Scott Manley's Video: Pulsed Rocket Drives

[anorlunda]

Scott Manley makes some excellent videos. This is a thought provoking one about several futuristic rocket engine concepts.



Note in the video that many of the drives are pulsed. I'm wondering if there are any SF stories incorporating those ideas. I'm thinking of the ergonomics for the crew with zero-G almost all the time punctuated by say 1-G acceleration for 0.25 seconds repeating once every 3 seconds.

That is a living environment that sounds hard to visualize. In the case where rotation provides continuous artificial gravity, there would not be zero-G most of the time. However, the acceleration pulses would be orthogonal to the rotation G, and that sounds very hard to deal with.

 

[Melbourne Guy]

I'm wondering if there are any SF stories incorporating those ideas.

Not sure that all of these incorporate the same ideas, @anorlunda, but Wikipedia lists a lot of stories with pulsed drives of some sort:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stories_featuring_nuclear_pulse_propulsion

I've read some of them, and none of them that I can recall describe or account for the acceleration you note.

 

[anuttarasammyak]

That is a living environment that sounds hard to visualize. In the case where rotation provides continuous artificial gravity, there would not be zero-G most of the time. However, the acceleration pulses would be orthogonal to the rotation G, and that sounds very hard to deal with.

In a daily life in a running train, we are under gravity from the Earth in vertical direction and get shocks by the sudden starts and stops in horizontal direction. We would observe the similar effects in your case.

 

[anorlunda]

Not sure that all of these incorporate the same ideas, @anorlunda, but Wikipedia lists a lot of stories with pulsed drives of some sort:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stories_featuring_nuclear_pulse_propulsion

I've read some of them, and none of them that I can recall describe or account for the acceleration you note.

Wow, thanks. I had no knowledge of that wiki page or of the many stories mentioned. I guess my question is well answered. I'll have to read some of them. I just loaded Steven Baxter's Ark into my Kindle.

 

[willem2]

Them Orion rocket from FOOTFALL by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle has shock dampening
https://www.up-ship.com/apr/michael.htm