How advanced should technology be to built spaceships as spacious as in fictions

[False Prophet]

Oh my, no... the YAL-1A's COIL laser system doesn't have anywhere near that kind of output. It's also so large that there would be no hope of ever getting it onto a space shuttle, it consumes most of the internal space of a modified 747-400F, each of its fuel cells weighs over 2 metric tons, and the continuous irradiation time of the system is only about 100 seconds before its fuel cells are spent.

It wasn't even very good at what it was built to do, which was shooting down IBCMs right after launch.

So no laser-shooting asteroids in the foreseeable future?

I suddenly remember blurbs I read from a Popular Mechanics article published in the 1990s about preventing asteroids to reach us: We make really big cannons that shoot lead bullets. Because they are made of lead, the projectiles would bury itself in the asteroids before melted completely. Human just need to shoot repeatedly at one point to dig a tunnel through the asteroid, which would completely change their flight path and divert them away from Earth.

Fanciful and likely would fail, but it sounds impressive enough. I wonder how would ballistic science work in outer space? There aren't that many fictional spaceship with actual ballistic cannons.

Say, I know that modern spacecrafts and space stations are designed into modules. Could these modules be isolated in case of disasters like chambers on a submarine?

[MythSearcher]

If I remember correctly, weren't there some companies with the idea of going to space to clear out the debris with spider-like robots?

Ideas, nothing currently remotely close to practical use.
Not just companies, NASA and ESA also had various proposals like using nets, to capture debris

And how exactly do rockets change their direction in space without being under the influence of gravity like ballistic missiles?

Propellant.
Either Vernier thrusters if your spaceship is larger enough, or if your micro/nano-satellite is too small and light, thus having no space to stuff a whole rocket thruster into it, some will just have a few canisters of compressed gas to be released. Inefficient but practical.

Oh well, anything you thrust out from your spaceship will give you a reaction to push your ship towards the opposite direction, so you might as well just open a can of soda/beer and let it spray out as thrust if you are that desperate.

And speaking of ballistic missiles, I have heard people saying that we could use the laser that was used in the American missile-intercepting Boeing aircraft for clearing asteroids if we just figure a way to put that laser projector onto a shuttle. It makes me think of the beam shield of the fore of the Reinforce Junior.

I believe you have mistaken different lasers.
Many have proposed using lasers for deflecting asteroids, DE-STAR is one of them.
Directed Energy System for Targeting of Asteroids and ExplorRation
https://www.deepspace.ucsb.edu/projects ... ry-defense

The idea is NOT destroying the asteroids, which will take too much energy.
The idea is to burn the surface of the target asteroid so that the evaporated material becomes the propellant to create a thrust to push away the asteroid (slowly)

Fanciful and likely would fail, but it sounds impressive enough. I wonder how would ballistic science work in outer space? There aren't that many fictional spaceship with actual ballistic cannons.

First Gundam has plenty. All of the AA guns during OYW are ballistic, the Whitebase class has a 520cm double barrel cannon. Also, technically MS and MA are spaceships, and many use solid rounds to list.

Or if you are talking about ballistic as to a projectile path influenced by gravity, no, it'd be extremely hard to use because gravity is too weak in most of space and the projectile will take too long to hit if you have a long enough distance for gravity to matter, so you'd probably miss instead of hit, calculating the path would be kinda pointless unless you are shooting at a relatively stationary target, like a space station or base, which would still likely be useless because small bullets wouldn't be very effective(even at hyper velocities, because they have all the mass to add shielding) and larger ones will very likely be detected and deflected(you can always send out squads to push it away or shoot it with DE-STAR like laser arrays in that kind of tech level)

Say, I know that modern spacecrafts and space stations are designed into modules. Could these modules be isolated in case of disasters like chambers on a submarine?

Kinda.
Using the ISS as an example, you can see that they have doors between modules, so you can close them in case of emergency.
By hand.
In case of chance of impact from debris, the ISS crew will all go to the Russian module(with highest protection shielding).
Better than a submarine, you only need a spacesuit to survive for an extended period, instead of being crushed by the high pressure of the ocean, and as long as the station isn't blown up, you can still work inside without it being filled with air. So evacuating to other modules is a bit easier than in a submarine.

[Seto Kaiba]

So no laser-shooting asteroids in the foreseeable future?

Not from space, for sure... it'd have to be from surface-based lasers at low energies to push them off course.

Fanciful and likely would fail, but it sounds impressive enough. I wonder how would ballistic science work in outer space? There aren't that many fictional spaceship with actual ballistic cannons.

That's more because rayguns are futuristic than anything... in space, there's no or negligible gravity to act upon an ordinary kinetic projectile so it'll just keep going until it hits something (or several somethings). That's kind of the problem with orbital debris... until the orbit decays, they just keep going and going and going...

There are a fair number of sci-fi settings where ballistic cannons are a thing:

• Warhammer 40,000's setting makes extensive use of ballistic weapons in space. The Imperium's warship technology - used by the Imperial Navy, Space Marines, and Chaos - makes relatively little use of energy weaponry (only high-powered laser weapons called lances). Their primary weapons batteries are broadsides full of cannons which use conventional chemical propellants and railgun technology to fire ultra-high velocity shells that have an array of warhead types. There's also a massively upscaled version called a Nova Cannon that's a railgun so totally insane it can reach high relativistic velocities and the shell is so massive it can destroy small groups of ships with one hit. The T'au also make extensive use of railguns as the primary offensive weapons on their ships. The Orks also use cannons extensively on their warships.
• Halo's Covenant make extensive use of plasma weapons, but their human enemies use almost exclusively kinetic rounds. Their ships are mostly built around massive anti-warship railguns (that the setting calls magnetic accelerator cannons) and planetary defenses are orbital railgun batteries.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans is a setting where beam weapons had been largely neutralized by nanolaminate armor, so kinetic weapons run the show. Ships are armed with rapid-fire cannons that lob cannon shells full of special napalm that burns through nanolaminate armor and space-use mobile suit weapons include an overpowered railgun called a Dainsleif, massed bombardment with which literally changed the shape of the moon in the Calamity War.
• Turret weapons in Space Battleship Yamato can fire shells or beams, depending on the target.
• Battlestar Galactica also uses conventional cannons firing (often nuclear) shells.
• Several warships in Macross make use of heavy railguns as offensive weapons, and the walking warship turret called the HWR-00-Mk.II Monster has four large-bore cannons meant to deliver thermonuclear reaction shells.

And that's just the ones I could recall offhand...

Say, I know that modern spacecrafts and space stations are designed into modules. Could these modules be isolated in case of disasters like chambers on a submarine?

Yep... that's part of the reason they're designed that way.

Apollo 13 improvised this to work around the damage from the disastrous onboard tank explosion in the service module. They used the lunar lander as an ad-hoc expansion module so they could appropriate the CO2 scrubber systems to extend the damaged breath gas supply.

[False Prophet]

That's more because rayguns are futuristic than anything... in space, there's no or negligible gravity to act upon an ordinary kinetic projectile so it'll just keep going until it hits something (or several somethings). That's kind of the problem with orbital debris... until the orbit decays, they just keep going and going and going...

There are a fair number of sci-fi settings where ballistic cannons are a thing:

• Warhammer 40,000's setting makes extensive use of ballistic weapons in space. The Imperium's warship technology - used by the Imperial Navy, Space Marines, and Chaos - makes relatively little use of energy weaponry (only high-powered laser weapons called lances). Their primary weapons batteries are broadsides full of cannons which use conventional chemical propellants and railgun technology to fire ultra-high velocity shells that have an array of warhead types. There's also a massively upscaled version called a Nova Cannon that's a railgun so totally insane it can reach high relativistic velocities and the shell is so massive it can destroy small groups of ships with one hit. The T'au also make extensive use of railguns as the primary offensive weapons on their ships. The Orks also use cannons extensively on their warships.
• Halo's Covenant make extensive use of plasma weapons, but their human enemies use almost exclusively kinetic rounds. Their ships are mostly built around massive anti-warship railguns (that the setting calls magnetic accelerator cannons) and planetary defenses are orbital railgun batteries.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans is a setting where beam weapons had been largely neutralized by nanolaminate armor, so kinetic weapons run the show. Ships are armed with rapid-fire cannons that lob cannon shells full of special napalm that burns through nanolaminate armor and space-use mobile suit weapons include an overpowered railgun called a Dainsleif, massed bombardment with which literally changed the shape of the moon in the Calamity War.
• Turret weapons in Space Battleship Yamato can fire shells or beams, depending on the target.
• Battlestar Galactica also uses conventional cannons firing (often nuclear) shells.
• Several warships in Macross make use of heavy railguns as offensive weapons, and the walking warship turret called the HWR-00-Mk.II Monster has four large-bore cannons meant to deliver thermonuclear reaction shells.

And that's just the ones I could recall offhand...

Thanks for reminding me about these series, but what I am thinking about is more in line of cannons firing at an indirect trajectory A.K.A. "lobbing" the shells. Without gravity, how can a projectile go up and curve down, bypassing obstacles in the middle? Presume that projectile did not have any rockets or self-guidance system attached?

(I think I have read a passage in one of the Honor Harrington books (haven't read the whole series, since a lot of people keep telling me that it is terrible) about shooting solid things on the thermosphere that you must factor in the curvature of the planet and its gravity field, and if you do so, you can still "lob" the projectiles over something. Grasers/lasers get a pass because their mass are too small for gravity to make a different.)

Anyway, NASA has this notion called "In situ resource utilization". I wonder would there be anyway for a long-range exploring vessel to repair itself with material taken from celestial objects, instead of being tied to stationary resource extraction and processing plants? Grey goo?

[Seto Kaiba]

Thanks for reminding me about these series, but what I am thinking about is more in line of cannons firing at an indirect trajectory A.K.A. "lobbing" the shells. Without gravity, how can a projectile go up and curve down, bypassing obstacles in the middle? Presume that projectile did not have any rockets or self-guidance system attached?

It can't.

In artillery, indirect fire has essentially nothing to do with circumventing obstacles. It's all about extending the range of the artillery by sacrificing velocity by firing above the target and using gravity and atmospheric forces to bring the shell down on the target. Spacecraft don't have to worry about this, as kinetic rounds in a microgravity environment have no range constraints. They'll keep going until they hit something hard enough to stop them.

If you need indirect fire in space for some reason, you need a guided missile or a cannon shell that contains guidance systems.

Realistically, even that's kind of a waste. If there's something between you and the target and you've got some massive kinetic cannons firing explosive rounds, just blow it the f*ck up and let the debris from it do the job that your shells would be doing otherwise. Most space debris is not particularly durable.

Anyway, NASA has this notion called "In situ resource utilization". I wonder would there be anyway for a long-range exploring vessel to repair itself with material taken from celestial objects, instead of being tied to stationary resource extraction and processing plants? Grey goo?

You'd need to have a fairly complex factory/refinery complex in your ship to do that... or be towing a dedicated factory ship around, like the emigrant fleets in Macross. Otherwise, you'd need to have something like the replicators the Star Trek franchise makes such gratuitous use of... the ability to convert matter into energy and back makes that kind of resource processing easy but extremely energy intensive.

[False Prophet]

Say, is there any other way to block harmful radtion beside blocking it (with lead) or absorb it (with silicon carbide)?

[Seto Kaiba]

Say, is there any other way to block harmful radtion beside blocking it (with lead) or absorb it (with silicon carbide)?

Outside of passive radiation shielding with absorptive or reflective materials, throwing up a powerful magnetic field to mimic the radiation shielding effect of Earth's magnetosphere is one way to go about it.

[MythSearcher]

Thanks for reminding me about these series, but what I am thinking about is more in line of cannons firing at an indirect trajectory A.K.A. "lobbing" the shells. Without gravity, how can a projectile go up and curve down, bypassing obstacles in the middle? Presume that projectile did not have any rockets or self-guidance system attached?

Technically they are still under influence by all of the gravitation bodies, you just can't see it. (Just like you cannot see the curvature of the Earth's surface when you are close to ground level.

You cannot have any curvature without a force acting on it, thus you can either 1) give it a force (rocket thrust), 2) have some other force pulling/pushing it (gravity)

But in space, you don't really have that much obstacles to begin with, you usually will pass through to a place where you have direct line of sight pretty soon unless both of you are really close to a very large body like a planet, where obviously you can use its gravity to do exactly what you are talking about.

If you are just trying to write sci-fi, you can just invent some kind of force doing so.
If you want it to be hard-ish, but still want to have some kind of indirect fire ability, missiles is almost your only choice, or you can try to model your fight near something with a very strong gravity environment(say, a black hole)
You can also have some kind of tether system to swing your projectile around, which may not be very well suited for indirect firing(since the tether will likely have to go through whatever is blocking you) but can create strange looking paths.

Another example of solid rounds in fiction, F90II L-Type's weapon is a beam/round firing sniper rifle where the rounds contains an explosive charge for changing direction once during flight. It is likely very impractical IRL.

Say, is there any other way to block harmful radtion beside blocking it (with lead) or absorb it (with silicon carbide)?

Radiation from charged particles can be blocked with a magnetic field, but gamma radiation and neutrons can't.
You can have a plasma field to block gamma radiation(and basically all kinds of EM waves, so yes, you cannot see outside), but the field will require a very powerful EM field so not very practical.

[False Prophet]

Say, what kind of people would you want to be on a colonuization spaceship? Scientists and doctors are a given, but what other job/talent/attribute should you look for? Presumably that the ship could build robots to do away with most of the labour and manufacturing jobs?

And, let's just say that the ship landed safely on a habitable planet. How many centuries you think it would takes for the colonists to create a civilization as equal as we are now?

[MythSearcher]

Say, what kind of people would you want to be on a colonuization spaceship? Scientists and doctors are a given, but what other job/talent/attribute should you look for? Presumably that the ship could build robots to do away with most of the labour and manufacturing jobs?

And, let's just say that the ship landed safely on a habitable planet. How many centuries you think it would takes for the colonists to create a civilization as equal as we are now?

If you are in anything that reflects our current understanding of Physics, any colonization without new additional member sent by the originating planet will be very far away, and takes really long time to travel, thus most of the crew that originated from your planet probably cannot reach the destination, or has to be put in cold sleep.
Thus most of the job will be done by highly automated computers/robots/drones, and most of the working/awake members of humans will likely be engineers that are there to oversee those work in case something malfunctions to a point where self repairs cannot fix (which makes little sense because the humans will likely die first in such situations and human repairs will be much slower than robots, both repair of the robots and repair of the humans)
AND the more important, in the case where the computer cannot handle the situation.(Something completely unforeseen happened)

Since the human body is likely already pretty well known at the time, and most of the robots will be able to handle that part, I'd say that human doctors won't be a must.