Re: starship-design: Anti-antimatter

[Steve VanDevender <stevev@efn.org>]

L. Clayton Parker writes:
 > > 	The first is probably the most easily shot down: power the ship 
 > > from an enormous relativistic or near-relativistic flywheel.  There's a 
 > 
 > Hmm, you mean like a rotating black hole? I think Robert Forward has
 > already proposed this one. Check out a few of his books. Bear in mind that
 > now you have to accelerate the mass of the black hole also...and anything
 > spinning at relativistic speeds is going to have the same mass moments as a
 > black hole anyway...

I remember reading that a black hole can have up to 29% of its energy
tied up in angular momentum.  Unfortunately to get the energy back out
you have to throw more mass into it in such a way that some of the mass
is given to the black hole and the rest spews out carrying away some of
the rotational energy.

Of course, with a quantum black hole you can do partial conversion of
mass to energy by feeding it at the same rate that it emits mass/energy
due to quantum evaporation.  If you run out of fuel you have to be able
to toss the black hole away before it blows up due to runaway
evaporation; the rate of evaporation is inversely related to the mass of
the black hole.