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darkmax wrote:Instead of Hydrogen, use Deuterium. And no, this is a real fact, not just copied from Star Trek.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterium

Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen, with 1 neutron.

oddly enough most fusion concepts (plants and bombs) use a Deuterium/Tritium mix, tritium being another isotope with 2 neutrons.

Compressed quark nuggets.

radiation pulses resulting from matter being consumed by the infinite gravity of a quantum singularity....

Misfit KotLD wrote:

glitterboy2098 wrote:radiation pulses resulting from matter being consumed by the infinite gravity of a quantum singularity....

Cooper wrote:**** layman's terms, do you speak english?

when matter is drawn into the event horizon of a black hole, it's converted into energy. roughly half of it manages to escape as high energy X-rays, gammarays, microwaves, and other radiation. the other half is added to the black hole's mass.

if you could use that radiation to create electrical power, you'd have a ultra-efficent power source. and fuel is no problem, you can literally use anything. for example, nuclear waste, toxic chemicals, water, rock, old starwars comics......

Misfit KotLD wrote:

glitterboy2098 wrote:

Misfit KotLD wrote:

glitterboy2098 wrote:radiation pulses resulting from matter being consumed by the infinite gravity of a quantum singularity....

Cooper wrote:**** layman's terms, do you speak english?

when matter is drawn into the event horizon of a black hole, it's converted into energy. roughly half of it manages to escape as high energy X-rays, gammarays, microwaves, and other radiation. the other half is added to the black hole's mass.

if you could use that radiation to create electrical power, you'd have a ultra-efficent power source. and fuel is no problem, you can literally use anything. for example, nuclear waste, toxic chemicals, water, rock, old starwars comics......

Event Horizon reference, for those who missed it.

actually, The Doomsday Effect.

oh, i thought you meant where i got the idea.

actually, the event horizon referance was used by KotLD to explain the 'talk english" quote, but i thought it was a remark on where the idea of using a blackhole as a powersource came from.




as for the "planetary slingshot", you mean Orbital tether propulsion.
you build a 'Beanstalk' out to orbit, and send a rocket up along it, and once it reaches the top, it'll be travelling at orbital velocity and can start accellerating away.
it's pretty slow though. although you could sling payloads out of the system, it would take thousands of years to reach even the nearest stars. so it's pretty much a in-system set up.

darkmax wrote:

glitterboy2098 wrote:actually, the event horizon referance was used by KotLD to explain the 'talk english" quote, but i thought it was a remark on where the idea of using a blackhole as a powersource came from.

as for the "planetary slingshot", you mean Orbital tether propulsion.
you build a 'Beanstalk' out to orbit, and send a rocket up along it, and once it reaches the top, it'll be travelling at orbital velocity and can start accellerating away.
it's pretty slow though. although you could sling payloads out of the system, it would take thousands of years to reach even the nearest stars. so it's pretty much a in-system set up.

Ah! You've found the actual term. Hmm..."Beanstalk", nice name....

But yes, it will take eons to get to the next star system. It is as I have mentioned, you will reach near light speed, not light speed. Then again, even at light speed, it will still take eons.

actually, at light speed. it would take something only a few years. 1 light year=distance light travels in 1 year. so at lightspeed, an object would only take 4.5 years to reach Alpha Centauri from earth.

however, even the orbital tether method wouldn't even come close to a hundreth of lightspeed.

the speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second.
even being genrous, a beanstalk would be only able to acheive a few hundred kms. lets say 100 kms for ease of calculation. and thats being generous. most wouldn't even reach more than a few tens of kms.

thats .00003336 C, or only 3 hundred thousandsths of the speed of light.

to reach alpha centuari, you'd be looking at more than one million, three hundred fifty thousand years. (1,350,000 years.)

substantial percentage being what? a hundreth of a percent?

and to reach that, you'd have to remove the moon, since it would be in the way of the tether.


a beanstalk is a good way to get a payload into orbit, perhaps out to the moon. with proper plotting of orbits, it could be used to send stuff to the other planets. (and thats slow. months to years to go from launch to destination)
but it would be totally useless for interstellar travel.

For my Robotech vessels, I use water heated to plasma by the reflex reactors to propel the various ships. When my buddy noticed that in the various ship write ups, he was like, "Steam Power??"

I said, sure, why not. Heat it hot enough and it is just as good as anything else, and you don't need to find an exotic fuel source if you are cut off from your supply lines. Just find a comet and chop it up.

darkmax wrote:

devillin wrote:For my Robotech vessels, I use water heated to plasma by the reflex reactors to propel the various ships. When my buddy noticed that in the various ship write ups, he was like, "Steam Power??"

I said, sure, why not. Heat it hot enough and it is just as good as anything else, and you don't need to find an exotic fuel source if you are cut off from your supply lines. Just find a comet and chop it up.

Err... that's great so long as you are in a system with asteroids. If you go into the outer space, you will be hard pressed to find comets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud

oh, and 'outer space' is anything not on a planet.
i assume you were refering to 'interstellar space'. as opposed to interplanetary space or orbital zones.

back on topic, our solar system has hundreds of comets, most on long term periods, a few decades between passes through the inner system.. it is very likely there are thousands more between saturn and the kuiper belt, since that far out solar energy isn't enough to ablate the ices, so they'd be unnoticed.

glitterboy2098 wrote:

darkmax wrote:

devillin wrote:For my Robotech vessels, I use water heated to plasma by the reflex reactors to propel the various ships. When my buddy noticed that in the various ship write ups, he was like, "Steam Power??"

I said, sure, why not. Heat it hot enough and it is just as good as anything else, and you don't need to find an exotic fuel source if you are cut off from your supply lines. Just find a comet and chop it up.

Err... that's great so long as you are in a system with asteroids. If you go into the outer space, you will be hard pressed to find comets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud

back on topic, our solar system has hundreds of comets, most on long term periods, a few decades between passes through the inner system.. it is very likely there are thousands more between saturn and the kuiper belt, since that far out solar energy isn't enough to ablate the ices, so they'd be unnoticed.

Yup, exactly. I figured that most solar systems have an oort cloud, or something similar. Or at the very least, a moon like Europa where it should be theoretically possible to land and go ice mining. Besides, if it does turn out than an unexplored solar system don't have one of the above, they can just fold to a known system that does. The job of the REF Pioneer mission is to find those systems.

actually, since FTL is impossible with normal engines, that ratio would be meaningless.

you'd be using the water as reaction mass for insystem STL travel only.
what devillin is describing is a Fusion based NERVA drive. those would be very energy efficent, and would use far less fuel than normal combustion based drives.

In either Mutants in Orbit, or Manhunter (I've forgotten which) there is an Ion Drive that requires Elemental Iron. This could be a relatively easily available, and cheap fuel source.

Hmm...

*Atmospheric conversion Drives (takes "whatever" from the "sky" and turns it into energy...the more polluted/thick the atmosphere...the stronger the conversion, but takes some time to power-up)

*Synergy engine over-ride (divert power from other systems; weapons, radar, etc. to power the main engine...each component stacking upon the other...a rather dangerous solution and by default programmed and hardwired OUT of all standard drives...shields are an exception in some crafts)

*The Carriousios Plant (a creature mined from the depths of some water worlds, this animated planet produces a large amount of energy when in contact with radion fluid [used to contain some star drive engines] they are easy to transport and cheap to maintain, but don't live long outside of their native environment [4 yrs], cannot attain FTL but just below it, and illegal in some area dues to the normally poor construction of the engines)

You could use a technology similar to nuclear which strips matter of its electrons to produce energy which would destroy the material and consume it like fuel.

Anvil Dwarf Coal Drive?

Actually... I was thinking of a drive that burns the coal into atomic particles. but its funny to imagine Dwarves shoveling coal into a molecular destabilising fusion reactor!