🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <J85swB3w165w@tradent.wimsey.bc.ca> lord@tradent.wimsey.bc.ca (Jason Cooper) writes:
>> 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


Good grief, guys.  Since we're speculating all over the place here about
science-yet-to-come, why not build a quark-catalyzed ramscoop.  All the
advantages of muon-catalyzed fusion except that the Quark doesn't decay.
All you have to do is crack open a hadron!  If you want more details,
please let me know and I'll post them.  (I'm only half joking, by the way.
Quark-catalyzed fusion is a "serious" possibility if quarks can be unbound.
Emphasis on the if.)
 
--
Dave Michelson
davem@ee.ubc.ca