4 ms·
There's also always the Orion drive - basically dropping nuclear bombs out of the back of a ship and riding on the blast. Do you know how it and the Bussard Ram
by sorbus 15y ago
There's also always the Orion drive - basically dropping nuclear bombs out of the back of a ship and riding on the blast. Do you know how it and the Bussard Ramjet (which I think is what you meant) compare in terms of mass needed to run? Of course, a Ramjet would probably be much better for long missions, since it gives you a source of power as well as not requiring carrying reaction mass, which avoids running out of fuel.
- VladRussian 15y agoBussard's ramjet is too far fetched still. I meant more along the lines of http://www.emc2fusion.org/2006-9%20IAC%20Paper.pdf http://www.emc2fusion.org/2006-9%20IAC%20Paper.pdf and http://www.ibiblio.org/lunar/school/InterStellar/Explorer_Class/Bussard_Fusion_systems.HTML http://www.ibiblio.org/lunar/school/InterStellar/Explorer_Cl... The EMC2 is (was) his corporation that gets [though very small compare to other causes government spends money on] real funding and making real progress today, just as we speaking :) though i'd not discount the Z-pinch (Sandia) approach and think that ultimately working system may be a combination of these 2 approaches. The Z-pinch, dense plasma focus and other similar dynamic (inertial) confinement approaches is, in principle, the Orion, only with very small "bombs".
- InclinedPlane 15y agoBussard ramjets are non-starters. Firstly, as it turns out the drag from the ramjet would be much higher than the thrust generated by the fusion reaction. Secondly, a pure Bussard drive would be hugely difficult because proton-proton fusion is enormously challenging and would require very, very high temperatures to occur in a practical amount of time within a rocket.