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FW: starship-design: Pellet track





-----Original Message-----
From:	Lee Parker 
Sent:	Wednesday, August 20, 1997 1:26 PM
To:	'LIT Starship Design Group'
Subject:	RE: starship-design: Pellet track

Isaac,

ISP and thrust are both important, and unless you are using voodoo, I don't
see how you can say the rocket equation doesn't apply. A ramjet is still a
rocket, not a warp drive. It still ingests mass and exhausts mass. ISP and 
thrust are two of the yardsticks which we use to measure the usefulness of
particular drives. 

An ISP of 10,000 sec would require an enormous mass of pellets, even for a 
900 year mission! To bring it into the realm of possibility would require 
over 100,000,000,000,000 kg of pellets, assuming you "catch" all of them. 
Umm, let's see here, that comes out to about thirty moons the size of Mars' 
Deimos. Actually, it will be at least double that because you are going to 
have to cancel the acceleration of the launcher also. BTW, what were these 
pellets made of? D3He or D-T?

Lee

                                                          (o o)
------------------------------------------------------oOO--(_)--OOo---------
Bohr moved in atomic circles while Schrodinger waved and Heisenberg 
hesitated.