
Realistic fusion drive with Epstein Drive-like performance - lachlan-sneff
https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-drive.html
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oaiey
Everyone who has not watched The Expanse yet: start doing it. It is easily the
best SciFi show in the last decade and a top contender for best SciFi show
ever.

It has a slow start but is increasing pace and when you realize you are being
watching seasons you are doomed because soon the year long wait starts :)

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MagicWishMonkey
The books are really good, too.

I need to watch the series at some point.

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onepremise
I not sure how many realize this, but the books were actually written by a
team of writers, well 2 writers, in parallel, defining the world, characters,
and storylines. James S.A. Corey is the pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and
Ty Franck. Great series too :)

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oaiey
And it get really interesting who their friends are down there in New Mexico
:)

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dghughes
take a fictional propulsion technology from [Sci-Fi TV show, movie or book]
and apply the appropriate science to explain its features in a realistic
manner

Doesn't everyone do that or is it just me? I always try my best to think of a
way that such things could work.

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ksaj
That's how I watch magic and mentalism acts as well. Until now, I'd not
considered such a similarity between Darren Brown and Geordi La Forge.

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pmoriarty
With the caveat that magic and mentalism don't actually work, but only appear
to work. So a better analogy might be between magic/mentalism and those fake
perpetual motion machines which appear to work but don't.

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hirundo
Is it fair to call the Rocinante a time machine? If it can achieve 5% of C in
37 hours it can go seriously relativistic in a reasonable amount of time. It
becomes possible to travel across hundreds or thousands of Earth years in a
lifetime, like Andrew and Valentine Wiggin or Colonel George Taylor.

The travelling through space feature is pretty cool too though.

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rbanffy
If you want to go relativistic, you'll have to deal with the fact vacuum is
not as perfect as you'd like it to be. You'll need some form of abrasion
shield because you'll be hitting a thin wall of hydrogen at relativistic
speeds.

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rolph
Bussard ramjet:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet)

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rbanffy
If the field manages to catch everything in the ship's path, that's good, but
not all particles will cooperate. You'll catch some, push others out of the
way and still get hammered by all the stubborn neutrally charged ones.

And that's only for the atomic scale. Smashing into a grain of dust at a
relativistic speed is very destructive.

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jakedata
They really did sell everything at Radio Shack back in the day.

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pfdietz
It's gratifying seeing a discussion that focuses on the central problem of
waste heat control.

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fowl2
An "engineering challenges with today's technology" section would be great
addition to this piece, I'm sure there'll be a few "biophysically possible but
we don't know how" parts ;)

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rbanffy
Would the heat absorbed by the heat shield be enough to power the igniter and
the magnetic field?

Worst case scenario would be to use the heat to power a thermal rocket. Not an
efficient use of propellant, but still doable.

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garmaine
Assuming 100% combustion of fuel is not realistic, especially with fusion.

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rbanffy
If the engine manages to get half as much useful thrust out of the fuel, it's
still a nice 1g all the way to your destination. Still quite a revolution.

How much would be realistic?

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garmaine
Maybe 2%? That’s based on yields common in nuclear weapons of this complexity.
Fusion should be even harder to contain above critical temperatures.

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rbanffy
Well... I guess even .04 G can be useful... And if we are only fusing 2%, we
can bring the reaction to much closer to the ship itself.

