Re: MARS HYBRID DESIGN II (First Draft)

[Brian Mansur <bmansur@oc.edu>]

>From Brian At 3:45 CT 3/4/96


>At 3:00 PM 3/4/96, Brian Mansur wrote:
>>From Brian,
>
>Brian Says:
>>PHASE 4: SYSTEM EXPLORATION/CONSTRUCTION OF MASER REFLECTOR
>>     The Asimov enters the Tau Ceti star system's Kupier Belt.  At this
>>point it disassembles its sail and starts scouting for a low gravity, 
metal
>>rich Kupier body that is not too far from the maser beam path.  Once such 
a
>>body is located, the seed robots are deployed to begin a robot community.
>> Since the Kupier body will be too far away from Tau Ceti for solar energy
>>collection, it is assumed that the robots will be powered by fusion 
reactor
>>that must be brought along (in addition to the fuel).  Depending on the
>>automation technology at the time of launch, these robots will at least be
>>responsible for construction of a mirror platform needed for 
reacceleration
>>to Sol.
>
>Kelly Says:
>>Why so far out?  That doesn't sound like and area we'ld want to do most of
>>our exploring at.  So why make the base there?
>>You could fuel the fusion reactors with fuel avalible were you set up the
>>operations.
>
>Brian Says:
>The reason for putting the base so far out is because whatever Kupier body
>we find near the maser beam is going to be orbiting TC very slowly.  It 
will
>give us time to set up our reflector and get it into position with the 
least
>amount of effort.  It just occured to me that if you find an object further
>inside the system whose orbit would be just right at certain times to let
>you do the same thing.  Of course that also depends upon the orbital plane
>of TC.
>
>Kelly Says:
>Object that far out areactually moving faster than orbits closer in.  They
>just have farther to go.  You also have to remember that if the beam is
>powerfull enough to push the ship at 10m/s, it will push the lighter mirror
>faster.

Brian Says: I'm sick of writing says.  From now on its just the name of the 
person.
Brian:
Doh!  Oh well.  Guess that just means that we'll have to use an extra 
100,000 tons of fuel to slow the array down to keep it inside the beam.  You 
know, when I joined LIT I really never thought that getting to another star 
system would be so hard.  Back then I thought  you could just say "engage" 
and the engines would start up and "whosh."  You'd be there after the 
commercial break.  Ugh!

[Much discusion deleted]

Brian:
>I'll go ahead and put a few ideas I had for mirror and ship course
>corrections here.  We could have the Asimov detach its ion drive and cable
>connect it to an edge of the wire mesh sail and the hab section.  The drive
>could then gently pull the whole set up back onto the beam path.   We could
>also, perhaps have the maser array at Sol periodically decrease power to
>allow this tug to do its job without being microwave fried.  We would have
>to do something about shielding the tug, of course.
>
>Perhaps the tug could be a pair light rockets hanging onto opposite sides 
of
> 1000km+ wide sail.  They could have their own shielding and would be in
>excellent positions to do their jobs.

Kelly:
>You have to remember these tugs would have to pump out thousands, to
>hundreds of thousands of tons of thrust.  That's too much to just hang off
>the sail.

Okay, new twist.  Leave the blasted maser beam on full and use power from 
the masers to convert to electricity and let the tug boat ion accelerator 
eat cake (the kind made up of one ion variety of course).   You can tell I'm 
getting frustrated here.

Kelly


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Kelly Starks                       Internet: kgstar@most.fw.hac.com
Sr. Systems Engineer
Magnavox Electronic Systems Company
(Magnavox URL: http://www.fw.hac.com/external.html)

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