- #91
Strato Incendus
- 188
- 23
Mmh… so we’d have to go back to the idea of the ship picking up extra hydrogen from a gas cloud or something? Or, potentially, from the destination star itself? Both would be ways of “recharging the battery”.
In Elite: Dangerous, for example, you can hang around a star and use the scoop tool to pick up hydrogen for your drive. An interstellar colony ship traveling at between 0.1 and 0.125 c (by the time it reaches the star, since we’ve established they’re going too fast and will zip past it) won’t be able to spend a lot of time in the vicinity of the star, though. And even for the time that it does, it might still be too fast to pick up anything, even though it is indeed decelerating at this point.
Then again, this could be used to add a sense of urgency: We have a limited time to potentially pick up some new fuel for our drive, and use that to brake faster / re-accelerate back towards the star. Zipping past the star, based on the established calculation in this thread, would happen about 18 years after first discovering that the ship can’t brake fast enough. This happens to be right around the time the second volume of the story is supposed to play.
Even if this works, the question is then whether to simply put that scooped-up hydrogen into the fusion drive, or whether there would be any net gain in energy by using it to power lasers for the black-hole drive instead.
In Elite: Dangerous, for example, you can hang around a star and use the scoop tool to pick up hydrogen for your drive. An interstellar colony ship traveling at between 0.1 and 0.125 c (by the time it reaches the star, since we’ve established they’re going too fast and will zip past it) won’t be able to spend a lot of time in the vicinity of the star, though. And even for the time that it does, it might still be too fast to pick up anything, even though it is indeed decelerating at this point.
Then again, this could be used to add a sense of urgency: We have a limited time to potentially pick up some new fuel for our drive, and use that to brake faster / re-accelerate back towards the star. Zipping past the star, based on the established calculation in this thread, would happen about 18 years after first discovering that the ship can’t brake fast enough. This happens to be right around the time the second volume of the story is supposed to play.
Even if this works, the question is then whether to simply put that scooped-up hydrogen into the fusion drive, or whether there would be any net gain in energy by using it to power lasers for the black-hole drive instead.