| So let's say the superconducting cable loops are several tens of kilometers wide, the magnetic fields would be even larger, so this will harness the energy of the matter-antimatter explosion and all those plasma ions it releases. The ship is many kilometers in length, and that passenger sphere is heavily shielded, it has to be! Even if this is a robotic ship carrying probes, orbiters and landers, to study a nearby star system there must be a shadow shield to protect the electronics. The magnetic fields are "flexible" enough to absorb shocks which won't be that intense anyway. Note the radiation reflector that resembles an Orion push plate. The reflector obtains some thrust from the radiation released (yellow lines). |
| Magnetic fields (red circles) will extend beyond the superconducting loops of the sails and capture plasma from the bombs for thrust. |
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| Mag-Orion Let's dispense with the reactor, magnetic plasma confinement beam core engine and the Orion style pusher plate Let's build a ship with mag-sails and detonate bombs behind the ship and let the ionized plasma push the sails. A typical mag sail will be several dozen kilometers wide. Really big ships could have sails hundreds of kilometers in diameter. The sail also allows us to brake in interstellar space. The sail should be even more effective for braking in interplanetary space at lower velocities than those of starflight in the denser plasma medium near a star. We are now detonating hydrogen bombs and our giant mag-sail catches about as much energy as a sail under intense illumination. Mag-sails or laser sails with massive surface areas allow dispersion or dilution of the incredible energies of high-speed space flight, so the physical limits of materials are not exceeded and a magnetic field isn't going to melt if it contacts gobs of million degree plasma. This system is called mag-Orion and is described in Zubrin's Entering Space. To propel a 10,000 tons ship to 10%c we need 4.5E21j. If we accelerate up this speed in one year we generate 1.427E14 watts or the equivalent of 34.6 kilotons per second. Since about half the plasma is lost we need twice as much or 69.2 kilotons per second. We need 31.5 million bombs of this yeild. That complicates matters. In any case, a 50 kilometer wide sail would experience (1.427E14j)/(1962500000 sq. m.) = 72.7 kW/sq.m. or about 54 times as much energy as the Sun at 1 AU. A magnetic field is not harmed by hot plasma. If this was a laser sail 50 km wide under 54 Suns of energy it could probably take a beam this intense, since 98%-99% would be reflected. So we might be better off using sails and particle beams or lasers instead of trying to carry 31.5 million bombs! For Die-Hard Antimatter Fans A matter anti-matter rocket engine would be much like a fusion rocket engine. Small matter-antimatter charges could be made to propell mag sails. Only 1.6 grams of amat reacted with 1.6 grams of ordinary matter would yeild 1.427E14j. Actually twice this since 3.2 grams of mass would convert to energy. Only 50.4 tons of amat would be needed instead of 31.5 million fusion bombs! (1.427E14j)/( c squared or 9E16 m/s) = 0.00158 kg. or about 1.6 grams (1.6 grams*365*24*3600)/ (1,000,000 gr/ ton) = 50.4 tons. The M-AM pulse units would consist of supercold superconducting magnetic bottles with jackets of plastic or a light metal like lithium. We'd keep them in a liquid helium cooled chamber. The bombs would be ejected in rapid succession. A laser would fire at them to heat them up, destroy the magnetic containment and KABOOM! The energy turns the plastic shell and/or metals into hot high speed plasma that is caught by the mag-sails and away we go. If the shells surrounding the amat (antimatter) charges consists of lithium deuteride, a fusion reaction will result and we will get more bang for our antimater buck. This system would be called amat pulse or amat-fusion pulse . progress in the production of antimatter must happen. The M-AM charges would be assembled by robots, or course. Here's another idea. Bombs can be touchy. What if we store the antimatter in a magnetic bottle, picture crystals of super cold antihydrogen suspended in a magnetic field, and we heat up little bits with a laser and draw the vapor off with a magnetic conduit, accelerate it out the back end of the ship, while firing a beam of normal hydrogen atoms out the stern that collides with the antihydrogen several kilometers behind the ship and BANG!BANG!BANG! Our cosmic hot rod is off to the stars, or just the planets and comets. However, will we ever produce antimatter economically and will it be safe to handle? Massive solar energy complexes, lasers or accelerators, and lots of progress in the production of antimatter must happen. The M-AM charges would be assembled by robots, or course. Here's another idea. Bombs can be touchy. What if we store the antimatter in a magnetic bottle, picture crystals of super cold antihydrogen suspended in a magnetic field, and we heat up little bits with a laser and draw the vapor off with a magnetic conduit, accelerate it out the back end of the ship, while firing a beam of normal hydrogen atoms out the stern that collides with the antihydrogen several kilometers behind the ship and BANG!BANG!BANG! Our cosmic hot rod is off to the stars, or just the planets and comets. However, will we ever produce antimatter economically and will it be safe to handle? Let's say we can produce amat and handle it safely. If we want to reach 50%c with our mag-orion ship we only need about 300 kg tons of the stuff. We can brake with mag-sails. With another 300 tons we can return home. That's rather amazing, and only a small fraction of the ship's mass. If we deem amat powered ships to be to dangerous for humans after a few accidents, we can still send high speed AI robotic probes to nearby solar systems, maps those systems by deploying numerous orbiters and deploy landers that return samples for study on Earth. We'd only wait about 20 years for results in the form of real samples from another star system. Images could be returned in 10 years ( 8.6 + accel an decel time) plus 4.3 years ( radio data return time) or about 15 years after launch. The star systems would be well studied by mammoth compound space telescopes long beforehand. Telescopic data would be used for mission planning. Human missions would follow via large beamrider vessels. These could brake in the interstellar medium but they could not return unless this was a colonizing mission whose goal was to set up propulsion beams in the target star system, or these could be constructed by AI robots. In all probability humans and replicating AI robots will work together. Two way travel between the Sol system and the Alpha Centauri tri-star system could then exist. We will colonize many nearby star systems and create a beamrider network that also connects Oort Cloud colonies. |
| Propulsion Critique 2 |
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