RE: starship-design: Hull Materials

[TLG.van.der.Linden@tip.nl (Timothy van der Linden)]

Hi Lee,

>I don't have anything like the tables you are describing...

I've only few, not enough to make any reasonable choice. An university
library or radiation lab likely would have a book containing the right
tables and graphs. One book of mine mentions the "Radiological Health Handbook".

>I think the alloy of Tungsten was with chromium and iron. There is some 
>promising new work in "intermetallics" which might yield even better long 
>term performance. So far however, most of the intermetallic research has 
>been with Aluminum for turbine blades with a sustained operating 
>temperature around 300 C for only a few thousand hours of operational life. 
>We need on the order of 500 - 900 C for tens of thousands of hours for hull 
>materials and 2,000+ C for drives.

The particles we will be encountering will have a completely different
velocity from those encountered by a turbine blade. I doubt if any
comparison can be made. The particles the spaceship will encounter are
hopefully only protons, these will not directly erode the material. They
mainly will ionize some atoms, and my guess is that these ions will
recapture some electrons after a while.

Timothy