Space Voyage #1 Chatter

[Jay-qu]

yeah yeah.. Ill get back to it, I have the week after next off, which should ensure that I have some extra, extra time B)

[ronthepon]

Allright, I'll not resort to beating round the bush.

 

The sub forum is dead, and we all know it.

 

Why?

 

Probably because we found writing the relation and blah about it boring and uninteresting.

And there's the 'busy fever' caused by various reasons. (Hell, my exams are literally standing on my head now.)

 

Am I right, guys?

 

Is writing up a complex and well planned storyline really hard? (Yes: my answer.)

[TheFaithfulStone]

I tried to inject a little drama into it. By trying to kill myself

 

I'm cooking up a story line right now that gets us all off the hook when I crash the Prophesy into Jupiter in a fit of insanity.

 

Somebody stop me before it's too late!!!

 

tfs

[CraigD]

Allright, I'll not resort to beating round the bush.

 

The sub forum is dead, and we all know it.

 

Why?

Dead? Perhaps. Much quieter than at its peak? Certainly.

 

The voyage of the Prophesy was essentially an exercise in collaborative SF writing by a relatively large community of people, most of whom, I think, had modest experience in writing, collaborative or otherwise. We (not really including me – I provided just a couple of introjective posts) were fueled more by novelty and enthusiasm than expertise. TBD was effectively, if only informally, the managing editor, and was largely the driving force that kept it going as long and as well as it did. When he had to cut back due to job demands, the thread stalled.

 

I don’t think we should be too hard on ourselves: keeping a collaborative work going is no easy task, even for pros.

 

At this point, I can see 3 futures for the subforum:

1. Reinvigorate it, and continue much like before. To do this, someone will have to shake the reigns/crack the whip, as TBD did in round one.
   
2. Get serious/professional about it, following the principles successful pro and fan collaborative fiction projects do.
   
3. Scale back the fictional elements, and focus on the science & technology, like the 6352 that spawned the subthread.
   

These futures aren’t mutually exclusive – more than one could happen simultaneously. I’m personally enthusiastic about #3, as the orbital dynamics and mission planning aspects of a high-impulse ship like the prophesy interest me a lot.

 

One suggestion (from the peanut gallery, as it were): There’s a lot to be said for letting the story wander “off cannon”, splitting into several mutually exclusive directions. There are a lot of interesting failure/recovery failure/disaster scenarios that could be explored, but aren’t directions anyone seriously wants the main, canonic story to follow.

[TheBigDog]

Thank you for the 2 cents Craig. I expect nothing less than the most insightful comments from you. You are after all the secret mastermind behind the Overlord system.

 

I am noodling on how to lay out some juicy opportunities for people to run off on a tangent, without endangering the ship and the crew. I will continue to think on this...

 

Just as an update, we are currently between lunar orbits. We have dispatched satellites around Io, and are heading for the next large moon in the system. At the same time we are using our powerful telescopes to survey the 60 or so small moons and pick the best opportunities for research. By the time we are done will will have the equivilant of GoogleEarth that we can use to examine all of the BigRed moons with detail down to the square decimeter. And even finer detail where we choose to focus. What will we find? What are we looking for to decide to land a ship and get samples? Will we find an environment that is suitable for a manned landing? Many questions to ask. Before we leave for Saturn we will have collected TONS of soils samples from the system, and we will construct the God's Eyes telescope in the permanent shadow of Jupiter. Look at the discoveries being made with Hubble of late. What would we see with a telescope that is several orders of magnatude better than Hubble?

 

Bring your imaginations. And don't be shy about writing.

 

Bill

[TheBigDog]

I am taking advantage of my sick day to write another chapter in the Space Voyage. I will be posting it later today. If it makes no sense blame my medications.

 

Bill

[Mercedes Benzene]

Wow. I forgot all about Space Voyage #1. Thanks for taking the time to revive it...

 

 

...and I hope you feel better BD. :cup:

[Jay-qu]

The ship has been to busy to bother writing their auto-biographies :(

[TheFaithfulStone]

Wow Pyro, what the hell? Our voyage just took a turn to the severely screwed up.

 

Or, you know, YOU did.

 

TFS

[Pyrotex]

Hi guys.

I'm back too. Mostly.

I like Craig's idea of focusing more on science and tech than on plot skirmishes. Unfortunately, I have to tie up a few loose strings, by finally getting to the bottom of the nanobots, and who loosed them in the first place. This will be donely shortly and then on to science and Life on Enceladus!! Hahahahah.

Oh. And I'll help stop TFS from destroying the ship.

You see, his problem is, he's still infected with nanobots. Easy to fix.

[TheFaithfulStone]

Wait, wait, the nanobots cause hallucinations to the point that you can do it with a bugger and not notice?

 

Furthermore, I think it's reasonably clear the at the MCP program has sort of gone the way of the deist god. I doubt he's going to play much of a role in the story anymore.

 

Also, I don't really have any plans to destroy the ship - but I don't mind being nanobot infected. I was just looking for a denouement, when I suggested a fiery fatal crash.

 

So, we'll talk about science for a while, until someone gets interested in the plot again.

 

TFS

[Pyrotex]

As will soon become clear in the story, ALL were infected by the nanobots by a rather mundance entity for purely rational reasons. These nanobots cause us to see six (6) imaginary folks who aren't really on the ship. We encounter them (actually, a specially progrogrammed bugger who triggers the nanobots) and give a data dump without realizing what we're doing.

What I need is for folks on this thread to contribute who has interacted with "Franklin" the IT guy, Honey the pastry chef -- or contribute one or two other mentioned characters we can now tag as imaginary.

[TheBigDog]

"They're all assistants," said Big Dog.

 

"Yeah. Except for Desiree, who's the ship's only whore."

Oh my god... I have tears rolling down my face I am laughing so hard.

[TheFaithfulStone]

Damn, this is getting really odd.

 

TFS

[Pyrotex]

Damn, this is getting really odd.

Not to worry. We'll be exploring ice moons before you know it. Then you'll have your chance to get really even. :confused:

[TheFaithfulStone]

<push>

 

Whoops. :confused:

 

TFS

[Janus]

I thought this might to bring up some technical points that have come up in recent posts to the Space voyage thread.

 

 

The Janus objects

 

It is extemely unlikely for Io to have four moons of its own for the following reasons:

 

1. The Hill sphere(the region where moons could exist.) for Io only has a radius of about 10,000 Km. This makes for a small target that any object captured by Io would have to hit.

2. The difference between Io's orbital velocity and escape velocity at Io's orbital distance is greater than Io's surface escape velocity. This means that any object falling in towards Jupiter would be moving too fast to be captured by Io. In order For Io to capture it, it would have to been slowed down by interaction with one or more other moons first.

 

These two facts combine to make the capture of any object as a moon of Io a very rare.

 

3. Any moon orbiting Io would be subject to perturbation by other moons.

Io orbits in periodic resonance with Europa and Ganymede. Thus, any perturbation caused by these bodies. Would occur at the same point of Io's orbit. This periodic tugging would eventually disrupt Io's moons out of the Hill sphere.

 

4. Io's volcanos generate a dust and gas ring that orbits Jupiter with Io.

A fraction of the gases expelled by these volcanos actually reach escape velocity and orbit Jupiter. A moon of Io would have to orbit through this "smoke ring". Over time, the drag would cause its orbit to decay, falling into Io.

 

Given the low incidence of capture, and the tendancy for captured objects to either drift away or fall into Io, It would be rare to find even one object orbiting Io, let alone four.

 

One possible solution to this would be that the Janus objects were all captured at once; possibly all that remains of a piece of a comet captured by Jupiter and then Io. They could have been contained in a chunk of frozen gasses ans Ice, which then melted. When the chunk melted in left behind these bodies which then drifted in to their present orbits. There may have been more originally, but these four pieces are now all that are left. As it is, we were lucky to arrive while anything was left at all.

 

Next post I'll discuss the Brown Dwarf.