🚀 go-pugleaf

> Not good enough, alas.  The pressure at the *center of the Sun* produces
> only the most sluggish hydrogen reaction -- one that will take billions
> of years to consume the Sun's hydrogen supply.
> 
> Ordinary hydrogen burns quickly in thermonuclear reactions only under
> near-supernova conditions.  The heavier isotopes used in fusion bombs
> burn like gasoline by comparison, to the point where they are distinctly
> rare in the universe -- even the small supply existing on Earth requires
> significant effort to explain.
> 
> Building the ramscoop itself is the easy part (difficult though it is).
> Getting the hydrogen to *do* something useful, once collected, is hard.
> Using it as reaction mass for an antimatter-powered jet engine is going
> to be much easier than trying to burn it raw.
> -- 
> "God willing... we shall return."       | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoolog
>        -Gene Cernan, the Moon, Dec 1972 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry

Ah, but that would defeat the entire purpose of the ramjet itself!  You 
are now carrying around a mass of fuel equal to what you are going to tak 
in in the scoop.  Now we get into all of the standard limitations, as the 
faster you want to go, the heavier the ship's going to get, the more fuel 
you'll have to carry, the heavier the ship's going to get, etc. ad 
infinitum.  The *REAL* advantage of the ramjet is that this is not 
happening.  The fuel is just waiting out there, and it just so happens 
that the faster you go, the more you're going to collect.

Of course, I'm not using the p-p fusion until I'm into the speeds where 
the beta- decomposition involved is not a problem probability-wise, due 
to the large number of chances it will have.  How's a carbon-catalyzed 
reaction sound for getting there (except at the lower end, where we'll 
have to use some conventional engine to attain a speed at which THAT 
reaction is possible)?

                                                Jason Cooper