Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

[Aeronaut]

Jolly Roger wrote: From “DREAD Weapon System” thread:

The MagBeam System is a plasma-magnetic equivalent to the Laser/Solar Sail system above, but has the advantage of being self-aiming adjustable at the payload, and reversible (push or pull). All the components of the system need power, which Focus Fusion (FF) could provide.

An FF could also serve directly as a plasma source. However, it is probably more useful as the power source of the HPH. Even though FF has a high specific impulse (high velocity), it does not have the high mass throughput, hence Thrust, of an HPH.

BTW, 1 N thrust = ~ 0.1 g acceleration per kilogram of payload. A 100-ton craft would need about 1 million Newtons thrust for 1 g.

NB: M2P2 /PlasmaMagnet can brake at the destination by interacting with a planet’s magnetosphere or a star’s solar wind.

The MagBeam is new to me today, Jolly Roger. I’ve always been assuming that a ship would spend half the flight accelerating, then turn around and decelerate for about the same amount of time (distance). Now the question is how fast we can decelerate a “relativistic” ship without the paying passengers griping (too much) and without needing more mass in the ship’s frame.

Mass is the reason for not lugging a ton of decarbane around with us if we only need an ounce for redundant backup storage. Excess mass is penalized by the theory of relativity as well as lowering the delta-vee, hence our speed and manueverability maximums.

Therefore, if 10 N= 1G of acceleration, a 100-ton ship would require only 1kN for 1G. For clarity, that would be tons of mass, not earth weight. 100 metric tons of mass would still be a sizable (and hefty) 1,000 metric tons or 3,200 tons (US) weight.

I’m looking forward to learning more about this runway to orbit FF Jet engine, also.

Cheers

Matt