Science fiction purports to be based on science. I hate to tell you this, but a lot of SF is as close to science and math as Taco Bell is to authentic Mexican cuisine.
I revelled and still revel in mass ratios and scale heights, albedos and exhaust velocities, evolutionary biology and world history. (I’m not the only one. Big wave to my homies out there.) So…as much as I love SF, I’m constantly running head-on into settings that could just not work the way the author imagines. My SOD (suspension of disbelief) is motoring along merrily and suddenly, bang! Dead in its tracks. Perhaps you can understand now why so many of my reviews grumble about worldbuilding.
Teen me had no net, no Wikipedia. It was dead-tree books or nothing. Teen me also had his father’s library card and could access the University of Waterloo libraries. (In retrospect, I wonder that the library staff let me do this. I mean, it’s kinda odd that an obvious teenager had a tenured professor’s library privileges1. Thanks staff!)
What was I reading? Books like Stephen Dole’s Habitable Planets for Man, and Cole and Cox’s Islands in Space. Fond memories. But I’ve got to admit, the stuff that’s available online, today, free, is way, way better and bigger than the resources that seemed so wonderful forty years ago.
All of this is an extended prologue to a recommendation for a fantastic online resource for the budding spaceflight fan: Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets.
His site was initially inspired by the works of authors like Clarke and Heinlein, not to mention Jerry Pournelle’s “Those Pesky Belters and Their Torchships.” He wanted to supply budding SF authors (and fans) with the info they needed to keep the necessary suspension of disbelief alive. He planned a one-stop site where authors could find conveniently organized information that life (and declining public library funds) had denied them.
Chung started the site way back in the 1990s, when the internet was a collection of coal-fired VT100s connected by lengths of frayed twine. His initial efforts were rather humble. But one has to start somewhere.
Today, however…well: The site map looks like this:
Atomic Rockets is my go-to resource when I have forgotten some bit of rocket-related science, and when I need to learn more than I actually do.
Caveat emptor: actual rocket science differs from the plot-convenient SF variety with which you may be familiar. Many stock plots are impossible if you hew to the realm of actual possibility2. But (to my way of thinking at least) the effort you put into learning how things work will give your fiction a depth that using time-worn implausible tropes will not. If you have ambitions of writing hard SF and your work has rockets, consider perusing Atomic Rockets.
If you are a reader, and you crave rocket-science SF, Atomic Rockets offers a handy and convenient list. Two lists, actually: books that could have been inspired by Atomic Rockets and ones that actually were. Enjoy.
***
This week, Atomic Rockets founder Winchell “Nyrath” Chung announced via Twitter that he’s been hospitalized with a serious illness and is in the process of planning for the continued curation of the site. This has led to an outpouring of support and tributes on Twitter—if his work has helped or impacted yours, or your enjoyment of SF, please consider reaching out.
An earlier version of this article originally appeared in May 2019.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Perhaps I had an air of remarkable maturity for my age. Or perhaps I was not the only prof’s kid using their parent’s card. These days, I am sometimes mistaken for faculty by students. It seems almost rude of me not to reward this by booking an unused room to expound to the student body on various subjects. Apparently as long as I don’t claim to offer course credit, this doesn’t break any rules.
[2]I would cite stealth in space as the canonical “no, you can’t do that.” But as someone or other once said “It is a truth universally acknowledged that any online discussion that begins by pointing out why stealth in space is impossible will rapidly turn into a thread focusing on schemes whereby stealth in space might be achieved.” As proof I offer the comment thread to come…
Oh, wow. Um … this discussion is really empty. Someone ought to step in and be first, I guess?
There once was a spaceship they wanted to hide
They wanted to cloak their really sweet ride.
So they tried to use fins to distribute the heat
but the infrared images looked really neat.
So they tried using heat sinks only to find
they were visible to sensors of every kind.
They tried reflective camo only to see
that made their image bigger than it ought to be.
Because stealth in space is futile to try.
You cannot spy.
(The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly)
“Sundiver” by David Brin had a clever idea for getting rid of excess heat. Sink the excess heat into the generation of a laser and then direct said laser away from the ship. Granted, in the novel, the characters didn’t use it for stealth, but as a way to deal with overwhelming heat when sending spacecraft into the sun.
From the .pdf linked: “F = Thrust (Newtons or kg m/sec)”
If F = ma, is that not kilogram-meters per second squared?
@2 Although I can’t find anything but Usenet discussions about it, my understanding is that the Refrigerator Laser Will Not Work As It Was Written, due to entropy concerns.
Now, you may be able to use Really Good Shielding around your thermal radiators to make sure that you only radiate in a particular direction which will not be seen by your enemy. But using heat to run a laser … generates more heat.
You asked for it, so:
would it be possible to have some sort of stealth from a specific direction?
Assume you are traveling toward an enemy’s known location. you’ve managed to hide your acceleration phase behind the bulk of a planet and are at the coasting phase and won’t need to turn on the drive for some time. say you’re planning a flyby of the enemy’s planet/station/whatever, or just want to delay your detection until the last possible moment. Your ship is manned so it’s radiating at about 300K. you can still radiate heat elsewhere but need to hide any radiation above background in a cone, say, 30 degrees across pointing forward. Is that possible?
Best wishes to Winchell Chung. Atomic Rockets is an invaluable site, and I hope both it and its creator continue to thrive.
My mother worked as an acquisitions librarian for the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire. So not only did teenage me have access to her ID for library books, I got to see every new book the day they arrived and had first dibs on the best of them.
As well, I’ll agree with CLB & send “Positive Waves, Man” to Winchell Chung and Atomic Rockets which has been some of the most enjoyable deep diving reading since the days of that University library in the 70s & 80s.
I’ve thought a lot about stealth in the context of Star Trek (which is obviously not real science but…)
I think you could get a practical form of stealthiness but shutting off the active sensors. Per the tech manuals, the Enterprise radiates terawatts of energy for active sensors, a lot of which is FTL. So entering a system, the ship is a lighthouse to anyone looking. If you shut off the active and FTL sensors and relied on passive sensors, your enemies could detect your heat signature in normal space, but there would be a time lag you could exploit.
You could then potentially enhance your own sensor capability by using drone probes positioned several light-seconds away from the ship, that used active FTL sensors to locate the enemy, and transmit the data to the mothership via a non-directional encrypted subspace signal. Enemies would know the mothership was nearby, but their ability to detect it would be time-lagged if it is only radiating energy in realspace, while the Enterprise would still have FTL detection of the enemy. (Something like WSKRS in Seaquest DSV were supposed to be.). The enemy could use FTL sensors to sweep for “stealth-like” ships, but this would still be slower than if the target was also actively searching. (Compare two people in the dark trying to find each other with flashlights, and then one person turns their flashlight off.)
How about, y’know, just trying not to make enemies? Then you wouldn’t have to hide from them. Unless you wanted to play hide and seek… or throw them a surprise party…
This site is invaluable for those who want their spacecraft to behave with at least a modicum of plausibility. I have never found another source that packs so much useful information in one place. Highly recommended.
A refrigeration laser as described in Sundiver will not work, but an external laser can be used for refrigeration, by anti-Stokes scattering. In this process, low entropy laser light interacts with a solid and is scattered as higher entropy light with a larger spread of wavelengths and directions. Done properly this can cool down the object.
While of dubious utility for stealth, this could be useful for making a very high power/mass ratio beam powered spaceship. Not only could the beam power the ship, but (waves hands sufficiently) it could also keep it from melting.
The situations in which stealth in space can work:
1. The hunter is not hunting. Whether they are pre-technological, myopic, innately incurious or otherwise, those who are not looking will not find you.
2. You know exactly where all of their sensors are, and their sensors have an implausibly large nuimber of blind spots. Basic incompetence.
3. There’s a ridiculously large number of decoys, natural or otherwise. If Star Wars-density asteroid fields could exist, for example — which they could, shortly after the destruction of a planetoid — and they were relatively hot — you could pose as a chunk of rock as long as you didn’t accelerate. This isn’t really stealth, because they can see you, but they might not be able to act on it.
4. They can see you, but for some reason they are ignoring you. Have a spy on the inside who has cinematic hacking skills? Again, not actually stealth. Similarly, impersonating a chunk of asteroid or hitching a ride on a comet core is a disguise, not stealth. Impersonating a moon is a felony in most jurisdictions.
5. Some things are just too small to detect until it’s too late. If you can fit a nanotech payload in a dust grain, it can hide for a very long time. Is it of any use? I don’t know, but it does count as hiding in space.
@12/-dsr-: “Similarly, impersonating a chunk of asteroid or hitching a ride on a comet core is a disguise, not stealth.”
Oh, I don’t know. It sounds to me like following the first rule of not being seen: not to stand up.
More seriously, I guess you’re using “stealth” in the technological or military sense, or something? Because hiding behind or within something or impersonating something definitely qualify as stealth as I understand the word. In the general sense, the word just means being clandestine, doing something secretly or in concealment. It originally meant the act of stealing.
What? Taco Bell is a lot closer than that!
To begin with, the laws of the universe will not stop you from making a Taco Bell taco in Mexico. Good sense and better alternatives might, but when did those ever stop anyone?
I am curating a Google Doc of people sending their appreciation of Winchell’s work — Winch is reading it a few times each day.
Email me (link is in my name) if you’d like the URL to add your own appreciation. It’s currently at 51 pages and still growing….
@14/Ellyne: Well, if Google Maps is to be believed, there are authentic Mexican restaurants less than two miles from my local Taco Bell. That’s pretty close.
Ah yes, the “Sure flashlights work in practice. But how do they work in practice?” defense of why stealth in space is impossible.
Here are my collected findings on stealth in space: http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2018/04/permanent-and-perfect-stealth-in-space.html
Ah that second ‘practice’ should be ‘theory’, of course:
Ah yes, the “Sure flashlights work in practice. But how do they work in theory?” defense of why stealth in space is impossible.
On a related note, even the passage of several decades hasn’t done much to develop the sections on life support. Why are people still talking about stealth when they should really be talking about why ‘shrimp & algae’ just don’t cut it, and what are the current developments in the field? IMHO, that is _the_ outstanding problem to an extended presence of humans in space. And we don’t seem to be any nearer to a solution than we were twenty years ago.
G. C. Edmondson’s 1980 The Man Who Corrupted Earth is a bit unusual for space industrialization adventures of its vintage that it acknowledges unsolved issues in deep space life support, proposes solutions, and then has the solutions fail abjectly in the field. It’s not, alas, a particularly good book but that aspect was unusual.
I remember reading years ago a SF story (can’t remember author or title) in which a ship needed to cover a great distance but didn’t have enough fuel. Their solution? To match velocities with an asteroid, and ride the asteroid until they were close to their destination!
I still haven’t figured out how the author thought you could save fuel that way, unless you just let the asteroid splat into you and change your velocity that way (not recommended). Talk about failing to suspend disbelief.
I’m trying to dredge up from memory any stories where state-of-the-art life support is a key background item. About the only ones I can think of are the Oakie stories. The space folk are almost — but not quite — independent of planetary cultures because hard radiation has a deplorable tendency to make whatever comes out of the city’s vats either inedible, unbreathable, or both. I suspect Blish of hand-waving this dependency, but OTOH, the cities we saw were sometimes centuries between landfall, which in-novel seemed to be more than enough time for a deleterious mutation to spread through the crops. In the world of Atomic Rockets, or for that matter, ours, I’d guess that missions with closed-loop recycling lasting five to ten years would count for ‘close enough’.
The circumlunar habitats in Sterling’s Shaper/Mechanist stories had on-going problems with their artificial ecosystems going haywire.
@25 – Life support plays an important role in Bujold’s Ethan of Athos
Aha! Got another one, sort of: Farmer in the Sky. Yes I know, not mobile, but I suspect that life support failure during a long-term mission is both a more realistic and interesting (IMHO, I grew up on a farm) idea to hang a story on. Further, Charles Stross once averred that the minimum number of crew for a generation-type interstellar ship would be on the order of 50,000,000. I’d go that one further and say that the maximum duration for any mission into tran-Martian space would be limited by the mass of the life support system along with the number of crew and crew specialists to maintain it. Biosphere II … In Space! would be very, very bad. At least, as seen by the in-story characters. Plus, you could go the entire gamut from ‘lifeboat ethics’ to ‘all for one and one for all’. A win-win for Libertarians and everybody else!
Then there’s the story in the Venus Equilateral collection, where a new manager comes aboard the eponymous communication station, finds a large space filled with ‘weeds’ and orders them thrown out. And nobody realises what’s up until the plucky radio engineers on the station notice that they’re feeling groggy and headache-y and start to wonder why.
And I wrote the Three Generations Rule as a way to justify using planets for anything; it was based off of a mixture of reading ibn Khaldun’s observations on Al Andalus and the nature of petty monarchies, and being the public affairs reporter working the city planning beat.
TL;DR: Somewhere within 3 generations, an independent city-state in space will have someone cut enough corners to save their pet part of the budget that an artificial life support system will have an evacuation event, or, if there’s no place to evacuate to, a die-off event.
Having an external organizational entity pump resources into this removes the “independent city state” variable, and slows down the rate of decay.
And we can see how three generations of complacency works on things people actively care about a lot (like money, and political power) with current and recent events…
CLB said,
” How about, y’know, just trying not to make enemies? Then you wouldn’t have to hide from them. Unless you wanted to play hide and seek… or throw them a surprise party…”
Problem is, once you are a spacefaring species, every other spacefaring species is a direct competitor for vital resources. If we ignore conflicts over political ideology*, most if not all wars and conflicts on Earth have been related to competition for vital resources—arable land, water sources, fossil fuels, access to warm water ports, precious metals, etc. It all boils down to survival of the fittest, the group that grabs the most resources has the best chance of perpetuating its existence.
I tend to think that space is so big that humans will not be bumping up against other intelligent spacefaring life, and we will end up competing amongst ourselves like we always have (something like Dune). But if we are really going to be cheek to jowl with dozens of other intelligent alien species, I expect we will find ourselves fighting for our survival against more advanced species who want our sun’s energy or our biosphere.**
*One could argue that even purely ideological conflicts are about a scarce resource—believers.
**Unless we can invent replicators that operate off zero-point energy and have a truly post-scarcity economy, which I doubt.
@31/Thomas: “Problem is, once you are a spacefaring species, every other spacefaring species is a direct competitor for vital resources.”
I was making a joke, obviously, but just to play along…
Would they really be competitors? Space is chock full of vital resources. The Main Asteroid Belt alone contains thousands of times as much mineral wealth as you could ever extract from the Earth’s crust even if you strip-mined it to the core, and the outer moons, Kuiper Belt, etc. contain a vast wealth of water and CHON. As far as power goes, you’ve got billions of ginormous fusion reactors just floating in space and giving vast amounts of energy away for free. Scarcity is a function of being stuck on one planet. Oh, and there’s also a whole lot of elbow room, so it’s easy to stay out of each other’s way.
If anything, I don’t see any reason why different alien species would need to fight over anything. The trope of aliens coming to Earth to steal our water, minerals, or territory is absurd for the aforementioned reasons. If they need food, any technology sophisticated enough for interstellar travel should be sophisticated enough for 3D bioprinting from raw CHON resources — plus you’d pretty much need a post-scarcity economy and technology to be able to harness the resources for interstellar travel.
The only basis for ascribing value to anything from alien worlds is its exotic nature, like the way Earth traders got rich trading in spices and textiles and foodstuffs from distant lands. You could replicate any such thing easily enough, but an authentic alien origin could make it valuable. (This is the basis of the interstellar economy of the Nocturne League in my Analog story “Twilight’s Captives,” along with trade in personal skills and expertise; even in a post-scarcity economy, a person’s time and attention is a finite resource that would carry monetary value.) Of course, people have fought wars over control of the trade in tea, spices, and such, but they’ve also traded peacefully for them.
ChristopherLBennet @@@@@ 32
The Main Asteroid Belt alone contains thousands of times as much mineral wealth as you could ever extract from the Earth’s crust even if you strip-mined it to the core
The mass of the main belt (roughly 2 or 3 x 10^21 kg) is only about 10% of the mass of the Earth’s crust (roughly 3 x 10^22 kg), so that’s not really a true statement, except possibly for certain siderophile elements that are strongly depleted from the Earth’s crust and sequestered in the core (e.g., iridium).
Of course, stuff in asteroids, Kuiper Belt objects, etc. has the additional advantage of not needing lots of energy to haul it up out of the gravity well of a massive planet, like you do if you’re trying to get stuff from the Earth out to somewhere else in space.
That said, stuff in an asteroid is not necessary energetically close to possible destinations.
ToughSFMatterbeam @@@@@ 18:
Here are my collected findings on stealth in space…
I’m afraid there are a number of problems with that web page, starting with your underestimation of the actual backgrounds in space (you’re assuming everyone is in intergalactic space) and the very confused (and erroneous) discussion of fields of view. (E.g., “The cancelled NASA WFIRST, or ‘Wide’ Field Infrared Survey Telescope, only had a 2.5 arcsecond field of view, which works out to about half a millionth of a square degree.” — First, it isn’t cancelled (it’s now known as the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, and is scheduled for launch in 2025). Second, the field of view of its imager is slightly more than half a degree on a side, for an angular area of 0.28 square degrees. Third, the field of view of the instrument is irrelevant for calculations of detectability anyway.)
@24 That would be Pioneer by Robert Zimmerman, and, really, he should have known better.
Robert Forward came up with a way to use passing bodies for propulsion. His characters used harpoons and lengthy cables to briefly couple to Saturn’s moons…
Magical cloaking field always works for me!
PeterErwin @35
Let’s discuss this further!
Send me an email at toughsfmatterbeam gmail.com or a message on twitter at ToughSF