RE: starship-design: (AIMSTAR) stuff

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

Ben,

> -----Original Message-----
> > 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.

Yes it is a fusion drive, I said so all along. It is however, a very light
fusion drive, much lighter than anything else we have come up with, with
performance figures that barely make it into the interstellar class. Nothing
else yet does that.

Lee Parker