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Wishing to make a little novella set a few thousand years in the future where interstellar travel is comon. In the hopes of using time dilation as a plot device, I want to make some ships capable of travelling at close to c with a constant 1g acceleration, while staying within the realm of possibility. I was hoping you guys could help to make sure that the propulsion concepts i was planning to use were still scientifically accurate, for the most part. To solve the "where did you get all that antimatter?" hole, I know that the collision of two specific kinds of white dwarves can generate lots of antimatter. Since fusion reactors somewhat replicate the conditions inside a star, it seems feasible that a very powerful, unstable fusion reactor could produce antimatter. So what if the reactor destroys itself in the process! You have antimatter! Let's just assume it's a very expensie fuel source. The only somewhat cheaty thing i plan to do is give humanity thermocouples that are close to 100% efficient. I'd prefer not to have to deal with hundreds of kilometres of radiators. Now on to the ideas: Antimatter- So i know that typical matter-antimatter collisions produce exhaust velocities of about 0.33c. Too low for me. I also know that pure electron-positron annihilation produces velocities closer to 0.56c, which is what i need. Is there any possible way to magnetically store electrons on their own, or to supercharge normal matter with hundreds of electrons apiece and store that? (don't mind if the magnetic storage takes crazy amounts of energy (thermocouples!) or if some of the fuel decays over the two-year transfer time due to quantum tunneling). Also, what are the actual equations that are used to determine the destructive capabilities of antimatter? Bussard Ramjet- I know that these supposedly have a "terminal velocity" of 0.2c, but this assumption seems to imply that the hydrogen is sped up to roughly the same speed as the ship before being fused. I was planning to use a series of magnetic wireframe nozzles a couple hundred kilometres across placed a few light minutes at maximum in front of the ship to ionize the incoming hydrogen (using beamed power from the ship) and nudge it into the ship's reactor. These nozzles could also use the ionized hydrogen to propel themselves at the same pace as the rest of the ship. Light Sails- Probably incapable of near-lightspeed travel, but maybe a cheap way to transport cargo at reasonable speeds. A ship could use an engine to get close to a star, and then unfurl a solar sail at perihelion. A quick calculation based on the amount of power the earth gets tells me that a circular 100km sail placed 6.4 million km from the sun (the closest we can get a spacecraft with our current technology i believe) would be hit with about 3.0*10^16 watts of energy (give or take an order of magnitude). Is this reasonable? Black Holes- Could a black hole be used as a gravitational slingshot to get ships close to the speed of light? Thanks for reading this.