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> To Kelly,

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

Draft text Externally fueled Fusion drive
===========================================================================
>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.  --
======================
> How do you shove a few kilometres of clouds? Especially during acceleration
> and deceleration a lot of cloud-rebuilding will be needed.

Ion cannon.  Since the dust is light, it would take little power to throw it
that far ahead.  The parts that fall back on the ship can be reused, the rest
would need to be replaced.  Since you spend most of the mission coasting its
not a big problem.


Habitation deck
===========================================================================
>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.

True but you still have to have the same cross size, and you can't always use
a bar.  (Most of my designs have a channel runing through the center of the
ship.)

Kelly