starships

Not posted for a while, so brace for impact, here come a few!

Here’s my model of a Bussard Ramjet.

This was thought of as a serious design for an interstellar starship, which would use a huge magnetic scoop to collect interstellar hydrogen. This would be fused and used to shove the starship ever faster.

Unfortunately on more detailled examination it turns out to have severe problems, including that it need to go really fast to get going, (like 10% of the speed of light fast), the difficulty in making a hole at the base of the magnetic funnel, and most problematic of all, the friction from collecting the hydrogen is greater than the force you get from the fusion.

ramjet-galaxy

BUSSARD_ortho_captioned