Re: Engineering Newsletter

[rddesign@wolfenet.com]

I've sat back and watched this talk go on for sometime now.The phylosophical
nature of this is interesting but not getting us to designing the ship. It
is obivous we are having trouble coming up with a mission statement that
nails down where we are going and for how long. I feel this discussion is
just going to keep going around and around.
Like Dave said. TC is arbitrary and the focal point for the ship design. 
Can we design a ship to take 1000, 2500 people?
Can we insure we can have the proper and correct amounts of food and spare
parts?
Can we drive, ( stear ), the danmed thing?
Can we stop it once we get it going?
Can we get it started at all?

The big problem as I see it is building a drive to get us to TC and back if
we want to. The rest we can probably do with the technology we have today or
in the next ten years.

I know I know Nothing about the physics of all this that many of you are
writing about. But I do know we are running in circles right now. How do we
proceed? I don't have a clue. Just give me a hammer and some nail and I will
start building the ship :-) You guys come up with the steam engin to push
it.  Maybe we need to concider several types of propulsion. kind of like a
small sailboat that has sails, outboard motor and oars. Or just build the
thing large enough to carry all the rocks we will need to toss into the
ramscoop.  Or, maybe we just might have to set our sights closer to home.

Ric

( Kevin: No line about beads. :-) )