06-29-2020, 05:54 AM
From the Discord:
Indeed, I had forgotten the details of what mass beams are and treated them like laser beams. The footnote article was quite interesting, although I have not read all of it, but I think I get a better sense of how it works. Do you think it would be possible to use collimated solar wind instead of streams of micropellets?
During flight, the ship needs to monitor the environment (although I don't think I need to get into details here), be able to make some level of course correction, resist to erosion, defend itself against hostiles. It can brake and accumulate energy by deploying a forward magsail towards the end. Ideally, it would run as fast as a Conversion drive or some drive of equivalent efficiency would permit. Ideally somewhere between 0.5 and 0.8c
I haven't figured how big the Neumanns are yet. I'm not sure I need to get into that kind of detail anyway. It's meant to be a philosophical story, so the technical side of things needs not be very developped, but I'd like to avoid if possible making up stuff that obviously wouldn't work for a reason I'd have missed. Also I try to not just recycle the ideas but attempt to introduce variants, like a cruder form of the tech that uses "natural" solar wind as mass stream particles.
A proposed idea is inspired from the Caplan thruster: a swarm of mirrors reflect some sunlight on a certain region of the sun, which then emits extra solar wind. This solar wind would then be collimated and beamed towards the ship's magsail.
Thoughts?
Quote:The Architect
It's for a personal project. The ship is meant to set up a colony and install "interstellar routers" in which entities coming from the main core can download themselves using something a bit similar to quantum entanglement
So he is the A.I. version of the cable guy
Also, the ship needs to be able to shoot pursuers because it passes near a volume where there is a higher probability of hostile rebels trying to destroy it
That weaponry would surely add significant weight
Drashner1Today at 2:20 PM
So - the subject of mass-beam propulsion is a large and involved one. I'm going to provide an initial (high level - since the questions are somewhat high level at this point) answer to your questions here and then post some links to initial references that you can read to start to get a handle on the concepts. A lot will depend on the mass and speed you want for the ships - but this tech scales pretty readily, especially if you have neumann constructors to build the infrastructure.
Ok - specific (but high level) answers - Re size and frequency of the beam - This sounds sort of like a question that would apply to laser based beamed propulsion but not really to mass-beam propulsion. In other words you don't need a sail 1000 km across to intercept the beam. The beam solar power collectors and generator array can be large enough to be a naked eye nighttime object over interplanetary distances -but the actual beam it produces might be only tens of meters to hundreds of meters across.
Mass beams deliver their energy via the velocity of the beam rather than frequency (although I won't be surprised if someone here posts to say that frequency applies here in some fashion as well, but whatever. One of the nice things with a mass beam is that you can 'tune' the velocity such that the maximum amount of energy is delivered to the target ship at any given time, making the system maximally efficient. The faster the ship is going, the faster the mass stream particles are fired at it. Lasers beams can't do this since light must always travel at the speed of light.
In terms of the size of the ship - If you really want bigger ships than a mass-beam system can support that - unless up to a very high point. But before we get to that point, I think we get into issues of what you want the ship to do, how you want it to do it, and how fast you want it to travel. Also, if you have neumann tech (which you kind of do need to make mass-beam travel practical on any large scale), then how big are the neumanns? And what else do you need on the ship besides neumanns? And what sort of weapons do you need/want, since you mention those?
All of these factors impact your ship and system design. Lacking details on those, I'm still quite confident that a mass beam system can be scaled to launch your ship up to some interstellar speed. At least as long as the masses and speeds involved are below what can be powered by intercepting a large fraction (or even all) the energy output of a star or generating the equivalent. That level of energy is a factor regardless of how you propel your ship btw. Assuming you aren't using a tech that extracts energy right from the vacuum or something, which isn't really considered to be possible anymore.
Anyway - references - For an easy starting point within OA itself, see here: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/460c3685cd4c4
The EG article also has a reference at the end which provides a general RL overview of mass-beam propulsion physics and options. I'd recommend reading that as well.
After that, loop back to me (on the forum is fine and probably a better place for this depth of discussion) and we can talk about things in more detail, including answering any questions you have, details of how your proposed ship might operate, etc.
Indeed, I had forgotten the details of what mass beams are and treated them like laser beams. The footnote article was quite interesting, although I have not read all of it, but I think I get a better sense of how it works. Do you think it would be possible to use collimated solar wind instead of streams of micropellets?
Quote:But before we get to that point, I think we get into issues of what you want the ship to do, how you want it to do it, and how fast you want it to travel.
During flight, the ship needs to monitor the environment (although I don't think I need to get into details here), be able to make some level of course correction, resist to erosion, defend itself against hostiles. It can brake and accumulate energy by deploying a forward magsail towards the end. Ideally, it would run as fast as a Conversion drive or some drive of equivalent efficiency would permit. Ideally somewhere between 0.5 and 0.8c
Quote:Also, if you have neumann tech (which you kind of do need to make mass-beam travel practical on any large scale), then how big are the neumanns? And what else do you need on the ship besides neumanns? And what sort of weapons do you need/want, since you mention those?
I haven't figured how big the Neumanns are yet. I'm not sure I need to get into that kind of detail anyway. It's meant to be a philosophical story, so the technical side of things needs not be very developped, but I'd like to avoid if possible making up stuff that obviously wouldn't work for a reason I'd have missed. Also I try to not just recycle the ideas but attempt to introduce variants, like a cruder form of the tech that uses "natural" solar wind as mass stream particles.
A proposed idea is inspired from the Caplan thruster: a swarm of mirrors reflect some sunlight on a certain region of the sun, which then emits extra solar wind. This solar wind would then be collimated and beamed towards the ship's magsail.
Thoughts?