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Getting to space without violating the Proscriptions

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Re: Getting to space without violating the Proscriptions
Post by Sounour   » Mon Jul 06, 2015 10:12 am

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OrlandoNative wrote:Mmmm... and just *how* are you going to do this?

LOX is *liquid* oxygen. Liquid oxygen requires a temperature of less than -100 C to condense, or extreme pressure - more pressure than regular iron and steel containers are able to hold. Not to mention the special insulation required to keep it liquid. I'm pretty sure at some point in the process a purely mechanical approach isn't going to work - either in making the LOX itself, or making something you *need* to make the LOX. Or both.

Safehold doesn't even have air conditioners. You're not going to be able to use *ice* to do this.

In any case, what would any kind of "simple" rocket do for them? Without complex calculations, I doubt one could even plot an orbit. You probably couldn't loft enough payload to build a space station, and, even if you could, what would be the point?

The real question is what *exactly* do the Proscriptions proscribe? We've never seen the actual text. All we know is that the *allowed* methods involve muscle, wind, and water. We don't know how they detail what *isn't* allowed. If they just say "everything else is taboo"; then there's a lot of "wriggle room"; because one with sufficient imagination can usually come up with a way of tying things back to one of those 3. We've already seen this in the case of the steam engine. It would be interesting to see if the mariners of Safehold use compasses. If so, I think electricity *could* be argued to be within the proscriptions, *unless* it's explicitly prohibited in the Writ, since a spinning piece of lodestone within a coil of copper would generate it. Copper isn't verboten, lodestone may not be either. The steam engine is already attested. *If* one used hollow copper tubes rather than solid or stranded wire to conduct the resultant electricity, one could probably argue that it was just basically some invisible type of "wind". Actually, since electricity is a flow of electrons, that wouldn't be totally untrue, but just not the whole truth.

The fact of the matter is that the Inquisition has always been good at this kind of thing, easily coming up with some way to justify the "inventions" it wants, just as it does denying the ones it doesn't.


I'm pretty sure that I remember there being something that says lightning is the reminder of langhorne's rakurai and a warning against overstepping the proscriptions.

So any device using electricity would have to be unable to generate electrical sparks / electrical arcs = mini lightning or otherwise there would be "Hey I invented this device, but then it produced Langhorne's lightning by which the archangels themselves told me I should not do that. "
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Re: Getting to space without violating the Proscriptions
Post by Tonto Silerheels   » Mon Jul 06, 2015 10:58 am

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OrlandoNative wrote:

LOX is *liquid* oxygen. Liquid oxygen requires a temperature of less than -100 C to condense, or extreme pressure - more pressure than regular iron and steel containers are able to hold. Not to mention the special insulation required to keep it liquid. I'm pretty sure at some point in the process a purely mechanical approach isn't going to work - either in making the LOX itself, or making something you *need* to make the LOX. Or both.

Not so long ago runsforcelery asked how to make pure oxygen within the proscriptions, and the consensus at that time was that fractional distillation was the way to go. You would need stainless steel to have strength at temperature, and but the only energy inputs would be to the compressors and fans. The compressors and fans could be driven by steam engines.

As a bonus, you would also get liquid nitrogen and argon. A double fractional distillation column should require no more than about five bar of pressure.

Speculation at that time then proceeded to what needs Safehold would have for pure oxygen, and the consensus was that it would be used for industrial quantities of steel.

~Tonto
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Re: Getting to space without violating the Proscriptions
Post by pbreed   » Mon Jul 06, 2015 11:26 am

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Current Lox plants don't use electricity directly, the electricity is used to run pumps and compressors... ie the work in a lox plant is mechanical work. No reason at all that one could not build a steam driven fractional distillation lox plant.

Nice wiki article..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenic_oxygen_plant
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Re: Getting to space without violating the Proscriptions
Post by drudolph   » Mon Jul 06, 2015 2:07 pm

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Interesting speculation. Two thoughts.

First, if I recall correctly, Charis now has nitric acid and nitroglycerin, and is working on getting guncotton / nitrocellulose into production. I think nitrocellulose would have the necessary energy for a solid fuel rocket.

Second, if it seemed necessary to add things like aluminum powder to the fuel, I'm sure it could be manufactured in Nimue's Cave where the proscriptions can't be enforced, and transported in reasonable quantity by skimmer. It seems to me less likely they could get LOX out of Nimue's Cave by skimmer, but the solid rocket fuel might be workable.
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Re: Getting to space without violating the Proscriptions
Post by Halancar   » Mon Jul 06, 2015 2:12 pm

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Steal a leaf from Jules Vernes: build a very, very big canon and shoot your (very, very sturdy) space module without using a rocket at all. Once in space you can even use pressurized air bottles (or any of a dozen ways to generate gases) to do minor course correction without needing a very powerful rocket.

And canons have been allowed under the Prescriptions. A mistake born of bribery, to be sure, but they are allowed.

Of course, given what your space module would have to endure during the shooting, you may be limited to sending solid metal projectiles into space; and by itself a canon cannot launch anything into a stable orbit (it will at some point fall orbit back into its launch site if it has not hit the ground somewhere else first); but it's a start.
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Re: Getting to space without violating the Proscriptions
Post by Aethor   » Mon Jul 06, 2015 2:23 pm

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The whole thing is a moot point for several reasons.

First, if I remember correctly, the Writ describes the universe quite differently from what it really is (in OAR). So, as soon as you get to space, you'll notice that things don't agree with the Writ, and the can of worms will be open.

Second, ultimately, Safeholdians need ships and weapons capable of defeating Gbaba, and/or defending themselves, if/when Gbaba come to them
There's no way in hell you can have that w/o electricity.

Third, you can't have powered flight until OBS is down, since you don't know what will trigger an orbital bombardment.
And once the OBS is down, why wouldn't you reveal the truth?
The only alternative would be to prolong the lie, and then who would believe you about anything else, once they find the truth?
That's the reason Merlin was careful to never directly lie, from OAR on.

Fourth, economy of doing anything useful once you get into space. Even if you could shoot a big bullet from a big cannon (Jules Verne style) you will eventually need viable colonies or at least stations and outposts, space industry for building ships etc etc.
Trying to do it with added extreme constraints like no electricity, even if you could find a way to do it, would make the cost unacceptably high (and I'm not convinced you could do it at all, in the first place)

Fifth. Complex computers w/o electricity? Yeah, you could make simple calculations with mechanical or otherwise made calculators, but try to run anything that controls robots, runs complex spaceships etc etc... you'd have a collection of wheels and cogs much bigger than the spaceship itself.

For an exercise, try to make a wheels-and-cogs computer that calculates in real time everything needed to walk a 4-legged robot over an uneven surface with some obstacles. Good luck.
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Re: Getting to space without violating the Proscriptions
Post by Silverwall   » Mon Jul 06, 2015 3:40 pm

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The biggest issue with doing any of these is that it requires an industrial chemistry capability that safehold simply does not have a foundation for. RFC has made it clear they have a strong "bathtub" chemistry but for real industrial chemistry the techniques don't scale worth a damn and you need new techniques based on a sound understanding of the basic chemistry.

Dr Lewis? is doing amazing things but has yet to come up with any solid theories as to how to do things. The other problem they have is that often these industrial processes need highly purified >> 99% purity inputs to avoid tainting the reaction into uselessness and getting those purities is a slow chicken and egg iteration problem.

Does anyone know what refrigerants would be available to get things cold enough without using the chlorinated compounds we use in the real world?

I avoid chlorine because chlorine requires electrolysis to make and you require elemental chlorine at some point in thier manufacturing process.

As for solid nitrocellulose based rockets they tried that in the 40' and 50's and the problem they have is they don't burn hot enough until you add the powdered aluminium mentioned above. The heat (and thus thrust) needed for space apps is much higher than needed for viable weapons systems like the Ohka suicide rocket bomb or katyshushas.
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Re: Getting to space without violating the Proscriptions
Post by Tonto Silerheels   » Mon Jul 06, 2015 4:48 pm

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Silverwall wrote:

Does anyone know what refrigerants would be available to get things cold enough without using the chlorinated compounds we use in the real world?

You actually use air as its own refrigerant. In 1885 Joule and Thompson confirmed that if you flow a gas through a restriction then you get a temperature drop as well as a pressure drop. If you then route the exhaust air back past the incoming air to cool it, then you get a vicious cycle with the exhaust air cooling the incoming air, and cool incoming air leading to even cooler exhaust air, which cools the incoming air even further.

~Tonto
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Re: Getting to space without violating the Proscriptions
Post by Silverwall   » Mon Jul 06, 2015 5:07 pm

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Tonto Silerheels wrote:Silverwall wrote:

Does anyone know what refrigerants would be available to get things cold enough without using the chlorinated compounds we use in the real world?

You actually use air as its own refrigerant. In 1885 Joule and Thompson confirmed that if you flow a gas through a restriction then you get a temperature drop as well as a pressure drop. If you then route the exhaust air back past the incoming air to cool it, then you get a vicious cycle with the exhaust air cooling the incoming air, and cool incoming air leading to even cooler exhaust air, which cools the incoming air even further.

~Tonto


I know that you can use air as it's own refrigerant and was in fact the first refrigerant used on freezer ships but they could only get to below freezing to keep meat fresh. Also note that while they could maintain a cold room in tropical conditions they could not get it down to that temp from a warm start in tropical conditions. They had to be precooled in a colder environment. To get down to cyro temps needed for fractional distilation of air is a much much more complex problem and the lack of phase change in air is a huge issue causing massive inneficiencies which is why I am ruling it out. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigera ... efrigerant for details
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Re: Getting to space without violating the Proscriptions
Post by peke   » Mon Jul 06, 2015 5:48 pm

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Going to space without developing electricity?

No idea if it's actually feasible, but the question in my mind is "what's the point? ;) "

If it's feasible, it would certainly be a colossal expenditure of resources, with no benefits other than "one-upmanship" in the best spirit of our own Cold-War era space race.
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