A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
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:
That scene scared the shit out of me
What blows my mind is that I could right now recreate this in moments on a cheap, low-power microcontroller.
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?
Alternatively you do like the Parker Solar Probe and do 7 Venus flybys, bleeding off a little speed each time with an inverse gravity assist.
Not an expert, but I've read it's easiest to use jupiter to bleed off enough velocity to fall into our sun.
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.
Huh. I would have thought that once they break orbit that the sun's gravity well would do the heavy ~~lifting~~ pulling.
If you care to learn orbital mechanics, Kerbal Space Program is a great teacher.
"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.
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.
once you break out of earth orbit you are now in an orbit around the sun, similar to earths.
I legitimately want to be cremated by the sun after I die. Doesn't matter how long it takes.
When the sun dies it will take the earth with it iirc so if you can wait until then you're good
Don't worry, we all will. We all came from a sun, and will all return to one.
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.
The issue is that you're starting from earth, and the earth already has a lot of momentum that keeps it from falling into the sun. To get an object from here to the sun you would need to counter the majority of that momentum it already has.
It's not about the propellant, it's about sending a message
Instructions unclear. I'm going to the moon on Delta IX.
(Edit: my dumbass just realized it's ∆V, as in velocity. I thought Delta 5 was the name of a type of chemical propellant. Though now that I think of it, it really should be. Damn, and I work for a space company too. At least I'm just in IT).
If the idea is to be rid of the person completely, we don't need to fire them into the sun. Or launch them out of the solar system. They don't even need to reach earth escape velocity.
Just launch them at the sun. Use whatever method you like. Just get them high enough that after gravity starts to overpower acceleration, there is no chance for survival. Boom! No more person. For the most part.
Well, I guess this applies to me. I say that a lot.
