Space Core

What’s your favorite thing about space? Mine is space.

What's really weird, is that the Space Core is voiced by Nolan North, who also voices Romeo in ODST. Which is odd, as he's a white dude from New Haven, Connecticut, and Romeo sounds like, well, someone whose real name is Kojo Agu, born in a West African colony in orbit of 23 Librae (assuming it speaks American English).

• The gent who runs Swords and Space, link over there on the right, was saying (when I was talking about how a realistic spaceship would tend to be long and thin, to maximize distance from the engine without increasing the mass), that you'd probably only need that for engines that are radioactive. But, unfortunately, virtually all decent spaceship engines are highly radioactive—if some nuclear reaction isn't taking place, the rocket takes days just to reach the moon. Yes, the moon is further away than any point on Earth—9.6 circumnavigations of the globe, to be precise—but that's a hop-skip-and-a-jump by space standards.
  
  There is one decent exception, though it has its own little oddities. Namely, the Orion rocket—a nuclear bomb, any kind, igniting plasma and pushing against a huge armor plate on the back of the ship—and its cousin, inertial-confinement fusion. Those have a respectable acceleration, maxing out at a sweet 1 meganewton per ton of engine, and exhaust velocities that can give you a healthy cruising speed (c. 5-10% lightspeed), without needing your ship to have the same gas-to-solid ratio as a party balloon. Most of their radiation shielding (called a "shadow shield" in the business, since "shadow" is what we call it when radiation gets blocked) is provided by the rocket-nozzle itself. Since, y' know, it's basically a huge metal wall (or a magnetic force-field, in many ICF designs).
• Interestingly, possibly because it predates the Internet zealotry that will hasten to scrub the world of any challenge to some sacred cow, Alien's scientific flaws are regularly pointed out. But one common complaint is bogus—and this is me talking, I don't even like the thing.
  
  Namely, many people seem to think it's silly the Nostromo only has 7 crewmen. But why? Extra crew is extra mass, both the guy and the stuff to keep him alive, and that is very bad on a spaceship, especially a mining ship, most of whose pushing-power is already spoken for (for the ore). Currently, we're questioning whether you'd even man mining ships at all, and the answer we're coming up with is mostly "no". Even if you do, the consensus is that minimum crew for a spaceship is 3 people, and all three of them would only be on duty at the same time during rocket burns—sometimes only on the iffy things, like docking or landing (if it were a shuttle; I haven't seen the very beginning of Alien in a long while, but I seem to recall the Nostromo uses a lander, so, hey, points for that).
• One real flaw in Alien that seems to be oft-overlooked, is, no spaceship is going to look like that on the inside. Know how big you can be and still crawl around a spaceship terrorizing the inhabitants? We made that movie already, it was called Snakes on a Plane—spaceships are basically airplane cabins on top of nuclear power-plants.
  
  The inanity of the pipes and chains inside the Nostromo is best summed up by Tom Servo, during Space Mutiny: "Back to the rusting septic system of this FUTURISTIC SPACESHIP!"
• Not directly related to space, but related to SETI and xenobiology, Alien(s) and Avatar both raise an interesting issue: why do people think their work is done when they've got halfway-decent spaceships? The ships in Avatar, all forty-seven seconds of them, are rightly praised by hard-SF killjoys like myself...but nobody who didn't sleep through high school Bio praises Pandora.
  
  The Na'vi not matching their ecosystem is the big one. Aside from how everything else on their world is a hexapod, with a different mouth structure, they are just too damn human-looking in general; while I'll be the first to defend roughly man-shaped aliens' plausibility (not just because I use them myself, either), they would absolutely not have the same social signaling-cues. Cameron's much lauded facial-expression mo-cap technology is a detriment to his film; aliens should not emote the same way humans do. Sure, Zoe Saldana tried to shore up the difference by emoting Neytiri like a brain-damaged drug-addict (zing!), but nevertheless.
  
  Another issue is, nothing like Eywa could exist. Sorry, Greenshirts, but science puts paid to the Gaia Hypothesis. That planetary superconsciousness would never evolve, because any lifeform that was immune to it would have a leg up on other species. Sort of like how any political-economy that requires perfect selflessness is doomed to failure, because someone will shirk his duties for personal gain? Yes, just like that, appropriately enough.
• To defend the wrongly accused, again, though, many people think it's stupid that there are explosions on Pandora, when it doesn't have an oxygen atmosphere. Only, you'll get a flame-looking plasma if you set off a hot enough reaction in any atmosphere, even if it's not "fire" strictly defined—you'll basically get what looks like a "fireball" in vacuum, actually. Besides, most chemical explosives (other than FAE ones) include an oxidizer, since in many circumstances (both naval and high-altitude) there may not be sufficient air for the explosives to work quite right.
  
  Besides, is there no oxygen in the atmosphere? Or is there something else, that happens to be toxic? Or something inert, that'll simply suffocate you? There's O₂ bubbles in seawater, you know, but there's also freaking water; that's why fish, who breathe oxygen just like we do, need special equipment (gills) to get it.
• One realistic thing about the spaceships in Halo, that partly redeems their otherwise straight-Hollywood design, is that they have armor plates at a distance from the hulls, since vacuum doesn't transfer force and the initial impact is likely to rob a lot of a projectile's momentum. It's a real part of spacecraft design, although we currently only use it for protecting space stations from meteors; it's called a Whipple shield or standoff shield.
  
  There are several variants, like multi-shock shielding, with multiple layers of plating, with vacuum in between them, or stuffed versions, with a shock-absorbing stuffing (often Kevlar) sandwiched between the rigid plates. It works just as well on bullets as on meteors; one fast-moving object is pretty much the same as another.
• Thought of oxygen and inert gases reminds me, people often take hard-SF sport-spoilage too far, saying, for instance, that aliens and humans couldn't live on each other's planets, since even if the aliens do breathe oxygen, it's probably at a different pressure and concentration.
  
  The minor premise—"even oxygen-breathers will encounter pressures and oxygen-concentrations widely different from their native one"—is true, but since humans recreationally visit oxygen bars and hyperbaric chambers, with oxygen mixes and pressures (respectively) far in excess of the norm, I think we can discount the implied major premise, namely "organisms have a narrow tolerance for atmospheric composition." Then again it probably varies by species, and by things like mass—a bird's much better at using oxygen than you are, but carbon dioxide poisoning will get to a canary long before it gets to you, mostly because of the size difference.
  
  Did you know miners used to call CO₂ poisoning "blackdamp"? It totally sounds like one of those made-up diseases from Skyrim, like Rockjoint or Mindrot—something you might catch from a skeever bite.
• Space, it seems, both is and is not cold. It is cold in terms of temperature, but not in terms of heat (I think I'm putting that right?). As Winchell Chung said, a spark from a campfire is far higher-temperature than the frying pan on the fire, but touching the frying pan is more likely to burn you—because it can transfer a lot more energy to you, and therefore is "hotter". Space is a vacuum, and, though it's 3 Kelvin (or in layman's terms "3° Celsius above 'as cold as anything gets, ever, the very temperature of nonbeing, the chill of the final circle of Dante's hell'"), it can't suck the heat out of an object at anything like a quick rate. Hence why a major design difficulty with spaceships is cooling them—you can only do it by radiative cooling, since there's nothing to convect or conduct the heat away.
  
  Indeed, since most of your space-travel or mine would be in the near vicinity of a star, a bigger problem would be heat, not cold—sunburns are really bad in space, that's why spacesuit visors are big gold mirrorshades and astronaut sunglasses have dead black lenses. And, well, go stand outside in the sun—notice how hot it feels? And that's inside an atmosphere (less of one, for me—my town is at 2100 m above sea level, one of the very few cities in the US where you can get altitude sickness within city limits).

That picture is some twisted modder's addition to Skyrim, a Space Core you can put in your inventory (why you would, I have no idea). But how messed up is it that I can tell the background is in front of Candlehearth Hall, the inn in Windhelm? I always ask the bard-lady there to sing the Dragonborn song (so I'm egotistical, sue me). Except sometimes I ask her to sing "The Age of Aggression", just to rub the Stormcloak capital's face in the fact the Empire put down their rebellion. The fact she's a Dark Elf singing it just makes it that much more awesome (Stormcloaks are a nativist ideology, and Dark Elves in Windhelm live in a ghetto called the Gray Quarter).

I think I've been playing that game too much.