RE: starship-design: What is safest?

["L. Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>]

On Wednesday, January 07, 1998 6:37 PM, Timothy van der Linden 
[SMTP:TLG.van.der.Linden@tip.nl] wrote:
> Lee wrote:
>
> The more derived they are, the more complicated they get.

Well, yes and no. The current candidate is not really all that complicated. 
Basically, just a pellet injector and a bunch of ion accelerators.

> Are Orion or any
> of its current derivatives usable to get us towards several tenths of c?
> Still the firing rates for these engines are quite low. If they don't
> rattle
> the ship to pieces, they are likely going to make the crew very sick.

The current generation actually explodes several pellets a second which 
should improve the vibration. If you couple that with several engines out 
of phase with each other, the ride might actually be pretty smooth. And 
yes, it is capable of well over .3 c if it was scaled up to several 
engines.

Lee