putt-putt boat fusion

[Richard Hull]

One still has the issue of the electrical energy to create the terawatt joule energy on board the ship. I do not know just how low the input energy would need to be to do useful fusion in this situation that would supply a manned ship the required thrust to be of significant value is getting someone anywhere in space within a time frame that might be considered reasonable. One might posit such a system with unmanned probes using solar power within the solar system. This would mime the high impulse low thrust ion engines. Net energy available at the propulsion end will always be the final arbiter here. The ratio of collected solar or fission power plant energy would be multiplied many times using a working fusion system, but at what weight and volumetric size cost? You just can't beat the bean counters...They are always watching and calculating and more than willing to shoot flights of fantasy and proposed spacecraft out of the sky.

I give us more chance of reverse engineering an alien spacecraft at S-4 or capturing a "tic-tac" than getting a working fusion system into space.

One man's fantasy is always as good as another.

Richard Hull

[Paul_Schatzkin]

Hey Richard, just seeing this thread for the first time...

That "putt putt boat" looks vaguely familiar. I think there may have been one in my bathtub, too.

--PS

[Richard Hull]

The only reason this old post is at the top is that the image disappeared and I replaced it with new textual info.
I am on a long time mission to replace some of my images lost in the transfer. I am far more focused on the FAQS right now, but also do the easy pick-up images in images du Jour.

Richard Hull

[Cristiano_Machado]

I seems that we can find some pictures at google, this was the picture

D97C15DB-4132-4C6C-9740-A4296FAA7E4F.jpeg (15 KiB) Viewed 3794 times