[Last updated on: Fri Apr 16 16:16:01 1999] Welcome to the starship-design mailing list! This mailing list is for anyone interested in the practical realities of interstellar travel. It is an outgrowth of David Levine's Lunar Institute of Technology web site, particularly the College of Starship Design section. The original forum hosted at that web site centered around the development of a hypothetical manned mission to the Tau Ceti star system by the year 2050. The College of Starship Design web page created by David Levine and currently maintained by Kelly Starks is at: http://metalab.unc.edu/lunar/school/InterStellar/SSD_index.html Another site maintained by list member Kevin Houston is at: http://www.urly-bird.com/LIT/ Although clearly there is much speculation involved in the development of future technology, this mailing list is practically oriented and proposals should be justifiable using presently-known engineering techniques and scientific knowledge. Proposals involving highly speculative topics such as FTL (faster-than-light) propulsion or novel energy generation techniques will be treated quite skeptically by list members. To subscribe, mail to majordomo@lists.uoregon.edu and put the following line in the body (NOT the subject line) of your message: subscribe starship-designBe sure to use your fully-qualified, correct email address when subscribing. If you use your correct email address in your subscription request, then you should shortly receive a message at that address with information on how to confirm your subscription. You must return the confirmation as instructed to complete your subscription. You will not be subscribed until your confirmation is received by majordomo@lists.uoregon.edu. To unsubscribe, mail to majordomo@lists.uoregon.edu and put the following line in the body (NOT the subject line) of your message: unsubscribe starship-design To successfully unsubscribe you must specify the same email address you used when you subscribed. List postings for starship-design should be sent to starship-design@lists.uoregon.edu. In order for a posting to be automatically distributed to the list, it must be sent from the address that you have subscribed under. Postings from addresses not on the subscriber list will be sent to the list owner for manual approval. Postings should be under 40,000 bytes in size; postings over that size must be manually approved by the list owner. Postings should not contain HTML or binary attachments; if you believe such an item would be of interest to list members please post a reference to where the item can be obtained on a web page or FTP site rather than posting the item to the list. The list owner reserves the right to unsubscribe list members with persistent mail delivery problems, typically those for whom list postings bounce for more than a few days. The list owner also reserves the right to unsubscribe members who are persistently disruptive to the list. Examples of such disruptive behavior include but are not limited to "spamming" off-topic material to the list, flooding the list with messages with the intent of inconveniencing the list members, or repeated personal attacks against other list members. If you encounter difficulty in subscribing or unsubscribing, or have other questions about the starship-design list and its operation, email to owner-starship-design@lists.uoregon.edu for further assistance. Archives of this list organized by month of posting are at: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~stevev/sd-archive/
Timothy van der Linden maintains an archive of some very early material that was posted in David Levine's web site at http://www.xs4all.nl/~jvdl/sdnewsletters/.
I also saved many of the messages that I received as part of the informal mailing list that preceded this one. You can view these messages in threaded order, chronological order, or a file of all the messages.
The current Lunar Institute of Technology web pages are at http://www.urly-bird.com/LIT/.
List member Rex Finke has written a paper "Starflight Mechanics Notes" summarizing and collecting many of the major physics and engineering discussions from the list archives. This paper is available as a Microsoft Word document or as a Postscript file.
These browsable archives were generated with MHonArc from the list owner's mail folder archive of list postings.