Re: starship-design: Re: FTL travel

[Steve VanDevender <stevev@efn.org>]

STAR1SHIP@aol.com writes:
 > As with known bomb and reactor fusion and fusion reactions, my plasma from 
 > Americium 241 above critical mass contain mostly fusion compared to fission 
 > reactions. The liquid propellant (water) exposed to the plasma temperatures 
 > has mainly fission (hydrogen) with some fusion products. The higher the 
 > plasma temperature the smaller the fission parts.

Elements heavier than iron will only fuse if you put energy into the
reaction.  You aren't going to get fusion products out of Americium,
only fission products.  You seem to be deeply confused about the basics
of nuclear fission and fusion.

 > Even were my "fusion drive" very low efficiency aboard my 105 ton craft only 
 > 1/2 ton of americium 241 need to be converted to the energy required to 
 > accelerate the 100 tons of propellant causing the 5 ton payload to approach 
 > light speed relativistically to earth observer and with time dilation effects 
 > greater than light speed wrt to the ship for just such an acceleration. 

Even if you were to indulge in your amusing habit of mixing Newtonian
and relativistic physics, you would find that accelerating a payload to
a high fraction of c requires a quantity of energy comparable to the
mass of the payload converted _completely_ to energy.  As a very rough
approximation fission converts about 1/1000 of the mass of the fission
fuel to energy, so 500 kg of fission fuel won't get you more than about
0.5 kg of mass converted to energy, and correspondingly won't accelerate
even its own fission products to more than about 1/1000 c.  It would
accelerate your 5 ton payload considerably less.  That's probably good
enough for interplanetary velocities, but you're going to need a _lot_
more fuel than that to achieve relativistic velocities.