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starship-design: Pellet track
Isaac
You wrote to Kelly:
>Well, then I guess my idea is more original than I thought. So here is
>my concept for the acceleration track:
>
>1. An relatively slow moving acceleration track is set up so that
> somehow a track of small fission/fusion pellets are spaced along
> a line. (I imagine a string of pellet shooting fuelpacket ships,
> to minimize the time/distance between firing the pellets and
> their target pickup points.)
If the pellets are slow moving, then what is the use of pellets?
Catching pellets like this, will not give a significant energy advantage
over taking the pellets with you (=attached to the starship) from the start.
>The idea for the deceleration track?
>
>Same idea, but with the ship turned around 180 degrees. Yes, this
>implies having some shielding in the back of the ship, but the
>deceleration run shouldn't last too long.
Still you have to launch the pellets many many years in advance. This above
all is considered the worst problem for the "pellet-track" idea. It may not
be a technological problem, but it surely is a big ideological problem.
Timothy