Re: Hard Sci-fi?

On Apr 17, 2:45 pm, Luke Campbell <lwc...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Apr 17, 9:05 am, CharlesRCap...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
>
> > Your characters need to have a kung-fu battle on a space ship in orbit
> > over Jupiter? Well you'll need artificial gravity for that (though I
> > think the description of a space-fu battle (kung-fu re-engineered for
> > use in micro-gravity) would be much cooler, but much harder to write).
>
> Eh, spin gravity is a perfectly "hard" form of artificial gravity.
> There's no need to abandon a-grav in a hard scenario - just include
> habitats modules spinning on tethers or on-board centrifuges or some
> such.  In fact, the lack of such devices could be seen to be less
> likely, given the adverse effects of weightlessness on the human body.

I was making some unvoiced assumptions about the size of the ship. I
was thinking a ship that was pretty small and if it had a spinning hab
module going fast enough to provide 1g would be spinning too fast to
have a "normal" kung-fu battle due to excessive Coriolis. Go less than
1g and you can't have a "normal" kung-fu battle because leaps and
spinning kicks start to look more like the stuff they do in those Hong
Kong flicks. Granted, I didn't mention those assumptions, so I accept
your points.

> Extra points for incorporating the Coriolis force during the kung-fu
> fight, especially as a clever tactic at the end to dispatch the bad
> guy.

Well, I would assume that this "space-fu" would incorporate various g
levels from micro-gravity to maybe lunar gravity in its training. So
spin habs would be taken in to account. (Part of why it would be tough
to write but probably be pretty cool to read.)

> > You'll also need to ignore or explain away how your ship is hanging
> > out in all that radiation around Jupiter without killing the crew.
> > Don't want to spend a couple thousand words explaining how the
> > radiation shielding works without violating physics? Well, just ignore
> > physics and say it just works.
>
> A throwaway line like "magnetic shielding" or "artificial
> magnetosphere" could work, possibly with details popping up like
> radiation belts around the spacecraft that are best avoided when going
> EVA, and a tragic scene where the disposable character has to go out
> unprotected to save the rest of the crew, and gets terminal radiation
> poisoning from Jupiter's radiation belts.

Sure, but that becomes much less plausible if you need tethered spin
habs and thus any radiation shielding capable of dealing with
Jupiter's radiation belts would require more extensive explanation. In
any case if we are talking about "hard" SF you need to be careful
about those throw away lines. If the reader doesn=92t agree with its
plausibility you have a tough time maintaining that "hard" SF
classification.