Do spaceships float on water?

[rust]

Now, even if you want to declare that this isn't an issue as a referee (its your game, after all), there still might be situations where this ice-forming problem could occur.

I am not sure whether this would be a "bug" or a "feature".

Ice floats, and with some control over the placement of the insulation and
thereby the distribution of the cold over the ship's hull, it might be possi-
ble to create an iceberg-floater of the right shape to keep the ship in the
preferred orientation while floating on the surface of the water, without
the need to use energy for the gravitics to prevent the ship from going
"nose down" or "tail down".

 

[BP]

Anyone ever given thought to starships creating their own icebergs?... situations where this ice-forming problem could occur.
...

Ouhhh! Gotta love that

Instead of a problem - I'm thinking feature! Visibly hide and sneak around in iceberg camo. Create a working base on that water world. Ice float anyone?

If one actively cooled (thermo electric style?), then the discharged heat would need someplace to go - and that could bring up creatures from the deep thermals :twisted:

Certainly goes with this topic. Speaking of which, my latest starship is designed to submerge (not very far) in water. I addressed ballast by using the fuel tanks - since one can always refuel from the water (topside - after pumping out). Of course, not all liquid bodies consist of water - so I made limits...

 

[BP]

Now, even if you want to declare that this isn't an issue as a referee (its your game, after all), there still might be situations where this ice-forming problem could occur.

I am not sure whether this would be a "bug" or a "feature".
...

Geez - I gotta learn to type faster!

 

[cbrunish]

I'm not sure what armor value has to whether the ship floats or sinks. The USS Ronald Reagan displaces approx 100,000 tons and has decent armor. The IJN Yamato displaced approx 72,000 tons and was one of the most armoured ships of WWII and it floated.

 

[EDG]

Anyone ever given thought to starships creating their own icebergs?

This just came to me, so ignore it if you like. We've got a starship, with fuel tanks loaded with liquid hydrogen, sitting in an ocean. Now, even with superscience insulation on those tanks, the hull would probably still get cold. So wouldn't there be a possibility of ice forming around the fuel tank areas of a ship?

It'd have to work both ways though. If, even with "superscience insulation" (though it may not be cold, it might just be really highly pressurised but I guess that'd cause other problems), the hull gets cold, then rest of the insides of the ship must also get cold. And if it's cold enough to freeze seawater outside the ship, then any time spent in travelling in a spaceship in the presence of that cold is going to be really uncomfortable. And so far nobody's described the innards of the ship as being well below freezing.

So... no, there doesn't seem to be a possibility of forming ice around the ship because of the coldness of the fuel.

 

[GypsyComet]

I'm not sure what armor value has to whether the ship floats or sinks. The USS Ronald Reagan displaces approx 100,000 tons and has decent armor. The IJN Yamato displaced approx 72,000 tons and was one of the most armoured ships of WWII and it floated.

Both are also ships designed to float. By their nature and job description, they don't have enough armor to tip them over the float/sink threshold.

The point of armor changing the equation for a starship is that it raises the overall density of the ship. If the overall density of the ship is higher than the density of water, the ship cannot, by definition, displace enough water to hold up its own weight. Thus, it sinks.

You *can* do this to water vessels as well. Ever hear of a boat or ship capsizing due to being overloaded? Seen it happen. Not pretty.

 

[GypsyComet]

So... no, there doesn't seem to be a possibility of forming ice around the ship because of the coldness of the fuel.

Not by accident, anyway. It might be possible to create such conditions with creative plumbing, or design the ship to do this, but since ships generally have to deal with excess heat, this would be a rather specialized design.

 

[Gee4orce]

The ship might well float - but I've always wondered, what about seawater penetration ? I mean you could reasonably assume that pressurised areas of the hull are safe, but what about engines, or landing gear wells ? Seawater (at least, on Earth) is highly corrosive of certain metals - I'm not sure I'd want that sloshing around the engine exhausts or landing gear wells :/

 

[Gee4orce]

Anyone ever given thought to starships creating their own icebergs?

Nice idea - you could probably create an iceberg with controlled release of liquid hydrogen, though waste heat from the ship would probably start it melting again straight away.

But there's a major gotcha - icebergs are incredibly unstable, as the sea melts the underwater component the centre of gravity shifts, and the whole thing topples over. Being frozen inside the ice, the ship would be very unlikely to spend much time at the correct attitude.

 

[Stainless]

C'mon guys. The game is 100% fiction. It's made up.

If it were 100 % fiction, you could have stars orbiting planets, space figh-
ter weapons destroying entire battlefleets with a single shot, beginning
characters with an average skill level of 75, and so on. :lol:

Reconsider the meaning of the word "fiction" and try not to conflate it with the word "realism" or the concepts of "game balance/design".

 

[rust]

[Post deleted, was off topic.]

 

[Stainless]

:shock: Ya gotta laugh....

 

[OldMongooseFordy]

This has slewed dangerously off-topic and, quite frankly, it's starting to bore me. Get back on topic or this will be locked.

Fordy

 

[phild]

The "science" in "science fiction" balances and restricts this openness of
imagination and establishes the concept that this kind of fiction should
consider certain basic rules, mostly some laws of nature - and therefore
Traveller is not "100 % fiction".

I happen to agree with your general thrust, but this is simply not true. If "science" in science fiction means that writing should consider certain basic rules including "laws of nature" then it means 99% of all fiction ever written is science fiction. This is clearly not true.

I think the point is that different game styles like to operate within different levels of grounded realism. Some people handwave everything, putting it down to the power of narration. Others play it hard physics. Most of us operate in a middle ground somewhere along this spectrum.

Personally, I like to have some fundamental facts behind gameplay decisions, because I feel this gives me a more comfortable framework within which I can then use the handwavium. For example, given that momentum = mass x velocity^2, and given that I don't want two spaceships completely obliterating each other with the force of a high speed impact, how do they survive? I think you could describe an equation here:

Science + Handwavium = Conclusion

Given that I know Conclusion and I have a rough idea of the value of Science, I can then work out a number of variable values of Handwavium that satisfies the equation to my personal liking. The more accurate the value of Science, the more focused and targeted the Handwavium can be. And there's two other equations at work here, which are something like:

Suspension of Disbelief = Style of Play* Handwavium / Genre
Narrative Intolerance = sum(Suspension of Disbelief^Disbelief Intolerance)


Essentially, the less handwavium I use, the less players need to Suspend their Disbelief, and the more players have to suspend their disbelief the more their narrative intolerance builds up (a factor which varies on how tolerant they are of different sized packages of Suspensions of Disbelief). My group consists of a Biology PhD, an MSc in Chemistry and an MSc in Biochemistry. They're not science absolutists, but they like to see some rationale behind game decisions. We quite like to play fairly cinematic games, and as such they have a relatively high threshold of narrative intolerance, so long as it comes in lots of small bits of suspending disbelief; i.e. their Style of Play <1, Disbelief Intolerance is >1.

Either I've overanalysed this, or there's a nascent Forge article here

 

[Lorcan Nagle]

I'd assume that ship hulls can take a reasonable amount of pressure from the strains of 6G acceleration (there's no greater hull cost for fast ships), from gas giant skimming and from whatever other structural challenges deep spaces lends.

This is a bit complicated, because starship hulls are built for "high pres-
sure inside, low pressure outside", while under water the situation is re-
versed, with "low pressure inside, high pressure outside".

As a rule of thumb, the pressure under water increases by approximate-
ly 1 atmosphere per 10 meters of depth, so at a depth of 100 meters
the pressure would be 10 atmospheres - ten times the pressure at the
surface level.

Wasn't there a gag about that in an episode of Futurama? Somethig along the lines of the ship crashing into a high-pressure environment, but it was only able to take 1 atmosphere of pressure?

 

[Jeff Hopper]

One More Thing....

I know we have been talking about water ice here because it floats, but doesn't ammonia ice sink if it is in liquid ammonia? Not all oceans of worlds are made of water...

 

[EDG]

Wasn't there a gag about that in an episode of Futurama? Somethig along the lines of the ship crashing into a high-pressure environment, but it was only able to take 1 atmosphere of pressure?

Yeah, they go underwater and the ship starts creaking ominously, and the Prof says it's rated for anywhere from 0 to 1 atmospheres

 

[EDG]

I know we have been talking about water ice here because it floats, but doesn't ammonia ice sink if it is in liquid ammonia? Not all oceans of worlds are made of water...

Yes, only water ice floats on the liquid form. But unless it's in the outer zone, all the oceans will be made primarily of water (tainted by salts, acids, or other gases in solution, yes... but still mostly water). You'd only get oceans/lakes made of other liquids in the outer zone (Titan right now has lakes of liquid methane/ethane, for example) - but you'd also need to have the right pressure/temperature for them to be stable.

 

[EDG]

I happen to agree with your general thrust, but this is simply not true. If "science" in science fiction means that writing should consider certain basic rules including "laws of nature" then it means 99% of all fiction ever written is science fiction. This is clearly not true.

The fallacy is to imagine that "science" and "fiction" can be separated, as if they're two things that have to balance eachother (which usually leads to people claiming that there's too much "science", which to them always has to be beaten back in favour of "fiction" which lets them completely ignore reality). It's not "science" and "fiction", it's "science-fiction" - fiction based on science and scientific conjecture - and removing the science is not an option unless one wants to veer off into other genres. If one doesn't want to be "hindered by science", then one is in the realms of Fantasy, not scifi.

 

[lucasdigital]

Traveller has always been the game favoured by people of a technical persuasion, who on the whole know the basic principles of science. It's not really about "is it science or fantasy" afterall, nobody gets choked up by the minutiae of hydrogen fuel purification, or how inertial compensators work. It's about players' suspension of disbelief exploding when very simple rules of physics fly out of the window.

To throw my twopence on the topic. I'd always believed that in classic Traveller most ships were built to operate in "wet" conditions. It was noted that some System Defense Boats are based on ocean floors, making them difficult to track until they launch. I'd understand if this didn't apply to the Mongoose edition, or even T5.

Most strealined ships with fuel scoops can use them while floating, and buoyancy could be overcome using a ship's reactionless propulsion system, failing that, they could be fitted with ballast (big blocks of concrete).