Re: starship-design: Mini-Magnetosphere and Star-Travel

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

Adam Crowl wrote:
> 
> Hi SD
> 
> The system seems to have a lot of potential within this system but as an
> interstellar drive it's pretty pitiful except for missions to the solar
> focus at 550 AU or so. It's maximum velocity is limited to the speed of the
> solar wind which is only 500-1000 km/s, so it'd be a long time between stars
> unless you had a secondary drive or a working ramscoop. A better system
> would be a magneto-sail pushed up to interstellar speeds by a massive
> particle beam. Powered by fusion it'd push the costs of probe launches way
> down since it'd only take a few hours at a time to accelerate probes up to ~
> 0.3c or so. I think all this has been discussed before and the basic design
> settled on involves a lithium-fusor launched via a beam/laser to 0.3c [?],
> boosted to 0.4c by fusors and deccelerated by a mag-sail.
> 

So what happened to the tacking into the wind, for the return trip home.
A insystem ram scoop is a good idea -- 
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"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
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