No help?
surely there are some smaller ships that could send them fuel or help them get back on course right?
shareThis story goes back to the early '50s but it still can be seen to hold up. The ship is really massive. It has accelerated to high velocity and is apparently on the wrong course after the accident. To get anywhere at all the ship would require a lot of fuel (or reaction mass) and that would require another very large ship with at least twice as much fuel aboard as it takes to intercept. Remember, the rescue ship has to go faster than the endangered ship to catch it and then it has to have enough fuel to accelerate the endangered ship in the opposite direction. We don't know what sort of ships are out there--how many--how big--how well provided with excess fuel... I'm pretty sure the original poem paid no attention to the details and I know the opera didn't, but it is not an unreasonable situation that rescue is simply impossible.
shareThat make sense though its weird not to see any attempts being made , come to think of it there should have been some kind emergency ships onboard for some of them to escape back to Mars.
shareI'd assume the ship isn't designed for constant acceleration and merely accelerates to a high cruise speed for most of the duration of the flight.
I'd think a rescue ship wouldn't need to be some giant thing capable of bringing enough fuel to turn it 180 and point it back to Earth. They just needed to alter its directional vector enough to get it moving back into the solar system to enhance its recovery potential.
The other thing that bugged me was the single-source of propulsion. Surely they would have thrusters or secondary propulsion that would be useful for some kind of backup or directional control. You'd also think they could come up with clever ideas for using the domestic power supply in combination with reaction mass taken from the ship to alter its course.
The other thing that bugged me was their ability to jury rig the ship, normally accustomed to handling the milk run to Mars in 3 weeks, into a decade-long generation ship. While I get a ship like this probably has a lot of self-sustaining systems, its just not built for being self-contained for years on end and lacks the systems for that kind of endurance. Even if the Staten Island Ferry could handle transoceanic seas, it's not equipped for traveling to Boston, let alone the UK.
...and don't forget, the rescue ship has to have enough fuel and supplies to itself return to its origin.
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