RE:

[Brian Mansur <bmansur@oc.edu>]

 ----------
From: KellySt
Date: Wednesday, February 28, 1996 11:56PM



> 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.

Just stating the obvious here, I'd note that keeping a dust cloud close 
enough to your ship when decelerating would be a big problem with anything 
but an ion/fusion drive.  With the ion/fusion drive the ion exhaust would 
serve the same purpose as a dust cloud since it is being spewed in the 
direction of flight.

Brian