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 | Re: Why didn't the colonists do a runner? | |
| Posted By: SiliconDream =PN= | Date: 2/4/02 12:04 p.m. |
| In Response To: Re: Why didn't the colonists do a runner? (darky) : Yeah, but we're talking a few kilograms here! A kilogram of nuclear material will run a satellite like Voyager for decades or centuries, but those satellites aren't mile-wide, constantly accelerating spaceships with thousands of crewmen. :-) Loren Petrich kindly calculated the kinetic energy per unit mass of the Marathon as .0008 c^2. Now, the energy released per unit mass of hydrogen in idealized nuclear fusion is .006 c^2; that means you'd need a hydrogen tank 1/7 the mass of the Marathon to generate the necessary energy. In addition, remember that the lighter objects in an interaction almost always leave with more of the kinetic energy (because momentum's distributed evenly, and kinetic energy is momentum squared divided by mass), so the majority of the energy will be lost in the exhaust. That means you'll need a LOT more hydrogen--over ten times more--to make up for that energy loss. Plus, of course, you need to power the ship's internal functions. Now it's not as bleak as all that, because the Marathon is a ramscoop, designed to pick up hydrogen in flight and use it for power. (This provides another way the Pfhor might track it, btw...by the faint "trail" of hydrogenless space it leaves behind.) But ramscoops only work once they're already moving at a good fraction of lightspeed, so most of the voyage either way would require an internal fuel source. Again, maybe they could crack a few thousand tons of hydrogen from water down on the colony planet and send it up...but that's certainly a non-trivial task and, heck, maybe that's what they were spending months doing when the Pfhor arrived. :-) : On the contrary, I would have thought it to be quite easy, except maybe in
Thing is, the rest of the ship's got a temperature a hundred times higher than the stasis chambers. That's got to introduce some difficulty right there...imagine trying to keep your ice cream at just the right temperature in a thermos immersed in molten iron. :-) Cryo stuff is also tricky because of the reactions that can occur. Icing, for one thing...if a small particle of ice forms anywhere in a human in stasis (or enters externally), it'll cause all the supercooled water to freeze in seconds, and then the human dies. Or if part of the body is a few degrees warmer than the rest, you get a difference in metabolic rates that can lead to nasty buildups of waste products and deficiencies in nutrients. It's a sensitive situation, I would think. Beyond this, active humans can take care of themselves to some degree. If the oxygen suddenly cuts out and the temperature climbs to 120, the active crew can put on respirators and sweat...if all else fails, they can suit up and/or flee to another area of the ship. But the poor crewsicles can't even complain. Nor can they heal, so minor long-term effects--like low-level ambient radiation, say--can end up doing horrible amounts of damage. All this is speculation, of course. All we know is that when Durandal said "Help me fight Pfhor, or I'll stick you back in the stasis tanks for a while," all the Bobs opted to fight Pfhor. :-) : One more thing, though: why didn't they build some nuclear bunkers? Maybe they did... the Pfhor "nuked the colony down to bedrock." --SiliconDream | |
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