Excerpt from Starships Now! by Robert Duncan-Enzmann

"Glory" By Don Davis and Duncan-Enzmann 

Transfer to Eureka: Section on Shields Down

View from a Starship’s Bridge

Clamshell and iris-shields of the Echolance and Torch ships open. Standing on the bridge of these ships is now like standing under a starry sky. But what a sky! It is totally free of light pollution, gases, mists, and other things that spoil the view.

Fleet Operations

“All hands! All hands!”

It’s Admiral Duncan.

“Refueling, report to your stations.”

He’s timed things – not just carefully, but wisely. It’s afternoon. Everyone has been fed. They’re rested. They have practiced, and they know the order’s coming today or tomorrow. It’s a clockwork operation.

The next months will be a period of maximum work-load for the ship’s company of Rainbow. Every man, woman, and child will work fourteen to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. Preparation for this effort started weeks earlier with a tightening of discipline to the point of harshness.

It’s the way of those who live their lives on Echolances. For them, it is survival. It’s life and death. At these times they must work. Those who cannot, or will not, are expelled from the communities – usually to the colonies. A small number of very able colonists who are both compatible-with and accepted-by ships companies may join them. It’s a two-way migration.

Cleanup is now done by children so young they are but little more than toddlers. Kitchens are operated and food is delivered by very young grade-schoolers. Communications are manned by women in the last stages of pregnancy, and the very old. Cargo, supplies, and structures are moved-about by older grade-schoolers, while the oldest of this cohort refuels, repairs, and refurbishes the refueling fleet.

Ages of the maintenance cohort range up to twelve; it’s a tender age, but on a Starship they have trained for this since they were four. Girls and boys work, eat, and sleep beside the glove docks. The refueling fleet tolerates no breakdowns. There are no excuses. There is pride, even an enormous esprit de corps. They are magnificent and they know it.

None falter. Yes, there are injuries, but they are cared for. Yes, many are exhausted and sleep “just a little longer” on the decks; but the refueling fleet functions like clockwork. When a damaged or malfunctioning craft enters a dock, it is replaced at that moment. The cohort is ahead of the game, it has extra vehicles equipped and ready for launch in their glove docks.

Incoming vehicles are seized on the spot, the cohort swarms over them working with almost-desperation. Teams rival each other, checkers rival each other to find faults. Scores are posted.

Groups of Little Ones bring in food for “their teams.” The bring clothes they have cleaned and sort-of ironed, warm water with which to clean up a little, progress reports, and “good news” about work accomplished, errors not found, and accident free days.

On each team it’s the section of Little Ones who make up more-or-less nice fresh beds for the big children. It’s the Little Ones who understand that many of the team will be happier at night if well-loved dolls, teddy bears, and other objects “sleep with them.” The little ones understand – and so does everyone else, up to and including the fleet Admiral. Often the Little Ones tell bedtime stories or read to the team members – they understand.

Flag officers, already seasoned, with ambitions to become Captains, and even Admirals, manage the repair cohorts. It requires great insight, nicety of timing, a great deal of human empathy, sympathy, and compassion. No team may be discouraged by doing too poorly, no team is allowed to be so much better than the others that it becomes arrogant – even as the others are discouraged. This is education aboard a Starship at it is best. Those who have lived, worked, planned, and made their friends in such an environment are fortunate indeed. 

From schematics drawn for Dr. Enzmann by Pangman

Related Posts:

Scatology in Space

Pioneering Crews and Passangers

Starships Now!

Suited for Stardom

From the archives of the Enzmann Starship notes:

I) The need for improved spacesuits

Starship crews should be able to perform a wide range of difficult functions more efficiently than permitted by today’s spacesuits, and to survive indefinitely despite ominous hazards

a. One way tickets for some voyagers; colonists for whom, because of time dilation or for other reasons, return to the Earth would be impossible or impractical. Therefore seek to improve chances of survival and success in interstellar space and on landfalls.

b. The primary importance of people, appropriate clothing not merely makes the man, it may save him

d. To understand the changes in spacesuits needed to make them appropriate for star flight, we need to briefly consider the development of spacesuits and their present characteristics. First, examine how space-suited crew members could safely leave and enter a starship, and vehicles in which they could be communally transported.

II) Prerequisites for using spacesuits

a. Airlocks. When leaving or entering a starship, must conserve air by preventing it from leaving the ship. Present day methods are from the Stone Age, not sufficiently effective for starships. Four new methods: Air pump (pump air in locks back into airlock supply; waffle-board locks about the spacesuit (tight fitting connection to prevent air leakage); glove docks (almost no air leakage); gangplank airtight tubes frame cranes.

b. Life boats

c. Like life rafts, to transport space-suited workers or serve as preservative cosmic lifeboats for survival in disasters. 

d. Mini life boat. Has its own Amoeba-lock. Enter it in spacesuit lying on back, carries one or two crew members and supplies, including spheres which blow up like balloons with a diameter of about eight feet. Has a sheath or hull over it so it blows up on its own, a ship leaves it behind as part of the bubble and can later dock with it. 

e. Larger life boat, about 20 feet long, carries more crew members and supplies, including flame sprayers and spheres that, when expanded, would be large enough to enclose a small asteroid, thereby permitting mining. 

f. Two larger life boats, one of which can carry 25 people, the other 250 people, also serves as quarters. 

g. Life-preserver unit (for attachment to space suit).

III) Spacesuits today

a. Development of spacesuits

b. Characteristic of current spacesuits

c. Generally anticipated improvements

IV) Gracile spacesuits

a. Technology feasible to construct comfortable, tight-fitting, yet expandable, full pressure spacesuits that would dwarf today’s in potential size, complexity, and life sustaining capability.

b. Powered suits recycling everything would be equipped with numerous instruments for life support and life enhancement.

c. Can be made of fine tungsten, stainless steel alloyed, and vanadium, augmented by stainless steel, with a diamond finished surface (extremely hard, strong surface).

d. Comfortable to wear and attractive, hand crafted and decorated

e. Yet too bright to behold. A windshield effect – solar scintillation – just as one can be overcome by the inescapable bright reflections of the sun’s light by cars parked at various angles, so any nearby star could cause the may rounded diamonds on the surface of a spacesuit to radiate blinding light. Dulling the diamonds, colorfully, to protect against this shiny specularism; need to darken or color the diamond coating. Shading the eyes: in addition, install in spacesuits specular spot- filter eye protecting visors.

f. Basically standardized, with replicable parts, but somewhat personalized, especially distinctive male and female versions adjusted for uro-genital differences; also, variations in size of suits.

g. Lead time: estimated twenty years, which could be reduce tot ten; no major technological breakthrough required, though recycling of feces is an exacting task. 

h. Cost: We’re worth it. Expensive, individual production: estimated $10 million per suit. Mass production: between $500,000 and $2 million per suit. Requires machinery and skilled persons to produce. To discourage suit theft, use chips tuning the suit to owners. An Echo Lance must be able to repair and produce gracile space suits, though the first few trips could be made with the ability to produce a somewhat lower grade suit.

V) Indefinitely long life support

a. Occupant able to live indefinitely in suit, the main hazard being a major accident that would penetrate the puncture resistant material, thereby causing death.

b. Precise regulation of pressure and temperature.

d. Full recovery of oxygen to produce breathable air from exhaled CO2. Air recycling. CO2 scrubbing, volatiles, filtering humidity.

e. Continually renewable food and water supply from safe recycling of wastes.

e. Washed the body, ensuring cleanliness, avoiding itching with dirt, submariners' dirty eye-lines

f. Perpetually satisfies all the body’s basic physical needs.

VI) Propulsion and strength from power plants

a. Even without use of its power supply, the comfortable suit allows smooth movement.

b. Power plants using small conformal radio-isotope plutonium packs safely implanted in the suits arms and legs provide the wearer with both a source of propulsion via mini-Lance drives and enhanced power for such tasks as lifting boulders or tearing metal apart with claws.

c. Uses a quadrapole accelerator: the nuclear part generates electrical energy which the other part – the beam of the lance – uses to accelerate particles.

d. The packs, which also power other functions of the suit, constitute a virtually inexhaustible source of energy.

e. Position or orienting oneself is accomplished by using inertial reaction back and side wheels, or alternatively by liquid pumping.

VII) A panoply of additional functions

a. many instruments and tools contained within the suits a host of corresponding functions; hammer, saws, torch, pliers, drill.

b. Communication via conformal antennas built into the suits

c. Navigational equipment projected on helmet plate; beacons.

d. Lights, visible, infra-red, radar

e. Instruction: a computerized library available for prolonged study, photography, recording, project on helmet plat

f. Entertainment: extensive, varied entertainment in solid sate storage, print, diagrams, movies, music voice, interactive voice, helmet screen, thoracic screen.

g. Kinetic pellet gun, beam laser for defense but also for drilling, can be directed by eye for one or multiple targets. 

VIII) Suited for expansion and co-habitation

a. Thoracic expansion: from the waist upward may be enlarged into a small room, four conjoined to another suit. Mobility of arms allows tending a baby, made possible by “origami shoulder” – fold arms in draw arms into space suit. 

b. Can turn the expandable thorax into a back porch that does not interfere with arm movement by means of two O-rings. 

c. Blowing bubbles within bubbles: blow several Mylar bubbles, one inside of another for added protection. Padding them with Aerogel (Aerogel is especially strong, rigid, and resilient), and flame spray nickel-iron steel on their walls, forming a room perhaps as large as 25 feet in diameter, size limited by air supply weight. Use of roll-top extender. 

d. Coupling together: can join (egress) with another suited person at a conjunction port (intersect junction), permitting that person to enter the room; can join others at six ports, but the others cannot enter the room while a visitor is there. Going from one suit to another involves the use of double turning O-rings, which are as wide as the shoulders.

e. Enables space-suited individual to enjoy close social contacts, combats loneliness an facilitates sharing with others.

f. bubbles can be made transparent: glass, plastic beads and slots; light pipes, pipe screens.

g. Also the expanded bubble makes possible aerobic exercise to combat bone and cardiovascular deterioration. Artificial gravity could be generated by using the power pack to spin the bubble, though this would not be very good. A shortcut continuous running track, a raceway, can be constructed around the interior of a bubble. A bicycle-like apparatus can be rolled around it. 

IX) Who gets what type of spacesuit to use how and when

Gracile suites will be made available to all passengers who can afford them. Those who cannot will be supplied with minimal containment suits that would give them the opportunity to reach life boats in case of catastrophe. 

a. acceleration – deceleration suits: worn to increase tolerance to G-force while accelerating, decelerating or undergoing a gradient plunge in a starship, this making possible rapid acceleration or deceleration which otherwise would have been ruled out by human inability to tolerate such levels Everyone gets one, and must wear them at appropriate times.

b. Living sleep-suits: for hibernation. High speeds of the Echo Lance could make hibernation unnecessary for trips within the Milky Way Galaxy.

c. Minimum pressure suits, priced at perhaps $250,000 each may be made available for certain passengers in Torch ships, perhaps to leaders of passengers, or perhaps only to passengers who are willing to assist the crew in large scale tasks such as refueling.

d. Liquid breathing suits: (to be discussed subsequently)

e. Gracile suits: supplied only to crew members, but each has at least two (use is considered in the next section)

X) Occasions when worn:

a. Drills in the Echo Lance

b. Solar Gradient plunges

c. If starship becomes punctured by a collision

d. To repair the ship from outside while in space

e. Transfers to other ships

f. Landing on the surface of a landfall that lacks a breathable atmosphere.

g. Initially exploring the surface of a new landfall regardless of atmosphere. Danger of rebellion within the ship.

h. Encounter with aliens; danger of contamination or war, danger of giving away information, finding Earth’s location.

i. Castaways marooned on a landfall without food or drink, even for generations.

j. Ceremonies.

k. Sometimes while working in a fusion Torch ship.

XI) Prospect of liquid breathing suits

a. While this document, unlike typical treatments of star flight, centers attention on what is currently technologically feasible, or on what requires only minor expected breakthroughs to become feasible, occasionally mentions a possible breakthrough so revolutionary that it should not be ignored.

b. Experiments suggest that humans may be able to breathe certain liquids safely.

c. If lungs are filled with saline or oxyflouride compounds, humans can apparently tolerate much more g-force, perhaps as much as 20 to 50 Gs or even higher.

d. If everyone in an Echo Lance was totally immersed in liquid, each inside a special small compartment, a starship could reach near light speed in a few days and decelerate in a similar period. Otherwise, much of the time in star flight would be consumed in one or the other.

e. The crew would need to be in the eyeballs out position – lying down and looking up in the direction of motion.

f. The problem of getting nutrients in to the bodies and extracting wastes would have to be solved; no trouble, take a rest period.

g. Tightly compartment the ship; most of the air in the ship would have to be pumped into containers because of the Pogo effect.

XII) Gracile spacesuits as miniaturized starships

a. Like long-lived turtles are protected by their shells, so a group of stranded crew members could survive comfortably with close social contact for years on an isolate, barren asteroid.

b. Like starships, they would be equipped with life support systems, communication devices, libraries, shielding from hostile environments, and their own sources of propulsion. 

Starship Main Drive Propulsion Systems – Athodyde

Don Davis and Duncan-Enzmann

The Athodyde has an extraordinarily positive effect on mass ratio. It not only gains fuel from the environment, but burns it much more effectively than any proposed engine at speeds of over 90% 99%, and 99.9% of that of light, and higher. This is why:

At these velocities time dilates (slows down) on a starship. (Read To The Stars for a novel based on this equation) The thermonuclear fission/fusion piles slow and the main drives slow down. To an extent this may be overcome by Engine Ganging. It is imaginable using two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, and perhaps even more doublings of energy generation and lance engines; however power plant/engine ganging reaches a limit.

The Athodyde eliminates the need to gang power plants, and to gang engines. The Athodyde’s volume in which hydrogen, deuterium, and other elements are fused is not in the same inertial frame in time at speed of about 99% and above. The volume in which the material gathered by the Athodyde undergoes thermonuclear fusion is in normal space. Energy is produced in normal inertial space and then transformed into momentum in relativistic space. 

The Athodyde is operated with the photon scoop such that the scooped fuel is formed into streams. These may be directed against each other in the manner of clashing particle beams – a method of inducing thermonuclear fusion discovered by Rutherford and his colleagues late in the nineteenth century. 

Shielding the passengers on a starship from the hard gamma flux and neutrons generated by fusion events in the Athodyde should not be a significant problem. The Athodyde would be used before (in front of) the ship – in effect, towing it. It would therefore shelter the ship from interstellar gases and particles by shunting them into its combustion and/or thrust augmentation (afterburning) chambers. In addition at these speeds gamma rays, neutrons, and almost all other particles would be beamed forward of the ship because of beam topple. Beam topple, or head-lighting, operates upon the coulomb electrostatic field, photon propagation, magnetic fields, and the nuclear field. I adumbrate that it must also operate upon the color forces.

Forcing plasma into the Athodyde’s fusion chamber is beautifully solved by scooping. The particles moving inward would be kinetically heated such that they would reach critical frequencies at which both they and associated thermalized photons would be rammed downward into the combustion chamber as the path of least resistance. 

At relativistic speeds, self-pinch acts formidably to constrain plasmas. In a funnel, self-pinch effect may be resonated such that the funnel will feed itself with a self-generated peristaltic traveling wave. Such waves may be generated in plasma vorticies to force fuel down into the reaction volumes to undergo fusion, generating a pulse which operates to gorge the fusion chamber until it generates another pulse. 

At relativistic speeds the gamma rays generated by the fusion pulses could be manipulated to further augment scooping and also feeding of fuel into the reaction chamber.

Athodyde reaction chambers might be operated as pulsed fusion devices, traveling waves of plasma undergoing fusion, and/or a chamber in which thermonuclear fusion is continuous in one location. 

In an Athodyde it would be simple to rotate beams at relativistic speeds. This would cause charge separation and generate an electrostatic Coulomb gradient. A moving charge generates a magnetic field, and at relativistic speeds, magnetic fields undergo self-pinch. In the funnel of an Athodyde the velocity and self-pinch would induce fusion.

At certain thresholds an Athodyde could cross thresholds which would result in genesis of:

White dwarf plasmas

Neutron plasmas

Meson and baryon plasmas

And very probably quark plasmas

On emerging from the stern port of the Athodyde vortex such plasmas could expand successively, they would press against the magnetic fields of the Athodyde and drive the ship forward.