Misc.

[T.L.G.vanderLinden@student.utwente.nl (Timothy van der Linden)]

To Kelly,

Most of your letters sounded familiar, only two things I want to say:

Draft text Externally fueled Fusion drive
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>Because of the deceleration fuel limitation, it is unlikely that the ship
>can get to more than a quarter or a third of the speed of light.  But
>that's still a 100,000 kilometers per second.  The ship will need to
>protect itself against impacts.  One of the simplest ideas is to push
>several miles of charged dust ahead of the ship.  Ramming a cloud of
>charged iron dust at a 360,000,000 kilometers per hours will turn most
>anything into ionized plasma.  Which can be shoved ahead of the ship, or
>off to the sides, by the charges dust cloud handler.  Effectively most
>anything you run into at speed will become more shielding dust.

How do you shove a few kilometres of clouds? Especially during acceleration
and deceleration a lot of cloud-rebuilding will be needed.


Habitation deck
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>One large limitation in the starships design, is the habitation deck. The
>Space Settlements design study published by NASA (reference 1), pages 22
>&;42 states that most people can adapt to rotation rates of up to 3 rpm,
>but that this adaptation might not be possible if personnel routinely move
>between the rotating 1 G. sections and the non-rotating zero-G sections of
>a space settlement or ship. The design study strongly recommended a
>rotation rate of less than 1 rpm. But that would require a habitat over
>1600 meters across. A 3 rpm limit still requires a habitat 200 meters
>across, but this at least seems plausible for a large exploration platform.
>A 4 rpm rate would allow a 110 meter across habitat, but for purposes of
>this design I'll assume a 3 rpm rate. Putting this 200 meter in diameter
>ring in the ship, immediately means a very large ship.

One may not need a complete ring. Just a habitation "cube" at the two ends
of a long "bar". Then just turn this bar around, thus the ends making a
common circle. It is in fact just a the torus mentioned above only with a
lot of segments left out.


Timothy