Enzmann starships

[SciMan]

Enzmann or not, I want some form of torch drive. If the answer to "do you want high specific impulse or do you want high thrust?" is Yes/Both, then what you want is a torch drive. Capable of sustained burns of 1G or more for extended periods. Great for in-system travel, get to Mars in a few days.
An Orion drive is a torch drive we could build TODAY if the will was there for it.
The "Epstein drive" from The Expanse is a torch drive. We might not be able to build that one for a while, but despite it coming from a sci-fi book it's theoretically possible according to some calculations (the trick is that the farther away from the spacecraft you can set off the fusion pulse, the stronger that pulse can be, and that makes higher thrust).
Nuclear Salt-Water rockets are CERTAINLY torch drives, since they're basically a CONTINUOUSLY DETONATING Orion drive. Those are only hard to build because we don't know exactly how to contain such an intense reaction.

Also, you can "easily" make an interstellar starship from 5 ingredients. From front to back, an asteroid to act as an interstellar debris shield, a nickel-iron asteroid to build a habitat inside (or don't take the nickel-iron asteroid with you but you're going to want that extra shielding mass) A ball of deuterium ice gathered from a gas giant, a nice long structural truss (probably made from that nickel-iron asteroid) to keep the drive (and it's radiation) far away from the habitat module, and a drive capable of accelerating the whole thing at pretty much anything above 1/10 gravity or 0.981m/s².
Depending on what kind of acceleration you want out of the ship, you may need more than one drive to get the required thrust power.

Of course the Enzmann starship needs that three megaton ball of deuterium on the front because it's using a Brachistochrone trajectory, meaning it's under constant thrust the whole journey. The Enzmann starship also uses that ball of deuterium as the interstellar debris shield, but I put it between the habitat and the drive because the drive will be fiercely radioactive if it uses any kind of nuclear propulsion.

[FreeThinker]

Seems to me the Enzmann starship is a really outdated design. It does seem to take into consideration radation, wasteheat, long term habitation and interstellar spacedust. In short its just really bad design.

Edited May 19, 2020 by FreeThinker

[Defenestrator47]

On 5/13/2020 at 3:16 PM, SpaceFace545 said:

yeah the storage is the only real problem, trying to keep matter out and keeping the antimatter stable. no giant explosions just the antimatter doesnt like existing.

Walter Jon William's 'Praxis' trilogy (plus two novellas and soon to include a new novel) details a method of creating and storing antiprotons - planetary scale orbital rings which contain the acceleration rings to create and then capture antiprotons, and a method of suspending the antiproton within a charged silica chip on the microscopic order.  The chips are so small and 'slippery' that they flow more or less like a fluid, can be pumped to suitable engines, and also serve as the fuel/warhead for antimatter missiles.  I thought it was an interesting and at least imaginative solution (within a fictional story, but one more grounded in our understanding of particle physics).  He apparently consulted materials scientists and physicists for the idea of how to store antimatter as a fuel.

I'm just a layman who enjoys watching PBS spacetime, and similar educational videos, so I can't really judge, but the little I know did make this at least a credibly believable (given the stories take place 10K years after the conquest of humanity by a time/space spanning empire).