why don't we try syntrivical force? That's a proven alternative to gravity, and if the spaceships are large enough, then it shouldn't take too much velocity to get it up to 1g.

syntrivical force

 

you mean centrifugal? that was described in the post directly above yours.

If I were in on the planning for a space ship for extended exploration, I would be thinking in terms of constructing the ship in orbit.

 

It would be shaped like a wheel with sufficient diameter to allow for all the necessities of maintaining normal living standards on the outer deck--near the rim. Perhaps a mile or two in diameter and something like say, 300 ft. in thickness? Then the inner deck(s) would contain all the necessary mechanical hardware and provide storage capacity for the things that we had not at that time learned to re-cycle.

 

The whole ship would revolve around it's axis at a speed sufficient to provide 1 G of gravity on the outer deck and it would be propelled by whatever means was sutable at the time of it's construction.

 

This would be of course, a rather crude affair, but such is the history of man's dominance over his environment.

 

 

Good lord! Why so big?! Like I described above, any size craft can have comfortable 1g artificial gravity, just using a tether, say 100 meters long.

if its extended exploration (probably going to be longer than a year or two) your going to need a LOT of consumables. power isn't such a problem solar and nuclear can provide everything.

Right, but miles? I could see that if you were trying to create a permanent, self-sufficient space habitat. But for mere exploration, the problems are big, but not that big. Maybe the "extended exploration" he meant a great deal more extended than I assumed. Like, abandon Earth permanently, and bring enough people along for a healthy gene pool...

interstellar exploration perhaps? but then it actually starts seeming more than a tad small. call it oort cloud exploration.

Good lord! Why so big?! Like I described above, any size craft can have comfortable 1g artificial gravity, just using a tether, say 100 meters long.

 

I only quoted the diameter for the sake of including a number. The idea is to provide artificial gravity by rotating the vehicle. My first thought was that such a ship, if planned today, would need to be capable of being in transit--even if the voyage were to the nearest other star in our galaxy--for a very long time and having enough stocks of consumables (as alien says) to last for a period of years--perhaps decades, would require a lot of cargo space.

 

But there is nothing cast in stone as to size or configuration. It is just that if the trip takes a long time, then it figures that the ship will have to be large, unless we figure out a was to produce replicators like the Enterprise has....

 

A tubular shaped ship of smaller diameter would do fine also, just spin it faster and have the humans spend a goodly amount of time on the outer decks.