Nobody like Weber for a stern chase full of slashing lasers and flying missiles. And nobody like Weber to drop a multi-page info dump about the physics of hyperspace wormhole physics right in the middle of said tense space battle.
@sudnadja There’s a new installment coming and I have a few other unread books as well, so I am doing a “chronological by timeline” run through the books and shorter works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorverse
@nyrath@FredKiesche One of the things I don't like about much of science fiction set in mid-future timeframes is that it attempts to recreate the age of sail, in space. Space is a different environment than humans have ever dealt with before in warfare - for once, we're not moving though a medium dense enough that motion (and momentum) is dominated by it, yet it isn't all that often that science fiction treats it that way. Nearly everyone has some form of generated gravity because, I think, they still want an attachment to sea going vessels and warfare standards.
@RogerBW@nyrath@FredKiesche The Revelation Space approach could be taken, if you're referring to generated gravity, with "gravity" being usually present thanks to constant acceleration, though you'd still have periods of time without gravity. When dealing with written fiction though, there shouldn't be quite the resistance to freefall scenes, unless there is a deliberate attempt to maintain the sense of a seagoing ship, I think
@sudnadja
I had fun in The Fallow Orbits (which just finished its serialization on my newsletter) with mediocre acceleration: too much to float or fly about the cabin, not enough to walk. The crew spend weeks crawling like crabs, rolling, waddling on their knees, doing nothing in a dignified way. Ah, the romance of space travel! @RogerBW@nyrath@FredKiesche
I'm with you on that. What enrages me is arranging a spacecraft like a passenger airliner, so that the direction of "down" is 90° to the exhaust direction, instead of in the identical direction.
This started with Flash Gordon, and is common today. Ships are arranged like skyscrapers, everybody!
@nyrath@sudnadja@FredKiesche The Enterprise is a slightly unfair choice: it's not supposed to land, there's an entire ecosystem of tech for avoiding that! Forwards is a bit more problematic (whatever "impulse" is supposed to mean), and the show's always been fairly transparent about that, but forwards isn't up/down in most Trek vessels.
@nyrath@sudnadja@FredKiesche Oh, I know. Just, the gravity vs thrust thing is a pretty significant difference that plenty of shows do enough work on - "splat on takeoff" and "splat on non-trivial thrust" are worth telling apart and the diagram only works for the former when I think we'd both like to see some work on the latter?
(I think the implication in Farscape was just that Moya never really accelerated that hard - but FTL is weirder than usual for TV SF in it)
@nyrath@sudnadja@FredKiesche Oh, it started way before Flash Gordon. Often with science-fictional spaceships that looked more like ornithopters or submarine-helicopters, by people who were somewhat unclear on the concept.
@nyrath@FredKiesche That's one thing I liked about #StarFrontiers , there's no generated gravity and thus ships are designed in the stacked orientation with decks perpendicular to the direction of thrust, which has a slightly more realistic feel (to me).
@nyrath@sudnadja@FredKiesche I try my absolute best to take that into account... and make sure to describe the situation as resembling that of a carousel whenever the ship makes a maneuver involving a quick turn.
The main reason for this orientation is that it's practically necessary for the training copy on Earth. Other spacecraft won't necessarily have the same sort of design priorities, but it's worth remembering - a spacecraft is just one part of an overall system.
@isaackuo@nyrath@FredKiesche the acceleration that the ISS can provide is effectively zero though (a few cm s^-2 or so?) which is not the situation that the mid future sci-fi generally describes. Yes, if the vehicle will never undergo significant acceleration then orientation can be arbitrary, but that’s not the case for vehicles that accelerate at 1 g or so.
What sort of vehicle should accelerate at 1 g or so, though? You get the benefits of the Oberth effect at much lower accelerations, and designing for lower accelerations provides a lot of benefits. You get reduced structural mass - especially for solar arrays and radiators, lower thruster/engine mass, and usefully better specific impulse.
@isaackuo@nyrath@FredKiesche Star Frontiers and Traveller vehicles are all at least 1g, the Revelation Space spacecraft are generally at least 1g, I suppose you could say Known Space spacecraft are usually much more than 1G. "Mid-future" science fiction, to me, means hundreds to thousands of years in the future, but not tens of thousands (that is, not so far as dune, but further than The Martian). You get the benefits of the Oberth effect at any acceleration, but it's best if that acceleration is concentrated where the vehicle is moving the quickest - if you could do 100g for 1 second right at periapsis you might prefer that to 1g for 100s for the 50s around periapsis. I'm curious to see if the internal layout of larger vehicles like (spaceX) Starship will use.
I suppose if you don't care about realistic technology or space navigation, then who cares?
Neither Star Frontiers nor Traveller attempt to use realistic mid future space propulsion technology. They're meant to replicate familiar SF tropes for the purposes of (tabletop) role playing. It's a design decision to include artificial gravity and "horizontal" decks to make things familiar for the players and game master.
@isaackuo@sudnadja@nyrath@FredKiesche If you've got a magic reaction drive (unlimited thrust, no waste heat, no fuel mass problem), then you might as well thrust at whatever acceleration is best for the cargo. If that's humans, it would be the lowest acceleration to keep the adverse medical effects of microgravity at bay (probably a lot less than 1g but more than 0.1g).
Depending on your definition of "unlimited thrust", you could squint and say artificial spin gravity qualifies. It obviously has no waste heat or fuel mass problem.
If your spacecraft spins, the most intuitively obvious thrust axis is parallel to the spin axis, but it's not a no-brainer. For example, with solar electric you probably want the spin axis pointed to the Sun, but you usually want thrust perpendicular to the Sun.
@isaackuo@cstross@sudnadja@nyrath@FredKiesche With solar electric that's relatively simple to arrange. Solar sails harder, but in that case the thrust is so low that it will be lost in the noise in the spin habitat.
@isaackuo
Once you stop accelerating, you split the ship in two and let out a line. Then you spin the bolo. Simple! People think of spacecraft like boats, as necessarily unitary. Baw. Split 'em up into however many pieces you need and spin the parts separately if you need to. It's not like the other sections are going anywhere unless they're pushed. @cstross@sudnadja@nyrath@FredKiesche
@KarlSchroeder@isaackuo@cstross@sudnadja@nyrath@FredKiesche Rotating warships a la B5 are just a bad idea (no matter how cool they look). Rotating is enormous momentum and makes it hard to do dynamic motions. And damage to the section would rapidly cascade into a disaster. Expanse's "everyone strap in for high G" is the only sensible way to fight.
@hendric
Realistic space warships aren't single entities except when under power; they're dispersed constellations (swarms) and typically will engage in battle from millions of kilometers away. Incoming ordnance will be stealthed and traveling at tens of kilometers per second. Possible fleet trajectories will be known ahead of time. The concept of 'maneuvering' simply doesn't apply. @isaackuo@cstross@sudnadja@nyrath@FredKiesche
@sudnadja@c0dec0dec0de@KarlSchroeder@hendric@isaackuo@cstross@nyrath@FredKiesche another aspect of this: modern "stealth planes" are detectable! They just get filtered out. Ships have limited real estate for scopes. Having a low enough signature means no system or human will see an exceptional enough blip to point a scope your way, especially in the heat of battle where hot missile's be eating up scopes!
@sudnadja@c0dec0dec0de@KarlSchroeder@hendric@isaackuo@cstross@nyrath@FredKiesche like: in space, active sensors will suffer an inverse-fourth power loss of power with distance. Sensors will rely on passive "tripwire" surveillance. Get below the noise floor on those sensors and while x-ray sensors will probably still give them a general warning, that‘s still a long chain until "something is right there!"
@hendric@KarlSchroeder@isaackuo@cstross@nyrath@FredKiesche Even more than that: your targeting system is seeing the ship where it was 5 seconds ago, not where it is "now", so you have to guess what the ship will be doing over the next 10 seconds of observed time. And in reality, you might not even know the range to the target with precision. All you really can tell is the apparent visual motion though spherical coordinates. If they're not moving perpendicular to the axis of the beam you're shooting at it, range is changing as well. If they're varying their direction of thrust, range rate as well as range is changing. Even determining if there is a hit, if the player were made to give you an exact spherical direction to shoot in might take a little work (there will be an iterative root finding in there).
@nyrath@hendric@KarlSchroeder@isaackuo@cstross@FredKiesche At one point we came up with nearly the same approach and that was used for "targeting", where a probability of where the target is and could be is determined, but in the past we had allowed knowledge of range to target implicitly - the full cartesian coordinates of the target were known, just light speed delayed. Later on it wasn't a given that range was known, and it made the solution finding very difficult. (It was sort of fun presenting the 'raw' sensor data to a someone playing as a test to see if they could even determine in a crowded volume of space which of the contacts was stalking them vs innocent movement).
@isaackuo@sudnadja@nyrath@hendric@KarlSchroeder@FredKiesche ... Which in turn presupposes currently existing social distinctions (military/civilian) are propagated to a spaceborn polity. And also that sensors are expensive, rather than "external hull surfaces are coated with extruded CCDs able to discriminate single photons at wavelengths from ELF to soft gamma, with similar pixel density to a human fovea centralis (the entire hull is a multispectral interferometer)".
FWIW, I do not assume sensors are expensive. I do assume a single photon is indeed detectable, but a cold object with a sunlight mirror isn't emitting photons in your direction unless you're inside the reflected sunlight cone.
And yes, only military craft will bother with this sort of stealth. Solar power is too useful for civilian craft, and this inherently spews photons over a wide angle.
@cstross@isaackuo@sudnadja@nyrath@hendric@KarlSchroeder@FredKiesche Even if sensor surfaces like that are cheap, that still requires you 1) have enough compute to process all the information 2) physics-wise you will never be able to have a soft-gamma sensor with any conventional nano-structure, much less a phased array 3) physics of sensor light requires you still aim that array in a specific direction to gather high-res images, and do it long enough for a worthwhile SnR.
And of course, if you have the means to process digital interferometer information from the entire hull, the enemy will be able to employ all the tricks modern radar electronic attack taps into
@cstross@isaackuo@sudnadja@nyrath@hendric@KarlSchroeder@FredKiesche from waveform shifts inducing indications of blue or redshift without physical backing, to waveform distortions indicating different shapes or reflection behavior, to delays and offsets that murky up other indications.
Yeah, it's definitely more complicated than simply receiving a photon and knowing this photon is from a target of interest. But there are a lot of sensors that do indeed determine a lot of info from even a single photon. So I take it as a baseline of what's physically possible.
The other type of passive sensor - occultation sensor - is easier to analyze.
So, let's assume an occultation sensor or photon sensor has detected a potential target of interest. It only has a single bearing hit, at a single point in time.
What I assume happens next is that the sensor platform shoots pings - hard UV/soft X-ray FEL - toward that bearing. This gives range info, as well as speed, and doppler-delay imaging ...
Anything made of atoms will scatter photons in this range.
The challenge with visual triangulation is that you need to be able to see the target to triangulate. If the target is cold, that's ... definitely NOT a given.
Lighting up a target with hard UV lidar lets you track the target, but with a big obvious down-side - the target sees you too! So, it's not a no-brainer. You have consider when/if you want to shine...
Recon by fire, if you are not seeing anything, it is probably a good idea to detonated a few nuclear weapons in the area, so as to irradiate the area. Also a bonus of detonating weapons is the ability to fry any eyes looking at you.
@cstross@isaackuo@sudnadja@nyrath@hendric@KarlSchroeder@FredKiesche Given that any useful spaceship drive is a weapon of mass destruction, maybe the real constraint on space trade is the number of people with a psychological profile that would qualify them as ballistic missile submarine commanders.
Until someone decides to use them as strategic weapons.
In my SciFo world building project, one of those destroys Beijing and leads to cislunar space being locked up for a few decades. Mostly due to a Chinese civil war, an economic crisis and a partial Kessler cascade.
But how many of those are the pressssious ones? isn't like 99% of them boring silica/ice things, here we are looking for the juicy metal ones en masse.
Hydrolox is so boring, though, and not really available from orbital atmospheric scooping. I want rocket fuel from orbital atmospheric scooping! (Looking up molecules with Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Carbon ...)
Meh, Nitrous is also BORING ... Carbon Monoxide LOX? BORING!
Oooooh, CYANOGEN-lox. Now we're cooking. Good performance. Very hazardous to humans. Very challenging combustion chamber temps.
Per wiki, "The vacuum-optimized Raptor targets a specific impulse of ~380 s (3,700 m/s)".
So I'm guessing using a Rvac engine to get off the Moon is a really bad idea unless you want to blast things a LONG distance away with hypervelocity regolith fragments.
@MeiLin@cstross@GoblinQuester@RogerBW@isaackuo@sudnadja@nyrath@KarlSchroeder@FredKiesche I didnt know that, thanks! I'd love to see simulations on the effects though; flaring out the thrust from the nose means more total thrust needed, and with out air to slow it down you'll still hit the soils at an oblique supersonic speed. Maybe the plume expands enough that the density would be low enough to prevent launching boulders, but you're still going to scour fine dust everywhere.
@isaackuo@MeiLin@RogerBW@cstross@sudnadja@nyrath@hendric@KarlSchroeder@FredKiesche Venus would make for a pretty "nice" target in that regard. If you mess up your aerocapture, the asteroid will probably just burn up and not even make a crater. And the atmosphere is a neat source of carbon dioxide propellant for sending refined material back out with solar power.
@MeiLin@hendric@isaackuo@RogerBW@cstross@sudnadja@nyrath@KarlSchroeder@FredKiesche tbh I too have considered that one of the kickoffs for space development having an argument of public interest was a "Rama event" so to speak, but instead of an Earth impactor it was a lunar impactor and Earth orbit was just showered with indirect debris.
(One side advantage: a couple cooler years which helped in some other aspects of the polycrisis)
@Sevoris@hendric@isaackuo@RogerBW@cstross@sudnadja@nyrath@KarlSchroeder@FredKiesche
In my case it was a local killer, just the size of a small nuke, but enough to kill the entirety of the Chinese leadership, sparking off a civil war, where the parties tried to deny each other space borne assets, leading to a partial Kessler Cascade that took decades to clean up.
Not to mention an economic crisis in the wake of the Chinese civil war. And the collapse of the asteroid mining sector.
@MeiLin@isaackuo@nyrath my "belters" are the rock jokeys who drag rocks from the belt down to Venus. Mainly a space-to-space community, a diaspora supported by start-up coops from downwell who‘re looking to space as a new living space now that the old imperial powers managed to trample up earthside. A lot of their work goes back into plasmadyne ships and building long-term communities in space that can eventually support the full flourishing of their peoples.
I imagine "rock jockeys" as log drivers hopping from rock to rock in space suits, setting them all spinning the right way so they'll Yarkovsky with the rest of the rock herd.
@Sevoris@isaackuo@MeiLin@RogerBW@sudnadja@nyrath@hendric@KarlSchroeder@FredKiesche Think big: dump the largest snowballs you can find on Venus. Aim to blast loads of the current atmosphere into orbit, crack the crust, hydrate it, and then churn up the upper mantle until you can get convective subduction going and start plate tectonics. Who knows, a few hundred million years of this and you might even make a start at terraforming!
I'm definitely not sold on plasma sail concepts, but I do have a thing for superconducting magloops (albeit they do have a lot of engineering ... I'll call them "aspects".)
One possible train-like layout could be a mag-sail on one tip of a string of modules kept taut by artificial spin gravity. In other words, it's like a spinning baton.
In 2D simulation, each ship has a circular (elipse?) destination footprint, dictated by their drive power and turning rate. The ship must end its turn somewhere within the footprint. But the faster the ship is going, the further ahead of it the footprint is.
@sudnadja@hendric@KarlSchroeder@isaackuo@cstross@nyrath@FredKiesche
"Where it was" - Coastal/Harbor Defense Artillery had the same problem 1890s-1940s before RADAR was deployed. Analog computation (mechanical & nomigram) provided forecast position based on observed track & speed (=velocity), allowing for time of flight of munitions (and correcting for meteorological conditions, a problem not occurring in vacuum).
@BRicker@hendric@KarlSchroeder@isaackuo@cstross@nyrath@FredKiesche in any targeting problem restricted to the surface of the earth, light speed delay is not significant compared to the speed of the weapon - your information is never more than a few milliseconds old at worst. When you’re dealing with targets that are several light seconds in distance away you need to accurately predict the “future” motion of the target for a much longer period of time, making the problem more difficult
Milliseconds is in one sense correct, and true today with digital communications. But 1898-1941, the millisecond knowledge of a corporal on one tower must be merged with the knowledge of another corporal at the other end of a baseline at central plot, via sync bells and telephonic dictation. People with nomogram slide rules apply wind and other ballistic corrections, and pass the solution to the guns.
I'm involved in interpretation and preservation of Coast Artillery fortifications (1775-1949). The maths of the analog computations 1898-1941 are a particular interest.
Your milliseconds dismissal of long distance surface combat (ship v ship or shore v ship) is only correct once Radar was fielded (1942). It is very much wrong 1898-1941. During that period, the solved sensor-fusion/target-prediction problem was quite analogous to the light-second or light-minute problem.
(And thanks to non uniform atmosphere, harder.
And you have computers, barring a Butlerian Jih*d.)
@sudnadja@hendric@KarlSchroeder@isaackuo@cstross@nyrath@FredKiesche
(Even when RADAR was deployed, the firing solution still had to allow for target movement during time of flight of munitions and meteorology.
The first of which would apply to laser-ish weapons at light-second ranges also.
Momentum insures changes of maneuver are minimal in short time periods, assume d³X/dt = 0.
Only mythic UFOs exhibit non trivial, non smooth Jerk.)
My main interest in very long range XFEL focused by spaced apart zone plate is non-military, but I've also pondered military use. We're talking ranges on the order of multiple-AU ... targeting delays on the order of minutes to an hour.
This may seem crazy, but it's within the historical delays for (dumb) artillery fires. And given the ranges involved, we're talking continuous bombarding of each other for months.
If by "dumb" (an ableist word to be eschewed) you refer to the munitions.
Long range Artillery in the pre-RADAR days was generally quite involved and for non-seeking/correcting payloads remarkably ^precise^. (Not by modern standards of course! )
@isaackuo@sudnadja@hendric@KarlSchroeder@cstross@nyrath@FredKiesche
(And aside from terror uses e.g. Paris gun, where target was a whole city. But iirc the WW1 Paris gun projectiles were arguably the first human made objects to rise above the atmosphere - which required a change to their meteorological corrections.)
@BRicker@isaackuo@sudnadja@hendric@KarlSchroeder@nyrath@FredKiesche IIRC the manufacturers calculated the precise barrel wear per round fired (after 80-ish rounds, the Paris gun would be toast—new barrel time!) and machined the shells to be fired in sequence with increasing diameter to account for gradual erosion of the barrel liner!
Yes, an ambient plasma would act as atmosphere for some ^ballistic^ (optic) corrective-calculation purposes!
(I'm guessing (SWAG!) it would have to be rather thick plasma for the reduction in light-speed C implied by the Index of Refraction n to be sufficient to change the set-forward time for target projected position?)
There‘s two aspects. One, ambient EM fields have large fields, and can minutely deflect charged beams, and basically any beam will be charged- ion beams don‘t have electron recombination occur instantly, so they‘re neutral plasmas only.
Second, "moot scattering", occurs when the beam interacts with ambient hydrogen
Well, you may have demonstrated that Charged Ion Beams are sub-optimal for use within a star-system's inadequate vacuum?
(Coriolis affects on long range terrestrial gunnery (and missiles) are a long known, long solved dynamic swirl in artillery, to extend my "it's been done - without computers" metaphor.)
Either fight in a better vacuum,
or pick weapons suited for the battlespace,
e.g. ones that can accept the peri-stellar approximation of vacuum, vs ones sensitive to the deviations from vacuum there.
@hendric
You're probably right about that. Don't listen to me, I was raised Mennonite on the Canadian prairies. I was taught to think of war as 'that thing where they slaughter us again and the handful who survive rebuild their lives in a foreign land.' So my practical expertise here is pretty much nil. @isaackuo@cstross@sudnadja@nyrath@FredKiesche
@hendric
--Mind you, I did write five books with war in them in the Virga series. Fleet engagements in zero gravity, too, but the ships were wooden and the engagements often hand-to-hand combat with swords. Pure swashbuckling, pirates, boarding parties, broadsides, the whole bit. But I wasn't striving to be... you know.../realistic/ with that stuff. @isaackuo@cstross@sudnadja@nyrath@FredKiesche
@KarlSchroeder@hendric@isaackuo@cstross@sudnadja@nyrath@FredKiesche “Mote in God's Eye” was (quasi-)realistic in that sense. Warships were powered by a fusion-powered reaction drive, with decks perpendicular to the thrust axis. When coasting and not in combat, they'd rotate about the long axis to provide “gravity”. Flywheels were used to spin the ship up and down.
@SteveBellovin@KarlSchroeder@hendric@isaackuo@sudnadja@nyrath@FredKiesche I have a soft spot for Iain M. Banks's Culture novels where the tech is 100% rigged for plot purposes BUT the space battles are epic (especially in "Surface Detail" and "Excession").
@SteveBellovin@KarlSchroeder@hendric@isaackuo@sudnadja@nyrath@FredKiesche Yeah, but Pournelle's Codominium universe was rigged: perfect black body forcefield, magic jump drive between points of equivalent spacetime curvature orbiting stars, and the Moties STILL couldn't invent hormonal contraceptives!
@cstross@KarlSchroeder@hendric@isaackuo@sudnadja@nyrath@FredKiesche That's why I said quasi-realistic… (Pournelle and NIven wrote that they started with a plastic model of an imaginary warship and used that as the prototype for the MacArthur (and what a name, but I guess it goes along with Lenin…).) The jump drive was designed, per another essay, to make interstellar travel difficult but expensive, to avoid other plot failure modes.
@SteveBellovin@KarlSchroeder@hendric@isaackuo@sudnadja@nyrath@FredKiesche (We expect ships to carry reaction mass. Why not have them also carry feedstock and a printer, so that the core military tech you need is a big reactor, bigger radiators to dump waste heat, and a design library full of weapons and countermeasures?
(The term "energetic merchant cruiser" comes up: it's officially unarmed, stands up to customs inspector scrutiny, but you do not want to fuck with it …)
@cstross@KarlSchroeder@hendric@isaackuo@sudnadja@nyrath@FredKiesche I'm blanking on the name of the series and the author, but not all that many years ago there was a series where fleets did include manufacturing ships. It was notable for being one of the few space navy books to worry about orbital mechanics, relativity, and (especially) logistics. (The religion seemed to include the stars as containing or personifying their ancestors. Ring a bell?)
@zakalwe@SteveBellovin@KarlSchroeder@hendric@isaackuo@sudnadja@nyrath@FredKiesche Yup! And then there was wossname in "Surface Detail", a single retired fast picket (aka light cruiser) that wipes out an annoying alien battle fleet en passant in a few milliseconds because it has no time for their shit.
@SteveBellovin@KarlSchroeder@hendric@isaackuo@sudnadja@nyrath@FredKiesche I had a lot of fun towards the end of the second draft of this interminably unfinished novel, where the energetic merchant cruiser Wakes Up And Chooses Violence and its thermal dump panels briefly glow hotter than the surface of the nearest star ...
@KarlSchroeder@hendric@isaackuo@cstross@sudnadja@nyrath@FredKiesche if you're fighting at sufficiently large distances then manoeuvres regain importance because you have to factor lightspeed delay into your targeting. If a target is far enough away and can maneuver in such a way as to potentially be in places that are greater than the focus area of your weapon, then dodging and targeting becomes a matter of statistics.
@A_C_McGregor@KarlSchroeder@hendric@isaackuo@cstross@nyrath@FredKiesche For my own system, we do factor sensor delay or information propagation delay into targeting (as well as beam dispersion), which in effect has turned lasers into point defense weapons and most of the 'ship to ship' action is via self-guided weapons (then programming the guidance system becomes the challenge)
I think I basically killed the project by pointing out how, at a solar-system scale and without magic, warfare is mostly a game of electronic warfare (sensor arms races and emissions control) and information warfare.
Once you're discovered, it's nukes-on-drones time and goodnight.
long ago I tried making a 2D space combat sim with realisticish physics... from a "fun play" perspective? the horrors, the horrors... debris became a real problem. large exploded ships becomes huge number of tiny fast friendlyfire projectiles
If you want, you can ignore the problem of debris.
The thing is ... natural debris is a real problem, which more or less demands Whipple shielding. The debris from a nearby exploded ship isn't going to be going nearly as fast, so your shielding may be fine with it.
You might want to angle solar arrays parallel to the debris "flow", though.
I did enjoy the Expanse - it was pretty open about its (drive) magic - despite a few places where an inability to detect ships/drives was sadly necessary for the plot.
He described it to me in person (he was a good friend of my grandfather, Wilhelm Angele, so we spent some time together when I was a kid). Maybe I misunderstood or his proposal never saw the light of day.
All I am saying is I have yet to be fortunate enough to stumble over an old scientific paper that was blessed with an artist conception. Which is a disappointment that happens regularly to me.
I think he also had a plan for crews in each of the nodes to visit each other, like three houses close together being on good terms with each other. Kind of an emotional/social health aspect.
No idea what the mechanics of that would have been. Elevator on the cables?
@FredKiesche Those miniatures, as I recall, were molded from a very high grade of plastic, yielding lovely surface detailing, crisp snapping-together, etc.
I had the earlier version: Lou Zocci's Alien Space Battle Manual.
My brother and I played the heck out of that game. Crawling around the floor, using the protractor ship counters, stretching the 10 foot thread to see which part of the enemy ship you shot with your weapons.
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