u/Tiny_Scholar_6135

The idea is to build a Banks Orbital centered around Mars out of Mars materials.

Width = 2700 miles ≈ 4,345 km.

Earth surface area ≈ 510 million km².

At a radius of about 1.84–1.87 million km (the scale that produces ~1 g with a ~24-hour spin), the area comes out to roughly 98–100 Earths.

At a radius of about 1.84–1.87 million km (the scale that produces ~1 g with a ~24-hour spin), the area comes out to roughly 98–100 Earths. The surface insolation at the distance of Mars from the Sun is approximately equal over a year as that received by Anchorage, Alaska. Since this Orbital is aligned with the Martian equator, this will give it an axial tilt of 25.19°. The day length can match the rotation of the planet Mars itself. To hold itself together and to stabilize it, a series of spoke-like tethers would connect to an outer ring the north and south poles of Mars. One each pole would be a turn table that counter rotates against Mars' spin, thus not spinning at all, the outer ring of the Banks orbital doesn't spin either, the inner habitable ring spins within it, supported by magnetic fields that transfer the weight under spin to the nonrotating more massive outer ring. Each 27 miles width of the orbital has the surface area of the Earth, so a 2700 mile wide band will give you 100 Earths worth of surface area, approximately equal to the surface area of Saturn if we could live on its cloud tops. The rim walls would be angled at 65.81° to the Banks Orbital floor so they would produce no shadow on the floor even at maximum seasonal tilt. Total hypotenuse length of the walls from floor to top would be About 2,350 miles., to achieve an elevation from the floor of 1000 miles. The walls would lean away from the floor by 2126 miles giving a total width for the banks orbital of about 6,953 miles at the rim wall tops, about a third of its surface is habitable floor space, while the lower sections of the inclined walls can also be habitable at the lower atmosphere layers.

What would it take to build such a time machine? We would need massive processing power to simulate past eras and then travel to them virtually. Another thing we might try is to simulate a galaxy and then travel through it using a simulated FTL drive. We might try something like a simulated warp drive, and try to keep that simulation as close to real physics as we can while achieving the results we want. They say an FTL drive is the functional equivalent of a time machine, and a time machine creates paradoxes, unless we create simulations of parallel universes, or just the parts of those universes we are interested in.

By biological immortality I mean aging is reversed or prevented, people still die eventually due to other things like accidents and so forth. Now most scientists will probably agree that biological immortality doesn't violate any laws of physics but faster than light travel does. If you have a setting with a galaxy spanning empire, usually some kind of FTL drive and some FTL communication holds it together, but people tend to age and die just like they do today. Since finding a cure for aging is within the realm of the possible while FTL is not, why do most science fiction universes do the opposite?

Then you put a floor above that, add a dome on top. There is a hub tower in the center of the dome. You enter the dome area, walk to the center to the hub tower and you take the elevator down to the Stanford Torus below.

This involved Elon Musk's plan for AI satellites, one of the problems is that they are in low Earth orbit and so fall under the Earth's shadow frequently, so one possible solution is to beam energy from a satellite that is in the Sun to a satellite that is in Earth's shadow, so what is the best way to beam energy to keep these satellites running? Alternatively the satellites in shadow can go dormant and you confine most of the computing to satellites that are in the sun, and they just relay information when they are not.

I have been waiting for a movie based on Larry Niven's Ringworld Novel for a long time. I think developments in Artificial Intelligence have lowered the cost of making such a movie, after seeing chapter 1: Heir to the Empire produced as an AI movie, no actors were involved, just AI produced video, no doubt with human guidance, looks pretty good actually. So there has been talk for a decade or more about producing a Ringworld Movie, but it never led to anything. Science Fiction movies were expensive if done right, and most of Hollywood does not like to take chances with anything new, they like doing sequels, prequels, remakes of television shows and movies, because of the expense of producing science fiction movies, but now that has changed! Maybe now we can make that Ringworld movie using AI, and it wouldn't cost a fortune, we wouldn't need to hire actors or find locations in which to film, it can all be imagined with an AI with human direction. What do you think? Is it worth doing?

Suppose we wanted to build something that rotated once per minute and provided 1 full Earth gravity, what is the cheapest thing we can build which could do that? Enter the rotating spoke, if we build a spoke 1788.5 meters long and spin it at a rate of 1 per minute, then at the ends it would provide a full Earth gravity of centrifugal force, the midpoint is where we dock spaceships, and the spoke would consist of an elevator shaft, and at the ends would be the habitation modules, each spoke would come with two.

Space 2055 would be a grounded, character-driven hard sci-fi drama series focused on the challenges and triumphs of sustaining a large permanent human outpost on the Moon. It keeps the show’s strongest elements—Moonbase Alpha as a bustling, self-reliant research and industrial hub with ~300–311 personnel, the modular Eagle Transporter as the workhorse vehicle, and realistic near-future space tech—while ditching the runaway Moon, weekly alien planets, and physics-breaking propulsion.

The Setting and Premise

Moonbase Alpha is a sprawling, mostly underground facility (roughly 4 km across, built from lunar regolith and imported modules) in Shackleton Crater, supporting scientific research, resource extraction (e.g., water ice, metals, oxygen via ISRU), and serving as a hub for cislunar operations. By 2055, after decades of Artemis-style buildup, international/commercial partnerships, and heavy investment in lunar industry, the base houses ~300+ Alphans across specialized sections (Technical, Medical, Service, etc.). Life support recycles air/water/food; nuclear or solar power provides energy; psychological support and rotating shifts manage isolation.

Year Choice: 2055

A Moonbase of similar scale (~300+ people, large modular/underground layout, multiple launch pads, full sections for research/engineering/medical) is implausible by the 2030s. NASA’s current Artemis roadmap targets initial permanent elements and small crews (4–10 people) by ~2030–2036, scaling to sustained outposts later in the decade. A base supporting hundreds requires massive infrastructure: ISRU factories, habitats printed from regolith, reliable power (nuclear reactors), closed-loop life support, and economic drivers like lunar mining or tourism. Optimistic projections with strong commercial/government investment put a facility of this size in the mid-2050s—ambitious but feasible if space economy booms in the 2030s–2040s.

Realistic Eagle Transporter Capabilities

The Eagle remains the series’ visual and functional star: a squat, legged, modular VTOL spacecraft with a detachable command module, central superstructure, and swappable pods (passenger, cargo, lab, rescue, etc.). It looks exactly like the 1970s design—utilitarian, NASA-inspired, no sleek curves—because that aesthetic already feels like real hardware.

In a realistic 2055 version:

Propulsion: Chemical rockets (e.g., liquid oxygen/methane or hydrogen) or advanced nuclear thermal for efficiency. No fusion drives or 15% lightspeed; thrust is high but fuel-hungry. Refueling at the base (from lunar-produced propellants) is essential for reusability.

Range and operations: Primarily cislunar—lunar surface to low lunar orbit (~1,700 m/s delta-v one way), short hops across the Moon (hundreds of km), or rendezvous with Earth-Moon Lagrange point depots. Round-trip Earth-Moon is possible only with orbital tankers or staging (not routine solo flights). No interstellar or high-speed interplanetary jaunts.

Payload/crew: 2–4 pilots/crewmembers in the command module + up to 8–12 passengers in a standard pod (or ~10–25 tons cargo in a freight pod, depending on configuration). Modular design lets one Eagle swap roles quickly (e.g., science lab to heavy lifter).

Performance: VTOL landings on the Moon (no atmosphere means no aero issues, but dust plumes are a major engineering headache). Top speeds ~several km/s in vacuum; flights measured in hours/days, not minutes. Highly durable for crashes; abort-to-orbit or safe landing emphasized. Artificial gravity? None—realistic zero-g or lunar-g ops only.

Limitations (story fuel): Fuel margins are tight, maintenance is constant, radiation shielding matters, and pod swaps require careful EVA or robotic arms. Eagles are reliable workhorses, not invincible starfighters.

So, I throw it out to you, what story elements would work in a realistic reboot of Space 1999? What would be interesting to watch without making the show implausible? Finding alien artifacts on the Moon is always possible I suppose, the Moon has been around for a long time and its surface is ancient! So that's one. There are political ramifications for operating a Moon base. in the show the Moonbase was run like a quasi military organization with armed crewmembers, I'm not sure how realistic that is unless MoonBase Alpha serves a military purpose, but that is another source of show drama. Any Ideas?