Aphelion

Just got an email from Bill Warren.

Bill's taken all the stories and the series guide and created an incredibly detailed glossary (concordance, technically) as a guide for his own illustrations. It's got everything in it from what people eat, to what Little Pakistan or Oxyria Digyna are, to where the rovers are stored on the ship. It's just an amazing collection of facts as we writers dreamed them up, but put down in a way that makes us all look like we knew what we were doing. I'm definitely going to add it to series guide as a resource for writers.

There are a few details to hash out between he and I, but soon after that, the artwork creation should begin. We're going to have detailed ship views, character info, and also full illustrations for the first two stories that were made from the flash challenge pieces.

I don't know if they'll be done in time for the "next issue or two" that Dan mentioned in his editorial, but hopefully it should be in the next few months. I certainly can't promise things faster than Bill can create them.

It's exciting to be a part of this!

Nate

We're working through all of our details and we've run across a possible snag, one where I need someone much better at math and astrophysics than me.

The particular year in which the Aphelion Project launches (in real life) has a 60-day launch window. The stories prescribe a 9 light second delay. Is it possible with engines on today's drawing boards, together with some orbital maneuvering, to get one ship that far ahead in 60 days??

Unless I messed up, that's about 1.67 million miles, or a little less than 1/20th the distance to Mars at its closest. I don't have the notes anymore from when Bill Wolfe and I came up with that delay, so I don't recall what we figured in the part where Ophelia needed emergency surgery. Bill is much better at physics than I am, anyway.

Bill Warren, on the other hand, has quite an eye for things from a hard SF perspective, so he finds a lot of minor bits that I have to fix or explain. We'll never manage a strict, hard SF in the stories simply because few to none of us are actually rocket scientists. I'm sure not. We're aiming at as hard SF as we can get without strangling the story, but I'd like things to make sense while setting up the series guide, if at all possible.

Thoughts about the 9 second delay??

1 year = 31,566,000 seconds (for a non-Leap year)
1 light year = 9,460,528,405,000 kilometers
9 light seconds = 9/31,566,000 x 9,460,528,405,000
= 2,699,922.49 kilometers

60 days = 1,440 hours
so AVERAGE speed would only have to be 2.7 x 10^6 km/ 1,440 hours
or a measly 1,874.95 km/h! Unless I'm mistaken, this is way below Earth escape velocity.*

Of course, the actual course of the ship would be curved (an arc from a point on Earth's orbit to a point on Mars's orbit where Mars WILL be), and the ship would be accelerating from a lower speed, so its final velocity would be much higher than that... How long since the end of the primary delta-v burn?

Still, even current hypergolic rocket fuels should be able to cover THAT kind of distance in that kind of time with no trouble.

Have I slipped a decimal point somewhere?

RM

Addendum:

from the Wikipedia article on Escape Velocity:

"...On the surface of the Earth, the escape velocity is about 11.2 kilometers per second (~6.96 mi/s), which is approximately 34 times the speed of sound (mach 34) and at least 10 times the speed of a rifle bullet. However, at 9,000 km altitude in "space", it is slightly less than 7.1 km/s."

7.1 km/s x 3600 = 25,560 km/h, so 1,900 km/h IS only a fraction of "escape velocity". No problema.

If so, we could probably plot the relative positions of the planets for any given date (I think). Might even be able to do some rough orbital calculations for the spacecraft...

(Of course, Heinlein would have thought we were all barely human -- needing pre-programmed software to calculate orbits instead of some reference tables and a slipstick.)

RM

I can't claim to have followed half of that, but only a week ahead would make me very happy.

My assumption was that they were assembled in Earth orbit, not a LaGrange point. Probably parts temporarily hooked to the ISS & put together there for ease of assembly, testing, and crew transfer.

Is that very flawed logic, and would it mess up the calculations?

Hero, the year is 2035, which coincidentally may match the Constellation program goals. We'll see what happens.

Nate

Bill_Wolfe wrote: The whole life-support system thing--as opposed to just electronic junk--really changes everything. These things are massive to the point of being ridiculous, and we don't use motors or engines to do much more than change a few little orientations and things.

The stories use a new state of the art algae-based life support system. Smaller. Faster. Better... Somehow.

They would have breakaway rockets to get them heading toward the moon at the proper angle, and then they would make a close flyby of Earth to SLOW THEM DOWN A LITTLE until they could put themselves in the way of Mars.

Once captured by Mars they would be able to achieve orbit with nothing but thrusters.

That's the only way this will work with anything close to current technology.

Due to the mass of both ships, we'd need to think about how to slow them down in time to intersect the Mars orbits.

It's not that complicated, really. But it's a lot of math.

The artwork gives us a big relightable booster, but not much else. These are interesting points, though, and I'm going to forward them on to Bill Warren. I get the feeling he thinks of it in more Apollo-style terms.

Nate