3 ms·
Weirdly - we were talking in the office last week about what it would take to get something into orbit from, for example, a rail gun. We calculated that for a
by polemic 15y ago
Weirdly - we were talking in the office last week about what it would take to get something into orbit from, for example, a rail gun.
We calculated that for a 100m rail gun and a 0.5 kilogram payload you'd need to feed it about a 100 MW power source (over about a tenth of a second) to accelerate it to the necessary 7.8 km/s. That doesn't include the energy needed to get it to altitude.
Naturally, if TPB could actually put something into orbit on a commercially viable basis, they could probably afford to fund their pirate service as a teeny part of the Enormous Space Freighting Corporation that would naturally to ensure... just sayin'.
- kragen 15y agoA friend of mine just mentioned http://startram.com/ http://startram.com/ to me this weekend; apparently sending something into orbit from a ground-mounted rail gun is possible in certain parts of the world. They also propose magnetically levitating the end of the railgun by a few thousand more meters for a later version that can use lower G-forces. Last year I did some calculations about mounting the railgun on a dirigible: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2011-August/000939.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2011-August/... The usual way to power railguns (or particle accelerators) is with giant high-voltage capacitors, which can discharge their energy very quickly. I forget the term of art used for this particular kind of capacitor, unfortunately. Startram suggests using superconducting magnetic energy storage, which has apparently become practical recently; and giant homopolar generators with flywheels are another (low-voltage) alternative.