theory, gravity causes inertia. Einstein's GR is consistent with Mach's Principle, but not contingent upon it.

We call G-Forces caused by sudden movements G forces but they are not caused by gravity, they are caused by inertia...

General Relativity is based upon Einstein's Equivalence Principle (EEP) which states that gravitational mass and inertial mass are always the same, because they are in fact the same thing. GR stipulates that there can never arise a situation where gravitational mass and inertial mass will be different.

GR is the reigning scientific paradigm for all things gravity related, and so far as I am aware it has been validated thousands of times and yet never been shown to be wrong in a single instance. One would need to have the strongest kinds of reasons to propose it is wrong.

Mach's Principle is the basis for the only plausible propellantless propulsion scheme I have ever encountered, that of Dr. James F. Woodward at Cal. State Fullerton. His theory also makes wormhole generators a possibility. Very cool stuff. I think the team at Fullerton just landed their second NIAC grant. Lets hope they get good results.

 

[Phantomoftruth]

I only meant that a finely tuned gravity well at the right place could act as a redirector of the comets/asteroids for delivery to Yar. that they land with some force only spreads the wealth of the body so directed. :)

 

[Shadow Reaper]

That was proposed by Dr. Robert Baker a little over a decade ago. His scheme was to focus a pair of High Frequency Gravity Wave generators at a location and cause them to constructively interfere in order to generate a synthetic singularity, toward which the ship the generators were mounted on would then fall, producing propellantless transport in space. Trouble was he was off by 44 orders of magnitude in the effects he needed for propulsion. That didn't stop CIA from pawning Baker's nonsense off on the Chinese who then funded it for years and with millions.

Such jokers at CIA.