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Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoI enjoyed Delta-V, but Daemon and Freedom IMO were much more entertaining
- RangerScience 6y agoIn same-same-but-different, I recommend "Walkaway" (Cory Doctorow) and "Nexus" (Rameez Nam).
- mrslave 6y agoI'll take these as unsolicited strong recommendations for my next sci-fi novel reading, as I'm just finishing the Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space trilogy. Thank you!
- superkuh 6y agoDaemon and Freedom are top class hard scifi. The plot hinges on technical detail that is both completely plausible and a natural extension of existing information technology. It's obvious that Suarez really understands what he's talking about in a deep way. I'd say "Daemon" is top twenty for best hard scifi books. http://superkuh.com/hardscifi.txt http://superkuh.com/hardscifi.txt Delta-v is good scifi and I love this kind of background detail.
- Barrin92 6y agoI found the books enjoyable, they're good techno thrillers and page turners like the Ramez Naam ones or Crichton's books but I think putting them into the top 20 is a little bit too much. Just taking a look at your list, Butler and Lem and Ted Chiang are on a different level.
- ppf 6y agoFunny you should bring up "Daemon", I just tried to read it. If anything, I found the writing focussed too much on accurate details at the expense of good storytelling. As the plot was no secret, and the concept fairly trivial, I gave up pretty quickly.
- mwcampbell 6y agoI've recently been re-reading Daemon, and I find that it's very dated to the Windows XP era. As for Freedom(TM), I think it goes too far with its extrapolations from then-current technology. To name just one example, speech recognition and human-sounding speech synthesis were nowhere near as good as they were portrayed in that book.
- RangerScience 6y agoSuarez used to be a tech/security consultant... the title is a direct reference to system daemons :)
- varjag 6y agoJust read it off your recommendation here. It's not a hard scifi unless you'd think Transformers also are. Some really far fetched sysadmin fiction.
- mdorazio 6y ago100% agree that Daemon and Freedom are top-class plausible hard sci-fi, which is surprisingly hard to come by. On the other hand, I didn't much care for Influx.
- arethuza 6y agoI thought they were fairly enjoyable books but I didn't find the initial scenario at all plausible.
- Setheck 6y agoinflux was really good!
- zokier 6y agoThis Amazon review doesn't seem too promising, and there were few others that echoed the same sentiment. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B07FLX8V84/R1CKDTZCNU5E6V?ref=pf_vv_at_pdctrvw_srp https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B07FLX8V84/R1CKDTZCNU5E6... How do you feel about the non-tech parts of the novel? Does it get soapboxy or cartoony, or does it hold a sensible tone?
- RangerScience 6y agoI found it very definitely a light read. It's a fun romp into 'what if we did asteroid mining like right now'. Characters are fleshed out enough to tell that story, I didn't find anything preachy or cartoonish, and I didn't spot any idiot-balls or other fake-danger tropes of SciFi.
- Symmetry 6y agoI appreciated the science that went into Delta-V but I just couldn't enjoy the book itself. Random things happening that provide continual doses of danger and excitement I can deal with. But main characters making engineering decisions that seem designed to provide that less so. And secondary characters whose only motivation I could figure out was to keep up that same danger and excitement just ended up making the book unenjoyable for me.
- RangerScience 6y agoWhich engineering decisions do you think were made in service of the plot?
- mabbo 6y agoOne of my favorite recent hard sci fi novels. The science and engineering were all real, plausible, and the story was fun too.
- brutus1213 6y agoWonderful book and very thought provoking. Agreed on Daemon being fantastic. I read these as audio books on the treadmill .. can't give it a higher recommendation.
- dvh 6y agoNot a single radiator on that thing.
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- IntemerateApe 6y agoin Delta-V - one character goes on a rant about how Mars is pretty much a dead end. Does anyone know how true this is?
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoI’m not familiar with the contents of the rant but I don’t think anyone can know how well Mars colonization would go.
- elihu 6y agoI haven't read the book and maybe the argument is solid, but I'm inclined to disagree. For mining, maybe Mars isn't the best place (hoisting stuff out of the gravity well might not be worth it except for high-value metals), but on the other hand it has decent gravity and an atmosphere, which means it's more suitable for human habitation and fuel processing than the asteroids. And living on a planet has a certain appeal that living on a ship doesn't. In the far future we might have better habitats in the asteroid belt than on Mars, but that's pretty far out. In the medium term, I expect Mars will be an important fuel stop at the least. I guess there'd be a kind of a self-perpetuating economic force at work: mining would be most lucrative when the products can be consumed near where they're made, and if there's a heavy demand for construction in the asteroid belts then the asteroid belts are where most of the materials will come from. If it's on Mars, then the materials will be gotten on Mars. (That's assuming that material shipment is expensive. On the other hand, if you can mine iron in the belts and then just lob it at Mars with a rail gun and have the Martians drive out in rovers to collect the splatters of molten metal off the surface, then maybe the economics of non-local mining can work out.)
- blkhawk 6y agoMars might not be worth the effort if you have good asteroid mining - you could say build a O'Neil type cylinders inside an asteroid from local resources and spin them up. Some of the Tech you need for mining might transfer directly into tech or building structures like this. For instance refining metals in zero-G via rotating smelters to separate materials might serve as system to spin up and control the cylinder rotation. You might even get most of the stuff aside from metals as byproducts of the metal refining process (water, oxygen(from oxids) and carbon mostly). Nitrogen and Phosphor might need importing. Most of the leftover asteroid serves as Protection against small collisions.
- 082349872349872 6y agoI couldn't find it on en.wikipedia, but Konstantin (the man) seems to have been a precursor of transhumanists: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantin_Tsiolkovski#Cosmisme https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantin_Tsiolkovski#Cosmism... .
- bserge 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky He was considered one of the founding fathers of cosmonautics in the USSR.
- 082349872349872 6y agoYes, I believe he's on the left in the pantheon: https://earth.google.com/web/@29.56025315,-95.08501348,28.52758217a,0d,60y,113.8584275h,96.22160312t,0r/data=CiwSKhIgN2Y3ZTA1ZTg2Y2E1MTFlNzk5YzI1YjJmNTFhNjA3NTIiBm5vZGUtMSIaChZmZGZCa3Z0V1FUWUFBQVF2eGdnM1lBEAI https://earth.google.com/web/@29.56025315,-95.08501348,28.52... but the english wikipedia article talks mostly about those of his ideas which had substantial impact, and doesn't mention his more science-fictional manifestos. (My guesses: Циолковский, Королёв, Гагарин, ??)
- bserge 6y agoI believe the last photo is Alexey Leonov possibly with Pavel Belyaev (not really sure), of the Voskhod 2 mission. Leonov was the first person to do a spacewalk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Leonov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Leonov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Belyayev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Belyayev (some interesting tidbits about the Voskhod 2 mission there)
- red2awn 6y agoNot related to the novel, but what is the current biggest technological challenge to asteroid mining?
- giantrobot 6y agoPhysics followed closely by economics.
- AtlasBarfed 6y agoHave you seen the estimated values of ores in a decent asteroid? I think it's technology and up front financing. Well, and there are probably space treaties that are problematic. I'd drop an ion drive on the asteroid and nudge it towards the earth (but not AT it), and once it's in a stable near orbit, figure out what to do with a much faster communication loop with remotes/robots: process in orbit, drop parts down to earth, or some combination. 100% chance SpaceX is considering this long-term.
- grumpyoldman77 6y agoSpace treaties- means war, inevitably Nudge towards earth Stable near orbit Remotes/ robots Process in orbit Drop to earth Space X Damn, you just outlined a horror novel in space
- WalterBright 6y agoSee "Footfall" by Niven & Pournelle.
- evgen 6y agoI have seen people imagine what those ores are worth when they pretend that they are somehow magically transported to the surface of the earth, but I have never seen these same people budget the cost of the energy to retrieve, return, and land those same resources. If your value calculation did not go negative there then you are doing it wrong.
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