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Southern Star, v. 1, issue 2, June 1941
Page 27
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REBUTTAL TO SPACE SHOPS AND SPACE WAR by - "Guest Material - Oliver Saari - Article - The maneuverability of space ships has been made a far greater problem than it really can be. It's a common mistake to think of motion only in the earthly senses. Here on earth we have to worry about friction, trajectory, traction, engine speed, and traffic cops. All our machines move by pushing against something. Flying, walking, swiming, skating, we move on or in a stationary medium, and our speed is limited by how fast we can make this medium retreat from us. When we take a corner on two wheels, tires screaming, we're basing our hopes for survival on the solidness, the immobility of the earth. But you can't apply the sense of earthly motion to space ships. Out there motion, at least, will be simpler. There's only a little guy named Newton and he was, reputedly, a very reasonable fellow. Before he came along, people were doing things with spirits and elementals.He boiled it all down to inertia, acceleration, reaction, and gravitation Those laws of his have been good for four hundred years, and even Einstein can only dent them slightly -- so let's see how they are applied t space ships. Unless you're traveling at speeds greater than 140,000 miles a second, that's all you have to do. Inertia. All things either stand still or move in a straight line until acted on by an unbalanced force. O.K. Our ship is going, say 100 miles a second in the direction of Alpha Auriga. Say its engines are turned off and its speed has become constant. It will continue to move in a straight line until a force acts on it. What force could it be? Certainly not friction, as on earth. So you have no traction -- you have no stabilizer-in-air, no tires on pavement, no fin in water. You have only the engines you used to get in that pickle, and nothing else in the universe will get you out unless the Lone Ranger happens to come along. So we have to turn on Newton's second law. An unbalanced force acting on a mass produced an acceleration directly proportional to the force and inversely proportional to the mass. In space, any force is an unbalanced one because there is no friction to balance it. So any force will produce acceleration on any mass. That means if some mischievous space-mosquito kicks our space-ship, he will change our course. Our original velocity will continue unchanged in direction or magnitude, but the kick would have given us an added velocity in the direction of the kick. In other words, our true motion would now be the vector sum of those two velocities, and again in a straight line till we get kicked again. Now let's suppose a couple of belligerants are going in the same direction and at about the same speed. They have to be, before the battle can commence. Say they're both going toward Alpha Auriga at 100 mi/per sec. Let me quote from the article by Fischer and McQueen: "Speeding vehicles just don't handle like bicycles. Any quick maneuver would jerk the passengers of space ships to shreds." Sure it would -- on earth, where you turn against a stationary medium. But in space, as far as those speeding belligerents are concerned, they are standing still. They can just forget their 100/mi/sec as if it didn't exist at all. Relative to each other, their motion is nil. Any maneuver they wish to make is simply an acceleration in some direction, and must be produced by the same kind of force that drives them in space. The simple thing to do would be to govern your engines down to a maximum acceleration of, say, four or five g's ----- just so
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REBUTTAL TO SPACE SHOPS AND SPACE WAR by - "Guest Material - Oliver Saari - Article - The maneuverability of space ships has been made a far greater problem than it really can be. It's a common mistake to think of motion only in the earthly senses. Here on earth we have to worry about friction, trajectory, traction, engine speed, and traffic cops. All our machines move by pushing against something. Flying, walking, swiming, skating, we move on or in a stationary medium, and our speed is limited by how fast we can make this medium retreat from us. When we take a corner on two wheels, tires screaming, we're basing our hopes for survival on the solidness, the immobility of the earth. But you can't apply the sense of earthly motion to space ships. Out there motion, at least, will be simpler. There's only a little guy named Newton and he was, reputedly, a very reasonable fellow. Before he came along, people were doing things with spirits and elementals.He boiled it all down to inertia, acceleration, reaction, and gravitation Those laws of his have been good for four hundred years, and even Einstein can only dent them slightly -- so let's see how they are applied t space ships. Unless you're traveling at speeds greater than 140,000 miles a second, that's all you have to do. Inertia. All things either stand still or move in a straight line until acted on by an unbalanced force. O.K. Our ship is going, say 100 miles a second in the direction of Alpha Auriga. Say its engines are turned off and its speed has become constant. It will continue to move in a straight line until a force acts on it. What force could it be? Certainly not friction, as on earth. So you have no traction -- you have no stabilizer-in-air, no tires on pavement, no fin in water. You have only the engines you used to get in that pickle, and nothing else in the universe will get you out unless the Lone Ranger happens to come along. So we have to turn on Newton's second law. An unbalanced force acting on a mass produced an acceleration directly proportional to the force and inversely proportional to the mass. In space, any force is an unbalanced one because there is no friction to balance it. So any force will produce acceleration on any mass. That means if some mischievous space-mosquito kicks our space-ship, he will change our course. Our original velocity will continue unchanged in direction or magnitude, but the kick would have given us an added velocity in the direction of the kick. In other words, our true motion would now be the vector sum of those two velocities, and again in a straight line till we get kicked again. Now let's suppose a couple of belligerants are going in the same direction and at about the same speed. They have to be, before the battle can commence. Say they're both going toward Alpha Auriga at 100 mi/per sec. Let me quote from the article by Fischer and McQueen: "Speeding vehicles just don't handle like bicycles. Any quick maneuver would jerk the passengers of space ships to shreds." Sure it would -- on earth, where you turn against a stationary medium. But in space, as far as those speeding belligerents are concerned, they are standing still. They can just forget their 100/mi/sec as if it didn't exist at all. Relative to each other, their motion is nil. Any maneuver they wish to make is simply an acceleration in some direction, and must be produced by the same kind of force that drives them in space. The simple thing to do would be to govern your engines down to a maximum acceleration of, say, four or five g's ----- just so
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