Towing Asteroids to use as OWP

[Steve Walmsley]

Umm...

  Next logical question: Why not build a "PDC" with engines on it to push the asteroid around?  

Steve

I’ve been thinking about the concepts raised in this thread, as they have re-awakened the B-5 fan in me <G>.

I have always wanted to be able to do something along the lines of B-5 in both Starfire and Aurora, and to have it make economic sense.  The problem with the “towing asteroids” concept raised in this thread is that Aurora prohibits the establishment of manned colonies on bodies smaller than moons, at least for most races.  To stay within that boundary and still be able to make a B-5 type station, I propose the introduction of a “Space Station”, which is a mega-project, in essence.

As I envision it, a Space Station is a civilian structure primarily and has two basic components, Structure and Modules.  Structure contains connection points for modules, and also contains station crew, power, and maintenance areas.  Modules are the reason for the existence of the station in the first place.  While I suppose they could be built anywhere, it might make sense to limit them to locations close to warp points to justify the economic bonuses discussed below.  So far I have thought of the following modules:

Population Module (PM): A PM holds living and work spaces for population, perhaps the same amount that can be transported in a cryo-transport module.  Perhaps more, as this is supposed to be big.  If it isn’t doing anything else, population on a station generates income at, say, five or even ten times what a standard planetary population would generate.  This is due to a “Way-station” trade bonus.

Cargo Module (CM): A CM is exactly like the cargo modules used for freighters.  They can be the same size, or as with PM’s they can be larger.  Anything that can be transported in a freighter’s hold can be stored in a CM.

Mass Driver (MD):  An MD is the same as a planetary mass driver.  A station with an MD can either receive minerals or send them to another location within a system.  

Troop Module (TM): Exactly like the PDC’s troop capacity.  

Military Module (MM): This can mount offensive and defensive weapons.  While its active defenses can cover the entire station, its armor covers only the module and it either cannot have shields, or the shields will attenuate if they have to cover the entire station.  

There are other possibilities.  Fuel refineries, research labs, shipyards, maintenance facilities, all are possible.  

As I envision it, construction ships would be used to build the station’s structure, which would have to be built in place, while the modules could either be built (slowly) in place by construction ships or at planets by industry and then towed to their final destination and installed by construction ships once they arrive.

I’m sure there are other modules and ideas.  I am not sure if the military modules are a good idea.  These structures should be vulnerable, not mega-fortresses sitting on warp points, unless everyone thinks that that is a good way to go.

What does everyone think?

I do like the concept of a "city in space". The trick will be getting it to work within the Aurora mechanics. The station would presumably spin to maintain gravity, which would avoid the main reason for the inability to create inhabited asteroid colonies. (digressing for a moment, that might be one way to create asteroid colonies. You have to hollow it out first and find a way to rotate it. The max pop and industry would be determined by internal volume.)

Back to the B5 concept. Rather than have new modules that are specific to a new 'space station' unit type, I would prefer to find a way to adapt existing modules or add new systems so that a space station is simply a different design of 'ship'. For example, the cargo module would just be a cargo hold and the troop module would be troop transport bays (with perhaps a new larger version of both). Military modules would just be regular systems. A mass driver would be a huge new system that could be installed on any 'ship' without engines. A new 'population module' would simply be a huge version of crew quarters. New research labs, etc. could have a large crew requirement that would be fulfilled by the population modules, although fitting that into the existing research model might be tricky.

Having said all that, perhaps the better way to go might be the hollowing out and rotating of an asteroid so that asteroid colonies are possible. That could still create a B-5 style situation.

Steve

[ShadoCat]

Steve,

One method of creating an asteroid colony is to Drill its core out, spin it and then "inflate" it using nukes in the hollow core.

If you want to learn more about the topic, try:

The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space 3rd Ed. by Gerard K. O'Neill
Publisher: Apogee Books
ISBN:  1-896522-67-X

If you want, I can glean info from the book for you.

Here are some basic stats:

Cylinder: length: 20 miles, diameter: 4 miles, interior surface area: 500 square miles at 1G and could hold several million people.  

I'd say that population limit is a bit low since you could build at least 5 stories under the inner surface without getting too high in G (probably wouldn't break 1.1G).

Note that I would allow commercial engines on it.  No reason not to but the mass is going to be large enough that they would crawl from location to location.

You can put weapons on them if you wish but I wouldn't want to see it in combat.  Any good hit might evacuate the whole thing (talk about collateral damage to population).

I would also like to see the ability to build facilities into it (factories, research centers, space ports, etc.) to give the populations something to do.  I would however, require a greater percentage of the population to be devoted to "support".  

I want the space colonies to be more expensive that the equivalent ground colony.  The thing that makes space colonies cost effective with today's tech is the fact that we are restricted to reaction drives.  That makes gravity wells (planets) expensive to get to/from.

I don't know why engines would prevent a mass driver from working (it just takes time to stabilize and make sure the calculations are correct).

In general, as you increase the radius, you decrease the spin speed needed to attain 1G, increase the surface area and widen the "sweet spot" around 1G.  You also make it more fragile and less maneuverable.

Also, all of my comments are based on "Newtonian" materials.  A station built with Duranium would be very expensive but would be much more robust.

[Kurt]

I do like the concept of a "city in space". The trick will be getting it to work within the Aurora mechanics. The station would presumably spin to maintain gravity, which would avoid the main reason for the inability to create inhabited asteroid colonies. (digressing for a moment, that might be one way to create asteroid colonies. You have to hollow it out first and find a way to rotate it. The max pop and industry would be determined by internal volume.)

Back to the B5 concept. Rather than have new modules that are specific to a new 'space station' unit type, I would prefer to find a way to adapt existing modules or add new systems so that a space station is simply a different design of 'ship'. For example, the cargo module would just be a cargo hold and the troop module would be troop transport bays (with perhaps a new larger version of both). Military modules would just be regular systems. A mass driver would be a huge new system that could be installed on any 'ship' without engines. A new 'population module' would simply be a huge version of crew quarters. New research labs, etc. could have a large crew requirement that would be fulfilled by the population modules, although fitting that into the existing research model might be tricky.

Having said all that, perhaps the better way to go might be the hollowing out and rotating of an asteroid so that asteroid colonies are possible. That could still create a B-5 style situation.

Steve

I understand trying tto remain within the existing mechanics as much as possible, but I was thinking of something very large scale.  However, as you noted, you could just add larger versions of the cargo module and a larger "living" version of the luxury passenger accomodation.  

This could probably all be done within the existing mechanics, at least mostly, but I'd also like to see some incentive for doing this.  After all, a player will be spending a lot of resources to build something like this, and even if protected they would be relatively vulnerable, so there would have to be some incentive for doing this.  I can think of several:

1. Economic: A per capita income bonus if located near a jump point, to reflect the income multiplier from trade facilitation;
2. Military: A maintenance free (or at least time-clock free) military base located where needed in a system (like PDC's on a planet currently);
3. Scientific: Research stations located at exotic locations (gas giants/deep space/Oort cloud, whatever) gain bonuses to research.

There are probably more as well.  

Kurt

[Morrigi]

Hello, I'm completely new here. Anyway, I noticed the asteroid thing, and there happens to be a very simple and versatile asteroid impact calculator by the university of arizona, here's the URL:  http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/

[Rathos]

I am re-reading the Starfire novel 'Crusade' and am at the part about Asteroids that have been converted into super OWP's. That got me thinking if it would be possible to tow an asteroid within a system to orbit of a planet. From there you could 'Install PDC' or equivalent and then tow it out to the location you wish to deploy it.

I guess there are few things to take into consideration:

1. Not sure if you do this already, but when generating asteroids do you give them a mass and three dimensions? That would mean you could only do this to asteroids that are a certain size - depending on how many PDCs you install.

2. it needs to have maintenance storage and usage but probably give it a highly reduced failure rate?
2.1 possibly allow maintenance facilities so it can act as a harbor for patrol vessels?
2.2 let it be designated as a collier, tanker and supply vessel/station.

3. Allow shields? or just rely on the natural armor of the asteroid used - depending on the (Duranium/Volume-of-asteroid) ratio? When installing the PDC ignore any inherent armor level added to the design.

4. When converted to an OWP remove it from the acceptable list of locations to drop off planetary sensors and mines.

5. Do not allow it to be transferred through a JP, even one with a gate.

6. ensure that any movement by tugs is slow but let multiple tugs pull it - depending on size of the asteroid

Sound feasible?

A fascinating idea. Not sure I can find a way to make it work but still fascinating to look at the possibilities. There are two sides to the question I think. The first is can you 'hollow out' an asteroid and turn it into a floating PDC. The second is can you move asteroids around. The reason to split this into two sections is that either by itself would be cool even if you couldn't do the other. Assuming you could move asteroids, I think the simplest way to approach this would simply be to avoid the complexities of 'hollowing out' and treat the asteroid as any other system body and place several PDCs on it. That allows asteroid fortresses with the minimum modification to the rules.  

Anyway - lets look at moving asteroids first. Asteroids in Aurora do have diameter and mass, just like planets and moons. However all system bodies have been given a minimum mass 0f 0.0001 Earths, so as the first stage of looking at this idea I removed that minimum. Low masses will now be shown on the system view in scientific notiation to two significant figures to allow for realistic asteroid masses.

The formula used by Aurora to determine mass in Earth equivalents is: Mass = ((Radius / 6380) ^ 3) x Density (where Earth is density 1)

So Mars, which has a radius of 3400 km and a density of 0.71 would be Mass = ((3400 / 6380) ^ 3) x 0.71, which is 0.107 Earth masses and matches up with the Wiki entry for Mars
Mercury has a radius of 2440km and a density of 0.98: Mass = ((2440 / 6380) ^ 3) x 0.98, which is 0.055 Earth masses and also matches up with the Wiki
Lets try an asteroid with a radius of 20 kilometers and a density of 1: Mass = ((20 / 6380) ^ 3) x 1, which is 3.08055E-08 Earth masses.

Now we getting into scientific notation in terms of Earth masses so lets convert to metric tons instead. Earth is approximately 5.9736E+21 metric tons so if we multiply this by the Earth mass equivalent of our 40 km diameter asteroid, we get 1.8402E+14 metric tons or 184 trillion tons. So we won't be moving that then :twisted:

[Morrigi]

O_O

[Virex]

Well, assuming you want to get a speed of 100 km/s out of it, the equation becomes:

Speed = 1000 * Total power/Total Size
Total Size = 1000*Total power/Speed
Total Size = 10* total power
Total Size = 15,000,000
Total Mass = 750,000,000 tons
Mass Asteroid = 742,065,600 tons = 7.42*10^14 grams
So the diameter of the asteroid would be: (3*mass/(4*density*Pi))^(1/3) = 31,788 com or roughly 318 meters

[Morrigi]

One would think a few hundred missiles would be more logical... But screw it, asteroid bombardment=WIN  



By the way, a nickel-iron asteroid of that size, going 100 km/s would end up creating an 8 mile wide crater on impact. Ouch.

[Virex]

Well, one handwavy way to make it so people can tow large objects is already given. The background lore states that only non-newtonian elements experience "space drag", so in theory the max speed of an asteroid would be determined not by it's total mass, but only by the mass of it's mineral contents. In that case, towing huge asteroids becomes a posibility.

[Rogtuok]

I really love this.  There is a serie I just read about moving large objects Troy Rising by John ringo.

Me personally don't see any problem with actually moving any object size you just need enuff tugs fuel and time.  Or you can build a Orion drive to move the object.  It whoud be a blast.

[wilddog5]

if Steve is going to add small asteroids to move he could use this to also allow the creation of stations they get classified as a planet in the database no different from earth just with a small enough mass to be moved and you "expand" them by building buildings on them like a current planet/moon. Hell you can even put them in orbit of another stellar body.

edit : sorry for the language got over excited by the prospect

[Rogtuok]

I'm totally with you there making something of a Death Star whoud be fun I love Star Wars and whoud like to roll play something like that.  But as I said moving something even the mass of earth is possible it just take time.  With today's tech we can move asteroids it just cost a big amount of money and takes time.

[Zatsuza]

OP *snip*

Yeah, frankly I'd love to do this too.  Anyone ever read the Night's Dawn Trilogy or The Empire from the Ashes? Hell, even Homeworld had people towing/firing asteroids at orbital factories.  A sufficiently large asteroid could be used as an anchor to a space elevator/ industrial station/ orbital habitat for example.  Also I think it would be much cheaper installing some kind of industry/weapons or habitat in a mined-out asteroid than creating a PDC or orbital habitat from scratch. 

I think you could probably do it as a subset of automated mining colonies-- after the colony is completely mined out give it a certain tag that allows colonization, but if asteroids and comets work the same as planets I can see people making tugs large enough to throw superjovians at people. 
Hell, if it's a sorium gas giant you wouldn't even need to fuel it, it could fuel itself.  and of course you'd be running into size problems with the asteroids I think-- basing a twenty-thousand ton PDC in an asteroid that used to house about 10k duranium for example. . .
Then again, you could have construction begin by converting said asteroid into a PDC with the minerals it already contains, but that strikes me as a bit complex.

[ollobrains]

at the moment apart from an orbital habitat, u can put pdcs on asteroids, haul components out, haul minerals take a few constructin bridgades drop em off and build then move the bridages to the new spot to build, i use construction bridgagdes early on to expand startup colonies, this help supplement inital expansion and given civilan takes forever to move auto mines etc etc this is a slightly accelerated way of shifting it along

[Thundercraft]

…[snip]
So to my surprise, this is starting to look possible for small asteroids.  Bear in mind they are usually less dense than Earth as well so the actual towing speed would likely be slightly higher…[snip]
As I said earlier, there are no asteroids this small in Aurora.  Adding them would be very straightforward though.    They wouldn't contain minerals but they would be available to convert into some type of base, probably by building a PDC on them…

If you add mineral-less asteroids this small, I assume you would have to add multitudes of them to be realistic.  Already, turning on "Orbital Motions for Asteroids" can impose a performance hit on older machines.  I can only imagine what this would do to performance if this means keeping track of countless tiny asteroids as well.  And since they don't have minerals, they wouldn't have much purpose outside strategies such as this.   

Wouldn't a simpler approach be to have the player create these tiny asteroids by doing something to the current large asteroids? Perhaps by mining or an option to break them into small pieces?

The Babylon station concept was originally intended to serve as an interplanetary meeting place, IIRC.  Not hard to do when everyone has hyperspacial travel and can get to it from pretty much anywhere.  Not so easy when everyone has to travel through jump points and "invade" someone's space to get to it.

I was thinking how much different Aurora might be if players were allowed to research interstellar travel tech beyond jump gates.  That might make such a B5 station concept more realistic.  If races and players could eventually learn to travel with the equivalent to warp drives or super-hyperdrives that work between systems (at tremendous expense in research and resources), that would radically alter strategies and game play.  Even the ability to build jump gates on artificial jump point wormholes to connect systems would radically change things.  But this could easily be a game setup option so that players who don't want this and prefer strictly jump gates could leave it turned off.