The Ugly Truth About Realistic Spaceship Design

Most science fiction shows sleek, elegant starships—but real spaceships would look very different. In this episode of Entropy Rising, we break down what realistic spacecraft design might actually look like using real physics and engineering constraints.

From massive radiators needed to dump heat into the vacuum of space, to radiation shielding, propulsion limits, and the surprising advantages of long, narrow ship designs, we explore the practical challenges that would shape future spacecraft. We also look at how ships might differ depending on their role—whether they’re transporting people between space stations, hauling cargo across the solar system, or operating as military vessels.

Along the way we discuss what sci-fi gets right, what it gets wrong, and how concepts like heat management, shielding, and orbital mechanics will influence the ships humanity may one day build.

If humans expand into the solar system, these are the kinds of designs that could actually make it possible.

Transcript

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The reason being is that vacuum is an amazing insulator. So if you don't have these large radiating surfaces, your ship will overheat and your crew will die, and components will start to melt down and break. Mm-hmm. The, the engines will essentially just cook. Yeah, just melt down your entire ship and the people in it engine, there's no engine you spill that heat. The engines, the computers, the people, I mean, you can think of every single person on your ship as a 100 watt space heater. So 10 people, you know, that's already a thousand watts that you gotta deal with a kilowatt of energy that you need to be able to radiate out into space. And that's just for 10 people. Hello and welcome to Entropy Rising, a podcast all about discussing the possible futures that humanity could see in maybe even some of the impossible ones. I'm your host Jacob, and I'm joined with my wonderful co-host Lucas. Lucas. How are you doing today? I'm doing wonderful, Jake. How are you? Doing great. We're finally getting outta the depths of winter. It's 70 degrees outside, which is good for outside, bad for being stuck in a studio with really bright lights. We're talking about what I think is gonna be a really fun and fascinating topic, which is designs or realistic designs for spaceships that fit a wide variety of roles. And yeah, I think this is gonna be a fun episode, a fun topic, and yeah, I'm excited for it. Yeah. Yeah, we've, talked a lot about, different spaceships in the past, but I definitely think it would be cool to just hop in there and. Really think about all the broad spectrums of ships that can exist that will help support humanity as we advance. Yeah, exactly. And then to also to talk about the different design considerations that would go into each different type of ship and, uh, what science fiction gets right, what science fiction gets wrong and you know, all the different things that go into designing a natural spaceship to fit a role. Which actually brings me up to one point, which is that obviously there is no one size fits all solution to spaceships. Right. Four meets functions. you're gonna design your ship to fulfill whatever role it needs to fill. Right? Right. With that, it's fun to think about what different types of ships we're gonna see, what types of roles we're gonna see, and then I think it'd be a good idea to dive into some of the design considerations and how that's affected by the role that the ship actually fills. How that sound. Yeah, that's a great idea. Yeah, absolutely. What? Um, I think it's a good way to break it up. Let's start by looking at Earth. Okay. And then expanding outward and talking about what types of ships and roles we see fulfilling that That makes sense. So if we're looking at Earth, we'd probably want to talk about. You know the types of ships that we'd use in low earth orbit first. Right, exactly. Which for that I can see two primary types, which is gonna be the ships that actually get you off of Earth and into low earth orbit. And then the types of ships you're actually gonna see moving around low earth orbit. And those have very different design considerations, obviously., You need to get ships to get you off of the earth. Right? Whether it's a rocket or a space plane or something like that, this is gonna be a shift that has to be able to operate within atmosphere. Mm-hmm. And then within Earths orbit itself. Right. And then on top of that, you're probably gonna see, once you actually get into Earths orbit, you're gonna see ships that. It doesn't really make sense to only move around habitats with ships that are also designed to go into atmosphere because you need to carry a lot of extra weight and have a lot of extra components to be able to operate in an atmosphere and in a vacuum, of course. So once you're actually in orbit, you're probably gonna have much smaller, lighter ships. That just move from habitat to habitat and that are not actually capable of reentering earth's atmosphere. Yeah. Because they wouldn't need the thrusters capable of getting them out of earth orbit to begin with. Just enough thrust to get them, you know, around in a zero gravity environment. Yeah, exactly. And if you have a bunch of different space stations, right, like we typically imagine low orbit being a fairly busy place in the future, lots of different manufacturing sites, O'Neill, cylinders, places where people live. People are gonna wanna move from station to station. Mm-hmm. And it really doesn't take a lot of energy to move from, uh, very similar orbits. Right? Like if you have two O'Neill cylinders that are both in a, a lower Earth's orbit, then the delta V required, or the actual change in velocity required to move from one to the other isn't a lot, right? In fact, you could do it in a fully ballistic trajectory and very well. You might, uh, have a system where you have spaceships or little shuttles that are basically accelerated out from one station to almost perfectly match the orbit of the next one with maybe some small thrusters for redundancy and to fine tune the orbit. That's a, that's actually a really cool concept. It would act more as like a catapult or a slingshot with just being able to make slight adjustments as you need them to be able to go from one station to the next, and you'd think that those, uh, those ships would need to be used a lot because let's say, you know, you moved, you're like, mom, I wanna leave Space Station 4, 5, 4, and I want to go over and go over to the one that views the, the sun a little bit better. You gotta go and view your parents, you're gonna be traveling back and forth from these space stations all the time, which is a point that is actually great that you brighten that up because yeah, you can actually move between these stations a lot. This very well could be a normal commute. You do, you might work in one station, live in another. One station, might not really have a lot of human habitation. It could be just farming and you need to commute there every day. So you might have, you know, a, a, a system on your space station that launches you out. And other workers, uh, and get you to that other station. And that station has a, a system that catches you and the actual spaceship itself doesn't really need to be anything more than a pod with some basic thrusters. And it, it doesn't even actually need to have thrusters to slow down or speed up much. You might have them for redundancy. But your acceleration and deceleration could fully be done by launching you out of one station and then catching you in the other. And it might even work that the, the fee you pay to move from station to station is dependent on the delta V. They expand to accelerate and decelerate you. So like your station might charge a small fee, uh, because when they launch you, that slows them down and they have to adjust their orbit. But the receiving station might actually give you a credit because when you reach them, They pick up some speed from IG decelerating you, and that helps boost their orbit. And so then you might actually see some fees associated with being launched from station to station if you don't have your own thrust. Yeah, I mean that's, uh, that's actually such a cool concept, like, because you of course need to maintain that thrust, just like how our International Space Station does now, so you know, every time that you. Project mass, you lose a little bit of that thrust, and every time that you gain mass, you gain a little bit of that thrust. It's, it's just such a interesting idea. But you'd think that it would be about the same if the shuttle is the same weight Right. Going back and forth. Sure. But it depends where they're, you're being launched in your orbit. So if you're being launched ahead of the orbit from the station, you're, you're leaving, then they've expended energy to accelerate you. So that's gonna slow down them in their orbital path. And vice versa, if you're being caught by a ship ahead of you, then that's gonna speed them up in their orbit. And it does, it does depend what direction you need to be launched and all of that. And, and that's something that could be factored into the cost. Yeah. And it could also be very well that you see. Dynamic pricing, right? Everyone loves good dynamic pricing. Um, but you know, you might find it at certain periods of time cheaper to leave your station when they already need to do a. uh, control burn to slow down their orbit or speed up in their orbit. Mm-hmm. Uh, they might offer a discount on destinations that already align with that, and that means they have to expend less mass when it does come time for them to do that. But since this is an episode about the actual spaceships and not, uh, the orbits of, uh, space stations, right, we can imagine that pod would be very simple depending on how far of an orbit you're trying to transition from. It's likely, this could be only a few minute commute from station to station if they keep similar orbits. So for near transit. It really might just be a small life support system for redundancy, a couple of small thrusters in case they need to make maneuvering changes in their orbits. And that's about it. Maybe if you have some further stations, you're going from a low earth orbit to a higher Earth orbit, you might see some more stuff associated with that. For one, they might actually have a thruster to do the burn themselves because that might be a bit much for a station to launch you into a much higher orbit. They might not wanna do that. They might not be equipped for that. So this is when you can get to more advanced crafts that have actual bigger thrusters for accelerating and decelerating, more robust life support system, because these could be several hour transits. Uh, especially if you're gonna the moon, right? These could be maybe up to a day more creature comforts. More redundancy, maybe a little more radiation shielding. But even there, these could be very simple craft. It's not that much energy expenditure to move around in an orbit once you're already there. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it, the simplicity of the craft would remain the same as long as it's still being sling shotted, you know, as its main form of thrust. And then, like you just said, increase the robustness as the travel, you know, time increases. Yeah, absolutely. And we compare and contrast that with a ship that needs to be able to transit from earth's surface to orbit. Uh, the complexity goes up, you know, in order of magnitude, if you've gotta be able to reenter and exit the atmosphere. I mean, reentry alone is a very. energy intensive process. Not only do you need to be able to, do a deceleration burn to enter the atmosphere, you need to be able to handle the heat of reentry. If we're not assuming we have any special thing to catch you in orbit and you actually need to be able to come all the way down and land on earth surface itself, then you need some type of heat shield, whether that's an ablative heat shield, which I would hope that we get away from ablative heat shields at this point and maybe have a more reusable heat shield, something that's actually cooled with something like a, a cooling loop. So you're not constantly losing material and having to rebuild the heat shield every time you land.'cause that's a, a very expensive thing to do every time your ship lands. Yeah. But even if you do an, a blade of heat shield, uh, that's very possible. But I, I do think that maybe these ships we could see more like space plants that would be very nice, that are actually able to take off and land. That's the dream. That's what the shuttle was supposed to mimic. So hopefully that's something we see. Yeah, I mean it would, it would be wonderful to see that. And it's not out of the realm of possibility. Um, you know, we definitely can get there. Yeah, absolutely. So then moving out, I think a little bit, we can also talk about ships that actually operate in our solar system. So these could be people movers, right? Transport ships that move you from earth to Mars. Just Jupiter, wherever humans end uping and colonizing. These could be object movers. Maybe this is a, a ship that's designed to go out. Mine asteroids and transport those rare materials back to earth. Or, you know, the fun one we always talk about, these could even be warships ships that are obviously designed to go to battle and, fend off territorial claims and maybe protect different pirates. Who knows, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, definitely it is, it would be something that would just come naturally with the progression of civilization in there. So we would see or have to see all of those categories. I think so. And obviously when you're operating on a much larger scale, you're, going from working in earth orbit, maybe going to the moon to potentially month long trips up to Jupiter. Right? This is a very different beast, and this is a whole. A lot more complexity, a lot more things that you need to be able to, to take into account and actually manage, right? Mm-hmm. One of the ones obviously is redundancy. You might be fine. Having a single life support system for a ship being flung from orbital to orbital, when there's a ton of backup and safety around you, and you don't know, you only have an hour long transit time, but if you're in a ship that could be potential days away from rescue, you need redundancy. You know, it's a famous saying two is one and one is none. So these ships are gonna have redundancy on, redundancy on redundancy, Maybe double and triple redundancy for things like life support and thermal management systems. Yeah, I mean, you would definitely wanna see that, especially if these are commercialized programs, um, that are, you know, transporting, paying customers back and forth. You, we see it already in all transport. They have, you know, just safety precautions that sometimes they don't even need and. But it's either regulated by the government or by the company just to make you feel safer. So we would absolutely see that in these long distance ships as well, like triple the amount of safety precautions that we should see on them. Oh yeah, exactly. You can't have a failure, especially when you're days to weeks away from help, then you, you, you can't risk that. Right. Yeah. And you know, that's especially true for warships where you're gonna see so many redundancies because a key component failing in the middle of battle is life or death. Not just life or death for the crew, but possibly life or death for whatever they're defending. Absolutely. When we think about these ships too, some of the things that science fiction gets wrong a lot, uh, and something that gets overlooked so much in science fiction. I know we've talked about this in the past, but it's thermal management. It's not a very sexy topic to think about because it doesn't look good. It ruins the nice, sleek designs of your ships, but radiators are going to be king. Oh yeah. you just have to think about it. We take for granted. What our atmosphere is able to do for us for just expelling heat. We don't have that in space. So having, like you said, these big ugly radiators that are just meant to put off. As much heat as they can, but it's still not a lot. So you need 'em everywhere. especially if you're doing something like a warship that needs to be able to run really hot, you, you need massive radiating surfaces for that. And obviously the way you handle thermal management is gonna change a lot, whether you're talking about a, passenger ship moving people from earth to Mars or a, a warship designed to operate in a battlefield. Mm-hmm. So I think for a ship that's moving either people or cargo, but that's not in a battlefield. Right? your main strategy is just gonna be having large radiators. That manage your heat. It's not too crazy. You just have these huge surfaces, however large they need to be. Uh, they're just gonna depend on whatever your reactor output is and how much heat you're managing. You're probably gonna have backups, of course, and maybe even temporary deployable, uh, radiators you can set up if your main radiators get destroyed. Maybe these radiators can retract if you are doing a hard burn, right? So if you're, you know, for example, if you have a ship that's capable of doing a one G sustained burn for a little bit, you might have a way to shore up your radiators. Or if that's something you're doing long term, right? Like we see in the expanse, ships are able to do a one G burn from earth to Mars. Obviously, if you're doing the one G burden the whole way, you need to build your radiators in such a way that they can withstand one G of force, which means they would have to be able to withstand. Fully on earth. Right? So you can't just do a nice, thin, long, narrow radiator like the ISS has. Because if you were to try to put that into gravity Well, right, or subject it to one G force, it would snap. Yeah. It would just slump over. yeah, I mean it's, it, it is a really cool concept to think about. And one that, like you said, is super important because like you think about, uh, massive ships that we have. They like on Earth today, like cruise ships for example, their highest expenses are their engines and their engines put off a lot of heat. So their second highest expense is climate control. Oh, really? I didn't know that. Yeah, so being able to not, you know, just have everybody live comfortably on these massive ships, it requires these radiators to be able to produce enough cool air to be able to just circulate. And that's not even the main thing. The main thing is that if you don't, yeah, living comfortably and feeling comfortable is nice, but without these radiators, you'll cook. Oh yeah, you will die. Like these ships are very isolated, right? If you have a water bottle right now, that's probably a vacuum insulated bottle. The reason being is that vacuum is an amazing insulator. So if you don't have these large radiating surfaces, your ship will overheat and your crew will die, and components will start to melt down and break. Mm-hmm. The, the engines will essentially just cook. Yeah, just melt down your entire ship and the people in it engine, there's no engine you spill that heat. The engines, the computers, the people, I mean, you can think of every single person on your ship as a 100 watt space heater. So 10 people, you know, that's already a thousand watts that you gotta deal with a kilowatt of energy that you need to be able to radiate out into space. And that's just for 10 people. Insane to think about, especially when we're talking about these ships that are carrying potentially thousands. Exactly. And I know we've done an episode about building up like world sized planets. You can get to a point where just shearly the, the body heat of people can make a planet surface inhabitable. And that's quadrillions of people. But when you're on an isolated spaceship, you don't need that many. So long story short, heat management is gonna be a huge thing you have to think about with ships and for civilian systems that's, you know, all fine and dandy, massive radiators that can withstand whatever your max burn is. But with warships, that gets a little more complicated. Yeah, I mean, you need to take into account. First of all, the output of your weapons mm-hmm. Is for every weapon that's fired, you're producing heat energy. Unless you somehow create something that is a hundred percent efficient, which is only speculative at this point, it's just impossible. Yeah. By knowing thermodynamics, right. You don't even speculate that possible. and then you're also thinking about you need to perform evasive maneuvers, be able to move around in, like you said, you know, sustaining a one G burn is fine, but what happens when you have to sustain a four or a five to evade? Weapon systems. What are your radiators doing then? And then like when you are able to fan them out, like, like how do you get to that safety point? There's so much more to consider. That's a big one, is just can you maneuver the way you need to maneuver with your radiators deployed? And what happens when your enemy shoots your radiators? So I suspect there would be a lot of emphasis on radiators that could retract and deploy very fast. That way if you detect something coming at you, you can pull your radiators in and move. In addition to that, you probably would design your radiators with fail safe points. If you see a missile coming and you've got two seconds to evade, you need to know that if your ship makes that move, your radiators are gonna break in such a way that it's not gonna damage the rest of your ship, because yeah, that presents an issue down the road, but at least you have it down the road to contemplate that issue. Right. That's true. Yeah. I mean you could implement like snap points, sort of like how, you know you were, you were talking about the ISS, it's on just that. Then Pul if it experiences one G, it just breaks. Yeah, exactly. So like they could have it set up to where they have failure points at three Gs or whatever it might have to be, or they break in such a way they're not gonna damage the rest of your ship. Yeah. Just fly around and tear off all your other radiators that are already retracted. Exactly. Another thing I think you would do with a warship is you would actually build radiators into the whole of the ship. So we imagine spaceships being these nice, sleek designs, right? But I think you would actually see these would be quite rough surfaces. Like imagine what a car radiator looks like. You would probably wrap your ship in that to have some type of radiating capacity while your radiators are pulled in. I mean, this obviously would not be enough. To fully meet your ship's thermal needs, but it could buy you some valuable time while you're in combat. That way you still have some radiation ability while your main radiators are pulled in. Might only last for a couple of minutes, but maybe that's all you need. Yeah, especially in earlier designs, before it's perfected, it would be seconds would mean everything between the shift of having your radiators pulled in and pushed out. they might be able to implement some kind of a, like a, like a water cooling system that gives you more time like that, sort of like you have on a computer. So you have like this layer of liquid that is able to store that heat instead of radiating it through the ship, and then the radiators just expel the heat from the liquid. But then again, you're adding more weight to your ship, more problems. If there's damage to that system, it leaks that water. And then what? No, I actually think that's a great idea. I really could see ships hamming, especially ships that are preparing to go into combat. If you need to pull in all your radiative surfaces, and especially in combat, you're expecting to produce a lot of energy. Weapons are gonna be hot, engines are gonna be hot. You need to be able to get rid of that heat in in some way to operate. So having massive tanks of liquid, even water, water actually would be great for this. What you'll probably do if you know you're going into a battle is you'll go ahead and start freezing that water in advance. That way you can take advantage of the phase change as the water changes from ice to liquid. And then the energy it takes to heat that from zero degrees to a hundred degrees. And then another latent heat of energy is that transfers from a liquid form to a gas form that is a lot of energy. You're able to absorb a lot of heat that way. And if you had a ton of ice, which for these ships might not be a lot, depends how big your ship is. Obviously that could buy you. Up to eight minutes, 10 minutes of operational time at like a five megawatt output. Obviously the, the time you have will depend on the amount of ice you have and the actual output you're expecting, but this could buy you very valuable, serious time to operate with radiators retracted. And then once you finish battle, you pop out your radiators and you get rid of that heat. Or if it's an emergency situation, you could even vent that steam as a way to carry away that waste heat and allow you to not overheat during battle. it's actually really cool to think about, but it's, we're still talking about just like moments in time and, and, but those moments will mean a lot because fighting in space, like with these warships will probably be more like a game of chess than it would be like what we're thinking of as like a, a. Reelection fight back and forth, but we've, we've talked about that in the past, but it, it just is a, it's definitely a really cool idea just to add moments and how important that'll be during those combat situations. Yeah, absolutely. But I could see some type of internal heat sink like that being developed for warships to handle moments where you're. Expelling a lot of energy. Uh, but you can't have your radiators out, and that's something I don't expect you would see in commercial designs like, you know, civilian designs. Yeah. Because you would be expecting that you can retract and deploy your radiators as needed. Yeah. You know, uh, another thing to think about too is the actual temperature of your radiators. Is the hotter you can get your radiators, the more efficiently they transfer heat, because the energy you radiate from a surface is to the fourth power of temperature. So if you double the temperature of your radiator, you get 16 times more energy transfer through radiation and space. So For a warship, for example, you might run your radiators a lot hotter than a civilian ship. And the thing that's gonna limit how hot you can run your radiators is really just how efficiently you can transfer heat and move heat, right? Because ultimately you're pumping against a temperature gradient. You're going from cooler temperatures to hotter temperatures with your heat pump. So the bigger that temperature gradient is. The more work that heat pump needs to do, and there obviously will be a point of diminishing returns. It might be worth it for a warship to expend the extra energy and mass to get those diminishing returns that wouldn't be worth it for a civilian ship. The radiators on warships might be much, much hotter than the radiators on civilian ships. Oh yeah, absolutely. Just with how much more energy, like you said, they're moving through that heat pump at at any given moment. Yeah, exactly. Because that adds complexity then adds cost. But yeah, that would be a key thing. And if Mike can run my radiators hotter than you can run yours, I can get by with less radiating surface or get rid of energy much more efficiently. Yeah, I mean it's just, it's more time not sitting idle and being able to essentially fight back. that you have. So it would be like this crazy race of radiator technology. Absolutely. Another thing too is obviously gonna be radiation space is not a kind place. There's a lot of radiation coming from our sun or coming from, uh, actual space itself into our solar system. Mm-hmm. So we're gonna have to design ships with that in mind. Now, obviously for the ships that we're talking about that are operating in earths. vicinity. They can take advantage of earth magnetosphere that extends out past low Earth's orbit. They can get by with less shielding and you're also just not in on this long. Right? So even if you are getting exposed to more peak radiation, if that transits only five, 10 minutes, then it's not a big deal unless you're doing it constantly. Yeah. With a ship that's gonna be operating in the deep solar system for longer periods of time, that becomes an issue. You really do need to manage your radiation and on top of that, you have to think about solar storms. There's times of more radiation than others. If you get hit with a solar storm, the radiation shielding you might have that's adequate for day to day might completely fail you during a solar storm, and you might take a very dangerous dose. Yeah, I mean, it is just like you were talking about before, these smaller ships, they have this, this time to be helped and have maintenance on them whenever they need it. You know, if we're talking about 10 minute transits, but if you're going out there for six months, eight months, two years. Uh, you gotta make sure that that radiation shielding doesn't get stripped away because again, you just end up getting cooked in a probably a much worse way inside of your ship. Or, you know, really what you're gonna just see is just increased rates of cancer. Yeah, I mean, I guess you, you would have that, damage over time. Maybe you run three missions and you come back and, uh, oh, well now your whole crew is dying of cancer. That's gonna be the big one, is the, the, the cancer and the cumulative effects more than the immediate radiation exposure, especially in the deeper solar system. So that's something you have to take account of. but that's an interesting one.'cause that's where spaceship design and modern medicine will collide. Because the better you can treat cancer, the less you're concerned about radiation exposure to an extent. But if you can treat almost all cancer, you might be willing to get by with a little less radiation shielding, right? And if cancer stays what it is today, then you might want more radiation shielding. So that will also play a role. But in general, you're gonna need it no matter what. Now, one of the things I was thinking about for a ship that's operating in the solar system is. This is an old design, but for one water storage around the outside of the ship, especially through compartments because water makes a great anti radiation shield. Okay. Right. There's a reason we store spent nuclear fuel underwater and why a lot of radiation and a lot of nuclear reactors work underwater. It's just, it does good at blocking high energy radiation and conveniently water's already something you have to carry in your ship. You need it for people to drink. You're gonna have wastewater. You probably have it for cooling, so this isn't extra mass. You have to carry. If you just, instead of having the water tank leak in this center your ship, if you actually just, uh, put that water as a jacket around your crew compartment, it's doubling as radiation shielding while you're waiting to drink it or, uh, storing it to recycle it and, and filter it. It's a cool idea. doesn't, the water retain that, the radiation in it though, or does it just block it off? It mostly just blocks it. These are high energy particles, so what a lot of these high energy, especially things like protons, uh, what makes them so dangerous is the energy they're carrying. So when they get stopped, it's just a proton. Now ionizing, radiation's a different story, but, it's not like your drinking water's gonna become irradiated. Yeah. I mean, and then, then in that case, that would be perfect because that also helps radiate heat away from those cabins as well, having the water stored around them. Not really, no.' cause you'd have to get rid of the heat. Well, this wouldn't anticipate into the water and then into the radiators. On the outside of the ship, you would need a cooling loop to move it. I see. But just having it stored there? No, it's just an extra layer of mass that's gonna be absorbing heat. I gotcha. But I mean, once you reach equilibrium, that doesn't really matter. Well, regardless, it's an excellent idea to be able to store that water, like you said, that you would need already, and then for it to be able to block radiation. I didn't know it was so exceptional at blocking radiation. Yeah. Anything with a high hydrogen content is gonna be really good at blocking things like solar rays. Alternatively too, if you're dealing with solar storms, the thing with solar storms, you have to remember is these are not, omnidirectional. They come from the sun. So you can build a radiation shelter in your ship that has thicker radiation shielding on one side. That way when you detect a solar storm, you just orientate your ship in such a way that you have the most protection from that direction, and that means you can carry less mass overall. You don't need meters of radiation shielding around the whole shelter. You just need, you know, maybe several meters in one direction and then light radiation shielding around the rest to deal with off access scatter. As these, you know, Ray hit your ship and bounce in, and you can also pair that with if you want, potentially water storage. Yeah, I mean that would, that would be awesome. You would think that you would put it at the widest point of your ship, right? So that when the radiation hits, it would just form, like go, like around it. and then you would also be able to store the most amount of water by doing that. Yeah. It just really depends on where we are with spaceship design. I mean, if, if these are earlier ships, then you know, it might be one small room that you just have to hunker down in during a storm. If we're getting to the point where we're, we have a whole orbital manufacturing And mass is less of a concern, especially if you're talking about things like civilian ships. Then you might, just have that around a whole living compartment so you can spend a long period of time there with relative comfort. I didn't even think of any of that. That that's pretty, it's pretty incredible. Yeah. It's fun to think about and it's interesting to think about how you don't need like a one size fits all solution. I think there's this idea that like, oh, you're going, you need a meter thick of armor, radiation shielding around your whole ship to protect you from radiation. That's gonna depend on medicine, that's gonna depend on what type of radiation you're talking about. It's gonna depend on what environment you're operating in. Big difference if you're operating on the inner solar system versus the outer solar system. If you're operating in Jupiter where there's actually a ton of radiation, because Jupiter directs all that radiation, and IO is there just polluting, uh, polluting Jupiter's orbit with, uh, radiated particles that then get concentrated by Jupiter's magnetic fields. So if you're operating in Jupiter, you need a lot more radiation shielding than if you're operating around earth, where you're actually protected by earth's magnetosphere. So there's a lot of different considerations and it's not necessarily a case of just throw a bunch of radiation shielding around your whole ship. Yeah, I mean that's, that's honestly what I had in my mind. I was like, so how do we get a ship that's entirely made out of lead into space? and the the best thing too is just repurposing masks that you have to carry anyways to help protect you. Yeah, I mean, that, that is, that is great. I learned something new today about water. But yeah, when you have the, these ships and you can consider these different designs for them, where they can specialize against different types of radiation is just so cool. But I, I definitely also like the idea of where, uh, you know, you can just take a pill and cancer goes away. Yeah. That is nice to think about. Right. And you know, again, you would reach an equilibrium point just because you can, 99% of the time cure every cancer doesn't mean you're gonna. go and radiate yourself for the fun of it. There's always still gonna be that chance. And even if you can cure cancer very effectively, there's other considerations with that. yeah, radiation isn't, isn't ever really a good thing. Yeah, yeah. You melt your organs and stuff if it's too high. So speaking of radiation, another thing you have to consider is radiation produced by your ship. Obviously there's radiation from the sun, there's radiation from space. But if you're working on a nuclear fission or nuclear fusion reactor, you can also potentially have radiation on your ship itself. And this is an area of design that I really like to see, like, um, the ships and avatar do a really good job of this actually where the, the thruster component of the ship and the engineering component is moved very far away from the habitation component. It doesn't really feature a ton in the movie, but if you watch some of the opening scenes. You can see these ships doing the deceleration burn and you see the design. They're very long ships with the reactor on one end, the habitation component on the other. And this is actually a cool detail in the movie as they're doing their deceleration burn, you can see the radiators are glowing hot, trying to get rid of all of that waste heat as they're doing this burn. So it's also a very possible design you might see is very long ships, uh, with radiation shielding in the middle to help protect you from itself. And even though this is science fiction, this is. I guess one of the things that I've seen people say that they try to justify Star Trek ships making sense is they're like, oh, they, they have an engineering hole and then a crew compartment, and that way the, the dangers of the engineering hole and the radiation from the engineering hole are moved away from the crew compartment, which is like. I see it. That's a cool thing. I don't think that's what they were thinking of when they designed the enterprise. Uh, and I don't think the enterprise design as a whole, you know, actually makes sense. But it's, I'm a huge trek. I grew up on it. It's cool. I do like that you can kind of justify the design by arguing that they're separating the engineering from the, the crew space, right? Yeah, of course. when you're talking about ship design, just in general, I think that length is, is really, really key. Like you were talking about before, being able to separate, first of all, those. That dangerous nuclear reactor or the fusion reactor from, where everybody's living and where the ship is operating from, and then just being able to add as many radiators as possible to expel heat. And then if we can, like you said before. Create compartments, just like specific compartments that protect against radiation. There's not much harm in creating a ship that is longer and has more surface area. Yeah, well, and especially when you're talking about potential interstellar ships, length makes more sense because when you think about it, if you're moving through the interstellar medial. For one, if you get up to a certain speed, which is hard to imagine that we would actually be able to go this fast, but when you're getting up to significant fractions of speed of light, like 99.9 9, 9 9 and repeating, uh, then you do kind of have to worry about drag again because you're just moving through, so much material that they're the random hydrogen atoms that exist, There might only be a couple per cubic mile of space, but when you're ramming through, millions of those cubic miles per minute or per hour, right, then they start to add up. so a long narrow ship makes sense from a drag perspective, but also from a radiation perspective because when you're moving through. Interstellar space, you are expecting all of the debris. Mm-hmm. And all the, a lot of the radiation to be coming from one direction. So it actually makes sense to have a very long and narrow ship. So you can just have a bunch of, protection from impacts and protection from radiation at the front of the ship, protecting what's behind. So for Interstellar, especially a skinny long design makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I mean, I just think that it makes sense in general, even talking about our smaller ships, like, like the transport pods that you're talking about before, if we can get them to consistently run, like you were saying in the expanse, they're able to run at a one G burn. going from point to point, if you build the ships lengthwise, you can stack them just like how they are in the expanse to have levels. That people can comfortably move around and walk on because they'll be experiencing one g of gravity the entire time, and then they can just sit down in seats when they're decelerating. That is true, and that is something that, uh, classic sci-fi of course. Well, it depends what you mean by classic sci-fi, but a lot of science fiction TV shows get wrong, right? the ships and things like Star Trek and the ships and things like Star Wars are built like modern ships, right? Like battleships. The levels are done lengthwise. Mm-hmm. But realistically, something like the expanse makes a lot more sense. Where they're built like giant skyscrapers essentially in space where you strap an engine on the back and then when it's doing its acceleration, then you get one G all the way there. And if you live in some future where you can do a one G acceleration and then do a flip of the halfway point and then a one G deceleration, you effectively have gravity for the entire trip. Yeah. Now that's a lot of energy. Uh, but maybe one day. Yeah, you know, it, it, definitely, definitely comes with its downsides. but it, it definitely ties into that just length seems to be, uh, a more reasonable design for ships in, in the future just because it adds so many different benefits. Like, like, you know, the shielding, the being able to separate different components that could be harmful and then reducing heat in the ship as well. Yeah, it just really depends on the, the, the intended design for it. Yeah. And, and then going onto that too with like, um, interstellar ships especially. Mm-hmm. Uh, where we're talking about maybe these potential long, skinny designs. Something else you have to worry about, and I see this all the time when I talk about interstellar colonization or any type of ship that needs to move between solar systems. It's like, okay, that's great, but what do you do when a grain of sand has the same kinetic energies and nuclear warhead coming at your ship? And that's, that's completely fair. One of the things I expect is in addition to this long skin new design, right. Uh, I think we're gonna take advantage of wiffle shields, which are having multiple thin layers of shielding that aren't designed to absorb or stop the impact, but instead fragment whatever hits you. And the idea is the first shield, uh, basically gets obliterated. You know, it gets hit and the whatever the particles that hit you then fragments. And then you have multiple layers of the shielding with each layer, fragmenting it more and slowing it down. So for, I think you would see this in any type of ship. in fact, the ISS already uses this to manage micro meteorites. But with interstellar colonization efforts, we really might see this, where you have really thin, like solar sails, almost like really thin material pushed out in front of the ship. And you can do multiple layers of those. And when a particle hits, you know, it hits those instead of your ship. Yeah. In addition to that in front of your ship, you might also keep your water storage there. It's just a, a last ditch, layer where if the particle makes it all the wiffle shielding, you have massive water tanks there to absorb it. And especially because with really small micro punctures that could potentially be a self sealing system, whereas the water leaks, it freezes, and you might weirdly enough, even put your fuel tanks up front too to act as again, another layer of, Absorption of micro meteorite impacts, which might sound weird, like why would you wanna lose your fuel? But, uh, if that's another layer of shielding, it might be the case that even the, the small punctures and leaks and the fuel loss you have from that could be less than the fuel loss of carrying extra shielding. It's, uh, it's definitely a, a great idea, first of all, talking about that. It's, uh, the design of breaking up a projectile and scattering it across multiple platforms is something that we see in all modern armor nowadays. Yeah. That's not a new concept. Yeah. Ceramics are in the first part, and then heavy metals to catch it later, after or after you break it up. and then having self clotting. Water, tanks is, is an exceptional idea. That way it stops its own flow. And then when we are living in a civilization where, you know, help is only a few days away, maybe when we're talking about these crazy interstellar ships, it might be more of a cause for concern that you're draining fuel. But, uh, I, I would definitely see that in ships that remain, you know, at least within a couple of weeks of civilization, because you can hold out, you may not be able to have fuel, but you'll, you know, survive an impact. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah, no, definitely. For sure. The issue with ships in the solar system, of course you have less predictability at the angle of which you are. You might have an impact where with an interstellar ship, you almost always expect that to be from the direction of travel, right? Yeah. But when you're in the solar system, those can hit you from the side. So that's a slightly different considerations. I see. But you'll still have that multilayered biffle shielding like you were talking about. Yeah. That is super interesting to think about. Like the, the ships would still be long. Would we try to design them to be even thinner to reduce those impacts? Because how many of those could be handled? depends. Over time, it really depends on what your use case is. Again, for interstellar calling ships, I do think, you know, longer, thinner makes the most sense. But for in, in system ships, less sense. Yeah. Okay. Especially because you know, as you grow the size of a ship, You take advantage of the the square cube law, which is that if you scale something up, right, the volume grows with the cube of the size. However, the surface area only grows with a square. So as you get larger and larger and larger, you need less radiation shielding. For a proportional amount of volume to protect it or armor or whatever that is. So big ships have a huge advantage of that in the sense that they, percentage-wise need less armor and less radiation shielding than a smaller ship. Like a smaller ship Wouldn't be surprising to see 25 to 50% of its mass just be armor and shielding, where a much larger ship might only have 5%, 1% be radiation, shielding and armor really just depends, especially because. It's not like you need more radiation shielding as you get larger. Right? That's a fixed amount of protection you need. So if you need three meters of radiation shielding, which would be a lot, I probably don't need that much, but if you did need three meters of radiation shielding, you need three meters of radiation shielding, regardless of what's behind it. Right? So having more volume behind that radiation shielding doesn't mean you now need six meters. Right? Yeah. So that's another thing to take into consideration and an advantage larger ships have. That's definitely true, especially if you're building them, you know, to just all fall behind that one safety point at the front of the ship. Yeah, well that would, that would work for interstellar ships. That would not work for in, of course, solar system ships. Of course. Although, one thing we didn't really mention that's also worth pointing out is that these have all been in cases where you have people. If you're talking about cargo, you, you might not really care about radiation shielding all that much, especially because if most of your ship is dedicated to carrying inert material, especially like asteroids and minerals and stuff like that, especially if you're doing asteroid mining and, and these are materials that have already been exposed to space, then by proportion, a lot of your ship might be unshielded cargo bays with just a small amount being a radiation shielded protection. Point four. The, uh, the actual organic component, the people, right, right. And that's if you even really move these asteroids around inside of your ship, I think a much more realistic situation is that you have a, a small asteroid mining ship that. finds this asteroid and either just straps and thrusters on it with maybe a beacon saying, Hey, this is mine. If you touch it, we'll uh, sue you. And then you, and then you just program a course right where it just pushes it back to whatever the collection point is. Maybe you have a refining station behind it, uh, and you know, you just move on to the next one. Or alternatively, maybe you have a ship that actually comes. and mines the asteroid at location, refines it at location, uh, and then ships pods, same situation, uh, where you just put, you know, build these pods. They don't need to be anything more than basically fabric, right? Just something to keep all the material together with some thrusters and then sends them back toward maybe Earth. I don't think you would really take your ship, go out there, collect the asteroid, and then carry the whole asteroid back. That just seems like a, a not efficient use of your ship, right? Yeah. I mean, unless like you were trying to just purposefully move the asteroid to be closer, but you definitely wouldn't just try to mind the whole thing. Bring it back with your ship. That depends too, on the asteroids.'cause some asteroids are just like a collection of loose gravel held together by gravity. Uh, you still can strap a thruster on those, but what you would probably do is secure them in some way. Maybe wrap them in some type of fabric or, or material, or even literally just like glue them together, uh, to, to hold them together and then strap a thruster around those and then send them to wherever you need 'em to be. Maybe it's the inner solar system back toward earth. Maybe it's the outer solar system. I mean, that would've to be a pretty big, uh, asteroid to have its own gravity to hold all the gravel together. No, no, no. These can be really small. Everything has gravity. So when you're in space and you're not really being influenced by other bodies, uh, you can have some asteroids that are literally just a small collection of gravel. It's, you know, things always aggregate, right? It's the same thing with like particles in a solution. They're always gonna aggregate together. That happens in space too. You know, if you have. A gravel field, it just naturally is gonna come together. I see. Yeah. And, and then like you said, you just cover them in fabric. Yeah, just some type of tension to hold 'em together. You don't need to do like a one G burn either. You can, you very well might have. Some of these things take years to get back to their station. You know, if you're running an asteroid mining operation like this, you might be receiving payment for material that's delivered decades down the road. It could almost be like a, a whiskey manufacturer. A wine manufacturer, right? Like you start manufacturing stuff today without receiving payment But then once those age, in this case, that'd be aged wine age whiskey. In the, in, uh, in our space instance, this would be asteroids arriving to their location. But once you do that, you've got a steady stream of income constantly coming into your pocket, regardless of what happens today. That's very true dude, that would be so cool. Like, like just think like, uh, wine 150 years aged entirely in space. I wonder what that would do to the wine. Oh God, yeah. Hmm. Maybe not in oak caskets.'cause oak is porous. Right? Just you would just get an empty, uh, an empty barrel by the end of that. Oh yeah, it would just all, all leak out. You would've to be like in like in steel compartments. but no, that, that is awesome. It really becomes a lot simpler when you don't have to, think of our squishy, delicate bodies inside of the ships. No, absolutely. That's true with drones and the truth with cargo. Well, Lucas, I think I could talk about Spaceship design for another few hours, but we are kind of hitting the end of our episode, so I think we've gotten to a good point where we can wrap it up. I do think we should revisit this topic and maybe. Get a little more granular with specific spaceship designs and specific use cases. Trust me, I could talk about thermodynamics all day, but I do think we're, we've reached a good point for this episode. Yeah, I think so as well. We touched on a lot of cool stuff that intertwines a lot of our older episodes together is, um, with topics that we've touched on. Very cool. With that being said, I invite you all to join us next week where we're gonna actually be covering a, uh, broader topic in science fiction. It's the, uh, HFA branch of science fiction, which is effectively looking at the idea that humans are particularly resilient. Uh, or competitive because we grew up in a, a very harsh environment and exploring the idea of humanity being a particularly aggressive or dominant species in the far future. I know I've definitely heard a lot of people talk about how aliens would avoid humans because we're particularly aggressive, Uh, and this branch of stories really focuses on humans being. Kind of an underdog. So I think it's gonna be an interesting topic. And if you're not familiar with that branch of science fiction, it could be an introduction into it. I am gonna thank, uh, a viewer, uh, for suggesting this on our YouTube channel. So it's gonna be a fun one to explore and I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, it's gonna be awesome seeing us on top for once. As always, we welcome you to comment below if you have any suggestions for us in the future, or just, uh, to let us know how you're enjoying the show. Helps us out in the algorithm, helps us understand what you like. And a special thank you too. All of our Patreons for supporting the show and making all this possible. And thank you all so much. Take care. Bye-bye.