So You Want To/Write a Hard Science Fiction Story With Space Travel: Difference between revisions
So You Want To/Write a Hard Science Fiction Story With Space Travel (view source)
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Since space travel is involved, it's important to remember that human beings have traveled in space for over five decades now. We ''know'' what is involved in getting from the Earth's surface to low Earth orbit. We know what's involved in landing on a rocky world 400,000 kilometers away. We know what effect micro-gravity has on human bones and muscles. A realistic story involving space travel must take all this accumulated human knowledge into account. The cartoonish world of 1950s B-movie astronauts having a "navigational error" that sends them to an "uncharted planet" with an Earthlike ecosystem inhabited by alien women who speak English is, and should be, a [[Discredited Trope]] -- but so should portraying space travel like anything other than space travel just because it [[Rule of Cool|looks neater that way]] in your head. In many ways, you'll just have to dispense with the story making artistic sense so the story can make logical, scientific, engineering and micro-economic sense as something that could actually happen in the future, so be ready for a lot of artistic disappointments.
One of the best resources out there for realistic future space travel is the [https://web.archive.org/web/20120513122140/http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/ Atomic Rockets page], which covers everything from "what designs are on the drawing board for spacecraft capable of crossing interstellar distances within a human lifetime?" to "why should my female crew members not wear skirts?"
== Outline of Artistic Disappointments and Non-recommended Tropes ==
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... where sqrt means square root, and c is the speed of light in a vacuum (about 300,000,000 m/sec). As you can see, it varies according to how fast you're going (that pesky v<sup>2</sup> term in the denominator).
The Atomic Rockets website lists many, but not all, of the [https://web.archive.org/web/20120513193616/http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/slowerlight.php#id--Relativity useful equations] that come into play for a rocket travelling at these relativistic speeds. These include:
# T = (c/a) * ArcCosh[a*d/(c<sup>2</sup>) + 1]
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