RE: starship-design: VASIMR

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

Oh I am well aware of VASIMR's limitations. Kelly and I discussed them at
length early in 99 when it first started showing up in the news. But it is a
step, and one step leads to another...

BTW, if you run "VASIMR" through the Excite search engine, it will bring up
almost all of the old thread on starship-design.

Lee

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-starship-design@lists.uoregon.edu
> [mailto:owner-starship-design@lists.uoregon.edu]On Behalf Of Steve
> VanDevender
> Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2000 6:06 PM
> To: starship-design@lists.uoregon.edu
> Subject: starship-design: VASIMR
>
>
> 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.
>