McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
an engineering problem which I need to solve for a story
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: LDWriter2 on June 22, 2012, 12:29:17 AM ---Just had an idea, I would think this depends on how the info is storied. I was trying to think of what type of data storage they had in the 40s. Computer tape, written word, audio tape, punch cards, vinyl records. They may have had some type of metal "paper". Not sure if they had cassette tapes back then or not. But as I think someone suggested your world could have some tech that is from the fifties or sixties. A little mixing of tech might be a good idea because it wouldn't be a complete parallel development.
--- End quote ---
It's a world of people originally from Earth who have got records of Earth history to serve as guidelines, so I'm not opposed to a certain degree of following the path they are given as tech development goes; I'm thinking that they may be balked at some levels by not having a great deal of aluminium around, for example.
--- Quote ---Lead lined for sure, padded probably, maybe a box or barrel completely filled so the object would not be able to bounce around. Not sure if they would have suspended the object by straps as I have seen at times. Not sure when that university started the yearly challenge to drop an egg from a great height and not have it break. But if you could find one of the first year results on line you might find some ideas.
--- End quote ---
Good thought. Thank you.
--- Quote ---A bullet shaped container maybe with either a very hard nose or a false one that is made to break off.
--- End quote ---
It's bullet-shaped basically to minimise the amount of heat generated by friction while going up through the atmosphere of the planet during launch. The scale of the impact with the moon isn't one where the shape of the original container will survive - the principal intent of the project is to deliver large quantities of raw metallic ores, the designers do not care whether they get melted or scattered about some or buried on landing and are much more likely to err on the side of overkill where the propulsion is concerned.
The thing that's really balking me about the possible solutions I have come up with is that I'm not seeing any way of guaranteeing the thing won't tumble randomly in flight - fins are useless in vacuum even if I could believe in any surviving the launch, and I'm not seeing any plausible way to spin-stabilise it either.
Serack:
--- Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on June 22, 2012, 02:14:05 PM ---The thing that's really balking me about the possible solutions I have come up with is that I'm not seeing any way of guaranteeing the thing won't tumble randomly in flight - fins are useless in vacuum even if I could believe in any surviving the launch, and I'm not seeing any plausible way to spin-stabilise it either.
--- End quote ---
Try to find a way to use tidal forces (principles similar to tidal locking and the Roche limit) to cause it to auto stabilize as it descends into the moon's Gravitational Well.
In otherwords, depending on shape and size, the difference in gravitational force seen on the portions closest to the moon could be sufficiently different from the forces seen by the portions furthest that they effect its orientation, solving the tumbling problem.
Yeratel:
When NASA sent the Voyager probes on a trip outside our solar system, they put data about Earth and our solar system embossed on thin gold plates attached to the spacecraft. A scroll of gold, or gold-plated alloy could hold a considerable amount of data, and be rolled up compactly inside a heavy protective armored tube to suvive a considerable amount of impact force.
Getting many tons of cargo from an Earthlike gravity well to a nearby moon with 1940s technology is doable, if not exactly cheap. An enlarged V2 type rocket with an extra stage, all the way up to something like an Atlas booster like the ones that sent the Apollo missions to the moon would be feasible, using hydrogen or some hydrocarbon fuel with liquid oxygen.
Launching thousands of cargo rockets is no problem in a controlled economy. There were even plans in the late 1940s and early 1950s for using an atomic power plant to power a plasma rocket engine, but those got scrubbed because of civilian concerns about radiation damage if one ever crashed. Those concerns would be unlikely to stop a project under a totalitarian government, it would just relocate the rocket base away from population centers near the capitol.
knnn:
--- Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on June 22, 2012, 02:14:05 PM ---The thing that's really balking me about the possible solutions I have come up with is that I'm not seeing any way of guaranteeing the thing won't tumble randomly in flight - fins are useless in vacuum even if I could believe in any surviving the launch, and I'm not seeing any plausible way to spin-stabilise it either.
--- End quote ---
Why do you need to be stabilized after it leaves the atmosphere? Once it is in vacuum, I'd think that all you care about is that the center of mass is pointed at the moon.
Also, how complicated is the information you are trying to encode? If it is only a few bits of information, you could store it as the ratio between the total quantities of two (unusual) elements used in the bullet.
OZ:
I like what Yeratel said about the gold plates although you would probably want a harder metal to survive your giant bullet. You could stamp the information onto sheets of steel or some other hardened metal then roll the steel into tubes ( I say tubes plural because some redundancy is probably needed.). If you made the steel tubes to look part of a steering rocket or some other mechanism that was on the "bullet" no one would notice them. Say, for instance, that you had some steering rockets with minimal fuel that were only to be used in the very final stages of the bullet approaching the moon. If the rocket broke apart just as the bullet was approaching the moon's surface, no one would probably notice a few extra metal tubes amidst the exhaust tubes or support struts or whatever other part of the mechanism that the tubes were created to mimc. There would have to be some way of identifying which tubes actually contained the message. Someone who was unaware could have one of the tubes for a souveneir for years as long as they never cut it down one side and flattened it out, they would never know what they had.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version