Galactical Events

[Jeanway 0]

If we had the capabilities, what events could we change? And how? For instance, a meteor heading for Earth. How would we change it's course? Cloud of radiation, an anomaly, affecting orbits of planets. Xindi type weapon threat. Wormholes sucking planets in? Disturbances in Time. Space junk getting sucked into intake manifolds. Too much plasma venting, pollution of space, just areas not all of space, encapsulize. Space pirates. Mid space collision Insurance :P who'd collect?

[Jeanway 0]

Does anyone know about Nuclear Propulsion?

[nik 0]

If we had the capabilities, what events could we change? And how? For instance, a meteor heading for Earth.  How would we change it's course? Cloud of radiation, an anomaly, affecting orbits of planets. Xindi type weapon threat. Wormholes sucking planets in? Disturbances in Time. Space junk getting sucked into intake manifolds. Too much plasma venting, pollution of space, just areas not all of space, encapsulize. Space pirates. Mid space collision Insurance who'd collect? :P

For over 99% of meteors heading towards the Earth, we really don't need to worry; our atmosphere does a good job of protecting us from those. However, I bet you're talking about the big ones such as the speculated meteor that causes the pre-Camrian extinction. This has been the subject of some (very poorly thought out) movies. Are we currently capable of changing the course of a meteor? Probably not. Are we capable of developing that technology? Probably. Space junk is actually very real problem for the astronauts - in fact, it may be what caused the latest space shuttle accident (a tiny piece of junk destroying heat shielding while in orbit).

 

Nuclear Propulsion? Do you mean the steam turbines currently used in nuclear naval vessels? I bet the good Ensign Jim Phaserman knows about that. He actually has a really nice thread going on right now you can ask him.

 

If you are referring to the hypothetical Orion project, that involves essentially

using nothing more than nuclear weapons to propel a rocket.

[Jeanway 0]

Yes, the Orion Project. I read something about this somewhere. I was wondering about it. If we had WARP capabilities would this be just an added momentary jump? Or is is comperable to Warp speed?

[nik 0]

If humans used current technology to build the Orion rocket, I don't think it would

ever get near to the speed of light. It might get to 1% of the speed of light if it ran

for a long time. I've never done the calculation, but it would be interesting to find out how much energy it takes to propel a rocket (of average size) to the 1%, 10%, 50%+ of the speed of light, and see if the planet has that much energy stored in

thermonuclear warheads.

[WEAREBORG4102 0]

Orion theoretically can go up to 10% but that's theoretical..

[Jeanway 0]

So how would this device be detonated? Dropped , shot, propelled away from the ship? Think nik, think!

[WEAREBORG4102 0]

propelled

[nik 0]

Here's an interesting notation. Let's assume that we want to use nuclear "bombs" to

propel a small craft, say the size of the space shuttle (100 metric tonnes empty). Getting it to the 10% of the speed of light would require about 11000 Megatons of

energy from the reaction. That assumes that ALL of the momentum goes to forward propulsion, which it probably would not (in fact, in the case of currently speculated

Orion designs, I would expect no more than 70% efficiency, more like 50% or less).

Currently, the planet earth has about 18000 Megatons of nuclear warhead capacity.

[Jeanway 0]

What if it was detonated in a giant megaphone?