🚀 go-pugleaf

-From: lord@tradent.wimsey.bc.ca (Jason Cooper)
-Subject: Re: *** BUSSARD RAMSCOOP ***
-Date: 3 Jan 93 15:36:30 GMT
-Organization: TradeNET International Trade Corp.

-> 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.
-> 
-> 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.

A "conventional" antimatter drive uses millions of parts of ordinary matter
for each part of antimatter. Thus if the main thing you carry along is
the antimatter, you can still potentially benefit from gathering your
reaction mass as you go.

John Roberts
roberts@cmr.ncsl.nist.gov