Has anyone produced a mod to emulate Project Orion? This was a research project of the late 1950's. Basically it was a system involving throwing a succession of nuclear bombs out the back of your spacecraft and riding the blast wave on a gigantic shock absorber! The science is perfectly valid and the radiation increase caused by the rocket was negligible, but everybody got very anti-radiation and it got shelved. Project Orion had the advantage that it could get very large payloads into space very cheaply, (as I remember it was something like 250$ to get a mass of 1lb into orbit, as opposed to orthodox rocketry, which costed out at 5000-6000$/lb). This seems to me to be a technology that Kerbals would leap at!
This is a computer animation of what Orion could look like
