Fwd: Brian is BACK!

[kgstar@most.fw.hac.com (Kelly Starks x7066 MS 10-39)]

>Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 00:45:33 -0400
>From: KellySt@aol.com
>To: kgstar@most.fw.hac.com
>Subject: Fwd: Brian is BACK!
>
>
>---------------------
>Forwarded message:
>From:	mkshp@ionet.net (Michael Shipp)
>To:	KellyST@aol.com
>CC:	hous0042@maroon.tc.umn.edu, david@interworld.com
>Date: 96-07-17 00:20:42 EDT
>
>>From Brian V. Mansur
>LIT Member # something or other
>Starship Design Project
>
>I'm back!  Yea, I can tell you're all wetting your pants with
>excitement :)  Don't worry, there won't be any more avalanches of
>e-mail for a while.  That's because I'm working out of a friend's computer
>and so the e-mail has his name, of course.  By the way, whoever gets
>this, could you please forward it to the other members of the
>discussion group and I need you current e-mail adresses again.  Also,
>if anyone has time, I'd love to be filled in on what has been going
>on in the discussion group these last few months.  Sorry for the
>inconvenience.
>
>Remember that Argosy design that I promised.  Still in the works.
>Right now I have 14 or so pages worth of text.  Don't let that make
>you think its really worth anything, but then you never know.  I'm
>now toying with changing the name of the paper because the paper
>describes more than just a starship.  It describes an entire
>interstellar transportation system that I think from henceforth shall
>be known as the Tradewinds.  The starship remains the Argosy-class
>and now there is an unmanned probe/seeder component called the
>Pathfinder (an overused name that I'll change if something more
>inspiring occurs to me).
>
>Basically, you guys are going to hate the whole set up.  I'm saying
>that because it takes about two hundred years to get the Tradewinds up and
>running from its 1996 conception date (just in time for the 23rd
>century).  The Design Overview is as follows:
>
>The Tradeswinds are basically two power/maser arrays set
>up at the origin and destinations of the manned starship.  For
>propulsion, the starship uses the photon pressure of the electron masers
>bouncing off of a hundreds of kilometers wide ultra-thin sail.  By the
>way, electron lasers were described in the July or August Discovery
>Magazine: read all about them.  They are still hard to make but they
>are 50% efficient or so.
>
>Because the Tradewinds assume a technological presence at the
>destination, the mission of exploration is secondary.  The new goal
>here is interstellar colonization.  I know that isn't what the LIT
>charter calls for.  But as I explain in the Tradewinds paper, none of
>the propulsion designs detailed in the Starflight Handbook have any hope
>of carrying a crew to another starsystem in their life-time, to say nothing
>about bringing them home.  What the designs in the Handbook can do is
>send a robotic Pathfinder seeder probe of a few thousand tons.  It will set
>up
>an Automated Robotic Civilization (ARC) that will eventually grow into a
>maser array that can stop the manned Argosy-class starships that
>ferry colonists from Sol.  Nifty huh?  It may be a slow thing to
>establish, but it has a real chance of working.  Yea, I know you guys
>want a fast ship, fast mission, fast food starship that will get us
>to Tau Ceti and back in 22 years Earth time.  But as I explain in the
>Tradewinds paper, I really think this idea is our best hope.
>
>As said, most of what you have just read is old news.  But when you
>finally get the Tradewinds paper, it be DETAILED old news.  This  is good,
>I think if we are trying to give some basic starship designs to future
>generations that can refine them and use their spanking new technology to
>make them into something that they will fly.
>
>By the way.  I'll only be able to answer whenever I can get back to
>my friend's terminal.  So don't expect quick answers.  I'll try to
>hurry up and finish the Tradewinds paper.  I have two more days off
>work which is a little bit of time.  Finally, I go back to school  in
>about six weeks, so that's all the time I have until Christmas.
>Sorry, but I just won't have the time for Starship Design in school.
>I didn't earlier this year when I first joined the discussion group
>but, hea, at least it was fun.
>
>Live long through relativistic space travel.
>
>In Christ,
>Mike
>http://www-origins.uoknor.edu/~mshipp/welcome.htm
>


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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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