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Post by Apotheon on Apr 13, 2019 14:16:03 GMT
In sci-fi with magic propulsion, say constant g acceleration, considering Mercury is the closest planet to all other planets on average and closest about 50% of the time, wouldn't Mercury be an optimal location for a solar system capital city?
What else is Mercury good for? Efficient solar power... natural resources? |
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Post by bigbombr on Apr 13, 2019 14:44:53 GMT
In sci-fi with magic propulsion, say constant g acceleration, considering Mercury is the closest planet to all other planets on average and closest about 50% of the time, wouldn't Mercury be an optimal location for a solar system capital city?
What else is Mercury good for? Efficient solar power... natural resources? Mercury is pretty deep inside the Suns gravity well, and has no atmosphere useful for aerobraking. It's a big chunk of rock rich in metals with a lot of solar power available. Mercury seems to be only useful as a source of raw materials. |
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 13, 2019 18:25:18 GMT
Energy generation and metal mining.
It's hard to support large population on Mercury, and with a bit less than magic propulsion it's in deep gravity well and has no atmosphere.
From outer planets POV there is little difference between Mercury and any other inner planet in terms of distance too.
The only way I can see Mercury becoming capital is if it would first secede, then scare everyone else into submission with big solar-powered laser arrays and mass drivers.
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Post by airc777 on Apr 13, 2019 19:00:28 GMT
It's the thing we disassemble to build a Dyson sphere.
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Post by Apotheon on Apr 13, 2019 19:57:22 GMT
What about a communications hub? Where it is in the “gravity well” sounds irrelevant with free-ish propulsion, say in Aurora4X(?), where ships travel linearly.
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Post by airc777 on Apr 13, 2019 20:31:08 GMT
Yeah, Dyson sphere's ought to make a decent communications hub.
If you had truly magic drive systems and you could fly to and build anything anywhere for whatever reason with relatively negligible efficiency losses, then you would probably build whatever you wanted where ever you felt like because why not. Or you would just build everything at Earth because all of your infrastructure is already there and in this hypothetical scenario we've already determined it costs you no delta V to fly material back to Earth.
Assuming finite delta V is going to be a thing for the foreseeable future then Jupiter would be the best place to plan interstellar captures because it can give you the strongest gravity assist to put you in line with the orbital plane. Also Jupiter and it's moons have a lot of various resources.
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Post by EshaNas on May 2, 2019 23:26:08 GMT
In sci-fi with magic propulsion, say constant g acceleration, considering Mercury is the closest planet to all other planets on average and closest about 50% of the time, wouldn't Mercury be an optimal location for a solar system capital city?
What else is Mercury good for? Efficient solar power... natural resources? The best Capital would be low in D/V needed to take off, close to the solar plane, still capable of holding an atmosphere if needed, and close to the 'center' of civilized space. The Moon, Callisto, or somesuch comes to mind. Ceres, Vesta, and most of the 'roids in the belt are off too much from the elliptic to be worth the constant travel. Mercury is a mining colony, antimatter farm (if for some reason you want it plunged into that deep gravity well and on a rock), scientific base, stuff like that. |
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Post by airc777 on May 4, 2019 16:20:15 GMT
The best Capital would be low in D/V needed to take off, close to the solar plane, still capable of holding an atmosphere if needed, and close to the 'center' of civilized space. Also having a strong magnetic field, or other natural radiation shield is nice. So is access to solar power, water, phosphorus, and so on.
Having a near absolute zero thermal mass would have applications for quantum computing. Having readily available hydro carbons has industrial applications, more so if you also have readily available oxidizers.
How you intend to build your 'capital' is going to have an effect on what you prioritize, but if you're defining capital as just the largest population center of humans and not necessarily as the largest industrial or computing center then your upper bounds is probably going to be limited by things like the phosphorus cycle.
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Post by Rocket Witch on Jun 30, 2019 0:08:19 GMT
Mercury could be a good military command centre in a setting without magic propulsion. Being deep in the well makes it expensive to assault. It is cheap to attack (this is a different thing from assault*) from somewhere like Pluto but being relatively useless for everything else allows it to be fully given over to its purpose, enhancing security and providing lots of landmass for protection of underground bunkers. It's also a useful hangout spot for beamed power transmitters serving the rest of the system since orbits so close to Sol are fairly dangerous. This potentially goes in hand with the military notion, since in an advanced civilisation (without fusion) power is power.
* For anyone curious, because it is quite specific, in a military context an attack is directed at a particular objective, while an assault is more of a general advance to cover territory. In space war I surmise an attack could be as simple as throwing long range missiles at a planet, while an assault would be capturing it.
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