Spacedock delves into the intricacies of fusion engines as applied to sci-fi space travel.
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7:54 Ooh! Ooh! Project Orion!
You don't need energy positive-fusion to generate thrust. You could have a fission reactor to make up the difference, and provide power to a fission drive that consumes net energy. In that case, use fusion as a way to get an engine with large mass flow (and thus large thrust) very hot exhaust (high fuel efficiency), while not actually needing a viable net-positive fusion power technology. Some form of nuclear propulsion (fusion, fission, or hybrid) is pretty much mandatory for non-fatal regular human interplanetary travel, especially for any planet further away than Mars.
The energy involved also means gigantic heat radiators, unless you use something like metallic dust radiators or liquid tin radiators.
Thrust greater than a humming birds fart. LOL
why dont we just accelerate plasma to near lightspeed ? particles with mass are gaining that mass as they accelerate towards the speed of light right ? if you have speed of light your mass would be infinite right ? then we just got exponencional or logarithmic function, it would extreme amout of energy but your thrust will be pretty damn high. and you dont need that high specific impulse if your acceleration exceed several Gs. you cant stay at 1G and have artificial gravity etc.
Always love seeing starsector clips
THANK YOU for pointing out that "Fusion Engines" don't produce any motive force via the act of fusing atoms. Hollywood seems to have tricked the vast majority of people in the world (at least the scientifically illiterate ones) that fusing atoms in a vacuum, will someone generate an explosive force/ shockwave that can propel a spaceship forward. Hells, even Project Orion mistakenly designed a spacecraft around this principle (though with fission, not fusion. Nuclear Pulsed Propulsion). They completely failed to register the reality of nukes in space – If there's no atmosphere, there's no shockwave. The plasma generated from vaporising the bomb casing, re- Project Orion, is nowhere near enough to generate any kind of motive force, let alone the massive amount of force needed to move the large pusher plate. While such Nuclear Pulsed Propulsion would work fine within Earth's atmosphere, as soon as they got into space, they'd find out that their engines are completely useless
One thing I found myself super curious about by the end of The Expanse was what would it feel like to be inside the moving drum of the Nauvoo during the originally intended journey to it's new star system?
Because you get gravity along the length of the ship via the engines thrusting forwards, which presumably needs to keep happening through the entire trip for it to take even a remotely reasonable amount of time. And rotational gravity in the drum via the spinning of the drum.
So would you have two different sets of gravity pushing you against the outer edges of the drum and also feel like you were constantly being pulled in the direction of the engines at the end as well?
@5:31 Can someone please translate the force of a hummingbird's fart into SI units? Cheers!
Of course Kerbals are going to be in there somewhere.
u forgot about field reserve configuration fusion
Like the use of far future tech mod, basically the only “”””realistic”””” expression of fusion and nuclear fragment propulsion
Magneto-inertial drives also have a second, similar variant
The magnetized target fusion one
But the principle is the same. Use mass to squash mass until it fuses.
So instead of using lithium foil, you can use deuterium to squash deuterium to fuse, by spitting it at the plasmoid in the middle at high velocities, then throwing some propellant on it afterwards. This version can achieve high thrust for its efficiency. (for any inaccuracy i apologize)
I love Atomic Rockets, and how its author, Winchell Chung writes it
Does anyone know what spaceship game gameplay was at 07:50-ish?
Yay I'm glad you touched on this topic. Scott Manley did a really interesting video on it as well so this got me hooked.
Inaccuracy: The sun is actually too cold to produce fusion. It occurs in the core because of quantum tunneling.
Don't get me wrong, all forms of fusion are cool, but Tokamaks are by far the coolest type.
I'm very late to the party, but I just wanna say, if you want to use high-thrust fusion engines in your setting while still making it sound realistic, you can limit it to Solar System only.
We don't really need more than a few hundred km/s of exhaust velocity even to Pluto; we don't have enough time to reach higher velocity before the flip-off point is reached.
Since fusion engines are capable of spewing its byproducts up to 1000 km/s, we can easily trade some excess velocity for higher thrust.
The one thing Star Wars and Star Trek & a lot of others have always gotten wrong is, there is no top and bottom in space. The Expanse got this right.
On an ISD in REAL space would look weird on its side and dumb reversed with the mast on the bottom. The Borg Cube starts to seem to be the most logical design. How weird would it be to approach the Galaxy Class with the saucer section on its side or on the bottom?
These S.T. & S.W. ships all are based on the idea of surface water ships.
The Expanse corrects this very well. Almost every ship is based on the principles of this very argument.
My theory is simple: Epstein drive just arrests energy that goes into neutrinos and through some weird conservation principle causes its conversion into momentum. That would give "Efficiency" author mentioned (98%) with acceptable waste heat.
I just got a Pfizer advertisement with this video. Apparently science fiction is safe for Pfizer!