Forstchen is the one who, more recently, wrote the "One Second After" trilogy, showing what would happen if an enemy detonated nuclear bombs IN ORBIT over the USA. The result would be the loss of our power grid, communications, most of our civilian vehicles and within a few months, most of our...
Cylindrical tanks with hemispherical ends are currently a standard industrial structure. Since we have yet to start fabricating (in space) the components of tori for rotating space settlements, curved sections of tori, like a bent tank, are not a standard structure. However, by the time we...
The source I had on fusion engines indicated that they put out a massive amount of heat and a small amount of thrust. My engine set put out 14,000 TW, a staggering amount of energy, but only about 400,000 tons of thrust. IF an anti-energy use person saw this they would freak out. So if you had...
I can see some others support my position on having a large mass of fuel. If the ship was 1 million tons and the fuel mass was 1 billion tons, the mass ratio would be about 1000: 1,000,000 / 1000. If the ships mass is 4 million tons, with the same fuel load, the mass ratio is about 250, still...
If you go back almost a century, some of the early written SF had effectively FTL type transport in its stories, and the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers shows definitely went to new planets without going to other star systems. That still provides a lot of credit to the Star Wars series and Lucas...
"trying to poke holes into my design wherever you can"
Of course my hole poking is intended to try to improve your construct. I use the mathematicians term construct for the imaginary world SF writers create with some difference between it and reality. If there is no such difference, it is...
to Strato Incendus
Yes, the ice disk should cover (be between) all ship structures and any particles in the vehicle's flight path. It should probably not be supported only by the core cylinder, but also by other struts placed around the circumference of the vessels "hull." This non-rotating...
@Filip Larsen offers a good discussion of the rationale to have slowboats / generation ships / colonization ships in the first place. Assuming that it is possible to maintain space settlements in our own solar system, there is no immediate need to launch such ships for humanities survival...
Thanks for the support. I enjoy both realistic and less realistic SF, including that with FTL ships, etc. What counts is how good the story is. I promote interest in fusion powered slowboats as I think they are more realistic than the laser-driven light sails, they can slow down and stop...
Here are some basic values and relationships for interstellar flight.
A light year is about 6 trillion miles or about 10 trillion kilometers. If the Centauri system is exactly 4 light years distant, it is then 40 trillion km distant. If you could travel at exactly 0,1 C for the whole trip, the...
This physical design means that all of the habitable space is outside the protection of the ice shield (on the front of the ship) and is also unprotected from the "velocity sleet" radiation by the mass of the fuel. Is the fuel for your ship stored in the central cylinder? What is the mass...
I am glad to see other people interested in what I refer to as "slowboats", realistic interstellar starships that are not FTL ships as in Star Trek, etc, but rely on the physics we know. I am not a physicist, engineer or mathematician, but merely a generalist who can ask the right questions and...
Maybe you have a table somewhere in the past posts that give the ship's dry mass. For the ship sizes I am seeing, I assume the ship is over 1 million tons dry. If you want to reach a cruising speed of 0.1 C (30,000 km/sec) in 1 year, that means you must gain over 820 km/sec every day (300,000...
I have no idea if this discussion is ongoing or not.
You seem to need to know some more basic physics so that any description of an accident on the ship would make sense. This does not need to affect the characters as much unless it is in the story design. I used 3 colonization ship designs in...