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Possible acceleration systems
#3
(06-29-2020, 08:01 PM)stevebowers Wrote: Solar wind particles are charged, so they could be collimated - but charged particles repel each other, so they would spread out and quickly lose focus.

How far would they start significantly losing focus? I assume accelerations in the hundreds of Gs are not on the table.



Quote:Drashner
But before we get to that point, I think we get into issues of what you want the ship to do, how you want it to do it, and how fast you want it to travel. Also, if you have neumann tech (which you kind of do need to make mass-beam travel practical on any large scale), then how big are the neumanns? And what else do you need on the ship besides neumanns? And what sort of weapons do you need/want, since you mention those?

Alright, so I think I have a few more answers here. I've started reading the space warfare article and ever since then I'm reeling with all the possibilities in terms of story telling. This was one of the most transforming articles I've read so far.

So the ship is essentially a Von Neumann seed which has its own intellect. If the solar wind solution fails, I might want to replace it with a amat-fueled booster system to be discarded at 0.2 c once the magasail / conversion drive equivalent start functioning. After that I could have the system run anywhere between 0.5 and 0.8 c.

The ship must contain a number of mining units ready to work on any M-type asteroid. Basically, they will shoot a lesser asteroid, or somehow discharge enough energy into the center of a well-chosen 'pile of rubble' type of M-type asteroid (probably located near the Lagrange points of gas giants) to break it into its component parts. Then, during the few weeks that it takes for the asteroid parts to join back together, structures and thrusters are built on each of them so that when they get back together, they encase into each other with a huge construction facility at the center and mining units eating each part of the asteroid, until the time when there is nothing left but the junk. In the meantime, hundreds or thousands of other asteroids near the Lagrange point may have received a similar treatment.

I'd say it needs at least a hundred self-propelled mining units, plus some drones, of course a large array of sensors, many ways to collect energy (I assume a lot of antimatter could be generated during the magsail braking phase). I guess if the mining units can work very fast, they don't need to be very big. Hopefully all that fits into a handful of million tons.

As for weapons, I'd say lasers, X-ray for big / close targets and more conventional ones for longer distances. Weapons would be essentially defensive during interstellar flight.
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Messages In This Thread
Possible acceleration systems - by The Architect - 06-29-2020, 05:54 AM
RE: Possible acceleration systems - by The Architect - 06-30-2020, 10:39 PM
RE: Possible acceleration systems - by Drashner1 - 07-01-2020, 12:35 AM

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