PB666

Please. Who has a valid plan?

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160229-the-place-where-you-can-walk-through-the-universe Now I know why they call it the milky way.

How about Star Kracked I have a whole bunch of great titles unfortunately the mostly violated the CoC.

Yes but they would not be dead-dead until you thawed them out, but when they smacked mars at 2500 m/s their ice crystals would be blasted into martian dust. My point was thats the only way you are going to get a fully intact human to mars in 3 days. A radial trajectory, no life support (thats why they would have to be frozen), and a direct trajectory to intercept mars (basically shooting an orange with dart). To keep the human from shifting around simply freeze to below -50'C, insulate until in space. remove the fairing, bingo you have a frozen human payload (technically it would be a projectile). @fredinno - there is no known way to cryofreeze the human nervous system, most of the cryoproctants are neurotoxic and to boot, there is not a 100% recovery of cells that are recovered from storage in liquid nitrogen.

Actually, This was the reason CO2 levels in that atmosphere were not rising like scientist believed they would back in the 60s and 70s. CO2 particularly likes very cold precipitation, the fog that forms over the arctic ocean and then falls has been really good at pulling CO2 from the air, the oceans then picked this up and transported it down into the deep ocean, but now its started to come back to the surface. But its not dry ice by any means, its just CO2 rich regular ice.

Take human freeze to 50'K When they reach mars in 3 days and smash into the surface you won't know whether the freezing killed them or the fall.

Just want to report that the parts I had made I was using at a rescale = 3. For whatever reason the config creater squared these (rather big as the originals were, they rather overwhelmed the VAB) for parts that have rescaleFactor = 3 the entry in the new config is ..... scale = 9, 9, 9 MODEL { model = ............ position = 3.678, 12.259, 0 scale = 9, 9, 9 }

We already have a thread open on this topic, why do we need another one. Merge.

Try spelling it left, tell the g to go left and and trick the u into going right. And bits and fragments of black hole drive ships.

Yes, indeed lets not encourage people to build rockets unless they can get some expert help, seen a couple of deaths associated with home-made explosive and one fellow missing the end of his foot.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35639899 Basically alot of cold invisible stuff in space, we tend to see stuff that scatters, absorbs (less-so) or emits light, but this stuff is cold, very cold, and at most wavelenths it will not be visible. In our journey to find faster spacecraft that thinks that are very small like aggregates less than 400 nm in size are small but can create tremedous energies. At 0.33c (1E8) such 200 nm particles 400 joules of energy.

If you are talking about Star Treks enterprise, love the show, but the ship, not realistic. The Nacelles should have been opposed not like a v, if it was making a warp field then the generartors should have been in front or back. Its not even balanced from an impulse point of view. Somehow I wish star trek would dispose of that design and make a more intelligent one.

Math is the language we would speak if it were not for scarey snakes, interlopers and delicious bananas. Physics would be a second tongue we would speak if it were not for religion, biology would be the language we would speak if we were not enamored by sin.

I think that to get to the bottom of the question you need to look at the natural system, and when you do that our numbers and numbering system look meaningless. But then once you get there there is a certain elegance for instance e = m, f = m1 * m2 / r, and alot of complicated physics looks simple and you don't see constants all over the place So what is a constant, a constant is simply a correction factor between the quantum 'reality' and our world view, which happens to be interpreted primarily with the metric system. In nature there are symmetry and axis. Our 3D view of nature, reading the Feynman lectures, its not so important, from a space-time perspective, alot of the physics is about the perspective of a point, and its often on a second point, more or less binary. It gets worse because when you get to the quantum level you start dealing with a statistical world of probabilistic potentials. We are describing relationships, some, like the mass energy equivalence can be greatly simplified, others cannot be simplified. You ask yourself the basic question, we have been studying numbers for 10000 years, rather intensely for 4000 years, but it wasn't until about 400 years ago that the first of these constants, G, was inferred and not until Boltzmann and Planck that two more were discovered. These constants are not rolling off the tongue or apparent, you have to dig deeply to see them, we are in the process of discovering the fundamentals of nature which have relationships that can be described by math (but see above, just by change foundation I could make the mathematics change) . . . . but I should point out gravity may not be constant, that is to say the degree that space-time warps space may change depending on some metric for the local or total universe.

Put the tanks at the center, the engine at the center bottom. and the crew on the outside were g-forces are the greatest. This way the cost of spin up and spin down are the smallest. The problem with putting the crew on the outside however is that this is where they are most exposed to damaging radiation.

If you play the neutrons correctly you can breed deuterium from hydrogen, and there is literally an ocean of hydrogen atoms to breed from, might have to figure what to do with the left-over oxygen.

Thats women shoes, mens shoes size twelve is very close to 12 inches. Its something like 11.25" in the sizing horn.If you don't compress the back of the foot it basically is one foot. Are we still arguing this thing, just remember, except on eva you don't need shoes in space because you don't really use your feet.

How fast can a black hole drive be. First we have to define the setup 1. We have a load, lets say the load is 1/3rd of the total vehicle its nature does not matter, the only quality of load that we care about is that any hv or particles traveling in the -y direction are either reflected or emmitted in the xz, that is no hv or particles travel with a velocity vector relative to the ship of -y. 2. We have a device which defines the power plant of the ship. It performs several functions a. I positions the black hole (how this can be done is beyond the scope of this presentation) b. It reflects the black holes radiation c. It insulates the ship from the black holes radiation d. It transmits non-inertial forces from the back of the ship to the payload e. It wastes energy by allowing some hv to escape in the xz directions. The amount of waste energy is defined as the Power vectors xz that is to say the accumulation of all radiant vectors (sqrt(Sq(TotalPower)+sq(Power-y)). The blackholes radiation vectors present as a shere of power, its essentially powerdensity at 1 meter radius. If we then take the Y (thrust vector) and ignore -y that comes to about 27%, the -y has to be dealt with separately. For all vectors that have a +y component about 23% have energy that is wasted. If we forget about acceleration and set the reference frame of the powerplant, and set the blackhole as a point light source. The further the the mean distance of the surfaces relative to the source, and the smaller their profile, the less light will be reflected Case 1 is microscopic efficiency. In this case the power plant is far behind the source, the red dot in the image is off to the right, only a few photons strike the power plant and the force exherted on the device is almost zero. since the -y and y vector component of photon bearing cancel each other out the net efficiency is zero. Case 2. wide flat perfectly reflective surface. About half the photons are reflect off the surface, the other half radiate into space. Assuming the origin to be the center of the source basically we can determine these X2 + y2 + Z2 = 1 and this can be used to determine the proportion of y vector and not-y vector. the mean y vector is ~.55, it can be split into -y and y, y radiates into space and -y reflects and radiates in the y direction. In this case the amount of waste is 1 - 0.55 or about 45% Case 3. We have a wide flat perfectly opaque surface. In this case half of the 0.55 or about .275 component is in the y direction. the -y directed photons are perfectly absorbed by the power plant, some are radiated backwards and some are radiated to the side. Case 4. I we have a hyperbolic mirror that reflects the photons in which case we can convert all the directions to y and this is 100% Dealing with -y photons. So basically the types of photons that the black hole is emitting is the high energy stuff, we can't see it. IN fact the frequency of radiation in a 1 attometer black hole is in the TeV range, which is well about the gamma for more radioactive decay. https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/reflecting-gamma-rays.515289/. These photons will be absorbed, and on absorption they impart much of their momentum, however they will also generate radiant heat which will dissipate in many directions. So basically we can think of a black hole devise as case number 3, our minimun efficiency is 0.275, and we can assume that we can get 0.25 by absorbption, but the remainder depends on how heat is channeled through the power plant. As I progress through the post we can see that this is not completely subject to theoretical. Just like creating a black hole, redirection -y momentum is full of technical challenges that may not be solvable, at least not for a bh of the 1 attometer - 0.01 attometer size range). Creating as Filght Lets be generous and say that we get 66% efficiency. Not withstanding that a blackhole will eventually blow up into a gamma-ray burst of immense power, we are going to assume that its power output is constant. But this is not true and the only real measure of energy available is via mass energy equivelance. Next thing we need to do is plan our trip. Most trips will involve starting and stopping. Rarely would you just happen to accelerated to catch a planet that just happened to be whizzing by the sun at 0.Xc (x = your dV potential, lorentz transformed of course), but anyway lets see what X might be, lets suppose that a black hole has is half the weight of a 1212000000kg ship, to keep it simple our unit is 1u = 606000 tonnes. so ship weighs 1 and black hole weighs 1. Over the course of the journey it burns its weight, and we found a way to keep it from exploding and blowing us to smitherines. 1 unit is 606000000 x c2 = 5.545E23 joules, since we are 66% efficient then we can produce how many newtons? 5.54E23 * 0.66/ c, so essentially is mass x c times * efficiency = 1.2 x 1017 N since we are not losing most of our mass we can sloppily set the mass at 1.5u and divide to get dV. In this case dV = 1.32 x 108 which when divided by c = 0.44C (more like 0.42c because of dilation) How can we be confident in our results. We know how much energy is there, the mass energy equivilence tells us that E = mass * square of speed of light, we can't ever have more than that we know that momentum imparted on the ship is going to be roughly equivilent to that. We can get the number up, but then we have to get rid of some of both power plant and payload. A stop and start flight So next we want to stop and start. Basically SM/MidMass = MidMass/EM MidMass = 0.707 Starting Mass. Therefore we burn 0.586u over an sloppy average mass of 1.707u this means that we can reach a speed of 1.03 x 108 m/s or 0.34c So that is a rational examination of speed, given of course an irrationally produced black hole, a handwaving procedure for grapling it and accelerating it in step with the ship. The fairy-tail flight (the interstellar equivalent of 39 days to Mars and back again) So lets now say that we created completely non-massive energy beings and our power-plants is crafted from a new material (Otherwise known as wee fairy-dust) that has stronger bonds than carbon and is lighter than hydrogen it perfectly reflects any em, no matter how powerful and its equally good at reflecting cosmic radiation and other unexpected black hole emissions. . In this scenario we cut our ship down now to 0.1u and the black hole 1, total weight is 1.1, the efficiency remains the same. 0.66% So our new equation has 1.2 1017 N but now we have to get the weight, we can use the rocket equation. This is a twist, take mass lost (606 kilotonnes) and devide by Newtons/dMass = 1.98 x 108 which just happens to be c * our efficiency (imagine that). If we then go back and use this we find out that our maximum speed here is ln(11)*0.66c = 1.54c. With speed above 0.5c one needs to do a transformation resulting 0.84c. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/rocket.html Wee fairy-dusted start stop trip 1.1/midmass = midmass/0.1 This tells us that we can burn down to about 0.33 during the acceleration phase, that is a change of 0.77u or 4.668E8 Mass. we can get our friend the equivilancy equation and the photon/force equivilancy to give us the total number of unwasted Newtons, 9.26E16N. With this we can calculate the acceleration phase to be 0.62c. So this is strictly theoretical, however a starting Load + Powerplant(w/o BH has theoretical limitations) Reality of the powerplant. One of the problems is this. If we recall that particles tend to be stimulated according their frequency, and everything has a frequency. It is call the Compton wavelength. Why am I bring this up, it has to do with reflection. When we see light reflected from a mirror the reflected light is almost perfectly redirected, thus it is an elastic process. Light can be reflected, including UV and X-rays to some degree. But this is not true for high energy X-rays, gamma rays and particularly high energy gamma rays. As stated above the size of the black hole is directly proportional to its mass (the black hole being the sphere is space were no light can escape). A .9E-18 BH therefore has a wavelength, and the particles emmitted would also have a wavelength. Over the course of our trip our black hole is converting mass to ever shorter wavelengths. The low limit is 16GeV and would rise to the TeV range before a catastrophic loss of the hole. m = h/wavelength * c. So if the average wavelength is say 0.45E-18*2*pi = 2.9E-18, so this has a mass range it would like to dance with, around 8 x 10-25 kg. Protons have a mass of 1.67E10−27 kg. So basically this gamma can kick the butt of anything with atomic weight of 267, essentially it would knock these particles up to c. But this would not happen in the metal of the power plant, because it would obliterate the surrounding structures. One of the arguments could be, well we simply use light atoms like aluminum, and the wavelengths just zip right through. OK if hv zips right through unaffected, you basically sacrifice your thrust, because without reflection or scattering, the -y and y vectors cancel each other out. So it is a requirement of the Powerplant that it must absorb or reflect, since no known material reflects these high energy things then is must absorb bh hv. So if it is absorbing it also means that the nuclei within are being scattered as they scatter this light. And overriding principle of any thruster is that we should not tabulate values of thrust associated with the destruction of the craft, this makes both of the above scenarios acceptable as a valid powerplant and thruster. Simply stated there is no certainty that these would survive until a full deceleration occurred, in which case if the power plant fails, then all the payload is essentially wasted. Therefore to make this work we have to split the powerplant into its superstructure and its ablator So how big should the ablator be? So we have the issue that the BH is shooting >50% of its energy at a structure that is designed to protect the material in front of it, primarily absorbing that mass, but in the process sacrificing itself as ejecta. Lets say they are ejecting the matter on the back of the ablater at 0.46c and that this accounts for 25% of the Energy of the BH. 0.25 * c2 = 1.36 x 1025 joules 1.36 x 1025 = 1/2 X (1.5 x 108)2 that comes to a mass of 1.2 x 109 so basically our powerplant needs to be twice the size of our black hole. And if we want (need) in the end that there be some mass to protect the payload, then the powerplant needs to be some safety factor larger, consequently that mass should be >2.2 times the size of the blackhole. In addition we want to steer those particles which means it should have shape, this means that shape will also have mass. If we go by this u (BH) + 2.5u(P) + 0.5u(L) = 4u. This complicates our thrust argument, we know we have 25% efficiency, but now what is thrust, this has to change in flight because the ability of the power plant to absorb and redirect heat changes with the ablation of the powerplant. The ablation of the powerplant increases as the black hole shrinks. We know we cannot reflect hv anymore, and we have much less ability to control radiation and limited ability to direct ablation. If we assume the flat plat position the we have a given efficiency of 27%, and then we can add maybe another 25% in the form of ejected mass, which has momentum and can accelerate. I won't add this together, but I can reduce the mass separately. In addition at 0.1u the black hole is unmanagable and is ejected. To do this we are going to break the trip up into 4 legs. So lets say that for each amount of energy 0.52% we eject 3.0u of mass during the course. So basically ISPv = 0.52 * c * ln(4/1.1) = 0.68c (not transformed) which means for each leg we have 0.34c. This another thing to be considered, if the output of the black hole is 3.5 years then its acceleration is going to be g/year * total dV/life = 0.194g or 1.96 meters per second. So in this model a trip = 2*1/2at2 = 1.96 * (1.75 years) = 1.6 light years, and you did not make the trip to centauri, instead you have created a brand spanking new graveyard in interstellar space. Maybe Nemesis will rescue you. Bottom Line The bottom line is this, we have done several methods, starting with a simple model, then tested a fairy-tail model, and then finally a model compensated for the destructive forces of the drive. With the exception of the fairy-tail model, all models come in below 0.5c, the last model may not go far enough, since the full potential of the wormhole might not be available, and, in fact 606 kilotonnes for the bh may be too small and too unstable. I final and most important factor is this, acceleration. The problem here is that the black hole dies over 3.5 years as claimed the ship is accelerating to 0.39c which means its average speed is 0.2c across the duration of the trip. Then its not going to get there in 3.5 years but E-AC 4ly/0.2 = 20 years. Therefore the black hole is way too small, it needs to be larger. This is good because larger means less destructive radiation, but it also means more mass and slower acceleration. Its more or less the dog chasing its tail. If you get the black hole big enough that it only emits X-rays then you can perfectly reflect the radiation and efficiency goes close to 95%. How big is an X-ray black hole. So lets say we use 20KeV instead of 20GeV, in this case we have a radius 1000 times as large and a mass also 1000 times as large. Now our ablater can be rather small in size but we are now carrying around 250 times the load. The good news is that acceleration is constant and we can make a return trip, the bad news is that we would better off with fusion power. A critical arguement here is going for smallest possible black hole is not so smart becaues weight of ablater needs to be added, going for a bigger black hole is not smart because acceleration goes down. Generation ships are the way to go. We can go so fast that space dust will not matter? First, invent fairy-dust, then we will talk.

i can help you out here, there is everything (a word) in the Universe (another name or word). We (another name or word) propogate through space-time (yada-yada). What separates humans from other species is that we create abstractions of the physical and non-physical world. So in this sense mass may or may not exist. Newton was partially wrong, not completely, he realized that gravity was pushing back on earth, in reality an object in flight was not accelerating toward anything, it was in a non-inertial reference frame. But if we say that the surface of the earth is a reference frame, then anything that changes its velocity in that direction is accelerating. Einstien made the essential point that it is impossible to distinguish acceleration in a centrifuge from acceleration of gravity relative to a non-inertial reference frame. So yes, gravity is a faux-force, when we think about the surface of the Earth we should be keenly aware that electron densities of 6400 km of iron are pushing up ever higher layers of dirt, the bottom of your tennis shoes to constantly force us upward so that you don't fall in. This in turn creates(ed) alot of power at the center of the earth, and thus allows the core to melt, and spin and thus gives us a magnetic field. However if we remove newtons wrongness and accept gravity as a faux force created by the warping of space-time, and we remove earth and atmosphere from our feet then we no-longer have a problem. If I am holding a basket ball and I throw that basket ball, it will still travel forward and i will travel backward, since my feet are no free to drift Mme * dVme = Mbball * dVbball Now, lets say we zap all the energy out of something. Iron is a good example we can cool it to very low temperature. Its got a little energy from electron potentials in its unfilled outer shell electrons which is really only an issue in gases and on the surface. First the disclaimer, only a small percent of the mass of an iron is, in fact, massive by its very nature, the quarks however are held together by binding energy known as gluons, and gluons energy adds mass to helium. This is only relevant if we slam a helium into an anti-helium, once the quarks poof, the gluons become unstable and vice versa. There are also weak and strong force in the nucleus and this adds a little more mass. So there is a potential that we can violate Newton laws of conservation and convert mass to energy, but I should also state that these photons released can convert energy in the form of photons back into mass, just not the same mass. At this cold temperature and at mass densities Schwartfield dynamics that bosonic helium is really really stable. So we have to state that the low energy state of Iron balls that are slowly flying toward each other in our supercooled universe will collide, that collision will result in a change of inertia of the individual balls, and therefore this low energy state has mass. If the collision is elastic the balls will reflect off each other like billiard balls and if not they will heat up. Iron exists because mass is repeatedly cooked in high density state releasing binding energy of the nuclei until this low energy state is achieved. So what helps you out in this understanding of mass is that from the initial state of the Universe, mass is more like you are thinking, that is because the state of the universe favors dissociated fields of energy, each field is so energetic, the field itself is trying to achieve disorder but the state of the universe, high density, is much more ordered than the state it would like to be in, diffuse. Mass that forms is also high density and photons are highest energy and between the two matter cannot exist for any length of time. The key here is that the energy density in the premass universe is astronomically higher than it is now, its not a familiar state to use, its hotter even than the interior of an H-bomb at the point of maximum pressure (which is driven by x-rays). The energy of the early universe is very far into the high energy gamma range. Atoms appear to be an ordered state, just like life, but that ordered state is compatible with a greater feeding toward disorder in the entire system. The high energy photons and exotic particles eventually settled into stable things, like atoms, that could persist and confine energy. The energy confinement of the atom is a response to the super high density of energy of the initial universe, lots of short lived energetic particles all trying to seek entropy at once simply does not cool things down because they are constantly scattering each other, shoving energy into atoms is a very nice way of cooling the universe because CMBR tells us, this is a way for photons to spread out. So this initial problem of pair production and annihilation eventually feeds a state of atom production and photon stability (transits) and it allows the spreading of energy. IOW, while mass is not the absolutely most favored state once stable atoms form, they tuck interaction energy into confined space allowing many other forms of energy to spread more rapidly. This I argue that the universe while spreading has a natural outer boundary of photons and particles which is not in our visible space. Thermodynamics of mass suggests that universe should have unbounded limits it can feed into. Some have suggest with the formation of space-time the higgs boson spread at c, with no differential mass to warp it propogates the outer limits of the universe, the edge of an expanding sphere. Even without this inflation of the universe and expansion within the inflation has also created a transitional energy state. Mass therefore a heat sink for energy when energy is too high to be dealt effectively by other means. But for mass to be a heat sink, it has to give up its ability to propogate itself as a linear oscillating field at c, otherwise that energy just flows at c and interferes with the ability for other energy to flow out (opaque), and the higgs boson does this. Part of what makes mass confine is the gluon quark interactions that form the proton and neutron. protons then interact with electron, and this finally removes the opaqueness and photons now propogate more freely in space. So as we see the phase transition from the hot to colder universe causes a phase transition to a proportionally massive universe (mass being only s small part of the energy). When the universe is exceptionally hot, but not apostatically hot, mass formation is somewhat favored. But as mass congregates and cools into highly condensed states (like black holes) that instability and different state favors energy. Dilution is a form of chaos. The next step is why is mass still allowed given the universe is cooler. The answer is that as long as mass continues to spread uniformly in space, then its stability protects it from degradation, but if mass collects then its state no longer is favored and a consequence is hawkings radiation from a black hole. Mass = a place to tuck energy when energetic field densities are exceptionally high. Other field Energy = a place to release tucked energy when tucked energy density is exceptionally high. Mass is therefore a legacy state, which means it also predates you, language and our semantics about it, it is a pre-existing substate in an energetic universe. By the fact that we communicate implies that the universe is energetic, thats its initial state, infinite energy density. There is nothing we can say, write or alter that stops matter from existing, the tools we use to describe energy states (i.e. the higgs boson, the photon, the neutrino, gluons, w-bosons, etc) also describe matter as an aggregate energy state for which we can create properties such as normal or exotic, atomic number, atomic mass, etc. You can't actually define mass out of existence, you can eliminate the word and change the definition, but that would only make mass less useful as an abstraction. Particular useful measures of the the universe can be found here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units, You should note that in each scale there is a mass unit, there is a length unit and there is a time unit. Despite the fact that space-time tells us that these measures are not a relevant as we think. Within our comoving space time they are critically relevant to physics.

Vasmir without some sort of fusion power is limited basically to Earths or smaller semi-major axis. For orbits between earth and mars solar is questionable to power VASMIR and for anything beyond solar is completely useless for VASMIR, you would be better off just using small ion drives with low ISP once you get beyond mars (meaning small ion drives and large arrays of solar panels). If it requires 50MW of power that means 10000 square meters of solar panels at 0.4 efficiency. If one gives 1kg per meter of panel that is 10,000kg of weigh just for the panel and at ISP of 17000 = 172000 Ve which means 200N of thrust which over the panels itself 20 millimeters per second less with Payload and VASIMR. For past earth you would need batteries and have to pulse.

The have magnesium thrusters. When we start talking about isps in the 100000 m/s range its feasible....the process is rather simple, chop the metal into small pieces, a bit tricky in space, roll them into a thin wire. As the noodle enters the back of the thruster its entering a vacuum, its zapped by high voltage, somewhere in the 100000v range a heats to 5000 degrees where the vacuum pressure and vacuum pull small bits of metal off which are accelerated. Of course you are going to have bits of the metal stick all over the inside ofvthe device spoiling it,mbut in a long flight you could simply grind up the device. Actually the only real source of metal i see in such flights are gas containers, but i have basically come to the conclusion that for manned electric powered flight one needs to use hyperglolics or liquified lfox propellants, whereas these are refueled at stations, like l1 and l2 of target planets and these are carried by fusion electric or solar electric power and return to LEO to be refueled and serviced, in these schemes the only waste is close to LEO. My second scheme is to use low isp xenon power craft to clean LEO of all these scrap satellites.

Abstactly its about semantics and definitions. If you choose to look at the universe for exampl at the classic and relativistic scales then the fact that inertia can be define means that mass exists, somewhat less true with gravity because energy above rest mass can contribute to gravity. But at the quantum scale everything eventually resolves to fields, in which case there are two kinds,mthose that have intrensic mass like quarks, very small amount of the inertia in a nucleus, they get thier masses by interaction with the higgs field. But the majority of the mass of the nucleaus comes from gluons, and they impart mass simply by being in the nucleus and being energetic. I would say howver no matter the scale higgs ensures that at least a few types of fields are clenly massive. And secondarily if we cool an atom to 0k, the gluons do not lose a substantial amount of thier energy, so at least a rational scales this is also mass.

So to get to 0.2c they are going to 2 g at 2 to 3 pulses per second. Hmmm lets see c ~ 1 yr at 1 g so 0.2 c would take 70 days at 2 g thats 35 days at 86400 seconds per day that comes out to 7.5 million hydrogen bombs. This is not rational, its insane to think you could eject weapons every half second get complete noninterfering clearance and eject again, the ejection port is going to get pressurized at several atmospheres full of radioactive material which will end up being the bane of crewmembers involved in the plant.

lol. yeah the DoD didnt think the liberty ships would be damaged by the h-bomb, little did they know it wasn't the damage they should have been worried about. No one has answered my question, suppose we allow them to build a really nice facility close to the North Pole at 2 km alt. Does the drive produce adequate g-forces in the atmosphere?

Has anyone asked the question yet can you get the near 2 g of acceleration required to launch (although for the game I don't use 2 g, I use 1.4 to 1.5 and rely on more aerodynamic vehicles). If the pulse and reload time is a minute and your impulse last 10 seconds thats 20g to get 2g. I don't think this device can launch. The other problem, you would have to use a design that did not use plutonium, as taking this to antartica would be a violation of nuclear proliferation treaties.