Posted on 01/11/2002 6:34:50 AM PST by techcor
The Rolling Stone. Flat cats.
Here's one of my personal favorites, Project Orion:
Project Orion: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth
Here was a real contender for Mars propulsion Sytem, until NASA cut funding for it last year:
Basically, everytime scientists say "here, we figured it out! We can get you to Mars in three months or less"
NASA says "thanks, but we really weren't serious"
Question: Does anyone know about the ability of the reaction to be throttled, or at least turned on/off? Seems to me, that would be a necessity for space travel.
That's what I figured (read an article in Pop. Sci. on several different drives-that seemed best because of low and high drive gears). Check out B-Chan's post about atomic bullets. I always wondered if that was possible and now I have a source for it. Great!
One last thing before I go. Sometimes I have a couple of beers with friends and we discuss what groups could terra-form Mars. Well, the Clintonistas cames up as a group. Basically, it would be : " Bill Clinton: Porn King of Mars". Where he sells tapes of himself doing the Kama-Sutra with 480 of the top porn stars (mostly women) to raise money. They use Californium and call themselves the "Californicates". After that we decided to stop drinking so much.
Take it easy. And thanks for the links to the "gas-core" technology.
Yes, Heinlein is very, very good.
On the topic of Mars, however, I seem to recall that my favorite Mars story was Asimov's "The Martian Way."I haven't read it in about a decade, but I remember it being very cool, with people humming around in nuclear ships that use water as reaction mass, everything very casual. I don't remember the exact plot, but I remember it being about, in a Heinlein kind of way, the colonists becoming self-sufficent for water...
(Darn, I was going to watch "The Mummy" and "The Mummy Returns" tonight -- Now I guess I'll have to dig out a copy of TMW and buckle down for some reading instead of four hours of Rachel Weisz watching...)
Mark W.
I agree 100% with this.
Let's hope that some fringe group or some pseudo-crackpot has or is developing a real "reaction-less" drive. Some kind of real space drive like Townsend Brown seems to have had in embryo.
Taking a year to get to Mars is crazy.
Taking a couple of weeks to get to Mars is like bicycling across the US.
A serious opening of space needs some kind of 1G drive. Then you get to Mars in about a day and a half...
Mark W.
Anyway, what's the hurry? You'll be stuck on line at the terminal forever, and when you get to Mars they'll just put you to work. Take an extra paperback.
Dang! You're tough to please. I figure two weeks is the best I could do. BTW have you ever read a book called "The Boot-Strap Effect" (I think). It was sci-fi but very interesting concerning "reaction-less" drives? In which case, who wrote it because I'd like to get a copy?
This sounds interesting but I must admit I don't see how it could work. We're talking about spontaneous fission with 252Cf, and a lot of it. The problems with predetonation become quite difficult to manage with this kind of material. Add to that the fact that in any kind of impact the compression will be quite asymmetric and difficult to control, which makes it difficult to attain a supercritical assembly, much less maintain it for the time necessary to achieve a significant fission rate. If Kahn suggested something like this, either he was free-associating ideas or knows a lot more about the physics of the weapons than I do (which is probably true).
It would have to be an Atomic Nerf pistol.
just saw this old post. You’re right that there were old tales about atomic revolvers. But I believe those were based on somewhat exaggerated numbers and would not actually work, as cool as they sound.
A critical piece of californium (which at current prices would cost either billions or trillions of dollars to produce depending on whom you ask) weighs about 11 pounds. It’s heavy stuff, so a bomb-sized globe of it is only about 2 1/2 inches in diameter. So that is not revolver bullet sized, or even .50 bmg sized. But it sounds Nerf gun sized!
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