Possibilities for the Future
Lightship- Necessity is the mother of invention. Boredom helps too. Technology may lend a hand. Is it all enough to cause a guy to invent a new kind of spaceship?
The Old Man- Living a long time can have unexpected wrinkles- in more ways than one.
Long Shot- People rarely leave vengeance to the Lord. After a nuclear war that leaves the Northern Hemisphere in shambles, what’s left of American leadership wants the Russian who started it to pay. There’s a small problem- only the Navy has the reach to complete the mission after so much of the U.S. and the world has been destroyed. Can the ships and planes of the fleet get the job done?
Damage Report- It’s fun to think about space aliens in flying saucers coming to visit, or even coming to invade. If there are any who can get here, they certainly wouldn’t need a flying dish to explore a strange planet. If there are any who would like to live here, they may be waiting until the crowd gets out of the way. Maybe they won’t have very long to wait.
Possibilities for the Future
Lightship- Necessity is the mother of invention. Boredom helps too. Technology may lend a hand. Is it all enough to cause a guy to invent a new kind of spaceship?
The Old Man- Living a long time can have unexpected wrinkles- in more ways than one.
Long Shot- People rarely leave vengeance to the Lord. After a nuclear war that leaves the Northern Hemisphere in shambles, what’s left of American leadership wants the Russian who started it to pay. There’s a small problem- only the Navy has the reach to complete the mission after so much of the U.S. and the world has been destroyed. Can the ships and planes of the fleet get the job done?
Damage Report- It’s fun to think about space aliens in flying saucers coming to visit, or even coming to invade. If there are any who can get here, they certainly wouldn’t need a flying dish to explore a strange planet. If there are any who would like to live here, they may be waiting until the crowd gets out of the way. Maybe they won’t have very long to wait.
A Man with an Idea
Kevin Lee had a hard time believing what he’d found at first. He was leafing through some hard copy industry mags in the library when he came across some notes on recent advances.
He was stalling on the work he was supposed to be doing for his doctoral dissertation. The topic he had chosen was boring, even though it would be an advance beyond current thought in his field of study. Kevin was not happy; the topic would get him a doctorate but other than that he thought it was a complete loser. Dropping the topic would make his advisor (who thought his topic was ‘phenomenal’) really angry. He would probably have to find a new advisor and start all over again. He was stuck.
Then he ran across the articles and suddenly his mind started churning. It wasn’t a field he was really familiar with but he was a solid hands-on engineer. Given a little time and commitment he felt he could pull together pretty much any kind of hardware, at any size. It might be a little arrogant, but it was pretty close to the truth.
He did some checking on the materials advances. The new solar sheeting was lightweight, very efficient at converting sunlight to electricity, and flexible enough to roll onto a decent sized cylinder. The sheets couldn’t survive a right angle bend but were fine with a fairly small curve. The stuff would greatly reduce the weight of a solar power-generating installation. With power radiating out of the sun at nearly 1.4 kilowatts per square meter, a lot less weight and more efficiency could go a long way toward powering a spaceship.
He did a little exploration into various forms of electric rocket motors. The best options seemed to be systems that turned a fuel into a plasma, causing a relatively small mass of fuel to be expelled at very high speeds. Where a rocket propelled itself with a large mass of low-energy fuel, a plasma drive accelerated a small amount of fuel to very high speeds. The result was a substantial amount of momentum to propel the ship, using less fuel. That saved on weight (less fuel required) and, in theory, the ability to achieve very high speeds due to nearly constant acceleration.
It was the constant acceleration part that was interesting. A plasma engine didn’t have to be enormously powerful. The engine could just push a little bit, all the time. In space, no friction meant that a constant push resulted in constant acceleration. If a ship was constantly accelerating, it would end up going pretty fast in a relatively short period of time.
Kevin was disappointed when he found some old work that looked a lot like what he was planning, but the old proposal was never funded to completion. He looked further and realized that many of the old project proposals were probably not practical. At the time the projects were proposed, solar panels were like solid windowpanes, relatively heavy and not very efficient, so right from the start power to “burn” the fuel was a problem.
Even if there was a good source of electricity, the plasma motors didn’t produce much thrust for the amount of fuel and electricity they used.
The prototypes used magnets to accelerate the fuel. The magnets generated a lot of heat in operation because the magnetic field had to be strong enough to accelerate the fuel ions, while channeling them in a way that maximized the direction of thrust and kept all those super hot ions away from the magnets themselves. So much heat was generated that plasma engines couldn’t be operated for very long before they destroyed themselves. That meant acceleration was rather poor (a lot of downtime to let the motor cool), there was a lot of wear and tear (starting and stopping the engine all the time with a lot of heating and cooling) and lots of weight for a cooling system to trap and radiate the waste heat. The pounds added up, making for poor performance. Just like for aircraft, spaceship pounds cost performance and money.
The result was that existing plasma motors were small and relatively weak.
There were new electromagnets on the market now, though, that were lighter in weight, powerful enough to be useful, and better able to survive internal heating. Kevin ran the new numbers through his head three times, checking his basic formulas, dimensional conversions, and physical constants. After all that, he realized that while there were still some issues, the problem of powering a spaceship was much easier given the new solar sheets and better magnets.
The stuff needed to build an efficient solar powered ship hadn’t really been available until recently- as in just getting press through the journals that Kevin had read. Solar cells had been getting cheaper and more efficient, but had only recently become ultra lightweight, very efficient in a wide band of wavelengths, and flexible enough to fabricate without a lot of structural support. It was only recently that materials that generated power from light could be made into flexible sheets. Maybe that was why the old plans had been pretty small scale in the first place- even if the motor had been decent, the planned prototype didn’t have a lightweight source of electricity that converted sunlight efficiently, reducing waste heat and increasing power. If so, Kevin had to move if he thought this would work. Soon enough, others would have the same flash of insight about the state of the necessary technologies and the race would be on.
So it seemed that there might well be a cheap and efficient source of electricity for the spaceship. That still left conversion efficiency and heat dissipation in the engine itself. The heat problem was tougher, but he had some ideas that might give him a starting point of forty or fifty percent engine efficiency. The new magnets were better and he thought there might be some ways to cool them more effectively than in the early plasma prototypes. He thought about the energy being left behind, tearing up magnets and overheating the motors. There was a lot there, and there just might be ways to get the system efficiency up to sixty percent. The more of that energy that he could put to work propelling the ship, the less equipment would be needed to keep the engines cool. It would take work but he thought it could be done.
There might be one other stumbling block- politics. Maybe the issue of ownership at the destination was a far stickier problem than he thought. Maybe the space-capable nations were afraid of the political consequences of interplanetary space travel. After all, something had held up the progress toward habitats in space. And political entities were enormously inertial- big blocks of paperwork not moving.
Well, first comes science and engineering; then comes politics. The other way round and nothing would ever get done.
But to do the engineering and put together a working model, money was necessary. That was the real starting point- finding someone or some group to foot the startup costs. That might be the toughest thing to get done. Even if everything went well, building the ship would cost a lot of money.
He thought about trying to build something that could go interplanetary, but Kevin rapidly figured out that the human problems were too great and overall costs were just too high. On the other hand, while the Moon had its own problems it was close, already reachable by manned craft. It was just that no one was going there. The problems of the Moon for humanity were at least reasonably well understood. If there was ever going to be a long-term habitat in space, the first one would likely be on the Moon.
He was still wondering why all the talk was about Mars. It was terrifically far away, so if you got into trouble you would be toast. It had almost no atmosphere; so little it was a minor advantage at best. Same with its gravity- while higher than the Moon, it was still quite a bit lower than Earth’s. And if it weren’t for a really tiny atmosphere to provide minimal protection from the solar wind, Mars would have one of the big problems of the Moon- lack of a magnetic field to protect it from the ion bombardment that was the solar wind.
Mars was too far away to be a jumping off point without a monumental investment, while the Moon was close enough to be a big space station that had needed resources right at hand. Maybe Mars looked good on paper, but the details looked pretty rough.
Looking at problems for habitation of the Moon would have to be a part of his long- term plan. He didn’t really know what was holding things up, but actual travel couldn’t be the only thing. His ship would do it faster and easier, but it was going to be important to have a genuine, possibly profitable reason to go there. Kevin was sure he could spend a little time on the problem, and maybe a little time was all that was needed. After all, how hard could it be?
He thought he could do just enough on his dissertation to keep from pissing off his advisor while he started to look for backers. That way he would have a backup plan in case money couldn’t be found or there was an unsolvable technical problem of some sort. It was going to be a delicate process; the wrong few words in the wrong places and someone else might just figure out what he was up to. With what he already knew, Kevin was pretty sure someone else could come up with cheap, fast transport to the Moon too. Once they caught on to the possibilities.
Whether or not he was in competition with others, if he couldn’t find money he’d actually have to finish his dissertation. It was worth some time and extra effort to find an alternative to a purely academic fate.
The Man with the Money
Danny Smith was a man without a purpose when he saw the proposal. After years of excitement in collegiate and pro basketball, a wild, risky ride in commodities futures and leveraged buyouts of a number of startup technology companies, the sheer amount of money he had piled up was making life a complete bore. So boring, in fact, that he was spending a significant amount of time on his foundation. That was a singularly uninteresting activity. It was the kind of thing old guys did before they died.
For the first time in a long time he was leafing through a bunch of funding requests that had been sent to his foundation. He’d done it a bit when he first established the foundation; at the time he thought there might be something worthwhile in it. That turned out to be untrue.
He hadn’t done it again until now. That was a true hallmark of his boredom.
Danny had more money than could be spent by a small nation in any reasonable period of time and no idea what to do with it. It had been difficult, exciting, and ultimately a fair amount of fun to get to where he was, but now he was at a dead end. All this cash and nowhere he wanted to go. He could get altruistic and just start dropping cash on struggling little goody-goody foundations everywhere, but that was a little too much like piling up bunches of paper money and putting matches to them all. He hadn’t put all that physical and mental sweat into getting where he was just to give it away.
At first Kevin’s proposal looked like a complete loser. It was dry, didn’t seem to do much, and was difficult to read. He wasn’t sure why the chair of the review committee had sent it to him, but Chaz was a good friend. He also had an unnerving instinct for moneymakers, finding gems in the midst of useless rock. Not that he needed more money, but he didn’t like the idea that Chaz sent him something he couldn’t find the gems in. Danny went back and looked at the proposal again.
Then he got suspicious. The goal of the proposal was a little too innocuous. Chaz might have spotted something in it that would be interesting.
“A Proposal to Investigate Technologies for Fine-Grained Motion and Orbital Control of Satellites”- talk about a way to put a review committee to sleep. The topic was rather silly, too. The technology in use worked perfectly fine. Not sexy, but workable.
He decided to follow his nose and kept reading. He took a close look at what the guy was proposing. He started to read between the lines. He’d have to get one of his geeks to go over the math but his was good enough to think it might be right. On the other hand, the words were a little too vague and the bit of math was certainly not all that was necessary. If this proposal was what he thought it might be, it would open doors. Yes, indeed. Big doors. And with a wrinkle or two, it could cause a lot of trouble in the global political system. Now that might be fun. Why, it might even do some good for the world.
Danny thought the proposal was worth a serious look by some good tech eyes. It might be just the kind of fun that would make his day.
The Call
Kevin was not working on his dissertation when the call came. Instead he was working through some of the more recent papers on plasma engines. So far he hadn’t made a lot of progress on the heat problem in them.
The waste heat from the sails turned out to be pretty easy. The efficiency of the newest solar cell materials was quite good, and there were a couple of decent technologies for conversion of the waste heat to electricity. Materials advances had come to the rescue again; there were now materials that absorbed heat and turned it into electricity at a reasonable rate. Not perfect, but a reasonable solution to getting more work out of the sunlight.
He still had to fix the engine problem, though. Otherwise the engines wouldn’t last long enough to get to any place interesting. The electric-powered engines in use were very low power, to avoid the heat problem. That wouldn’t get him where he wanted to go. He needed a good start on a viable solution. He was gambling but it was still better than going back to his dissertation.
He didn’t recognize the phone number but the caller was at the Smith Foundation. He was pretty sure they were one of the foundations he had sent a proposal. He crossed his fingers and answered the call.
“Is this Mr. Kevin Lee? Hello, Mr. Lee. My name is Charity Thompson. I’m Dr. Chaz Delsun’s executive assistant. Dr. Delsun is Executive Director of the Smith Foundation and chair of the proposal review committee. He would like to arrange an appointment to discuss your proposal. The address in the proposal, is that your current address? It’s actually quite close to us. He suggests that you plan on an hour. I will send you directions. When would be convenient?”
For a minute he had a hard time understanding what the angelic voice on the other end of the line was telling him. Voices like that seldom (maybe never?) called him. Then the fog cleared enough for him to fumble through the calendar on his phone and find a date to accept the appointment.
Kevin hung up. He smiled, and the smile got bigger. Maybe he wouldn’t have to finish his dissertation after all.
To start this review, I must say that it is not, as described in the synopsis, a single book portraying four main themes. Instead, "Lightship" is the title of a short story anthology consisting of 4 unrelated works exploring different aspects of Hard Sci-Fi: Lightship, The Old Man, Long Shot, and Damage Report.
There is a vast difference in both writing style and storytelling ability between the works, which makes this a very difficult piece to give a star-rating. Damage Report and Long Shot are well-worth a 3 "Worth Reading" score, due to the intriguing plights of the characters tying in other-worldly responsibilities for humanity's actions and inactions.
Lightship, the first story we read in the anthology, is the primary reason I made the difficult decision to give this anthology a 2-star review. Hard Sci-Fi comes with an in-depth explanation of the science that makes the story possible as a default, and that aspect is one that Besik hit perfectly.
However, there are scenes that drag on and on in monologues where the plot sits on hold far too long to maintain the hook of the story, and the pacing truly drags throughout the whole piece. The most exciting part (which I cannot mention due to this being a spoiler-free review) is about to be answered (whether or not it will happen, that is) at the end, and then the story is cut off. It was such a disappointment to know the stakes of the story and trudge through all the repetitive details and character lectures, only to leave off without knowing what happens.
Besik truly knows the science in and out, and should take great pride in his ability to relay it so believably in these stories. Their strength in remaining true to the hard Sci-Fi aspects of their world-building, though, often overshadows character development (we don't really see much internal life-altering growth in the plethora of POV characters save in a few like the Chief). This makes following along with the plot almost feel pointless, and the stories often leave off at the 'best parts', save for Long Shot, where we see the resolution.
Ultimately Lightship was too world-building focused and did not resolve enough of the plot points for me to give this anthology a 3-star review. However, a lover of narrative fiction who also enjoys engineering and technology-heavy sci-fi with social and global responsibility as undertones would definitely find this a book worth reading.