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starship-design: RE: Perihelion Maneuver
On Saturday, December 06, 1997 10:31 AM, Isaac Kuo
[SMTP:kuo@bit.csc.lsu.edu] wrote:
> My personal favorite is a modified MagOrion, where a track of nuclear
> bombs are used to accelerate a large superconducting magsail. The
> bombs are detonated far from the magsail so that the exposure to
> hard radiation is minimized and the push from the fraction of ions
> which "hit" the sail is spread out.
>
You really ought to check out Penn State's page on ICAN and the antimatter
catalyzed fission/fusion rocket. It is basically a modified Orion concept
that is much more refined than the original. Besides the fact that the
hardware is already being tested, it offers a lot more in near term
improvement potential.
The current reaction is D/T but with a few years of operation and improved
confinement technology which seems likely, we should be able to move on to
He3 with a second or third generation design. If you assume another ten
years of research on the current generation (it would actually be in
service by the end of this period), twenty years for research and
development of second generation (same fuel, just more efficient
confinement and improved systems), twenty years for third generation (use
improved confinement and systems to fuse He3) then that puts us at fifty
years.
I haven't even used any hardware here that isn't already in existence or
made any assumptions that are really weird. In the short run, we could use
this in a brute force approach and simply add engines and increase the fuel
supply to raise the cruise velocity. It has sufficient ISP for the
"supertanker" category.
Lee
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