Speak slowly, I'm a history major.

[Harryasaboy]

Hello you sciency/mathy type peoples. I've got a couple of technical questions here. I'm writing a science fiction type story involving space pirates being ravaged by their captive.

1) How would they say the location of an object in relation to their ship? The crewman sees a helpless ship and has to report it to his captain. I have it as the target being ___km in the X axis, _____ km in the Y axis, and ____ km +/- in the Z axis. Is there a better way to say this? Try not to laugh, I haven't opened a math book in over 30 years.

2) How much time would someone have to react to a hull breach? Could they buy themselves time by plugging the hole with a rubber sheet?

 

[someoneyouknow]

Hello you sciency/mathy type peoples. I've got a couple of technical questions here. I'm writing a science fiction type story involving space pirates being ravaged by their captive.

1) How would they say the location of an object in relation to their ship? The crewman sees a helpless ship and has to report it to his captain. I have it as the target being ___km in the X axis, _____ km in the Y axis, and ____ km +/- in the Z axis. Is there a better way to say this? Try not to laugh, I haven't opened a math book in over 30 years.

2) How much time would someone have to react to a hull breach? Could they buy themselves time by plugging the hole with a rubber sheet?

You're assuming the crewman has some sort of radar to give distance values. Also, in space, to my knowledge, they don't use X and Y to describe an object's relation to ones position. Generally it's port and starboard.

As to a hull breach in space and the loss of atmosphere, it would depend on the size of the breach. A small hole could be covered over and stop the leakage entirely. A larger breach would still leak but then you get into all kinds of maths to determine initial volume of air in the space, how much was lost to the breach, how quickly the breach was covered, how much is still leaking, etc.

 

[legerdemer]

Hello you sciency/mathy type peoples. I've got a couple of technical questions here. I'm writing a science fiction type story involving space pirates being ravaged by their captive.

1) How would they say the location of an object in relation to their ship? The crewman sees a helpless ship and has to report it to his captain. I have it as the target being ___km in the X axis, _____ km in the Y axis, and ____ km +/- in the Z axis. Is there a better way to say this? Try not to laugh, I haven't opened a math book in over 30 years.

2) How much time would someone have to react to a hull breach? Could they buy themselves time by plugging the hole with a rubber sheet?

Here's some homework - go see The Martian.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

Current spaceships don't have the ability to zoom around in space in arbitrary ways. All we can do is plot courses in advance and make minor corrections; anything more general takes an impossible amount of fuel. So your space pirates are using a science fiction technology. And in science fiction, you do what you want.

The readers are probably not fascinated by how you give bearings in space - and I say it as someone who prefers hard sci fi. "Enemy ship at 4 delta 12 dis 267 and closing!" will do fine. The only word that matters is "closing".

Your high tech futuristic ships could be self healing. The amount of pressure lost in a rupture, and how much of an issue that is, is totally up to you. In the modern era, anything larger than a small leak is a big problem, and anything that's going to tear a gash open in a hull is going to leave a jagged-edged hole with protrusions, that you won't patch with a simple sheet of anything. If it was that simple, aircraft (which do lose pressure on rare occasion) would have patch kits. Instead they give you an oxygen mask. Large ships would have sealable compartments.

Read on Wikipedia about Apollo 13. We barely got them back and we got them back only because of bright engineering, done fast. It's good to contemplate if you want to write about a ship in trouble.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Sciency Fictiony answer...

Captain we have ship bearing 128 Mark 5 450 Kilometers.

128 is the reference around the pirate ship...in space there is no true north, so an arbitrary north is picked, in our case, humans, north or 0 bearing is down galaxy to the center on the galactic plane.

Mark 5 is the distance above the plane of the ship or the galactic plane. A positive number is up, a negative number is down.

450 kilometers is the distance from the pirate ship straight line to the object referenced.

This was all worked out by Gene Rodenberry, the creator of Star Trek back in the 60's.

As for losing pressure...how big is the ship? The bigger the ship, the bigger the hole it can have before it becomes a problem. And you can always seal off that part of the ship, after all the people get out, of course.

A mile long war vessel can take a bigger hit than a 200 foot yacht.

 

[NotWise]

1) How would they say the location of an object in relation to their ship? The crewman sees a helpless ship and has to report it to his captain. I have it as the target being ___km in the X axis, _____ km in the Y axis, and ____ km +/- in the Z axis. Is there a better way to say this? Try not to laugh, I haven't opened a math book in over 30 years.

I expect the ship would be traveling on a fixed course and the coordinates would be reported relative to their course; elevation and azimuth in degrees. Distance in an appropriate length unit--a kilometer is a minuscule distance in space. Light years? Parsecs?

2) How much time would someone have to react to a hull breach? Could they buy themselves time by plugging the hole with a rubber sheet?

It would only be reasonable to expect that the ship would react immediately to a hull breach by sealing off effected areas. Sayonara if you're in the effected area.

Rubber sheet? What trans-time world are you from, anyway? Or maybe you're in the effected area and you have seconds to find a way to survive until you can get a pressure suit on. Plug the hole with your seargent's corps.

Hmm. Future history. Is that a major?

 

[Handley_Page]

Remembering Apollo 13, you ain't going to get much time with a hole in the side. Explosive de-compression and really instant death. Of course, 'instant-shut' compartment doors are going to help.

Regardless of how it might really be done, I'd suggest sticking to the late Gene
Rodenbery's idea for where something is..
Another idea might be to study the late EE 'Doc' Smith's 'Lensman' series, where he addresses this problem quite well.
I suspect, however, that the 'incident' or whatever would be a reference to the axis of the ship (think like a Navy vessel).

Good Luck

 

[Bramblethorn]

Hello you sciency/mathy type peoples. I've got a couple of technical questions here. I'm writing a science fiction type story involving space pirates being ravaged by their captive.

1) How would they say the location of an object in relation to their ship? The crewman sees a helpless ship and has to report it to his captain. I have it as the target being ___km in the X axis, _____ km in the Y axis, and ____ km +/- in the Z axis. Is there a better way to say this? Try not to laugh, I haven't opened a math book in over 30 years.

Navigational equipment is quite likely going to translate things to (x,y,z) format, but I doubt the crewman would describe it in that way, because gauging distances naked-eye is hard and that requires estimating three different distances.

It'd be more natural for him to describe the direction first, then estimate the distance. Some ways he might do that:

- by celestial reference points: "About halfway between Sirius and Canopus, distance maybe 8 km".
- by azimuth and elevation: "Azimuth minus twenty degrees, elevation forty degrees, distance about 8 km." (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_coordinate_system for more info about how this works.)
- if using a modern telescope, he can just record the coordinates electronically and the captain can view them without him having to speak aloud.
- if aiming for a space opera feel, port/starboard/etc. might work.

2) How much time would someone have to react to a hull breach? Could they buy themselves time by plugging the hole with a rubber sheet?

Hull breaches come in all sizes from "a tiny micrometeor made a hole too small to see, but after a few weeks we might start noticing a slight loss of air" to instant explosive decompression. In between, it's plausible to have something that's fast enough for a dramatic plug-the-breach scene but not so fast as to be unstoppable, and something like a rubber sheet could be helpful there.

Heinlein's "Gentlemen, Be Seated" was about a guy who plugged a small-but-dangerous breach by sitting on it until help arrived...

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Heinlein's "Gentlemen, Be Seated" was about a guy who plugged a small-but-dangerous breach by sitting on it until help arrived...

If I remember right he died.

 

[jomar]

Sort of depends on your goal. Are you writing a Lit smut story set in the sci fi world or looking to write a more hard science work you hope to sell as an ebook.

For the former you could probably get away with they're coming in fast at 2 o'clock on the bow-starboard position. Or if you want to do a more Firefly type thing have the officer tell the captain a string of speeds and vectors, and distances, then the captain says just tell me in English and the officer points and says, they're coming really fast from that direction and they'll be here in ten.

Check out Firefly tv show. Also David Webers Honor Harrington series, the first ones, anyway. They don't get bogged down in too much tech spec.

If it's hard science you are after, you may need to do your research because even if you're writing erotica, you'd probably draw a more technically demanding crowd. Even then, those that don't much know about the tech won't care as long as it's consistent and plausible.

 

[loquere]

Say clicks instead of kilometres.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

If you REALLY want a level of realism...

Modern military systems I've worked on deal with incoming missiles, which is a 3D problem. Radars report position data relative to the radar, and after they've done their signal processing will report they got an echo, some number of degrees left and up from the way they are facing, with an approximate distance. I'm simplifying, but ultimately they're going to report 2 angles and a distance, which tells you where the object is relative to the radar and the way it is facing. If you know where your radar is and how it's facing - and you'd better - you can translate that to other coordinate systems, like ECEF or LLA. In space there's no convenient frame of reference, so they'd use "ownship" - the ship they are on - as the zeros of the coordinate system, for warfare purposes.

But humans don't work quickly with measurements, and anyway in most situations your target is moving relative to you (in space, everything is moving). So any measurements you take are changing moment by moment. It's meaningless to call out angles and distances to a gunner - those numbers are instantly out of date in just about any situation. So that's never what you do, not in the real world today and certainly not in space, where the situation is more fluid.

Instead, you let the software make a bunch of measurements and figure out how many objects there are out there and which way they are moving. (That can be a hard problem, google "radar clutter".) But once you solve that you can talk about moving objects, and assign each of them a unique identifier, usually referred to as a track number.

"Track 117, hostile, on intercept, collision in 3 minutes. Permission to engage?"
"Track type?"
"No visual yet, but data suggest an Omega Warhammer B-9 tacnuke."
"Permission to engage at will."
"Engaged. Launching in 15. Impact in 1 minute 10."

Except let's not be absurd. In the modern era that conversation never happens and the decision maker isn't even in the same room as the radar operator. The radar operator gets notified that track 117 is incoming, by the software. The software has measured the strength of the radar echo and worked out the likely size and possibly even the shape of the tracked object, and worked out what it probably is. It's queried it for friend or foe and not gotten a reply, so it's a foe. The operator is shown all this data. If it's legitimately dangerous, or if the radar operator just doesn't like it, he clicks on it and the decision maker gets notified to take a look on his own screen (which might be anywhere in the world). If he doesn't like it either, he clicks on it and selects Engage. The software comes up with a targeting solution and launches something appropriate, when the engagement is most likely to succeed.

Nobody's saying anything. It's possible that there's a protocol in place that requires operators to announce what's happening aloud, and if things get complicated conversations will certainly occur. But in general there's no drama, no conversations, certainly no coordinates being discussed. And if you want to flip the switch on the weapons control system to automate the whole process and leave humans out of the process entirely, you can (but top brass probably won't like that and very likely forbids it.)

Realism, in short, is dull, and NOTHING like either 1940's war movies, most 1950's sci-fi, or Star Wars. Some more modern sci fi tries to get it right - Firefly was almost oddly realistic at points.

The crap in Star Wars about how Luke was better than the computers at coming up with a targeting solution? Well, that's science fiction for you. In reality, people handling artillery of any kind are overjoyed to have weapons that get it right for them. So's the top brass - shooting anything is expensive and they want one launch to equal one kill, whenever possible.

Bottom line, every military on earth wants humans out of the loop. Humans aren't fast, make mistakes, and get upset. And putting them in harm's way if you don't have to is just bad resource management and very bad politics. Building hardware that does all that work is expensive and hard but WAY better than a lot of humans shouting at each other in critical situations and screwing up.

 

[Handley_Page]

And very nicely put, Hands

 

[Bramblethorn]

If I remember right he died.

Not in that one; a couple of them pass out from cold and/or hypoxia, but they get rescued in time. Copy here: https://www.unz.org/Pub/FantasticMysteries-1952jun-00092

You might be thinking of "The Long Watch", the one with the nuclear warheads?

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Not in that one; a couple of them pass out from cold and/or hypoxia, but they get rescued in time. Copy here: https://www.unz.org/Pub/FantasticMysteries-1952jun-00092

You might be thinking of "The Long Watch", the one with the nuclear warheads?

Could be...it's been a long time since I read them...even though I now have all of them as ebooks.

 

[Harryasaboy]

I was thinking of enough time to get into a small survival bag that had a few hours of air and a beacon to guide rescuers.

 

[Harryasaboy]

Oh my this does sounds complex. I was hoping for a scene where there's a hull breach about the size of a basket ball. The character throws something like a thick rubber sheet over it and gets into a survival bag similar to what firefighters use when a fire suddenly over takes them. Eh Maybe I should just spend more time describing how her breasts jiggle instead.

 

[JackLuis]

There is a difference in how "Hard Science" Fiction and Future fiction are interpreted by readers. Most times you can sluff off a lot of the tech-talk with 'future-speak' to describe things easily. Explosive decompression is a bit too violent unless you really want to off some character, by slapping his ass over a minor hull breach and having him inviserated by the suck.

If you just use a "Slocum Converter" and go faster than light! Nobody's going to come up from behind you. Now do you describe the intricate details of a device that only five people in the Universe truly understand the physics of?

Hell no, you just describe how it keeps Captain Tumesque one dick length ahead of Commander Generals Vile and Loathsome for the last five cycles. Never leave Rigualis V without a 'Slocum Converter'.

If this is a future history story, how have sexual practices changed over the (period of future) years? Are women liberated and protected by birth control and drugs/medicine technologies more aggressive? Has sex assignment tech gotten to the Funari Fulcrum yet? Has double penetration acquired a new meaning?

Use your imagination and your history background and leave the Titanium Transmutation to the geeks.

If you get stalled, write the aside about the Vestuvian Harlots cult of Vestus, who have developed a gene replacement that allows females to have a masticating vagina. "I believe yeoman Silirilly can show you their techniques, Captain"

Even at Light speed there is a lot of 'waiting to get there' time.

 

[colddiesel]

A spaceship especially a larger one would have sealed compartments, so the occasional decompression would be a useful method of disposing of redundant characters.

Maybe you should express distances as elapsed time, that is time on the ship. That would avoid any silly technical errors.

 

[Handley_Page]

See E E 'Doc' Smith (the 'Lensman' books) on the subject of the "Bergenholm" device.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

Oh my this does sounds complex. I was hoping for a scene where there's a hull breach about the size of a basket ball. The character throws something like a thick rubber sheet over it and gets into a survival bag similar to what firefighters use when a fire suddenly over takes them. Eh Maybe I should just spend more time describing how her breasts jiggle instead.

Skip the rubber sheet. Have her run straight for the survival bag. She doesn't have a lot of spare time and you don't want to be near that hole - there is going to be a lot of suction at first. And rubber wouldn't be a reasonable choice anyway - even a thick sheet will be sucked through or shred. Search "55 gallon steel drum can crush" on youtube. The can didn't have anything like full vacuum inside, and look how it collapses. Those are forces you don't want to mess with.

If memory serves, Arthur C Clark did depressurization in 2001 (book form, don't know about the movie). The ship was opened to space and the hero had to run to a special closet designed for that situation - a sealable chamber with a separate air system and a space suit. People can survive for a good few seconds in vacuum, so dashing to a safe place is feasible. Once in the space suit, of course, he was free to roam the airless ship and start making repairs.

Clarke did a good job with technology in his stories. He thought about what could go wrong and what systems people would put in place to deal with problems. He overestimated computer AI quite a bit - everyone did back then - but his ideas on technology were sound. (Though I have to wonder why there wasn't a physical kill switch for the AI portion on the onboard computer; the hero shouldn't have had to go to a bunch of racks and start pulling processors out. I guess drama won that round.) If you want to write sci fi, read his stuff.

The key point is this. Other than a few techies, no one knows how technology works. No one whips out an iPhone to make a call and first has to spend ten minutes talking in techy terms about reconfiguring the peak power of the quadrature amplitude modulation in the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexer. (Yes, those are real things - cell phones are busy little devices.) If you had to know anything about that you'd never use an iPhone. Everything you know about technology is reduced to tap and click because humans do things by touching things. Your hero has no idea how space drive works and doesn't care. When it fails he sends his Wookie to bang on loose connections (and personally I'd fire the Wookie for leaving loose connections on his ship.)

And don't be afraid to bluff. Here's a passage from a futuristic story I've posted here (The Captured Princess).

The library was dimly lit and predictably deserted, and large cracks in the wall attested to some nearby explosion that had made it that way. Tir made his way towards the stacks quickly; sheaves of glasslight were stacked there, glowing their oddish blue color. ...

What is glasslight, which does it come in sheaves and why does it glow blue? I have no idea. I don't know what purpose it serves or why it's stacked in a library. But Captured Princess is a very visual story set in the far future, and I felt at that point that I needed more visual description. I closed my eyes, saw a blue-green glow in an otherwise dark-ish room, typed that sentence and moved on. It's technology, it's akin to magic. Not understanding leads an air of mystery; that can be a good thing.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Oh my this does sounds complex. I was hoping for a scene where there's a hull breach about the size of a basket ball. The character throws something like a thick rubber sheet over it and gets into a survival bag similar to what firefighters use when a fire suddenly over takes them. Eh Maybe I should just spend more time describing how her breasts jiggle instead.

That's a bit large for the rubber-sheet trick to be plausible. Simplifying the physics a bit, air will be rushing out at the speed of sound (~ 600 mph/1000 kph) and anything you slap over the breach will need to resist a pressure equivalent to about two tons (assuming the inside was pressurised to 1 atm; if they're using pure oxygen about a fifth of that, but that's still quite a lot).

Surviving that is going to be hard. Unless you can hang on to a fixed object VERY tight you're going to be slammed against the breach hard, along with any other loose objects in the compartment. Once the air's gone the suction will stop, but then you only have a very short time to get to another compartment before passing out from lack of oxygen. You can't even hold your breath, because really bad things will happen to your lungs if you try that.

 

[Harryasaboy]

Elapsed time. I like this idea.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

That's a bit large for the rubber-sheet trick to be plausible. Simplifying the physics a bit, air will be rushing out at the speed of sound (~ 600 mph/1000 kph) and anything you slap over the breach will need to resist a pressure equivalent to about two tons (assuming the inside was pressurised to 1 atm; if they're using pure oxygen about a fifth of that, but that's still quite a lot).

Surviving that is going to be hard. Unless you can hang on to a fixed object VERY tight you're going to be slammed against the breach hard, along with any other loose objects in the compartment. Once the air's gone the suction will stop, but then you only have a very short time to get to another compartment before passing out from lack of oxygen. You can't even hold your breath, because really bad things will happen to your lungs if you try that.

Keep in mind the gale force winds (well, more than gale force) are localized near the breach. You'll need to hang on, but how hard depends on your distance from the breach. If you're in combat you should already be strapped down and safe from being sucked away. If it was a chance collision with some unexpected object... yeah, fall flat to the floor, palms flat to the deck and maybe you won't discover how air pressure and a hole in rigid metal can have a slimming effect on your torso.

I only got half a ton on the basketball sized breach. 10 inch diameter; 74 square inches for the hole, times 15psi is about 1,100. Figuring how thick rubber would have to be to handle that goes beyond my knowledge of physics, but tires handle a bigger pressure differential, so I'll go out on a limb and suspect that 1" thick *reinforced* rubber could take it. How you glue it to the wall so it doesn't bend and get sucked out is an exercise to the reader. But it's no good anyway; the hole isn't going to have neat edges and there'll be metal bent inwards from the impact. It won't seal well and now the rubber is subjected to interesting airflow ... yeah, not making any predictions here. Besides, by the time you found your rubber patch kit, the air is gone.

All the experience we have with this (airplanes) says you get to air quickly as priority one.

Personally, if I'm out there I want a Vorlon ship, alive and self healing. Tin cans are just asking for trouble. No, I don't want to read your story about sex with your spaceship. And no, I don't think the ship should have an orgasm every time you go to warp. Who comes up with this crap?

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Of course she could always be wearing her spacesuit. From what I have read so far I assume she is in a one or two (wo)man ship...a scout ship of some kind. Spacesuits are the best defense against a hull breech. Why run for a survival bag? Just grab your helmet and put it on. Then go take a look at the breech and go about fixing it.