If fusion, assisted by magnetic sails, gets us to Alpha Centauri in ~50 years, then how do we get there faster? Absent annihilation drives, powered by gamma-ray lasing matter-antimatter reactions or Hawking decaying force-fed mini-black holes, then we need to get the power-supply off the space vehicle and send fuel, momentum and energy to the
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a repost from Facebook. ?”Daedalus” had a top speed of ~0.122c, though some variants could hit 0.138c for an extra 10,000 tonnes of fuel or so. This makes for a 36 year trip to Alpha Centauri – but no way of stopping. Equipping “Daedalus” with a magnetic sail and enough propellant to brake downwards from
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After rearranging the mass-models, just for the sake of the exercise (Eric Storm’s suggestion), I’ve computed the fastest time to Alpha Centauri via a Mag-Sail equipped Two-Stage “Daedalus”. In this case both stages will be use to reach the cruise speed, then the mag-sail will be deployed at the appropriate point in the voyage. The
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Blogging helps collect one’s thoughts. After the previous post I revisited my presentation and mass-models, only to discover a significant mistake in a key cell reference in Excel. Yikes! Re-writing my equations’s references I managed to shave a significant number of years off the minimum voyage time to Alpha Centauri via a mag-sail equipped “Daedalus”
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Something about my mass model of “Daedalus” didn’t sit right with me, so I recomputed the tankage from first principles. The percentages were more like 5%, thus meaning a slightly slower fastest time – 71.58 years with an initial mass of 281,181 tonnes. While “Daedalus” can cruise at 0.12-0.14c, meaning speedy trips to Alpha Centauri,
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