starship-design: (AIMSTAR) stuff

["Ben Franchuk" <bfranchuk@jetnet.ab.ca>]

> It is possible through a combination of minor (single order of magnitude)
> improvements and the use of multiple engines (another order of magnitude)
to
> get up to 1 g of acceleration even out of AIMSTAR. I have never seen the
> figures for VASIMIR, they were apparently yanked from the web soon after
> they were posted. But I get the impression that although it is ready for
> flight testing, its PEAK performance is probably not as high as what was

Looking at the website, AIMSTAR is still a basic fusion drive,burning
Hydrogen.
 The design of the reactor is light and simple, but other fusion drives may
scale better for large ship
designs. I see 25% improvements as a guess, but that goes for any fussion
drive.

Ben.