starship-design: VASIMR

[Steve VanDevender <stevev@efn.org>]

While VASIMR looks very promising for interplanetary travel, it is not
very promising as a means of achieving even low relativistic speeds.  As
always the problem is that reaching relativistic speeds with a
self-propelled ship requires high fuel-to-payload ratios that can only
be partially reduced by using fuels with high energy conversion ratios.

Alas, I've just spent a bunch of time going over the existing list
archives at http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~stevev/sd-archive _and_ the old
archives at the metalab.unc.edu (formerly sunsite.unc.edu) web site and
discovered that the derivation I posted a long time ago predates the
messages available in either location.  I need to go over and get
greylady.uoregon.edu booted back up one of these days since that may be
the only other place I'd have it.