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Yes, Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky had Bussard ramjets, and using one inside a civilized solar system was usually a great crime since the magnetic fields
by db48x 2y ago
Yes, Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky had Bussard ramjets, and using one inside a civilized solar system was usually a great crime since the magnetic fields may be extremely large. But you can’t point them; they’re more of an area–effect weapon.
Larry Niven’s Known Space stories coined the phrase Kzinti Lesson when a peaceful Human crew turned their photon drive on an attacking Kzinti ship, slicing it in half. The Kzinti had acquired an anti–gravity drive from aliens (who they then enslaved and ate) so they didn’t have a good visceral sense of the energy required to visit the stars the hard way. Their telepaths kept reporting that the Humans were peaceful and didn’t have any weapons on their ship right up until the ship flipped over and sliced them in half. That kind you can point.
- lazide 2y agoI thought the Fusion Drive plume also came up - but perhaps I’m thinking of a different book? At the accelerations most sci-fi happens at (even fractions of 1G), the energy coming out the business end of any sort of drive based on extrapolations of currently known physics are going to be in the TJ+ range, and often with relativistic particle velocities. Probably not as focused as a laser type drive, but in a vacuum such a fusion type drive would melt any known materials at multi-km distances and likely cause extreme x-ray emissions from whatever it was vaporizing when it came in contact with it. In atmosphere, it would likely just vaporize the space craft along with anything in a several mile radius. It’s basically carrying around a directable, continuously exploding hydrogen bomb.