... Thats a good point. You can totally keep the two week Earth Saturn trip if its the story you want to right. My point is there basically aren't any hard SF...
... It isn't terribly hard to have nonlinear time requirements for ftl drives, but if they're viable at all they'll probably outperform conventional drives for...
... No, this vessel is supposed to be designed for interplanetary trips, mainly shipping rich tourists from Earth to interesting places in the Solar System...
A laser firing on a path passing crossing near the sun is fairly predictable, but a particle beam through those magnetic fields and solar wind? Don't think it...
Hi, everyone. First post here. I've been playing with an idea for a space drive (well, actually, this one is probably better named a "star drive"; get to that...
The napkin-bot has a very thin plastic base onto which is painted the circuitry. Some of the circuitry includes photovoltaics that store power in capacitors...
You might start your research by looking over the references given at http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=22358 (in particular, look into Robert Forward's...
From: Henry Cobb <henry.cobb@...> ... This won't provide anywhere near the desired performance. The desired performance is on the order of 1000km/s. ...
I kinda like this. Some thoughts below. Disclaimer: I am not a physicist, and I may be completely off here. That said, I think that this could fit into both...
... Wouldn't the actual limit be the speed of the plasma particles? Two streams come together to form a plasma ball and then you squirt that out your back...
... This isn't inherently unreasonable, it's similar to ICAN-II (though that didn't have a fusion stage) or AIMStar, but that would be more on the order of two...
... There is another, more capable antimatter-fusion concept around: antimatter-catalyzed ICF. It works in the way I described above. It requires more...
... Particle beams can be stripped of their charge and then ionised again as they reach the target. Particle beam propulsion is much more energy efficient than...
From: Henry Cobb henry.cobb@... ... The speed of the plasma particles is limited by the speed of the impactor streams, plus a negligible amount for the...
From: Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...> ... Because you can turn it on or off at will, and the other end of this enormous massless spring is moving at...
... I can see what you're getting at here, Mr. Kuo. I hadn't quite thought it through from that angle, but I was thinking that the total energy in the system...
From: Henry Cobb <henry.cobb@...> ... This is fundamentally similar to my old idea for solarkinetic pulse propulsion, and idea which I have moved on from...
... I'm not sure about 'wretched', but they did ban me for stating that according to certain records, I'm descended from Charlemagne, who is descended from the...
I have nothing to add concerning spaceships and physics but would be curious to hear more about the culture drift. Not so much who's shooting but why....
... I've recently had a discussion about the setting in another forum, which included posts touching on this topic; here are excerpts from the most relevant...
