Yeah, but propelling them out of the solar system just sounds like the kind of fake-ending that ends up with the super villain coming back stronger in a decade. Have we learnt nothing from science fiction? You have to destroy your foes whilst you can.
From the https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilOverlordList
4: Shooting is not too good for my enemies.
7: When I’ve captured my adversary and he says, “Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?” I’ll say, “No.” and shoot him. No, on second thought I’ll shoot him then say “No.”
13: All slain enemies will be cremated, or at least have several rounds of ammunition emptied into them, not Left for Dead at the bottom of the cliff. The announcement of their deaths, as well as any accompanying celebration, will be deferred until after the aforementioned disposal.
Man, I haven’t thought of the Evil Overlord List in many, many years. Thanks for that.
The phantom zone ain’t gonna cut it.
It blows my mind that this was cutting edge, jaw dropping graphics back in the day. A shape-shifting trapezoid with some panicked faces peeking out.
E. Nah now I’m thinking it’s a one dimensional parallelegram.
That shit’s laughable, but then there was Superman III and the trauma it caused:
What blows my mind is that I could right now recreate this in moments on a cheap, low-power microcontroller.
Which angel is that?
Going easy on traitors is how Germany gave us WWII.
Back when RT wasn’t shit.
It’s definitely harder to decay the orbit into the sun directly than it is to get to escape velocity. But to play devil’s advocate, there is probably a way to get them into the sun while being a similar cost to escape velocity. All you need to do is burn prograde to a super high aphelion, ride all the way out there to Pluto or whatever and then do a small retrograde burn to bring your perihelion inside the sun’s photosphere. When you then get back towards the sun years later you would slam into it with a sick velocity that I think would be worth the decades-long wait.
This definitely reads like one of my KSP exploits…
Gravity assist with one of the larger planets to make a very narrow orbit seems to be the most efficient way. But you need the planets to align correctly to have an efficient route.
“I’ll launch you into the sun once there is an appropriate transfer window to Jupiter” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
What if we catch a gravity assist off Jool, and do the retrograde burn at perijool to gain some free Oberth Effect DV?
This guy orbital mechanics!
Jebadiah is always so happy to spend 52 years only to find himself stranded on Bop.
I actually sent a rescue mission to save one of my kerbals and the science they had on board, and ended up needing to launch a mission to save the rescue mission…
Had to break it up into three launches, two to build the larger ship in orbit and one to fuel it up.
I learned a lot about orbital mechanics that day…
Total time in space was probably about 20 years…
And I may have forgotten about a kerbals in one or two plays…
I love KSP
That’s what I was thinking too.
Launching someone straight into the sun is very very expensive but doing a gravity assist around Jupiter or something to redirect your orbit into the sun is much cheaper.
Even with the explanations given here, it’s still very counter-intuitive for me.
I think the best thing would be to cut the person in half, send one half towards the sun and the other half out of the solar system.
Huh. I would have thought that once they break orbit that the sun’s gravity well would do the heavy
liftingpulling.If you care to learn orbital mechanics, Kerbal Space Program is a great teacher.
That one’s been sitting unplayed in my library for a very long time. I guess it’s time to give it a shot.
And if you want more complicated orbital mechanics there’s a ksp mod: Principia which adds n-body orbital mechanics over ksp’s relatively simple patched conic orbital simulation.
“Breaking orbit” still leaves you in almost the same orbit around the sun as the earth. You need to slow down a lot to bring the periapsis of the orbit within the suns surface.
Imagine that you’re standing on a train and have a baseball. If you throw the ball off the train, the ball will still have momentum in the direction of the train’s movement.
If you want to throw the ball to a friend the train just passed, you have to be able to throw the ball faster than the train is moving or it will never reach them.
Now all im imagineing is a ball floating mid air and it’s beautiful
Mythbusters did this! (Well, the ball fell to the ground, but for a split second it looked like it was hovering after being shot out of a cannon.)
Oh nice. Im re-watching then on youtube at the moment so will have to keep an eye out for that one.
once you break out of earth orbit you are now in an orbit around the sun, similar to earths.
The vessel would still have a lot of speed after escaping earth’s orbit, so the trajectory would become a large orbit around the sun. You still have to slow down by about ~30km/s (or ~100 000 km/h) to make that orbit intercept with the sun’s surface.
I legitimately want to be cremated by the sun after I die. Doesn’t matter how long it takes.
Don’t worry, we all will. We all came from a sun, and will all return to one.
Knowing my luck I’ll end up in a black hole instead.
Well, I guess this applies to me. I say that a lot.
Can a solar sail be used to put a craft into the sun?
That’s an interesting question. A regular sail can sail into the wind, but they have a triangular sail, and a keel with water resistance. I don’t think any of those things exist in space, so I’m going to guess no. Perhaps some sort of high efficiency propellant keel could make it possible?
My intuition would say no, but to be honest, I don’t understand the physics of either solar or watercraft sails.
As a certified small keelboat skipper, I understand watercraft sails. I think I understand solar sails, but not nearly as well. I know Stephen Hawking wanted to send a bunch of micro drones to Alpha Centauri using solar sails powered by on-board lasers. That seems like the whole fan on a boat pointed at a sail situation, which doesn’t work on earth, so maybe I don’t actually understand solar sails. I’m definitely not going to say that Stephen Motherfucking Hawking was wrong about his area of expertise.
Edit: I got really curious about this after posting and looked into it more. The project was called The Breakthrough Starshot, and I misremembered the configuration. The lasers weren’t onboard the spacecraft, they would have been earth or satellite based. So I guess I do understand how solar sails work. When photons hit the sail, they impart some of their momentum to the sail, and the attached spacecraft. Since billions of photons are hitting the sail every second, all those tiny little pushes provide forward momentum. I’m still not sure if you can use a high efficiency propellant keel to sail towards the light source or not, but I’m thinking probably “no”.
If it would work, it would be by stopping the angular momentum around the sun, then letting the sun’s gravity pull the object in.
Yes, because of the way orbits work, you just need to add velocity horizontal to the orbit, which is just as easy going into the sun as out of it.
So a solar sail is just as good both in and out of the sun.
Wouldn’t shooting them into Jupiter be the easiest?
I’m sure I’ve read a few things about what an impact that big bugger has on trajectories in our solar system.
Intuitively I feel like a push towards Jupiter would be easier than a push to get all the way out of the solar system avoiding Jupiter.
Ummm… quick question: Isn’t that all just a matter of timing?
So you’re telling me shooting a space gun at the sun will miss?
No, just that you’ll need to use a longer casing on your round.
Exceptions do apply, things like near-immortal beings or cursed objects may require the destructive power of a Sun and no less
You could always put them in a co-orbit with earth or something and then just use solar sails to provide the delta-v
But I also like the idea of certain peeps having time to understand the error of their ways before slowly falling into the sun faster and faster.
And before some one says “well, there’s still plenty of time for that with a rocket…”
Naw. We’re talking about a truly idiotic person. It’s gonna take them a while,
