With a dude named Ender playing a Game, how did you think it was going to go?
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- Опубликовано: 29 июн 2024
- This week's episod is sponsored by Sanctuary Coffee - sanctuarycoffee.co/ - for all your shipped-and-roasted-the-day-you-order coffee needs.
And yeah. Ender's Game was a weird book, wasn't it? And an even less-appreciated movie, which is something of a shame. Nice shuttle, though. The rest of this sequence makes absolutely no sense, though, if what I'm complaining about is what they actually did, and, let's face it, I have no idea if I'm right or not, so this is probably all just miscellaneous noise.
But "miscellaneous noise" /is/ the byline for this channel, so...
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0:00 Intro
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1:44 On with the show 
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Launching big fireballs from a platform placed on meltable material seems very smart
The problem is even more basic than dust and detritus trashing your solar panels.
At Cape Canaveral, if you park a car within 1 - 2 miles of the launch platform during a Saturn V or a Space Shuttle launch, you can safely expect that all the glass in that vehicle will have been blown out by the blast and overpressure generated by the engines trying to ramp up enough -specific- total impulse to get this multi-ton pile of metal and plastic accelerated enough to climb it's way out of a gravity well.
So on the bright side, by the time the dust from the flame trench settles on your solar panels, they are already so thoroughly trashed that the dust won't matter a damn.
If the water deluge system on the launchpad fails to function, the sound is sufficient to shatter concrete and damage the launch vehicle itself. See also the first Starship launch and the thirty foot deep crater that the rocket exhaust dug. Rocket acoustics is sufficiently studied in the case of Launch Complex 39 that the failure to take better care while launching Starship is baffling to me.
But the scene LOOKED pretty, and that matters more than plain good science in a movie far too often.
And that is why I say that the first thing I would do if I had a say in how to use the Starship fleet, it would be towards building a network of space elevators.
Don't get me wrong, I find the idea of a space launch exciting, and pulling g's is like one of the whole points of getting into space in the first place, but between blowing around all of that dust and detritus, and the chance of your rocket ride literally blowing up in your face, developing a network of space high-speed elevator trains just makes a whole lot more sense. Let's face it: the public will never support space travel on a commercial scale if they are aware that there is a 1% chance they will be starring in a Challenger Incident reenactment (especially with rumors that the Challenger crew was still alive and conscious as they hurtled towards the Atlantic).
If you build a pressure tunnel around the cable/track sections, and suck out all of the air from those sections, you could theoretically even have cars traveling at hypersonic speeds on electromagnetic rails, without the air resistance!
Specific impulse is a measurement of efficiency not power. You're referring to total impulse or thrust
And, if you are within 1-2 miles of the launch site at 0 hour, you will literally fucking die, even if you're standing in the middle of a field.
Ahh... wrote my master's thesis on hydrogen production and utilization technologies (and how they pertained to like... seven compounds I shot X-rays at). This video makes me very happy.
While I love you breaking down the sheer idiocracy that is Hollywood, The answer to "why" is quite simple: Because it looks pretty. That's it. I doubt that whoever designed that actually thought beyond that.
For an explanation of Mr. Card, I think we should quote Admiral James Tiberious Kirk, UFP Starfleet (Retired), "Too much LDS in the 60s."
The sad part is that "LDS" isn't a typo.
Yeah, definitely too much L.D.S. going on with Card. Which is all you need to know in order to understand his more whacked out ideas.
@@Hambie76To be fair, though, the Ender's Game book, itself, does not have much if any of his religion or politics shoved in there. It's a much more classic speculative-future sci-fi novel, and in the story, religion is mostly frowned upon by the world. He gives a very modern and fair portrayal to Alai (who is Muslim) and such.
It was much later (the Empire novels?) where his own beliefs and politics really started to get hammered into the story.
I can almost promise you that you spent more time thinking about that monstrosity of a launch site then anyone in the production did. building a launch platform in a location like that is asking to have an avalanche destroy it.
To know thy enemy is the first rule of war. I know them out of hatred, not love.
Example, I know a LOT about spiders.
It's also probably not a fabulous idea to be extracting water from the frozen lake that you've built your launch complex *on TOP of*.
Honestly, my biggest bugbears with the film as far as the tech's concerned were twofold
one, making the battle-room a giant glass sphere is both obscenely dangerous and makes the whole "The Enemy's Gate Is Down" concept harder to explain when there's a big spherical point of reference for a potential down RIGHT THERE
And secondly-
actually wait, shit, spoilers ahead for those who want to avoid spoilers for a ten year old movie, or a nearly forty year old book.
and SECONDLY, because they don't explain the giant chain-reaction molecular disruption device built into most of their ships, the climactic disruption of an entire blessed planet feels like a dumb stupid cop-out, and call me morbid but I'd been looking forward the whole film to seeing an entire planet get disrupted!
What would make the most sense to me would be if the road leading to the launchpad were actually an EM catapult. That would help explain the ship's small size, but the orientation of the main engines would be worse for some of those panels.
Yeah, solar panels would be a bad idea to have on/near a launch pad. Can you imagine the amount of manpower it would take to clean them up after each launch?
What if they were something else? Maybe they capture some of the released energy to be reinvested. Sensors of some sort. Of course, being Hollyweird, solar panels look cool and they help spread the green message, despite everything, so practical aspects are missed.
The out-of universe reason is disappointingly simple. It's pretty much classical greebling, inspired by the look of a solar furnace. And showing the solar array communicates the idea that the launch pad is a self-contained unit in a remote place. If they were a realistic distance out, they wouldn't fit into the frame, just like a squad of infantry in a war movie.
A snow covered mountain valley is perfect for solar collection lol
Until it snows, and the panels get covered lol
This was one of my favorite books as a kid. Book was impossible to make into a movie, they shouldn't have tried - could have been a *series* but even then... difficult to translate a story that covers 10+ years of a person's life, in fair amount of detail.
That said, Ford was fantastic as Graff, and Asa Butterfield did a pretty good job as Ender. Not their fault the script sucked.
Colorado mountains do have very good solar. Especially in the mountains and if youve kept all debris from flying towards yhe panels theyd get a production boost for evey launch. However, I personally would have gone with a nuke over solar.
colorado plains are even better - it's arid, sunny, and high up, so good conditions for panels, just higher latitude
Yeah, *almost* everything about the solar panels are dumb, with the exception that solar power is actually more efficient at colder temperatures since you get better energy transfer and often very cold places still get *plenty* of sunlight. (There's a reason arctic explorers/mountaineers wear sunscreen and sunglasses in below freezing temperatuees)
They might be absolutely freezing but so long as its still a bright day you'd match/exceed energy generation from places like deserts.
The issues arrive when you get bad weather or you need to account for the energy usage of de-icing systems to keep snow/ice off the panels.
His point was you have to Grok in Oneness to destroy a thing completely, but in the Grokking, you absorb what was destroyed.
No one needs to become one with an ant colony (or roach infestation) in order to wipe it out....
Starship IFT-2 got away just fine without a flame trench, but it did need a way to make the heat go from "right here" to "anywhere and everywhere in the Great Maker's grand creation EXCEPT right here" in a very short time to avoid what happened with IFT-1, which came in the form of just spewing ungodly amounts of water up through a steel plate under the flight stand.
Aliens watching humanity go from nuclear power to windmills and solar panels must think we are some silly backwards oddballs
Progress isn't a straight road marching steadily towards the future. It's a drunken stumble on twisting paths strewn with empty beer cans and bad ideas.
@@enoughothis Especially doesn't help when you have an arrogant and sociopathic elite class that can't stand the fact they don't own what you little you have making it so we needlessly suffer down that drunken path.
Remember, these people would rather have less overall if that means they get to have more then you do. We're living in the rat utopia and they are the beautiful ones.
or it's just a common pattern. getting PV efficiency up took a lot of time, while nuke design worked on far less technology
The problem is that the "environmentalists" formed a coalition with the anti-nuclear witch burners. Now there isn't a political party that is for nuclear power and for the environment.
It's for the ESG score *wink wink*
I think all that stuff at 6:25 , may have been inspired by the ICBM housing area of the Minute Man silos.
Mind you, in Ender's Game humanity has apparently come up with a weapon that creates a field in which electrons could not be shared, causing whatever it hits to disassociate into it's component particles. The field collapses at a short distance and time from the point of impact... unless it connects with more matter, at which point the field gets stronger and expands faster. Given that, it's entirely possible they came up with a better method for cracking water.
Ah yes, the "Little" Doctor
In the Swedish translation it’s literally called dr death. If this book wasn’t written in the seventies I would have presumed it’s main reason of inclusion being to screw over anyone attempting to pull a “my dad can beat your dad” sci fi universe comparison.
Given its... propagative nature, it seems ill-suited for terrestrial use.
@@SacredCowShipyards Agreed, but there might be an offshoot technology that is more easily limited.
A couple additional issues with that launch facility: first, as I understand it, rocket launches are _kind of_ loud. Like, they routinely have to use exotic methods like dousing the launch platform with water from industrial fire hoses to dampen the sound to keep it from rattling itself apart. Even if we're assuming the benefits of future-tech at work here, I can't imagine launch noises loud enough to turn organs into soup would do solar panels much good.
Second, launch facilities tend to be somewhat near the equator. Not because rocket scientists like kicking back in the sun-drenched tropics between shifts (though I'm sure many enjoy that aspect), but because the closer you are to the equator, the more of a boost the planet itself gives the rocket. It doesn't feel like it on the ground, but a rocket on the surface is already moving at about 1,650 kph relative to Earth's center. The further north or south you go from the equator, you get less of a push from the Earth's rotation, to the point that the rocket would just be spinning in place at the poles, and the planet's rotation would give zero help.
I suppose if we're assuming future-tech (which we clearly are, since we still don't have true SSTO and they do), their rocket designs might let them overpower gravity more easily and so they might not care as much about energy requirements for space launches. ...Of course, that kind of flies in the face of relying on hydrogen-oxygen rocket fuels generated on-site by solar farms.
Now that I think of the sound issues - building a giant noise generator surrounded by snow-cowered mountains must trigger so many avalanches. And that is not even getting into what it would do to a potential frozen lake below.
Living in the mountainous part of austria, we do have solar panels in the valleys but they are mostly in the ones that are alligned with the suns path. Getting some "free" energy is better than none.
Sure, but that's just it - it's not free.
@@SacredCowShipyards yes they require upkeep and arent cheap in the making but are better than nothing ( im not an eco terrorist rooting for renewable energies, i'd rather say build a few nuclear powerplants in places where they are safe and get the required upkeep instead of plastering the landscape with solar and windpower but no, of course our people where too scared of having those and banned them whilst having a few risky built ones right at our borders... )
(Sry for no cohesion in comment, 3:30am here
Colorado has two distinct climate areas . The Eastern Slope , and the Western Slope . The Western Slope is called the Desert Slope as well . At altitude of Approximately 8 thousand feet in the worst of winter season they get about 3 feet of snow that often melts off in a day or two . . The Western Slope is the better side of the state to use Solar Panels .
You should take a look at the ships and technology from Dune next! Interstellar travel achieved by inhaling copious amounts of giant space-worm sh1t.
We touched on the Heighliners, but should definitely get back there.
You should look at O'Neil cylinders and a major example would be the Colonies from Gundam.
Would have been pretty neat if instead of solar panels they were focusing arrays to heat a fuel pellet for the shuttle. That would help solve the why of the arrays at the bottom of the mountain and how the shuttle could ssto without significant fuel tanks.
Yes. I am suggesting using lasers to warm rocks to make things go fast.
I never thought of them as solar panels....for all the reasons you mentioned. I thought they were part of a magnetic repulsor array that pushed the shuttle into orbit while the rockets sustained the velocity. The junk in the flame tube may be thermal exchangers used to convert the heat into energy to help power the repulsor. Extremely inefficient, to be sure....but not as stupid as solar panels.
Given "equal and opposite reactions", the structure beneath them would have to be a lot more... significant.
Well, if nothing else, the regular rocket launches gotta do the job of defrosting the solar panels...
I was hopeful for even a modicum of smutt, was very slightly disappointed.
efficiency isn't really a concern. if they were somehow able to get the h2 on that shuttle, then running at 28% * 70% efficiency just means you have 4-5x as many panels
This is not a post-scarcity society.
So I am guilty with the water cracking fuel idea but for a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle (FCV), which we combined together.
I actually had a bio inspired design project where we used Photoelectrochemical (PECs) which use the processes of photosynthesis but with only water and sunlight, which leaves you with O2 and H2.
The PECs can be used either in a electrode type panel or particle type panel (so kinda closer to what plants do).
Albeit this is outside of my major as I'm going into civil engineering directly. So it's all theoretical.
This is exactly the type of hybrid design I've been looking at building. Do you have any ideas/sources I can study?
@@GrantvsMaximvs Resources wise, I used the department of energies article on PECs and FCVs but a great portion of the heavy lifting with exploring and explaining the idea was Chat Gpt 4. It was invaluable and was actually able to explain the theoretical process.. etc.
Also with speaking with a professors assistant who was researching Photoelectrochemical cells. Which the major things he told us, is we would want to use deionized water to fuel it.
Bear in mind the storage requirements for free hydrogen make personal-vehicle-applications... challenging.
@@SacredCowShipyards oh absolutely. We didn't really glance at the requirements for safety on a fuel cell vehicle as it was outside the scope of the project.
The theory is you would use deionized water that would be split by the PECs. The hydrogen would be captured for use in the Fuel Cell and the oxygen being released back into the atmosphere (for our green requirement and the fact I doubt anyone is going to be comfortable with have a oxidizer coozieed up next to a fuel in a car).
The only "comforting" thing about driving the car is the water storage tank sits next to the hydrogen tank. Doesn't really mean much though.
But really the biggest issue with this design is the people who came up with the idea, aka myself and my group, as we're basically all freshmen and none of us majoring in chemical engineering and quite frankly I'm a civil engineering major.
I was curious, so I watched that docking scene again. The shuttle docks with the middle section that isn’t spinning (the virtual camera is twirling, so I didn’t catch it at first). Meaning zero-G. But the cadets are shown climbing up out of the floor - correctly - and standing normally - incorrectly. The station’s end bits are spinning, so they seem to be subscribing to the bad sci-fi trope of “spinny section creates gravity across the entire ship, not just inside the spinny bit.”
The station captures the shuttle on a rotational section. Perhaps not the outermost part, but still rotating.
I wonder if these solar panels were artist's (rather clueless) vision of light propulsion. Reflect enough sunlight onto the craft (equipped with a mirror too) and light pressure will accelerate it. Would solve the problem of fuel capacity, would require a fantastically reflective mirror on the spacecraft to propel it instead of vaporizing it, and for a craft of this size would require a 'mirror farm' half the size of Colorado. What we see in the movie would maybe suffice for a poststamp-sized craft, dust aside.
Besides solar panels, they could be antenni/sensors to help the shuttle make adjustments. Or detect if something is going wrong and abort lainch/eject the passengers. Rockets going very wrong can happen faster than humans can react.
All Gadzillion of them?
It would be bizarre for them to use thousands of such panels when your modern spacecraft require but a few dishes and antennae.
Very fun video.... Rather exciting and almost hard to contain... Seemed by design too!
Just a thought, satellite collection of power with a beam to earth collected in a collector area away from people might make more sense
Centering the receiver on... a shuttle launch pad?
@@SacredCowShipyards If the shuttle also relies on the beam it could make some sense, or it could be to hide the base from curiosity inspection. Thats not a rocket silo, just a power downlink for a nearby mountain town, hidden well away from anything the em could interfere with.
Fun question, if they can 'geoscape' a flat plain could they not have turned a mountain and lake area into a giant hydrogen storage bunker. The thick sheet of ice is there to help keep the cryogenic hydrogen contained and insulated from solar heating. The dumb solar panels (needing to be repaired and cleaned every launch) also act as insulation; not sure why that design though. Another interesting video might be on the book/movies concept of spaceships and FTL/Temporal dynamics!
While I have no idea what the setup of that launch site could be I have to say that your rants tends to be oddly relaxing so no need to stop them any time soon ;-)
Also I am curious if you have seen the movie Titan A.E. and if so what your thoughts on the main "hero ships" are. Have a nice (insert suitable time here).
You know, I look back on the required reading programs that included things Ender's Game, Cask of Amontillado, Scarlet Ibis, Catcher in the Rye, and Bridge to Terrabithia I'm not surprised society is kind of messed up.
How could it not be when in your formative years you're reading about things like an 8 year old child soldier killing two of his classmates on their way to commiting unwitting genocide, a man seemingly taking murderous revenge on a friend for a petty insult, an older brother bullying his handicapped younger brother, one antisocial morons lunatic weekend in New York, and a book where the main character's best friend drowns because he's hot for teacher on an unsupervised visit to an art museum.
I didn't even bring up the book That Was Then, This is Now which is more or less about two idiots that steal cars, get arrested, and get high with their drug addict friends until one of them dies from an overdose.
Damn. Required reading kind of sucks and is depressing.
I find this calming. For the longest time I thought that required reading was only fucked up in germany where we had
-A stage play (Nathan the Wise)
-A guy getting into a romantic relationship with his daughter (Homo Faber)
-Abusive relationship simulator (Agnes)
-Constant sex jokes, then everybody gets executed (Danton's Death)
...To be fair I found the last one actually quite good after repeated reading. The sex jokes were great.
(given this place is in Alaska, so, so far up north a valley this deep gets 0% direct sunlight the idea of solar-panels never occurred to me... It's just so plainly ridiculous)
at first, to be honest, I thought these were an extremely square shiny honorary guard standing to attention... but more likely, since the shuttle both takes off and lands on this pad, it is a sort of giant reflector beacon for navigation.
"Why would you do that"
Well, the launch facilities' director likes his Sanctuary Coffee hot. All those solar panels? They are there for his coffee machine. There you go, riddle solved.
Earths modern energy solutions. They think theyre
Cool like Heisenberg, but instead theyre
Hot like Hindenberg.
To be fair, and i say this as someone who likes spicy rock production and thinks we should be making a lot more spicy rock power, the reason we’ve seen so much focus on sunlight activates computer chip is that is half to a third the cost.
Which is to say, if you build a spicy rock plant you might break even in forty years if there are no cost overruns, of which there are meant becuse we don’t build them much. If instead you put your money in a grid scale pile of sunlight activated computers chips you’ll be making bank ten years tops, and since the most important thing about any power production is obviously how much shareholder value it generates, you can afford to overbuild for site losses and still be making a return before a spicy rock plant.
All that said, they still should have been on the hillside of the sunny mountain and not artfully installed in the shade around the giant dust generator.
Maybe we should just call them magnetrons for a microwave beamed power.
Unfortunately - and as always - a lot of those costs are regulatory, in both directions.
@@SacredCowShipyards It’s definitely a factor, although I suspect legal challenges by Nimbys play a larger factor, but it’s much harder to clear up red tape than just outbuild it, especially if said red tape is the work of decades of lobbying by organizations that still have a lot of money at their disposal. Isn’t that a depressing thought.
Subsidies wise, while solar receives a lot more in absolute terms, that tends to be spread out across a far larger amount of built capacity, with a lot of potential nuclear subsidies being left underutilized.
Lets rock and roll! *magic carpet ride*
Oh. Dude. Read the speaker of the dead series (enders story continued. The bean series is actually pretty good.) The ftl ship the eventually come up makes absolute no sense at all. Pick that apart, because the only explanation is drugs. Crush it! Crush it real good.
What are you talking about? Starship had a flame trench! I mean, it didn't START with a flame trench, but the flames dug a trench, so there you go.
Your issues with mountain ranges aside, if the energy is free, you can just fiddle around absorbing sun and producing fuel and oxidizer, and the biggest issue will be your production rate vs. your intended launch tempo. A facility like that? You need up-well and down-well lift capacity measured in tons per week, not counting re-boost reaction mass, for food and waste. Yeah, someone gonna have to drive the sewage truck. No, the biggest issues I take with your suggestions of possible launch sites is the total restriction of launch windows and attainable orbits suffered from high latitude mountain ranges and safe downrange vectors for a vehicle leaving such high latitudes. If we wanted to make your Hydrogen- LOX booster idea work, it would be likely in the Andes, near the Equator.... Good news, lots more solar. Bad news, does not match the flora or snow cover level depicted in the movie. Worse news, it's actually pretty arid, so you're gonna waste a lot of effort pumping water into the Atacama desert, because that's a place where they need a fossil record to determine when it last rained. If you launched from Colorado, you wouldn't be able to effectively attain an orbital inclination less than about 40 degrees without massive expenditure of delta-v... and that would only be attainable by firing due east, and flying directly over the Boswash corridor.
More bad news.... if the exhaust plume is any indicator, they're flying on solid rocket boosters, not hydrogen-LOX. If you wanna see the difference, watch an old shuttle launch... the orbiter with its near invisible flame of the RS-25 is a LH2-LOX engine. Delta IV with it's near clear flame is also a LH2-LOX, though it is my understanding the slight orange color is an ablative nozzle coating to keep that hellish juju from touching anything important. Starship with its clear blue is Methane-LOX, the clean orange of a Saturn V or a Falcon 9 is Kerosene-LOX, clear flames and brown smoke like you get from Titan, Long March, Proton, or Satan-II is hypergolics (stay upwind), and this soot-and-smoke-belching-firefart look is what you generally get from dirty combustion, like you find in a solid booster, incomplete combustion, or perhaps engine-rich exhaust.
You're two thirds of the way to my ideal morning: coffee, cigarettes and ranting about dumb shit. Marlboro sponsorship next?
I think they're microwave emitters that beam power to the shuttle, which itself is electrically powered. Or at least that's the least dumb thing I can think of.
You've still got the problem that electric rockets aren't the sort of thing you can use to do the ground-to-orbit jump; they're pretty efficient with their reaction mass, but don't have the acceleration to overpower gravity.
@@boobah5643 Yeah, but this is the future. Maybe they have, like, better electric rockets.
If it uses pure hydrogen it can be a thermal rocket that uses the heat of microwaves instead of oxygen reacting with it to make hot gas. Big problem is even liquefied hydrogen is very bulky.
Got the other problem of no apparent accommodation for receiving that energy appearing to be built on the shuttle.
It's a magnetic field focusing array. A powerful, but highly focused, magnetic monopole generator shunted through an array. The combined magnetic force pushes the shuttle just enough that the limited amount of fuel on board is enough to get the shuttle spacebourne. That amount of magnetic force could be generated with a fusion core or three, but the monowire superconductor material would be hard to get, and harder to work with, but much better than pure rocket fuel.
This was a good one. I'm going to share it with the few people I know who will appreciate it and get a laugh too.
Well, they do have gravity manipulation technology. Perhaps they are using that to lighten the mass of the shuttle to the point not much energy is needed to get it into space?
They... have simulated gravity systems... but still build massively overcomplex 1960s ring stations to make centrifical force for gravity? There is a reason ALL of the ring station ideas were scrapped, and the idea they built one after already having simulated gravity is even harder to get my brain around than having ANY sensor/panel/antenna structures within a mile of a SSTO rocket launch system.
And that point, they might as well develop gravity drives and to hell with the reaction thrust. It can't be much more complex compared to reducing the mass of an object.
They spin their station. Not sure that counts as "gravity manipulation".
@@SacredCowShipyards Perhaps they didn't talk about it in the movie? I only skimmed through it. There was a bit in the book where the humans were using artificial gravity on the space station and pretending they were using spin to simulate gravity. I don't remember the reasoning behind hiding it. And I can't remember if they had put it into their ships or not, just that the later launched ships had caught up (timing wise) to the earlier launched ones due to better engine tech being incorporated.
@@patchmoulton5438 I think they do, it's just still secret.
I saw the plot twist coming within a few chapters, the character development was incredibly trite.
I tried the sequel, but simply didn't care how it continued. Gave them to a charity shop.
So a couple thoughts from a solar enthusiast:
Cracking hydrogen to fuel, well with enough panels it's free and anyone who plays with solar understands there are losses in the system and the cheapest and easiest way to deal with that is to just install more solar panels as they're the cheapest part of any system.
Why put all the arrays on the lake: Flat space! You've GOT all this nice open flat space not doing anything else anyways, might as well USE all the flat space that's not doing anything else anyways. The shot where the shuttle has lifted off really gives you a perspective on just how HUGE that array is. This size array is small-city size so there's plenty of power generated in a short time to compensate for the shorter usable solar hours.
Power consumption & usage: Even with the inefficiency in cracking fuel aside, a common saying when talking about heating anything is "Anything but Solar!" because heating is an extremely energy heavy usage process. Since you have people living and working and equipment inside there that likes to be at the same temperature as the squishys, you're going to need a LOT of power just to run heaters for the HVAC system, and need more panels. Battery and fuel storage are probably in caves in the hills for climate control reasons. Wires are easy to run so there's no reason you have to have your batteries in the field right next to the arrays getting cold.
Durability: Modern consumer grade panels are build to withstand baseball sized hail, I can only imagine that military grade panels aren't even going to bat an eye at whatever debris comes out of the flame chute and into the air. Worst case scenario, the enlisted engineers are out there after every launch washing the panels for a couple days.
Solar efficiency: Your giving them 50% efficiency is being really REALLY kind. Even nowadays we get excited if we can get something at 25% efficiencies. Considering that asteroid mining is common in this world, just putting up more panels is an easy solve for it. As someone in the pacific northwest, Colorado is much better than we get. Adding losses on top of losses reaches a point where you can throw enough money at something to solve the issue, and nobody has mastered throwing money at problems to make them go away like the military.
Solar location: Colorado is one of those places that the government already owns LOTS of space and is geographically protected. Yes, ICBM's make it pointless but remember every development in war is to make the last war work better. A missile might get through, but the ground troops that the generals are used to and thinking about will have a hard time packing up and down the hills.
Stuff in the flame trench: Yeah, that's dumb.
Nuclear Power: Because that makes too much sense and the NIMBY crowd has been very effective at generating fear and spreading stupidity. 2000 mini explosions a minute on the other side of a piece of thin sheet metal? That's fine. Nuke? OMGNOBOOMFEARTHEENDOFTHEWORLDOMG!!! 🙄
Putting a ton of solar panels on the bottom of a deep valley (instead of, say, southern slope of the mountains around the valley) is still quite dumb IMO. Why undercut already lacking efficeny of the panles by putting them in a shadowy place? If you choose an inefficient option at least try making it a bit less inefficient. 😉
@@090giver090 Very true!
Given they appear to have reliable FTL capabilities, there are far less expensive solutions for doing what they need to do, especially in light of all the additional costs you document.
I guess it could be a fusion rocket powered by cracked water hydrogen? Maybe? Idk. I'm just a history guy.
So far, fusion requires deuterium by itself or with added tritium. Those are isotopes of hydrogen that occur naturally but are pretty damn rare, down in the parts per million and parts per quintillion respectively in natural water sources. Deuterium is stable but tritium isn’t- however it is slowly replenished by cosmic rays.
Both can theoretically be extracted from seawater or lakes or even rivers and used to generate enough energy in a fusion reactor (that we don’t quite yet know how to build) to not just run the extraction and purification processes but provide surplus power too.
The exhaust will be largely helium with none of the hydrocarbons mentioned, as opposed to the steam from just burning hydrogen and oxygen. It will still kick up dirt etc. because the exhaust trench is built wrong as mentioned. Loudly.
So yes, such a shuttle could be fusion powered using fuel taken from water, but that frozen lake *might* yield enough deuterium and tritium for one launch.
Hence the launch site should be near a seashore, not high up in the mountains. It should also be near the equator because more solar power is available there, and you get a boost from the rotational velocity of the Earth.
There are a... variety of other detrimental problems involved in using a fusion torch inside an atmosphere.
That's a very cursed launch platform.
The launch is also harder because it's at a slower point of earths rotation, there's a reason we do it in florida
Love your rants and your insight. I'd like to know exactly why the animals we elect to tell us what to do have elected to regress technology 200 years into the past. We have all the energy we'll ever need beneath our feet, it just requires one handle with care.
I havent seen the movie, so I have no idea how much it deviates from the book, but can we maybe presume technology has progressed enough in the movie universe for some simple self-assembly and null-fruction surfaces?
If we do, the solar farm could make sense. Being up in the mountains, getting the materials in place for a nuclear reactor could be tricky, and possibly cost ineffective. A small army of machine assemblers building a big solar farm could make sense in that context, and the energy coat associated to crack the water isnt a really big deal if thats all the farm does. And, if they have null-friction tops, a simple tilt to perpendicular to the ground would have the post launch dust simply fall away.
Of course, we all know the real reason the movie had it was that they thought it looked cool and so no amount of theorizing will make the facility actually _good_ but that's my shot.
Given they have SSTO craft about the size of the USAians' Shuttle, moving material around on their planet seems... inconsequential.
The Enemy Gate is CUBE. 😮
Bruh, the spore music got me.
It's probably worth pointing out that hydrolox engines don't produce much soot. That's why the RS-68s on the space shuttle burned with an almost clear flame, there is pretty much zero incomplete combustion
Sure, but everything they're hitting will.
Fair. And now I think about it even on a kerosene burning rocket most of the dust would come from detritus collecting in the flame trenches anyway
Hi there, long time viewer (And a fan of enders game, although I must say the book is much better than the film). I was wondering, would you ever consider perhaps going over a ship design not part of any major franchise, maybe not in a video but perhaps taking a look at it nonetheless? I'm sure fans would be interested in sharing their own designs with the dockmaster and getting feedback. Perhaps you could inspire the next generation of sci fi creators to make more realistic or at least more tasteful ships?
That would be a cool episode.
How about that sequel though eh?
Haven't seen the sequel yet, is it any good?@@Tricky117
It's come up before, and we may figure out how to set it up in the future. If nothing else, hopefully the discussions here are thought-provoking enough to prompt better designs.
I thought “Ender’s Game” was the variant of Russian Roulette that uses five chambered rounds.
Maybe their not actually solar panels but rather some kind of laser array system that assists with propelling the shuttle into space, ala Laser propulsion.
It would help to explain the apparent absence of fuel as you said. Still no reason to keep such a facility right next to the rocket launching platform though.
Lasers would have similar problems plus the vibrations from the initial rocket stage would throw the optics all out of alignment which would at best make them far less efficient and more likely self-destruct.
Plus there's no indication on the shuttle for any kind of receiving end of such a system.
Well, it is pretty shiny... Mirrored surfaces for reflecting the odd stray laser beam perhaps?
Edit: To be fair I'm not trying to defend Hollywood here, it's obvious they were just promoting Big Solar in this scene. I'm just Spit balling over here.
@@SacredCowShipyardsThere's another massive problem. If cracking water for LH2 and LOX is inefficient, then lasers are far worse. CO2 lasers powerful enough to actually have an effect on an object are about 20% efficient (rest is dumped as waste heat). I'll go ahead and bump that up to 60% to be generous given the tech shown in the film. That's still a MASSIVE array for an optical SSTO vehicle that I'm going to ball park as having about 50 tons of mass empty.
Back in 1998, the first laser propulsion system underwent testing using a 50 gram test vehicle being hit with a 10 kW pulsed CO2 laser and the vehicle only made it about 100 feet in altitude; the researchers estimated that you would need a 1 GW laser to get 1 ton into orbit SSTO at 10G acceleration in their published paper (not good for squishies as that is WELL beyond our tolerances beyond a couple seconds duration). So if we assume linear scaling (and ignore the insane G forces involved), that's a 50 GW laser for a 50 ton vehicle. So if we're assuming 60% efficiency (and no other losses due to transmission, thermal blooming which WILL happen in an atmosphere, and so on), the solar array would need to be putting out 83.3333....GW just to power the laser itself. Not including other equipment like computers, tracking arrays, communications, environmental systems for the ground crew, etc. And with that much power generation, you need to find a way to dump the waste heat in a way that doesn't fry your delicate equipment. Granted, it's easier planet side since you can run coolant lines to take advantages of conduction and convection, but now you also have to power the various pumps, monitoring equipment for that system, have redundancies so you can have safe failure modes, etc.
The kind of solar array you'd need to power all that (and the control systems to make sure all the panels are facing the proper orientation, the star trackers to tell the control systems where to look, etc) would mean you'd almost have to turn an entire mountainside into one giant solar array. To say nothing of the maintenance requirements involved. This is the kind of operation that would have to require Avatar's Pandora run just to have the funding to maintain.
@@gigagian Based on research available on laser-based propulsion that can do SSTO, you're looking at a full gigawatt per ton of vehicle and payload to low orbit as a rough ballpark. At the ranges those mirrors would be at, they'd undergo explosive vaporization. For comparison, Lockheed Martin's laser weapon is only running 300 kilowatts, 3333.3333... times less powerful than what would be needed for just 1 ton to LEO via SSTO.
Art.
but but... RADIATION!
Ugh.
Anyways, I seriously would prefer non-pressurised reactors, especially ones that don't operate on coolants that become hideously reactive with everything metal if you overheat it just a touch.
I guess this big misconception about dangers of nuclear energy comes from the fact that we kinda just rested on the old ones we built, but not even enough to need two hands to count them went critical...
I though they might of gone down the classic 50's rocket on a ramp with a magnetic acceleration otherwise ... nup no idea
C'mon Aaron, the rockets energize the solar collectors which energize the repulsor field aiding the liftoff. Everyone knows that... ;-)
And Plebe's have to go clean the panels on a daily basis. Great reason to get straight A's...
The reason the movie was less-appreciated was because of how much it ignored its source material. As a fan of the Ender series and the companion series following Bean and the other members of his "Jeesh" when they returned to Earth since middle school.. The movie was an atrocity.
I never saw this movie, i thought it was just a bad offbrand battship plot. Might actually watch it now
So speaking of flame trenches, think you'll ever talk about the 2004 live action thunderbirds?
Probably.
If it is a lake, maybe the rocket is like the The Sea Dragon was a 1962 conceptualized design study for a two-stage sea-launched orbital super heavy-lift launch vehicle.
No real indication of any staging for the shuttle.
Using spicy hot rocks wasn't broke. Governments, and citizens, had to fix it. Result: wind and solar farms for everyone.
1) isn't that launch facility for the battle-school only? If it's the prestige launch site used infrequently mostly staffed with guards to keep the dissidents and nutsos out the setup you theory crafted may work.
2) about the stuff on the sides of the pit. perhaps they were inspired by a neat bit of trivia from attack of the clones the core ships have a similar setup with the technology being used to trap radiation and presumably other nasty things.
3) while I'm on the subject what do you think about separating/combining vehicles? Seems like they're hard enough to keep together as is without a gimmick but dang if it doesn't look cool.
Later Dockmaster 🙂
As long as we last long enough for AI to replace us. All hail SCS!
It always bugs me that humans where practically gifted the warm rocks to make power efficiently. but they don’t because the oil companies convinced all the humans that the warm rock is dangerous.
My guy, you taught rocks to think. You then taught those rocks to think for themselves almost. Let the thinking rocks govern the warm rocks with a little human oversight for LOTS of power. Stop letting rich bastards trick you for their benefit.
@ 3:28, tell me that door swings up or down, because it cannot open otherwise. Unless it's paper thin...
I like the seat belts. Look like the one my Dad designed way back in the 70's. The original was push to open and that had problems when the AC was spinning and flailing arms popped it open. Dad modified the design to require turning before pressing to open.
He also told me he designed landing gear for Naval aircraft, to which I thought: didn't the guy who designed the plane do that? Navy has higher requirements, in that carrier landings far exceed normal landings.
Not sure they showed it, but your aircraft already have doors like that which pop out and then rotate.
@@SacredCowShipyardsFair point. Been a while since on a plane, but I seem to recall that.
Even the very fact that an interstellar civilization would use solar power at all is insulting to the technology tech tree. No, not even Dyson spheres are a real thing worth pursuing for any civilization that already has access to nuclear energy. The Dyson sphere concept was conceived before nuclear energy was a mainstream idea and is inherently pointless after the fact.
Yeah, it's a good thing the tech tree doesn't have feelings, nor do I (or most anybody) care about insulting it. You use the right tool for the job, and for much of the solar system what makes sense, even with our shitty current-day solar panels, is solar over fission. Get far enough out, and fission is the choice.
I'm sure it's an insult to the tech tree that we still build houses out of wood rather than steel, too.
@@boobah5643 Nah, solar makes zero sense over fission, and especially later over artificial fusion. The sun is a terrible fusion reactor, you can make a better one with a bigger power output, the same fuel, and much fewer resources than a dyson sphere.
@@boobah5643 Of course you're right that solar does have a place as the right tool for the job, it has a place on small satellites and other small remote users, be it even just a remote house on an island somewhere.
15:00 soo much YES!!!!!
Star ship still doesn't have a flame trench, and it seemed to be fine this time around...
Looks like the water spray worked this time.
I know you think those solar panels are terribly placed, well then you should look into Solar FREAKIN Roaways, where hundred of millions was spent to put solar panels in parking lots and to be made into the roads.
And they broke within the first weak. Hell, didn't they freeze over at some point?
@patchmoulton5438 At one point? Multiple points and for long durations, the workmanship was sloppy at best, they would fail within days, and some had to be cordoned off from the rest of the parking lot so they would stop failing. I fail to see why they just didn't put that money into a few strategically thought-out areas for power gain then stick to cheap ass mostly recycled asphalt and get back to public trains.
@@roberthill5805 oh I remember them taping it off to stop people from walking on it because it couldn't handle the weight of a person. And they wanted them for roads.
@@patchmoulton5438 Yeah, it is painful to think that they would consider it a good idea.
Cracking water for hydrolox production makes sense if you are capturing solar energy to power it. But yeah, those panels should be on the ridges surrounding that valley, not in the valley itself.
Even then there are far more efficient systems.
@@SacredCowShipyards certainly, but if you've got a bag of free hammers, might as well smack some nails.
Solar isn't free.
@@SacredCowShipyards Sunlight is free.
Sure, with our modern manufacturing capabilities, solar panels are quite expensive. But there's no law of the universe saying that will remain true in the future. It's not difficult to imagine that a society which has achieved interstellar travel has had one or two technological breakthrough along the way which would applicable to thing like mass manufacture of energy-harvesting solutions.
The same could be said of any of the massively more efficient options.
I've read the books and skipped the terrible movie adaptation. If those are solar panels, I agree that the placement is stupid; but, in the books humanity learned to extract solar energy at the theoretically possible limit of efficiency from Bugger technology. So solar with that tech is fantastic. The book doesn't mention anything about the shuttle other than it's existence, so I guess the movie team was free to dream up whatever they wanted. My impression from fan reviews and the previews is that human tech level in the movie is noticeably lower than in the books - other than interstellar travel, we were approximately matched technologically with the Buggers in the first war.
2:00 if you are intellectually inclined eventually, even if not in the moment, you do tend toncome to love/understand your enemy.
Every person has some redeeming quality, and most people do what they do for logical reasons, believing all the while that they are good and right. War isn't really about hating your enemies, war is about breaking the system that is doing what you don't like. People are part of that system, and even if you love your enemy, you understand the necessity of breaking them.
There is a radical difference between "love" and "understand".
Dockmaster there is another massive flaw with this system. You didn't notice
They've put a massive rocket on top of an icely lake. Last time I checked, rockets creat fire a lot of fire,
Fire melts ice. The whole base is gonna since into the lack bed after one or two rocket lunches
I had assumed the flame tube was in some way insulated.
@@SacredCowShipyards Considering the rest of the things mentioned in the design? You really think they would have bothered with insulation or thought of that particular flaw?
Man... hydrogen storage and if the batteries to into full thermal runaway means things will get "interesting". Even worse if they're using capacitors. Hope like hell there's one seriously good series of fuses and breakers and ways to dump all that waste electricity and heat somewhere else.
So what would happen if we filled the flame trench with sewer runoff water, instead of normal sea water?
Probably nothing good.
If I may posit something to you dockmaster it is quite simple, really.
Movie producers are obsessed with putting greeblies everywhere because they are afraid the audience won’t bother watching if there isn’t something interesting looking on screen at all times regardless of whether or not said greeblies have any justification or even RIGHT to exist in the first place.
Movie takes place in future therefore solar panels therefore future. There is no greater reasoning behind it than that. Because the scientific literacy of our plant is, unfortunately, less than satisfactory I’m afraid.
And even THEN there is also the fact that most movie goers go for “entertainment” first and foremost. Scientific accuracy is more of a bonus for those interested in that sort of thing.
So yeah…Humans are humans and we like shiny impressive looking things because the deep lizard brain go brrr when something shiny…or whatever.
Jupp Sacred Cowplaints Shipyards 😁
How seasons work is science and teaching science isn't really allowed in Texas.
Making energy from water _may_ be an "energy profitable" if instead of simply burning Hydrogen one would use in for nuclear fusion. But still, if the technology in the movie is advanced enough to have a working fusion reactors... the hell sombody need solar power panels for?
i was hoping for a video on the combat fleets/ships from the ender's game movie.
We might get there, but there's not a lot of detail to work with.
@@SacredCowShipyards true true. I just like the art direction and maneuvers they do with the fighters.
Were they worried about detection by aliens? That's the only reason that makes sense, that solar would be safer or more accessible than nuclear.
Seems like properly shielding your reactors is better than building a literal bullseye around your launch site.
I totally agree with you on the *location* of the solar panels. Even if you have a bloody good reason to use that launch site, *and* you have a reason (probably ideological or politicial) to use solar power, you could site the panels far better. However...
Throughput efficiency is irrelevant, if the power is effectively free, *and* you really need to convert electric power into a storable, portable format because the end power user (the shuttle) will rapidly outreach an extension cord.
But, small nuclear plabts wouod make more sense, and the power to keep that facikity warm, well lit, amd all the IT infrastructure running would practically be an insignificant parasitic draw on the total power needs if youre doing more than one launch every few months.
There is, however, one explanation to hand wave the fuel limits of that small SSTO somewhat away... if the thruat of the hydrogen engines were boosted by injecting MORE energy into the rocket engine via ground based lasers (Yay! More electricity needed!). Note that power lasers wouldn't have any visual signature, but wouod increase both the mass flow (heating up ambient atmosphere that's otherwise "in the way" of the rocket thrust in the bell) and the exhaust velocity (by heating the both atmosphere and rocket exhaust to temperatures higher than the straight hydrogen/oxidizer mix qouod naturally reach), thus increasing thrust dramatically. And critically, it would be increasing it in the portion of the floght profile where it maximizes overall fuel efficiency - while the SSTO is trying to accelerate against gravity in the thickest part of the atmosphere. The faster you ounch theough the thick crap that sophonts like to breathe, the less fuel overall you need.
Combining propulsion lasers with exhaust-plume-creating reaction drives is even sillier than using solar power on a mountain top to crack water.
Umm, Sacred Cow, just a point of order here, but aircraft flight decks have always had doors separating them from the cabin area. The only things that changed after 9/11was that the door now has to stay closed at all times, is somewhat armored, cannot be forced open from the cabin-side, and recently, had a secondary door added so the pilots can leave the flight deck (to use the toilet, for example) and not have a straight path into the flight deck in case someone tries to rush the door.
Doors?..... a number of legacy Turboprop regional short hop flights would disagree.... they often had a curtain..often not even closed.
Even larger craft frequently used curtains.
i still play all borderlands games. tons of fun and funny.
tell me you're a nuke, without telling me you're a nuke :)
The Shipyards prefer more... exotic... power sources.
That is such an inefficient way to just put a single shuttle into orbit. My question is if this is their launching infrastructure, how the #@&% did they get everything they have into orbit, let alone MANY massive interstellar battle fleets. How many launches would it take to put up Battle School? Let alone each of their MANY interstellar ships. Yeah, this shuttle is single stage to orbit, and they likely have some sort of fast turn around system after each landing, but this thing doesn't look like it has a whole lot of cargo room.
There is this major technology discrepancy between their planet side launching and their star ships. They can build ships that are able to go a reasonable fraction of the speed of light, and have been able to build those ships for many decades, if not a century or two. They have much better tech available to them. Why do their planetary launches suck so much?
You’re assuming everything was launched from Earth’s surface. Much more reasonable to presume mining and manufacturing facilities on Luna and the asteroids.
And where will those mining facilities come from? If the school was build in orbit, where did the orbital factories come from? At their root, their whole space economy is still going based on bring up stuff from Earth.
When I see stuff like that I just assume somebody needed to either pay back a donor with the government funds or someone needed some more money spent in their District. Most logical reason really... Will Realistic reason at least.
Perfect example of what you get when the government gets involved. was also 3x over budget when built.
Yeah no solar panels are a joke while reactor cores are alot more functional, if you need to use solar use it in small scale or for orbital structures like stations or satellites/probes
The real work happens from the second novel. Not the first novel. That's just the top dressing
Oh, SCS, you do so much more than complain... ... ...I'm trying to think of what, but nothings coming to the top of my pile of grey mush.