Propulsion

penlu

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Anybody have any weird, new ideas for a fast, efficient form of propulsion? Something like those crazy peoples invented: Bussard ramjets, solar sails, magnetic sails, fusion-direct exhaust, fusion-energy conversion, nuclear, solar- anything? Those types of propulsion can be pretty neat. I'll bet a fusion ship with direct exhaust (that's maybe... uh... 6% of light speed?) could get you up to 250 km/sec- that's Jupiter in 30 days- and still be able to decelerate you when you get there. At three gs, it would take about 20 hours to accelerate to that or something. I really forget, I worked it out three weeks ago. But seriously... that's fast.
 

Wraith

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Well, you may try VASIMR Still in development, but actually, a pretty neat design, unlike many electric/ion engines this one's quite powerful and efficient. It's claimed to have an ISP ~290 km/s (compare this to eg. Shuttle's SRBs that have ~ 4 km/s)

Also, 250km/s in 20 hours is just 0.3g's.

Oh, and if that's not weird enough, you can always try this.
 

yagni01

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Well, we have Bussard ramscoops, and I think someone tried a solar sail. I would like to see a VASIMR-powered ship as well as one using aerospikes. But I assume you're talking about way out designs that have preliminary engineering behind them.

You might try here for some ideas http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?board=26.0
 

jedidia

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A Nuclear salt-water rocket (NSR) is a pretty exotic concept too, one that would yield quite a high ISP with an incredible thrust. Backdraws are that some think the concept isn't really feasible, and that the exhaust plume would be radioactive...

I'll bet a fusion ship with direct exhaust (that's maybe... uh... 6% of light speed?) could get you up to 250 km/sec- that's Jupiter in 30 days- and still be able to decelerate you when you get there. At three gs, it would take about 20 hours to accelerate to that or something.
Problem is, a Fusion Drive will never ever give you that much thrust. It weighs over a thousand tons all by itself, so forgett your 3 Gs. something like 0.01 G would be more realistic. Still, the ISP is absolutely incredible, so you can thrust constantly and don't need to waste much weight on fuel. Jupiter in about 6 Months IS a definite possibility. Problem is, we don't have the navigational tools in Orbiter to plan such a flight, since it looks substantially different from a Hohmann transfer. I tried to make one once, but... well, My maths... I didn't have integration and differentials in school, and I'm having a tough time learning it. The concept per se is not soooo difficult, but how to aply them to the problem is completely above my head. I'm not good at visualizing curves out of data.

This one might be interesting to look at, it's a NASA-study for a Fusion-driven Jupiter mission:

2005/TM-2005-213559.pdf

Also, this one is interesting to look at. It shortly describes quite alot of concepts:

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3c.html
 

penlu

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Even if the fusion drive weighed 5000 tons, I'm pretty sure that if you fattened up the exhaust stream a little you could get HUGE acceleration. Pump hydrogen into the exhaust!
 

Linguofreak

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3 g's for 20 hours is pretty harsh on the human body.

And keep in mind that power = thrust * exhaust velocity. For a constant power level, you lose exhaust velocity as you ramp up thrust, so if you can and do cram enough propellant through your fusion drive to ramp your thrust up to three g's, your exhaust velocity is likely to be much lower than 0.06 c.

Or, if you ramp up your power levels to keep your ISP constant as you increase thrust, you find that you pretty soon have a ship with (much) more engine power than the entire electrical generating capacity of Earth. Assuming that your 5000 ton drive makes up 10 percent of the mass of your ship (for a total mass of 50000 tons), that you have an acceleration of 3 g's, and that your exhaust velocity is 0.06 c, your thrust power is 25000 terawatts. By comparison, Earth's generating capacity is 15 terawatts. And only part of your engine power goes into your thrust. If the engine is 50% efficient (which is pretty good) it will put as much power into waste heat as it will into thrust.

Assuming (optimistically) that the engine doesn't vaporize itself, it will be as bright as the sun at a distance of 740 miles. Try parking the thing in LEO, and you will make the locals *very* angry. At a distance of 0.86 AU it will be as bright as Sirius. At the distance of Jupiter, it will still be as bright as a star of apparent magnitude 2.25 (for example, the constellation Cassiopeia is the one that looks like a "W." The two stars that make up the left-most arm of the "W" are about magnitude 2.25). On the other hand, most of that brightness would be in the form of X-rays or gamma rays, so you wouldn't actually see it to be quite that bright. You would, however, get pretty bad radiation burns if you were anywhere near it.

If you manage higher efficiencies (say 99.9999%, which would probably be pretty near impossible), you still have to worry about the fact that your exhaust stream is a weapon. Be careful where you point the back end of your ship.
 

jedidia

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Even if the fusion drive weighed 5000 tons, I'm pretty sure that if you fattened up the exhaust stream a little you could get HUGE acceleration. Pump hydrogen into the exhaust!

You probably could... apart from blowing up the engine you would however face the problem that the engine looses efficency. Meaning alot more fuel to bring along, meaning more mass, meaning the acceleration diminishes again. Apart from that, a trip at 1 G would be alot more comfotable, but this also is quite outside the efficiency patterns of a fusion drive. Their major strength is efficiency, meaning exhaust velocity, not thrust.

The best compromise between efficiency and thrust would be the above mentioned NSR, but as I said, there's serious doubt wheather the concept would really work.
 

thomasantony

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Assuming (optimistically) that the engine doesn't vaporize itself, it will be as bright as the sun at a distance of 740 miles. Try parking the thing in LEO, and you will make the locals *very* angry. At a distance of 0.86 AU it will be as bright as Sirius. At the distance of Jupiter, it will still be as bright as a star of apparent magnitude 2.25 (for example, the constellation Cassiopeia is the one that looks like a "W." The two stars that make up the left-most arm of the "W" are about magnitude 2.25).

Well .. at least there won't be a Jupiter hoax then :D.
 
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