Worth something for sure; the Netflix 1st season is based mostly on the 1st book and the space elevator is in the 2nd book. It’s an odd trilogy - ongoing mind f&*#k while reading but then you forget everything once you finish. But i remember that space elevator
Nice. I've been enraptured by the skyhook concept for a long time now. I'm not sure exactly when it was first presented to my young mind- maybe that Clarke novel someone referenced in the comments, which probably means middle or high school. Sci-fi is so great at opening minds.
Feel free to link to some stories you've written on this! Here's a good place for them; sometimes readers read these comments, and I swear half the fun is here anyway.
"Plasma drives of low quality left a much more pronounced ion trail, meaning they did create pollution of sorts. In space terms, it was ludicrously minute and contributed virtually nothing to overall pollution levels. There was no ill effect unless you flew straight through the trail of a huge starship, while wearing a simple spacesuit.
Even a starfighter’s or a shuttle’s cockpit was strong enough to protect the crew from this. On a planet’s surface, that was another deal altogether. In some cultures it was considered a crime of extreme proportions to use powerful plasma drives in atmo. Mag launch ramps were a way to drastically reduce the pollution.
Some, desperate enough to risk constructing the suicidally dangerous, massively expensive and otherwise useless orbital elevators, did so, in an attempt to remove pollution entirely. Those civilizations were easily the biggest fools of them all, in his humble, yet informed, opinion.
One could cause untold devastation and even cripple the entire economy of a planet sporting an orbital elevator just by shooting it in the middle. Better yet, one sneaky special op later and the planted explosives could topple the entire thing.
In the old galactic strategy books there was a term for this madness, and after translating it from Dzent’a to English it sounded like “Snake slapped” or “Ropemageddon”. A structure of such size, falling from orbit with great speed would certainly cause a specific damage pattern.
Thankfully his Terran friends wouldn’t fool themselves by the supposedly wondrous “advantages” such a structure offered."
Love me a Space Elevator! Spent some time today writing about a not-so-veiled Amazon(tm) building one for a story and because serendipity is a thing I read this just an hour later!
Dude, enough with the "elevator" and other supposedly practical excuses for this hypthetical Skyhook.
We know it's really all about attaching a massive spherical satellite to it, letting the Earth's spin do its thing, then detaching it to set the intergalactic record for hammer throw.
I contemplated using a GIF today, and I found some pretty good ones. None of them were quite right for what I wanted to illustrate, but I did find one really cool gif that shows this momentum:
SpaceX's Mars rocket is supposed to use a somewhat related concept to launch towards Mars. It would float up into low Earth orbit first and sit there until the distance between Earth and Mars is at its shortest, at which point it'd use the Earth's pull to speed up and fling itself towards Mars. I might be simplifying a tiny bit.
Here I thought you were going to talk about the Fulton Skyhook developed right here in Tucson, aZ but I got Space Elevators instead!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery_system
No, but I wonder if you might be able to work this into an upcoming piece. We can play like a low-key reference game only the two of us get!
Side note, seeing David's comments and Andrew's affirmations makes me pseudo-wish I had talked about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's hook shot.
If anyone can be said to be an expert on skyhooks, it's our fellow Substacker Kareem Abdul Jabbar....
Did you read the 3 body problem Andrew? I think there is a whole chapter on the ride on one of these
Nope! Sounds really neat, though. I will certainly watch the remainder of the Netflix series, for whatever that's worth.
Worth something for sure; the Netflix 1st season is based mostly on the 1st book and the space elevator is in the 2nd book. It’s an odd trilogy - ongoing mind f&*#k while reading but then you forget everything once you finish. But i remember that space elevator
Nice. I've been enraptured by the skyhook concept for a long time now. I'm not sure exactly when it was first presented to my young mind- maybe that Clarke novel someone referenced in the comments, which probably means middle or high school. Sci-fi is so great at opening minds.
Excellent point, and I may have missed a chance to tag him so that he could get a chuckle from the title.
Same; I wondered if this one was going to be about basketball
This is something which has been in the far reaches of the back of my mind, since reading Arthur C. Clarke s- “The Fountains Of Paradise “ in 1979.
Probably me too!
While a space elevator looks and sounds quite amazing, I wouldn't live on a planet that has one.
Feel free to link to some stories you've written on this! Here's a good place for them; sometimes readers read these comments, and I swear half the fun is here anyway.
"Plasma drives of low quality left a much more pronounced ion trail, meaning they did create pollution of sorts. In space terms, it was ludicrously minute and contributed virtually nothing to overall pollution levels. There was no ill effect unless you flew straight through the trail of a huge starship, while wearing a simple spacesuit.
Even a starfighter’s or a shuttle’s cockpit was strong enough to protect the crew from this. On a planet’s surface, that was another deal altogether. In some cultures it was considered a crime of extreme proportions to use powerful plasma drives in atmo. Mag launch ramps were a way to drastically reduce the pollution.
Some, desperate enough to risk constructing the suicidally dangerous, massively expensive and otherwise useless orbital elevators, did so, in an attempt to remove pollution entirely. Those civilizations were easily the biggest fools of them all, in his humble, yet informed, opinion.
One could cause untold devastation and even cripple the entire economy of a planet sporting an orbital elevator just by shooting it in the middle. Better yet, one sneaky special op later and the planted explosives could topple the entire thing.
In the old galactic strategy books there was a term for this madness, and after translating it from Dzent’a to English it sounded like “Snake slapped” or “Ropemageddon”. A structure of such size, falling from orbit with great speed would certainly cause a specific damage pattern.
Thankfully his Terran friends wouldn’t fool themselves by the supposedly wondrous “advantages” such a structure offered."
Link to the piece for folks now that you've done a good teaser! :)
I think I wrote a bit for one of my books, where a character was recollecting something about orbital warfare and tactics. Let me look for it.
Great, now I know how to build a space elevator! that's going into my books.
Thank you.
Hey, awesome!
Love me a Space Elevator! Spent some time today writing about a not-so-veiled Amazon(tm) building one for a story and because serendipity is a thing I read this just an hour later!
What an incredible vehicle for sci-fi these things are, right?
Dude, enough with the "elevator" and other supposedly practical excuses for this hypthetical Skyhook.
We know it's really all about attaching a massive spherical satellite to it, letting the Earth's spin do its thing, then detaching it to set the intergalactic record for hammer throw.
I contemplated using a GIF today, and I found some pretty good ones. None of them were quite right for what I wanted to illustrate, but I did find one really cool gif that shows this momentum:
https://i.makeagif.com/media/12-13-2020/egWGEp.gif
SpaceX's Mars rocket is supposed to use a somewhat related concept to launch towards Mars. It would float up into low Earth orbit first and sit there until the distance between Earth and Mars is at its shortest, at which point it'd use the Earth's pull to speed up and fling itself towards Mars. I might be simplifying a tiny bit.
That's solid! It's really fun to think about those catapult effects once you get your mind around them.