Re: Low Isp vs High Isp in Interplanetary Orion Warships


dwight.thieme@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
James Nicoll wrote:
In article <1156011463.370403.181380@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
IsaacKuo <mechdan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Really, the big thing which would convince me more than
anything else is some information about where you could
get relatively accessable Uranium and other fissionables.
I'm not comfortable with the stereotypical assumptions
of a future deuterium/helium3 based fusion economy.
Without good fusion reactors, I see fusion power as being
a more specialized part of the economy, reliant on
fissionables for fission-fusion-fission bombs in Orion style
rocket drives.

No joy, I am afraid. It's not so much that there
aren't heavy elements but that there is so much more of
the light elements.

Io might be the best bet, since it is active and
wouldn't have hundreds of kilometers of ice or water on
top of the ore beds.

Otherwise, how much mass would we be talking in
annual consumption of U and Th? Maybe they can just import
it from Earth or Mars.

I think it would be relatively low, mostly limited to military
applications.

In the inner Solar System, most energy comes from solar
power stations. Beam powered thermal rockets are used
for most interplanetary transport.

In the outer Solar System, most energy comes from
electromagnetic power stations around the gas giants.
A mix of microwave beam powered electric engines and
thermal engines are used.

One application where nukes might be used a lot is
asteroid "mining". I feel it's more plausible to transport
entire asteroids toward the processing industry, rather
than transporting processing facilities to the asteroids
(too much down time in transit). One way to get the
asteroids where you want them is with a series of nukes.
However, I my gut feeling is that it's not really necessary
to use nukes and that it may be more economical and
operationally easier to simply directly impact the asteroid
with "inert" slugs.

That just leaves mostly military applications--Orion style
pulse rockets for maneuvers far away from friendly
beam power stations, and fission reactors for high
power equipment.

Now _that_ would be a cool (and, afaik, unexploited) scenario. All the
cool cutting-edge stuff is happening in the Outer Satellites, Earth is
a backwater whose only importance is as an extractive economy -
fissionables for energy, and other heavy metals of varying degree of
importance. President-For-Life George Bush VIII's chief importance is
his vice-like control of the Thorium Fields.

In the sort of Solar System I'm imagining, the concentration
of fissionables in the inner Solar System has more troubling
consequences. You've got the inner Solar System "old world"
which has most of the military capabilities, contrasted with
the outer Solar System "new world" which has most of the
economic wealth (thanks to abundant electrical power).

The economic engine of the outer Solar System is highly
vulnerable to "evil dictatorships". Unlike the inner solar
system, where solar power is somewhat decentralized and
available to practically anyone at any scale, the outer
solar system relies almost entirely on centralized microwave
beam power farms. Control the power farms and you
control the region. This makes them enticing objectives
for potential despots or "liberators"...

Isaac Kuo

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Low Isp vs High Isp in Interplanetary Orion Warships
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