Re: starship-design: Collision sails and various things

[KellySt@aol.com]

In a message dated 7/31/97 6:49:58 PM, stk@sunherald.infi.net (kyle) wrote:

>Greetings:
>
>I know I'll be ridiculed but:
>
>We need some serious thought into alternative propulsion ideas. These
>designs are great, but require so much fuel/energy to run, that they
>defeat the purpose. I have some ideas created by myself and NASA below:
>
>1. collision sails: To ride QZPF/such as a sail would ride a laser beam
>2. transmission sails: To absorb, concentrate, and reemit QZPF/such
>3. Field drives: To alter space in a way providing propulsive force
>(falling into your gravity well, etc.)
>4. EM drives: distort gravity via electromagnetism. (ZPF is an
>electromagnetic phenomena).
>5. ????ideas anyone????
>
>These were not forbidden by the charter. Look at how far we've come
>since 1947! If anyone misunderstands, that date is only provided as a 50
>year ago reference, not the roswell incident time.
>
>We need to do some work on these. If NASA did, we might as well.
>
>Kyle Mcallister

The concepts you listed, and several others NASA is looking at (inertia
damping is a nice one) would dramatically  cut the difficulty of interstellar
travel.  But they are VERY speculative.  Noone knows if any of them could
work.  Much less how to use them.

On the other hand the designs were coming up with are fairly buildable.
 Require little new technology (thou a lot of new development of that tech).
 But need huge power sources.  That could eaither be handeled by a very rich
society, advaces in mass production, or new concepts in power production..


Kelly