Archive for May, 2012

Original

Superfreighter

Superfreighter

As Dee and her nakama build a colony for themselves in the asteroids, they find a need for a workhorse vessel – and design a class of spaceship which fills all their needs, and then some.

The inital model used for the first trips, the SF-0 “Zip”, had a somewhat different drive configuration than became standard. Once it was rebuilt with the new manufacturing processes available on the V-type asteroids, it was redesignated the SF-1 “Love”. The next ships sharing the design were the SF-2 “Unity”, SF-3 “Imagination”, SF-4 “Napier”, SF-5 “Ludolph”, and SF-6 “Euler”. Most official markings are English written in the Unifon script.

Crew: 8
Dry Mass: 135 tonnes
Typical fuel mass: 240 tonnes
Rated cargo mass: 440 tonnes
Main thruster: antiproton-catalyzed n-6Li microfission

From left to right: Non-aerodynamic lander; containerized cargo; small heat radiators for hab section; main comm antenna; a pair of counter-rotating sections, each with three inflatable habitat modules; the main boom and radiators, with tanks for water-propellant inside the boom; and the main drive.

Artwork by http://varus-argo.deviantart.com/ .

Further details: http://www.datapacrat.com/hf/superfreighter.html

Original

Given how much you have learned of the techniques of rationality, of Bayesian updates and standard of evidence, of curiosity being the first virtue and being willing to update your beliefs… have any of your dreams been affected by them?

 

The reason I ask; I’m reading the entirely of the Sequences, and am about an eighth of the way through. And I’ve just woken from a dream whose plot was somewhat unusual. I had noticed some mildly strange animals and/or people, and upon trying to find out what was going on, discovered a small riverside camp of people who fell well outside what I understood to be the realm of human variation. The person I had started investigating with then claimed to be a god, or if I preferred, a vastly powerful and intelligent alien entity, and offered to do something to prove it to me. I remembered that I had once established for myself a standard of evidence for exactly this sort of question – the growth of a new, perfectly functional limb, in a way outside of present medical understanding… and in a few moments, my dream-self was the possesser of a nice, long tail. I had not been expecting that to happen, and noticed I was extremely confused, and deliberately raised my estimate of the probability that I really was talking to a god-like figure by some number of decibans. At the end of the dream, said deity-figure said that he would offer to split us off from his ‘main project’, on a few conditions – one of which was ‘no more clues’, since he had given us ‘more than enough to figure out what’s going on’… … whereupon I questioned a few things, and immediately woke up.

I don’t recall having a dream of anything like that sort before – and I dream in understandable narrative plots so often that I sometimes dream sequels. So I’m curious; is this a normal sort of thing that happens to LessWrongians?