Recent content by Jakko

So, if any of you were designing a spaceship drive, did not want to replace a neutron-eaten reactor core every--few months?--needed, obviously, to keep it light, and preferably compact, and wanted to avoid high-energy neutrons for safety, what more or less aneutronic fuels/reactions would you...

"For the same reason D-D doesn't produce He-4 in relevant amounts." Typo? It's He3 we want to produce. I found a note earlier that says stellarators burning D-D don't burn the T or He3 they make. Their reaction rate is obviously not break-even yet--no one's is. No chance of producing enough He3...

Same question, different fuels: why not lithium-proton? If it'll burn in brown dwarfs...

I've been reading all I can google about fusion for several months now, both to write better spaceship drives and to better understand the fusion start-ups who promise to bring this planet-saving technology online far sooner than the government's (deliberately?) time- and money-wasting...

So stoney and metalic asteroids formed from dust and gas condensed from plasma. You would think they would be fluffy, dust piles, unless they had been part of a body large enough for its own gravity to melt it--large enough to form a sphere? Yet we're told that Sol's asteroid belt was never part...

Thanks for the equations, gneil. I'll play with them and see what they teach me. I think I understand this well enough, now, to keep my timeline reasonable. You understand this stuff rather well. What do you do professionally? Thanx huge! Jakko

Distance meterskilometerslight-secondslight-minutesastronomical unitlight-yearsparsec -- this computer program messes with formatting when you post. And when I tried http://nathangeffen.webfactional.com/spacetravel/spacetravel.php :, it took me nowhere. So from another relativistic starship...

Maybe I'll have them not thrust through the asteroid belt, 2-4 AU, to make it easier to dodge any rocks.

Sol to Jupiter, a distance of about 5.2 AU, could be covered in less than a week, easy. Maybe double that time if you want to come hang around at Jupiter (so accelerate about half the trip, decelerate the rest to match speeds with Jupiter Nope. I'm on the way out of the solar system, don't want...

Sorry for not getting back sooner, gneil. Taxes and dentistry and plumbing leaks wait for no man... I want to read through this a couple more times, and absorb the numbers. Numbers always did sink into my head very slowly... But it sounds as if I can almost ignore solar escape velocity, use a...

Hi, gneil. I had to add the numbers back into the fields above the line, so it's not quite a screen shot; the numbers are as on the screen. the planet Sun Mass M 1.989E30 kg radius r 6.96E5 km Orbit radius R .0977 AU [21...

Hey, orbital mechanics! I can't find what I need to figure this out on the internet, and I don't do calculus so I don't understand all that I find. Help me make my next sci-fi novel plausible? I just did an Oberth maneuver around Sol, 21 radii (.0977 AU, 14,616,000 km) from center...