Landers and OTVs

[SKyOdin]

Space Elevators are far too superior of a means of getting goods into space over traditional rockets for people to not try building them in a setting like yours. I don't think them being a target for attack is too big of an issue. For one thing, a space elevator is very, very big. Even more importantly, few people would have much to gain from destroying one. It would be much more effective for someone to try seizing it in order to control the transportation of goods from the surface to space. If someone did want to destroy a space elevator, it would be more for the purpose of dropping its immense mass on the planet and causing mass devastation than simply cutting off supplies and transportation.

I would actually recommend having an orbital elevator simply to have the question of "who controls it?" being an important political issue.

There are quite a few space elevator designs out there. I am mostly familiar with the designs from anime series like Gundam 00 and Zone of the Enders, but there are probably more I haven't seen.

EDIT: BTW, does your setting just have people living planetside, or does it have orbiting space colonies as well?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Space Elevators are far too superior of a means of getting goods into space over traditional rockets for people to not try building them in a setting like yours. I don't think them being a target for attack is too big of an issue. For one thing, a space elevator is very, very big. Even more importantly, few people would have much to gain from destroying one. It would be much more effective for someone to try seizing it in order to control the transportation of goods from the surface to space. If someone did want to destroy a space elevator, it would be more for the purpose of dropping its immense mass on the planet and causing mass devastation than simply cutting off supplies and transportation.

I would actually recommend having an orbital elevator simply to have the question of "who controls it?" being an important political issue.

Ben Bova thinks along such lines as well...and the aftermath of the attack in his book is waaaaay cool.

 

[garrowolf]

Okay, Okay! I give up! You guys win! I'll put in space elevators!

I'm thinking there will still be some OTVs simply to get cargo from lower geosynchronous orbit to various space stations. Now I am thinking that I will have a few on Earth and one or two on Mars. They would also be common for back and forth on Luna.

I was thinking about a variant on Venus that would slowly drain the atmosphere. Ships would come to the elevator station and pump in a load of chemicals to process and make use of. It would lower the density of the atmosphere so that it could be eventually terraformed and it would allow people a chance to mine the planet without cooking so quickly after it cools the planet down.

I was thinking of sort of the opposite for Jupiter. Basically send a tether down in Jupiter from a ship and collect samples and send probes down to the end of the tether.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Jupiter and other gaseous bodies could be sources for fuels and reagents. Cloud-mining, if you will.

 

[garrowolf]

Well I want the cloud mining on Jupiter to come in during the next Tech level - the Gravitic Age. Basically their work on Jupiter would be too hampered by the gravity so until they can control that they are just pecking at it.

 

[SKyOdin]

Well I want the cloud mining on Jupiter to come in during the next Tech level - the Gravitic Age. Basically their work on Jupiter would be too hampered by the gravity so until they can control that they are just pecking at it.

I am not sure that is a good idea. Jupiter is the best source of fuel for fusion energy in the solar system. A society that spans multiple planets with a massive demand for fusion energy might not have much choice but to try. Definitely no Star Wars style floating cloud cities, but there might be fairly stable large scale operations based out of orbiting space stations. I am not certain if anyone has ever come up with any designs for it or not yet though. I think I might check.

As a whole though, Jupiter and its moons are the single greatest source of natural resources in the solar system. I have done a lot of campaign planning along similar lines to yours, and I have often seen Jupiter as undergoing a gold rush of sorts: full of miners seeking to strike it rich and very little order. Since Jupiter and its local space is so big, it would be very difficult for anyone to really control it easily.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

Jupiter's Radiation Belt

 

[SKyOdin]

Yeah, Jupiter's radiation belt is an issue. After my last post, I was looking up on some of this stuff again, and I was reminded of it. I don't think radiation itself is an insurmountable issue to a Fusion age civilization though. However, I will admit that with their weaker magnetic fields and gravity, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus are probably better suited to gas mining than Jupiter.

 

[garrowolf]

Well part of the point of this setting is what happens if you have a slower technological expansion rate. Most settings throw in an FTL system very early on. I wanted to create an expansion not based on finding some technology or having it given to us.

I am going to have a Gravitic Age after the Fusion Age as a logical extension of the same setting. Basically the Main Belt will have most of the population of humanity in it by that point. Each sector will have 8 to 10 asteroid cities the population of New York or greater. There are 360 sector radii and each sector is one AU deep. The Main Belt starts at about 2 AU and goes out to 4 AU so you are talking about 720 sectors just in the Main Belt of people. Then Earth and Mars will be terraformed (Well Earth will be repaired) and Venus will be close to terraformed (stripped of the extra atmosphere). Jupiter by that point will have a major population as well as ones around Saturn and the other outer planets.

The ships will have have accelerations of up to 300 gravities and we will have serious mining of the Kupier Belt. Plus I would have large gardens and antimatter generators around the Sun. I would also have gravitic pulse communications for high speed but limited information signals.

But I need to finish the Fusion Age first.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

It just occurred to me last night: the Space Elevator attack may not have been in Bova's series. There is another very good Fusion Age series of books written by Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars and a short story collection called The Martians.

The books cover about 200 or so years of exploration and terraforming of Mars.